choice is a beautiful thing – Page 5

If I had my way, this woman would be dead (according to her)

Meet Rebecca Kiessling. Kiessling was conceived in horrific circumstances: her birth mother was brutally raped at knifepoint. Her mother sought an abortion, and, because it was illegal, ended up giving the baby for adoption. It is a very sad story for both the unnamed woman, and for Kiessling herself.

In her struggle to process the circumstances surrounding her birth, Kiessling has become a vocal spokesperson for the anti-choice movement, speaking out to make abortion illegal, in particular attacking “the rape exception”, a watered-down anti-choice position which suggests that abortion should be available for rape survivors. She uses the following rhetorical device to make her point:

Please understand that whenever you identify yourself as being “pro-choice,” or whenever you make that exception for rape, what that really translates into is you being able to stand before me, look me in the eye, and say to me, “I think your mother should have been able to abort you.” That’s a pretty powerful statement. I would never say anything like that to someone. I would say never to someone, “If I had my way, you’d be dead right now.”

It is a very emotive argument, and thoroughly fallacious. To counter it, I am going to use as ludicrous an example. In the following scenario, I have travelled back through time to late 1984, and my mother–who, by the way, is a happily married woman impregnanted by the conventional means of happily married monogamous couples by my lovely father–is considering an abortion, because she doesn’t want a kid right now. The embryo inside my mother will become me, and I know this. So what would I do? Would I look her in the eye and say, “go on, mum, kill me, you big killy murderer”? Would I wave around pictures of foetuses and pray aggressively in her face? Would I ask Margaret Thatcher to ban abortion?

No. I am pro-choice, so I would respect that choice the woman who could have been my mother made, and I would respect it as I dissipated into the time-void. I wouldn’t be dead. I’d have never existed at all.

Because that’s how choice works. I don’t want Rebecca Kiessling dead. I want a world wherein any woman can make the choice to terminate a pregnancy. I do think Kiessling’s mother should have been able to abort her, just as I think my mother should have been able to abort me if that was the choice she made.

It must be horrible for people like Kiessling to find out that their existence is the result of a brutal attack. Nobody should have to go through it. Not Kiessling, and certainly not the woman who gave birth to her. Yet Kiessling’s proposed solution–banning abortion–would lead to the suffering of millions more women, forced to carry pregnancies or endure dangerous illegal abortions. The violence inherent in taking away a safe option for women is stark: with what she is proposing, Kiessling endorses a different kind of invasion of women’s bodies. She would be better placed throwing her energies into building a world where rape is not possible.

Abstinence education: better than nothing (with bonus bullshit from the anti-choicers)

Anti-choice news-bender Life News has trumpeted proudly that abstinence education totally works, yo. Using the language of science–and some fancy-looking footnotes (which actually lead to, among other things, a book published by a Mormon abstinence education “research centre”)–Life News claims that abstinence education works.

Well, they’re sort of right. It does work. If taught as an intensive programme compared to reading a few textbooks that are also about abstinence. When tested in a study as full of holes as a colander [not paywalled, and published in a journal I hadn’t heard of].

The participants in the study were ninth-grade pupils in schools in Georgia, a state where abstinence education is already the norm. I’m sure this is a wholly unrelated point, but Georgia also has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the US. Six schools were selected, and parents were asked for consent for their children to participate. Less than 40% of pupils were allowed to participate in the study; among the sample, girls and African Americans were overrepresented demographically. On top of this minor issue is the fact that this means that participants were aware that they were participating in a research study, and had an awareness of whether they were in the intervention or control group. When this happens, results of studies tend to skew somewhat, inflating the positive effect of the intervention.

I am going to give some credit to the authors of the study: they actually made a brave attempt at using a theory to evaluate the intervention: you’d be surprised how many behavioural interventions are atheoretical clusterfucks with a mishmash of things the authors like chucked about willy nilly. Unfortunately, they picked the Theory of Planned Behaviour, which is rather simplistic. And they didn’t even use it that well: they forgot to measure one of the key theoretical constructs (perceived behavioural norms), and threw in a bunch of other measures of things like “hopefulness” which have absolutely nothing to do with the theory.

Perhaps most vitally, though, the authors failed to measure some very important behavioural measures. Sexual behaviour was measured entirely by asking on the questionnaire if participants had “gone all the way” (using those exact words). So there is no way of knowing whether they had been enjoying all of the other rainbow of sexual experience, and whether the participants chose to define what they were doing in such euphemistic terms. Secondly, the authors report that they were not able to measure whether the sex participants were having was safe: this was due to the politics of obtaining participants for the study.

With the measures this royally cocked-up and run in some dodgy circumstances, what can be concluded from the study? Firstly, that there’s a short-term effect of the more intensive abstinence programme, but in the longer-term the effect diminishes. It should be noted that the “long-term” follow-up happened just after the summer holidays, while the “short-term” follow-up happened just before the holidays. So, the effect of a more intensive abstinence programme diminishes in the space of a couple of months. It is worth noting, once again, that this is in comparison to doing nothing different from usual.

With this in mind, it is highly disingenuous–or thoroughly scientifically illiterate–of Life News to dress this study up as evidence that abstinence works. It shows nothing of the kind. It shows that in a study which inherently favours a slightly more intensive approach to teaching abstinence, there’s a slight effect for more intensive teaching of abstince, but that effect fucks off in the space of a summer holiday. And that’s the best they’ve got.

Pro-choicers have more fun: 40 Days For Life counter-demo in Bloomsbury

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a counter-demo organised by the brilliant Bloomsbury Pro-Choice Alliance. Womb-fanciers 40 Days For Life decided to drag a bishop down to preach outside a (thankfully closed) abortion clinic, and a network of pro-choice people decided they couldn’t let it pass without some noise.

The bishop turned up an hour early, perhaps having heard about the possibility of a counter-demo and wanting to squeeze in some praying for a good peek at the inside of our uteruses before we arrived. Luckily I and many others had been nearby, and we mobilised quickly. In a panic and with no equipment, someone began to sing the first song that came to mind: A Hundred Green Bottles. Once the first eleven or so bottles had fallen of the wall, we’d lost count, and there were finally enough people for some serious chanting.

The energy grew and grew. As the original seven o’clock start time approached, more and more arrived. The Red Rag Campaign appeared, clattering away on pots and pans. The SOAS Samba Band, a staple of a good demonstration, provided us with rhythm and the ever-growing crowd began to dance. To loud cheers, hundreds of Critical Mass cyclists rode past, ringing a chorus of bicycle bells. As the night fell, glowsticks were passed around, and we sang and danced until our feet and lungs ached.

It was a party. Sure, there was more placards and banners and chanting, and a heavier-than-necessary police presence, but it was a party nonetheless. The mood was jubilant, celebratory of a person’s right to choose. The atmosphere was irreverent, fun and friendly, never threatening. At times it was easy to forget about the fascists hidden away behind the police lines. We had drowned out their sermon and hidden them from view. Their archaic obsession with our wombs had brought us together, and we were winning.

While we danced, 40 Days for Life were doing this.

There is one very notable thing about this image if you enlarge it: I can count only six women among the hundred-or-so anti-choicers.* This is the crux of the anti-choice movement: it is almost invariably men telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies.

It is crucial that we do not give an inch in protecting the right to choose. The anti-choice movement is gaining traction, putting out lies and propaganda where it can. They are not going to go away, so neither must we. We must call out each lie, each distortion, each veiled threat, resisting every attack. And if resistance means the odd street party now and again, I think I can live with that.

*A further point about this photograph: the moustachioed man in the beige jacket behind the photographer is self-professed fascist Geoffrey Godber, which highlights neatly the shared theoretical roots between anti-choice and fascism.

“Illegal” abortions? Distortions from Dorries, Lansley and the Telegraph

The Telegraph thinks it has a scoop. ONE IN FIVE ABORTION CLINICS BREAK THE LAW, it screams. Womb enthusiast Nadine Dorries and other uterus-fanciers have also jumped on this bandwagon, wheeling out faux-concern with the implicit subtext that maybe we should just shut down everything.

The Telegraph alleges:

The Daily Telegraph understands that more than 250 private and NHS clinics were visited and more than 50 were “not in compliance” with the law or regulations. Doctors were regularly falsifying consent forms and patients were not receiving acceptable levels of advice and counselling in many clinics, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) discovered.

I immediately decided that a better source of information on the matter would be to find the original CQC report, rather than a right-wing newspaper which has been quietly agitating against women’s bodily autonomy for the last few months. I searched and I searched. And it appears that the CQC report does not exist online. All search terms simply led back to a string of Telegraph articles on gender-selective abortions. On the CQC’s own website, precisely one search result for “abortion”, which is a response to the Telegraph articles and a promise to investigate, unhelpfully undated.

With this in mind, it is impossible to tell exactly how the abortion clinics are breaking the law, if the “one in five” statistic is true in the first place.

There are several ways in which the “one in five” statistic could be true. The first is the way the Telegraph spins the story: that 20% of abortion providers are evil baby-killing fraudsters who will stop at nothing to whip a girl-foetus out of an unwilling woman. This scenario seems extremely unlikely.

The second–and more plausible–way in which this can be true is if one worker in each of the “one in five” clinics was breaking some sort of law in some sort of way. The magnitude of the offences is largely unknown due to the fact that we cannot read the report to find out.

It is impossible to tell exactly who is breaking the law here. The inspections happened at 250 clinics, who may or may not have been a representative sample of abortion providers across the UK. All we are told about the facilities is they were a mix of private and NHS providers: again, we cannot know whether these “illegal” occurrences were more likely to happen under private or public healthcare. Considering that the notably right-wing Telegraph hasn’t bothered making a fuss over “taxpayer’s money” paying for these “illegal” abortions, I’d hazard a guess that the private clinics were the ones with the bigger problems. This is purely, of course, an educated guess in a complete lack of information, given that we cannot read the report to find out.

The “major” problem which was possibly discovered by the CQC if this report were actually available is “pre-signing” of paperwork. Under UK law, two doctors must sign off on the procedure, and in an unknown number of abortions that were not adequately following procedure, some doctors signed the form without bothering with the consultation. While possibly negligent, this also suggests that perhaps some medical professionals do not believe it is necessary for two doctors to complete the procedure: it may be that this is a redundant safeguard which is rejected by those with more knowledge in the area. Pre-signing, though, is a different kettle of fish entirely to the alleged “falsified consent forms”

Along with the probably-not-entirely-fictitious CQC report, it is interesting to note what the Telegraph has chosen to lump in with its screaming about “illegal” abortions: patients not receiving acceptable levels of counselling. The thing with this is, that this isn’t illegal at all. There is nothing in the 1967 Abortion Act making this compulsory. To imply otherwise is highly disingenuous and clearly misleading.

To summarise, the Telegraph “investigation” and Nadine Dorries’s interpretation thereof is dodgy because:

There is a vast difference between “illegal” and “not in compliance with regulations”
The report cited is not available to the public to critically appraise
We do not know who has been failing to comply with regulations
We do not know how exactly they were failing to comply with regulations
We do not even know if any of the report cited is true at all
Throwing in references to “counselling” is irrelevant to any discussion of abortion providers breaking the law

So what function does all of this distortion serve? Odious twat Andrew Lansley makes it clear, his head sadly still not perched atop a pike:

“I was appalled,” he said. “Because if it happens, it is pretty much people engaging in a culture of both ignoring the law and trying to give themselves the right to say that although Parliament may have said this, we believe in abortion on demand.”

…

Mr Lansley warned that so-called abortion on demand was not acceptable. “It’s not what Parliament intended and it’s not what the law provides for,” he said. “My job is to enforce the law.”

That’s right. Abortion on demand is apparently not acceptable. We do not live in a free society wherein any person can choose to end a pregnancy. Despite the illusory freedom we have, it has become abundantly clear that there are some elements who wish to control the bodily autonomy of women, and will gladly do this through misleading–or perhaps outright lying. Abortion on demand is nothing more than a loaded term for “choice”.

This story highlights the precariousness of our freedom. The body fascists have opened up new avenues of attack, and we must be ready.

Update: It has just come to my attention that there is yet another distortion in the Telegraph piece: although they mention sex-selective abortions, they never state that any instances of this were actually found. Had the report identified this occurring, and given the Telegraph have been banging this drum for months, they would definitely gloat about this. Therefore, the only reason this is mentioned at all is in order to foster this implicit association in readers that sex-selective abortions are commonplace. Which they aren’t at all.

Update 2: @bloggerheads has found the date of the only CQC search result for abortion: 23rd February 2012.

The Dorries abstinence bill: not dead yet

Uterine enthusiast Nadine Dorries has faced something of a setback today. With a frisson of schadenfreude, it is pleasing to report that her bill on bringing in abstinence education for girls in schools has been withdrawn.

Many are claiming this as a victory, but it isn’t quite that. In fact, Dorries withdrew the bill because there wasn’t enough time to read it that day as the Commons were busy devising other ways of fucking us over. The bill is still hanging over us, a veritable chastity belt of Damocles, waiting for a more prudent time before Dorries makes her next desperate bid for ultimate power over women’s reproductive systems. If Dorries times it well enough, it could well pass due to sheer inattention, like it did last time.

So now is not a time for celebration, it is a time to maintain the pressure and keep talking about why Dorries’s harebrained scheme would be thoroughly awful for everyone.

First of all, abstinence education does not work [sadly paywalled]. It just doesn’t. It’s like teaching people to do a rain dance in order to influence coal production. Young people might want to fuck, and it’s probably best if they learn how to do it safely. The good news is, this bill would not teach abstinence at the expense of decent sex education. The bad news is, it would still entail vast quantities of money being poured into teaching something which is of absolutely no benefit save to make a womb-obsessed God-botherer feel a bit happy.

Perhaps more crucially is the dangerous idea of teaching abstinence only to girls. There is no reason for this but simple sexism. It buys into the notion that boys want sex and girls are the “gatekeepers”, a theory promulgated repeatedly by misogynists. Sex doesn’t work that way. It never has. It is merely a societal construct, one which is crumbling and requires complete demolition.

So keep fighting. Keep the pressure up. Hold on to autonomy over women’s bodies. Dorries won’t rest in her counter crusade, and we must not either.

I <3 the contraceptive pill

I have been on the Pill for six years now. It has been a part of my life for so long that I sometimes almost forget that it is there.

It has only really been this month that I have been thinking much about it. When I went to collect my repeat prescription, I went through the standard rigmarole. I was weighed and had my blood pressure taken, as always. The nurse tapped in the necessary information, and BING! the computer decided it didn’t want to prescribe me any more contraceptive pills because I had been taking them for six years.

In the end, it was all right. The doctor authorised the prescription and I went away with my prescription for freedom in my hand. The scare of those five minutes when I thought I couldn’t get any more, though, got me thinking.

I really fucking love the contraceptive pill. I know it doesn’t agree with everyone, but for me it is brilliant.

To me, the pill goes far beyond a contraceptive. It represents control over my reproductive system. I can choose when I fancy having a period, and if it doesn’t suit me I can completely skip one. I know exactly what to expect with my body and when, because I can regulate it with the pills that I take.

I can worry less if a condom breaks. I still have to go through the awkward ritual of popping to the STI clinic, but I am spared the inconvenience and expense of getting the morning-after pill, or, in a worst-case scenario, an abortion. It’s a little safety net.

It helps my epilepsy. Once upon a time, under a natural cycle, my brain would spike out abnormal electrical activity in sync with hormonal fluctuations. The Pill keeps my hormone levels regular. The seizures I have had since I went on the Pill are almost trivial compared to how it was before.

In the five minutes where I thought I would not get my Pill any more, I was terrified. The tiny little tablets I keep in my purse represent so much to me. They are autonomy, they are liberty. They are my pills, and I love them.

Transphobia has no place in feminism

TRIGGER WARNING for transphobia

I write this as a cis woman. If I’ve fucked up anywhere due to cis privilege, please, please CALL ME ON IT.

Hundreds of women have been killed violently. Many more live in fear of violence, sexual assaults and are at a greater risk of suicide. It’s a fucking travesty.

Yet there are some feminists who don’t really give a shit about this particular group. There are some feminists who actively partake in systemic oppression of others. There are some who call themselves feminists yet express hate-filled transphobia which, on closer inspection, is thoroughly indistinguishable from that coming from outside our supposedly safe space.

The vast majority of feminists are perfectly accepting of trans people. As far as I can discern, the transphobia comes from a small, though noisy minority. Unfortunately, this minority seems to be influential, and still get the platform to speak: I write this post after seeing that people are still paying attention to Julie Bindel, who spouted transphobic thought in an Oxford student newspaper today.

Bindel argues that trans people reinforce ideas of gender essentialism: that by getting surgery, or by living as a women when born a man one somehow metaphorically scabs as they “fly in the face of the feminist notion that feminized behaviour or masculinized behaviour is a social contract”. The logic here is flabbergasting. Apparently gender is a social construct, but it cannot be changed. So much for malleability. In arguing that people must stick with their biologically-assigned gender, Bindel herself is the gender essentialist.

Likewise, transphobic feminist Sheila Jeffreys labels reassignment surgery as “self-mutilation” and suggests that transmen are just lesbians trying to be more manly. It’s nothing more than a nasty hateful diatribe, and by arguing this line, it removes bodily autonomy from people. Bodily autonomy is apparently a privilege that only applies to some in Jeffreys’s book.

The “theory” underlying feminist transphobia is as flimsy as an Argos flat-pack, which suggests to me that it is not theoretically-driven at all, but rather a manifestation of a lack of understanding of intersectionality, combined with a hearty dollop of spite and prejudice. Twitterer @scattermoon recently found herself responding to Julie Bindel’s tweets about Channel 4 show My Transsexual Summer, pointing out that many trans people agreed that the editing of the show presented gender essentialism. This was retweeted by Bindel, yet hours later, Bindel bemoaned the fact that there was little to no condemnation of essentialism in the show from the trans community. Either Bindel has a goldfish memory, or, more likely, she is disingenuously pushing an agenda which is harmful to trans people.

Beyond hate speech dressed up as theorising lies another worrying fashion among some feminists. A few months ago, pseudo-feminist Caitlin Moran casually used the phrase “pre-op tranny”. This is hardly the first time Moran has used oppressive language; she has a history of throwing around words like “retard” to get a cheap giggle. When called out on her use of a word which is used as a weapon, Moran decided to block her critics, so desperate was she to hold on to such a vile word.

The shit from these influential transphobic feminists rolls downhill. The thorny issue of inviting trans women into women-only spaces periodically rears its ugly head, when the patently obvious answer to this debate is “of course. It’s a women-only space. We should allow women into the women only space.” Sometimes this manifests as dangerous, aggressive bullying, such as a feminist blog outing trans women. Given the very real threats many trans people face, I cannot believe that some feminists would gladly expose fellow people to such risk.

Transphobia has no place in feminism. None whatsoever. You can dress it up in as much theory as you want, you can stick your hands over your ears and deny you’ve done anything wrong, you can wilfully twist the truth into lies, but if you’re transphobic, you have no place in feminism.

For too long, we have been giving platform to those who actively harm members of an oppressed group, people on the same team as us. Enough is enough. We don’t need our Bindels or our Morans; they are not part of the struggle, they are manifestations of the problem we are tackling.

We do not have to listen to them. We must not.

The Tories try to absolve responsibility with magical in-utero interventions

Following the summer riots the Tories have been falling over themselves to look like they’re Doing Something (usually terrible ideas). Another dreadful idea has emerged from the Cabinet Office, this one inexplicably originating from the Department of Work and Pensions, with somewhat unfortunate implications.

Here, Iain Duncan Smith has proposed magical in-utero interventions to stop kids from joining gangs. It is the logical conclusion to the “blame the parents” line; the parents are now so much to blame that it must be happening right at the moment of conception.

“I am talking about intervening when the child is conceived, not even when born.”

This has the implication of following the anti-choice line: that life begins immediately at conception. This is hardly surprising, considering IDS has a distinctly anti-choice voting agenda. I do not think this is a poor choice of words here. He genuinely wants early intervention from the moment of conception.

Now, while in utero environment may have some effect on later life, it is hardly likely that the solution proposed here will be helpful in any way: IDS wants “more male role models”. It is another subtle rehashing of the “single mothers are to blame for the riots” line.

There are three other interesting things in the proposals. Firstly, IDS is falling over himself to not appear like a misogynist, repeating over and over that it’s actually gangs that are misogynistic, and that his proposal to blame women for their children’s behaviour is absolutely fine and dandy.

Second is the outright admission that for something so important, the government is actually not going to bother trying to spend any extra money on the solution:

“There is a lot of money being spent on families and estates but it is dysfunctional money that goes to solve only short-term problems.”

They are absolving responsibility here. Shifting around, looking as though they are Doing Something. when in fact they’re just rehashing rhetoric and not bothering investing in evidence-based interventions.

Finally, it just doesn’t make any goddamn sense. In the rush to blame the parents, IDS has confused himself hugely. Sometimes the gangs are the problem; sometimes parents. I think he thinks parents are responsible for children joining gangs. It’s hard to tell.

Essentially, what is happening here is that Iain Duncan Smith is spraying his blame-gun around indiscriminately. He doesn’t want to bear any responsibility for riots caused by poverty caused by the government of which he is a part. And so, nonsensically, he absolves responsibility.

It is the norm for this government. It will have real implications for generations.

I encountered an anti-choice demo

This afternoon, I had a lovely lunch with my friend Jed. We ate sushi in the park and enjoyed the glorious unseasonal sunshine. On the way back to work, our mood was sullied.

Opposite the Marie Stopes centre in Fitzrovia was an anti-abortion demo. A woman stood on the pavement, with a rosary wrapped around her wrist. Next to her, on the pavement, was the word “LIFE” spelt out in plastic foetuses. It shocked me. It was one of those things I associate with the US, not something that happened yards away from my office.

I decided to take a photo. I crossed the road, and, standing outside the centre, prepared my camera. It was at this point I realised there were two of them. The other anti-choicer, a man, stood in front of me and refused to let me take the photo. He spoke with an Irish accent. In his hands were two rosaries and a handful of leaflets printed on cheap coloured paper. I didn’t see the text, but there was a great big cross on the front, so I think I can guess at the subject matter.

I informed him calmly that it was my right to take a photograph of a demonstration, and he became rather enraged and threatening, so fixated was he on moving me away. Across the road, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jed lining up a sneaky snapshot. I created a distraction while Jed took the photo above.

As we were about to leave, the man had been pretending to call the police. Of course he wouldn’t have really called the police. He had been rather threatening towards me, and the demonstrators were wise not to want their pictures taken. They were in the process of committing a crime: section 5 of the Public Order Act, causing harassment, alarm or distress. Having an abortion can be a very stressful experience for people, and this is exacerbated by people hanging around with misleading leaflets, rosaries and plastic foetuses, harassing them and causing distress.

I found it very interesting that the woman never spoke. She stood, placidly in her position while the man spoke for her: “She doesn’t want her photo taken”. It was a microcosm of patriarchal privilege and power, which is a huge motivator of the anti-choice agenda.

The experience left a bad taste in my mouth. It is one of those things that I hope I will never see again, but, sadly, I suspect I will. I do not want such demonstrations banned–it sets an ugly precedent, and those anti-choicers have as much right to protest as any other soul.

But I don’t want to see it again. I don’t want women to have to enter clinics for advice, for contraception or for abortions when they are at risk from harassment. So what is the answer here?

Long-term, it is to build a world where choice and bodily autonomy is respected completely, and nobody feels the need to be poking about in someone else’s womb-business. For now, though, we must work to foster an environment where anti-choice demonstrations are not welcome–a less confrontational, smaller-scale version of counter-demos against fascist groups like the EDL. This may be as small as taking a photograph of the demonstrators. We may, at some point in the near future, need clinic escorts, who protect people entering centres from the anti-choicers.

I don’t want to ban demos like this, but I truly hope that I never see one again.

Letters to Nadine Dorries masterlist: what our wombs are up to

So many letters to Nadine Dorries! Because of this, the masterlist of letters to Dorries has been moved to its own site:

http://dearnadinedorries.wordpress.com/

You can see the full masterlist of posts here.

Please, please please send more. And don’t forget to send them to Nadine, either.