Tag: feminism

Planned Parenthood Is Moving On From “Choice” And That’s Just Fine

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary2 Comments

Just days ago, Planned Parenthood announced it would back away from the “pro-choice” label and move toward a no-labels approach in advocating its support for abortion rights and family planning. The organization will instead focus on how the full range of reproductive health care is critical for the different situations women can find themselves in.

This is a great move. While no one should expect the term “pro-choice” to go away anytime soon, and it will likely serve as useful shorthand for support of abortion rights and family planning for a long time to come, the language has been limiting to the breadth and depth of advocacy for full human rights, particularly in matters of sexuality, particularly for women. Adding more tools and new terminology to the toolbox is something to applaud.

Personally, when talking about abortion, I have always preferred to say I support abortion rights. “Pro-choice” struck me as the sort of casual conversation mechanism, something that implied the decision to continue or not continue a pregnancy was something best done over a latte and a Sunday crossword. It seems that everyone but the most extreme anti-abortion rights folks grants that’s not the case — that the decision to have an abortion or continue with a pregnancy is not some, oh gee, no big deal, that women aren’t totally and breathtakingly shallow and stupid.

When we’re talking about abortion, it’s okay to say abortion and specifically to make clear we’re talking about rights to have an abortion, or not having rights to have an abortion and forcing pregnant women to die if they happen to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is power in using real language.

For that matter, when we’re talking about contraception, it’s okay to say birth control or contraception. There is power in using real language here, too, especially when mainstream media outlets continue to perpetuate the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ complete and outright lie that no-copay contraception paid for by private insurance companies somehow includes “abortion-inducing drugs.” (Medical fact break: Contraception, including emergency contraception, works prior to pregnancy. Preventing pregnancy and ending pregnancy are two different things, boys.)

“Pro-choice” has been experienced as an economically limiting term, particularly since wanting an abortion and having a legal right to abortion has been prevented by discrimination in health care coverage (both private and public), forcing clinics to close to comply with million-dollar and medically unnecessary regulations, mandatory waiting periods that hit women far from clinics particularly hard, and other laws that make it impossible for many women to afford or otherwise get abortion. When federal and state governments bar coverage for abortion, “choice” is a term that applies only to those who can afford it: There is a lesser set of constitutional rights experienced by those who need abortions but must sell their cars, or go without groceries, or hope a local abortion fund has enough money to help.

Loretta Ross and others have for years pioneered a “reproductive justice” approach that resonates more with me. It is a more holistic, inclusive approach that deals not just with the right to abortion but also the right to parent, the right to adequate prenatal care, the right to respect raising children you may already have, the right to use affordable contraception, the right to dignified childbirth, and more. As an activist, and like many other millennial activists, reproductive justice is a shorthand umbrella term that resonates strongest with me.  It most comprehensively encapsulates what my activism is about.

Also as a pregnant woman, I have come to personally confront restrictions on abortion and reproductive health care in a new way. While I am happily pregnant, I am keenly aware of how being in the wrong place at the wrong time could get me into serious trouble. Restrictions aren’t about whether or not I want an abortion, they are not about my choice, they are not about one moment in time when I realized I was pregnant and contemplated what was next, they are about the fact that if I’m having a miscarriage, or really sick, or something else I can’t foresee happens … I could just die in a hospital because that’s what it means to be “pro-life.” Or because the National Right to Life Committee last year declared their “top legislative priority” to ban abortions at 20 weeks for women living in the District of Columbia, and I happen to be 20 weeks three days pregnant. Both of these are things House Republicans have been trying to pass. Further:

New research out from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women shows how anti-abortion rights, anti-birth control, and so-called “personhood” efforts are being used in practice to arrest and force treatment on pregnant women. Restrictions are not just restricting choice. They are restricting human rights, particularly for pregnant women and women who do not wish to become pregnant.

If you want a shorthand term, “pro-choice” is going to continue to work whether or not Planned Parenthood uses it. Chances are good I will continue to use it from time to time. More options are better and a healthy feminist movement of any kind, including a reproductive justice and human rights movement, is stronger with more approaches in the mix.

So that’s my take. How about yours? Do you prefer the term “pro-choice”? If you support reproductive rights, what language do you use?

Time Magazine Is Right. We’re Losing On Abortion Rights. Time for Change.

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary8 Comments

This week’s Time cover story on the steady decline of abortion rights since the Roe decision 40 years ago details, painfully, the obvious.

Rather than reconstruct some of the excellent reactions out there, including Amanda Marcotte debunking Susan B. Anthony List’s ridiculous “pro-life feminist” reaction piece (serious delusion, in what universe is forcing a miscarrying Savita Halappanavar to die in the hands of a “pro-life” state a feminist policy framework), Katie Stack reminding us that while we may be losing, we don’t have to give up, and Steph Herold pushing back against the idea that young activists are making the movement weaker by taking their leadership outside the Pro-Choice, Inc., box, I’d like to simply say I agree with all of them and provide some additional food for thought.

Probably the most unique insight I provide is having served in leadership, as a younger woman, inside one of the larger establishment organizations so frequently painted in the media as unable to connect with younger people. There are realistic tweaks that could be made in many of these legacy organizations to help reverse this trend:

1. Put young people on your boards. Then, use them. Most organizations work with appointed boards filled with older women, most of whom pay their own way. Develop an affirmative action policy for younger people of all races, sexual orientations and economic backgrounds. Pay their way to board meetings. I have come to believe in my own experience that the perspective problem is not a numbers problem. There are extremely talented young people in all of these organizations. These young people are largely not being used on a strategic level. When they are used strategically, it is usually in a “junior” capacity, meaning they are specially chosen to be the one younger person to weigh in on this one specific intergenerational thing with a larger group of powerful, older, white, wealthy and heterosexual people who have already decided upon the agenda they are steering. This leads to efforts “about” or “to” young people, rather than “with” them.

2. Find a way to answer the following query: Am I supposed to go away? Legacy organizations are very familiar with the history I am about to describe. Women of color are underrepresented in membership, leadership, outreach, you keep going and you’ll find underrepresentation all over the place. Someone well-meaning, often a woman of color, brings to the group an initiative designed to bring in more women of color. Others get excited. Then, as the idea fleshes out, it requires changes to the rules, or doesn’t quite fit with previous efforts, or heaven forbid, there are a fixed number of seats at the table and it had always felt so comfortable when it was just Sheila, Annie and the remaining 27 of “us.” (The word us and how it can be misused to exclude!) Suddenly the 27 make the conversation all about them. What about me? Am I supposed to go away? Are you saying I’m irrelevant? Wait is this just that you secretly want to grab the power and kick me out of here? These feelings are natural but legacy organizations have been having them for decades without finding a way to address them, and they replace the conversations that sparked them, usually resulting in very few changes within the legacy organization, with the exception of Sheila and Annie leaving, who are then replaced with a few other tokens who try to make change, and the cycle continues. If you are curious whether this same dynamic applies to younger people (including younger people of color) in legacy organizations, the answer is sitting in plain sight. The similarity of these conversations should be used as an opportunity for serious reflection on the part of movement leaders who look like part of “the 27 of us.”

3. Be aggressive! Really, really aggressive. The health care law started with a concession that was never requested from pro-choice allies in Congress. Was this concession accepted? No. It was made worse. The answer is pretty simple: Stop trying to bargain with politicians and theocrats who are opposed to reproductive rights and human rights. Work to defeat them. Expose them. Ridicule them. Picket their events. Demand corporations stop partnering with them. Put public pressure on insurance companies that don’t offer abortion coverage. Invest. This is not an image problem you solve with a marketing consultant, this is an organizing problem you solve with investment in the grassroots! Go hyper-local: Use the city councils and county councils to regulate crisis pregnancy centers and hospitals receiving public dollars. Build budgets that don’t depend on small-dollar fundraising that publicizes every backward move (a conversation does need to be had about the financial incentives for legacy organizations behind threats to the status quo). Don’t be afraid to use the “A” word. Abortion! There is nothing to be ashamed of in this movement.

It’s time for change. The fortunate news is that social media is helping to usher in tons of opportunities for more people, of all backgrounds, to exercise meaningful leadership within the movement. It is also offering opportunities for more people, of all backgrounds, to personalize what is so political. Carefully scripted talking points and political connections have mitigated losses, maybe, but they have not led to gains. Change will be led by those both inside and outside the legacy movement organizations, and for the sake of all involved, that’s a good thing.

Reflections On A Makeover

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary4 Comments

Today The New York Times ran a debate: Does Makeup Hurt Self-Esteem? As I see it,  the real question is not whether individual women are dupes, idiots or traitors for wearing makeup, or heroes, homelies or underpaid for not wearing makeup (although underpaid is, statistically, probably true) – the question we must ask is, Is The Beauty Industry Hurting Self-Esteem? Is there a relationship between the pressure on women to be ornate in appearance and the pressure on women to be subordinate in substance? Why do people make such large judgements on the basis of physical appearance about women, and to a lesser but still pernicious extent men? What are we getting in return for these assumptions?

Three years ago, I had a makeover that wasn’t my idea. At the time I never would have said the following out loud, so I wrote it to myself. While my views have expanded somewhat, these are those thoughts as they were:

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m beautiful. I know I’m beautiful. I resent the unearned advantages beauty gives me, and frankly find the whole thing to be a pain in the ass. As commonly understood, beauty is a form of racial profiling that excludes many from being taken seriously and awards a smaller number with unearned expectations of sex, compassion and feebleness. To the extent that beauty is not meritocratic it should be abolished, and to the extent that it is, it should be undermined.

Like most women in this country, I have an incredibly complicated relationship with my appearance. I grant my story is extreme. I’ve been hospitalized three times for anorexia. I have never been treated better than when dying. Everyone officious; the world was my hospice. Twice I was recruited for modeling. I can’t remember how many times I was stopped by strangers with you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Fucked up. The experience of scraping a heartbeat back together has made me prone to taking a compliment about my physique, appearance or even hairstyle as a thinly veiled death sentence.

It took a lot of therapy, threatened feeding tubes and observed toilet breaks to get to the point where I could acknowledge that my eating disorder developed as a response to feeling dangerously unfeminine for being a smart person in a high school classroom. In going to prom with the grim reaper, I lost my self-hatred and began to transfer my energy to doing everything I could to stop other women and girls from blaming themselves for living in a sexist world. Mainly, these days, I focus on exposing and correcting the latter.

I have a beef with manufactured beauty that reaches far beyond issues of body image and the routine use of Photoshop as a weapon of mass destruction. For example, the $50 billion cosmetics industry. It steals women from additional time that could be spent sleeping to literally self-embalm in unlimited concentrations of virtually any chemical. Cosmetics are the least regulated products under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration. Whereas the European Union bans 1,100 carcinogenic ingredients, the United States bans ten. As a friend explained to me today, men like it when women wear makeup. It signals that we ‘take care of ourselves.’

People write books about these issues in ways far better than I could. Needless to say, I don’t particularly enjoy wearing makeup. Before my feminism became a part of my paycheck, I slapped on the stuff maybe six times a year. I guess the makeover began during a dress rehearsal of a speech about the future of feminism with the advisers to a slate campaigning to lead a large women’s organization; I was running for a role. I am good at public speaking, and writing speeches, which I had hoped to mean we could skip past the basics and talk about some of the approaches I was suggesting for the million-dollar question. In the room were a handful of the smarter feminist activists alive, legends with names omitted for the sake of privacy.

Instead, I got a lecture. “Erin, your hair is driving me CRAZY! I can’t listen to what you are saying — the only thing I can do is look at your bangs.” Before I opened my mouth the campaign manager was sent to buy bobby pins. I was instructed to wear makeup and get rid of the bracelets. It seemed important, so I did. During the vote nobody thought we could win, myself included, I changed into board shorts and flip-flops. That’s how I came to be heavily photographed a few hours later as a little bobby-pinned punk standing between three women in suits who would also become the next talking heads for the group.

One member of the staff was a smart, stylish woman who knew a lot about presence on-camera. She’d worked in television before deciding to help others with what she’d learned. She took a shine to me pretty quickly, realizing I had an imperfect but promising skill for speaking. “You’re really likable,” she said. “That’s important. But we’ve got to do something about your appearance.”

She vowed to take me shopping to look at clothes. “You don’t have to buy anything,” she would say. “I just want you to start getting comfortable with styles.” She wanted me to wear things fitted, in bright colors, and always keep a jacket in the office. I got that resistance was a waste of time, so I began to step up my game for her, the movement really.

Less comfortable was her instruction to wear makeup; bring a brush, blow-dryer and hair goo to the office; and tweeze my eyebrows (my eyebrows?). She desperately wanted me to get a haircut. It was bigger than that. She wanted to give me a makeover. She spoke of it for months, warming me to the idea slowly, at least enough so that I would agree we could do it “sometime” the way you say you’ll call someone you don’t like but can stand, if the occasion calls for it.

I wish it were not true that living in a post-makeover body changes my day-to-day. Doors are opened more often, and people treat me like a small child during rush-hour duck, duck gray duck on the subway. Mainly the issue is men. I get asked out a hell of a lot more than I used to. Friends with girlfriends flirt and inquire about my sexual availability behind my back. I used to be a bawdy liberal feminist for men to challenge and now, it seems, I’m more often the subject of romantic speculation. I am aware this is unlikely to quench any of the poignant loneliness I feel some nights; I have learned it’s lonelier still to be saying something cool and interrupted by a lover with: “Sweetie, shouldn’t you start wearing makeup?” In any event I did not take on a public feminist role intending to grapple with these issues.

More haunting is the feeling that I’ve sold out myself, and embraced the very toxicity that led me into this fight so more people will listen to me. If that works, maybe it’s worth it. I have already silenced my personal freedom of speech, pulling down my essays, poems and short stories from the web, so that my thoughts aren’t held as definitive commentary or doctrine of my organization today. A close friend remarked about a year ago that I had changed: “You don’t say what you’re thinking anymore.”

I understand that my job is not to be a perfect expression of myself, and that, for the moment, my name doesn’t belong to me but the women I want to help. To give up my body is another matter entirely. It is so very strange to take on a burden so that others might not, to be taken as generally more shallow, to no longer hide behind words and arguments in plain sight. Today a friend took me for my first pedicure, and I was struck by how every woman in the place seemed to be grieving.

If I were not me, I might criticize me harshly.

Post-script from 2013: Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I would criticize me so harshly. Looking professional removes barriers to some of the amazing things a person is able to do, which for me includes saying to large groups and people who make decisions that sexism is not acceptable. These days I am no longer speaking for anyone but myself, and I choose to wear makeup and do my hair more often than I used to before this makeover took place. And, I believe this choice has nothing to do with my self-worth. Further, I believe that beauty is loving action and that whether, and in what color, you wear lipstick is one of the less interesting things I could know about you.