feministeblog-blog

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The consequences of sharkspreading

I’m not sayin’. I’m just sayin’. (Photo credit Coex Aquarium/Getty)

In Seoul, a female sand tiger shark has justifiably responded to her male companion constantly bumping into her by eating him. Slowly.

It took the 8-year-old female 21 hours to eat the 5-year-old male inside a tank at the COEX Aquarium. According to video of the consumption, the female shark started with the male's head and slowly went about consuming the rest of his body.

This act of shark cannibalism likely was the result of the sharks bumping into one another. "Sharks have their own territories," an aquarium official told Reuters. "Sometimes, when they bump into each other, they bite out of astonishment."

She bit out of astonishment. She kept chewing because fuck you, that’s why.

Manspreaders, take note.

[h/t Jezebel]

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Keep your hands off my uterus. (Do you need a diagram to find it?)

Here be dragons.

This was supposed to be a lighthearted post.

I ran across this blog post and video about how guys don’t understand birth control and menstruation, not even a little bit, and the funny things they believe. Ha, this guy thinks NuvaRings catch semen! Ha ha ha! Ha ha, this guy thinks women can hold their periods in like they’re holding in pee! Ha ha! This signifies a failure of sex education and, hell, basic life science curriculum, but at least it’s amusing!

At least these guys aren’t responsible for setting legislation that affects our lives, right?

Because... fuck.

As if their six-week abortion ban wasn’t bad enough, Ohio has come back in with (and maybe this is a one-up on Georgia’s even more horrible ban) a bill that would prevent private insurers from covering any nontherapeutc abortion. And it defines abortion in such a way that it also includes birth control pills, IUDs, and pretty much every other non-barrier method — anything that could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting — as “abortifacients.” And it reveals that our representatives, the ones we elected to advocate for our best interests, are fucking idiots.

One fifth of the representatives in the House have signed on to a bill sponsored by Republican John Becker that would prohibit most insurance companies from offering coverage for abortion services.

“The intent is to save lives and reduce the cost of employers and employees health care insurance," Becker says.

The bill would ban nontherapeutic abortions that include "drugs or devices used to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum.”

And Becker says the bill also speaks to coverage of ectopic or tubal pregnancies where the fertilized egg attaches outside of the womb.

“Part of that treatment would be removing that embryo from the fallopian tube and reinserting it in the uterus so that is defined as not an abortion under this bill," Becker explains.

That is, medically, not a thing. It’s… not.

If only that were the only thing Becker and his 19 idiot colleagues didn’t understand about biology, that would be bad enough. But he’s also an idiot about birth control.

Becker insists his bill does not target birth control.

“When you get into the contraception and abortifacients, that’s clearly not my area of expertise but I suppose, if it were true that what we typically known as the pill would be classified as an abortifacient, then I would imagine the drug manufacturers would reformulate it so it’s no longer an abortifacient and is strictly a contraceptive," Becker says.

Not his area of expertise? What?! NO. But despite his acknowledging this, he seems comfortable opining that drug companies can easily “reformulate” birth control pills so they’re… no longer birth control pills.

God grant me the confidence of a middle-aged Republican dude in elected office

Now, I’m hardly saying that the only reason legislators like Becker are trying to ban abortions is because they just don’t understand the biology of it. (As I’ve noted before, this recent crop of six-week bans is based on the fact that they do know how pregnancy works and are using that to get their bills in front of the Supreme Court.) They’re trying to control women’s bodies, and their lack of understanding of said bodies is just something that makes it all the more frustrating.

All the all the more frustrating is the fact that even while they openly acknowledge they don’t know anything about this stuff, they’re perfectly willing to build legislation around it anyway. I don’t know anything about civil engineering. If you came to me to craft a bill about bridge repairs, I would say, “What? I’m not an expert in civil engineering. Take this bill to an actual civil engineer, and I’ll just defer to their judgment.” Why? Because people’s lives are at stake when they drive across bridges. So people whose area of expertise it clearly is not should keep their mouth shut.

Kate Harding has created a pop quiz for cis male pundits that I feel should definitely extend to legislators.

Pop Quiz for Cis Male Pundits. Without Googling: -Define "ectopic pregnancy." -What do the following acronyms stand for? LMP, NVP, IUD, D&C -What body part is cut in an episiotomy? -Name three off-label uses for hormonal birth control.

— Kate Harding (@KateHarding) May 9, 2019

Extra credit: -What is endometriosis? -What is PCOS? -What are fibroids? -Name three common things that can throw off a menstrual cycle.

— Kate Harding (@KateHarding) May 9, 2019

Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t know LMP or NVP without Googling, and I wasn’t 100-percent certain about D&C, although I know what it means. But, see, even with the knowledge I do have, I’m still not going to go around writing legislation. I’m going to talk to an expert and be, like, “Hey, tell me some stuff about anatomy and physiology,” and they’ll be, like, “Thanks for asking. Not one damned legislator has ever asked me about such things.”

It’s kind of sad that I have more sense in that respect than our paid, elected representatives, but it’s undeniably the case.

Ask the experts

It's just jarring. In 2012, Rep. Todd Akin opened his face about pregnancy caused by rape, saying, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” which he says is “from what I understand from doctors,” and I would be really interested in talking to whatever doctors told him that.

During a 2015 discussion of telemedicine, after a doctor described a capsule endoscopy, Idaho state legislator Vito Barbieri asked, “Can this same procedure then be done during a pregnancy? Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor determine what the situation is?” No, Vito. Fucking no. Congratulations on not knowing the uterus isn’t connected to the intestinal tract.

In defending a 2017 bill that would require a man’s approval for a woman to get an abortion, Oklahoma State Rep. Justin Humphrey repeatedly referred to the father of the fetus as the father but referred to the mother as a “host.” (The bill never made it to a vote, thank God.)

These are the guys we're entrusting to write the laws that affect our lives, and apparently when they even bother to consult with actual medical professionals, they go to ones who say, "Women totally have an anti-rape force field up in their cooch, which is attached to their intestines. Hey, did I mention I bribed my TA to get through Human Anatomy?"

Get off my tits. (I’m guessing you know where those are.)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said about the new Georgia six-week ban, “Most of the men writing these bills don’t know the first thing about a woman’s body outside of the things they want from it,” and that’s entirely correct. They’re happy to fuck it, they’re happy to get babies out of it, and they’re happy to exploit it to further their political agendas, but that’s about it. #NotAllMen (are you happy? I said it), but enough men that people’s lives and health are endangered. But hey, Ohio might be first to the line, and y’all might get famous for being the case that overturns Roe, so that’s totally worth it, right? Ha ha!

Honestly, I might owe an apology to the birth-control-not-understanding guys for bringing them into this in the first place. They’re at the mercy of the educational system that failed them, they seem to mean well, and in the grand scheme of things, thinking you can squeeze out menstrual blood if you hug a woman too tightly is not likely to result in legislators trampling on our rights (although these days, anything could happen). And frankly, they look like biology scholars next to the complete dunderheads sitting in our capitol and in legislatures around the country. And that is just not fucking funny.

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Newsflash, legislators: Every pregnancy is dangerous

Hold on, go back to the exploding brain part? (Photo credit Antonio Guillem/iStockPhoto)

[Trigger warnings for medical trauma, intimate partner violence, and suicide]

The many and varied six-week abortion bans currently bopping around state houses throughout the Southeast and Midwest are all different, in their own horrible way, but they all have at least three things in common:

1. They’re terrible.

2. They’re written for the express and stated purpose of triggering a Roe v. Wade challenge, with no respect for the impact they’ll have on real people.

3. They include an exception for the life or health of the mother.

So that’s thoughtful, at least, right?

Not really. Those exceptions generally only make it into this kind of bill because sponsors know that even the reproductive-rights-violatingest reps in the legislature aren’t willing to kill pregnant women outright, even to make a point. (This isn’t universal, of course — during the 2015 Republican debates, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Mark Rubio, and Mike Huckabee all spoke out against such life-saving exceptions. Thanks, guys.)

Current bans in Ohio, Kentucky, and Minnesota make an exception for an unspecified “medical emergency,” and others specifically exempt the possibility of “substantial and irreversible impairment of major bodily function of the pregnant person.” (West Virginia goes so far as to specifically include physical dangers but exclude emotional, psychological, or situational dangers.)

So here’s the thing about pregnancies that threaten the life or health of the pregnant person: That’s all of them.

Newsflash, legislators: Every mother’s life is in danger.

Pregnancy is forever

A woman isn’t a ten-month incubator for a future baby — her body is constantly changing and shifting and giving of its very tissues and nutrients to support a growing fetus. And some of those changes never change back. Stretch marks and skin discoloration may never fade. Shoe size may change. Breasts may end up larger or smaller, and saggier. Women who have gestational diabetes frequently end up with Type 2 diabetes. The uterus and vagina will likely become wider. Abdominal muscles may separate and hips become wider to make room for the fetus — her actual muscle and bone structure changes forever. Many women lose teeth. Lose teeth.

Adult women of all ages experience these changes. So do teenage and barely pubescent girls. Rape and molestation victims who just want to get on with their lives but are forced to carry to term will have a permanently changed body — and the memory of gestation, labor, and delivery — as a constant reminder. All of which is assuming, of course, that she actually survives the pregnancy.

Except when it isn’t

Before you pull out that tired argument that women have been giving birth for millions of years, allow me to remind you that for millions of years more than one in ten of them died doing it — even just a century ago, the maternal mortality rate was more than 600 deaths per 100,000 live births. Historical cemeteries are full of women who did what women have been doing for millions of years, along with babies who did what babies have been doing for millions of years.

Now, or as of 2015, it’s a mere 26.4 deaths per 100,000 births — the highest mortality rate of any developed country (the next highest is the UK at a whopping 9) and higher than Vietnam, Albania, and two dozen other developing ones. For black women in the US, the MMR is three to four times that of white women — even after controlling for socioeconomic status. And if that thought isn’t scary enough, try this one: In 2014, the rate in the US was 23.8 percent. So it’s going up.

Why is this? Because pregnancy is fucking difficult. A woman’s bodily organs are suddenly working to support two organisms. Calories and nutrients that would normally be keeping her body functioning are going to the fetus first, and she gets what’s left over. Her abdominal tissues are carrying around a respectably sized watermelon that she’ll eventually be expected to push out of her body through a tube sock. The most common medically related cause of death is embolism (a blood clot, frequently to the lungs or brain), hemorrhage (during or after pregnancy or delivery — a woman commonly loses as much as a quart of blood during delivery), pre-eclampsia (a failure of the liver and kidneys that can lead to severely high blood pressure, stroke, and seizures), infection, and cardiomyopathy and other cardiovascular disorders.

Most maternal-fetal medicine programs provide extensive training in how to deal with high-risk infants (and, in fact, infant mortality is at its lowest point in history), but very few have training in how to treat high-risk and birthing mothers. And while newborns are monitored closely after birth, the mother is far less so. Inadequate health insurance is another danger factor for mothers, as are race-related healthcare inequities. As many as 60 percent of maternal death has been deemed “preventable” by the CDC, yet somehow we… don’t.

Through standardized training and treatment methods, Britain has reduced deaths from preeclampsia to literally one in a million. In the U.S., it accounts for 8 percent of maternal deaths. Women in the U.S. are five times more likely to need an emergency hysterectomy (you know, something substantial and irreversible) than women in Britain. It doesn’t have be that way. But it is.

The threat at home

Of course, not every maternal death occurs in a hospital. While it’s difficult to track non-medical figures, because there’s no nationwide method for reporting maternal homicides, researchers have extrapolated from available figures that the second most common cause of maternal death is actually that: homicide. (The most common cause is car accidents.) Most often by an intimate partner. Pregnant women are more likely to suffer violent trauma, and twice as likely to die after trauma, as non-pregnant women, and 21 percent of the 1.5 million women assaulted by an intimate partner in 2015 were pregnant.

Another leading cause? Suicide — a Canadian study (from 2008) found that 5.3 percent of women who died during or after their pregnancy did so by suicide.

Think about the father or brother of a young woman who has “sullied herself” by getting pregnant out of wedlock. A partner who never wanted a baby, or isn’t ready for a baby, or didn’t want to be linked to this woman by a baby, or didn’t want his wife to find out about his infidelity, or who feels trapped or manipulated by her pregnancy. A family member trying to hide the evidence of molestation. Or a pregnant woman who feels fear or despair about an unwanted or nonviable pregnancy. Or a new mother with postpartum depression who feels like she just can’t go on.

The life of the mother

Or think about the mother whose brain is literally bursting as she’s giving birth, or as she lies in bed while doctors ignore her symptoms, or who’s gushing blood faster than doctors can put it back in, and maybe she dies, and maybe the baby dies, and maybe she lives with the devastating effects of a stroke or aneurysm for the rest of her life, but she definitely didn’t find pregnancy to be “perfectly safe,” and neither do tens of thousands of other pregnant women.

Think about that, and then tell me that all a woman — or young woman, or girl — has to do is carry her fetus to term and then put it up for adoption, and everything will be fine. Because we’re talking about a human life here! A fetal life, I mean. That’s the one we care about. I’m sure the mother will be fine, and if not, that’s a shame.

Don’t let the fact that a doctor will be allowed to perform an abortion if they deem it a sufficient emergency means they’ll actually do it, with the risk of jail hanging over their head if the state disagrees with their judgment. Don’t let the fact that these legislators are pretending to care about women make you think they actually do give a shit. Don’t let words like “life” and “equity” make you think these bills aren’t a serious threat to women’s physical and emotional health.

And don’t let the fact that most women survive pregnancy obscure the fact that it’s a fucking miracle that they do.

[feministeblog-blog]

Blessed Be the Fruit: Six-week abortion bills are sweeping the nation

Under his eye. (Photo credit Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Back in March, I brought up a (then) brand-new law in Kentucky that essentially outlaws abortion. Technically, it only bans abortion after a heartbeat can be detected, but since that can happen as early as six weeks — before many women even know they’re pregnant — it’s basically a not-even-that-sneaky attempt to ban all abortions. Except it’s not even that. It’s an attempt to get their law in front of the Supreme Court to create an opportunity for our newly conservatized court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Kentucky was the first to get their bill over the line, but they’re far from the only contenders. Three more have been signed — among them Georgia’s truly repugnant bill, which was signed just this week — and six more are currently sitting in various stages in their respective legislatures, most of them openly declaring an intent to make it to the Supreme Court, consequences and expenses to the taxpayers be damned.

(A note on terminology: These bills are made all the most absurd by the fact that a fetus doesn’t even actually have a heart at six weeks’ gestation, as pointed out by Dr. Jen Gunter. But I guess “fetal pole tissue activity bill” doesn’t have the same ring to it. I’ll be using the term “six-week ban,” because I don’t like reinforcing inaccurate, intentionally inflammatory terminology.)

It’s important to note that even after these laws “officially” take effect, they won’t be able to actually take effect because they are, to a one, unconstitutional AF. (But again, that’s the whole point.) It’s less important to note that 56 percent of the U.S. public opposes the bans once they know what the bans really mean, and 65 percent of the public don’t want the court to overturn Roe. Why is that less important? Because the public doesn’t get an opinion on this one — it’s not in Brett Kavanaugh’s hands yet, but it will be before long.

Signed

Georgia

Just on Tuesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB 481 — the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, see, it spells a word! It’s so clever! — which prevents women from getting an abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. The law does include exceptions for a documented medical emergency or for rape or incest — in which case you have to file a police report before they’ll let you get an abortion.

But wait, there’s more. The Georgia law also declares that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person” that deserves “full legal recognition” — meaning that, no shit, fetuses have to be included in “population based determinations.”

Unlike many abortion laws that apply to abortion providers but not pregnant women, this law does criminalize women who get abortions. If they get an abortion from a provider, they’re a party to murder, punishable by life in prison. (If you travel out of state, or help someone else leave the state, for an abortion, that’s conspiracy to commit murder, 10 years.) If she miscarries because of her own conduct (like using drugs while pregnant), that’s second-degree murder, punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison. (So pregnant women in Georgia, look forward to an interrogation about that sushi you ate that one time if you should ever experience the tragedy of a miscarriage.) And if she terminates her own pregnancy, that’s murder, subject to life imprisonment or death.

The law will go into effect January 1, 2020, although Roe v. Wade will prevent the state from actually prosecute women — for as long as Roe remains precedent, at least.

Ohio

At long last, Ohio has finally managed to get a six-week ban passed! (Fifth time’s the charm.) In April, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed SB 23, the Human Rights Protection Act (which doesn’t spell anything clever. Come on, Ohio, you’ve had eight years to work on this). The new law, of course, bans abortions as soon as a heartbeat can be detected, making it a fifth-degree felony with up to a year in prison for any doctor who performs one. The legislation also lets the State Medical Board take disciplinary action against doctors, with penalties of up to $20,000. It was known as the country’s most punitive such bill until Georgia said, “Hold my beer.”

Is this another bill designed for the sole purpose of causing a Supreme Court challenge, though? No way!

Just kidding. “Will there be a lawsuit? Yeah, we are counting on it. We’re counting on it. We’re excited about it.” Well, I’m glad you’re getting such a thrill from violating a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, state Rep. Ron Hood.

The new law is scheduled to take effect 90 days after signing — which will be July 10 — unless, of course, it’s blocked by a federal judge.

Mississippi

In March, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed their own six-week ban, SB 2116, also prohibiting abortion as early as six weeks in lest a doctor lose their Mississippi medical license. (It does include an exception for the life or health of the mother, although the legislature rejected efforts to allow an exception for rape or incest.) In a statement at the signing ceremony, Bryant said, "I can remember the exciting moments both with my children and grandchildren when the first sonograms were taken and that heartbeat could be heard,” because some dude’s happy sonogram memory should definitely dictate what women are allowed to do with their own bodies.

Mississippi’s last attempt at an abortion bill passed last year — a ban after 15 weeks, which was, at the time, one of the most restrictive laws in the country. (Ah, simpler times.) It was blocked by a federal judge who found it to “unequivocally” violate women’s constitutional rights. I’m sure they have great hopes for this one, though. (Although it’s facing legal challenges, it remains as yet unblocked.)

(Fun fact: Did you know that Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the country? I wonder if any of those babies would have appreciated the funding the state is prepared to dump into defending this openly unconstitutional law.)

Kentucky

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin got to signing SB 9 with a quickness — not only did he sign the bill into law around midnight the day after it passed the Senate in March, he also signed an “emergency” declaration to make it take effect immediately. The ACLU of Kentucky filed almost immediately to stop it from going into effect, and then U.S. District Judge David Hale awarded them a temporary stay almost immediately on the grounds that come on, y’all, please don’t pretend to be as stupid as you’re pretending to be. Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

EMW Women’s Surgical Center, the only remaining clinic in Kentucky that performs abortions, had to turn patients away the day the bill was signed. They were able to reopen again when the stay was ordered — for as long as it lasts, anyway.

In Progress

Louisiana

Louisiana’s SB 184 passed through the state Senate just this week and is headed over to the House for consideration. The bill prohibits a person from performing an abortion after a heartbeat is detected under penalty of a fine up to $1,000, up to two years in jail, and revocation of their medical license. It includes an exception for the woman’s life or health but not for rape or incest — the Senate committee original approved such an exception, but then a representative from Louisiana Right to Life convinced them to leave it out, because it would show respect for a life after it’s born, which we don’t do in Louisiana, merci beaucoup.

This law actually has a trigger clause that it will only go into effect if Mississippi’s law passes its own legal challenges. That way, Louisiana doesn’t have to pay for a legal battle it know it won’t be able to win. There’s using your noodle, Louisiana.

Alabama

Alabama HB 314 would make abortion — all abortion — a Class A felony, carrying a maximum sentence of 99 years in prison, and attempted abortion a Class C felony, with up to 10 years. It passed in the House 74-3, with all of the Republicans voting in favor (save for two who didn’t vote at all), and nearly all the Democrats walking out of the House chamber rather than vote.

As in other states, bill sponsor Rep. Terri Collins was very open about the fact that her goal with this bill is a Supreme Court challenge — that’s why it doesn’t include an exception for rape or incest (despite a proposed amendment to include such an exemption). She says the bill will provide “a vehicle to revisit the constitutionally flawed Roe v. Wade decision.”

The bill will move to the state Senate sometime next week, and while it’s not completely certain that it’ll pass, a companion bill (SB 211) was introduced last month, so chances aren’t bad. I mean, “not bad” in the sense that it’s not unlikely to pass, not “not bad” in the sense that it wouldn’t be very, very bad for anyone who might get pregnant.

South Carolina

South Carolina’s H 3020 would make it illegal to receive an abortion in South Carolina after a heartbeat is detected. Unlike most other six-week bans currently under discussion, South Carolina’s bill includes an exception for rape or incest as well as for the life of the mother, although it was only added after a bit of a fight.

The bill isn’t likely to become law this year, since the legislative session is over, but: The South Carolina legislative session is actually two years, meaning this bill could come back up when the General Assembly reconvenes in 2020. So while the bill hasn’t totally passed, we can’t really put it down as a fail either. (More’s the pity.) And it’s not promising that this is the first time this proposal has ever made it this far — attempts in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018 never made it to the floor, but this one appears to be a winner.

Missouri

In February, the House of Representatives in Missouri — which has exactly one abortion provider left — passed HB 126, which bans… like, everything. It started out just banning abortion after the detection of a heartbeat, making it a felony, but then it got loaded up like a party bus on prom night. As passed, the bill also bans abortion on the basis of race, sex, or indication of Down syndrome; requires both custodial parents to be informed if a minor tries to get an abortion; and requires Missouri residents who are getting an abortion out of state to receive the same informed consent booklet they would if they were getting their abortion in Missouri. It also includes a trigger clause that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion is banned entirely in Missouri. And it bans abortion at eight, 14, 18, or 20 weeks, whichever ends up being deemed constitutional. (The bill includes an exception for the life or health of the mother but not for rape or incest.)

So just to be clear: This bill bans abortion after the detection of a heartbeat or on the basis of a whole bunch of things that can’t be detected at six weeks. And it requires out-of-state abortion providers to have Missouri informed consent materials, and it bans abortion after… basically whatever they can get away with. Missouri, you definitely win the award for most dadaist abortion bill.

The bill — called the “Missouri Stands for the Unborn” Act — is currently sitting in the state Senate, so we’ll see where it goes from there.

West Virginia

West By-God Virginia’s HB 2915 was introduced in February to ban abortion after a heartbeat is detected, except in the case of danger to the mother’s life or health, rape or incest, incomplete miscarriage, or fetal incompatibility with life — making it probably the most permissive of the current crop of six-week bills, which, of course, isn’t saying much. It also includes regulations as to what can be done with fetal tissue. The bill, which happens to have been co-sponsored by Speaker of the House Roger Hanshaw, was still sitting in committee when the legislative session closed in March.

Incidentally, last November, West Virginia voters approved an amendment to remove the right to abortion from the West Virginia constitution. During that debate, abortion-rights proponents argued that the amendment would open the door to other abortion restrictions. What a bunch of sillys, right?

Minnesota

In January, HF 271 (and its companion bill SF 869) were introduced to the Minnesota State Legislature. It was referred to the Health and Human Services Policy committee, and there it appears to be hanging out, for the time being. These bills are identical to HF 4524 and SF 4109, which failed to pass in 2018, so here’s hoping for a repeat of that.

FAIL

Florida

Companion bills HB 235 and SB 792 would have made it a third-degree felony for a doctor to perform an abortion after a heartbeat is detected, with an exception for the life or health of the mother. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had pledged to sign such legislation if it passed, which it didn’t.

Maryland

In February, HB 933 and HB 978 (the “Keep Our Hearts Beating” Act, like, seriously) were filed with the Maryland House of Delegates, but neither made it out of committee. Also in February, a bill that would enshrine a woman’s right to abortion in the state constitution was withdrawn because the Senate president didn’t want to move it forward this year. Maybe next year, Maryland.

Texas

The Texas House of Representatives held a public hearing in April to discuss HB 896, a law that would criminalize all abortion with no exception, and make it possible for women who get abortions to be convicted of homicide. Since Texas is easily the death-penaltiest state in the country, that means a woman could be executed for getting an abortion — even if her own life was in danger. Rep. Tony Tinderholt said the bill is necessary to make women “more personally responsible.”

The law, thankfully, was blocked in committee when Rep. Jeff Leach refused to advance it to the floor. The local sheriff’s department is currently looking into multiple threats to his life. Because, life! We care about it!

Tennessee

Tennessee’s HB 77 (companion bill to SB 1236) passed out of the state House in February by a vote of 66-21, but it failed in the state Senate Judiciary Committee because it is, as Lt. Gov. Randy McNally says, “constitutionally suspect.” (Not that “constitutionally suspect” is basically a defining feature of all these bills.) But the state House and Senate appear divided over whether they want to focus on a six-week bill or a trigger bill, and now they’re engaged in a zany comedy of errors. Don’t hold your breath, though — the six-week bill has been sent to “summer study,” so we’ll probably be seeing it again next session. Then again, Sen. Mark Pody has submitted a letter requesting that the bill be brought to the floor now, so who knows what might happen? It’s definitely not in any way a clusterfuck.

Iowa

Iowa’s six-week ban was signed into law in May of 2018 but never took effect because, of course, it violates the state constitution. The Polk County District Court deemed it “violative of both the due process and equal protection provisions of the Iowa Constitution as not being narrowly tailored to serve the compelling state interest of promoting potential life.” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said she thinks the court got it wrong but that she sees “no path to successfully appeal the district court’s decisions or to get this lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Oh, come on, Kim, don’t get all discouraged like that! That kind of thing isn’t stopping any of the other states.

[feministeblog-blog]

A Southerner Details Exactly How Donald Trump Is Horrible

All class, this man. All class. (Photo credit KSTP-TV)

The South, of course, isn’t exactly known for recognizing and rebuking Donald Trump’s awfulness. Every state in the Deep South went red in 2016, usually by a respectable margin, and his approval ratings consistently sit comfortably above sea level. But it’s far from universal. He has plenty of opposition in the South, people unwilling to accept his racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, unapologetically cruel policies and statements and are constantly fighting his rhetoric and standing up candidates to grind his attempts to kick our country back into the 1950s into a fine powder.

This is home, and we’re not, as so many have suggested, going to just move out of the South and let it secede like the growing, emboldened crowd of white supremacists want to. The South is made up of a diverse group of people with diverse philosophies, and we’re not giving up that easy to a man who’s heartless, ignorant, egotistical, bigoted, and corrupt. And with apologies to friends and family for the harsh language I’m about to use:

He’s so tacky.

Stay with me here, because I’m not just talking about the traditional conceptions of tackiness. Gold-plated bathrooms are obviously tacky. Ill-fitted suits when you have tons of money for a tailor are obviously tacky. Openly ogling women is obviously tacky.

But Trump takes tackiness to a new and unforeseen level. He uses it like a weapon of war, turning it into something that threatens global stability and gouges the foundation of our society in ways from which we seriously won’t recover. Never before have we seen 46.1 percent of our country vote for a man not in spite of but because of this unique, pernicious type of tackiness. Because tackiness plus power minus accountability puts us all in a very dangerous place. Here’s what I mean:

He’s thirsty.

Donald Trump is so very, very desperate to be seen as cool. Not since I was 13 and looking in the mirror have I seen someone so desperate to be liked by the cool kids. He’s spent most of his life up until now as an unchecked authoritarian power in his own little world, spending the vast majority of his time in towers and golf courses that bear his name and in which he’s able to craft reality itself to his liking, “you’re fired”ing at will and being named champion of golf tournaments he didn’t even play in.

But then, when he got to the White House and discovered that life there isn’t like life inside his gold-plated bubble, he immediately began currying favor with the people who have the kind of power he covets — the ruthless dictators who use fear and military might to craft their own reality in their own countries. Kim Jong Un. Mohammed bin Salman. Rodrigo Duterte. Vladmir Putin. He’s happy to give them a pass on offenses, attacks, and atrocities — over the objections of his own intelligence community — for fear of losing their favor and the sense of coolness he gains from their presence.

You can see that thirstiness in the shows of fealty he demands from those under him. Watching his cabinet officials prostrating themselves in front of him during cabinet meetings is nausea-inducing. (And Mike Pence is The Absolute Worst about it.) And that makes him manipulable — all Kim Jung Un has to do is send Trump “beautiful letters,” and Kim can get whatever he wants. Fox and Friends just have to stroke his ego a little, and they’re able to influence policy decisions via TV during Executive Time. It would be gross if it weren’t worse than gross — it’s a danger to our country.

Dictators invade countries, and have people murdered, and hack computer systems within our own actual country to sway elections in favor of the candidate they know will become the world’s most powerful puppet, and he doesn’t just ignore it — he actively defends them. Because who cares if ruthless authoritarians gain power in the world as long as they let him sit at their lunch table?

He’s fake.

Donald Trump is as fake as his orange spray tan and unconvincing yellow hair. He’s built up an image and fully invested in it, at any cost. He had his attorney threaten the schools he attended to keep his grades a secret so no one will find out that the self-proclaimed genius was actually a shitty student at UPenn. He strategically angled and cropped photos of his inauguration to make it look like people actually attended. He’s blatantly lied, and had his staff blatantly lie, about his efforts to hide any evidence that he probably could never have been elected without the interference of an adversarial power. He’s (allegedly) tried to obstruct an investigation meant to uncover important details about a foreign attack on our sovereignty. He lies, regularly, to the American people to cover up not just misdeeds but anything that might tarnish the image that he seems to think remains untarnished.

In his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Bill Barr insisted that without underlying criminality, Trump couldn’t have actually obstructed justice. First of all, Bob Mueller certainly didn’t see it that way, as noted in his report, but also, I can think of plenty of reasons Trump might have tried to waylay a criminal investigation without actually having committed a crime. If he thought he’d committed a crime, even if it turns out he actually hadn’t. If someone else (or, like, 11 someone elses) had committed a crime that he wanted to cover up. Or if there was just something embarrassing in his past that he didn’t want to come to light, to the point that he was willing to commit a crime — which obstruction of justice is — to keep it secret. There are plenty of reasons Trump might fear himself being fucked that wouldn’t end up with him behind bars.

Why is he going to such lengths to keep his tax returns (which every presidential candidate for the past four decades has made public) under wraps? It couldn’t be because they’d expose the fact that he’s not as rich as he claims to be. Just think about it: a president willing not just to lie to the people but to subvert the rule of law to protect his own ego. Tell me that guy is worthy of the office.

He’s crude.

This, of course, is a sin of which I am guilty myself from time to time (and am reminded about by my parents every time I drop an f-bomb in a blog post). But I’m crude recreationally and strategically. He’s crude as a way of life. When your grandmother tells you that people who swear do so because they don’t have a better vocabulary, this is the guy she’s talking about (although she probably doesn’t know it). “Grab ‘em by the pussy,” “shithole countries,” “get that son of a bitch off the field” — Trump directs his crudeness toward the people for whom he has the most contempt. You know, women, people of color, immigrants.

Dictators, of course, are funny, and very, very smart, and strong leaders, and truly love their countries.

Because murdering your own people is totally cool, but being a black athlete taking a stand against police brutality is the ultimate sin.

He’s indecent.

Giving his political opponents juvenile, asinine nicknames like “Sleepy Joe” and “Pocahontas” (and I won’t even try to unpack everything that’s awful about that), lying publicly about everything from murder rates to vaccine safety, filling his cabinet with criminals, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on golf trips, trashing the press as liars and enemies of the people at every turn? That’s offensive.

But fuck that shit.

Separating families, putting children in cages, and then firing his Secretary of Homeland Security because she wasn’t horrible enough? That’s indecent. Banning trans people from the military and stripping away protections for trans children in schools? That’s indecent. Smearing immigrants as rapists, murderers, invading forces, animals, feeding the cruelest instincts of hateful people who want to shoot up synagogues and mosques and churches? Greeting asylum seekers with indefinite detention and application fees?

That’s indecent. That’s offensive to anyone with even the most blackened and shriveled of souls. It offends the very concept of human rights and humanity itself. It’s the kind of thing any decent person would back away from slowly without breaking eye contact, but Trump is not a decent person. I’m not sure what kind of a person he is, actually. The things he does would seem over-the-top if they were coming out of a movie villain, but there he is, befouling the Oval Office and dragging the country down with him.

Unforgivably corrupt is as unforgivably corrupt does.

So when I say Trump is tacky, I don’t mean someone needs to talk to him about his handbag (although Mike Pence is definitely the fake Louis Vuitton bucket bag of U.S. politics). I mean he’s a generally horrible person and threatens the very fabric of our nation. I mean he redefines the concept and takes it to the point that it doesn’t even really qualify anymore, because lending his power to dictators, (allegedly) committing crimes, and blatantly lying to the American people isn’t anything that might be covered by Emily Post. I mean he is a danger and a threat to everything he touches, and he hides it all under the disguise of an ignorant buffoon. But, like booty shorts and a muscle tee at Walmart, his supporters don’t care as long as their ass is covered.

[feministeblog-blog]

Blessed Be the Fruit: Kentucky just banned abortion. Which is just the beginning.

Last week, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin signed two bills that essentially outlaw abortion in the state of Kentucky.

The first bill prohibits abortion after six weeks of gestation. Of course, per the American Pregnancy Association, most women find out they’re pregnant between their fourth and seventh week of pregnancy, so chances are good they won’t even know they’re pregnant before their window closes. Why specifically six weeks? Because fuck you, that’s why.

The other bill outlaws abortion if the woman is seeking it because of a fetal diagnosis. I’ve written in greater detail about why this issue is so painful and so complicated, and I encourage you to jump over and read it, because there’s really too much of it to fully address here, but the point is that many women who receive bad fetal diagnoses are going through horrible things. They’re often looking at fetal anomalies incompatible with life — issues that would inevitably lead to miscarriage, stillbirth, or a short, miserable life for a helpless infant — and having to make a heartbreaking decision about the baby they already love. The ostensible intent of this bill is to address women getting abortions because of diagnoses like Down syndrome, and I’m completely supportive of people in the disability community who are concerned about abortion legislation and rhetoric that devalues the lives of people with disabilities. But let’s not kid ourselves that these legislators give a single shit about that. This is about exploiting them as a tool for banning abortion entirely. And in some cases, terminating a much-wanted, much-loved pregnancy is the most merciful thing a parent could do, and the most awful decision they might ever have to make.

So fuck you, Kentucky Legislature, is my point. I give you no credit and offer no benefit of any doubt. We all know what you’re here for. In 2017, y’all passed a law that made two clinics in Kentucky stop providing abortions, and you used TRAP laws in 2017 to go after the remaining one. That last attempt failed when a federal district court determined that it was complete bullshit.

Which, be honest, is what you’re hoping for with these new laws.

Do they actually think this is going to fly?

Realistically, not at the state level, no. That’s not the point. The point is to provoke a lawsuit that will elevate this whole thing to the Supreme Court and create an opportunity to attack Roe v. Wade. If you had “appoint two super-conservative justices to the Supreme Court to prepare to take down Roe v. Wade” in the Conservative Control of Government betting pool, you win! You win a precedent of sanctioned government control of women’s bodies, irreversible impact on lives and families, and a future of women dying in unsafe, home-baked abortions. We all win that.

(Yeah, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh both said they wouldn’t try to overturn Roe during their confirmation hearings. Kavanaugh also said that he never drank to excess and that Devil’s Triangle is a drinking game. Sometimes, people lie under oath to advance their abhorrent, societally damaging agenda. Who knew, right?)

What is that going to look like?

It’s hard to tell. Here’s the ideological breakdown:

Chief Justice John Roberts. Conservative Roberts has been a swing vote in the past, but he’s also proven to be in favor of banning certain abortion procedures — he joined the majority opinion supporting the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2013 in Gonzales v. Carhart, but he chose not to join Judge Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion that Roe should be overturned. Early in Roberts’s career, under Bush I, he signed a brief urging the overturn of Roe.

Justice Clarence Thomas. See above. He also joined Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion on Planned Parenthood v. Casey. (He was another one who bullshitted about abortion and Roe during his confirmation hearing.)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Notorious RBG is known for emphasizing women’s equality in her rulings and rejecting the BS justifications used in attempts to limit abortion rights.

Justice Stephen Breyer. During his confirmation hearing, Breyer said he considers Roe to be settled law, but unlike others on this list, he actually seems to believe it. He wrote the court’s opinion on Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt and led the dissent on National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra.

Justice Samuel Alito. Possibly the most conservative justice on the court, Alito hasn’t said much about his feelings on the settledness of Roe, but he wrote a memo in 1985 saying the government “should make it clear we disagree with Roe v. Wade” and, as noted above, wrote the dissent in Casey.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor is another one who supported Roe in her confirmation hearing and seems to be following through on it. She has several times cited due process and a woman’s right to privacy in said support.

Justice Elena Kagan. Kagan has generally taken a liberal-leaning position on issues concerning abortion and joined the court’s opinion on Whole Women’s Health.

Justice Neil Gorsuch. Trump’s first Supreme Court justice, Gorsuch was the chosen replacement for super-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. He’s only ruled on one abortion-related case, Becerra, and joined the court’s opinion on the side of crisis pregnancy centers.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Trump’s most recent pick, Kavanaugh replaced the retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was known to be supportive of abortion rights in cases like Casey and Whole Women’s Health. Oath-bound statements notwithstanding, Kavanaugh wrote the dissent in Medical Services, LLC v. Gee and Garza v. Hargan, and he has expressed admiration of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his (unsuccessful) attempts to block cases like Roe and Casey.

So there’s no telling. When the Kentucky laws make it to the Supreme Court — and they will — they’ll be at the back of a line of more than 20 cases that could carve up Roe. Some states are already writing currently unconstitutional language into their laws so they’ll have a running start at blocking abortion rights once Roe is inevitably (in their minds) overturned.

At Politico, Robin Marty outlines the possible impact of Roe’s overturn, which she frames as a positive thing, for her reasons (she is staunchly pro-choice), although lines like “If Roe is overturned, abortion will be a criminal offense in at least 15 states where there is either already a trigger law” don’t make me think, “Yay! Looks like positive change is a-comin’.” It’s worth reading all the way through, though. It at least gives some pretty thorough context to any “Welp, looks like we’re fucked” feelings you might have had as Boofing Brett took his oath to protect and uphold the Constitution.

[feministeblog-blog]

An open letter to Meghan McCain and Ben Sasse

An open letter to Meghan McCain, Ben Sasse, and anyone who read their Wall Street Journal op-ed this week demonizing people who support abortion rights and thought, “Yeah, sounds legit.”

Hi, Meghan. Hi, Ben.

It’s kind of weird, I know, kind of ironic, but it seems like some of you people who call yourself “pro-life” (not all, just some — if it’s not about you, it’s not about you) are heartless beyond belief. Some of you are barely human. Back in 2009, talking about Medicare covering end-of-life counseling to help people with terminal illnesses get the most out of their last days and die with dignity and try to make it even a little bit easier for their family, and conservatives were demonizing it and calling it “death panels” and in the end, the provision didn’t get passed. So that's cool. I mean, who needs dignity or quality time with their loved ones?

Today, it’s an issue of letting newborns who couldn’t survive outside of the womb pass peacefully in the loving arms of their parents instead of alone in an incubator stuck full of needles and tubes, and you and your ilk are calling it “infanticide” and demonizing families and doctors that are just doing the best they can with a horrible, awful situation.

Here’s an idea I had while I was reading your op-ed: Have some fucking empathy. Have some fucking compassion. Get past this fixation you have that defines “life” as “having a pulse” and realize that everyone’s life isn’t like yours, and everyone’s struggles aren’t yours, and the heartbreaking decisions other people are forced to make aren’t yours. Try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes for ten fucking seconds and consider that maybe, just maybe, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Consider that just maybe, parents actually don’t want to murder their newborns and children don’t want to murder their elderly parents and doctors don’t want to murder their patients and these cartoonish monsters you have in your head are actually human beings doing the best they can when it feels like no choice is the right choice, and God forbid you should ever have to experience what they’re going through.

Be pro-compassion and pro-supporting people in tragic situations. Be pro-their lives. Stop thinking about pulses and try thinking about people for once. And if you can’t manage that, if you’re too mindlessly lost in your overly simplistic orthodoxy, at least shut the fuck up so you aren’t making it worse for people who are dealing with actual life, the kind that isn’t simple or easy, and deserve just a little bit of empathy.

Not telling you how to live your life or anything. Just inviting you to consider opening your heart and closing your mouth before you get someone killed or just make someone’s life even worse than it already is.

xoxo,

Caperton

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Y'all, don't do this: Co-opt and deface a WOC's art

I mentioned this in my last post, but it warranted further explication here: Sikh poet Jasmin Kaur wrote a powerful poem, "her voice," about the erasure of her voice and her culture as a Sikh woman.

scream

so that one day

a hundred years from now

another sister will not have to

dry her tears wondering

where in history

she lost her voice.

If you were making a list of the most ignorant, entitled things a white feminist could do to that poem, literally scratching out the word "scream" to erase Kaur's identity from the poem and repurpose it for her own political purposes would have to be at the top. And yet.

And here we are.

Y'all, don't do this. I don't even know where to start with that.

Y'all, not everything is about you. Not every artwork is written for or around your experiences. And here's a thing: If you read something, and you feel it has to be "edited" to apply to you, that thing isn't applicable to your experiences, which is fine, because it doesn't have to be.

Feel inspired by it. Put it on your wall. Research the parts that you don't understand and become a fuller person because of it. Share it -- in the context in which it was written. Hell, write your own poem about your feelings reading that poem. (I know! Revolutionary! Doing your own damn work!) But don't give the poet a big thumbs-up for spilling her blood on the paper to get you halfway there and then do whatever editing you need to make it juuuuust right.

As Kaur said in an Instagram post addressing the theft:

I write to exist. To be seen. To hold a mirror up to myself + women who look like me. In a world that very selfishly consumes the work of women of colour and marginalized folks. If you share my poetry (or your version of my poetry) without actually understanding who I am and why I am, you're engaging in my work passively. If you, as a white person, feel that I matter so little within the context of what I create that you can remove me from the work all together, you're colonizing my poetry.

Or as she said concisely on Twitter: "I didn't stutter. I said scream. Not vote."

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No, it’s cool, scream.

"Don't scream, vote!" Any time a woman writes a flamethrower of a blog post. Any time a woman carries a sign and shouts their views at a march. Any time a woman posts something long, outraged, explicit, and satisfying on social media.

(Any time a Sikh woman writes a powerful poem about invisibility and loss of voice in a white supremacist society and a white feminist sees an opportunity to co-opt and deface it for political purposes...)

Any time a woman expresses abject rage at a time when abject rage is a perfectly reasonable thing to experience and want to express, "Don't scream, vote!"

Screw that. Go ahead and scream.

Just over a week ago, Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice despite credible accusations that he was a sexual predator (not to mention a straight-up perjurer), and of fucking course he did. Susan Collins gave an interminable, meandering monologue indicating both that she believed women and that she didn't believe women when the woman was accusing her guy, and of fucking course she did. Was she going to choose compassion over power? Were Republican senators going to vote against their president's guy, after their own waffling and talk about respecting women and survivors and their constituents? Of fucking course not. And if you watched all of that, and maybe some part of you held out the slightest bit of hope, and the rest of you was rolling its eyes at that part of you, and then it happened, because of fucking course, because that's just how it works, and you wanted to lean out your front door and scream, "Of fucking course!" into the night? I hope you did that, because you certainly deserved it.

If you're a survivor of sexual assault and these entire proceedings have been triggering as fuck, and you want to scream, for the love of God, do it.

If you're talking with a crowd of guys who are aghast and amazed that this kind of thing could happen, that it should be easy to vote against someone as obviously unqualified as Kavanaugh, that they thought we'd moved past all this (wasn't that what #MeToo was for?), and no one could have predicted something like this? If they're looking to you to stroke their back and comfort them about it, while inwardly, you're thinking, "Are you fucking kidding me?" And you just want to scream, "Are you fucking kidding me?" Do it. Yes, the guys will probably think you're just being irrational and histrionic, but realistically, they were going to think that anyway as soon as you stopped stroking their back and explaining why none of this was even a little bit surprising.

If you just heard Chuck Grassley say it's hard to get women onto the Senate Judiciary Committee because "it's a lot of work -- maybe they don't want to do it," and you literally can't form words and all that's coming up is an inarticulate scream, let it out. Like a sneeze, it's not healthy to try to hold that in.

If you're inwardly raging, if you're carrying all of this around inside you and it makes you say something untoward during lunch, and the person sitting next to you says, "Listen, don't scream, vote," and that makes you want to scream? I'm of the opinion that opening your face like the mummy in The Mummy and letting out a rafters-shaking scream s is completely appropriate.

If you've been systematically disenfranchised in a targeted effort to silence you and people like you, and you have a scream welling up inside you and someone looks you in the eye and tells you not to scream! but to vote! then screaming is basically a public service.

Yes, vote, if you're able. Races are looking really tight in upcoming elections, to the point that every vote really does matter. Vote because voter rolls are being stripped and civil rights are being withheld, and if you don't vote in support of the silenced, no one will. Oppressive laws and policies don't change themselves, and they don't change just because you yell at them, so yeah, vote.

But if you want to scream? Scream. It doesn't have to be either-or. We are a deft, multi-talented species and can hold many ideas in our wrinkly brains at once, and it's possible to scream before you go to vote and scream again after, if you feel like you didn't get it all out the first time. Don't feel limited to one form of expression. Scream, and write, and march, and speak, and write letters, and canvass, and call your elected officials, and then vote (if you can), and then scream again, because after all of that, you've earned it. Scream not because some self-important woman on the Internet thought she could give you permission but because biology has given you some way to scream, by some method, using some mechanism, and it would be a shame to not use it just because someone thought they could tell you what to do with it.

[feministeblog-blog]

Still here, y’all.

If you've been thinking Feministe is dead, it's understandable that you should think that. We've been in hibernation for quite some time while we try to sort out some technical things. (Still.) But while we do that, here is the break-glass-in-case-of-technical-things, slimmed-down version, and it seems like a pretty good time to take it live.

So keep an eye on this space, keep an eye on the Facebook group for discussion purposes, and we'll move everything back over to the honest-to-dog site as soon as it's operable. Which we hope will be soon.

Cheers.