Herstory

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg discusses the energy and staying power her job entails and what she considers unfinished business in the fight for gender equality.

Many people might end up taking issue with my point of view here or how I’m expressing it. That will happen. I can’t, nor am I intending to, speak for every single person affected by the majestic tentacles of misogyny and patriarchy that reach out in all directions and attempt to suffocate the life out of any sense of shared outrage or mutual support of each other’s struggle with either. Plus, I admit, my thinking is not particularly nuanced on a day like today. Like a lot of people, I’m mostly just pissed.

Dr. Willie Parker didn't perform abortions for the first 12 years of his practice. But then he changed his mind because of his faith.

According to Kentucky Rep. Joe Fischer, who has attached a 20-week abortion ban to a domestic violence bill, "The most brutal form of domestic violence is the violence against unborn children.”

State legislatures trying to curtail
abortions have suffered a 0-for-8 losing streak after court
challenges to their new laws this year.

In the New York Times on Wednesday, Joshua Lang took a detailed look at the work of demographer Diana Greene Foster, who has spent close to five years studying what happens to women who are denied abortions.

We never talk about people who need or want abortions as living things.  All the focus goes on embryos, because for some reason, they’re more important than the people who are carrying them.

Abortion and access to contraception often get lumped with marriage equality as “social issues,” but there are reasons why they’ve played out differently. Take Portman’s own reasoning in his Op-Ed this morning: “We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives. We also consider the family unit to be the fundamental building block of society. We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.” In other words, gay and lesbian people are joining what Portman considers to be, and has historically been, a conservative institution — much like the military, where they’d already been serving in secret.

Although family planning used to be considered a conservative issue, there is still something more radical and terrifying about a woman not wanting to be a mother, or wanting to be a mother on her own terms. There will always be people who consider it the same as murder of a fully developed person in the world. There is still far more empathy for an embryo or fetus than for the living woman.