Category Archives: reproductive justice

Signal Boost! The Fight For Reproductive Justice

26 August, 2010military, oyd rants, reproductive justice, signal boostableism, barriers to access, disability, exclusion, health care, health care is an accessibility issue, high risk insurance pools, intersectionality, military, military abortion ban, military women, privilege, women in uniformOuyang Dan

Some of you may know that most of us here are FWD/Forward lurk around at other places doing other things when we are not toiling on the backend here at the humble blog. I happen to spend a bit of my time writing under my actual name over at Change.org’s Women’s Rights blog as the Military Beat Girl.

Two issues involving reproductive justice have passed over my RADAR here and there, and I hope you all will humor me in bringing the issue here to you all, in the hopes that you will give them the appropriate attention, and also in hopes that you might boost them where you have the opportunity.

First: As you may have heard, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently decided to pull a Stupak and have collectively taken the decision regarding abortion out of the hands of people who may need to seek coverage in the so-called High Risk Insurance Pools.

[Action Item at the link.]

Basically, it means that, aside from a glaring disregard for women’s health, and no nod whatsoever to the fact that a woman is capable of making decisions about her health care, women who are already medically vulnerable. This rule cuts them off from receiving any abortion coverage whatsoever even if they attempt to pay for it out of their own already strapped pockets.

In short, they do not trust women.

High-risk pools are meant to provide coverage to people who have been denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions, such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, and a slew of other chronic illnesses, conditions, disabilities, or diseases. These conditions could make pregnancy potentially harmful, exacerbate the condition, or just plain more stressful to an already stressed body, or even mentally hurtful (though, Obama has made it clear that mental health does not count, eh?).

s.e. smith wrote an excellent post about high-risk pools that I recommend, if like me you don’t fully understand high-risk pools.

Second is a fight that has been dear to my heart for quite some time. It is the ban on abortions in military medical facilities.

[Action Item at the link!]

Illinois Senator Roland Burris introduced an amendment that would repeal the current ban barring women in uniform and military dependent women from procuring abortion services in military facilities, even if they pay for it with their own money except in the case of incest, rape or imminent threat to the woman’s life. The committee approved this amendment and plans to introduce it as part of the Defense Authorization Act.

Currently U.S. military women in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, and the Republic of Korea (to name a few) are barred from getting abortions by the nature of where they were ordered to go. They are not available in military facilities except in extreme cases, and the the countries where they live have laws against them in most instances. The law discriminates against those women by first ordering them to a country where a service that is safe and legal in the U.S. is inaccessible and then denying them the care they could seek out if stationed there.

Further reading on the military abortion ban.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled reading.

It’s Always More Complicated: The “Justified” Abortion

28 May, 2010activism, feminism, intersectionality, introspective, invisibility, language, reproductive justice, resistance, shaming, social attitudesAnna

[Trigger warning for “disabled child = burden” narrative.]

Last night I was reading several pro-choice tumblrs, one of which had linked to “The Choice“.

What makes us human? When is a life worth living? Worth ending? How much suffering is bearable? Is avoiding suffering brave or is it cowardice? When is abortion justified?

Should Fred be born, my wife would never return to work. My daughters would always come second. Some basic research online and asking friends in health roles showed a high chance of divorce before my son was a teenager, the stress of care literally tearing our family apart. Every news article we read showed little or no government support, with charities closing their doors. The doctors were encouraging about support; the real life carers we spoke to, not so much.

I’d never support killing a born child on any grounds. Yet here I was, suggesting death for a child almost born. I may not be a good man, but I’m a husband and a father. Had we not known, I’d be living with Fred’s condition today; but we take the tests so we can act on the information received.

So, let a bad man say the words that will condemn me: Fred’s life would have been less than human. It would have been filled with love, yes, but mostly loneliness, confusion, pain and frustration. The risk to my marriage and the welfare of my daughters was too much. I chose to minimise suffering. For my wife, for my daughters, for myself and most of all for Fred, I chose abortion. It was a choice of love.

I have complex reactions to this that are not really easy to talk about, but the one thing I do want to make clear:

Abortions do not need to be justified.

I know there are strong political and advocacy reasons why stories like these – the so-called “justified” abortion – are told whenever people talk about abortion and the law. They are “good” abortion stories, with the happy family, the desperately wanted child, the “horrors” for everyone had the abortion not been performed.

I struggle with these sorts of stories because I don’t know a way to talk about them. I want to talk about the way that disability is discussed in them – always, always, as horrible, as tearing families apart. And yet, these are people’s lives. I don’t think in any way they made a “wrong” or “bad” choice, or a “brave” one, either. They made the “right” choice, in that it was the “right” choice for their family, and I fear that talking about the language used is abusive. You’ve shared your painful story, your very personal story, and I want to now talk about disability and how it’s used to score points in the so-called abortion debate.

And yet, I desperately do.

I deeply resent the way anti-choice advocates point at people with disabilities and talk about how they’ll all be eliminated if we allow abortion-on-demand. The sheer amount of hate directed at Don when he goes to pro-choice rallies by the anti-choice contingent, because they see him as a traitor to their cause, is amazing to me.[1. Of course, they direct more at any pregnant pro-choice women – there’s a video clip from Toronto last year with someone telling a pregnant woman “I hope your child kills you”.]

I don’t see these same people at protests and demonstrations about making Halifax an accessible city. I don’t see them at demonstrations about improving health care options. I don’t see them doing anything for people with disabilities except using them as pawns, and I loathe them for it.

And yet, many pro-choice advocates also use people with disabilities as pawns in these so-called debates. They hold up stories of fetal abnormalities as “justified abortion”, as the acceptable test-case, the one they know the general public is likely to agree with. I see no analysis, no discussion, of the ableist nature of this narrative. It’s an acceptable justified abortion because the fetus was abnormal, and who wants a broken child that’s going to ruin everyone’s life?

All abortions are justified.

It troubles me so much that it’s only the “abnormal” fetuses that are okay to use as abortion stories.

[Originally published on my tumblr]

[Note: Things we are not going to do in this thread: Debate whether or not abortion is “okay”. Publish shaming comments towards women who have abortions. Talk about people with disabilities as burdens. Discuss individual actions as though they occur in a complete vacuum and are not influenced by societal attitudes and pressures.]

Why I Am Not a Libertarian

19 May, 2010class issues, disability activism, justice, news, policy, politics, poverty, race, reproductive justiceabby rant, libertarianismabby jean

Here in the U.S., there’s been a lot of buzz about Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, winning the primary for Republican senator in Kentucky. Paul is a darling of the Tea Party and largely espouses libertarian values of decreased taxes and decreased government regulation and intervention.

There are some things about libertarianism that I like and agree with. I’m against state interference in romantic and/or sexual relationships between consenting individuals with full capacity. I’m in favor of strong civil liberties and freedom from search or surveillance by the state.

But I do not trust the free market to take care of civil rights issues, primarily because I’ve seen the free market fail to take care of civil rights issues for hundreds and really thousands of years. And I believe that getting the government out of the business of defining and enforcing civil rights would have disastrous results for all but the most privileged among us. And Rand Paul’s espoused views bear that out. Here’s what he’s got to say about LGBTAI rights and women’s health:

Not only is Paul perfectly fine with government prohibiting marriage between gays and lesbians, it bears mentioning that Paul’s anger towards the government for “betraying the medical privacy of ordinary citizens” doesn’t extend to women, whom he believes should be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term if state legislators deem it so. He also wants to offer legislation “restricting federal courts from hearing cases like Roe v. Wade.”

This isn’t even a consistent position – Paul is in favor of government intervention in personal relationships, as long as it’s “only” LGBTAI relationships. He’s also in favor of government intervention in personal medical decisions, as long as it’s “only” affecting the decisions of women considering whether to terminate a pregnancy. What he has to say about protections for people with disabilities is even more troubling:

You know a lot of things on employment ought to be done locally. You know, people finding out right or wrong locally. You know, some of the things, for example we can come up with common sense solutions — like for example if you have a three story building and you have someone apply for a job, you get them a job on the first floor if they’re in a wheelchair as supposed to making the person who owns the business put an elevator in, you know what I mean? So things like that aren’t fair to the business owner.

Yes! Let’s let the free market take care of rights for people with disabilities! Because it’s for damn sure that even with the existing governmental protections for civil rights, companies are taking an unbiased and totally not ableist at all approach to employing PWDs and even accommodating them as customers! So eliminating those marginally adequate and woefully underenforced protections would surely have the effect of enhancing overall liberty and freedom! That is, if you are looking only at the liberty and freedom of the already privileged.

There has been a lot of discussion on this site of how entrenched institutional ableism results in discrimination against PWDs, makes them more likely to live in poverty, lack employment, and have disproportionately negative health outcomes. That’s the status quo that would be preserved if government intervention and regulation of the rights of PWDs were to end. But there are definitely people who are benefiting from the status quo – white, cis, hetero, TAB men, predominantly. And we should be very clear that limiting government intervention would primarily preserve the status quo that benefits them.

Which is why you should not be surprised by two facts: 1) Rand Paul is a white cis hetero TAB man, and 2) I strongly disagree with these political ideas. While there are some areas in which I support limiting government intervention, my overall goal is to maximize rights of historically disadvantaged and relatively unprivileged populations, whether it takes more or less government to reach that end.

We Need to Consider More than Universities

10 March, 2010activism, class issues, disability activism, feminism, gender, intersectionality, justice, othering, reproductive justice, shaming, social attitudes, violenceabuse, exclusion, feminism, intersectionality, myths and misconceptions, privilege, problematic attitudes, social treatmentkaninchenzero

There’s a lot of really good stuff out in the blogoamorphia[1. Sphere, pshyeah.] about sexual assault on uni campuses. The focus is specifically on USian colleges and universities though Rape Culture exists pretty much everywhere with only slight variation. It’s worth reading, if you’re up to reading about sexual assault at all. (I’m not always.)

Predators are good at target selection. All of them. We see this in the uni rapists who repeatedly assault vulnerable young people. And the analysis of these assaults and assailants is valuable. I hope the attention being focused on this issue leads to real change in how sexual assault is treated by colleges and universities because the status quo is disgusting. Victims are made to undergo ‘mediation’ with their assailants in the name of ‘fairness;’ people known to administrations to be serial rapists face only the most cursory of punishments while their victims often leave, faced with an environment that could hardly be more obviously hostile; the government agencies tasked with reducing rape on uni campuses in the US have hardly bothered to appear to do anything at all.

But I’m a little uncomfortable that the focus is on the most privileged, most visible, most likely to be photogenic segment of sexual assault victims. Not that these people don’t need or deserve attention–they do. (And really I’d like there to be much more awareness that the things cis men do to each other are not HILARIOUS PRANKS but are sexual assault and should be treated as such. Cis men, you have a task: Even if you can’t be arsed to end sexual assault of other folk by cis men, you may wish to end assaults on yourselves by cis men. Hop to it.) I just worry that the pattern we see so often where the most privileged people are centered and marginalized people are pushed to the edges will repeat itself. That sexual assault victims whose circumstances differ will have a more difficult time being heard. That there will be a sense of “Well fuck we already had to care about these college [het cis probably currently non-disabled largely white largely middle-to-upper-class] girls getting raped and now you want us to care about you? Sorry, we’re all out of giving a shit.”

Because predators aren’t just at universities and colleges. All those uni students will leave school eventually. Not all predators even go to uni. They will all be looking for targets. Not only will they choose targets that are vulnerable and have a low risk of incurring negative consequences, they will seek out environments where there are large concentrations of their preferred targets. They will search for jobs where they will be in positions of authority over those targets. Predators that prefer children try to get jobs in schools or in religious settings. Predators that prefer disabled people, mentally ill people, or elderly people look for work in hospitals and supportive care facilities. Predators that prefer sex workers become pimps or police.

Part of the problem is going to be that people will be able to relate to the uni predators better. University-age women are often attractive people by accepted standards of beauty. Raping a pretty young cis woman is understandable–the rapist was attracted to her and wanted to fuck her and wanted to cut through all the preliminary bullshit and get right to the fucking. It’s harder for people to imagine wanting to fuck children or older people or disabled people or crazy people or fat people. Who’d find that attractive? (Who would rape you?)

It isn’t about sexual attraction. A predator’s preferred type of victim may not have anything to do with the sort of people xe finds attractive in non-predatory relationships (assuming xe has any) and may be of a different gender from xer orientation. Cis men who identify as straight and prey on children who read as male by ciscentric standards aren’t necessarily lying about their orientation, even to themselves. Predation isn’t about sex despite there being sexual gratification involved. (Though the predator xerself likely doesn’t understand this.) It’s about the predator making xerself feel powerful by stripping xer victims of power. It’s about the predator boosting xer self-confidence by humiliating xer victims. It’s about the predator feeling safer by making someone else afraid. It’s about hate. It’s about entitlement. It’s about controlling the behavior of others. And like all kinds of abuse, it’s about making the victims responsible for the emotions and actions of the predator.

Sex is just the mode of abuse. The choice of victim is about getting away with it.

So how do we not lose track of this? How can we address the issue of rape on university campuses without centering that experience of rape and marginalizing others? How can mainstream anti-rape activists not treat our experiences of rape as Other, as exotic, as something incomprehensible? Because that path leads to paternalism and patronization. It’s not good for us no matter how well-intentioned. It’s the sort of thing that leads to disabled people with ovaries being sterilized without their consent or knowledge at the behest of guardians who simply assume, with ample justification, that they will be raped in institutional care facilities. Since there’s nothing they can do about that (as we all know rape is a force of nature and not an act performed by humans capable of changing their behavior[2. MY SARCASTIC VOICE LET ME SHOW IT YOU.]) they can at least protect those people with ovaries from some of the potential things that could result from said rape. That one of the things they are protecting people with ovaries from is the possibility of bearing a child and being a good and loving parent–which happens even when a child is conceived by an act of rape–doesn’t occur to them. They know best, and they can’t imagine this person they’re placing in an institutional care facility being a good parent.

Cross-posted from my tumblr blog, Rabbit Lord of the Undead.

“Defiant Birth”: Impolite Women Who Didn’t Make History

1 March, 2010autonomy, bodies, feminism, medical practice, reproductive justice, resistance, social attitudesableism, ablist, abortion, achondroplasia, asthma, birth, cerebral palsy, defiant birth, disability, disability and pregnancy, disabled, down syndrome, down's syndrome, dwarfism, eugenics, genetic counselling, genetic screening, healthcare, lupus, mctd, medicine, melinda tankard reist, obstetrics, phocomelia, pregnancy, prenatal diagnosis, pro-choice, pulmonary hypertension, reist, reproductive justice, scheurmann's disease, termination of pregnancy, thalidomide, trisomy 21, wheelchairlauredhel

[WARNING for this post: ableism within and without the medical system, pregnancy/baby losses mentioned]

Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics, by Melinda Tankard Reist, is a book about women. It is a book about families. It is a book about resistance. It is a book about women who refuse to be told what they “should” do with their own bodies by healthcare staff, friends, and family.

It is a book of stories, of women’s voices.

All of the women in the book have chosen to continue pregnancies against medical advice. The medical advice is based on something about the pregnancy falling outside of the very narrow “norm” – the women’s disabilities, their “elderly” ages, a diagnosis (or misdiagnosis) of a fetus labelled “defective”. There is a woman with diabetes in her forties; a woman who chose to carry to term and birth two babies with anencephaly; women with babies with trisomy 21; women living with HIV; women with incorrect prenatal diagnoses of lethal conditions; a woman with lupus and a woman with MCTD and pulmonary hypertension; a woman with Scheurmann’s disease of the spine; a woman with severe asthma; a woman with cerebral palsy; a woman and man both with dwarfism; a woman exposed to rubella during her pregnancy; a woman with thalidomide-related phocomelia; and more.

I’ll start by letting some of these women tell their own stories, as this is the significance of the book as I see it:

d. a. marullo writes:

The next day I went to see my regular doctor whom I hadn’t seen yet. He was my general practitioner and I’d known him for eighteen years. I told him the news and he tightened up his face and looked at his paperwork while speaking.

“Well, you’re going to terminate, right? I mean it would be the smart thing to do!” I was so devastated by his words I almost started crying.

“I haven’t really decided anything,” I said. […]

“Well, the numbers add up, after all – your age and all. It’s probably not going to be normal!”

Teresa Streckfuss writes:

“He came bursting into our room and listened for Benedict’s heartbeat and said, “Okay, that’s all fine,” before awkwardly leaving us again. Lucky he left. If he hadn’t I might have screamed, “THAT’S ALL FINE? THAT’S ALL FINE? GET OUT OF MY ROOM! MY BABY HAS JUST DIED! IT’S NOT ALL FINE! WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THAT’S ALL FINE?” I know what he meant. Our ‘non-viable fetus’ had died, as expected. He failed to recognise that we had just lost a person, someone we loved.

Johanne Greally writes:

On returning home I went to see my doctor. I was totally unprepared for his reaction. “There will be no problem getting you an abortion,” he said. “You meet all the requirements on both physical and mental grounds.” “But,” I stammered, “I don’t want an abortion. I want a baby.” I felt shocked, belittled, and disempowered by him.

“Your back is unable to support just you, let alone a baby. You will never be able to carry a baby. You will be in a wheelchair by the time you are seven months.” It was true that my back couldn’t support me at that time, and I had been trussed up in a corset-type back brace off and on for over a year, so that I could not move around freely even without a baby.[…] All through the pregnancy my back continued to improve. I was now able to lift and bend, even chop wood by the time I was at the seven-month mark.

Heather Arnold writes:

The added pressure of a baby pressing on my lungs would cause more problems. This doctor also reinforced that the ‘standard of care’ in my condition would be to abort the baby. I told her immediately that abortion was not an option and that I would be carrying this baby as long as I possibly could. She encouraged me to go home and talk with my husband before making the decision, although my mind was already made up.

Leisa Whitaker writes:

I remember sitting in his rooms listening as he explained that there was a 25 percent chance that our child could still inherit the dominant achondroplasia gene and the dominant pseudoachondroplasia gene- a combination that they had never seen before anywhere in the world. They had no idea of what effect this would have on the baby – whether it would die soon after birth or if it would have lasting physical problems. They had absolutely nothing to go on. Having told us this, the specialist offered us an abortion. He asked us to think about whether we wanted to bring another dwarf baby into the world.

Rosaleen Moriarty-Simmonds writes:

We learnt this one day when my mum went to pick Deborah up from school, only to find her in floods of tears. The children in her class had been asked to tell a story about someone that they admired. She talked about her elder sister, who didn’t have any arms or legs, and Deborah was told off by the teacher for having “a horrible imagination!”

Jo Litwinowicz writes:

I heard mum calling dad to the phone and she asked me to repeat what I had said so I told them that I was expecting. Their reaction devastated me. “Well Jo, that news has turned this day into a tragic day. You are an irresponsible and stupid girl.” They might as well have kicked me in the stomach; I was so upset that I slammed the phone down. If my parents’ reaction was bad, what chance did we have with complete strangers?

When I went to see my doctor at his antenatal clinic his first words were, “God, you were the last person I thought I’d see here.” “Sorry to disappoint you,” I replied. He asked how we felt about the prospect of becoming parents, and we told him that deep down we had both secretly pined for a child and it was the greatest news ever. His response was to say that throughout my pregnancy, if I ever wanted an abortion, he could arrange it. […]

The next day there was a knock at the door and this woman said she was from Family Planning and could she come in for a chat. I joked, “You’re a bit too late.” She went on, saying how hard it was going to be to raise a child in my condition. I said, ‘What condition? You don’t know me and what I’m capable of. […] She calmly went on, “You do realise that when your child can walk and talk it will come to you and say, ‘I hate you, mother, because you can’t talk properly, you dribble and you’re in a wheelchair and I want a new mother.'”

Note that the stories are much longer and fuller than the bits I have picked out, which concentrate on ableist attitudes. There are many parts focusing on the authors’ happiness also!

One of the most powerful tools in our toolkit as PWD is to read the world in ways that others do not; to take tools for one purpose, and to use them for our own; to resist the appropriation of our stories for the political purposes of others. To this end I am also making a conscious choice to not review the introduction or closing words of the book here.

There are many stories in this book, and it is a book with multiple possible readings. I have deliberately avoided reading any other reviews while writing mine. I imagine that some may choose to read it as an anti-choice screed, just as some forced-birthers choose to see posts on FWD about the effects of ableism on pro-choice discourse as “on their side”. I choose not to read it that way. Only two or three times while reading did I get an sense of the voices possibly self-identifying as politically “pro-life”, and those moments were brief. One, who used the words “I chose life”, may or may not have been playing into the political nature of the phrase; either way, she is more than entitled to use the phrase in regard to her own personal choice. The other mentions in passing that she had worked at a “crisis pregnancy centre”, gave me a bit of a chill. But these are not the majorities of the stories, nor were they the most important or prominent parts of the stories in which they appeared.

The women who speak about their religion influencing their decisions, the women who touch on much-misused catchphrases like “I chose life”; these particular sentences did not resonate with me. However, not everything in this book needs to resonate with you for the stories to have power, for the experiences to speak. It was particularly noticeable that in some cases the medical staff just assumed that the choices to continue a pregnancy must be based in obedience to external religious edicts. The stories most of the women tell are quite different; their decisions were individual and deeply nuanced, not based in unquestioning submission to some sort of “authority”. Sometimes their religious beliefs were involved, and sometimes not; in no story did I read the story-teller proclaiming that other women’s choices should be legally constrained or outlawed. They are telling their own stories. I trust readers at this blog to handle the nuance, even as I might not trust those who bring their own agendas to the work.

Another issue I have with the book is the occasional mention of the experience of parenting a child with a disability as transformative for the parent. While this is not necessarily untrue, I think it needs to be written very carefully so as not to dehumanise or objectify the child, turn the child into an “inspiration” instead of a full, rounded person. I’m not sure whether that line was quite crossed – I’d have to re-read in detail, and the book has to go back to the library today! – but it skated close here and there.

If you’re looking for a statistical representation of how often prenatal diagnosis is wrong or misrepresented or used to pressure women, this is not the book for you. This books isn’t statistics; it’s lived experience. The stories have been chosen because they represent those times that women are pushed around or lied to or subject to misdiagnoses and poor medical care. The issue in the book is not whether this is a majority or minority experience, but that it happens at all, and that it can be handled very, very badly. Given the number of readers and writers on this site who’ve been stampeded in the healthcare system, I think many of us do have a sense of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that treatment. In these stories, the stakes are high: the result of the stampeding, unresisted, would have been, in each case, a wanted pregnancy lost.

But I am overemphasising my nitpicking and reservations, here. In short, I recommend this book highly. The stories of disabled women, in particular, I found absolutely riveting. Their stories are vivid, immediate, at times horrifying, but more often joyful. The joy can be transcendent, yet entirely ordinary: the joy of a wanted baby, the magnificence of a disobedient woman.

I would love to see a followup book, in a similar format, with a broader scope. I’d like to see a book including stories from parents in non-Western countries; from trans or nonbinary parents; from very young parents; from undocumented immigrants and refugees and Indigenous people. A book including more analysis of the intersections of class and nationality and gender and race and queerness with disability could only be stronger. Whether we’re likely to hear that book from Reist is, well, a matter for debate; but she doesn’t, nor should she, have a monopoly on this type of story. As it stands, I am left thinking that it is only the privilege that the women in this book have – mostly white, mostly relatively wealthy – that allowed them to resist as they did, to survive as they did. The stories in this book are particular types of stories, and do not represent the realities of all pregnancies labelled “abnormal” for one reason or another.

However, even in its current form, I think this book should be considered a basic primer – for healthcare professionals, for pregnant people, for anyone else interested in disability and rebellion. It is not a primer about chromosome diagrams or placental configurations or how to eat or what to expect; but a primer about lived experience. The book covers what medical textbooks and pregnancy self-help books do not: the intimate, touching stories of women who rebel against crushing ableism.

Above all, Defiant Birth, to me, is defiantly pro-choice. It’s a book about reproductive justice. This book deserves its place in the stable of pro-choice works dedicated to the equally valid and necessary choice to not have a baby.

Trust Me

23 February, 2010i'm right here, medical practice, reproductive justicedisability, health care, me, medical care, personal, privilegeOuyang Dan

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A couple of weeks ago I asked my PCM for a referral to OB/GYN to replace the IUD that I had to surrender over the summer. She and The Guy and I have been talking for some time about the options and realities of having another child with my condition, and the answer we came up with is that we will wait for a little longer and see if I am still doing well with my current regimen.

Usually these things take weeks to schedule, but they called the next day, and I had my referral appointment on the second day. No matter what your history in the OB/GYN clinics you have to have counseling in order to get birth control through the MTF (all the ones in which I have been treated anyway), and the idea is that you get to talk to your OB/GYN about all of your birth control options, what you want from your birth control, take his or her advice, and decide on what is best for you. That is the theory, anyhow.

Some people (like me) have an idea ahead of time what they want or what is best for them. I, for example, due to my medical history and ongoing condition, am not able to use a hormonal birth control. Because of that I know that the copper IUD (ParaGuard) is the best option for me. Also because of this, I often read up on ParaGuard and IUD use in women, and try to keep abreast of any information regarding IUD usage, risks involved, etc. The IUD has such a bad reputation from so much misinformation that I feel the need to stay on top of this. Some would say this makes me a big smarty-pants-know-it-all. I say that sometimes a woman can’t trust that her doctor is going to take her word at face falue, and in the off chance that her doctor isn’t as awesome as mine she needs to be prepared. I am privileged to have information available at my fingertips.

I did not realize that my appointment would not be with my usual kick-ass OB/GYN, Dr. K, the same one who saved my fallopian tubes and life this summer and who promised to give me a shiny new IUD whenever I was ready for it. Not panicking when I saw the face of a woman I didn’t know I sat down as she introduced herself as Nurse Midwife V and told me that she had been looking over my file. Great. Maybe she was doing her background reading too, because I really tire of bringing every doctor up to speed constantly on my condition when it is right there on the computer screen for them to see. I don’t have a bunch of degrees and I can keep up with the required reading.

Before I had even the chance to say anything she told me that I was “not a candidate for an IUD” because of my ectopic pregnancy, and that she was not going to refer me for one. When I started to say that I understood that there were some risks she cut me off and told me that my pap was also past due and kept talking. I tried to assert myself past her obsession with people rooting around in my vagina, to let her know that I was aware that there were risks involved with the IUD, but that I knew that not only was what happened to me rare, but that I knew it was rare that it might happen again. But she wasn’t having any of that. She kept right on talking like I wasn’t even there.

I told her that my regular doctor had already said I was fine to have one. She responded by saying that it usually took weeks to get in to see him, as if this was supposed to deter me somehow. I also tried asking if the new ACOG regulations had been implemented yet, thinking this might distract her and get me closer to my goal (also, I am in the lag area none of them know what to do with, being 29, soon to be 30) and all she would say was that my pap was past due. Is it? I don’t know. I had a normal one in late 2008. I am in a mutually monogamous relationship…

When I left I told the front desk that I would no longer allow Nurse Midwife V to treat me. I am currently in the process of filing a formal complaint against her. What shouldn’t have happened here was having everyone from the desk staff to the NCOIC (that’s Non-commissioned officer in charge) tell me how nice Nurse Midwife V is and how everyone likes her so much, and that she is well known for being very good at what she does. That might well be true, great. My experience is that she was condescending and rude, and didn’t help me with my medical needs to my satisfaction. I think that people forget that sometimes, that doctors and nurses are also here to provide a service for us. I have a medical need, and she didn’t meet it. I shouldn’t have to settle for that. No matter how nice and great she is to work with. I also shouldn’t have my experience erased and dismissed by everyone in place to help me when things go wrong for me. That is not good patient advocacy.

I am rather privileged, however, in that I was able to make another appointment, and I saw Dr. K the next day. Had I been someone who had to drive a long way to a clinic, I might not have been able to. Had I had to pay out of pocket for this visit, or if my insurance limited the amount of OB/GYN visits or birth control counselings I was allowed per year, I would not have been able to. Had the travel cost me money I did not have, this would not have been possible. Had I not had the type of job I do where I set my own hours, I might have had to miss work. These are the kinds of things that women face when they come up against providers like Nurse Midwife V, providers who don’t want to listen to women, who won’t talk to women about their own bodies and medical histories. Providers who don’t trust women to be actively involved in their medical processes. Providers who can’t be bothered to involved women in the partnership that should be their own medical care, especially when it comes to their reproductive health. As it was, having to go back a second time was already taxing on my spoons, and stressful, because now I have be on my game. Suddenly I have to come in educated on something that my provider should have known the first time.

Thanks to meloukhia’s indominatable Google-fu I took in the information I was looking for, backing up what I had already said, that an ectopic pregnancy did not preclude me from having an IUD (or, that a previous ectopic pregnancy was not a contraindication for an IUD). Dr. K was impressed that I was so prepared. He told me that he had heard that information, but he himself had been so busy that he hadn’t had time to read any of the journals for himself. He told The Guy (who went with me this time, because they like to banter back and forth in Korean) that I should come in from time to time to keep him updated on current women’s health, and said he wished more people came to him so informed. He said that whomever told me that I couldn’t have an IUD was wrong. I was prepared, but I shouldn’t have had to come in as if I was fighting a war.

Two weeks later I have my IUD.

Nurse Midwife V didn’t care to ask why, after having one IUD failure (as rare as they are, b/c they are pretty much the most effective form of reversible birth control out there, with a fail rate of less than one percent), I would want another IUD. She didn’t bother to find out anything else in my medical history that might affect my decision to make that very personal choice about birth control, like that I am on medication that might have contraindications with hormonal birth control, or that previous specialists had determined that hormonal birth control is a migraine trigger for me. She simply asserted her own opinion (as wrong as it turned out to be) and called it a day. But all of that information is in my medical record if she cared to look. The same record she said she reviewed when she made her initial judgment.

And now, I can’t trust her.

Originally posted at random babble…

Do you REALLY trust women?

22 January, 2010autonomy, bodies, feminism, gender, intersectionality, justice, media and pop culture, mental health, normality, policy, politics, reproductive justice, sexuality, shaming, social attitudes, Uncategorizedableism, choice feminism, class, cultural lens, culture, disability, feminism, health policing, justice, language, mental illness, neurodiversity, normal is only one option, politics, pop culture, pregnancy, privilege, privilege-check, problematic attitudes, reproductive, self-determination, shaming, social justice, social treatment, speak up, the left, the rightamandaw

For the purposes of this post, I would like to remind everyone that the range of disability includes people who are mentally ill, paralyzed, Blind, Deaf, permanently injured, autistic, physically disfigured, with compromised immune systems or disordered speech or chronic pain or cognitive impairments, and many, many others. Disabilities may be fatal or not, may be degenerative or not, may be apparent or not. Being painful, fatal, stigmatized, or poorly understood does not mean that life is not worth living, and I will not tolerate any attempts to enforce a hierarchy of disability; there is no category of Especially Bad Disability that destroys any chance of worthy life.

Blog for Choice Day 2010

Have you ever participated in the stigmatizing of pregnncy, childbirth and childrearing when the parent, child, or both have, or could have or obtain, disabilities?

Have you ever participated in the cultural narratives that say:

Older women should not have children because their children are more likely to have a disability
Women with disabilities should avoid having children because their children might also have a disability, and it would be wrong, unjust and cruel to give birth to a child that is not in perfect health
Women with disabilities should avoid having children because only temporarily-abled women can properly parent a child, or being a mother with a disability would somehow deprive the child of necessary experiences or put a burden on the child
Women with disabilities should avoid having children because they are more likely to be poor and need public assistance, and their children would also be more likely to use public assistance in the future, resulting in a drain on temporarily-abled taxpayers
Women with disabilities would be selfish to have children, and to do so would contribute to environmental destruction, economic decline, and even degradation of the human species, and they and their children would be less valuable members of society because of their lack of perfect health
It would be a tragedy to have a disabled child, disabled children are less desirable than temporarily-abled children
Life with a disability is inherently worse than life without one; life without a disability is the baseline by which all life should be measured, so of course to have a disability would be a negative and would make a person’s life worse
Disabled children are a burden on their temporarily abled parents, more so than any other child would be, and this is because of the child’s disability rather than because of the lack of support and affirmation throughout all levels of society for PWD and their loved ones
Of course it is more desirable for a child to be perfectly healthy than to have some sort of medical imperfection, and those medical imperfections are a big stress and hassle on the temporarily abled people around the child, and there is something wrong with the child for failing to meet an impossible standard of perfection
Health and ability are objective concepts and our current cultural wisdom on them are completely right and the medical industry that puts them forth is infallible; our ideas about health and ability are the only right way to look at things and can be universally applied
To violate those cultural ideas means that you are inherently flawed
The answer to all of this is to go to excessive lengths to avoid ever having, or being around someone who has, health problems, up to and including letting the least healthy die off or be terminated before they can live at all

You know what? I’ll bet you’ve all done it. Even the most radical disability activist has participated in some of these cultural tropes at some point in their lives.

But I’ll bet the vast majority of people “blogging for choice” would never think of disability as related to “choice” issues, and if they did, it would be for the right of temporarily-abled higher-class white Western women to terminate a pregnancy that has a more-than-minute chance of resulting in a less-than-perfectly-healthy child.

This is why the “choice” framework fails. It fails all of us, but it particularly fails those of us who fail to meet society’s idea of the optimal person: the pale, thin, beautiful, and financially comfortable picture of perfect health. The person who never relies on others (no!), is “self-sufficient,” and isn’t likely to end up a burden on the important people.

The rest of us can “choose” to stop existing.

Do you really trust women? Or are you perfectly willing to override their choices if you feel they threaten your comfortable position in society?

And you expect me to think you’re any better for my rights and needs than pro-lifers, why?

(Cross-posted at three rivers fog.)

Edit, Saturday 1/23: I am being very strict in moderating this thread. The primary response from people who do not identify as disabled seems to be “Well, I respect your choice, even though it is clearly cruel and bad/makes me ‘uncomfortable’/is the ‘wrong’ choice.” That is exactly the opposite of what this post is saying. If that is what you got out of this post, you have a LOT of stepping back, listening, and learning left to do.

I’m not asking you to be nice enough not to forcibly prevent us from ever having children, or anyone from ever having disabled children, even as you eagerly stigmatized disabled motherhood/childhood; I am asking you to genuinely examine the deep-rooted prejudices you have been taught and challenge your thinking on childbearing/rearing and disability. I am asking you to question why you have these ideas about disability, and whether they are appropriate to hold as a person committed to social justice. Including for women.

Because, here’s a hint: a lot of us women have disabilities, and all of us were children once, and some of us will have children of our own. And we are still women. Are you really protecting women’s freedom? Or are you merely preserving the temporarily-abled supremacist structure of society, with temporarily abled women as a convenient proxy?

I ask you to consider these prompts, to attempt to truly challenge your assumptions about disability and parenthood. If you aren’t willing to do that, please don’t drop in to explain why disabled women are “Doin It Rong.” Check your privilege. Thanks.

Less Than / More Than – My complicated thoughts on reproductive rights & feminist discussions

5 January, 2010101, bodies, class issues, feminism, intersectionality, introspective, justice, reproductive justice, resistance, social attitudesableism, abortion, children, exclusion, feminism, intersectionality, problematic attitudes, things people sayAnna

When I’m not being a student, I typically get temp jobs working in a variety of offices. Once things get settled, and folks realise I am married, they often start asking about kids. “Do you have kids? No? When are you having kids? It’s not too late, you know!”

This may seem like an opening for a post about being child-free, but it’s not.

I often put these questions off with flippancy or a shrug or just saying we’re not interested in having kids. In my experience, this will often have people leave the issue be.

Sometimes, though, people will hound and hound and hound.

“Oh, it’s different when they’re yours. But what about Don, what does he think of all of this? What about your parents? What about– what about– what about?” [1. Everything in quotation marks in this post is a paraphrase.]

Do you want to know the secret way of getting people to never again ask why you’re not having children?

At some point, drop into a conversation that your husband’s disability is genetic.

Without fail, that has stopped every single person who has asked and asked and asked about children, even when the “genetic” bomb isn’t dropped in a conversation about having children.

One of the reasons why the focus of abortion! abortion! abortion! whenever talking about reproductive rights really bothers me (and a lot of others) is because of the assumption that people like Don & I shouldn’t have children (because – oh no! – the child likely will have Marfan’s just like Don! And everyone knows people like Don are a burden on the system/have miserable lives/are never happy/can never be married/are all the same/should be stopped/are just an example for the rest of us). When people focus on reproductive rights only involving abortion, they neglect that, for people like us, the pushback is to not have children. Don’t burden the system. Think of the children – and don’t have any.

I’ve seen similar conversations play out around the feminist blogosphere. [1. I have decided not to link to specific examples, because it’s a general attitude I’m talking about here. And also, who wants to start a blog-war? Not I, said the Anna.] When older women have children, there is always a sudden upswing in “BUT THE CHILD MIGHT HAVE A DISABILITY!” (Yes, the child might. And the child might fall out of a tree and land wrong. Or the child might grow up to be the next Stephen Harper and prorogue Canadian government. WHO KNOWS!) “Think of the children!”

The same fears are reflected when discussing women with disabilities having children (with bonus “but how will she care for the child?”), or when parents forcibly sterilize their disabled daughters.

This pains me, perhaps especially as someone who doesn’t want children. It pains many other women who, for a variety of reasons, are discouraged or outright prevented from having children they want. That, in North America, these women are overwhelmingly women of colour, lower class, disabled, queer – that they’re often women who have been institutionalised in some way, be it a “medical” institution or a “criminal” one – is not a coincidence.

In my experience, marginalized voices who speak out about this disparity between on-line feminist discussions of abortion and on-line feminist discussions from a broader reproductive justice framework [1. FREE Halifax: Feminists for Reproductive Justice & Equality. We meet every other Tuesday for teach-ins & movies about Reproductive Justice. Look for us on Facebook.] are often shouted down, or ignored. We’re told our issues are “special circumstances”, or “pet projects” or “in the minority” or “don’t apply to as many people” or … Well, basically everything feminists in general are told when they talk about issues that are “special circumstances” that don’t apply to enough people (read: men) to count.

Frankly, I end up not knowing where to go from here. Do we, who are limited on spoons or forks or energy or time, keep trying to push for more mainstream feminist discussion on these issues? Do we form our own spaces, our own groups, and have our own discussions? Do we write blog posts that seem to dwindle down, rather than lead us all into the future?

I don’t know. I know and respect people who have made each of those choices, and still others that I haven’t mentioned. But I don’t know what the right one is.

Maybe they all are.

FWD/Forward

FWD (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward

Category Archives: reproductive justice

Signal Boost! The Fight For Reproductive Justice

Why I Am Not a Libertarian

Recommended Reading for April 20, 2010

Trust Me