Tag Archives: contraception

The Means Do Not Justify the Ends

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It bears repeating, now and then, that the people (politicians, activists, etc.) who tend to bray the loudest about the need to stop abortion also tend to oppose any and all measures with an actual, proven track record of reducing the number of abortions—usually because those measures require an acknowledgment that sex is a thing that happens whether they shame people for it or not. That’s something they just cannot do, I guess.

(They also tend to oppose measures that would assist new parents in raising the children they insist those new parents have, but that’s a rant for another day.)

In the face of all this evidence of what actually works, they just keep spinning their wheels. It’s almost like stopping abortion isn’t the real objective, you know?

Or, to put it another way: Continue reading →

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Isn’t it awfully nice to have a penis?

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The Raw Story has a list of “5 sexual health services insurance will cover… for men.”

I’m sure someone will make the arguments for the medical necessity, under whatever circumstances, of each of these five procedures, which is completely not the point of bringing up these five procedures. The issue is the way that someone is (or many someone’s are), sooner or later, going to rush to defend these five procedures as legitimate and medically necessary while still blithely dismissing various forms of women’s contraception as mere recreational implements for being a big ol’ Slutty Slutterson.

So I’ll just go ahead and get the ball rolling by making statements I know to be counter-factual, so that maybe people who are inclined to dismiss contraception as slut pills will get some smidgen of an idea of what it’s like to see demonstrably false statements treated as fact (or as “sincerely-held religious beliefs” when push comes to shove comes to science): Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, April 23, 2014

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David Jackmanson [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via FlickrApparently, We Need To Remind People That Pro-Choice Women Are Allowed To Have Babies, Samantha Lachman, Huffington Post, April 17, 2014

Chelsea Clinton is pregnant, and some anti-abortion activists responded to the news Thursday by showing they don’t understand what being “pro-choice” means: being able to choose to have a baby, or not.

White Supremacist’s Genocidal Paranoia: Inside the Mind of the White Man March Founder, Toby McCasker, AlterNet, April 19, 2014

Masked ethnic nationalism had been enjoying a nice stay as a dot-point in the “dark enlightenment” of the so-called neo-reactionary movement, but bigotry is never content to be itemized. Say hi to nuwe racism, and the composite ire-ony of using the Afrikaans for “new” here seems so complexly black and white as to transcend meta. Hyper-aware there is less and less room on earth for old hate, nuwe racists dress their prejudice in conspiracy and pseudoscience and call it “pride.” Pride is a much more appealing sin than wrath, and allows them to, heinously, plead victimhood just as they pursue a policy of victimization. It is like punching someone and getting angry at them for hurting your fist.

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What I’m Reading, March 25, 2014

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By Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsThe Breadth of Hobby Lobby’s Attack On Its Employees, Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns & Money, March 22, 2014

Hobby Lobby et al. are citing a “burden” on religious practice so trivial as to be non-existent in order to impose actual burdens on the rights of their employees. This nicely summarizes how American conservatives think about “freedom.”

Nauru–From Island Paradise To Hell On Earth, Down With Tyranny! March 22, 2014

I remember Nauru from the time I was a pre-teen stamp collector. It was– still is– just a speck of a South Pacific Island, about 8 square miles and less than 10,000 people. Earlier, it had been a German colony that was taken over by the Brits after World War I– like Tanganyika (which, coincidentally, also has a village named Nauru). I haven’t thought about Nauru in half a century until last night. I didn’t even know that around the time Nauru became independent, phosphate mining had given it the highest per-capita income of any country in the world– almost all of which has been swindled. They went from wealth to poverty and Nauru was reduced to taking money from Australia to host a virtual concentration camp for refugees from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine and Pakistan.

Ladders on Everest are just the latest step in our commodification of nature, Philip Hoare, The Guardian, posted at Raw Story, March 20, 2014

For a place already blighted by litter, fistfights and unburied dead bodies, it’s not so much “health and safety” as “access all areas”. Its greatest hero, Edmund Hillary, declared in 2006, two years before he died: “I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top.” His successor, Stephen Venables, the first Briton to climb the peak without oxygen, agreed. “The mountain has become a commodity, to be bought and sold like any other,” he said. We humans have come to expect the natural world to come commodified, negotiated, shaped to our needs. From high to low, there’s nowhere we can’t go, nothing we can’t do. In this age of the Anthropocene – the era of human manipulation heralded by the industrial revolution – it is a given that we have tuned the environment to suit ourselves. Dominion is all; human ingenuity has encompassed the planet. Now pass me the phone: “I’m on the mountain.”

More like the Dork Enlightenment, am I right?, PZ Myers, Pharyngula, March 7, 2014

I am told I’m supposed to take The Dark Enlightenment seriously. I can’t. I just can’t. What it is is mostly a bunch of pretentious white dudebro computer programmers with a fascist ideology who write tortuous long-winded screeds off the top of their heads, with most of their ‘data’ coming from pop culture movies like The Matrix, and a few similarly clueless nerds who think it’s neat-o. I take it seriously only in the same way I take Libertarianism seriously: it’s a nucleus for idiots to coalesce around.

They also throw the term HBD around a lot. If you’re not in the know, HBD is short for Human BioDiversity, and it’s the hot new sciencey word for racism. The only people who use it are racists.

Photo credit: By Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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A Searing Look at the “Pro-Life” Movement from a Former Insider

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Although I have been pro-choice for as long as I have known that this was an issue in dispute, I have always felt a certain sympathy for people who genuinely believe that “life begins at [whenever],” but my sympathy stops when they start trying to impose their views on others. Some people do not mince words, saying that because a fetus is a full human being, the rights of the mother cease to matter. Others simply claim to care deeply for the rights of the fetus, and to want to help the fetus survive. The problem is that nearly every other policy favored by the “pro-life” makes it as difficult as possible for the fetus to thrive once it becomes a baby (which, for the purposes of my argument, occurs at birth. Respect my opinions, dammit!) This is why many people, myself included, think the movement should be called “pro-birth,” rather than “pro-life,” because that is where their willingness to help ends.

Libby Anne, who blogs at Love,Joy, Feminism, has an excellent piece from last October about her shift from a vehement “pro-life” stance (scare quotes intentional) to being pro-choice. The whole thing deserves your attention, as she examines not only opposition to abortion among “pro-life” advocates, but also opposition to making birth control available, or even opposition to birth control at all. Contraception is generally agreed to be the best way to reduce the number of abortions, which I agree is a noble goal. By not encouraging contraceptive use, the “pro-life” movement does nothing to decrease the number of abortions, and reveals that for many, the true goal is controlling women’s sexuality.

[T]hose in the pro-life movement, or at least the leaders of the pro-life movement, are incredibly inconsistent. You simply can’t be against the pill for fear that it will result in flushed out zygotes and yet not concerned at all about the vastly greater number of zygotes flushed out naturally every day. At least, not if you really truly believe a zygote has the same worth as an infant, toddler, or adult, and not if you’re truly motivated solely by a desire to save the lives of these “unborn babies.” Fresh off of these thoughts, I came upon two news articles on the subject in the last week that have completely shattered the last bit of faith I had in the pro-life movement.

She then talks about how Obama, through health care reform, has reduced the number of abortions far more than a ban on abortion ever would. She concludes as follows:

The reality is that so-called pro-life movement is not about saving babies. It’s about regulating sex. That’s why they oppose birth control. That’s why they want to ban abortion even though doing so will simply drive women to have dangerous back alley abortions. That’s why they want to penalize women who take public assistance and then dare to have sex, leaving an exemption for those who become pregnant from rape. It’s not about babies. If it were about babies, they would be making access to birth control widespread and free and creating a comprehensive social safety net so that no woman finds herself with a pregnancy she can’t afford. They would be raising money for research on why half of all zygotes fail to implant and working to prevent miscarriages. It’s not about babies. It’s about controlling women. It’s about making sure they have consequences for having unapproved sex.

But I am very sure that there are other dupes out there. If you’re sitting there reading this thinking “but I really am in it to save unborn babies,” I am sure you’re not alone. After all, I was one of you.

If you are one who has been a part of the pro-life movement because you really do believe in “saving unborn babies,” it’s time to cut your ties with the movement. You may be an honest and kind-hearted person, but you’ve been had. You’ve been taken in. It’s time to let go. It’s time to support Obamacare’s birth control mandate, it’s time to call off opposition to birth control, and it’s time to get behind progressive programs that help provide for poor women and their children. It’s time to make your actions consistent with your motives. While I am myself no longer morally opposed to abortion, I and others like me share your desire to decrease the number of unplanned pregnancies and to ensure that every woman can afford the option of keeping her pregnancy.

We’d love to have you join us.

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