Re: [blind-democracy] Re: Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades as Hysterical

Hi Miriam and All,
Women's Rights is one of those topics I normally stay out of.
Although I am deeply moved and saddened by the direction we are
headed. But I feel about as out of place as a Priest counseling
teenage girls on the advantages of the Rhythm Method for birth
control. I recall far too clearly the horror stories of young
desperate pregnant Lower Income girls, visiting backroom "doctors",
who took away their ability to ever have a baby, if they lived.

In Seattle there was a Doctor Bamey(unsure of spelling)who defied the
law, and provided safe abortions despite threats by both the
government and by "kind, loving" Christian organizations crying for
his blood.
This was in the 1950's.
Here is a piece about Margaret Sanger:

Sanger_Fact_Sheet_Oct_2016.pdf
1
Margaret Sanger — Our Founder
A trailblazer in the fi ght for reproductive rights,
Margaret Sanger's history is layered and complex
Our founder, Margaret Sanger, was a woman of heroic
accomplishments, and like all heroes, she was also
complex and imperfect. It is undeniable that Margaret
Sanger's lifelong struggle helped 20th century
women gain the right to decide when and whether
to have a child — a right that had been suppressed
worldwide for at least 5,000 years (Boulding, 1992).
Anticipating the most recent turn of the millennium,
LIFE magazine declared that Margaret Sanger was
one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th
century (LIFE, 1990) — along with Jane Addams, Rachel
Carson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford,
Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King Jr., Alfred Kinsey,
Margaret Mead, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod
Bethune, Jonas Salk, and Malcolm X1 (Le Brun, 1990).
Motivated by a deeply held compassion for the
women and children whose homes she visited around
the world, Sanger believed that universal access to
birth control would:
• Reduce the need for abortion — a common and
dangerous method of family planning in her time;
• Save women's and children's lives;
• Strengthen the nuclear family;
• Lift families out of poverty;
• Increase the good health and well-being of all
individuals, families, and their communities; and
• Help women gain their legal and civil rights.
1 In the hope of building new alliances, former President Guttmacher
organized an informational meeting between the director of the Harlem
clinic and Malcolm X in 1962 (Lepore, 2013, 131)
Sanger was a true visionary. In her lifetime, she
convinced Americans and people around the
world that they have basic human rights:
• A woman has a right to control her body;
• Everyone should be able to decide when or
whether to have a child;
• Every child should be wanted and loved; and
• Women and all people are entitled to sexual
pleasure and fulfi llment.
2
MARGARET SANGER — OUR FOUNDER
Sanger's battle for family planning was unrelenting,
unyielding, and totally focused. Her crusade made it
legal to publish and distribute information about sex,
sexuality, and birth control. It:
• created access to birth control for, as she
saw it, poor women, women of color, and
immigrant women;
• spearheaded the development of contemporary
safe, effective, and affordable oral birth control
pills and other hormonal methods;
• became an early 20th century model for
nonviolent civil disobedience, empowering the
American civil rights, women's rights, anti-war,
gay rights, and AIDS-action movements (King,
2008[1966], 6, 7); and
• helped promote new ideas about volunteerism
and grassroots organizing in the U.S.


On 5/19/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> You're right. It's irrational and it's cruel. For me, it's not just
> theoretical. I remember life before abortion. My life was profoundly
> affected because abortion wasn't available to me. And I remember other women
> who suffered as well. I also remember helping someone obtain an illegal
> abortion when one of the social workers recommended a doctor for another
> employee at the agency where I'd previously worked. It was terrifying.
> That's what we're going back to.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> <blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2019 10:47 AM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for
> Decades as Hysterical
>
> Where do these people get off at?
> They are, to a man...and to a woman, the same people who scream their
> opposition to "government interference". They are the self same people who
> tearfully applaud as the drums and bugles play, and the banners fly as the
> cream of our youth march off to sacrifice their lives in another of our
> continuous wars.
> They are the same people who gather in their local churches and pray to a
> God of Forgiveness, and then demand that any doctor assisting in a woman's
> decision to abort a fetus, be sent to prison for 99 years.
> How is it that on the one hand we should down size government and allow
> people the freedom to conduct their own business, while on the other hand
> they want to post officials in every woman's bedroom with their noses
> between her legs?
> There's only one word which explains it. Insanity!
>
> Carl Jarvis
> On 5/18/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> She omits Hillary who, I remember, in around 2005 or 6, was talking
>> about abortion being only a last resort and how the Democratic Party
>> should welcome people who are opposed to abortion and include their
>> voices.
>> Miriam
>>
>> Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades as Hysterical
>>
>> By Rebecca Traister, The Cut
>>
>> 18 May 19
>>
>>
>>
>> have been thinking, like so many people this week, about rage. Who
>> I'm mad at, what that anger's good for, how what makes me maddest is
>> the way the madness has long gone unrespected, even by those who have
>> relied on it for their gains.
>>
>> For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before that, I
>> have watched people devote their lives, their furious energies, to
>> fighting against the steady, merciless, punitive erosion of
>> reproductive rights. And I have watched as politicians - not just on
>> the right, but members of my own party - and the writers and pundits
>> who cover them, treat reproductive rights and justice advocates as if
>> they were fantasists enacting dystopian fiction.
>>
>> This week, the most aggressive abortion bans since Roe v. Wade swept
>> through states, explicitly designed to challenge and ultimately
>> reverse Roe at the Supreme Court level. With them has come the dawning
>> of a broad realization
>> -
>> a clear, bright, detailed vision of what's at stake, and what's ahead.
>> (If not, yet, full comprehension of the harm that has already been done).
>>
>> As it comes into view, I am of course livid at the Republican Party
>> that has been working toward this for decades. These right-wing ghouls
>> - who fulminate idiotically about how women could still be allowed to
>> get abortions before they know they are pregnant (Alabama's Clyde
>> Chambliss) or try to legislate the medically impossible removal of
>> ectopic pregnancy and reimplantation into the uterus (Ohio's John
>> Becker) - are the stuff of unimaginably gothic horror. Ever since Roe
>> was decided in 1973, conservatives have been laboring to roll back
>> abortion access, with absolutely zero knowlege of or interest in how
>> reproduction works. And all the while, those who have been trying to
>> sound the alarm have been shooed off as silly hysterics.
>>
>> Which is why I am almost as mad at many on the left, theoretically on
>> the side of reproductive rights and justice, who have refused,
>> somehow, to see this coming or act aggressively to forestall it. I
>> have no small amount of rage stored for those in the Democratic Party
>> who have relied on the engaged fury of voters committed to
>> reproductive autonomy to elect them, at the same time that they have
>> treated the efforts of activists trying to stave off this future as
>> inconvenient irritants.
>>
>> This includes, of course, the Democrats (notably Joe Biden) who long
>> supported the Hyde Amendment, the legislative rider that has barred
>> the use of federal insurance programs from paying for abortion, making
>> reproductive health care inaccessible to poor women since 1976. During
>> health-care reform, Barack Obama referred to Hyde as a "tradition" and
>> questions of abortion access as "a distraction." I've spent my life
>> listening to Democrats call abortion a niche issue - and worse, one
>> that is somehow repellent to voters, even though support for Roe is in
>> fact among the most broadly popular positions of the Democratic Party;
>> seven in ten Americans want abortion to remain legal, even in conservative
>> states.
>>
>> You can try to tell these Democrats this - lots of people have been
>> trying to tell them for a while now - but it won't matter; they will
>> only explain to you (a furious person) that they (calm, wise,
>> knowledgeable about
>> politics) understand that we need a big tent and can't have a litmus
>> test and please be reasonable: we shouldn't shut anyone out because of
>> a difference on one issue. (That one issue that we shouldn't shut
>> people out because of is always abortion). Every single time Democrats
>> come up with a new strategy to win purple and red areas, it is the
>> same strategy: hey, let's jettison abortion! (If you object to this,
>> you will be told you are standing in the way of the greater progressive
>> project).
>>
>> I grew up in Pennsylvania, governed by anti-abortion Democrat Bob
>> Casey Sr.; his son Bob Jr. is Pennsylvania's senior senator now, and
>> though he's getting better on abortion, Jr. voted, in 2015 and 2018,
>> for 20-week abortion bans. Maybe my rage stems from being raised with
>> this particularly grim perspective on Democratic politics: dynasties
>> of white men united in their dedication to restricting women's bodily
>> autonomy, but they're Democrats so who else are you going to vote for?
>> Which reminds me of Dan Lipinski, the virulently anti-abortion
>> Democratic congressman - whose anti-abortion dad held his seat before
>> him. The current DCCC leader, Cheri Bustos, is holding a big-dollar
>> fundraiser for Lipinski's reelection campaign, even though it's 2019
>> and abortion is being banned and providers threatened with more jail
>> time than rapists and there is someone else to vote for: Lipinski is
>> being challenged in a primary by pro-choice progressive Democrat Marie
>> Newman. And still, Bustos, a powerful woman and Democratic leader, is
>> helping anti-choice Lipinski keep his seat for an eighth term. So I've
>> been thinking about that part of my anger too.
>>
>> Also about how, for years, I've listened to Democratic politicians
>> distance themselves from abortion by calling it tragic and insisting
>> it should be rare, instead of simply acknowledging it to be a crucial,
>> legal cornerstone of comprehensive health care for women, people with
>> uteruses, and their families. I have seethed as generations of
>> Democrats have argued that if we could just get past abortion and
>> focus instead on economic issues, we'd be better off. They never seem
>> to get that abortion is an economic issue, and that what they think of
>> as economic issues - from wages and health care to housing and
>> education policy - are at the very heart of the reproductive justice
>> movement, which understands access to abortion to be one (pivotal!)
>> part of a far broader set of circumstances that determine if, when,
>> under what circumstances, and with what resources human beings might have
>> and raise children.
>>
>> And no, of course it's not just Democrats I'm mad at. It's the pundits
>> who approach abortion law as armchair coaches. I can't do better in my
>> fury on this front than the legal writer Scott Lemieux, who in 2007
>> wrote a blistering rundown of all the legal and political wags,
>> including Ben Wittes and Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Cohen and William
>> Saletan, then making arguments, some too cute by half, about how Roe
>> was ultimately bad for abortion rights and for Democrats. Some like to
>> cite an oft-distorted opinion put forth by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who
>> has said that she wished the basis on which Roe was decided had
>> included a more robust defense of women's equality. Retroactive
>> strategic chin-stroking about Roe is mostly moot, given the decades of
>> intervening cases and that the fight against abortion is not about
>> process but about the conviction that women should not control their
>> own reproduction. It is also true that Ginsburg has been doing the
>> work of aggressively defending reproductive rights for decades, while
>> these pundits have treated them as a parlor game. As Lemieux put it
>> then, it was unsurprising, "given the extent to which affluent men
>> safely ensconced in liberal urban centers dominate the liberal pundit
>> class," that the arguments put forth, "greatly understate or ignore
>> the stark class and geographic inequites in abortion access that would
>> inevitably manifest themselves in a post-Roe world."
>>
>> Or, for that matter, that had already manifested themselves in a Roe
>> world.
>>
>> Because long before these new bans - which will meet years of legal
>> challenge before they are enacted - abortion had grown ever less
>> accessible to segments of America, though not the segments that the
>> affluent men (and
>> women) who write about and practice politics tend to emerge from. But
>> yes, thanks to Hyde and the TRAP laws and the closed clinics and the
>> long travel distances and paucity of providers and the economically
>> untenable waiting periods, legions of women have already suffered,
>> died, had children against their will, while columnists and political
>> consultants have bantered about the necessity of Roe, and litmus tests
>> and big tents. In vast portions of this country, Roe might as well not
>> exist already.
>>
>> And still those who are mad about, have been driven mad by, these
>> injustices have been told that their fury is baseless, fictional, made
>> of chewing gum and recycled copies of Our Bodies Ourselves. Last
>> summer, the day before Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation from
>> the Supreme Court, CNN host Brian Stelter tweeted, in response to a
>> liberal activist, "We are not 'a few steps from The Handmaids' Tale.'
>> I don't think this kind of fear-mongering helps anybody." When
>> protesters shouted at Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings a few
>> weeks later, knowing full well what was about to happen and what it
>> portended for Roe, Senator Ben Sasse condescended and lied to them,
>> claiming that there have been "screaming protesters saying 'women are
>> going to die' at every hearing for decades" and suggesting that this
>> response was a form of "hysteria."
>>
>> It was the kind of dishonesty - issued from on high, from one of those
>> Republicans who has inexplicably earned a reputation for being
>> "reasonable"
>> and "smart," and who has enormous power over our future - that makes
>> you want to pull the hair from your head and go screaming through the
>> streets except someone would just tell you you were being hysterical.
>>
>> And so here we are, the thing is happening and no one can pretend
>> otherwise; it is not a game or a drill and those for whom the
>> consequences - long real for millions whose warnings and peril have
>> gone unheeded - are only now coming into focus want to know: what can
>> be done?
>>
>> First, never again let anyone tell you that the fury or determination
>> to fight on this account is invalid, inappropriate, or inconvenient to
>> a broader message. Consider that this is also what women and
>> marginalized people are told all the time about their anger in
>> general: that they should not express it, not let it out, because to
>> give voice to their rage will distract from their aims, undermine
>> them; that it will ultimately be bad for them. This messaging is
>> strategic. It is designed to get angry people to keep their mouths
>> shut. Because if they are successfully stifled, they will remain at
>> the margins, isolated, alone in their fury. It is only if they start
>> letting it out and acting on it and working in tandem with others who
>> share their outrage that they might begin to form networks,
>> coalitions, the building blocks of movements; it is when the anger is
>> let loose that the organizing happens in earnest.
>>
>> Second, seek the organizing that is already underway. In the days
>> since this new round of state abortion bans have begun to pass and
>> make headlines, secret Facebook groups have begun to form, in which
>> freshly furious women have begun to talk of forming networks that
>> would help patients evade barriers to access. Yet these organizations
>> already exist, are founded and run by women of color, have long been
>> transporting those in need of reproductive care to the facilities
>> where they can get it; they are woefully underfunded. The trick is not
>> to start something new, but to join forces with those who have long
>> been angry about reproductive injustice.
>>
>> "Abortion funds have been sounding the alarm for decades," said Yamani
>> Hernandez, who runs the National Network or Abortion Funds, which
>> includes
>> 76 local funds in 41 states, each of them helping women who face
>> barriers getting the abortion care they need, offering money,
>> transportation, housing, and help with logistics. Only 29 of the funds
>> have paid staff; the rest are volunteer-run and led with average
>> budget sizes of $75,000, according to Hernandez, who said that in
>> 2017, 150,000 people called abortion funds for help - a number up from
>> 100,000 in 2015, thanks to the barrage of restrictions that have made
>> it so much harder for so many more people. With just $4 million to
>> work with, the funds were able to help
>> 29,000 of them last year: giving abortion funds money and time will
>> directly help people who need it. Distinguishing the work of abortion
>> funds from the policy fights in state houses and at the capitols,
>> Hernandez said, "whatever happens in Washington, and changes in the
>> future, women need to get care today."
>>
>> And whatever comes next, she said, it's the people who have been doing
>> this work for years who are likely to be best prepared to deal with
>> the harm inflicted, which is a good place for the newly enraged to
>> start. "If and when Roe is abolished," said Hernandez, "the people who
>> are going to be getting people to the care they need are those who
>> have largely been navigating this already and are already well suited
>> for the logistical challenges."
>>
>> The fights on the ground might be the most current and urgent in human
>> terms, but there is also energy to be put into policy fights. In 2015,
>> California Congresswoman Barbara Lee authored the EACH Woman Act, the
>> first serious congressional challenge to the Hyde Amendment, which
>> came after years of agitation and activism, especially by All Above
>> All, a grassroots organization led by women of color and determined to
>> make abortion accessible to everyone. Those who are looking for policy
>> fights to lean into can call and write your representatives and
>> candidates and demand that they support the EACH Woman Act.
>>
>> Rage works. It takes time and numbers and a willingness to express it,
>> but it is among the most reliable catalysts of social and political
>> change.
>> That's the story of how grassroots activism can compel Barbara Lee to
>> compel her caucus to take on Hyde. Her willingness to tackle it, and
>> the righteous outrage of those who are driven to end the harm it does
>> to poor women and women of color, in turn helped to compel Hillary
>> Clinton to come out against Hyde in her 2016 primary campaign;
>> opposition to Hyde is now - for the first time since it was passed in
>> 1976 - a part of the Democratic Party's platform.
>>
>> In these past two years, fury at a Trump administration and at the
>> Republican Party has driven electoral activism. And at the end of
>> 2018, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 2018 was the first year
>> since at least
>> 2000 in which the number of state policies enacted to expand or
>> protect abortion rights and access, and contraceptive access,
>> outnumbered the number of state restrictions. Why? Because growing
>> realization of what was at stake
>> - and resulting anger and activism, pressure applied to state
>> legislatures
>> -
>> led representatives to act.
>>
>> Of course: vote.
>>
>> Vote, as they say, as if your life depended on it, because it does,
>> but more
>> importantly: other people's lives depend on it. And between voting,
>> consider where to aim your anger in ways that will influence election
>> outcomes:
>> educate yourself about local races and policy proposals, as well as
>> the history of the reproductive rights and reproductive-justice
>> movements. Get engaged not just on a presidential level - please God,
>> not just at a presidential level - but with the fights for state
>> legislative power, in congressional and senate elections, all of which
>> shape abortion policy and the judiciary, and the voting rights on
>> which every other kind of freedom hinges. Knock doors, register
>> voters, give to and volunteer with the organizations that are working
>> to fight voter suppression and redistricting and expand the
>> electorate; as well as to those recruiting and training progressive
>> candidates, especially women and women of color, especially young and
>> first-time candidates, to run for elected office.
>>
>> You can also protest, go to rallies. Join a local political group
>> where your rage will likely be shared with others.
>>
>> Above all, do not let defeat or despair take you, and do not let
>> anyone tell you that your anger is misplaced or silly or in vain, or
>> that it is anything other than urgent and motivating. It may be
>> terrifying - it is terrifying.
>> But this - the fury and the fight it must fuel - is going to last the
>> rest of our lives and we must get comfortable using our rage as
>> central to the work ahead.
>>
>>
>>
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