03/2006 Part III

This began as a response to a comment on my last blog, but, characteristically, got so dry and long-winded that it’s now a blog in its own right. I do plan to write real blogs, with quotes and stats and what-have-you, but it’s spring break right now and you can all fuck yourselves while I get drunk and pick a fight.

But by way of a quick rundown of the news:

Criminal investigation into Pat Tillman’sdeath.

Very good discussion on possibilities of Roe v. Wade case on Salon’s Broadsheet

10 statesconsidering SD-style bill (AL, GA, IN, KY, MO, MS, OH, OK, TN, WV), all states with anti-choice local government. (Okay, customary Afro-American studies plug: remember when LA passed that, oh what was it called, oh yeah, literacy tests, grandfather clause, and poll tax laws and BOOM the rest of the South copy and pasted it? God, *puff puff* fucking flashback, man).

Suspects arrestedin church burning case. Claim it was a joke that got out of hand. I would make a cutting joke but look at them — God beat me to it.

Oh, and my personal favorite:

Meet Bill Napoli. He’s a senator from SD, and he wants to share his hard-on with you.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/06.html#a7412

(obligatory Afro-American studies plug: remember back in the good old days of lynching when that necessary evil was committed because the bestial black men, they raped the white women, they raped them for hours, first they tore their clothes off and then, as the pure virginal Christian woman pleaded for her life, he pulled out his throbbing member and then six black bucks walked in, each with a bigger dong than the last… yeah, this isn’t new, state senators talked like that back then, too)

Now onto the post. A real one maybe in a week. Maybe. Why am I making promises to you? Fuck you! I’m gonna spend this week getting laid.

* * * *

First of all, I want to point out some very important language you used:

“in my personal experience.”

And your experience is indeed very personal. In some ways it’s unique, in some ways it’s common, but it’s very personal. This is the major deficiency in every law meant to regulate women’s reproductive rights. Every woman has an extremely personal experience, and one size cannot possibly ever fit all. This is true of all laws, but when it comes to reproduction, the consequences of falling through the cracks are far more dire, not just for the woman, her mate, and her potential child, but for the taxpayers who foot the bill, too.

Let’s take your example. Now, you say you heard about birth control from a friend in high school, who, despite not being middle-class, somehow knew how to get free birth control through the school. You’re lucky you’re in (bland Midwestern state)! That is one of the few states a teenage girl could do that, and thank god, because I know plenty of girls who really truly needed the care they got at that free clinic. There is no federal mandate requiring that all states provide reproductive services to teenagers, and especially not for free, and especially not without parental consent. You had a pretty easy experience. Had you been born somewhere else, finding and then acquiring birth control would have been far more difficult (if possible at all).

Now when I talk about the poor or the whites or the what-have-you, bear in mind that I’m speaking in generalizations. Most of what I say isn’t going to apply to (bland Midwestern state) because overall, birth control and abortions are not too difficult to acquire there. There are several Planned Parenthoods across the state (though only one provides abortion services) that are relatively easy to access (since usually only the one that provides abortion services has protesters) and do not have to simultaneously cope with threatened violence and draconian laws from the legislature meant to shut them down (for example, South Dakota is attempting to shut down its lone Planned Parenthood by continually passing new laws dictating the mandatory size for hallways — if Planned Parenthood can’t continually come up with the funds to remodel their clinic, by law they have to shut down. Now you try and tell me that’s about drywall).

Talking about reproductive rights in generalizations presents some real problems, I know, and that’s part of the reason for the general disarray of the debate in the public sphere. Because when I say “generalization,” it’s more of a shorthand for “slippery slope” or “worst-case scenario.” For example, take the 24 hour wait bill. Our state has one of these, and it dictates that a woman seeking abortive services must wait a full day after making her decision to actually receive the abortion. In theory, I am completely and fully against this law — I find it demeaning to women’s decision-making capabilities, and I do not as a whole trust that once that door is opened, the government intends to stop at 24 hours (every new law sets precedent… our 24 hour wait law included language calling the fetus a human citizen, just to give you a nice view of the future).

But, okay, I’m willing to admit that on the whole, in practice, this law doesn’t hinder most women. You make your appointment, you go home, you watch some TV, you get up in the morning and you go back to the clinic. If, in that time, a woman is so wracked by guilt that she decides she can’t go through with it, well, maybe that’s a woman who shouldn’t have been having an abortion anyway. A law like that is also a fairly small price to pay to gain more moderates in the pro-choice camp.

Now take the same law in North Dakota. North Dakota, first of all, has no Planned Parenthoods (see draconian building codes and harassment, above). It has, in fact, only one abortion clinic in the entire state (and without the bulwark of Planned Parenthood’s funding, you can imagine how easy it is to operate). Doctors trained in North Dakota do not receive training in performing abortions (they must outsource for that, if they so desire, and most opt-out). North Dakota also has a conscience clause, meaning that any doctor can refuse to perform abortion services, even if it’s the only doctor your health care will cover. Most refuse to do so because in a heavily anti-choice state, they are either anti-choice themselves, or know they risk losing business or being firebombed if they don’t toe the line (I’m not being facetious… OB/GYNs still wear bulletproof vests in that state as a matter of course). So, North Dakota must fly in doctors, who can usually only come for one day per week or month and at great risk to their personal health and professional status.

Add to this a 24 hour wait law, and here’s the situation you have: A woman who needs an abortion must make her appointment (hopefully she has not discovered she is pregnant near the end of her third trimester and has to wait a month for the doctor to arrive, at which point she must now legally carry and bear the child). She must make an appointment, and then, the next day, arrive again at the clinic. Remember, sole abortion clinic in ND, and sole abortion clinic = protesters, every day, all day. In the case of the above link, protesters who photograph you and your license plate and place them on the Internet. In a state that thinks you’re a slut in the first place. Where, after being photographed, you now must wait a full day, knowing your license plate is on several websites, and knowing the same protesters will be there tomorrow, full well knowing why you returned in 24 hours.

So, this is the problem with speaking in generalities. A law that I am against in theory but can abide in practice in this state is a law that could quite literally get a woman killed in the Dakotas (never heard of a pro-choicer going crazy and shooting the Christian Coalition, have you?). Making generalities about white women and middle-class women and educated women is not to whitewash all their differences. But, in a country where women were granted the rights to their uteruses only thirty years ago, and has been rapidly backpedaling since, making generalizations that assume worst-case scenarios isn’t out-of-hand. I can be against a 24 hour wait period overall even if it’s not harmful in this state, because it could be and very easily is.

Likewise, I can speak in generalities about non-white women and poor women because even if this isn’t the case for all of them, it could be and very easily is. And I agree with you that we don’t give non-white women and the poor enough credit — survival for them is a much harder feat day-to-day than most of us have experienced in our entire lives, and yet survive they do. I don’t mean to say that the poor and non-white aren’t resourceful or intelligent, but blow for blow, they encounter the worst obstacles to reproductive care.

This has nothing to do with something inherent in non-white or poor women — it’s just the strategic difficulties of being non-white and poor intersecting with stigmas and stereotypes about welfare mothers, black mothers, etc. (For the following I’m not going to provide links because I plan to write a blog on it later, when I have time to be more thorough). For example, welfare caps. There are several states that place a cap on the amount of welfare benefits you can receive vis-a-vis your children. That is, if you enter the system with two children, you may only receive benefits for two children. If you enter with none, you may only receive benefits for yourself. If you have any children while on welfare, well, they’ll just have to fucking starve. But wait! Couldn’t you use birth control? Not on welfare’s dime, you can’t. It’s not covered. Couldn’t you get an abortion? Not on welfare’s dime.

Couldn’t you get sterilized? Of course! We cover that! (If there’s something on the tip of your tongue here, I’ll help: it’s called eugenics). What does this have to do with being black? It may surprise you to know that the majority of people on welfare rolls are white. Blacks are a very small percentage. However, proportional to their population, blacks are overly represented on welfare rolls. But when you hear welfare queen, you’re not thinking of a white woman, are you? When you hear teenage mother, she’s not white, is she? So how do laws like welfare caps get passed? When you hold up a picture of a black woman and call her a welfare queen driving her fancy-ass Cadillac and popping out babies like they was toast, that’s how (thanks, Ronnie!). Thus, when laws are passed restricting reproductive care on welfare’s dime, they affect the poor in general, but black women are affected the hardest, because they are the most disproportionately poor. And one look at the rhetoric used to pass these laws (I’ll dig something good and juicy up for you later, but for now you can check out www.sistersong.net) lets you know that restrictive laws are passed because race-baiting has never let a politician down yet. When reproductive rights are chipped away at in this country, it begins with the poor and it begins with the colored, because who gives a shit about them? Most (non-poor) normal (white) women don’t have any trouble getting their birth control, so overall things must be okay, right?

But let’s get off the black boat and talk about the poor. Okay, you’re poor as shit, and you live in North Dakota. People who have been poor will know what I’m talking about here — when you’re poor, everything is a far more enormous hassle. You’re living close to the line, and if one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong. So, in that spirit, here is a partial list of everything you can do right, and the ways it can go wrong if you’re poor:

1) Get on birth control — can’t. Your plan won’t provide for it (and before you start feeling too safe, read this). Or maybe you’re on welfare. Same deal.

2) Get on birth control and you can afford the copay or exorbitant fee. Oops! Your local pharmacy is run by a pro-lifer, who won’t fill your prescription. Okay, maybe on your next day off you can get on the city bus and ride two hours to another pharmacy. Oh! They won’t fill it either! Okay, day trip two towns over to find a legitimate pharmacist. How much work have you missed by now? Can you afford the gas? Do you have kids? Can you afford a babysitter? Maybe you’re pissed. Maybe you’d like to sue. Got a lawyer? Ha!

3) Use condoms. This one is pretty fail-safe, unless, of course, there’s not a store in town that stocks them, or your lover refuses, or you actually can’t afford condoms and there’s no Planned Parenthood in your entire state to give them away like candy.

4) Get knocked up, can’t afford a kid, need an abortion. Well, let me just go to my closet full of money bags and get 3 to 4 hundred dollars. In the meantime I’ll call my boss and tell him I need a few days off to drive cross-state, he totally won’t mind and I can totally afford it. Oh, wait, I don’t have a car. Okay, more moneybags for the bus ticket. And child care. And accomodations when I have to stay overnight (24 hours, ladies!). And another day off to rest or risk further complications. I can totally afford all that, no problem.

You’re right, we don’t give poor and non-white women enough credit, for going through all that shit (and it’s just a partial list, mind you) and still managing to get abortions, birth control, or bear and raise kids they couldn’t afford and didn’t want. But, and here’s the catch, they shouldn’t have to do that. And they do. I’m not saying only white middle-class women have information about and access to reproductive services; I’m saying it’s a lot fucking easier for them. Think about pre-Roe v. Wade days. The women dying in back alleys sure as shit weren’t the ones with money to spend — the ones with money to spend were flying to Mexico or Switzerland to get it done by a real doctor, sans coat hanger, while their black housekeeper got a friend of a friend of a friend to shove two feet of rubber tubing into her uterus and let it coil for a full day.

Historically, the women with money to spend are white. I could go into a very long diatribe about why this is so, and I will if you want me to, but I’m willing to bet you already knew this. When reproductive rights in this country are steadily chipped away at, and if/when they are overturned completely, the women who will be least affected will be the ones who can pay their way out of the obstacles, and for a multitude of historical reasons these women are more likely to be white and middle-class.

You came from a good place, somewhat sensible. It didn’t matter that you’re not middle-class, you still got the care you needed. Lord knows I love this state for it. But, same time period, same country, sameyou, if you were born one state over, you would have been fucked. Unless, that is, you had the money to buy off the fucking.