I’m cross-posting a piece here from both The Guardian (where it was edited down for size) and at Scarleteen, and then I’ve a bit more to say.

* * *

All of us who work at clinics that provide abortion, or as abortion or reproductive rights educators or advocates know we do so at substantial risk. Women who come to our clinics as clients also know that they, too, may be at risk.  The slaying of Dr. Tiller yesterday is tragic and upsetting, but it is not surprising or new. We didn’t become scared for the first time yesterday.  We’ve always been scared, and we have always had cause to be scared.

The independent clinic I work for part-time had a branch firebombed three times in 1983 until it shut down.  In 1988, via Operation Rescue, unending and intense harassment of children from demonstrators in another of our clinics forced us to close our on-site clinic childcare center for clients and staff.  And our clinic, despite being one of the 40 or so in the U.S. which provides procedures through the second trimester like Tiller’s did (though Tiller’s was one of but three to go past 25 weeks to 28 weeks, the legal limit), could very well be counted as one which has it easy. We haven’t had an incident of violence for some time, most days we have but a few protestors, and we do not wear Kevlar to work.  None of our providers have been murdered.  Yet.

But all of us who work in the field live either with the threat or actuality of domestic antiabortion terrorism daily: at work, at home or anywhere at all.  Let’s refuse sugarcoating or denials that merely call it violence or paint it as random or isolated: what happens around abortion is not the same violence as someone shot during a minimart robbery.

Terrorism is generally defined as an act intended to create fear, perpetrated for an ideological goal. The Patriot Act is not something I support, but antiabortion violence fits squarely in its definition of domestic terrorism. Vandalizing or bombing clinics; stalking, threatening or harassing staff, clients or providers and/or organizing or aiding others to do so; publicly publishing the home addresses of providers or staff, names, photos and school addresses of their children; outcries for a war:  all of this and more could be easily classed as terrorism by the definitions our government has used for other violence or threats.

The murder of Dr. George Tiller at his church yesterday morning  — based on the information we have so far – was domestic terrorism, and terrorism which has been known and prevalent for some time.

It’s been going on in the United States since we have had legal abortion, and typically increases during times when our federal government is not outright antiabortion.  As Christina Page points out, the number of harassing phone calls to clinics since Obama took office has massively increased. She also notes that the murder of Dr. Tiller is eerily similar to the murder of Dr. David Gunn in 1993: that, too, happened only a few months into a new administration which was not antiabortion. Dr. Tiller was also shot the first time in that same year.  Rachel Maddow gives a good overview of the history of clinic violence here.

Some antichoice groups will call Tiller’s assailant a vigilante. But for those who use incendiary speech, who provided him with the information and comraderie that fueled him, it’s going to be tough to uphold that stance with anyone of intelligence. We all have freedom of speech, to be sure, but as with any freedom, that comes with responsibility.

Current Operation Rescue president Troy Newman says they denounce vigilantism, but the raging enticements provided en masse through their organization has always told a different tale.  The organization’s founder, Randall Terry, says his movement “should not tone down its rhetoric despite the killing of abortion doctor George Tiller,” and that Tiller was “a mass murderer and horrifically, he reaped what he sowed.”

When someone like Bill O’Reilly provocatively says again and again and again, that an abortion provider is a butcher who the law refuses to punish (nevermind that abortion is legal), when he calls abortion “execution” or talks about providers as those who “kill babies for money,” (as if all surgeries did not cost money); calls abortion clinics “death mills,” or reports (falsely) that Tiller will terminate pregnancies up to the due-date, he is NOT denouncing vigilantism, just like someone constantly and intentionally pouring gasoline on rising flames is not denouncing fire.

This kind of rhetoric and harassment and the fear it creates is something we’re faced with every day. And it has serious impact, even when no one is murdered.

It purposefully scares, intimidates and upsets the women who come to our clinics.  It intentionally clouds their decision-making. If one reproductive choice may or does involve things like being harassed, stalked or assaulted, you’re obviously going to take that into consideration in your a choice, even though fear or harassment should have no place in choices as important, personal and complex as those of reproduction.  Even for those unswayed by these actions, abortion in a context of shame and blame can make a choice one’d otherwise felt was best one of guilt and remorse.

The threat of harassment and violence can even keep women from coming to clinics when they were not seeking out abortion services at all. Here in the states, clinics like mine are where many women – particularly low-income, immigrant and teen women — also get their well-woman care, contraception or pregnancy tests, as many women are without health insurance or a private OB/GYN.

The threats, intimidation, vandalism and assault and the fear of them makes staffing clinics difficult, and make a job which is already emotionally demanding far tougher. Anyone getting any kind of surgery ideally needs a centered, relaxed and stable staff and a safe environment during their surgery: that’s no minor feat in this culture.  Clinic staff work long hours, often at low pay and with few or limited benefits. Even without clinic violence or the threat of it, it’s not an easy job: abortion isn’t just any surgery, and as with anything to do with the end of a pregnancy, whether it tends in termination or a live birth, our clients emotional needs can be great.

With all of this violence and intimidation so constant and pervasive, and with the actuality of the job itself often being less-than-ideal, why do so many of us stick around?

We stay is because we know that women need us to.  Many of us have been those women ourselves at one time or another.  We know from women: we understand our own needs.  And we’re scared sometimes, but not scared enough to leave women without choice and care.

A sign at Tiller’s clinic read, “Abortion is not a cerebral or a reproductive issue. Abortion is an issue of the heart. Until one understands the heart of a woman, nothing else about abortion makes any sense at all.” Dr. Tiller knew us, too. No one going back to work a day after having both arms shot, knowing it could happen again, is going to take that risk for cash or because they want to win.  Only someone who cares deeply for and about women, and has a very real grasp of the realities of women’s lives, is going to do that.

Obviously, the threat of something is not the same as that threat made real.  Some of the shared upset the reproductive health and abortion communities have right now is because we do feel even more unsafe than usual.  For those who knew Dr. Tiller personally, their personal loss is profound. But even for those of us who never met him or were not close to him, even for those fear has not increased, the loss is enormous.

It’s obviously important for the women receiving abortion and other reproductive healthcare to have as fantastic a doctor as possible, but it’s also very important for those of us working in the field to have our Dr. Tillers.

Like any field of practice, abortion has those who are adequate (and some less-than-adequate), some who are very good, and a few who are simply exceptional. Dr. Tiller wasn’t just any doctor; just any abortion provider or advocate:  he was an exceptional and inspirational doctor, provider and advocate. He was someone who set and held high standards of care, a quality of healthcare we all want to receive, especially when we are in crisis. He chose to work with some of the toughest cases; to include providing for a group of women with some of the greatest emotional needs, women who also had few other places to turn, despite that choice creating additional risks for him and resulting in greater harassment. His commitment to helping women never wavered in over thirty years of his practice. Just like anyone in any field, we have our heroes, and we all looked up to George Tiller.  Just like anyone in any field, having our heroes assassinated is devastating, particularly when they are assassinated for being so exceptional.

Ginny Cassidy-Brinn, an ANRP and the author of Woman-Centered Pregnancy and Birth, works at my clinic, and is someone I look up to the way I have Dr. Tiller.  I want to leave you with words she shared with me yesterday. I think they’re the way Dr. Tiller would want us to best use our sadness or fear and the way he so bravely used his own.  I think they are what those of us in the field, as well as those who want to understand or support us or the women we serve, need to hear.

Like anyone who knew him even slightly, I know that he was very brave. He faced so much hatred on a daily basis: he knew the risks he was taking.  But he simply thought that women’s being allowed to decide whether to carry a pregnancy or not was an essential, basic human right.  So, he continued despite the attacks and threats. He was diligent in protecting himself, — I don’t think he had any desire to be a martyr — but he continued.  He was very careful as a physician: using the safest, best techniques.  He did a lot to foster communication amongst abortion providers to make abortion safer.

I keep thinking about the old Joe Hill quote, “Don’t mourn, organize.”  I intend to mourn, but I also intend to carry on his legacy–to try to be as brave, loving, politically savvy and competent in my work as he was.  And to try, to the best of my ability, to inspire others as well.

* * *

This has hit me much harder than I expected: it’s been tough for me to shake it off.  It’s not like I expected it to feel like a trifle, but considering how aware I am of this kind of violence, how much I know to expect it, I’m surprised at my response and how it lingers.

On the afternoon that Dr. Tiller was assassinated — again, I’m irritated with it not being made clear by our leadership that this kind of murder is a political assassination just like the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X or John and Robert Kennedy –  in an effort to find some way to work through my feelings without more hours of the crying that was hurting my face, I headed out back to do some weeding.  My garden had become seriously overgrown.

I was ripping those plants out like nobody’s business, feeling more and more anger with my sadness, and was struck by a (perhaps obvious) metaphor. I snapped a few shots trying to capture what was going on with me.

I think some of why my sadness and anger is lingering is that I feel we’re left so adrift, those of us who work in any aspect of reproductive justice, especially in or around abortion.  Yes, we have a new administration now which is more supportive of our rights when it comes to some policies. However, knowing that violence has begun again, in part because of that fact, I need a strong response to it: I need acknowledgment of the terrorism it is and always has been, clear statements that it is unacceptable, I need everyone and their uncle to shut the hell up about this “common ground” bullshit: my body isn’t common ground.  (Okay, so mine kind of is, but you know what I mean.) Women and our lives are not common ground, despite thousands of years of being treated like we are. Those of us who work in this field, who work around it, who work for reproductive justice have never sought to stamper on anyone’s rights or ideas: asking us for common ground is silly at best, and a grave insult at worst.

These are the loose thoughts I came back inside with, hands cathartically bloodied from weeding with such intensity:

An inexperienced gardener will often ask how it is, exactly, we know which the weeds are, and which are not.

The most simple answer is,
of course,
that I know what I want in my garden, and I know what I don’t. I get to make that determination because it’s all growing (or not) in my soil.

My neighbor or some bird passing by might drop a seed in it; that does not alter whose ground it is, and who’s right it is to choose what grows there: it is my own, and sovereign. It is my own say, and only mine, what gets nurtured and kept, and what is pulled, or let go to seed. However lovely everything growing might be, whatever it’s right is to grow, it may be that this plant will keep that one from growing. It may be that I either cannot afford or simply do not care to grow anything at all this year or that one — even every year there is — leaving the soil fertile, but barren.  I may even want to burn out all the seed entirely.  Again, my soil: my right to do with it what I will.

And sometimes it may be that this plant or that may well have grown into something more marvelous than I thought it would, and I will never see that result. And it may be that I accidentally pull a plant I did not intend to: but that is my regret, if I have one, to carry; my sorrow to hold, if I have sorrow.  All of that is the nature of my life and my life in this particular body: no matter what we do, no matter what we choose, there is a certain and unique weight that lives between our hips and in our hearts.

And we can’t always tend to our gardens on our own.  If we’re lucky, some other gentle gardener who understands, and cares to help, with no claim of ownership over the ground that is ours, will lend a hand. In the midst of storm, his hands, too, may become injured or bloodied; her heart, too, may sometimes be heavy.  This is not light business: whatever we do, even if we neglect the soil completely, blood, sweat, a tear, an ache, a strain and all the thick mud of our lives is unavoidable.

The best of help — genuine help — will not second-guess, will not presume ownership or a share of our crops, but will simply ask us what we need and then tend to it generously, offering counsel of his own only if we ask for it first. She will not ask if we’re absolutely certain we want these plants to go or that to stay; he will not enter into philosophical arguments with us about their own ideas about the way to garden.  They will not seek to speak for the weeds, nor for us: they are listeners with gentle nods, able hands who trust our hearts and their own and respect the soil.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, body/mind, photography & art, heart work, abortion | permalink | comments (6) »

Thursday was the kind of workday when I feel I’m right where I am supposed to be in the world.

I’m at the clinic itself around once a week now as part of my job running our outreach.  My job when I am there with clients having terminations is mostly as an educator: I give one-on-one consultations and discussions about birth control methods and proper use, STIs, relationships, sexual health and any questions or concerns a client might have about their procedure.  It’s also my job when there to particularly educate and advocate for teens and young adults, and since I’m trained to do options counseling, I do that sometimes, too.  Because I float in many respects, what this also means is that I can tend to be a bit of a concierge at the clinic, particularly between clients.  So, if someone needs help with say, a lodging issue, if I walk into a waiting room and a batch of clients have a question they’ve been discussing and want more information on, if someone is alone and upset about it, I’m able to tend to things like this and more.

While I very much like doing the outreach at the shelter and in other presentation environments, this really is my favorite part of the job, despite the hellacious commute.

Last Thursday, in the span of a day, I:

• Came upon a client in one of the waiting rooms who was alone and right about to burst into huge tears.  I was able to sit with her for nearly an hour, let her cry, be an ear for the relationship conflicts she was having and reflect back her valid sadness at being totally abandoned by her partner on that day and other times of reproductive crisis.  We managed to get from crying to laughing (she was actually tremendously funny, and HER words then wound up making another client who came in in the middle of our conversation feel better: gotta love that kind of trickle-down) during the space of that time, and every time I’d check in with her throughout the rest of the day, she looked better and better.

• Was able to help a developmentally disabled client and her very awesome partner (always so nice to see, and unfortunately a bit rare per the men who more often come to the clinic) with a whole handful of things, from connecting him with a state resource to have his vasectomy paid for, to getting them a place to stay overnight, to making very detailed notes about all of her medical conditions, reactions to medications, and just assuring her that everything was going to be okay.

• I was able to arrange for something to help a client who was otherwise doing just fine, but was terrified of but one thing.  To make it so she didn’t have to have that one thing be part of her day not only was going to change her whole experience of her procedure and let her feel really in-control with it, but it also meant she did not have to sit waiting all day dreading it anymore.  So, another where we got to go from tears to great big sighs of relief and peace and smiles.

• We had protestors yesterday, one of whom walked right by a teen client in front of the clinic (and broke the law here in WA by doing so on our property) who was already upset, and who was already being pressured TO terminate outside by her boyfriend and family.

I was able to get her inside, take her downstairs to my sitting room, and give her open time to talk about all of her feelings, what she wanted, and how she felt she was given no permission by anyone to make up her own mind.  She was able to say she felt very unsure, and was considering termination, but had also wanted to consider adoption but was told this was “selifsh” I gotta say, I hadn’t heard that one before about adoption, but you hear something new every day. She also informed me her mother had told her she could legally block her from remaining pregnant, which I let her know was false.  We were able to discuss both options in some depth, and she was able to hear someone tell her — and mean it — that ANY choice she made was an acceptable choice which could be her best one, and that none of her choices were selfish save that this was about her and it was really important she think of herself.  I was also able to open the pressure valve by letting her know that no matter what, when we have a client come for a procedure who says they are here due to being or feeling forced by others and/or says they do not want to terminate, we will not and cannot do a termination that day, and that I’d be happy to inform anyone she needed me to that that was our policy and my firm decision on that.  I let her know she was welcome, if she decided for herself she did want to terminate, to come back, even the next day if she liked, and we could still talk more about all of this regardless, but she did not have to worry about making up her mind that day.

After talking some more, asking a lot of different questions about both choices, she wanted mediation with her boyfriend. I got him and we were able to have a joint discussion for a while.  Some of this involved both of us listening to this guy dish out a neverending spew of how incapable the client was of anything (I was able to respond that my impression was he was talking about himself more than about her, as she seemed quite capable to me), how he feels abortion and adoption are the same since “either way, you don’t get a kid,” (I was able to make clear that he might feel that way, but she clearly did not and I hadn’t heard most pregnant women share that particular logic), and his unwillingness to even hear her feelings on this or to consider or research, with her, other options.

This and more also gave her the opportunity to listen while someone told her boyfriend that their impression of her was far more positive than his own, and she got to hear a rebuttal of all the negatives he lectured us both on about her.  She was able to hear that yes, he got to have his own issues and concerns but that our concern was for her, not anyone else, and she came first with us no matter what. (I believe my summary to him of all he had said was that what he had to say was very interesting, and he certainly did get to think what he thought about it, but that at the start, middle and end of the day, I just didn’t personally care what he thought because he was not our client nor the person pregnant, she was. He had his own choice, and he made it when he refused to use a condom.) She got to hear me point out that anyone pressuring her to make the choice they wanted not only was not okay, but that in this case, it really backfired mightily since their pressuring her resulted in her being unable to terminate that day, even if she had decided — in an environment without pressure — that that is what she had wanted.

He decided he needed to also go on this doomsday rant about how all teen and young mothers are doomed to disaster, how she won’t finish high school, won’t go to college, won’t have the money she wants, will lose her whole life, will be a terrible parent, will have no freedom — this is another point where I asked if he was sure he was talking about her, not himself — and I was starting to wonder if the story was going to end in a plague of locusts.  I was able to point out that yes, all of those things were possibilities, and statistically, were more likely for teen mothers than women who were older.  But I then made very clear that it was also possible she could have NONE of those results, and while doing things like finishing high school and college might be tougher for her or take longer, they were doable and I’ve met plenty of women who have done them.  He started to go down this road about how she wasn’t able to be like those successful women, so I pointed out that one thing I’d noticed those other women have that she doesn’t right now were people around them who didn’t tell them what they could NOT do, but what they COULD, and who were positive and supportive, not negative and nonsupportive.  I said that did she decide she wanted to parent, he could certainly influence the outcome by growing a better attitude, but she also had the option of influencing the outcome by choosing not to surround herself anymore with negative people like him, too.  Which, who knows, said I, she might choose to do at this point no matter what reproductive choice she makes.

I got to watch her face and posture change throughout in a very positive way, and also got to watch some guy who was clearly sure — even in the way he initially spoke to me — he could bully, sweet-talk or intimidate women like he had her find out that was so not the case.  His posture changed, too.

That never, ever gets old, I gotta tell you.  I can’t imagine it ever will.  If I could do nothing but mediate scenarios like that, adjusting the power-dial ever-so-slightly, in-person, with people (usually guys or parents) who talk young women into feeling like failures, I’d ditch everything else I do in a heartbeat to do that 24/7, truly.

I can’t know what she wound up deciding unless she does come back, but in the end, my sense was she was going to be likely to terminate, and was feeling that may have been best for her from the start, she just needed everyone to back the hell off so she could get all the information and breathing room she needed to consider her options, and so she could make her own choice. This is actually a pretty common occurrence, especially with teens who also tend to face people not giving them autonomy in most things, so they often already feel talked over and controlled as it is.

It doesn’t matter to me what she chooses, but my sense is whatever it is, it’s a lot more likely to be her choice now, and whatever she feels is best.  And that’s absolutely all I need to feel good about this stuff.

It was a really, really good day, and those are but the highlights.  Again, every day I’m there isn’t like that — and some can be full of sadness or feelings of hopelessness, to boot — but there is usually at least one exchange that just absolutely sends me.  I have similar things happen at Scarleteen all the time, mind you, but being in person, seeing body language change, really seeing something vital and positive alter in the moment adds something so massively marvelous.  I am so, so full of huge, bursty, loud love for these women, and I do think it manifests itself better in person — or sees itself reflected more — than online or by phone.

I hadn’t gotten decent sleep in two days, and thankfully, the one woman who lives near me was working that day, which is unusual.  So, I was able to catch a ride home with her rather than doing the two-hour, three-bus tango, which was a godsend, as I probably would have passed out on one of the busses and wound up gawd knows where.  We stopped at Trader Joe’s on the way home. I was able to get myself a cheap bottle of wine, come home and enjoy said bottle, a little battery-operated something else, and a fine, simple meal in a peaceful night alone.  I started watching a movie but wound up feeling the adrenaline and sleep-deprivation crash around eight, which I totally indulged by going to bed as early as I wanted.

Some days are better than others, and some days — like Thursday — are freaking banner days I get a contact high from that’s got serious staying power.  Which is really good, because Friday was totally full of suckitude and I needed that buoy, big-time. Meh: every day can’t be a winner.

P.S.  Today is the very last day of the funds-matching for Scarleteen donations.  That also makes today the last time I nudge anyone about donating, likely for the rest of the year.  Point is, if you want to pitch in and can in any way, please do: anything you give will be worth twice that.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, feminism, women, workworkwork, heart work, abortion | permalink | comments (5) »

Before I head off the San Francisco — where for the religious right to get at me, they’d have to crawl through an ocean of queers first, who probably would rub their cooties all over them and turn them gay — after a few hours in Slumberland, I feel the need to sum up my week in but two words: holy shit.

Which does a rather amazing job, really, of saying it all in very short order.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, women, abortion, in which I throw up in my mouth a little, the god squad | permalink | comments (3) »

Yesterday at the clinic I got wedged in the middle of a client’s abusive relationship.

It was pretty clear even from watching the goings-on in the waiting room that something was not at all right. She was dressed like she’d been scraping by, yet he was dressed like he was going for a job interview. He gave us her ID and insurance card because he was the one who kept hold of her purse. When she came in for her labs, he used that time in the waiting room to try and woo other women. (I found out later that while he was the one pushing for abortion, one of his wooing tactics was apparently to tell the women in the waiting room how much he didn’t want his wife “to kill our poor little baby.”) She also clearly, from her body language, did not want to be at the clinic. She had a do-rag she kept pulling down over her eyes, she was all curled into herself, but she also looked very irritated and upset.

We have a section of the intake form which asks how sure someone is of their decision to terminate, and she’d marked she was unsure. Those charts are more often given to me, in part because I’m trained for options counseling, and in part because they tend to be more difficult sessions, but I’m usually okay with that. When I get that on a form, I usually start with a discussion about that before I do anything else.

She told me firmly that she did not want to terminate. She had kids from a previous relationship, had never had an abortion, never wanted to have one.  She had been married to this man for a year, and described a very textbook pattern of the cycle of abuse. We discussed how the lone conflict she was having — the only thing which would incline her to choose to terminate of her own accord — was that she knew full well that having a child with this man would tie her to him. I talked about the realities of this, about legal help, about how it was a big issue, even if she could get a divorce and help keeping him from her and a child, a person obsessed with control tends not to be someone who gives up easily, so she would have to be okay with possibly fighting legal battles for years and years. All the same, in our conversation, it because clear that while she still might consider a termination given the permission to evaluate it for herself, she had been forced to be there by someone else that day — she was physically pushed into the car that morning and driven to the clinic — and so terminating that day was off the table so far as our polices go and her wishes went. I discharged her, making clear that should she make her own choice to terminate, she could reschedule for another day.

In trying to assure that going home not having terminated would not compromise her safety, I talked a little about shelters and ways to taxi her out potentially without his notice. What she just wanted was just somewhere inside the clinic to sit for a bit, gather her thoughts, ready her resolve, so I arranged that for her in another area of the clinic. I really thought she needed to get to a shelter, but obviously, I can’t usurp her choices that way. Unfortunately, when she stepped outside to smoke, he’d been circling the clinic and found her, and I was notified that there was a bit of an altercation outside. Looking at the security cameras, he kept blocking her path on the sidewalk, and wasn’t yet pushing or hitting her, but it didn’t look good. I was asked to go outside and help escort her into the clinic and to ask him to leave, making clear that we’d call the police if he came back into any of the waiting rooms.

And here’s the part where I found myself sucked into the vortex of another planet.

When I circled around to them, greeted her by name and motioned with my arm a bit protectively around her back for us to walk back into the clinic, and we tried to go in, he stepped in front of me, as well. He stepped in front of me, arms waving as if flagging down a driver who has come to help you when your car has broken down — as if clearly, I was help en route for him — and said, “She won’t LISTEN to me!”

It wasn’t just what he said, but the way he said it; the way he said it with this confidently held belief that I was on his side, that her disobedience was preposterous, and that, of course, her compliance to him would have been my primary or sole concern. I had to fight off the very nonproductive urge to say something to the effect of, “Oh dear! She won’t listen to you? That’s not right at all. Why don’t us uppity little ladies just sit down and you can tell us how it is since we’ve clearly lost our marbles all thinking for ourselves. I just don’t know what’s gotten into us. I am so sorry. Daddy knows best!”

Instead, still trying to get us both past him and back into the clinic, I said, very firmly, “I don’t care. I am taking her inside where she is safe, and you need to leave.”

He then said, “But she’s my WIFE!”

Resist sarcasm, Corinna, as it is not at all likely to de-escalate squat. Also? Do not stand there slack-jawed and silent because you can’t believe someone is trying to have this conversation with you at all. So, instead, again firmly and clearly, “That is not meaningful to me. I am taking her inside where it is safe, and you need to leave.”

And it isn’t meaningful to me, personally or politically, but it’s particularly devoid of meaning in my book when it’s obvious that the person telling me it is has acquired a wife the way one acquires chattel, and sees her likewise. You can have a marriage which is a partnership, but marriage alone does not partnership make, and I care about if someone has an earnest partnership, not a legal shackle to someone else as their personal property. I don’t give a rat’s ass what papers you have, what ceremony you’ve had, what promises you’ve made or what you call someone: what I care about is what is enacted and actionable. You can call it marriage all you want, but when what it is is bondage, putting a pretty, legally-sanctioned name on it doesn’t change a damn thing.

Then, clearly not having absorbed the general sentiment that we’re all just heartless babykillers (though most likely only because he sees us as people able to get him what he wants: I’m sure if he had wanted her to stay pregnant, we would have been Satan’s handmaidens), he tries a new line.

“But she SMOKED a cigarette today while she was PREGNANT with MY child!”

Oh, well THAT is a totally different story! Because of COURSE the damage a fag is going to do to a fetus so, so far surpasses a woman having you make her reproductive choices for her. Because of COURSE when you scheduled the appointment FOR her last week, you knew, being omniscient and omnipotent, she would have this cigarette today and thus make sustaining a pregnancy completely off the table, which I’m sure whatever you do to her at home can’t come close to comparing to. Because of COURSE your deep and utterly selfless concern for the fetus usurps her own life. Because of course, if a woman has done anything less than perfect pre-natal behavior we are morally obligated to terminate her pregnancy against her will. Duh!

He starts to ask if I asked her about that. I make clear that what goes on with a client and us is private, I can’t talk to him about her medical history or health, and that, again, I am taking the client inside, he needs not to block us or try and follow, and that if he persists, we will call the police. He is starting to sputter why at me, and then even goes so far as to make a move where his hand is starting to raise in my general direction.

I tend to react to anything like that, at this point in my life, with a reflexive look which I’ve determined, the times I’ve been physically threatened since I left home to get free of that in my teens, gives a crystal clear impression that laying a hand on me would be a Very, Very Bad Idea. For all my self-defense training, I never even really get a chance to use it, because the look always comes first, and it’s been 100% effective over the years. (I wish I could make it in the mirror to see what it looks like: I’m curious. Alas, I can’t do it on purpose, or at least I don’t think I can, because nothing I do when I’m trying looks all that intimidating to me, especially since it’s also usually happening several inches to a foot lower than the person I’m giving it to.) He lowers his hand very quickly, I swoop us both around him and get her inside, he tries to follow. Someone else’s boyfriend or husband tries to do him the profoundly undeserved service of being a brother helping another brother out by making clear that he really needs to go back outside because he’s about to find himself in serious shit if he doesn’t.

There’s more to all of this — it’s a very long story, aspects of it can’t and shouldn’t be disclosed, and this whole incident had legs and took up half my day. I’m not happy with how it resolved itself, if you can even call it that. She rescheduled for next week to terminate, clearly pressured again after several more bouts with him in the parking lot, thanking me the whole time tearfully for trying to help, telling me it isn’t what she wants to do, and wound up quasi-electively leaving with him (I say that because he had a pretty firm hold on her arm, and he looked like the cat that ate the canary), but the whole situation was such that our hands were tied, and since she was discharged and did go outside again and go to him, and they were leaving, there wasn’t anything we could do. I would have written down his license plate number — since we did make clear to both of them that he may not ever come to the clinic again, and police will be called ASAP should he do so — but he didn’t have any on the car. I will probably be her counselor if she shows up for next week’s appointment, and will have to try and suss all of this out again, trying to help her figure out what she wants or needs to do knowing that in the situation she’s in, whether I like it or not, what he wants is going to have an influence I can only mitigate so much. I’m trying to think of a small token to have for her if she shows up again: I’m thinking she might need some Maya Angelou.
Obviously, I was left after the whole thing feeling both rather unhelpful and helpless, my heart aching for this woman, but I also still just had this profound feeling of total sci-fi. That guy didn’t know me. He had no idea that I interpreted his words and behavior as completely sinister while, to him, they were sacrosanct. But I know me, and anyone who knows me even thismuch would know that saying the kinds of things he was saying, trying to sway me the way he was was so completely ridiculous as to — were the situation not so sad — be knee-slappingly funny. Again, were I not so outraged for this woman, I would have laughed myself, and amidst all the adrenaline, when he first opened his mouth at me I did have to fight off laughing outright. If we can (even though we really can’t) take out all of the ugly in this, to anyone who knows me, a person talking to me like this, asserting this kind of shit to me presuming I’m on board, is earnestly silly beyond measure.

By my perspective, it was this level of total delusion that his words were meaningful, that his control over the woman he was married to was sovereign and that I’d recognize that which struck me first and foremost. I couldn’t believe, through the whole exchange, that it was happening, that this guy could not know that he was trying to speak a language to me which was a long-dead language that even if I recognized some of the words, didn’t mean shit to me.

That was immediately followed by the not-at-all-laughable feeling that it was not entirely delusion, not outside my frame of reference, anyway, and what I will and will not tolerate or enable in my own life. Clearly, in order for both of them to be at this point, this crap had been working on this woman for some time, and was likely working for him in one or both of their extended families, in the community they were in: after all, in our session it seemed clear that no one had made any kind of motion to help this woman before or acknowledge that this guy was very bad news. When we talked about him, the way she was telling me about this had a certain certainty on her part that I’d think she was crazy and that he was reasonable: that I was supportive of her pretty clearly came as a total surprise.

(I should add, as an aside, that some of that might be my color. The clinic staff are very diverse, but unfortunately, all of us who counsel right now — who often have the most in-depth conversations with clients about their trickiest stuff — are white. So, I’m often not surprised to have women of color warm more slowly to me, be more cautious at first, and, understandably, be reluctant at first to trust that I’m in their corner.)

I managed my clients the rest of the day, but it wasn’t easy. I got a ride from work to a spot downtown a mile or two from the stop for my third bus, and took a long walk there, fighting tears. Sitting on the packed, rush-hour bus on the way home, I was not only still fighting tears, I felt pressed in on all sides by people, in dire need of more air, open space and ideally, the opportunity for a good, loud primal scream. I dove into some bell hooks, but I couldn’t stay with it all sardine canned like that. I stopped at the market on the way home, picked up a bottle of wine and some things so I could have a good meal, got home, had a yawp and a good weep, took out the dog, than parked my tucas on the porch with a hefty glass and Flannery O’Connor. I needed me some Flannery: I needed her beautiful darkness and her realness all at once, the way she shows up the facades of people. I needed her to give me empathy. Mark came home, and listened to the whole saga and gave me a much-needed hug. I sat this morning for a while: I breathed it all in and out. I need some extra time for myself at some point in the next couple days — which won’t be easy, given it’s Mark’s birthday today and festivities are afoot, I have a march tomorrow, and work that needs be done before Monday — but that’s okay.

* * * * *

I also have a bit of a Buddhist conundrum about scenarios like this when it comes to how I approach, manage and experience them.

In so many ways, I am loving the work at the clinic — even when things happen like this — because it is such an amazing and constant exercise in compassion. It is nothing close to easy: it’s sometimes very tough (especially when sometimes, you have to remain compassionate with a client when they are not extending you the same compassion), but it’s a nourishing, life-affirming challenge. I certainly have a similar dynamic with Scarleteen, but it’s a little different. Not only is it virtual, but if something shakes me up, stirs me, overwhelms me, I can step away from it for at least a few minutes, if not hours, gain some composure, and come back to it on my own time. I don’t have that luxury in my counseling office: the person disclosing to me, letting me in, is sitting right in front of me, and their need is intensely immediate. I also have to address those needs knowing that a) they need to be able to move through the clinic at a decent clip so they, other clients and staff don’t have to spend all day there, so I have to try and be efficient in how I address them, and b) I will not likely have another opportunity to help this person again. This is probably my one shot.

Here’s the kicker, though: in any aspect of healthcare or counseling, from a professional standpoint, you’re supposed to keep this given distance, not get too stirred, too invested, etc. That approach runs solidly through care-based services. But as a Buddhist — and as someone trying to remain devoted to helping others in heart, mind and body — striving for distance (not nonattachment, distance) in order to cope, stands counter to my practice, and in my mind in order to best connect with clients/readers/users/the-universe-en-large, I have to remain pretty open. When a client is upset, and I am troubled by their troubles — while still keeping my own shit together enough not to make them feel guilty or like they need to take care of me, and keeping it together enough to do my job for them — this clearly is and has always been a comfort for them. I have a tough time believing that when you feel you have been marked by a great tragedy that for a person you disclose that to not to express a deep and real empathy for you, to express feeling some trace of that tragedy in a very real way, is a comfort.

There’s obviously a balance to be struck. You still need to do your job and you need to be a support, not just a co-griever. You need to instill a sense of faith in that person that however upset you also may be, that you are capable of being unattached to your feelings enough to help them when they can’t help themselves. If they feel out of control or incapable, you need to be someone they feel is in control and capable. You need to be able to still do what you can do for them while being open enough that part of the help you are giving them is being someone — sometimes that only someone they have yet encountered like this — who feels their pain and is unhappy that they have been wronged, traumatized, shafted. And of course, you need to be able to do all of this and find a way to preserve enough of yourself and your own emotional equilibrium to still start each day whole and end it the same way.

When I hear noises from anyone that I or my kind of approach gives too much, opens too much, doesn’t distance enough, doesn’t shut down enough, should strongly consider putting a larger shield up, my first reaction tends to be repulsion. I feel like there is a certain arrogance in the idea that self-preservation must always come first, as if we had any way of determining that somehow our self has greater import or meaning than someone else’s self. (Mind you, I think I’m a bit passively suicidal sometimes, but I figure it beats being the actively suicidal I was when I was younger by a serious long shot. This may color my views here.) I know that in part, that kind of directive comes from a place of care, perhaps the same kind of place that mine is coming from in trying to put others first myself: people say that to me because they care for me. But I also can’t help but think that some of it comes from a place where I’m effectively being asked to follow a certain status quo as to not threaten or usurp it: if we don’t all agree that the self always comes first, even if making it secondary, temporarily or permanently, might help someone else, that we then make it harder for those who want or need it to always rule all to feel as comfortable doing that. That sounds a bit pious to me, but I don’t know how else to express it. Thing is, I’ve been going about helping and counseling the way I do it for many years now, and I have my own way of managing it. Clearly, I can handle it without burnout better than most since I’ve got some serious staying power, and I still very much like doing what I do. My way seems to work for me and feels authentic to me — and is also in line with the kind of person I want to be, the kind of life I want to live — and I’m the expert on me.

I came to the practices I did because they make sense to me, and they run through everything I do in my life, including work. I’ve never been able to — or wanted to — separate my politics, my ethics, my spiritual life from my work, or set them aside somehow, and I’ve tried very hard to only choose work and work settings where I don’t have to do that. I often approach people very vulnerably, with a great deal of openness. It’s gotten me hurt before, for sure, but I think that the benefits have far outweighed the harms. Yesterday was a hard, hard day and parts of it were painful and very frustrating. But at the same time, yesterday, amidst everything else, I did get to share more than one moment where I was able to do anything at all to help someone feel a little more empowered and a little more cared for. But I do sometimes feel a little alien, both at the clinic and en-large, when it comes to all of this stuff, particularly when it comes to the harmony and cacaphony of all of it with my practice. I need a new sangha, I think. It’s tough to find something I can actually get to here without a car (good lord is this city car-centric), but I think it’s time to renew my efforts.

I’m rambling. I’m seeking out a balance and a clarity with this which I’m finding difficult both to do and to express. I’m glad for the opportunity, but it is a lot to try and sort through in the breakneck pace of my life these days, and I’m certainly not going to sort it out before I head back to the clinic on Monday.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, women, rantapalooza, workworkwork, heart work | permalink | comments (10) »

I had an abortion in my early twenties.

It was not easy to afford. I was working sixty hours a week, in a fledgling business with a lot of overhead expenses. I was fresh out of a college education I had paid for myself, and was also caring for a parent at the time. There were no resources through public health in Chicago I could use to help with the expense. My partner was pitching in for half, but all the same, coming up with four hundred dollars was an additional struggle during an experience which was already challenging without any financial issues at play.

That four hundred dollars seemed like a whole lot then. But when it all comes down to it, it’s very little, and what I had to do to come up with it was so small in comparison to the experiences other women go through to obtain their abortions right now.

I had the luck of knowing almost right away that I had become pregnant. Plenty of women don’t find out before their sixth week, like I did. Given how many have irregular menstrual cycles or skip periods with birth control, don’t experience morning sickness or other early pregnancy symptoms, or are in such poor health already that feeling ill is normal, plenty don’t know until their seventh week, their twelfth week, even their twentieth week. For those women, an abortion isn’t going to cost four hundred dollars, but eight hundred, twelve hundred, even two thousand dollars or more and some only find that out once at the clinic. I had the privilege of being able to not only know I was pregnant very early, but the ability to raise money in a short enough period of time that I could get an early abortion which only cost that much. Some women know as early as I did, but are unable to raise the money for an early procedure. For them, every extra week it takes creates a new hurdle as each extra week also elevates their cost, as well as their distress by pushing them closer and closer to the point at which a termination will no longer be an option.

I had the luxury of having a provider a mere three miles from my apartment. But less than 15% of women in the United States have an abortion provider in their county, let alone a ten-minute bus ride away. Those women also have to factor in the time and cost of travel, lodging and meals into the already costly expense of their procedure.

I was able to have an early, first-trimester abortion so I also only had to be at the clinic for a few hours on one day. I did not have to risk my job by needing to take a week off of work for a procedure I probably couldn’t tell my employer about without risking biased treatment ever after. I did not have to worry about having even less money than usual because I needed a week off without pay. I did not have to push myself to get right back to work when I really should have been resting and risk my health in order to make up for the money I spent on my procedure.

I was a working adult, not a teenager: I had my own source of income to help pay for my abortion. I had working friends who I could ask for funds and support. I didn’t have to consider asking my parents, knowing it could compound my trauma and potentially put me at risk of being held back from getting a termination, nor did I have to face those I asked for help denying me funds because they figured I deserved the “punishment” of a child for having sex, having my birth control method fail, not knowing how to use it, not having one at all, or because I had a partner refuse to use a method or cooperate with mine. Because I was employed, period, I did not have to worry about being able to eat or pay my rent that month due to the cost of the abortion sapping all of my funds.

I had my partner’s support and was financially independent, so I had no reason to be concerned with that partner freezing me out of shared bank accounts to pay for my procedure, or refusing to help me with travel to a provider. I did not have to worry that disclosing to a partner or parent that I was pregnant, and that I needed help financially to obtain an abortion, might put me at a possible or known risk of abuse or assault. Because I was living in a city where my reproductive choices were largely supported, I did not have to try and hide my pregnancy or my abortion, or spend extra money to get a ride from a friend, take a cab a town or two over to use a different pharmacy for my medications.

Coming up with the money I had to was also easier for me because I was childfree, unlike the majority of women who have abortions. I wasn’t having to scrape by to support two or three children at the time while also paying for my procedure. I didn’t have to arrange or pay for child care during and after my abortion.

I had a place to stay after my procedure, and lived with a person who was safe for me, so I did not have to worry about my safety during a time that is critical for self-care to prevent infections and complications, or that my lack of money would prevent me from being able to stay somewhere safe during and after my procedure. I could also afford the medications I needed to manage my cramps and to help prevent infection, and could afford to feed myself the day of and after my procedure.

And because I had the means and the support to budget for and use two sound methods of contraception after my procedure, I did not have to go to sleep at night knowing that it was likely I would have to wind up having another termination to go through and pay for, another unwanted pregnancy, very soon after dealing with the one I’d just gone through. I could afford both getting my methods of birth control and paying for them over time.

Many women do not have these abilities, privileges or luxuries. Many either may not be able to have a wanted or needed abortion at all — they may not earnestly have the real, practical right many of us still do of reproductive choice — or they may risk being unable to have all that is needed to make an abortion truly safe and sound, physically and emotionally. Some will put themselves at tremendous risks to try and raise those funds in ways which are unsafe and emotionally traumatic. Some who cannot afford a wanted abortion will seek to self-abort or otherwise endanger themselves. Some will instead have to continue an unwanted pregnancy and deliver a child who is not wanted and who they cannot afford to sustain or nurture, from pregnancy through the whole of that child’s life.

Any of us who has been pregnant knows that what choice we feel is right for us with a pregnancy is not minor: it is essential. Pregnancy is major, and how it impacts our lives, tremendous. Being unable to make our own right choice, to only reproduce and remain pregnant when it is what we want, right for us and when we feel it is right for any child we might bring into the world is tragic and inhumane. As it is, even when we can manage the cost, we have to face protests and challenges from individuals and governments to our essential rights, judgment everywhere we look about a decision no one but we can determine is appropriate, all while often straining to keep our lunches down and continue, uninterrupted, the hectic pace of our lives.

In an ideal world, every woman’s right to choose would be completely supported, and every woman’s knowledge of what was right for herself and her offspring would be respected. Women would have no trouble at all finding all the financial, practical and emotional support needed to only reproduce when that was exactly what we wanted.

We don’t live in that world. We live in a world where, at best, abortion is merely tolerated, and rights expressly for women and children, which primarily or solely impact women and children when granted, are granted as if a great favor is being given, rather than an equal and inalienable right. The political climate we live in now has been doing more and more to keep the legal right to abortion from being practically useful: our right to abortion is only so meaningful when the barriers to it continue to grow. We live in a world where most women make less on the dollar than most men — and where seeking legal protection against that discrimination is still often viewed as frivolous — despite often having a greater financial burden to begin with. We live in a world where many Medicaid programs and private insurance will cover Viagra (even for sex offenders), but not abortion or birth control. Where many women have little or no consistent access to reliable, affordable and safe methods of birth control and plenty have partners that do not support use of those methods even when those women can afford and access them. We live in a world where those who most often tend to find themselves in the most need of an abortion and with the most limitations on getting one are not only women, but women of color, women in poverty, women who were not born (or are not yet) U.S. citizens, disabled women, women with addictions, women who are legal minors, women who have been or are raped, assaulted or abused: women who are marginalized and who have less privilege beyond simply being women.

I cannot imagine having to sneak across state lines so I can obtain an abortion without my father forcibly dragging me out of a clinic as he did two times before. I cannot imagine how, with three children and a coming eviction, I could possibly save for a procedure. I cannot imagine having to have a three-day termination while my only home was a bench on the street, or at home with a partner or family member I knew would beat me when I returned there. I cannot imagine feeling I had no choice but to remain pregnant and deliver a child I strongly suspected would be born profoundly disabled because of a drug addiction I was trying to break free of. I cannot imagine having just emigrated and finding myself in the position to have to pay for an abortion while working for a wage that is a human rights violation in and of itself. I cannot imagine the two-week waiting period advised to abstain from vaginal sex after an abortion to prevent infection seeming a practical impossibility because without engaging in sex work during that period, a woman cannot support herself or her family. I have met the women who have been in these situations and others like them, and have seen a profound helplessness and desperation that no woman should have to experience during an already difficult time.

But I have also met these women and literally watched some of that helplessness dissipate; seen their worries interrupted by an exhale of relief when I can offer them financial help with their abortions.

Cedar River’s Women in Need fund helps to cover the costs of abortion, lodging, transportation, childcare, meals, pregnancy testing, ultrasound and contraception for women who cannot afford or completely cover any or all of these things, even after exhausting every resource they’ve got. The National Network of Abortion Funds has listings for our fund as well as other funds like it you can either use for yourself, refer other women to, or help with a donation. It doesn’t take much, either. The medications needed after a procedure are often less than $20. Meals for a couple of days, $25. Three months of contraception, $75. Lodging for a night, around $100. Enough to cover the portion of a procedure a woman can’t, that $400 that seemed so tough for me to save up, but which is comparatively miniscule.

Because I work part-time for Cedar River, because we serve women from several states and more than one country and also include terminations beyond the first trimester, because we’re one of the last remaining independent feminist women’s health centers in the states which offers abortions, and because we’re having a benefit for our fund on Monday evening, I’d like to ask you to contribute to ours. I’ve administered some of these funds myself, and have spent time with some of the women who need them: I know, first-hand, how important our fund is, what a difference it can make and how it positively impacts the lives of the women we can help with it. I have watched women who would otherwise have been unable to make the choice they know was right for them, or who could not have had what they needed to assure all aspects of their procedure was safe have that ability due to our WIN fund. I give to it myself via a percentage of my paycheck every two weeks, and while I certainly need the income for myself, giving what I can to that fund is something I feel is very important and a really small sacrifice. Of course, some financial help with an abortion does not usually have the capacity to fix everything wrong in a woman’s life, to wipe away inequities and hardships which are bigger than all of this. In some ways, it’s a band-aid, but it can be one critical in keeping a deep wound from getting even deeper; causing further infection in an already fragile balance of well-being and survival. At the times I administer that fund to a client, it’s amazing to see, directly, how my small contribution can sometimes literally change the landscape of a woman’s life, both through being able to make the choice she knows is right and needed, and through being shown a much-needed kindness, sometimes for the very first time.

If you’re in or near Seattle, our benefit tomorrow night for the WIN fund begins at 5:00 at the Karma Martini Lounge & Bistro (where I also had my book release party last year), on 2318 2nd Avenue in Belltown. You can have a few drinks with us and donate there, and hear a little more about what this fund does. Or, you can donate through our website here. Again, if you’d like to give to an abortion fund but prefer to give to women in your area or some other specific area, or even start a fund in an area where there is not one yet, you can take a look at a listing of funds like ours here through the NNAF.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, feminism, seattle, events, abortion | permalink | comments (5) »

Two work-update quickies:

1.  RH Reality Check is now — as of today — syndicating my advice columns at Scarleteen twice a month.  I love them big bunches, and really appreciated their asking in the interest of getting more youth involved in reproductive and sexual health education and activism, so that’s exciting.  I’m also hoping my having some content there might help get some of our users at Scarleteen feeling more confident about getting involved in some of the discussions there.
2. I’m also the sexual health consultant for the upcoming orb28, a site I am SO thrilled is near to launch.  It’s from New Moon Media, the fantastic organization which publishes the magnificent New Moon magazine for and by girls, and orb28 will be an interactive site gearing to a slightly older audience than New Moon targets.   Feminist outlets for girls and teen women are so few and far between, and I think this is going to be a great one.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, Scarleteen, online life, workworkwork | permalink | comments (0) »

I am filing my survival of this last week under M for total freaking miracle. I slept until 10:00 this morning, after going to sleep before midnight, which is legendary sleeping-in for me, and I still woke up with achy feet and a very exhausted mind.

It’s tough to be unable to really write about work here. For as long as I have been keeping a public journal — nine years now — I have been self-employed, with only the occasional freelance gig where I had non-disclosures. Of course, I have never discussed every single case with Scarleteen, everything that goes on with managing the volunteers, nor did I do the same with Scarlet Letters or with photo clients, but I have always had an awful lot of room to discuss the ins and outs of my day being my own boss and having a setup where client privacy was not a big issue.

It’s weird to have a million big things I could write about and to be unable to write about them. Every day at the end of the day I come home with at least one client stuck in my heart or my head which I need to process, and writing things out is one of my primary means of expression and process. I have still sometimes written things out just for myself, but this is a large part of how much more infrequently I’ve posted here of late: time constraints notwithstanding, I just literally cannot write about my clients in-depth at the clinic or most of the goings-on there. I’m trying to feel out the ways that I can while protecting privacy, but it’s tricky.

In an extra training for options counseling yesterday — counseling for clients who are pregnant and don’t know what they want, so need someone to just sit for an hour or so and talk through their unique situation and walk through how all of their choices look and feel to them to help them find the best one — my trainer asked what we do to take care of ourselves when we’re feeling emotionally spent or upset. And I do still write it out sometimes, but given privacy issues and that writing is so much more work for me than leisure, I’ve been diversifying how I process lately. Obviously, talking it out with friends is massive, but on really tough days, I also have this thing going I really like where I load up the woodstove with wood and get a really hot fire going, sit in front of it and start sweating, and then let myself have a really good cry. The heat and sweat mixed in with the tears is my little sweatlodge: it’s seriously cleansing, and usually does the trick. I leave feeling warmed and relaxed by the whole process rather than feeling isolated or wrecked.

I also brought up the issue of how with any kind of job like this, you have to be able to recognize that there is only so much you can do, especially since by the time someone comes to you for help or counseling, they are coming as a result of situations and background that you can’t influence. In other words, the stage was set long before you. So, you have to invest yourself in doing what you can to help them right now — be that in giving them education they want/need or negotiating in relationships such as at Scarleteen, or in providing abortions or counseling to help them make reproductive decisions at the clinic. Any or all of that will, hopefully, help them, and be positives, but you can’t even get invested in those positives having legs: they may or may not. And by the time they leave your office or your websites or your email, you’ve done what you can do most of the time for them. You had your moments, and they have passed, and afterwards, it’s out of your hands. In other words, when you’re there, to do your best by them, I think you really need to fully commit and invest, but for you, after you’ve done that, then you need to be able to detach and let go. Obviously, that’s not always easy, and it’s also not always comfortable to fully invest when you’re in it.

The cases that keep leaving me hit the most hard are the genetics cases and the women you have to tell are too late to have a termination. With the genetics ones, even though I’m personally not one of those people who has ever seen the import of having biological kids vs. adopting (or to be more clear, creating family in any number of ways) — likely in part because I’ve never found that being actually related to someone automatically creates a stronger bond and because I also hate how many kids live their whole lives in foster care — it still is just so heartbreaking when a woman has planned a pregnancy or really wanted a happy surprise with one that was unplanned, made room in their lives and hearts for kids, saved money, etc., gotten all excited about it and then has to terminate when that is the last thing in the world she wants to do. Conversely, with the too-lates (which often happens because someone just didn’t know — lots of women have very irregular periods, especially young women — saving money for a procedure just took that long, they had to travel long distances, etc.) when an abortion is THE thing a woman wants, and she absolutely doesn’t want to parent or stay pregnant, telling her she’s without that choice is often an awful thing to have to do. When that happens with teens or very young women, I get extra sad, and when it’s with women, for instance, who are heavy drug users and you know that beyond their turmoil, they’re not even likely to deliver healthy kids (and lord knows that this is one of those instances where these folks are unlikely to be good parents, and those kids are unlikely to find adoptive families either, if they’re born special-needs), it’s another huge weight.

Of course, even outside of those situations, the stories women tell you about how they came to be in the spot they’re in are often maddening, upsetting, or just really sad. I’m not just talking rape or domestic abuse cases but also serious interpersonal betrayals or sudden abandonments with partners, the way they lose jobs or homes, how many doctors are just lax in telling people how to use birth control properly or just choose methods for patients that are not likely to work for them, how many partners don’t comply with birth control use, and so on. A couple times now, I’ve had women for whom the two-week period where you cannot have vaginal sex in order to prevent infection afterwards was a very real problem, not because of abusive partners (had those too), but because sex was how they paid the rent: making clear that they may have to choose between paying their bills and putting their health or lives on the line just stinks. And as a sexuality activist, how many women are thrilled when you say they can’t have sex for two weeks — some of whom will even ask if we can’t tell their partners it’s longer than that — is endlessly depressing.

I keep threatening to wear a button that says “Just keep it in your pants, man” for the men in the waiting room given how frequently I hear the story that’s that some guy doesn’t want any more kids because he has so many with other partners. Yet, Mr. Thing, knowing full well he no longer wants any children and being firm on that point, isn’t willing to get a vasectomy or even back up BC methods with condom use. Instead, he sees it as totally workable that he can just pressure partners into abortions they may not even want to serve his own ends. These same guys will usually pitch a fit when I say that no, they can’t come into the counseling session, because they usually really, very clearly, do not like the idea that their partner can say something about them uninfluenced or uncontrolled. Suffice it to say, if and when I find they’ve pressured a partner who doesn’t want an abortion and I discharge those partners with resources to have the kid they want, these guys are NOT happy. (Apparently, we’re not doing our job if we don’t push abortion on people, as clearly, we’re expected to do that.) I have, however, developed a hairy-eyeball just for them that has limited the number of times they’ll ask to go back with us, to the point that though I do usually say I can come get them when they are done if they have questions or want to talk to me, many of them are starting to get the message that they probably do not want to give me private time with them, because I am not the women they’re used to dealing with.

Too, sometimes you meet women who have just been through these unbelievably challenging lives are are flat-out amazons. I had one of them the week before last who had to be discharged due to having such collapsed veins from years of heroin use — she’d kicked the habit amazingly for the last handful of years — but got to come back last week. She had a kid she loved dearly, but because of a severe reproductive health problem likely due to her years as a user, found out she was not going to be able to carry another. I adored her, but there was something bittersweet about it, beyond her having to make a choice she would have preferred not to. With how she looked and what her social mannerisms were, with what she told me about her life and her recent medical history, it was clear she was one of those people that most tended to treat like shit on sight and without seeing who she really was. If I could have scheduled someone to give her a foot massage during her procedure and a week on some beach afterwards, I would have. I didn’t leave those days feeling sorry for her, like I said, she was incredibly strong and really amazing in my book, but there was something I carried home: this sadness that she deserved a life she was probably not going to be able to ever have, no matter how hard she worked at it and how much she survived.

This last week, not only did I work more than twice as many hours as usual, and have some other work issues on my plate to deal with, I had all of these kinds of cases and more when I was counseling. This weekend, I’d planned to be at Scarleteen pretty much 24/7 to make up for last week, but today that is so not going to happen. I think I need that heat and those tears today, and then some time to deal with no one’s crises.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, feminism, women, workworkwork, heart work | permalink | comments (4) »

Today at the protester corner outside the day job there sat a couple signs. One was an illustration of a baby seal, holding a sign itself that said “Save the Humans.” I’m so not kidding.

I looked once, then again, then turned to Mark (who was driving me in) to express that I had strong doubts that seals would want more people around just so we can continue to club them to death, poison their environment or, on a good day, take them far away from home and lock them up in claustrophobic living spaces at no pay for our own amusement.

I mean, if a seal was going to hold up a protest sign that had anything to do with human beings in front of an abortion clinic, I’m inclined it’d read something like “YOU.S. OFF MY BODY!” or “At least they won’t skin THEIR babies alive,” or “Good Choice! Less People = More Seals.” (Or maybe they’d be protesting the protesters, with a sign that said, “I’M the seal of God, not you!”)  And they’d probably be clapping.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, workworkwork, because sometimes I'm an asshole | permalink | comments (5) »

CHOOSE WIFE.

That was a sign being held up by a protester in front of our clinic this week. Two words, but they speak volumes. (Though I confess, it took me a little while to get pissed, because I couldn’t stop saying it in an Elmer Fudd voice for a few minutes.)

This has been one of the biggest blind spots I’ve had to contend with when it comes to both working in sexuality education and working in women’s health, and with women’s reproductive choice. There’s a very pervasive idea out there — and boy howdy, does it serve the agenda of the far right — that somehow, getting married fixes absolutely everything for women when it comes to unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and just about anything and everything you could think of when it comes to sex, sexuality and reproductive health and choice. That married people — but more to the point, married women — don’t need sex education, don’t need birth control, don’t need abortion, don’t need sexual healthcare, don’t need to know about their bodies, don’t need safer sex, don’t need to know sexual negotiation skills. Women, if you want to be protected and safe, get married. That’s what’s been said to women for most of our history, and despite knowing better now — especially if you provide any of the above services and happen to notice that married women are among the clients you serve — it’s still what is said to women daily and incessantly.

I’ve talked before about the flaw in that logic when it comes to STIs. Historically and currently, marriage, in and of itself, does not and never has offered protection from sexually transmitted infections, especially when you consider not only what the rates of infidelity are — particularly among men, who more often transmit disease to their spouses, simply when we’re talking about the physiology of sexually transmitted infections — and as well, when you consider that most people will have had other sexual partners before marriage, and how many people (again, especially men) never get STI screenings, and also don’t use latex barriers consistently, or at all. I’ve talked before — and you hardly need me to deliver this news flash — about how anyone with ears and eyes knows that marriage does not guarantee a safe or satisfying sex life. I’ve talked before about how given domestic violence rates, the notion that women are guaranteed lifelong safety, on every level, simply by getting married is an incredibly cruel piece of propaganda.

There’s not likely a woman in the world who needs me to tell her that getting married does not mean that birth control is no longer needed or wanted at times, or constantly — remembering that funny little factoid that not all women or couples want to reproduce at all — or that getting married does not mean a woman thus wants to spend the rest of her reproductive life pregnant or risking pregnancy. Getting married doesn’t necessarily provide even the woman who DOES love being pregnant and does love rearing children, who wants to be pregnant and parenting every waking minute of her life the financial or practical means to do so. My mother grew up with two parents in an Irish Catholic family: she has eight siblings, and would have had more save one stillbirth and a couple of miscarriages. Mind, her mother hardly had a choice in when she got pregnant, or when she had sex, but still. Anyone who wants to tell me I just don’t know what I’m talking about and what nirvana it is to be a kid in a household stretched that thin can bite one of my grandmothers dry Bisquick-and-water biscuits (and be unable to afford the dental care needed to repair their chipped teeth, too).

Even most conservative women know these truths. They too, are either using a method of birth control, or if they are not, are trying to just avoid sex to try and prevent pregnancy. Very few women in the world with any real agency are choosing to have ten children, and to be at constant risk of pregnancy, unsure when they’ll be pregnant again at any time. Conservative women come into clinics for abortions who make very clear that they do not believe in abortion, all while choosing to have one. For those most vocal about how not-okay with abortion they are, when a clinician tells them that IF they are really not okay with it, they can’t perform a procedure for them, the outrage is often astounding. (Because, of course, abortion providers are supposed to be just DYING to give everyone on earth an abortion, since the aim is apparently to wipe out the human race and make millions from abortion procedures, so we are never, ever supposed to say no to anyone. After all, we’re supposed to be lying when we say that we’re committed to women, committed to their choices being choices they can live with: when we show up that untruth, the antichoicers get mighty pissed.)

I’d posit that a lot of conservative women have the best of all possible worlds. They can malign or try and limit sexuality education, birth control and abortion all they like, even very publicly, even fight it actively, and yet, it’s still there for them — for now, and tenuously because of their efforts to make it so — when they need it, without judgment, and most of them do use at least some of these things. They can benefit from the feminist movement when it comes to getting them out of the house, allowing them the ability to be public spokespeople, to be politically visible, and reap those benefits while denouncing their source. They can even beg off sex to prevent pregnancy by being able to say they are so, so tired from doing the things in a day that only movements they oppose have allowed them to do. They can also cheerlead marriage and abstinence even if their marriages are a mess and they didn’t abstain from sex themselves. They don’t have to be consistent or truthful in any of this, because they know they can rely on our consistency, and the truth of our commitments.

From what I can gather by polls at Scarleteen over the years, as well as the daily conversations I have with teens and young adults there, around 30% of our users are not yet sexually active. Plenty have no intention of becoming so any time soon, and plenty are, in fact, right now waiting for marriage. (Some of them are even swift enough to know they may well change their minds about that later on, but acknowledge that even if that’s how things work out, this is their plan for now.) What they’re doing, see, is this crazy-smart thing we call preparing for the future. They know that someday they likely will become sexually active, and that at that time, they’re going to need to know about their bodies, about how to work sexuality out alone and with partners, about birth control and/or safer sex. They’re looking this stuff up now, asking questions now because they both know they’ll need it later and because they are curious about it now. Some of them WILL be people’s wives or husbands later, but most are smart enough to know — smarter than some of their elders in this regard — that that doesn’t mean they won’t need to have an idea about using birth control or how to take care of their sexual health. I feel pretty confident saying that most teens would do this — including those who do become sexually active in their teens — but many don’t simply because having the information in advance isn’t an option for them, and they don’t know where to find it.

As a former — though it still informs the way I educate — Montessori educator, it’s a very big deal to me to try and educate in such a way that I am teaching what I am in the windows in which someone’s mind is absorbent, or for you non-Montessori geeks out there, at the times when a person is in a stage of development where a given set of skills or knowledge are most likely to be learned, and a natural curiosity is most prevalent. For instance, the usual window for language is, not surprisingly, under the age of six. Children under six can often become bilingual or trilingual without even trying, just by listening and being talked to in several languages, simply because that time is when they’re forming most of their basic language skills and when doing so is so gangbusters for them. And one of the ways we, as educators, determine windows of the best absorbency is simply by watching and listening to our students: they tend to show us or ask us, pretty directly, when they want to learn something. Of course, when it comes to sex education, that can be tricky simply because so many young people have been shown by so many that it’s just not okay to ask questions about sex.

In the same vein, it’s no big shocker that during the big peak of physical and emotional sexual development, young adult minds tend to be particularly absorbent to sexuality information. For sure, if they are or are becoming sexually active at that time, that information is all the more essential because it has a very immediate and practical application. But even for those young adults who are NOT yet sexually active, even for those few who WILL not be in any way sexually active until their twenties, this is STILL a great time to teach them about it because they are so absorbent, and also because it’s obviously ideal to educate someone about something they will need before they actually need it. There’s a reason we try and do Driver’s Ed before someone is ever behind the wheel, after all, and why people who start factory jobs with big, sharp machines are given training first, rather than just being told to blindly try it out, see what happens, and hope they don’t lose a limb.

Again, I’m going to state the obvious. Speaking as one longtime sex educator, the idea that I somehow would profit from someone getting a sexually transmitted infection is hilarious. No one is going to donate to Scarleteen because what I do results in greater levels of infection. I bust my arse trying to do everything I know or suspect will be effective to reduce rates of STIs. Really, either way, profit isn’t my motivation, because I’d be a moron if I hadn’t figured out by now that no matter how great a job I do, I will rarely get paid, and when I am, I should never have any expectation that I will be paid at a rate at or much higher than your average high school kid working at the drive-through gets: in a good year, I tend to make around the minimum wage. If I wanted to work in sex ed for money (and had no problem leaving my conscience at the door), I’d work for the abstinence-only faction. THAT is who has been making the big bucks in sex “education” over the last ten years, kids. Leslie Unruh, for example, as executive director for the Abstinence Clearinghouse, reported compensation in 2004 at $109,920. In the same year, her reported compensation as executive director of the Alpha Center — a CPC — was $57,547. That’s an annual personal salary — not a gross for her organizations — of almost $170,000. I haven’t done my taxes yet, but for my sex ed work — at Scarleteen and with the book — I’d estimate (and I just took a closer look) that my personal salary for 2007 is going to have been somewhere around $16,000, if that, and I likely work more hours than she does, no less. Without the one larger private grant I get (knock on wood), I just couldn’t do this as a job at all anymore — in 2004, the same year Unruh was raking in the big bucks, that huge profit I was making from sex ed was a big, fat $7,026 — and it’s been crystal clear over the years that how hard I work, how many people I educate, or how good a job I do has little to no bearing on if I get paid and how much. No matter what, this girl just picked the wrong side of the wrong fence, and it is THAT which influences my finances.
I’m sure I’d horrify Wendy Wright and her ilk and perhaps even prove the link she’s reaching for: after all, I now am not only a sex educator, I also work at an abortion clinic. Surely, this has been a very crafty plan on my part. Work like the demon I am in sex ed for ten years, talk myself blue in the face about safer sex knowing that all sexy talk about condoms and Chlamydia is only going to make teens want to race out and have sex even more (Herpes sores, in case no one told you, are all the rage now, because with all that public hair removed, you’ve got to have something to decorate your vulva with, after all), know that those young girls with the STIs will get pregnant because of them, which assures that they’ll wind up for an abortion at my other job. And don’t you think for a minute that given the lousy pay, I didn’t negotiate in advance for a steep commission from all that new business I’m going to be bringing them. I’m no fool.

(Ten bucks and two doses of EC says that at some point I find what I just said there quoted out of context in some conservative blog or book.)

But what Wright and the woman standing in front of our clinic doesn’t seem to realize is that our lobby isn’t overflowing with nothing but teenagers and fallen, unmarried women. Married women are in there every single day, some even with their husbands sitting right beside them. Some of those couples are military, flag-waving, apple-pie baking, churchgoing folk. Why on earth would they be there?

It’s a stupid question, and we all — even Wright — know the obvious answer. Because there is NO woman on earth, no matter her age, marital status or station, for whom it is always the right time to be pregnant and no child on earth for whom it is always the right time and environment in which to be born and raised. Women like Wright, of course, are likely planets away from families who can barely afford to feed themselves, let alone more — or any — kids. Most women who come into the clinic do already have at least one child. I saw someone just last week who already had two, and whose biggest concern about having an abortion was that it would impact her fertility, because while there was just no way she could afford to remain pregnant or have another child now, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t want to have another somewhere down the road if things improved. She “chose wife,” and yet, there she was. A lot of women who get abortions do use birth control, and plenty correctly — this business about BC not being 100% effective isn’t a fairy tale. This one, though, not only wasn’t, she didn’t know how to. No one had ever taught her how, discussed her options, or even let her know that if she wanted to keep using natural family planning as she had been, there was a far more effective way to do that than the calendar method.

Suffice it to say, an abortion clinic doesn’t profit from STIs. That’s just silly. But it also doesn’t exist to profit from unwanted pregnancy. When I took this other job, for certain, some of it was financially motivated. I was working full-time and still having a helluva time paying my bills, despite already being without things many people have: a car, a house they actually own or are in the process of buying, health insurance. And this other job will help me pay my bills, but only because I live so leanly to begin with. Your average pencil-pusher makes more on the hour than most of us at the clinic, just for sitting in a cubicle and clockwatching every day, and he’s also not risking being shot or bombed, nor is he likely responsible for anyone’s physical or emotional health. And if suddenly there were methods of birth control that were 100% effective, totally safe for, and affordable and available to everyone (and you can tell me complete abstinence is when a) people stop having a libido and b) men stop raping women or obligating them to have heterocourse), if suddenly there was no more unwanted pregnancy, ever, I can assure you that not a single person at the clinic would shed a tear and be upset that the part of our job that is about providing abortions was over.

The thing that gets me the most about this “Choose Wife” stuff, whether it’s on a sign in front of my workplace or on the nightly news is that I have to also hear strong statements — from these same mouths — that women are no longer mere chattel. And yet, it is also stated or implied that once/if a woman marries, there’s just no need for any of these discussions about birth control, choice or sexual health because part of marriage presumably still requires a woman to forfeit all of that agency to one’s husband, or somehow removes a woman’s desire to have any of that ownership over her own life and body. Suffice it to say, it also — so far as I can make sense of it — implies that these children we’re told are SO important, are so UNimportant as to disregard their quality of life, whether we’re talking about having the means to feed and clothe them or we’re talking about assuring that they grow up without one or both of their parents resenting the hell out of them, telling — overtly or covertly — them HOW much they gave up to bring them into the world. Gee, thanks, Mom: lucky me.

I’m a blunt gal. I’m not going to say that some people’s opinions don’t horrify the hell out of me, they obviously do, particularly when they seek to make those personal opinions public policy. However, even with the seriously scary stuff, I prefer it straight up.

If you just think, as a woman yourself, that it’d be best for women to be without options anymore, for women’s lives to revert (and when I say that, I’m not even talking about all women: for the poorest women and women of color in many areas, marriage never even pretended to offer financial security, stability or safety) to being about nothing but preparation for marriage-and-mothering-as-career, then just freaking say it, and out of both sides of your face, please, with baby food in your hair and in your sweatpants, not a $500 hairdo and a Brooks Brothers suit. If you want to say that comprehensive, accurate sex education benefits no one, then you’d best start planning now for how you’re going to cover it up when your perfect teenage kid who has pledged abstinence gets knocked up, or winds up with PID due to an untreated STI from their new husband — who wanted to marry them, so he must have been a good guy, and who said he loved God and was waiting until marriage, so he must have been — an STI they didn’t even know they had since marriage = safe sex and no one who waits for sex until marriage needs regular pap smears and STI screenings. If you think, as a woman, women should have no choice as to when they have sex, when they become pregnant, if they remain pregnant, if they parent, then just say so and mean it…. which means you’re going to be saying it to a house full of whining tots, not on the evening news, not in your new Random House book; not with your sign you can somehow afford to stand holding every day in front of clinics where women are working, plenty to support the freaking kids women have already, plenty to support women just like you on the day you show up there, talking about how against abortion you are while you’re there getting one.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, feminism, women, rantapalooza, sexuality, education | permalink | comments (10) »

So, pretty clearly from the vibe and the lingo, a pro-lifer (and what sounds like an adult) just posted this question in the Sexpert Advice queue at Scarleteen.

Which is fine: I have a bit in my book on this, and have been meaning to have a piece up on CPCs at Scarleteen for a while now. I appreciated the reminder and the opportunity.

But I just have to wonder: what response did they expect from me? I kinda doubt they wanted to invite me to do an in-depth shakedown of the whole deal, but I can’t imagine, for the life of me, what else they thought I’d do, or how they thought any answer I’d give would someone send more women to them or be of any benefit to them. Did someone earnestly think I’d be all, “Oh, right! I totally forgot to include a link for pregnant women — especially poor women, teen women, and women of color who those orgs love extra-super-much — who want to be manipulated and lied to! After all, that’s a reproductive choice, too, right? Silly me, let me go fix that right now. Thanks for the tip!”

People are so freaking weird, man. Or stupid. Or both.

In other news, I am slowly on the mend. These antibiotics are hell on my guts, but finally, last night, my ears started going back to normal, I was able to stand (heck, even sit) for a while without wanting a five-day nap after, have the appetite for a real meal, take in a nice, deep breath without hacking up a lung, and not have to second guess that I’m semi-coherent, as I have been for days now.

In the ER the other night, when I got put in the room, I got told to take my top stuff off and put on a gown. So, I took it all off, knowing that if they were going to do a chest X-ray, I’d need to do that. When the X-ray tech came in, I asked if I should bring my pile of stuff, and to my ears, this was the conversation we had:

Him: Oh, good, your brassiere is off.
Me: Yeah, I figured it should be. So, can I leave my stuff here or should I bring it?
Him: It’s good you took it off, you can’t have one on for the X-ray. And you’ll want to have that for the holidays.

Which a) didn’t answer the question of if I needed to bring it, b) didn’t seem to acknowledge I said or asked anything at all, and c) made me arrive at the conclusion that I was either having some serious auditory hallucinations or this guy just was far more focused on the grave impropriety a bra-less holiday would be (maybe he had some kind of traumatic experience getting whacked with a merry, unrestrained boob one Christmas or something) than on anything else. However, I was left thinking that if the latter were true, and I really heard what I did, I don’t know why he wasn’t concerned about leaving said brassiere and it being stolen.

I was going to say “What?!?” but I thought it best I just let it go. I was either going to be told I was hallucinating or I’d have to hear about this holiday bra issue, and I wasn’t up to either possibility.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

Just so’s ya know, I wasn’t being vague about the new job, what it was, and where it was, just because. I just wanted to have a talk with the development director first about it before I said anything to be sure they were okay with it, and make sure we the same parameters I’d apply myself to talking publicly about work.

Truth is, I love, love this organization SO much — and that love has been mutual for some time, which has been such a compliment — and am so excited about working with them that I was aching to say something.

I had that conversation today, and it’s all good.

So, I’m now working for the Cedar River Clinics/ Feminist Women’s Health Center as an abortion and birth control counselor two days a week. Possibly more over time, I just need to feel out how this all works with everything else I do. It’s one of the last remaining independent feminist women’s clinics which provides abortions — I’ve talked about them before, so you likely already know this — it has an amazing history, is full of amazing women running an organization by a completely feminist model (The one big rule there? No stupid rules. Welcome home, me!). I’m really still quite beside myself that I get to do this work: it’s a position in which you’re there helping women who are giving you their trust in something so huge and so important. I’ve done a lot of feminist work over the years, but I feel like this really is such a peak. Being a pro-choice activist for so long, getting to be right in the thick of it all is such a gift. I’m nervous as hell — suffice it to say, one doesn’t want to fuck this up, ever — but for as nervous as I am, I’m even more elated.

Today I spent the day in some meetings with the women working in my clinic and one of the others, and it was very good news. That this is a new work community for me is heaven: as I said during orientation last week — and right after saying so, realized my lingo could perhaps use a makeover from all the time I spend talking to teens — these women are seriously badass. A drink afterwards with an instant pal from training last week was also just the thing. I’m tired as hell and will likely go to bed crazy early, but that’s largely because, of course, I had to get my period yesterday. I think my body figured out it was going to be in a room full of estrogen, so considered it my duty to not contribute further. I disagree, but I don’t really get a vote.

So y’all know the parameters, I likely won’t talk that much about this job when it comes to specifics. Patient confidentiality is obviously the mot central issue, but I’ve also been writing online longer than most and know better than to get anything even resembling in-detail with an employer of any stripe. So, that’s not going to happen, here or elsewhere.

But, that’s where I work, and I remain psyched-beyond-psyched. And today, very tired. I need some supper, a few Advil, a bath and my warm bed, big time.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, Happy!, feminism, women, workworkwork | permalink | comments (1) »

You have probably heard that the teen pregnancy and birth rate is up in the United States, for the first time since 1991. As is reasonable, the primary issue most talking about this are addressing is abstinence-only sex education and, due to the way the U.S. has only given federal funding to those programs since 1996, the lack of comprehensive sex education. Of course, too, the ab-only corner is immediately coming to the table with the strange idea that pregnancy and birth rates are up because of comprehensive sex education. Logic and sound data obviously is not the order of the day for that faction, including in their curricula chock-full of intentional medical and practical misinformation, so it’s hardly a shocker that they either haven’t looked at the facts here or have, but don’t care about misrepresenting them.

It’s not tough to find the flaw in that supposition: we’ve only had the abstinence-only mandates, and the popularity of those programs, in this country since 1996, and those mandates have grossly limited comprehensive sex education for teens everywhere. It was during the heyday of comprehensive sex education in the States — combined with the heyday of the greatest access to and awareness of reliable methods of contraception — that we saw teen pregnancies and births begin one of the strongest declines ever. As well, if they’re going to posit that comprehensive sex education is to blame, then as Desi Arnaz liked to say, they’ve got a lot of ’splaining to do, Lucy. Why, then, aren’t we seeing these increases in other nations, in which comprehensive sex ed, and contraception, is often even more widely available than it is here of late? Why, before the advent of abstinence-only, and in the swell of comprehensive sex education, did we see a decline in these rates begin around 1990, and a rise again now? If social and sexual conservatism is the answer to teenage pregnancy, why does the U.S. and other socially conservative nations have the highest rates of teen pregnancy?

As someone who talks to scores of sexually active teens every day, and has watched these trends closely for many years, I worry that critical issues will get lost in the battles between groups of adults fighting about who is in the right when it comes to sex education that isn’t even for them in the first place. Increases in pregnancy and birth rates to any group, including teens, are about more than just what sort of sex education people are getting, and tunnel-vision or polarized thinking is never helpful.

By all means, a lack of accessible, approachable and accurate comprehensive sex education is always going to create problems with unwanted pregnancy. It always has. Heck, in any given day, we see at least one teen — and sometimes full-fledged adults — who really, truly, doesn’t even know exactly how pregnancy can occur (and most abstinence-only curricula are incorrect or incomplete in that regard). If you don’t know how something even happens, and know ALL that you can do to prevent it, it’s not rocket science to figure that preventing it is going to prove a challenge. So, we know that sound, accurate sexuality education is a vital starting point, but what else should we be addressing?

1. The refusal of men of all ages — but particularly teen men and older men sleeping with teen women — to always and gladly use condoms. It’s a given that this remains one of the biggest problems with sexually transmitted infections, but this is also a huge issue when it comes to teen pregnancy. Many teen women do not have — and many cannot get — another method of birth control. Even when the female partner is using a method of hormonal birth control, effectiveness rates for those methods are lower among teens than they are for adults (largely due to so many teens having to hide use of that method from parents). If I had a dollar for every teen who I have had tell me that they (usually if they are male, or if they are female, if their male partner has given them this message) or their male partners “just don’t like” condoms and “can’t feel anything,” I would be an incredibly wealthy woman. Ironically, I get as many teens saying that as I hear about condoms having slipped off without anyone even knowing. We hear a lot about how condoms aren’t “natural” (as if hormonal birth control, the preference of most men, was), how they “get in the way” of sex (as if headaches, extra depression and decreased libido and vaginal lubrication on the pill don’t), and about how teen women will often go without them, even when they don’t want to, because it isn’t worth the strife and conflict they get from their male partners.

That negativity is often learned. A lot of the time we dig deeper into condom bellyaching, we discover that at least half the time, the guys complaining have never even used a condom, and/or have gotten messages that risk prevention is only women’s responsibility. They’re often parroting what they hear from other men: fathers, brothers, friends, men in media.

Too, girls are still getting the message that if they want to be sure to be prepared even when their male partners are not by having condoms in their own pockets and purses, then they must be sluts. “Good” girls don’t carry condoms: they may still have sex — and that can be socially acceptable, especially if they are in love, and especially when it’s what their male partners want — but being prepared on their part FOR that sex is not very acceptable these days. Condoms, in particular, are a no-no for girls to carry because it’s often assumed that they’re then concerned about STIs, and would only have that concern if a) they didn’t trust their male partners, and/or b) they have had many sexual partners and an STI themselves.

Condoms are, in my book, the best birth control going, especially for teens. They protect against STIs as well as pregnancy, they have no side effects for either partner, they are one of the least intrusive methods when it comes to impacting the sexual experience of either partner; they’re cheap, easy to find, and easy to use. And when a person knows how to use them and uses them properly, they are nearly as effective as any hormonal method. To boot, they engage men in taking equal responsibility in managing the risks of sex, and allow female partners of men to earnestly feel that investment when men not only use condoms, but do so gladly and of their own accord.

2. Steep increases in costs of birth control methods and the decreased access to birth control methods and sexual health services. Birth control costs have been skyrocketing, especially for student health centers, due to a loophole in federal law which penalizes companies (by receiving lower payments from Medicaid) for offering prescription medications at a discount. Some student groups and organizations have been working to try and subsidize birth control costs for students to offset this, but many young women are having to just leave methods behind which were working for them.

While it should be obvious, it’s always worth reminding everyone that birth control methods fail. Sure, we can say that abstinence does NOT fail, but the problem is that it does, because few people WILL remain abstinent for the whole of their lives (and unwanted pregnancy is still unwanted pregnancy, even in marriages). Abstinence-pledges have NOT proved more effective than most birth control methods: based on the data we have for the long-term effects of abstinence programs, we can basically say that abstinence is about as effective as the withdrawal method.

3. Rising rates of poverty. In every country, during every time, poverty has always created increased teenage pregnancy and birth rates, as well as presenting additional health and quality-of-life risks to young, pregnant mothers and their children. Worse still in the states, family planning services through Title X — and the placement of individuals in that department who outright oppose the services it is in place to provide — have been diminished or cut off for the poorest young women. The Senate tried to give it an increase in funding last month: the . It’s particularly nefarious in an antichoice administration which never shuts up about how concerned it is about giving children life, knowing that poor mothers equal children living in poverty, too. No child left behind my fat fanny: the United States ranks next-to-last in child welfare in a recent United Nations survey of the wealthiest countries.

Teen pregnancy in poverty increases health and other quality-of-life risks to mother and child, makes it even more likely for poor young women to complete their education and reach life goals, and it is usually far more challenging to be a teen parent than it is to parent at older ages. Don’t care enough about teen parents and their children, or about those living in poverty, to feel this is your problem? Then you probably at least care about our collective wallet: teen pregnancy costs the U.S. over nine billion dollars a year.

4. Self-esteem issues and lack of assertiveness among young women. Young women often struggle with low self-esteem, especially in a culture where everywhere they look — the media, peers, and from the right and the left — they’re sent endless messages every day about how their appearance and sexual appeal to others is everything. We’ve also been seeing with some feminist backlash in terms of gender roles, resulting in young women getting the message that they are supposed to be passive about sex and with sexual partners. Several times daily we counsel young women at Scarleteen through sexual conflicts and negative consequences due solely or largely to lack of esteem. And abstinence-until marriage attitudes don’t help that at all. Telling young women that sex is only acceptable within the context of marriage, and that they aren’t as good unless they do does not increase their self-esteem. Telling young women and men that sex is only okay (for them: you can say it’s not okay for men either, but male sexual behavior and cultural double standards about male and female sexuality show that up) within a certain type of exchange — in other words, men “earn” sex from women by marrying women — only enables and validates the message that women’s primary value is a sexual one. Positing every aspect of sex as something that needs to be bartered with or controlled is not empowering. On the other hand, young women generally report that learning how to set limits and boundaries, that they have their own sexuality which they can choose to share or not, on their own terms, that sex is about personal expression, not performance or duty, about how their bodies and sexualities work and learning how to use safer sex methods and birth control — even if they don’t plan to do so for a while — IS empowering for them. Not sure what young women need to raise their esteem and learn to be assertive? Then ask them.

In order to teach young women to be assertive, we have to protest traditional gender roles and heterosexism, because they are based in male assertiveness and female passivity as well as the notion that the only basis for relationships between men and women is sex and/or romance. We need to be talking to teens about sexuality honestly. We need to counter the messages they’re sent from the media about appearance and its value; about women as sexual objects or conquests. We need to let young women know that a young man not being down with them taking a turn in the driver’s seat is not the worst thing that can happen to them. We need to challenge young women to create a better world with better dynamics than the one they’ve got now, not just figure this is as good as it’s going to get.

We also need to pay teens real respect. The fact that most of the argument we hear about teen sexuality and sex education happens among a group of people it isn’t even about, and who are not directly impacted — adults, and adults who often aren’t even parents to teens — speaks volumes about the respect we have for young people. The fact that it’s up to adults what kind of sex education teens receive — rather than say, voted for amongst student bodies in the schools teens attend — is appalling and patronizing, and no wonder many kind of sex education aren’t effective. Speaking for teens without speaking with teens doesn’t increase esteem: we need to be their allies, not their zookeepers.

5. Rape and gender-based violence. Studies have found that between 11% and 20% of pregnancies in teenagers are a direct result of rape. 62% of pregnant and parenting adolescents had experienced contact molestation, attempted rape, or rape prior to their first pregnancy (Boyer & Fine, 1993). Around 60% of teenage mothers state their pregnancies were preceded by unwanted sexual experiences (Gershenson et. al., 1989). Before age 15, a majority of first intercourse experiences among females are reported to be non-voluntary. The Guttmacher Institute found that 60% of girls who had sex before age 15 were coerced by males an average of six years their senior. The California Center for Health Statistics found that 70% of babies born to teenage mothers are fathered by adult men. Sexual exploitation of minors, rape and other sexual abuses are NOT a small factor when we’re talking about teen pregnancy OR a lot of teenage sex. Do the math: you can see that that doesn’t leave us a lot of teen pregnancies that have NOT had something to do with rape, abuse and exploitation.

Most messages about sex and when to have it are directed at girls and young women, and when they become pregnant, they are often told, overtly and covertly, that they have been irresponsible. And yet, rates of partner abuse and date rape among teens are incredibly high, and for the youngest women, not only was pregnancy often unwanted, so was the sexual activity which created that pregnancy. “Just say no,” doesn’t help when you ARE saying no — or don’t feel your no would even have influence — and someone else is going to have sex on you anyway.

What’s our federal government been doing about that? Well, slashing away at domestic violence prevention and gender-based violence programs like VAWA and rape prevention programs and rape crisis services included under that vetoed Labor HHS bill, of course.

6. A greater window of teen fertility due to earlier menarche. This is a simple statistical matter. With menarche happening earlier and earlier, teen women have a larger window in which to become pregnant than they have before. What does that mean to us? Yet one more reason (as if we needed more) to do all we can to prevent sexual abuse and exploitation of the youngest women, to be sure young women know that common myths like them being unable to become pregnant the first time or at a certain age aren’t true, to do all we can to empower girls from day one so that they can be assertive about limits and birth control when they need to be.

7. When two people love each other very, very much… I’ve always found it pretty darn strange to hear people trying to keep teens from sex talking a blue streak about how partnered sex — or more pointedly, heterosexual vaginal intercourse — is the most super-special thing any two people can everdo together. Not only do I tend to disagree with that — simply because it can be mighty special, but isn’t always, and there are lots of other equally special things people can do together — I can’t for the life of me figure out why that is supposed to make anyone want to avoid sex. If you’re in a relationship that feels very special, you’ve got some sexual chemistry going as well as some sexual desire, AND you — understandably — want to do something with someone to enjoy and celebrate that specialness and those desires, then sex is going to be one of the first things you think to do. especially with everyone and their uncle telling you how precious it is.

The same goes for putting motherhood on a pedestal. We can all be supportive of mothers (and fathers) without being a perpetual Hallmark card about it. If you’re wondering why so many young people can’t get how much of a challenge parenting is, look around and listen: most of the messages we’re all sent about parenting are not realistic or practical, and many make pregnancy and parenting sound like a state of constant bliss and a guarantee of unconditional love. On top of sending teens really mixed messages, this kind of treatment of parenting also makes a lot of good parents feel like awful parents, and keeps their realities invisible, because they figure all the doubts they have, all the times they’re not so stoked about being a Mom or a Dad may mean they’re substandard or bad parents.

8. Which country won’t make emergency contraception over-the-counter for teen women? Oh right, ours! EC is incredibly effective, safe and easy to use, and yet, for all the bellyaching about teen pregnancy, and despite finding no scientific data that shows EC would be a danger to young women (especially when you consider that we have plenty of OTC drugs anyone can get which can be dangerous and even deadly); even despite losing valuable FDA staff over this, the U.S. refuses to have the same policies about teens and EC that other countries have.

Many teens who want EC are still going to find a way to get it, as they should. But because EC needs to be used in such a short window of time — before a pregnancy occurs — to be effective, the harder we make it for teens to get it, the less likely they are to use it when they need to (not to mention that we then increase the stress of an already panicked teen further).

9. Stop chipping away at reproductive rights. When we’re also talking about birth rates, not merely pregnancy rates, it’s also a whole different ballgame. Whether or not a teen woman continues or terminates a pregnancy isn’t really about why or how she became pregnant in the first place. And when we consider that most of the abstinence-only faction — as well as our President — is also usually antichoice, you have to admit that it’s awfully strange to see them framing increased teen births as someone else’s fault, or as a problem they don’t like. (Leslie Unruh — who has previously offered teen women money to bribe them into continuing pregnancies and who was key in the South Dakota abortion ban — in particular did a particularly creepy spot on a news show a while back cooing about how women, period, shouldn’t be using birth control because we all needed babies, babies and more babies! Thinking about it still gives me the willies, and makes me wonder if she doesn’t eat babies or something. Her statement in that link about ab-only getting 1/12th of the funding comprehensive sex ed gets is also a blatant untruth, and one easily checked.) They may or may not desire teen pregnancy — though I think it’s more accurate to say they are more concerned about teen sex than teen pregnancy — but most abstinence-only proponents DO desire births, especially if those births occur within a marriage or result in adoption. Additionally, for those who push adoption on pregnant women, it should be noted that teens who have been reared in foster care often have doubled rates of teen pregnancy as compared to other teens. Setting aside the grotesque of guilt-tripping women into what for many is such a difficult thing to do and treating woman as baby factories, consider how many children never are placed in a permanent home here. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, between 1999 and 2005, each year around 125,000 children are not placed, and of course, race plays a part: the poorest women so often being women of color, their children are less likely to be adopted.

If it’s teen births, not teen pregnancy that troubles you — and when those births are unwanted, it really should — then you’ve got to make sure that abortion becomes and remains widely available, accessible and affordable, including to minors. At the present time, 87% of counties in the United States have no abortion provider. Abortion continues to become more and more costly thanks to our policies about it. Most states have laws and policies which require parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortion (and the same is not required for minors continuing pregnancies), and in several states it is illegal for a teen to cross state lines to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I know I’m yelling into the void when I tell many conservatives that every birth and every child should be a wanted birth and child, and that we may never reach an agreement there. But if you’re going to talk about not just teen pregnancy, but unwanted pregnancy being a problem, you have to recognize that limiting reproductive choice is a huge part of that problem.

For the progressives reading sure they’re already doing all they can? One extra tip: stop apologizing for and about abortion. It’s nothing to apologize for, a procedure which most women who have it report as a positive, and there is no utopia we can imagine up — including a world where there are no-risk BC methods all women can use and afford which are 100% effective and reversible, a world where every woman always gets a say about sex, a world where infant health risks or defects are a nonissue, a world where every woman who wanted a child could afford to raise one — where abortion would not be an essential and needed service for women to prevent unwanted births. Women have had or sought abortions for as far back as we go, and the option of safe, legal and effective abortion is nothing to be sorry for.

10. An overall acceptance that teenagers always have and always will often be sexually active in some respect. There is no teen sex epidemic right now. Historically, teens have, as a group, always been sexually active, and that activity tends to happen with the physical, emotional and social sexual development that no one can halt and which is developmentally normal. By all means, it’s beyond sound to talk to teens about sex and sexuality and let them know about risks and consequences, and about what sorts of things they need to be ready to manage if they’re going to be sexually active. By all means, we should be talking to teens to let them know that if sex isn’t fully wanted on their part, then they should not be having sex (and sex-until-marriage rarely sends that message: instead, it tends to enable the message that once a person — especially a woman — is married, she MUST have sex, and often not based on her own desires). By all means, we should be supporting teens in waiting for any kind of sex until it is wanted and until they’re ready to handle it.

But trying to stop teens from doing something which is developmentally normal for them is not only ineffective, it’s ridiculous. Sure, once a two-year-old learns how to walk they’re going to face more risks and potential dangers than they did when they were less mobile. But we don’t hear anyone trying to make a strong case that because of those increased risks, we should be doing everything we can to keep toddlers from walking, an essential part of their growth and development. Sex isn’t inessential. It’s not required, but it isn’t inessential for most people and teenagers know that, even if older adults have forgotten (or their own sex lives have grown so stale and rote that sex seems inessential to them).

As a final aside, it’s important to realize that some teens choose to become pregnant. It’s patronizing and ignorant to class all teen pregnancies as accidental. Most are, but many are not. Plenty of teen women want to become pregnant, some even more than they want to sex they’re having to get there. Certainly, with many of those young women, we can identify some common causes for that desire to have a child. Poverty, low self-esteem (primarily, thinking that the only thing they have the capacity to become is a mother), loneliness, a need to prove maturity, as well as looking to try and cement young relationships have often been found to be common issues of the youngest parents who want to be parents. But too, not only are some of these some of the same reasons that older women want to be parents, some teens also share another common reason older women have to want to become pregnant: the desire to be a parent.  Whether or not you feel teen pregnancy is or is not acceptable (and from a standpoint of real reproductive choice, if you feel it’s outright not-okay when you’re not the one pregnant and parenting, I’d urge you to rethink that), it is not always accidental, and teen women do have the right to choose to become pregnant and remain pregnant if that is what they want to do.

So, you want to help halt unwanted teen pregnancy? What do we all need to do besides supporting comprehensive sex ed?

• Teach men to use condoms, always, and without all the bellyaching. Work to make it a positive for men AND women sleeping together to keep condoms on hand. Men: support and encourage other men in condom use. Women: tell teen women about how you don’t take no for an answer when it comes to condom use.
• Increase access to all reliable and safe methods of birth control and slash the costs of birth control. Bring back family planning and sexual health services and access for the poorest women.
• Fight poverty, even if that means giving up some of the luxuries you call needs. Live lean, and give to organizations like the YWCA, UNICEF, your local homeless shelters and other organizations which fight poverty and provide supports for those currently in poverty.
• Support and nurture positive self-esteem through personal achievement and value of diversity, address lookism, sexual performance vs. sexual intimacy and sexual valuation, and by treating teens with respect and AS young adults, not as children.
• Do everything in your power to work to end rape and gender-based violence, including blaming perpetrators, not victims.
• Recognize current changes in sexual development — like earlier menarche — and take them into account.
• Talk realistically, to teens and each other, about partnered sex, pregnancy and parenthood.
• Make emergency contraception easily available for all women, of all ages.
• Help keep abortion legal — even if you have no want or need for abortion yourself — and commit to making it affordable and accessible to every woman who wants it.
• Know and accept that many teens will seek out and have sexual relationships.

Comprehensive sexuality education does address usually all or nearly all of these issues, and incorporates an awareness about all of them into our approaches to sexuality education. Obviously, as a comprehensive sex educator, I’m all about doing all we can to get comprehensive sex back back in the game, for real. Even from a personal standpoint, every year when I file my taxes and know that I have no choice but to fund the institutionalized misinformation that I have to bust my butt every day, without funding, to correct, my blood boils. And I absolutely think that abstinence-only funding and curricula — and the lack of comprehensive sex education that has been a result — are a big part of the unwanted teen pregnancy and birth problem.

But I also think — scratch that, I know — that that’s only one part of the problem.

(Cross-posted from the Scarleteen Blog)

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, feminism, women, sexuality, education | permalink | comments (3) »

Thank christ.

Eric Keroack resigned from his position (due to charges of fraud from the office of Medicaid). As Director of the Office of Population Affairs, he oversaw all of Title X, the most perfect place ever for BushCo to have put a man who felt that “the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.” I don’t know about you, bit I just never get tired of men telling me what’s demeaning to me. How else would I figure it out with my ittle-wittle girlie brain?

Am I nuts, or have we never before in U.S. history had so many suits filed from one branch of the government against folks running another?

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights | permalink | comments (0) »

Someone really needs to remind me that it is vital — not merely for my work, but for my sanity — to talk to like-minded women doing the kind of work that I do.

I just got off the phone with the magnificent president of this organization, and this project, who just added this project to their roster, and I feel like I just got out of a cool lake on a too-hot day, man. Amazing the difference a half-hour conversation can make.

I think I often forget how fringe people like me really are until I connect with others in the same or similar position, and then I hear that instant connection we have, and I remember, quite profoundly. Such a treat to be able to connect that way, to race to support each other’s work, and just be able to talk to someone else who loves all the obscure authors no one else even knows about who write about the kind of issues I work with, who I don’t have to explain the pertinent issues to, and who just plain Gets It.

A nice shot in the arm for me, too. I am hoping to be able to bust out a bunch of materials in the next week so that we can do a big Scarleteen fundraising and awareness drive on and around Valentine’s Day, so I needed the boost.

* * *
On an entirely different topic, this commercial?

This PSA is dirty, dirty pool, especially for those of us dog and animal people who ALREADY feel terribly about animals stuck in shelters or without homes. Hell, I can’t even ever let myself volunteer at a shelter because I know full well that I’d have dogs coming home with me nightly. I don’t even let myself get off at the bus stop that’s near the shelter here, even when it means I have to go several blocks out of my way: it’s just not safe for me.

It’s that “I know I am a good dog,” line which is the absolute worst. To the point that when I saw it, it caused me to burst into tears (which I just did again, in watching it so I could link it), clutch my dog (who was looking at me like I’d lost my mind and squirming to get the hell away from her deranged owner) and then race to the computer because I needed to see many pictures of happy dogs posthaste.

Sure, it’s obviously an effective ad, and sure, Pedigree clearly has a great agenda with promoting shetlter-dog adoption. Here’s hoping it helps.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate them and think they are a very bad dog right now. No biscuits for them.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, rantapalooza | permalink | comments (5) »

While I have two seconds, and am doing some more book promo work for my editor at the moment, so it’s on my mind, I’ve forgotten to mention that I am pleased as serious punch that the wonderful, awesome Anne Semans is doing the foreword for my book. (I honestly have always thought that the Good Vibes Guide Anne and Cathy do is probably the only sex book most grownups will ever need.)

This makes me happy not just because she’s brilliant and warm and seriously gets it in a way few do when it comes to both sex and sexuality education as a whole (and without age limits or barriers), the most wonderful part is that it really nicely brings things full circle for me.

When I first started working in sexuality, Anne and Cathy were SO fantastic to me, such helpful mentors when I needed an ear or an opinion, and have supported the work I do over the years really generously. It was just so cool to have these women in my coner who I respected and admired so much, and it’s so nice that even though the web is no longer in its infancy, and it’s much harder for all of us working in these arenas to connect than it was, that we’re still all connected. So, being able to have Anne effectively introduce it is just such a feel-good thing in terms of a recognition of the whole process that’s brought this to the point its at per my work.

Always nice to have a minute in the day for mutual admiration.

* * *
And on that note, Cheryl does (per usual) a fantastic job of chronicling the feminist women’s health movement here, and addressing how incredibly sad and (in my mind) scary it is, to see so many women’s clinics unable to scrape by right now.

When I moved here, I started using Aradia right away, got exactly the kind of care I know I can always expect to get from grassroots women’s healthcare (and have always gotten: coming of age poor, while I often had to go without general care or dental care, I have never had to be without quality sexual healthcare thanks to these clinics), and getting news of their closing really bummed me out. I always get all the more bummed when any clinics like Aradia close, being privy to way more crappy stories of poor gynecological care than most given what I do for my living. Some of the stories Scarleteen users tell about doctors and nurses who either clearly could give a rat’s ass about women’s health, or who haven’t bothered to do ANY continuing ed in sexual health or sexuality; who instill crazy levels of bodily or genital shame in their practice or who just give half-assed counsel about STIs or birth control to their young patients make me cringe. My queendom for every young woman to have truly woman-centered sexual healthcare.

For those of you who are flush — especially as tax time looms, and you perhaps discover that you could have benefitted from having made more charitable contributions — do consider giving to whatever local, private women’s health centers you’ve got, eh? Really, the legacy of this kind of care, and what women did (and still do) to radically change the landscape of our sexuality with it is beyond worth what we can give to safeguard and keep it.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, bookish bits, s.e.x. | permalink | comments (4) »

I’ve recently been unable to put down The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler. (It’s a tough month for my bedside table, which has had to bear the physical and emotional weight of that book, as well as bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, Jackson Katz’s The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature.)

Even though every single first-person story in it makes my heart hang heavy, even though if I read it at night, I have to fight off the urge to allow myself to cry myself to sleep. It’s important. So important.

I was just mentioning today to one of the amazing young women at the All Girl Army, blogging for choice today, that while it is, absolutely, positively vital to talk about backalley abortions, to talk about what abortion was like before Roe vs. Wade (and what it still is like in areas where abortion is illegal or inaccessible), it’s equally important to talk about what choice as a whole was like and still IS like, even with the help of Roe and other supports. I think many often forget or simply don’t know the combined impact Roe vs. Wade,Title X and other feminist initiatives had when it came to reproductive choice no matter the choice a woman made. More accurately, no matter what a woman did or what was done TO her when she became pregnant before she had any sort of choice.

Before (and in some cases, still well into) the mid-seventies, we all too often forget that most women simply didn’t have any real choice. We all too often forget that decisions like Roe vs. Wade protect us because of the choices many of us still don’t have, and the world we live in which still threatens or refuses us all or some of those choices.

No choice for a safe, legal abortion.
If a woman was able to access abortion and got very lucky (or was simply very privileged), then she could contact, get to, and pay for a private — albeit illegal –abortion, done in sanitary conditions, by a doctor or nurse, under great secrecy. Those women were few and far between, to say the least. And even those women, in the “luckiest” conditions, often had to go back home, do all their grieving alone, suffer any side effects in secrecy and silence, and if they became ill due to the abortion, often did not or could not seek out care.

As for the rest who wanted or needed abortions, but who didn’t have the connections or the means for a safer illegal abortion, I think by now most of us — especially those who read women like me — have a pretty good idea as to what backalley abortions or self-attempted abortions were like. The tools of these abortions were knitting needles, coathangers, scissors, sticks; bleach, whiskey, turpentine or gunpowder douches. Women who got backalley abortions were often blindfolded so as not to be able to identify their abortionist, driven to remote areas, passed person to person. Many women who died from illegal, unsafe abortions slowly bled to death, in terrible physical and emotional pain, utterly alone: many were silently, slowly and painfully dying or becoming seriously ill while going to school, working their jobs, or sitting at the dinner tables with their families. That’s pre-Roe abortion history about as condensed as it gets, friends: that’s the light summary.

No matter the type of abortion, before Roe, as many as 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred annually in the United States and as many as 5,000 to 10,000 women died every single year following illegal abortions. Nearly four times as many women of color died as white women. That figure doesn’t account for injuries, physical as well as psychological, both of which were vast. No matter the type of abortion or the type of woman, nearly ALL of those women still suffered alone. They did not have support groups for abortion, nor any cultural sentiment which allowed them to feel any grief (rather than guilt), they did not have sound (if any) aftercare, they did not have any context to talk about their feelings or experiences, they often did not even have the allowance to say, out loud, to anyone, that they had an abortion or had been pregnant.

No choice to safely abort, but also no choice to parent, or no choice not to.
For those who either did not want to or simply could not access any means of abortion… Just in the few decades before Roe, around one and a half million women were sent away to maternity homes and tricked, coerced or outright forced into giving their babies up for adoption.

Some of these homes were okay enough places to stay (however much a place can be “okay” which robs you of a child you gave birth to and wanted), but some were not a far cry from — nearly identical to — the Magdalene Launderies. Women staying in them were hidden and isolated from everyone but the other women in the homes, shunned by their families (and sometimes the men who got them pregnant in the first place) and often during the rare times they could leave the home, they would be easily identified and harassed in the streets: insults and/or vegetables hurled, the works.

Like women who aborted during this time — and in my eyes, this is all the more painful — these women had to leave the homes after giving birth and pretend they had never been pregnant, that they were never mothers. Some of them would have contact with their infants for months in the home before having them ripped away from them. Women with postpartum depression had zero support. Women whose whole lives had been shattered were totally unacknowledged. Open adoptions arrangements (however flawed they can sometimes be) were not available: the rights of birth mothers were preciscely nil. If and when they were at all visible, these women were often disdained by their families and communities. But for the most part, they were and are often still, invisible mothers, invisible women. Too, we have plenty of history of mothers giving birth and being forced to give up their children to other women in their families: married sisters or aunts, even their own mothers, after which the mother of the child would be forced to spend her life pretending that she was sibling or cousin to her own child.

Of course, we also have the myriad women who did not want to remain pregnant and parent, but who found themselves forced into parenting, and often, unwanted marriages as well. For whom having to get married, bear a child and parent was ordered as punishment for being wayward (for as well all know, much like HIV is Gods punishment for being a deviant — even if you get it as the straightest, most vanilla person there is — pregnancy and parenting is Gods punishment to women for not keeping themselves chaste).

My mother was one of those women. Abused, lambasted, shamed by her family and told she had no other option but this to even attempt to redeem herself in their eyes, that of God and those of the whole world. (As one of “those” children, let me tell you from a child’s perspective how much fun it wasn’t to grow up looked at by a strict Irish Catholic family as the accidental, half-blood-Dego bastard child who carries the shame of her mother in every pore of her being: to be told, quite incessantly, that you were an accident, a punishment, an extension of sin. Or to reach an age where you’re well aware that your mother is working double and sometimes triple shifts, and you’re all barely scraping by, all because of you, a fact which the family who PUT her in that position reminds you of frequently.) This is some of what happens when choice is thought to stop at sex alone, if choice was even an issue WITH sex, especially when you consider how very many of these women were raised with the mutually-exclusive notion that they were both supposed to police men AND somehow also defer to them.

There are vast and varied tales of these scenarios. For women of color, while there were a scant few homes that catered exclusively to them, they just plain weren’t white enough for the maternity homes, so however horrendous an option that was, even that one wasn’t available; both per finances and connections (as well as due to racism from providers) private, safer illegal abortions weren’t optional, either. For the most part, women of color were those whose choices were the most terrifying sort of backalley abortions or forced parenting, ready or not, wanting or not. Bear in mind, too, given rates of incest, how many women were forced to parent the children of their fathers, brothers, uncles, and how many children grew up in these scenarios.

So, we then also had millions of “fallen” women forced to be mothers, often without the means for prenatal care for themselves or their babies, often pushed into greater poverty than they already lived with, often pushed into marriages that were unwanted, unhealthy or abusive.

And no choice to become pregnant or not.
I feel like what also often gets lost in abortion and choice debates is any address of how much sexual responsibility is and always has been put, disproportionately, on women. This is particularly of import for the youngest women, who obviously, I have great personal concern with. Teen women are incessantly blamed for not properly policing their male partners: especially when those male partners are same-age, but even when those partners are full-fledged adults, even sometimes when they are far older and predatory. Abstinence-based sex education makes this girl-blaming a critical part of their curriculum. Last I checked (which was very recently) at least 25% of the youngest teen women report that their first sexual experiences were coerced. The greatest rates of rape are — and generally always have been — to women under 18. And in many cases, as with sexual crimes so much of the time, these young women are held partially or even entirely responsible for being victimized. Bear in mind that many of these young women are reared with the same-old antiquated ideas about whose fault it is when they’re coerced into sex (theirs), or become pregnant (theirs), and pushed into one choice or another that they wouldn’t choose if they really had all the options available to them — including access to EC, thank you very much — and told that the person fully responsible for living with whatever “choice” they get is, guess who, them.

Let’s also remember that around 32,000 pregnancies as a result of rape occur every year just in the United States right now: I do not know what the rates were in the decades before Roe. Assuming the rates were at least the same or similar, though they were probably higher, that’s at least 32,000 women a year — more than die from breast cancer every year; only about half that many people die from drunk driving accidents annually, so where’s our PSA and OUR special fundraising wristband, right? — with NO choice as to whether or not they became pregnant, and no choice as to what to do about it. That’s tens of thousands of women every year with NO real reproductive choices whatsoever, and yet, often held responsible, in part if not in full.

Even when we’re not talking about rape or strong coercion, let’s not pussyfoot: women have intercourse they do not want to have ALL the time, every day. Out of feelings of obligation, out of a need to keep the peace, out of a need to feel, or assure a partner is feeling, “normal” per heteroseixst or gendernormative dictates and ideals, out of a need to keep a partner around so that they and/or their children have some means of survival and shelter.

Often, these same women cave when it comes to birth control due to a partner’s urging — it’s okay, you don’t have to use the condoms tonight, or okay, you’re so sure withdrawal works and you’ve worn me down arguing, or okay, you want to have intercourse RIGHT THIS MINUTE so I won’t go put the cervical cap on, or okay, I ran out of pills because the pharmacist didn’t have any this week, but we can do this anyway. Often, these women become pregnant, and these scenarios do not constitute full choice, no matter what spin you put on it.

Mothers STILL tell daughters that it is their duty to acquiesce to their husbands with all things sexual, and to service their “male needs,” whatever those may be. I have users at Scarleteen who have been reared with these attitudes with some regularity, and they are incredibly difficult to unlearn, especially when they continue to be surrounded by them in their communities and closest relationships.

Access to birth control, too, we often forget, was still incredibly limited pre Roe, and is a major factor in choice issues. When the pill came into circulation in the 60’s, half the states in the US only provided it for married women. Well before then, the Comstock laws made access to other birth control methods illegal. Before 1960, the vast majority of citizens had only condoms — which, without the male partners support, were useless — and withdrawal, which we know to be about as close to useless as it gets, and which also relies on male cooperation. And yet, when pregnancy occurred, it was often still thought to be the woman’s fault: her fault if she couldn’t “control” her male partner’s sexual advances, her fault if her male partner refused to use a birth control method, or she couldn’t access one that worked for her. This is history that is insanely pertinent right now, as things like the Global Gag Rule, Title X cuts (my clinic here sadly is shutting down this month), limiting access to EC and attacks on choice persist. The same people and forces who seek to limit or remove access to safe legal abortion, and thusly regress all the choices we have, are most often the same people seeking to limit access to contraception or contraception education, especially to those most at risk and with the least agency: the youngest women, the poorest women, the most marginalized women. Access to birth control is STILL a serious issue and a serious problem in this regard: the increased access we see has not by any means fully extended itself — or anything close — to the women who need it the most, and for whom even with legal abortion, even with changes in adoption, even with better welfare and treatment of single mothers, have far more limited choices than women with greater privilege.

Let’s not forget…
That tied up into all of this is also access to reliable, accurate and unbiased information about birth control, reproduction and sexuality as a whole. That’s not just a women’s issue, by any means, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that while lack of that information does everyone harm, men and women alike, it ultimately harms women the most. Everyone is harmed by sexual shame, by a lack of understanding of their own bodies and health — and that of sexual partners — by purposeful misinformation about sexuality and sexual and reproductive health. NOT everyone will become pregnant because of it, get cervical cancer because of it, wind up in rape or coercion scenarios because they don’t know the warning signs or are told to disregard them, or be unable to make a sound reproductive choice when pregnancy occurs that is best for them. (And that’s not even touching on issues of intercourse or other sex under obligation, sound counsel, prevention and address of sexual abuse, understanding of how women’s sexuality even works, the whole bag.) These things will happen to women, who even just by sheer biology, whether we’re talking about pregnancy or cervical cells, bear the greatest burdens when it comes to sex and the opposite sex.

In a culture/community/relationship or under a system which does not support an equality of full reproductive autonomy and agency, it is a given that sexuality and reproductive information will follow suit, and either protest that full autonomy or undermine it, and often quite intentionally.

Choice isn’t just about abortion.
Reproductive choice is an octopus of an issue. It’s not only an issue of sex and gender, but also one that strongly involves race and class.

Real reproductive choice includes a woman’s inarguable right to abort, parent or give a child up for adoption 100% informed, willing and able, as well as support for any and all of those choices, the choice to prevent pregnancy with safe, easily accessible and affordable birth control, the choice to have sex at all, and, by extension, the ability to obtain reproductive healthcare and sound information on reproduction and sexuality and most of all, to be held to sexual responsibility which is fair, sexual mores which are realistic, inclusive and not laden with sexism, and to live in an overarching environment which honors and safeguards a woman’s right to real and complete ownership and care of her own body and everything within it.

What you see here is about as abbreviated a take on these issues as it gets. However thick this text, it’s a serious condensation of this issue. What Roe vs. Wade did and does, what all the additional laws, policies and initiatives which support its principle do, is far, far greater than allowing access to merely abortion. We allow anyone to take Roe and everything related to it away — we even give an inch when it comes to this — we aren’t just removing access to abortion: we are removing a critical element of the whole of reproductive choice. Roe is foundational in many, many respects (when you really start to look at how much was built off of it, or arose because of it, it’s truly dizzying). You remove that row of bricks at the bottom of a building, you remove the stability and integrity of the building entire, and it will crumble in time. This is an absolute given, not theory or hyperbole.

This is the case whether you have never had an abortion or never intend to have one. This is the case whether you have had or do have the agency to make whatever choices you want, and may even still with regressions to choice policies, be it due to your sex, color or class. This is the case no matter which of those women above your mother was, or even if she was none of those women at all: this is the case no matter how it is you’re rearing your daughters. No matter how affected or unaffected you think you’ll be if that building built on Roe ever crumbles, you and your sisters will be buried alive in it, most likely just as we were before.

And as far as I’m concerned, if there’s even just one woman in the world who doesn’t have ALL of these choices, all of these aspects of choice? Then there’s no woman in the world who’s really got’em. Considering that even with Roe, even with policies that support choice there are still myriad women without them, both globally and right here at home, the fact that anyone still needs to defend or explain the importance of and need for Roe, today or any other day, to anyone at all, boggles the bloody mind.

Blog for Choice: Lots of people are doing it today, however. I’d encourage you to do so, or to avail yourself of their words, and by all means, as ever, to do all you can to work for choice in every way you can.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, feminism, sex/life, Blog for Choice | permalink | comments (0) »

Quick! (thanks, Clare.)

To recognize National Back Up Your Birth Control Day at Planned Parenthood, today they are offering FREE emergency contraception at their clinics.

Even if you don’t need it now or for yourself, if say, there’s a clinic on your drive home from work, pick up a pack. Maybe you will have need for it at some point, or maybe a friend, younger sibling, niece or neighbor will. Now that we’re getting to the point where we really can just have some handy, never hurts to have it on hand, especially for free.

posted in reproductive rights, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints | permalink | comments (0) »

Three important bits from my day yesterday:

1. My new editor? EDITS. Like, for real. She doesn’t ask me to do her job for her; she doesn’t pass her job off to anyone else. She does this cool, ingenious thing where she reads the material, makes smart changes, suggestions and notes based on the actual material, returns them efficiently, and passes them over to me to ask my input, which she has an actual interest in. My new editor? Advocates for me to the publisher, to everyone else involved in the project. My new editor has renewed my faith in the publishing industry. My new editor is my new shero.

2. I realized the other day that not only did I not know what the hell the FDA decision on OTC emergency contraception meant in practical application, no one else really seemed to either. Given the growing rate of pharmacist refusals, even for scrips, this seemed kind of important. So, I researched all day and made a lengthy post with all the info I could find here and cross-posted it at the All Girl Army. This also includes information on what to do per refusals, and arrangements I made with my lawyer at the ACLU about forwarding refusal reports to their repro rights sector for possible future cases against these assholes. So, pass the info on, if you would, to the women you know, especially in states and areas where refusals are more likely. Thanks!

3. So, the latest news in the Child Online Protection Act case is that the government filed a motion asking to dismiss the case (against them, against COPA) brought forth by the ACLU, myself and a handful of other plaintiffs, on the grounds that our case against them was frivolous.

Why, according to them, was our challenge without basis?

Because according to the U.S. government, none of us have prosecution to fear under COPA.

All of us being concerned that if we did not put up an age screen we would be prosecuted is vital to us having a grievance. To refresh your memory, the basic terms of COPA are such:

“Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes* that is available to any minor (without using a credit-card based screen to assure the user is 18 and over) and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both.”

* Understand that if I use my portfolio site to sell prints or net new photo clients, that’s commercial. If I use Scarleteen to sell my book, or make any revenue at all, that is commercial.

“The term “material that is harmful to minors” means any communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other matter of any kind that is obscene or that–
(A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest**;

** the legal definition of “prurient interest” is: a morbid, degrading and unhealthy interest in sex, as distinguished from a mere candid interest in sex. I bet you just love such a scientific approach, don’tcha?

(B) depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast; and
(C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”

In other words, if even a given itty-bitty community — such as, oh, let’s say, half the populace of this country who voted for Bush in the last election — decided that by their standards, my work isn’t artistic, isn’t educational, isn’t scientific, was offensive to minors, or was designed to appeal to “unhealthy or degrading” sexual interest, and I do NOT have an age screen up (which, obviously, in the case of Scarleteen particularly, is a contradiction in terms), I’d be looking at jail time or tens of thousands in fines. I’d absolutely be looking at the close of my sites, full-stop.

Why would I POSSIBLY be so silly as to be concerned about this?

In a country where my own government refuses to fund comprehensive sex education? In a country where a woman who does not meet this or that beauty ideal or this or that normative sexuality model (like, say, being heterosexual, or bisexual only when it’s pretty and looks like what men want it to) expressing her own authentic sexuality is often expressed on bulletin boards in group conversation as more morbid and obscene than a Girls Gone Wild ad? In a country where I have even had intellectuals and academics state that what I do is NOT art, that certain stances of mine ARE harmful to minors? Where I can read pieces from other writers stating that readers going to Scarleteen are being sent “into the open arms of pornographers eager to encourage them to see themselves and others as soulless sex objects to use and be used?” (I refuse to give Dawn Eden traffic: if you’re curious, google.) In a country where I can with a simple flick of the search engine find endless articles stating that I am encouraging teens to become lesbians (oh, would that I could: to be able to reduce teen pregnancy, STI transmission, and years of unsatisfying, compulsory sex many teens girls have in one fell swoop? Please. I wish.) and engage in that oh-so-ooky-and-immoral “homosexual activity?”

Why, oh why, would I have ANY concern living in a country in which some towns continue to support domestic abuse, shame raped women, name-call lesbians and gay men, fetishize fat women, older women and menstruation because of how “gross” they are, and feel that unwanted pregnancy is a justified punishment for wayward women who have the audacity to have sex when they don’t want to be married or pregnant? In this fantastic wonderland where I’m well aware that when my book comes out, I can forget about the most major superstore chain carrying it because it’s so immoral and obscene, and all the worse because I have the unmitigated gall to not only talk about sex outside marriage, but about gender equality for women? In a country which allows for legal adults to make arseloads of money off the dramatic, pornographic, and inauthentic portrayals of adults parading as “Barely 18’s,” but tells the ACTUAL barely-18’s that they have no right to the ownership and expression of their bonafide, non-commerical and authentic sexuality or consensual sex lives, or forms of birth control by which to manage some of same?

In this veritable utopia in which the NEA can’t deal with Karen Finley (it was a yam, for crissakes, not a rocket launcher), classical statues’ breasts are covered with drapes, 30% of a parenting magazine’s readership calls a tasteful photo of an infant breastfeeding obscene and hides the magazine from their children for fear of their lost decency, women’s right to ownership of our own bodies is challenged daily, and in which, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t likely ever go back to teaching Kindergarten because I not only allowed myself to be seen unapologetically nude, I’ve gone and made the whole deal worse by being that naked lady who doesn’t tell sexually active teenagers that they are making a horrendous mistake, refers young adults to abortion clinics, and doesn’t do the smart thing, the good thing, and tell gay teens that they’re just “confused” and obviously simply haven’t met the right man or woman yet?

Yeah, I just don’t know why I’ve been so worried, especially here, in this absolute honey of a progressive, forward-thinking land I live in. Clearly, I’m paranoid. Clearly, the communities in my country, while they may feel all of the above, still think the work I do is of infinite value and no trouble at all for minors. Or, as the documents from the motion filed states, my concerns are “illusory.”

We’re likely still going to trial in October/November; the ACLU is filing an opposition to this motion this week.

But to file that motion, and do their level best to get our challenge tossed out, see, they had to try and convince the judge that none of us plaintiffs had anything to worry about if COPA went into effect was sound. They had to SELL it, sister.

“(Scarleteen) offer(s) health, scientific and political information specifically geared towards teenagers. In addition, it does not contain any photographs of sexual acts, nor could the educational dissemination of sexual information in a manner geared towards teenagers be considered “patently offensive” to minors. It also has seriously scientific value for minors…

Ms. Corinna identified several pages in her deposition about which she feared prosecution under COPA. These pages are: an article about a 15 year-old’s experience with being a gay teenager (dig that, Jhames!), instructions for putting on a condom, and the Scarleteen message boards. A review of these pages demonstrates that… it is information that is age-appropriate for older minors, which is the goal of the Scarleteen website. COPA was not designed to prohibit the type of information that Scarleteen offers…

(the pages of Scarleteen) are designed to educate teenagers about sex, have serious value for minors, and are not designed to pander to the prurient interest.

…those articles, as well, (which also) have serious value to minors.”

This is probably one of the best reviews I have ever gotten for Scarleteen.

From the federal government under the Bush administration. From an administration which, per its policies and practices, feels comprehensive sex education does NOT have value, and has been crystal clear on that point…unless it’s coming from me! Whee! I’m so special!

“the Femmerotic material…is artistic as well as political.”

And lookie here! My work is finally made clear to be capital-A Art at long last. So nice to have it all shiny and certified!

Here’s the beauty of this. The federal government has not only just handed me a very glowing review, but a Get Out of Jail Free card. A very real one, when it comes to its practical application.

Even IF COPA passes (and I don’t think it will, really: I feel confident we’re going to win this thing, again), myself and all my sites (this one, Scarleteen, Scarlet Letters, and my personal portfolio) are essentially free and clear. I have the material equivalent of a lifetime doctor’s note to get out of gym class because I’ve got bad cramps. Should the government ever decide to try and prosecute me (or sites very similar to mine:”COPA was not designed to prohibit the type of information that Scarleteen offers”), all this girl’s got to do is wave this text around and have it laughed right out of court, because in THEIR own words, my work is now exempt. They have just made it all but impossible to prosecute me for my work — or anyone with similar work — with their own words, however much they conflict with their own policies and platforms.

Did they actually mean the stuff they said about my work, or did they just want to ditch this case that badly? Who knows. They might have meant it (the two lawyers who deposed me were cool enough, despite who they chose to work for). They might not have. We’ve no way of knowing. But it makes absolutely no difference because they said it, in a legal document, signed by the Assistant Attorney General, and a handful of gov’t lawyers, in the service of Alberto Gonzales.

In other words, this is a win-win situation, kids. (And just really, really funny in the most wonderful way.)

I spent all of yesterday with a ridiculous grin on my face, because you know, it’s not everyday that when the U.S/ government shoots itself in the foot, you not only be out of the crossfire and keep your friends out, too, but their blunder is to your benefit, especially when you’re just some weird queer feminist chick who spends her days explaining sex to teenagers and contemplating her ovaries as art and politic. It’s not every day that activism actually pays off in a tangible way you have put your hands on.

Yesterday? Was a Very Good Day. Mr. Price came home, we reviewed our days together, and he said, “You did a good job saving the world again today.”

And maybe I did. But not without help from the fine folks at the ACLU and…

(take a moment, now, because I can almost assure you you will NEVER hear these words out of my mouth again, so best we all relish them)

…my good pals at the Bush administration!
(Yeah, it’s still funny. Think it’ll remain so for a good, long while.)

posted in Heather Corinna, aclu, copa, reproductive rights, bookish bits | permalink | comments (1) »

Last week I was terribly unproductive. (This week has been much better: next week best be better still.)

Having my father here was just amazing. Per usual (sparing my annoyance at the television constantly being on, especially since I’m barely used to it being in my house, period), we got into a routine almost right away, shifted right into our usual comfortable dynamic, talked a lot, walked a lot, watched movies… and I tried not to cry too much.

It’s very rare when I wish I’d made different choices in my life. I generally feel very good about the ones I have made, and the sacrifices that entails — primarily financial — are ones I can live with.

But when it comes to my Dad, I find myself wishing I had found some way to have a livelihood that involved me having money. I HATE that I had to send my Dad back to the SRO in the ghetto-hell he lives in. I hate that while he was here, it was a luxury for him to be able to walk around feeling some measure of safety; to be able to sit on a porch outside at night feeling confident he wouldn’t be shot in the head. I hate that I can’t just fix that: it should be so easy.

Sending him back home last Wednesday night was just so hard. Both because I’ll just really miss him, and because I want him to have a better life than he has, and I feel like a rotten daughter to be able to help so little. (This is about the only reason I have any investment and hope in the book selling millions of copies from a monetary perspective: wishes to the universe it does if for no other reason than it giving me the ability to move my Dad here and into someplace safe. That, and I really, really need a part-time assistant: I just get further and further behind with everything with every passing month.)

It’s reruns for anyone who has read me for a long time, but my father and I have an incredibly unique relationship. He brought a copy of “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” with him for me to watch, because, while in many respects it is a highly bizarre movie, and not representative of us, he felt the dynamic and tone of the relationship between father and daughter in that film was us to a T (and was so excited about it, he wouldn’t be quiet through the film), and he was spot-on. Strange mirror to look in, really.

I was trying to explain to Mark that in many respects, our relationship is both more sibling-like, and more spousal than parent-child. Before you get the creeps (Mark was all, “Yuck!” until I explained what I meant by that), understand that what I mean by the latter is that we’ve always shared responsibilities; it’s always been presumed I was an equal partner in our relationship and the shared aspects of our lives. In some ways, that wasn’t so great, but for an exceptionally independent child, I’m not sure what else would have really worked, and I’d say that for the most part, that approach was and has always been ideal for me.

(Save that as a small child, at one point my father insisted he’d prefer I call him Dave, rather than Dad. I became quite confused, and asked if he wasn’t my Dad. He assured me he was, but would prefer I didn’t call him that because he didn’t want to be my capital-F Father. It’s cool to give your child credit for being a smartypants, but this concept was a bit evolved for a four-year-old, especially one who once tried calling her mother by her first name in front of friends and getting a VERY negative reaction to this, which she was NOT about to risk again. Suffice it to say, after seeing me terribly tangled in his sticky web of grownup logic, he accepted that he was getting called Dad.)

Unfortunately, in the middle of my Dad’s trip, my mother also sent an email that was pretty clearly an attempt at sabotaging or sullying my Dad’s visit. I’m 36 years old, and given all the other issues my mother and I have to resolve and ever grapple with, I really, really wish that she’d find a way to let go of the negativity about my Dad. They haven’t been together for 30 years now, after all, and while it was her first relationship, and sure wasn’t easy, she’s more negative about my Dad than she was about the abusive bastard she married afterwards who nearly turned her eldest child into a total vegetable.

The time before this that I saw my Dad in Chicago — when he was doing TERRIBLY, he’s been doing much better now, he looks in far better health, he’s not as close to being on-street again — I went back to my mother’s afterward, and we ended up getting in a terrible row about him. She’d asked if I was tempted to try and care for him, and I’d explained that of COURSE I was. I explained that even given the terribleness I’d weathered with her (which I have not with him) I’d feel the same way about wanting to care for her were she in the same position. I took the time to try and talk a bit even about how hard it was to have my two parents in such radically different positions financially and per their quality of life. And she started in with the sort of thing she’d say to me when I was a child, about how she knew him so much better than I did, blah blah blah. I was angry enough that I found the chutzpah to explain that at that point, I had spent DECADES close to my father… and she had not, so it was really ludicrous at that point to tell me she knew someone better she’d been with for a handful of years who I had spent far, far more time with in my life.

That, for whatever reason, seemed to sink in that time, to my amazement. So, I expressed that henceforth, I just could NOT listen to any more strife about my father, whom she hasn’t had to deal with at all, in any respect, since I left home in my teens, and that I really expected her to respect that, especially since I felt it was just really out of order to keep putting me in the middle of a one-sided battle (my father has never talked shit about my mother to me, ever, not even when it would have been totally valid) for the whole of my life, over someone I cared very deeply for.

I thought we had an understanding on that, but the passive-aggressive email I got belied that. It’s a tough spot to be in, because pretty much since birth, my father and I have had this Heather-and-Dad-against-the-world relationship that didn’t leave room for anyone else. Even before the awfulness in my mother’s house started, our relationship was very exclusive, and I think for my mother, it meant that she didn’t get the love she wanted or expected from EITHER of us. I can imagine that all dysfunction aside, and the fact that she very much really screwed me in ways she shouldn’t have back when, we made her feel very lonely. I can imagine that it probably hurts to see how much closer I am to him than I have ever been to her, but in the same vein, the opposite is true for my sister, so it isn’t as if she doesn’t have a close relationship with a child. And lord knows, if I had NOT had the relationship I had with my father I would have been a complete basket case, and someone unable to have any kind of relationship with anyone at all, let alone my mother. Of course, too, it’s not as if as children we choose which family we connect with and who connects best with us: that I’m more like my father than I am my mother, and always have been, is in large part, hardly something I could have controlled.

Barghblehgah. Family crap. Never easy to navigate, especially in any kind of public forum, but it’s not that much easier in my head, either. I still, two weeks later, haven’t figured out how to even respond to that letter. “For the love of Pete, knock it the fuck OFF already,” is about all I’ve come up with, and I don’t see that exactly netting the best results.

In any event, the visit was wonderful. I’m so, so grateful my father was finally able to get disability, because being able to see him having gained a little bit of weight, in clean clothes, knowing that however shitty the roof, he’s got one over his head makes all the difference. It was a real treat being able to make him beautiful dinners, share some good wine, take walks, watch him play with the dog, have us both smoke too much, talk too much, and watch Mark’s amusement at our doppleganger-like mannerisms and behaviors. That I got to also have Briana and The Baby Liam here in the middle of his visit just made it all the better, especially since my Dad has always had that awesome baby and kid magnetism that just makes kids happy to be near him. It was cool to watch him with a wee one: it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. All in all, the whole works was cool: even when it’s tough, even when we’re at some kind of odds, my Dad is someone I just never get tired of being around.

Thus, though, my lack of productivity in the days immediately following. It’s hard to have the people you care for so close to you and then so far away again.

I have to get started on some backlogged photo editing today. Among what needs to be edited, I was really pleased that my father let me take some portraits of him. He doesn’t really like having his photo taken, never really has, and he wasn’t the most cooperative subject, but it seemed like such a tragedy to do so much portrait work, yet have nothing (save one of the first photo portraits I ever did, actually) of the person who is likely the most important person I’ve had with me throughout my life. I didn’t get many, but the few I did just make me really happy.

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I don’t believe it’s about concern for young women’s ability to follow the instructions for EC, as I said in a comment here to one of the AGA bloggers posts about EC:

Two years earlier in age, young women have, and are given, the ability to follow the directions for driving a CAR, on the road, with other cars. It’s also an easy okay that married women under 18 have the ability to REAR A CHILD. Our culture has ZERO problem with putting young teens on antidepressants or Ritalin, and no trouble entertaining the idea they can use those ably. Our culture has women under the age of 18 graduating high school, passing the SAT, readying to begin military service, college, job training. And yet, we’re supposed to believe that all of these young women could not possibly handle the complexity of the following instructions on the package of levonorgestrel: Take 1 white pill within 120 hours after unprotected sex and 1 more white pill 12 hours later.

And I can’t fathom that anyone in charge believes any of us are so stupid not to see the conflict in that.

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P.P.S. Found a helper (thanks, William!) to help me shift the journal over to Wordpress, so hopefully, sometime soon, that’ll come together and make updating a fuck of a lot easier. This once-a-month stuff is just ridiculous.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, Mr. Price, family | permalink | comments (0) »