Tag Archives: abortion

Recommended Reading for 02 August 2010

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

RH Reality Check: Decriminalizing and the Global AIDS Epidemic

The International AIDS Conference’s theme of “Rights here, Right now” was clearly in evidence throughout the five days of the international meeting. An exuberant march through the streets of Vienna, a large human rights networking zone, multiple sessions on various aspects of human rights and numerous poster presentations addressed topics such as rights of sex workers and people with different sexual orientations, monitoring human rights violations, and combating stigma and discrimination. The subject receiving the highest level of attention, however, concerned the law: criminalization of behaviors and groups of people in the context of HIV/AIDS.

MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES (MSF): HIV/AIDS: The Stories and Trends Behind the Science

Despite the growing evidence that rapid scale up of HIV/AIDS treatment reduces unnecessary death, staves off disease, and reduces transmission of the virus, international donors are wavering and sending the message to scale back treatment plans.

European Disability Forum: From Spain to Belgium: The Disability Itergroup Explores the Job Yet to Be Done

29 July 2010 /// In the whilst of latest European warm wave, slightly before the European Parliament summer break, the Disability Intergroup held two meetings to sum up the achievements of the Spanish Presidency leaving office, and the challenges ahead for the incoming Belgian Presidency. Early July, a second meeting in Strasbourg focused on violence against women with disabilities. Ana Pelaez, one of the leaders of the European disability movement reminded the growing rate of violence against woman with disabilities in the EU.

Change.org’s Race In America Blog: Why Pop Culture Matters to Race Bloggers (Via Racialicious)

It may seem as if race bloggers are exceptionally preoccupied with blogging about pop culture. Indeed, whole sites are dedicated to debating the racial missteps associated with The Last Airbender, with a national boycott of the film underway in protest of the movie’s colorstruck casting. But, before you dismiss these efforts as unimportant, remember that the racial narratives in movies like The Last Airbender don’t just reflect contemporary racial attitudes — they also help define them. In short, challenging these pop culture icons is a key part of understanding — and changing — attitudes towards race in today’s America.

Pizza Diavola: ALERT: HHS Rule Banning Abortion Coverage in High Risk Pools

The Obama administration issued a rule yesterday that denied abortion insurance coverage for women in high-risk insurance pools (limited exceptions for rape, incest, and endangering the life of the woman). What exactly does this mean, aside from the steady eradication of a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, her future, and her reproductive choices herself? Well. The high-risk insurance pools are meant to provide health insurance to people who have been denied access to private health insurance due to pre-existing conditions. As a Planned Parenthood email puts it, these high-risk pools are for “some of the most medically vulnerable women in the country — those with pre-existing conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, AIDS, diabetes, and other conditions that may make pregnancy extraordinarily dangerous.”

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com

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

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

defiantbirthDefiant 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.

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

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.