Get even. Donate to Planned Parenthood in Karen Handel’s name. (H/T atrios)
Also, read Violet’s take on this fiasco here.
And Echidne’s sweet little ditty.
The term “out of touch” does not even begin to describe the rationale behind the Komen Foundation’s decision. It’s just an out and out catastrophe of monumental proportions. It has sullied the positive perception of the Foundation forever.
Just dumb. And stupid too. Would someone please remove the sharp objects from the Komen Foundation’s headquarters before they hurt themselves?
Update: I don’t think WaPo’s Alexandra Petri gets it:
So I’m also ticked off by the people who say they won’t donate to Susan G. Komen any more. Really? Refuse to donate to the fight on breast cancer on the grounds that some of the people leading it do not share all your beliefs to the letter? That seems woefully short-sighted. It’s almost as short-sighted as the funding decision that shifted the discussion in the first place.
Abortion is one of the few bitterly polarizing issues for which it’s difficult to locate any middle ground. At a certain point, you come down on one side or the other. I’m pro-choice. In no way do I think it’s an easy choice. But if it’s a hard and gut-wrenching choice for the actual women involved, it seems peculiar that it should be any easier for gaggles of state legislators who aren’t there, who in many cases are incapable of becoming pregnant, and who yet seem uncannily certain that they know exactly the solution.
Ok, let me say this very slooooowly: Susan Komen died of breast cancer. By cutting off Planned Parenthood in one of the most boneheaded moves since New Coke, the Komen Foundation is forcing Planned Parenthood to rejigger the way it allocates its money at a time when most charitable contributions are drying up and Planned Parenthood, in particular, is under attack from some very short sighted bronze age thinkers of the right wing. If we were to question Susan, we might correctly assume that she would want poor women to be screened for breast cancer. So, if we have to make a donation to either the Komen Foundation or Planned Parenthood, the donation with the biggest bang for the buck that would honor Komen’s wishes more completely would have to go to Planned Parenthood.
This is not rocket science, Alexandra. Yeah, it would be great if there was a cure but breast cancer is not just one thing. It could be many different snafus in the cellular mechanism gone awry. And the pharmas that are working on it have plenty of money to invest, now that they’ve laid all of the researchers off.
Finally, the choice between abortion and breast cancer research was not one that had to be forced on anyone. Karen Handel *made* it a choice because she’s an ignorant twit of a politician who is pandering to her ultra religious (and shrinking) base. Let it be the last hurrah of the religiously motivated politicians. Their audience is dying, literally. Pretty soon they’ll have to pander to the rest of us and we did not just fall off the turnip truck.
Update2: Komen Foundation board member Rafaelli explains why the foundation cut off Planned Parenthood and ONLY Planned Parenthood:
For the board, the calculation was simple: “You should as a general rule always pick vendors and grantees that will broaden your base of support and not narrow it,” Mr. Raffaelli said.
Ooooo, major miscalculation. Ginormous. Not even partial credit. You just lost the young suburbanites and educated women with decades to go but gained all of the crotchety, mean spirited seniors who are on their way out. Congratulations!
Oh, and the red beanie dudes are at it again:
Foes of abortion and Web sites critical of it have criticized the Komen foundation’s financing of Planned Parenthood for years. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis and several bishops in Ohio issued statements last year raising concerns about donating to the Komen foundation. In December, LifeWay Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, said it was recalling a pink Bible it was selling because a dollar per copy was going to the Komen foundation.
Technically, bishops don’t wear red beanies unless they are also cardinals but whatever. The bottom line is that they represent a foreign corporation that seems determined to make American women’s lives difficult and miserable. We really need to poll the pols to find out who they serve: American women or the Vatican.
Update3: H/T Marsha who sent me looking for this story about the hacking that went on last night at the Komen Foundation’s website. Here’s what googlers found last night when they queried Komen:
{{GASP!}} Alright! Occupy Komen.
Update4: Komen’s public health official, Mollie Williams, resigns in protest over the decision to drop Planned Parenthood funding.
Update5: It’s an unmitigated disaster for the Komen Foundation. Many former supporters are signing petitions in protest. As expected, it’s the younger, yuppier, women who are outraged by this. And here’s a new cartoon that is likely the first of many to come:
Update 6: Ok, here come the jokes:
@vtlozanoVicente Lozano
The Susan Komen foundation is marketing a new pink gun. It only shoots the user in the foot.#komen
Update7: Why do women journalists do this? Here is another piece of apologetics and “both sides are guilty” crap about the Komen disaster, this time from Rachel Latimore of Slate. No, Rachel, you can not make Planned Parenthood look like a bad guy just because some Right to Life group has been successful at relentlessly harrassing them into an investigation. That’s not to say there haven’t been improprieties and perhaps even indictable offenses. The problem is that Planned Parenthood has been around since the turn of the 20th century and I’ll wager that every woman I know has some kind of history with them. Planned Parenthood is where college aged women would go for paps, breast exams and packs of contraceptives at rock bottom prices. We grew up with Planned Parenthood and know that without Planned Parenthood, our lives might have been profoundly different. So, go ahead and pull out all of the dirty laundry. It’s a teensy drop in the bucket compared to the generations of good it has done. You want to find a crime of the century worthy of this much attention? Tell the right to lifers to focus their attention on MF Global.
I don’t know about the rest of you Conflucians but I am sick and tired of Planned Parenthood getting shit dumped on them by the clueless religious right. It’s time to push back. If you were ever served by Planned Parenthood, say thanks in the comments.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Karen Handel, Komen Foundation, Planned Parenthood |
The Confluence 
Is this the same warped, corrupted thinking that made NARAL endorse Obama over Hillary? Is it a way for the right wing to corrupt and in turn, destroy these types of organizations? Call me cynical, but money talks and integrity walks.
There were quite a few women’s advocacy groups that got rolled by Obama’s droogs in 2008 and are probably still afraid to buck the party apparatus. They should anyway. Obama never did care a lick about women. But he sure will use them to get re-elected.
I think it’s time for women to wise up about politicians from both parties. They are in it for themselves with very few notable exceptions. The next time women have a choice between a guy and a pro-choice woman as a nominee, they’d better not fuck it up so spectacularly. I hope they’ve learned their lesson from this.
As for abortion, I’m of the opinion that we need to abolish Roe. It does more harm than good since it was decided. Everything since that decision has been a step back for women. We should have continued to fight for equality first and formost. I know the theory behind bodily autonomy. We’ve seen it in action. It didn’t work out. Equality must come first or they will have no respect for you.
The right wing is going to paint a target on any organization that supports abortion and they will continue to win elections this way until their voters die out. Abortion is the ONLY thing that matters for some people. It’s stupid, destructive and short-sited but there is absolutely no reasoning with the anti-choice voters. They came of age in a different time. They missed the great liberation and they are going to make damn sure that no female enjoys sex and doesn’t have to pay dearly for it.
I don’t know. Abortion is pretty important to a lot of people. Personally, I am not a fan but I can see how someone who needs the procedure for a myriad of reasons should have access. I also tend to think that once Abortion is out of the picture anti-women zealots will just find some other thing that benefits women greatly and target that until it is done. Birth control, right to vote, women having autonomy over their own selves, women having the right to work. This list of things the RW hates literally goes on forever.
You misunderstand me. I am not about to give up being pro choice. Nooooo, what I am saying is that without true equality, women will always be fighting the RW zealots. Women have *always* had the right to an abortion. Nature gave us that right. But we have not always had the right to a safe one and legal one. That’s all that Roe does.
We know a lot more about abortions now than we did 40 years ago. We know that ru486 is very effective and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s easy to make. How many women could be trained to perform safe abortions in tHe privacy of their own homes with the help of their friends? Get rid of Roe and work for equality. Roe is hurting us in every other area of our lives. We need to make ourselves self sufficient so the issue of abortion can never be used against us again.
Gregory, as the old saying went (back in the 60’s and 70’s)–
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Obama never cared a lick about women and don’t mention Lilly Ledbetter. OK, how about Marissa Gaeta and Citlalic Snell? Think they would agree with you. And if we can just wait out the dying off of anti-abortion zealots 39 years after Roe/Wade, how to you account for fanatics like Lila Rose who’s, what, 20 years old?
Another passionate cause for me to spend my time on.
I just love this: “Hackers got ahold of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s website late last night, altering its copy to to read: “Help us run over poor women on our way to the bank”–a blunt take on the organization’s decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood.”
Occupy Komen!
OMG, you’re killing me! Too funny. Way to go, anonymous!
OK, after reading the story, dumb has nothing to do with it. It’s just another act of war from the fundies that managed to grab control of yet another women’s organization. Not unlike the Obama.inc did in 2004.
{{snort!}} Is this like a battle of wits with unarmed combatants? I think this is going to backfire on Komen like nobody’s business. Some of Komen’s state affiliates are baffled and frustrated.
Well, they’ll see. Planned Parenthood is going to be the beneficiary of this and Komen has been tarnished. What a nice boost for PP.
On a happier note, East Village Murray predicted a short winter
De-fund the Komen Foundation…
This just in – Coldwater Creek has announced they will no longer sponsor the Susan G. Komen Foundation!! We’re asking everyone to head over to Coldwater Creek’s FB page and post your thanks for their defense of women (and our boobs!!)
THIS MAY NOT BE TRUE – people are checking right now!
The legislator “investigating” Planned Parenthood should be pilloried for frivolous waste of taxpayer money. My understanding is their funding is very strictly regulated and it’s well-documented where every penny goes. The purpose of the investigation is to harrass PP and cause this sort of thing to happen. And how long has the investigation been going on? What have they found so far? How long is it going to take?
I’m from Georgia and when I found out Handel was behind this it made me sick. She’s like a bad penny that keeps turning up.
I’ve donated to PP already and will continue to do so yearly from now on. I certainly did use them when I was young in the early 70s and thank goodness they were there.
I gave too. Money talks and bullshit walks.
Hey RD:
I agree with everything that you said regarding Komen pulling its’ funding from Planned Parenthood. What bothers me is that the national chapter of PP decided to endorse a candidate (Obama) when they had never entered the fray in the past; especially never as contentious a battle and never one where the clear choice should have been Clinton.
It would seem to me that Komen is nothing but a money maker for a core group of executive board members. I know that my company every year participates in the race for the cure. I certainly will be sitting things out this year!
That aside, I agree, that Komen, which raised $271million last year is about ready to see its revenue, and tie-in “pink” money dry up.
I wonder how many liberal or effective organiztions that would hold the Congress’s feet to the fire were screwed in the past 10 years. I can name a few. AARP was corrupted by a right wing idiot, Willam E Novelli, (he wrote a forward to Newt Gingrich’s book)… who adjusted the board and then the rules of the organization and soon it was totally defanged into a insurance shill.
Then in 2008, NewYork NARAL endorsed Obama over Hillary to the outrage of most of the feminist community and the actual NY NARAL Organization. Who and how was that paid for? Now the Susan G Komen Foundation has been captured/corrupted. And I have big suspicions about NOW (National Organization for Women)..in their very lukewarm endorsement of Hillary and the pa$$ionate fervor for the ONE. I believe there are moles among the fools. Donna Brazille and her friendship with Karl Rove (BARF!)…..what is that really about? and then her lucrative CNN contract. Now who would pay her a penney for her analysis? Lets add the DNC to the organizations that were corrupted by money and a mole or two. If buying a Congress critter is cheap, imagine how easy a DNC member must be.
Of course this is an outrage and if Planned Parenthood can’t use it to their advantage to inspire fund raising they are idiots.
As far as Reproductive Rights as a 2012 campaign issue…it is time for women’s groups to take the fight to the states. Take a page from the Gay community who determinedly and repeatedly push gay marriage legislation in the states. I don’t want to hear about this issue in the Federal elections since it is a states issue and neither the Democrats or the Republicans care about the issue except as a way to manipulate women voters.
Here is what is being done in Washington State (Reproductive Parity Act). No one is going to guard reproductive freedom for women. We need to take the fight to the states ourselves.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2012/01/09/mandatory-abortion-coverage-in-maternity-insurance/
I thought of another….Emily’s List. I got a fundraising letter during the 2008 primary season. All woemn on the letterhead….but no Hillary Clinton. What did it cost to keep her name off that mailing. An accident I am sure…NOT! There are just too many of these examples not to understand the scope of the corruption and the selling out of people’s lives. Any one think of any more?
Sorry that link didn’t work, try this one. Same story different source.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/13/washington-abortion-reproductive-parity-act_n_1205415.html
I am eternally grateful to Planned Parenthood for helping me when I became sexually active in my mid-teens. I was poor and essentially on my own. I was able to get birth control, pap smears and annual check ups. Planned Parenthood was concerned about my health and well-being NOT my religion or politics.
f##k the mean, backward, sanctimonious, misguided idiots who don’t have anything better to do than to try and deny health care to women.
Ditto for me. Planned parenthood was a lifesaver.
I should add that because of planned Parenthood, I never needed an abortion. When it’s all tallied up, I suspect they have prevented a zillion times more unwanted pregnancies than they have ended them.
The religious right are their own worst enemies.
Bingo! What in the words “planned parenthood” do they not understand? Religiosity makes people irrational to the point of derangement.
Ain’t it the truth. They’re not thinking. Or they’re thinking that if pp performs even one abortion, it’s one too many and must be banned. But banning abortion and making it illegal has never stopped anyone who wanted one from having one. It’s only a matter of how safe that abortion is. So, we should stop calling these people prolife or even anti choice. When we meet them at a party we should refer to them with greater accuracy, “Oh, so your in the illegal abortionist lobby. Very interesting. How do you sleep? “
VERY good — I’m going to remember that, “illegal abortionist lobby” ….perfect and appropriate.
What Katie said. I will have to remember that phrase for future reference. Illegal abortionist lobb_.
B_ the wa_, what do _ou do when one of _our ke_board ke_s just stops working? I have never had this happen before.
Vacuum. Turn upside down and shake. Buy new keyboard. But really it’s probably just a crumb lodged in just the wrong place. Maybe run a toothbrush around it….
Me three. They have always taken great care of me.
Oh, and me also! They did my first annual exam (and probably the 2nd and 3rd….)
When my aunt passed on in the 80s, the notice requested donations to Planned Parenthood in lieu of flowers. That’s how strongly some women feel about reprodutive rights.
One wonders if groups and blocks of disaffected Komen field workers and members can defect en masse to Planned Parenthood and help Planned Parenthood create a Planned Parenthood Breast Cancer Funding initiative . . . a sort of “counter-Komen” if one will.
If Komen could indeed be bankrupted and forced into roach-motel liquidation, it would be a hopeful example for the targets of the other corrupted frontgroups. They could see it is possible to target the targetters.
(By the way, I wonder if the fetishization of kumbaya bipartisanship and postpartisanship is worthy of a post or posts all on its own? The most valuable thing Obama has done is to discredit the concept of bipartisanship and postpartisanship, hopefully for decades to come. )
(I remember years ago the notorious author Norman Mailer chattering in print somewhere about “cossetted women” expecting some sort of “right” to safe and legal non-coathanger abortions. I found myself wishing I was famous enough to be up at Mailer’s level when I thought of suggesting Mailer could lead the way-to-toughness by having a coathanger angioplasty if/when he had coronary narrowing.)
I was headed to your 1/29 post (comments closed) from a Twitter skirmish between Ted Rall and Markos Moulitsas. Then I browsed your page statements and concluded that this is an interesting Democrats-to-the-left-of-Obama site which I’ll add to my blogroll right now.
I am an Argentinean cartoonist and journalist posting on International politics and culture matters; mainly about the USA.
Feel free to use any of my drawings if you feel it suits your posts. Just don’t forget to link me. Thanks.
http://bobrow.wordpress.com/
Thanks, Bob! Er, did we already link to you and not attribute? If so, sorry about that. Sometimes, I’m in a hurry. It definitely wasn’t intentional.
Not that I realized yet. Just an invitation to share common interests. Be well.
One thing that is actually false in the whole debate is that Komen has recently swung right. Not so. Nancy Brinker has long affiliation with the Republican Party. She was a Bush pioneer in 2000, for one thing Her org is apparently just now getting big enough that she is unafraid to show her true colors? I don’t know.
Another falsity is that Komen is about the “cure”. In fact, Komen’s research budget is rather small. One of my favorite books on the whole Pink Ribbon Enterprise is called “Pink Ribbon Blues,” written by Gayle Sulik, a medical sociologist. It outlines the whole big fat nasty surrounding the Pink Ribbon Culture and lays much of the blame squarely on Komen. Here’s a link to the author’s blog: http://www.pinkribbonblues.org/, where she gives a really informative take on the whole Komenesque scam.
One thing that I hope will come out of all of this is a “dislodging of the status quo” (as Ms. Sulik puts it) surrounding breast cancer. Awareness is nice, but we’re there. We’re aware. Now we need to find a cure. The women in the most need are those with metastatic breast cancer….and they are still dying at pretty much the same rate as ever if not at a higher rate.
The fact is that “early detection” is not the gold standard people believed it was. Survivability is more about the cancer cell type than it is about when it was detected or what size it was when found. That is why root causes and cures needs to be found.
Early detection does increase survivability statistics? Why? Because in-situ cancers are more likely to be detected by early detection, ones that will not kill. Find more of those? The “cure” rate goes way up. It’s a false statistic. But it sells a whole lot of mammography machines…and Komen invests in GE stock….
Don’t donate to the Pink Ribbon culture, the prime purpose of Komen. Pink Ribbons don’t help and Komen participates in some pretty corrupt relationships, did so, far before this current fiasco occurrred. Donate to orgs like Breast Cancer Research Foundation that spend 88% of their money on research.
Anyway.
Pink Ribbon Inc is another book and the film comes out this month.
I, too, am grateful for Planned Parenthood, and will continue to support them.
Having read several articles about the Komen decision, and reading the comments attached to these articles, I am shocked that there is at least one troll in each comment section claiming that abortions/birth control lead to breast cancer. The WP article includes the gleeful reaction of a Ms.Charmaine Yoest, who has made her living off a variety of nutwing organizations, and describes herself as a breast cancer survivor. I do think she should try to contain her homies who are pushing the abortion/birth control=breast cancer meme, as it may put her personal past into question. The next step may be to institute committees of fine upstanding Christian men (funded by the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, perhaps?) who will screen women diagnosed with breast cancer to make sure they didn’t have an abortion or use birth control before they can seek treatment.
I do have to disagree with you on one point, RD: I’m a crotchety old woman, and my dander is up MUCH further than any of the young women I know. I am increasingly discouraged at the apparent lack of interest in anything political by the generation emerging into adulthood.
My apologies to the wiser women among us who were ahead of the rest of their generation.
However, I’m going to go with my first hunch that most of the socially conservative voters that make abortion their number one issue and who the republicans count on for votes, came of age in the 50’s and have never gotten over the shame and indoctrination they were subjected to at the time. They’re in their 70s and 80s now, Fox News has made an industry out of terrorizing them and has slavishly fluffed their tendency for old testament theology and eschatology. These people are judgmental and getting more mean spirited by the year. But they won’t be around much longer which is why, I think, the Republicans are pulling out all of the stops in the last few election seasons. Their opportunities for getting these useful idiots to the polls to vote against abortion while actually voting to undermine their own social safety net, their children’s future and democracy itself are dwindling.
It’s now or maybe never. Kill social security with abortion in this election cycle or learn to live with it. The numbers are ebbing away from the social conservatives.
I also am a crotchety old woman, 74, who came of age in the fifties and I don’t know any women my age who are not pro-choice. Most of us have daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters who we love and want to protect. We lived through some tough times for women and we don’t want our daughters and granddaughters to have to go back to those times. My friends include Democrats and Republicans and most are church members.
You haven’t met my mother and ALL of her friends.
I think it’s safe to say your mom and her friends are probably the outliers in that generation. I’ll bet there are more anti-abortion women in their 30s to 50s now than among the elder group. That’s what I’ve observed anyway fwiw.
On the contrary, what I have seen among the senior set is the norm. I have yet to meet a person I their 70s who does not think exactly like my mother. Clearly, they do exist because several of them on this blog say they are among that cohort. And yet, I have never met them in person. Everyone in their 70s and older that I have ever met has been prolife. Every last one of them. Now it could be that my mom is ultra religious with a capital R, and those are the kinds of people she attracts. But that only means that there are an awful lot of them.
And don’t forget that the Rep who is investigating PP comes from a state with a very high number of retirees. Plus, Pennsylvania, which has an aging population has not one but *2* anti choice senators. One of them is a Democrat. They didn’t get elected by the younguns.
You travel in very bad circles then. Expand your horizons.
71 and ditto! I even have healthy and incredibly astute women friends in their mid-nineties who also agree wholeheartedly with the right to choose. Granted, in all cases the hen-house is safe from the Fox (news).
And let me add that they would be more than happy, nay, *enthusiastic*, to force their daughters, granddaughters and nieces to have children they didn’t plan in order to teach them “responsibility”. I suspect that regular readers of this blog do not watch Fox and are not easily fooled into supporting über fundamentalist bullshit. But trust me, I have met the enemy. There are a lot of women in their 70s who would be delighted to ruin the futures of their granddaughters without blinking an eye. They don’t care. No, they really don’t. And they aren’t nice about it. They’re the kind of mothers who make minors appealing to the courts an absolute necessity.
No, I don’t know what made their compassion and logic mechanisms short circuit. I think it was the romaniticization of the fetus and a healthy dose of shame from their upbringings. But don’t think that because you are not one of them that they don’t exist and have lots of like minded friends. They are legion or this shit would have never gained traction in the first place.
I love it when I can take a clearly defined course of action to support my side– donate to Planned Parenthood.
“As for abortion, I’m of the opinion that we need to abolish Roe. It does more harm than good since it was decided. Everything since that decision has been a step back for women.”
rd, how can you mean that? I was shocked when I read it, but hoping for an explanation.
Relax. I’m pro choice. What I mean by that is that once Roe was decided, feminists let their guard down on equality. The ERA sputtered along of another decade and then it was abandoned. Women felt a false sense of confidence that they didn’t need it becaus all the needed was bodily autonomy provided by Roe. And Roe became a lightening rod for the religious. It was like a beacon, sitting out ther all by itself, not under the umbrella of any other act or law. There was no ERA to keep it safe. Essentially, we put the cart before the horse. Before Roe, states could decide for themselves whether abortion was legal. And there were states like NY where you could go to have one. IMHO, we should have left it that way until the ERA was passed.
Ok, so Roe got the full attnetion of the crazies in 1972. Great. Then the politicians saw that it could be used. Democrats could dangle it in front of Republicans who would snap at it like crocodiles and the Democrats would scream that if women didn’t vote for them, the Republicans would overturn Roe. Meanwhile. The Republicans would hold roe up as an abomination and promise to overturn it if they were elected but they knew that it was too valuable to them to ever overturn. So, in essence, both parties have conspired to eliminate the rights of women to bodily autonomy. As long as Roe exists, Democrars will swear to uphold it while letting pieces of it fall away in order to seem reasonable to the voters who are squeamish about abortions. democrats have actually done the greatest harm by propagating the idea that abortions are bad and distasteful. Meanwhile, Republicans whittle Roe down to the point that it is nearly meaningless and eventually it will be. But as long as it still stands, they can still throw feces at it.
And what had become of women’s rights? Shit if I know. Anything that has to do with labor equality, equal pay, eliminating the old boys club at work, and getting equal access to educational funding and title nine enforcement and every other damn thing has been completely muted by the attention we have focussed on women’s genitals. As far as American society is concerned, all they see when they see a woman is a uterus that can be pushed around by the state. There are medical restrictions on a woman’s body that a man does not have to tolerate. And those restrictions can affect your life, relationships, family life and career and they are things that men never have to worry about. That fact right there makes you as a woman unequal to a man. You can be humiliated and forced to jump through increasingly higher and tighter hoops, forced to take more time off of work to take care of a medical procedure that should take no time at all and have your privacy violated by screaming lunatics at dingy abortion clinics in dreary parts of town. Those lunatics have been known to take pictures of patients and publish them on the Internet. And all because women are not entitled to the same dignity and respect as men because the country doesn’t see us as equal. Our consciences are subject to state sanctioned religious busy bodies.
So, at this point, women need to take responsibility for doing their own abortions and not relying on the state. Tell the state to go Cheney itself and get rid of Roe. Once you’re free of Roe, the right wingers will back down and start paying attention to social security. Trust me on this, the last thing the Republicans want to lose is Roe. It’s al, they’ve got.
Once it’s gone, women can focus attention on things that are ad important as Roe and the country can stop looking t the place between our legs and focus on the place between our ears.
Honestly, I don’t think we have any other choice about Roe. It was useful when the ERA was still in play. When it was gone, Roe became a target and we became collateral damage.
We need to dump it.
Thanks for the reply, but I disagree with your reasoning. I know a lot of lawyers who think that
RvW was “wrongly decided” b/c of flawed reasoning blah blah blah, but at the time of that decision there was no good reason to suppose that the ERA would ever get ratified. And even if it did, imo, there would still be questions about what happens between our legs and in our bodies that would have had to be worked out in the courts. It hasn’t stopped, not because of Roe but in spite of it.
IMO, the Roe decision was a great leap forward in the rights of women; if you have no right to physical autonomy and personal privacy there is no way to claim equality in other spheres such as income, personal property, labor rights etc. etc. I doubt if the gains that women have made in those other areas could have happened without Roe.
Dump Roe, and I guarantee you there will be another target just as murky. And your plan to compensate by setting up private abortion labs in the basements of the chemically articulate? OMG. You must be kidding.
I didn’t say that Roe was wrongly decided. I said it was a bad strategy to think it could be used as a proxy for equality.
You can not save Roe. It is already dead. The more you cling to it, the more you’re going to get burned by it. The religious right and the Republicans are counting on your reaction. You will do *anything* to save it and they will take you on and defeat you bit by bit. In the end, you will still have a right to an abortion but no one in the country will be able or willing to give one to you.
And I am dead serious about finding alternatives although not serious about recruiting scientists to whip up a batch of RU486 (although it could be done and I’d rather it was done by professionals than some kid in a RV in the desert). If women don’t find a way of doing it themselves in a safe private manner, they will always be at the mercy of some ultra fundamentalist group. The only way around this is to pass some kind of equality amendment where women’s health is as inviolable as a men’s.
If you want to make sure the religious right don’t pick another target women have to grow a pair and fight back as vigorously as they did in the late 60s and early 70s. They have to stop passively assuming that some political party is going to protect this shred of a decision that is no substitute for equality. If the scandanavian countries can do it, WE can do it.
You don’t have any other choice. Roe is dead. And to be perfectly honest, it’s only one piece of a big puzzle. More of us have been burned by discrimination at work than will ever need Roe. I’m sick of having my entire life hang on the thread of whether or not I am allowed to have an abortion. We are more than our genitals.
BTW, you are not the first person to express shock and horror at the idea of dumping Roe. This is also not the first time I’ve written about it. I give it about six months before you reconsider. Once you let the reasoning swish around in your brain for awhile and observe what is happening in politics, you will start to realize that I have a point and you’ll say, “You know, RD, when you first told me we should dump Roe, I thought you were batshit crazy. But now, I think you were right.”
It’s happened before.
I should mention that whipping up a batch of misoprostol. Mifepristone or methotrexate should be a piece of cake. There are literally tens of thousands of unemployed pharma workers who could do this for you. You just need a chemist who has access to a lab to do the synthesis. Then, find someone who will do the separation, another person to do the NMR, another to do the mass spec and purity measurements. Then find an unemployed pharmacologist to tell you how to work out the dosage.
It might cost some initial investment but the chemists I know are pretty good at this kind of stuff. Once they get the reactions under their belts, they can churn this stuff out. And since there are so many chemists, you can outsource to different ones.
I’m not saying this *should* be done but it *could* be done. We have the technology and the experience.
Riverdaughter — Fookin’ brilliant post!
Thanks for all the good links — and the great analysis containing them.
What can you say….
http://www.businessinsider.com/hope-kills-susan-g-komen-foundation-would-rather-be-associated-with-a-handgun-than-planned-parenthood-2012-2
Does it shoot the user in the foot?
I can think of some other part of the anatomy (male and female) that I’d prefer it would shoot.
Most folks belief in Jeebus is inversely proportional to the size of their savings. Or the length of their unemployment compensation eligibility.
I don’t see religious insanity dying out anytime soon.
I find political doctrine fanatics on both sides the same as religious fanatics. They have a need to see things good or evil, black or white, and they need to know there is a power structure in charge whether it’s for good or evil.
Except in cases when there is actually a good and an evil. Like this one.
Massive takedown!
OTB . . . someone has satirised the, uhh, “heaven” out of Christian Fundamentalism. May Dog forgive me, here is the link.
http://imgur.com/a/CCF5A
suggestion I made over at reclusive leftist:
One suggestion…make the donations in “memory of” not “in honor of” Handel.