Posted on 8.20.2012 by Amy
Nothing I could possibly write this week could be more pressing than the letter a woman named Deb Walsh wrote 10 days ago.
Nothing could be more touching. Nothing could more starkly represent the nature of the times we're living in.
Maybe you've never heard of Deb Walsh.
She's the owner of Volunteer Women's Medical Clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee. She wrote this letter when she was on the verge of shuttering the abortion clinic where she'd worked for more than 30 years.
She was forced to close the clinic, she writes, because of a Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) law, similar to the one that has threatened Mississippi's only remaining abortion clinic. The laws are one of the ways the anti-choice movement is slowing ending access to abortion in this country, clinic by clinic. Deb Walsh explains:
I found out last night that I will have to close Volunteer Women's Medical Clinic in Knoxville TN, effective today. A law that went into effect July 1st 2012 called "The Life Defense Act", made it illegal for our local, Board Certified OB-GYN physician to perform abortions in our fully licensed Ambulatory Surgical Treatment Center. The law requires Drs. who perform abortions to have local hospital admitting privileges. The law applies exclusively to abortion. One of our Drs., Morris Campbell, was actually able to reinstate his privileges a few weeks before the law went into effect. Sadly, he had a stroke and died a few days after receiving the news about his hospital privileges.
I'm 25 years old. It's hard for me to imagine how anyone would feel disassembling the place they'd worked for 30 years. What relics of feminist history were packed into boxes and stacked into the Uhaul shown sitting outside the clinic in a recent photo? What inspirational signs, contraceptive teaching devices, letters from grateful patients...what must if have felt like to pack all that away?
According to its website, the clinic has been caring for women since 1975. That's two years after Roe v. Wade. That's 38 years. Many of the young women who sought abortions there back in the years when it first opened are probably grandmothers now. Deb Walsh remembers them.
The clinic has been open for 38 years and I have worked there for over 30 years. I still remember the name of the first patient I took care of on the day I started, and I remember the answer an eleven year old girl gave when, after days of counseling, I asked her what she wanted to do. She said "I just want to go ride my new bicycle". No kidding baby girl. So many images remain of the strength of women.......the day we looked out the front window and saw an Appalachian woman we'd just discharged pushing an electric blue Corvette Sting Ray fast enough that her husband could pop the clutch and start the engine.......the coal miner's daughter that was full term and about to go into labor but swore it couldn't be true because no one had ever been "up on" her.......the sorority girl that said she got pregnant by trying on her friend's diaphragm that "must have had sperm on it"......the woman I brought back to life when she stopped breathing who later told us she had withheld critical medical history from us because she was afraid we wouldn't let her have an abortion if she told us the truth......all the Catholic women who had abortions over and over again because taking a birth control pill every day added up to more sins than a few abortions a year.
I'm so angry about this, also sad, and I'm grateful for whatever wisdom I possess that keeps me from feeling like a victim.
Thank you to everyone who has reached out with kind words during this nightmare. Now, I've got to get back to packing. Imagine it all working perfectly.
Deb Walsh
There's a hope resonating through the final words of that letter that took my breath away.
The struggle to maintain abortion access in this country is a mix of bitter, tragic losses and, along the way, some victories.
And lest we end on a totally tragic note, there's success for common sense in Kansas, where a prosecutor has dropped all remaining charges against a local Planned Parenthood, ending what was believed to be the first attempt in the country's history at criminally prosecuting a Planned Parenthood facility. The prosecutor, Phill Kline, is the same one who charged George Tiller with more than 30 misdemeanors. All charges were later thrown out. Three years later, Tiller was murdered.
Some days we win, some days we lose -- irreparably, enormously, senselessly. But there's hope in the movement precisely because of people like Deb Walsh. Precisely because of her courage. Precisely because of her unwillingness to be beaten, even while antis are literally forcing her out the door of her clinic.
Imagine, she says. Imagine it all working perfectly.
Add a comment
Posted on 8.15.2012 by Kelly
Inspired by a book I recently bought called Revolutionary Women: A Book of Stencils, I've decided to start a monthly feature profiling radical figures in health history. By examining the stories of radical healers, doctors, nurses, and activists for health justice I hope to develop an understanding of an alternative version of medical history.
This month I am profiling Emma Goldman, one of the most well-known anarchists who is often misquoted as having said some iteration of the phrase, “If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.” Her actual quote, found in the autobiography Living My Life, Volume One, was of a similar sentiment but more verbose. In response to being told that as “an agitator” she should not dance, Emma responded, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.” Regardless of your political views I feel like this is something we can all agree on!
Emma was born in Russia in 1869 and had a childhood full of poverty and family strife. At age sixteen she left for America where she found work as a seamstress and factory worker. The event which raised her political consciousness and radicalized her was 1886's Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. A striking workers' protest for the eight-hour day was disrupted by a bomb thrown by an unknown person, and eight anarchists were scapegoated as the perpetrators with little supporting evidence. The subsequent execution of four of the men deeply disturbed Emma, and she soon decided to move to New York to join the anarchist movement. She became a renowned writer, touring lecturer, and co-conspirator in the assassination attempt of steel baron Henry Clay Frick. She was arrested multiple times and deported from the United States in 1919 though her career as an orator and activist continued across Europe and North America throughout the rest of her life.
Beyond being a strong and talented woman in the male-dominated radical activist world, Emma Goldman is notable to me for her work as a nurse and midwife. She first became trained as a nurse while incarcerated at Blackwell's Island Penitentiary. After a stay in the jail's hospital for her own illness, Emma was asked to help out in the hospital by the head doctor. As described in an article called, “'I Am a Trained Nurse': The Nursing Identity of Anarchist and Radical Emma Goldman,”
She...found that she loved nursing. Her experience among the other women prisoners—and as their nurse—provided an education in what she saw as a major injustice; women were jailed for having “ministered” to men’s sexual demands while the men themselves went free. Abused, often afflicted with venereal disease and other illnesses, “they were victims, links in an endless chain of injustice and inequality,” an experience to which Goldman could relate, having written about the violence that accompanied her own first sexual experience before leaving Russia.
After leaving Blackwell's Island, Emma took work as a personal nurse and loved that in having this profession she “no longer [had] to grind at the machine.” In 1895 she went to Europe to formally study nursing and midwifery and upon her return to America she worked in both capacities, nurse and midwife. Of her experience as a midwife she wrote in her autobiography, “My profession of midwife was not very lucrative, only the poorest of the foreign element resorting to such services...But while my work held out no hope of worldly riches, it furnished an excellent field for experience. It put me into intimate contact with the very people my ideal strove to help and emancipate. It brought me face to face with the living conditions of the workers, about which, until then, I had talked and written mostly from theory.” She goes on to describe her particular impression of the struggle of poor women in achieving reproductive autonomy at a time when access to abortion and contraception was extremely limited. While she eventually left nursing to focus on her other projects, her experience working with low-income women stuck with her. In later years she dedicated much writing and public speaking to the fight for access to birth control, something she was arrested for in 1916.
All in all, Emma Goldman is an inspiring figure in radical history. It is interesting to examine how her anarchist identity influenced her work as a nurse, and how her work as a nurse reinforced her philosophy and shaped her actions. I hope you enjoyed this first installment of “Radical Figures in Health History” and stay tuned for next month's profile!
Image By T. Kajiwara (Library of Congress[1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Add a comment
Posted on 8.10.2012 by Lily
AlterNet has a great profile up of Women on Waves, which, if you haven't heard of them, is a bad-ass organization that travels around the world providing safe medication abortion in countries where abortion is illegal or restricted. They accomplish this - legally - by traveling by ship and docking in international waters outside the country in question, and then bringing women who need abortions aboard, where their doctor, founder, and pretty much all-around kick-ass superhero Rebecca Gomperts supervises their medical abortions. Oh yeah, and their sister organization, Women on Web, sends medical abortion pills through the mail. Seriously. Bad. Ass!
According to the article, Women on Waves has been influential enough to inspire various countries to ban misoprostol, which is one of the two main medications used in medical abortion. Unlike mifepristone (the drug formerly known as RU-486, or "the abortion pill"), misoprostol has other uses besides its abortifacient properties. It's primarily approved as an ulcer treatment, and so is widely available in many countries without a prescription for this purpose. Women on Waves' impact has been as much about spreading the information about how to safely access medical abortion as it has been about the actual abortion provision; they now train international women's groups to educate the populace to access and self-administer at-home abortions using misoprostol.
In fact, due to the increased popularity and awareness surrounding medical abortion, the face of illegal abortion has largely changed since the "coat-hanger" days. Which is good, since self-inducing a medical abortion is way, WAY safer than any attempt to manually terminate a pregnancy. (Unless you have an Ipas system and know how to use it, I suppose.)
I've been thinking about medical abortion a lot lately in light of all the recent restrictions on abortion access in the US. In some places, abortion is as good as illegal. I don't know how women in these areas who need abortions are handling it. Probably they're traveling if they can, but according to the AlterNet article, Women on Web's US help desk has seen a surge in calls lately. Which isn't surprising, but I wonder how many of these women - if any - are able to get help from WoW. According to their website, they only help if you live in a country "where access to safe abortion is restricted." Technically, I don't think the US fits the bill, although we all know "access" is relative.
So the upshot of all this is that women in developing countries where abortion is completely criminalized might actually have better, safer access to abortion in some cases than American women:
In many countries where abortion is illegal, women can still purchase Misoprostol from a pharmacy for as little as $1 in Pakistan, for instance, and $12 in Morocco. Gomperts said it might ultimately be easier for women in Africa to terminate their pregnancies than women in Missouri where abortion is technically legal. This is not to say that the struggle for reproductive rights is easier for women outside the U.S., but rather, that in countries with less regulation, side-stepping the law is simpler and safer in this case.
I don't know what illegal abortion would look like in the US today - or what it already looks like. Misoprostol is only available with a prescription. No doubt black market versions exist, but as with all illicit drugs, there's little guarantee of either authenticity or safety. However, I am glad simply for more widespread knowledge and education about these medications. Hopefully, even under illegal abortion, the coat-hanger will fade into obsoletion.
Add a comment
Posted on 8.07.2012 by Chantal
I've been thinking a lot lately about rape. Specifically, about how activists and radicals deal with rape in our communities. Because it happens.
As an anarchist, I'm deeply invested in building community responses to rape that exist outside of the State and capitalism and, particularly, outside of the prison industrial complex. How do we create open spaces for survivors of rape and sexual assault to speak and to heal? And at the same time, how do we respond to the destructive nature of assault in our communities without tearing them apart? How do we acknowledge the humanity of perpetrators of sexual violence while holding them accountable for their actions?
bell hooks said it best when she asked, “How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing, and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
I came across a surprisingly great post on Jezebel the other day about a thread on Reddit that asked perpetrators to share their stories. I should mention, I guess, that I don't have a Reddit account. And I generally try to avoid random internet conversations with men (Reddit, of course, being 66% male) about rape. But shockingly, I think these Redditors are onto something. As one Jezebel blogger argues, perpetrators' stories and experiences matter. It's easy (and right) to argue that victim's voices are too often silenced and outright ignored. But listening to the experiences of perpetrators doesn't have to be a silencing experience. By understanding the motives of perpetrators of assault, we can begin to understand the social and psychological factors that make sexualized violence so prevalent in our society. We can start to invest time and energy in raising generations of men (and women!) who understand the concept of consent and respect the bodily autonomy of others.
Most importantly, I think, some of these Reddit rape stories as told by perpetrators accomplish something that rarely happens in our society. They make perpetrators human. And before you say anything, no, these accounts in no way justify rape or any type of non-consensual sexual violence. Some of these posts are downright nasty, revealing the horrific extent of misogyny in our society. Rape is never okay, regardless of why it happens. But if we can begin to see perpetrators as real human beings who are socialized into the same fucked up world, we can begin to create models and frameworks for rehabilitation that don't involve cops or jail cells.
I, for one, look forward to that.
Add a comment
Posted on 8.03.2012 by Amy
In a landmark case, Namibia's high court has ruled in favor of three women who say they were forcibly sterilized at a state hospital between 2005 and 2007. The women claim they were targeted because they were HIV-positive (although the judge apparently rejected that claim).
Accusations of state hospitals targeting HIV-positive mothers for sterilization have reportedly emerged in multiple countries in Africa, including Kenya, Swaziland and South Africa. In Namibia, about 13 percent of adults are HIV positive.
While it's possible to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child, so-called healthcare providers are apparently taking prevention into their own hands in the most inhumane of ways. It seems the focus on preventing HIV transmission to children can imperil and marginalize their mothers, as HIV/AIDS expert Stephen Lewis noted in a powerful speech at the AIDS Conference* last month. Here's what Lewis said about a global plan launched at a United Nations meeting, "To Eliminate New HIV Infections Among Children by 2015 and Keeping Mothers Alive":
"The people on the inside of this plan know—will never admit but know—that the Keeping Mothers Alive part was an eleventh hour insertion because women are always overlooked. As a matter of fact, if you take a look at the UNAIDS website today, it highlights the Global Plan to Eliminate new HIV Infections Among Children by 2015, giving only a subsidiary cut-line at the end for Keeping Mothers Alive.
"This has been one of the scandals of the history of AIDS. Preventing vertical transmission of the virus from mother to child is perhaps the easiest preventive intervention there is, but we marked time between 2000 and 2005, losing five precious years, and it is only latterly that we’ve suddenly begun to emphasize the importance of the mother."
These cases appear to show that some practitioners are not only ignoring HIV-positive mothers, but actively taking away their reproductive agency. Here's an excerpt from the Guardian article explaining the case:
Continue Reading →
Add a comment
Next Page Previous Page
