abortion

One of the problems with politics is how words and images can slip from being portrayals of people's lives into trite cliché so easily that you can't even remember when the line was crossed. For example, take the coat hanger.

The coat hanger has been the symbol of activists who work to keep abortion a viable choice for all women everywhere. It represents the bad old days, when abortion was illegal in many parts of the country, although being illegal never stopped it from happening. The coat hanger has become ubiquitous in the debate over abortion. So much so that its meaning seems to have become invisible. It's been over thirty years now since Roe V. Wade was first handed down, and a couple of generations have grown up and become sexually active with the choice of abortion as something that could be taken as granted. The coat hanger and the deaths and self-mutilations it represents has become part of our intellectual wallpaper, something that is so old and familiar that we barely think of it at all. When we do, many people are likely to see the coat hanger as more symbolic of earnest young activists wound up on idealism and hyperbole than as part of our history.

It's interesting that "Blog for Choice" day falls right after Martin Luther King Jr's holiday. It has me thinking about intersections and parallels of civil rights issues. For those who've studied segregation, the terms "de facto" and "de jure" are familiar. They mean "in fact" and "by law" and they are used to describe the reality of segregation in the United States today. Segregation in schools, for example, has been illegal since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 yet there is a great deal of de facto segregation in American schools.

Location(s)

$5 Suggested

With Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
Roe v. Wade is 35 years old this month. We'll be celebrating, agitating, and planning for the future by screening Gillian Aldrich's "I Had an Abortion" and hosting a discussion with Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards and other folks from the Third Wave Foundation.

The New York Times reports this morning that Verizon has rejected a proposal by Naral Pro-Choice America to use its network for sending text messages to people who sign up for them. Other cell phone networks have accepted the proposal which allows subscribers to sign up to receive text message updates from NARAL.

According to a communication with Verizon that NARAL gave to the times, the company's policy is to reject proposals from groups that “promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its [Verizon's] discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users.”

There are at least three very troubling pieces of this rationale.

A few days ago JanieBelle wrote about the Senate vote that would end the global gag rule if it isn't vetoed. A veto is a very real possibility, though. And before the President even has a chance to veto the bill, it has to get through a reconciliation conference with the House. NARAL Pro-Choice America is calling for 50,000 people to write to Congress to make sure that the gag rule repeal stays in the bill that goes to the President. That'll also help build a good base to organize an override of the veto if it becomes necessary.

A great big peek above our garters to Chris at SitPS for pointing us to Heather, and to Heather at Scarleteen for pointing us to this:

Via Tod Preston at RHRealityCheck:

Last night, despite President Bush's veto threat, the Senate passed the FY 2008 State-Foreign Operations Appropriations bill (by a vote of 81-12) that includes significant provisions overturning destructive policies on family planning and HIV/AIDS. Thanks to the leadership and commitment of Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA), the Senate bill not only includes the identical measures in the House-passed bill (H.R. 2764) -- exempting contraceptives from the Global Gag Rule and repealing the abstinence-only funding restrictions for HIV prevention programs -- it goes even further by repealing the Gag Rule entirely.

It looks like the Catholic League is slithering out of the closet again.

The Catholic League is the worst of the worst who represent the Catholic Church.  Ideologically, they hail from the bad old days, when everyone named Goldberg or Lieberman had hands that were literally, personally considered to be soaked in the blood of Christ.  The League has been an active force in trying to suppress art and expression that they considered to be "anti-Catholic," which is defined extremely broadly.  The sheer slavering paranoia of the Catholic League on virtually all fronts of the "culture wars" can be summed up by a single, infamous quote by League President William Donohue from an appearance on Scarborough Country in 2004:

Two sex-oriented op-ed pieces in one weekend!

On Saturday Atul Gawande wrote about how we as individualas and communities need to take greater "do it yourself" responsibility for creating an environment in which people can educate themselves about contraception , pregnancy, and talk openly about their own sexual practices. Click here to read my discussion of his piece.