Minor and Relatedl

prettywar:

flightofadragonfly:

“I see everything that made me, flying around in invisible pieces, I see that I am a little piece in a big, BIG Universe. “

This is my future baby, right there.

Beasts of the Southern Wild.

This looks amazing, I am legit tearing up rn.

(There’s something about it - probably the things frozen in ice and very young child hero - that reminds me of Rare Exports)

(Source: astroprojection)

stfuhypocrisy:

Women, especially young childless undecided women voters, are talking about jobs,  not abortion rights, right? What women really care about is not contraception, not access to family planning resources, not social issues like gay marriage, abstinence-only sex “ed” or Mitt Romney’s 50 year old bullying. Nope – it’s the economy. Women, “like everyone else,”– that would the norm – men, just want to be able to go to work, earn a fair wage and support their families. These “social” things are a “distraction” leading Americans to avert their gaze from what’s really important: the economy. Polls are clear:  jobs and the economy are their number one concerns.

This oft-repeated juxtaposition, superficial and  irresponsible, between The Economy and Social Issues (especially, in polls, “jobs” and  “contraception”) is like a political media Greek chorus.  People believe it, especially women who are disinclined to think about themselves as discriminated against by virtue of their sex.  Young women answer these questions and pollsters ask them the way they do based on the assumption that women, armed with education and “girl power,” have equal access to newly created jobs and will be paid fairly for their work.  Those are false assumptions that women, especially young childless ones, need to consider before they vote, because this year’s elections, both state and presidential, will affect their ability to do both for years to come.

We’re engaged in a mass delusion that misleadingly pits The Economy against what are at their core,  Reproductive Rights.  Don’t be fooled when considering who to vote for – women can’t participate equally in the first until they have the second.  The very phrasing of the questions and the reporting of the answers hide the complex and interdependent relationship between the two. Contraception, reproductive rights, gay marriage (defined as it is by conservatives as a threat to male/female hierarchies) – all have critical implications for women’s economic well-being and for the economy at large.

Insistence on splitting these two concerns is particularly useful to Republicans, because it allows them toblame women’s economic woes on their “choices,”  a specific irony.  If a woman gets paid less or doesn’t have a “seat at the table” it’s because she chose a lower paying job, or because she chose to have children and works part-time, or she chose to not complete her education. If women make “bad choices” it’s their own fault, their decisions and they have to pay the consequences. Which gets us to the second half of this equation. Simultaneously, for the “less important” Social Issues, the word “choice” is completely anathema to Republican legislators and presidential hopefuls. Girls and women cannot possibly be trusted with “choices” when it comes to their own bodies, sex ed, birth control, health care, sexuality, domestic violence and marriage.

Most importantly, however, in terms of the economy, is that what all of these secondary-in-importance social issues boil down to is that women especially cannot be allowed to “choose” for themselves when to become mothers – arguably the single most important contributing factor to their, and our economies, long-term well-being.

What single factor arguably has the greatest impact on a woman’s work life? In other words, what enables women to participate in the economy and become productive workers and engines of economic growth and expansion?

That would be motherhood.

So, even single, childless, undecided women who may one day get pregnant, should consider what happens to a woman when she gives birth:

• She is 44% less likely to be hired
• She makes 11% less than her non-mother female counterpart (who is already just making 78cents to the male dollar)
• She is less likely to go to school or complete her education.
• She works part-time with more frequency, so that she can provide child care for which she is uncompensated and can derive no benefits as child care is invisible labor.
• She is less able to work overtime.
• She is unable to get maternal health care coverage as part of a basic insurance policy. Already discriminated against by gender rating in insurance prices, she is now doubly financially harmed by the fact of her parenthood.
• She is more likely to have to limit herself to lower paying job sectors where she thinks she will have more “flexibility” even though this has been proven not to be the case.
• She is more likely to be impoverished and become state dependent.

And, what is motherhood? In it’s simplest terms, it is reproduction.

Control of reproduction is an economic issue. This isn’t an academic abstraction, it is a practical reality for any human endowed with a uterus.

This is why instead of The Economy and Social Issues being unrelated as people keep suggesting, they are integrally related.  The very nexus of The Economy and Social Issues then, from a policy perspective,  is the question “Do you believe women should work, for (fair) pay and outside of the home?”  Republicans do not.  That’s why their dedication to controlling female sex and reproduction is an economic policy choice – it affects women’s abilities to pursue education, get hired, be paid, stay in the workforce.

If you believe yes women should be able to work and be paid fairly outside of the home, then you do everything possible to create family friendly work structures, fair pay regulations, health care access, planned parenting provisions, that enable women to do just that. If no, then you don’t. You do the opposite. You create a disabling “social issue” legislative scaffold on which to build a “it’s your own fault” Temple to Patriarchy. This is precisely what the Republic party is doing.  If you are an undecided woman voter you should pause to consider the impact of these intersections on your own life and the lives of other, often far less privileged, women.

As it is now, even for a woman who has access to birth control, health care, safe and legal abortion, becoming a mother in this country, planned or unplanned, is the single worst economic decision a woman can make.  She is still cobbled by inadequate health care, higher gender-rated insurance premiums, discriminatory pay, poor return on her educational investment, greater responsibility for child care and an inability to save effectively for security in her old age.

Republicans have shown repeatedly and without remorse that they want to keep women vulnerable, dependent and at home:

• Lilly Ledbetter? What’s that? “Money is more important for men.”  I finally support it, but (wink, wink) my surrogates will make sure it never happens.  Fair Pay in Wisconsin? Don’t want to force employers to prove they are paying women fairly. Definitely don’t want to “clog up the legal system” unless, of course, it’s to send black boys and men to jail.
• Domestic Violence? Let’s make sure the Abuser Lobby  is happy, given the mail order bride business and more, and ensure that women most vulnerable to violent abuse are isolated and left even more at the mercy of mostly men who will rape and beat them without recourse to the law.
• Reproductive Freedom? Let’s pursue husbandry-informed blunt force trauma legislation ensuring that women’s bodies and reproduction stay in the control of men.  Eliminating Planned Parenthood, making it hard to find birth control and abortion services, mandating transvaginal ultrasounds that women themselves have to pay for, requiring waiting periods that require expensive travel – all of these things impede women’s freedom and ability to compete fairly in the job market.
• Health Care: What, you mean the stuff that keeps people healthy and able to go to work? Hell, no. We’ll not only fight against affordable health care (the opposite of which is unaffordable health care) but we will also stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood, even including monies dedicated to non-abortion services like…family planning – often the only services that poor women have access to. Title IX?  The only federal program devoted to family planning,  you almost cannot make this up it’s so ridiculous: Romney will eliminate it entirely, to save money for The Economy.
• And yes, even Mitt Romney’s 50 year old bullying of a gay boy. Why? Because the exact same attitudes that informed that incident inform his support of abstinence-only education, gendered societal roles, fair pay provisions, reproductive freedom – namely, there are rules, boxes which people are supposed to fit into – and when they don’t conform to his world view they should be punished and forced to. The roots of his high-school bullying escapades and his “Social Issue” policies both reside in an inability to empathize with people who don’t look like and sound like him. It’s why he saw nothing wrong in explaining that Ann Romney was responsible for translating females.  Empathizing with women is just not a possibility if you’re a man.

All of these issues profoundly affect women’s ABILITY TO ENGAGE FULLY AND EQUALLY IN THE ECONOMY WITHOUT PENALIZATION.  If Republicans were serious about their commitment to women’s unimpeded equality in the workplace, then they would not insist that “social” policies are unrelated to “the economy” and they would not be pursuing broad legislation that affirmatively harms women’s ability to participate in the economy on multiple levels. Basic control over her own body, that would be reproductive freedom and health care that is affordable, non-discriminatorily priced, and relevant to her body and not men’s, affects whether a woman can seek and complete her education. The type of job she can get. How many hours she can work. If she can afford to start a business. Whether or not she can work full time or has to work part time. Whether she can afford childcare and health care, if she works. Whether she can safely leave an abusive spouse without fear for her children and seek work to support herself.

That’s why Social Issues, like contraception, are ABOUT The Economy not separate from it.

prochoicegeneration:

feminismisprettycool:

keepyourboehneroutofmyuterus:

wheretheweedstakeroot:

A month ago, the story The Right Not to Know appeared in the Texas Observer: one woman’s experience with a second-trimester abortion after discovering her desperately-wanted baby had a genetic defect that meant abortion was by far the more humane choice. This was just after Texas’s new sonogram law went into effect, meaning that she had to endure not only a 24-hour wait, not only have a third (and medically-unnecessary) sonogram, but was also forced to listen to the abortion doctor describe the sonogram images and read off a boilerplate (bullshit) state-mandated script about the risks of abortion.

My heart was breaking as I read the article — I challenge anyone to read it and not be furious — but one paragraph in particular really stood out to me. Emphasis is mine:

“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.

Hang on, I thought. I’d just been to the dentist; the dentist’s office specifically invites you to bring your iPod or other handheld music device to help drown out the sound of the drill, and if you don’t have one, they have one in the office (loaded with Metallica and Guns and Roses and other loud stompy music) that they can lend you. Surely if it works for dentistry, it would work for this as well. This is a problem technology can solve!

The president/CEO of Planned Parenthood of West Texas got back to me this week and said she’d love to take me up on it. So I’m fundraising! She has requested four units (one for Abilene, one for San Angelo, and two for Midland) and it’s possible more clinics might get back to me requesting the same, since I asked the woman who replied to my initial broadcast email to forward it around in a more directed fashion.

The goal right now: $480 to cover four 8GB iPod Nano units and $560 to cover seven pairs (to make sure there’s one spare in each location, since headphones are less durable) of Audio Technica ATH-ANC1 QuietPoint Active Noise-Cancelling On-Ear Headphones. So, total fundraising goal for this round, which may increase if more clinics get back to me: $1060.

signal boost. please give if you can guys

THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING.

From the website:

EDIT: Thanks (so many thanks!) to everyone for spreading the word about this, we’ve reached the original goal in less than ten hours (even if the widget hasn’t updated yet). At this point, do feel free to keep donating — I’m trying to network with other Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas providing abortion services in the hopes that more of them will be interested, and any amount over-and-above will be used to buy a few backup/additional players (and some iTunes gift cards to help fill up the playlists) and then donated to the organization as cash — but in the interests of cutting out the middleman and getting some cold hard cash into the hands of organizations that are doing good work, please also consider donating to Planned Parenthood directly, or to the National Network of Abortion Funds or a state-specific abortion fund, where your donations can help to preserve women’s right to bodily autonomy and personal choice.

This is SO AWESOME I CAN’T EVEN.

Reblogging again for the added note!

(Source: calanthe)

marpotish:

sexreeducated:

If you are looking through google for information on the wonderful contraption known as Plan B, Emergency contraception or the Morning After Pill-
avoid Morningafterpill.org, which comes up on page 1 of most searches

It is a actually a Anti-Abortion,…

colferkurtofsky:

I can’t resist ranting… I have to say something.

It’s complete and utter bullshit that Rachel got in and not Kurt.

And for what reason? Simply because Carmen saw her perform on stage with her Glee Club and saw her shine in the spot light? Because other people kept telling Carmen how amazing…