To the anti-choicers who trolled me: Thank you.

I'm no stranger to the wasps' nest that is the American fight for reproductive rights, having interned for Ms. magazine, written various pieces about anti-choicers'* legal tactics that seemed to emerge almost daily, attended a rally in LA against the War on Women, and volunteered as an escort outside a women's clinic. Yet the other day I achieved what must be a true milestone in the life of any feminist writer who covers the reproductive rights beat: I got my first anti-choice trolls.

This was as a result of reporting in my capacity as a Lifestyle freelancer for the Daily Dot on Indiana's new restrictive abortion law, which has to be some of the most transparently pointless legislation I've ever seen. It requires aborted or miscarried foetuses to be cremated or buried, effectively furthering the anti-choice position that foetuses are full human beings, plus the emotionally manipulative tactic of "waarrrgh you've killed a BAYBEEEE, we must now have a little funeral for it just to make sure we don't miss out on any opportunity to guilt-trip you, you heartless bitch." And don't even get me started on the horrific emotional burden this hands to survivors of miscarriage, who are given no choice about how they wish to process the already horrible experience of losing a wanted pregnancy. It's also just a massive waste of time and money and presumably adds to the financial burden already on women paying for what is a simple medical procedure. The law also directly flies in the face of the basis of Roe v Wade (which was the constitutionally protected right to privacy) by stating that foetal abnormality is not an acceptable reason for an abortion. Basically, wimminz, if you don't fancy subjecting a child to a life of disability, pain, limitation and discrimination, or carrying to term a foetus that may immediately die after it's born, or may not even make it that far therefore causing you to carry a dead foetus around inside you, you're shit out of luck. Your "reasons" are not good enough for the mostly male senators and congresspeople who thought up this batshit law and voted it in to practice. 

Anyway, having reported on Indiana women's fitting response to a male governor signing this bill into law (which was inundating him with calls about their periods until he was forced to disconnect his office's phone lines), I saw my Facebook Author page blow up with shares, Likes and... yup, here they came...the anti-choice commenters. The first one was a nonsensical image about Planned Parenthood allegedly selling foetal parts, a report that has been widely debunked. Quite what the poster hoped to achieve I'm unsure; did they imagine that as a journalist who keeps abreast of reproductive rights news that I would somehow have missed that particular attempt by anti-choicers to discredit an organisation that does a fantastic job of providing sexual healthcare? Did they think I'd give any credence to the idea that PP is an evil organ-harvesting profiteer that entices women - who are obviously always too weak and stupid and easily influenced to know what they really want - into having abortions just so they can make a buck on selling on the results? 

Sorry folks, you underestimate me. I know you anti-choicers. I've met you. I've seen you handing pictures of what is most likely doll parts covered in fake blood to a woman who's just come out of a clinic and is standing on a roaring hot city street recovering from an anaesthetic. Your credibility with me is less than zero, not least because two of your folks who tried to sting PP have themselves been indicted by a grand jury on counts of fraud (hoooo, ain't justice sweet?). Also, you know what?  - PP are legally allowed to use or pass on fetal tissue for stem cell research as long as the woman who terminated the pregnancy gives her consent (funny idea, isn't it! the crazy concept that the contents of a woman's body is her business to exercise her autonomy over). They're also allowed to claim back their costs for storing or transporting said tissue. What they're not allowed to do is profit from it, but the rest? Well, I'm sure this will confirm in your heads an image of pro-choicers as heartless murdering harridans, but I'm going to stand up and say Planned Parenthood can go apeshit doing whatever they like with foetal parts as far as I'm concerned. Because I support stem cell research. Because I don't equate a foetus with a baby. And because I'm soooo over tactics nakedly designed to try and emotionally blackmail women out of exercising their legal choice by making aforesaid false equation. Take that foetus-fetishising ridiculousness to someone who's actually fooled by it, please.

Which brings me on to the next commenter (after I had deleted the first comment, and of course banned the commenter from my page and reported him to FB) who posted one of the aforementioned pictures of what's probably corn syrup with red food colouring plus some doll parts in a kidney dish designed to look as gory as possible. Well, shit, have they ever seen what childbirth looks like? That isn't a pretty picture either, and it's 12 times more likely to kill you than an abortion, but anti-choicers don't ever mention that little fact, or even care about it because women are expendable whereas foetuses need constitutional rights, apparently. The snidey comment accompanying it was "Doesn't look like a clump of cells now, does it?" Ah, where to even start with that one. Well, how's about the fact that most abortions, if you could see them (and as if anyone working in an industry so regularly threatened with fatal attacks that security in all abortion clinics has to be better that Fort Knox's would somehow be allowed to photograph the aftermath of the procedure anyway, come the fuck on) would look indistinguishable from a heavy period, because 90% take place before 13 weeks? How about the fact that the ones that take place later are often of wanted foetuses that didn't present with serious deformities until the 20-week scan? Or that other reasons for having later abortions including being abandoned by your partner, being prevented from accessing abortion services by an abusive partner, being diagnosed with cancer, being homeless or being misled by an anti-choice doctor? But ultimately, again, to hell with having to justify ourselves to those who think we should fall to our knees and beg for forgiveness just because they wave around pictures of blood and body parts. I don't give a fuck if abortion is gory. I am unmoved by talk of heartbeats, little hands and feet, of foetuses screaming in pain as they're ripped to pieces (and please, fuck all the way off to Uranus with your medically inaccurate fairy tales anyway). Why? Because my belief in a woman's right to control her body is non negotiable. It will not be chipped away by the goriest story or picture you can manufacture. It will not be softened in any way by romanticising of a foetus at the expense of an already live human. It will only ever be strengthened by your nonsense.

(Which, in case it's not already clear, will earn you instant deleting, banning and reporting if you wish to post more of it here or in any of my social media channels. So before you post that meme, why not use your time better by going and volunteering at the local children's home, seeing as you're so invested in mandatory childbirth regardless of whether kids are wanted or not. Better yet, go get some papers and start the process to adopt or foster as many unwanted children as you can. It's called walking the walk, folks. You want no woman to ever abort again? Then you've got a fuck of a backlog to clear first, folks - 102,000 children are currently awaiting adoption in the US alone)

The fact that anti-choice tactics only ever serve to bolster my determination to fight for women's freedom to choose goes to the heart of the matter, I think. We spend so much time pandering to anti-choice jackasses that we forget to stop and ask ourselves, why are we even bothering? Why are we letting them set the terms of the argument, when they would never extend the same courtesy to us? Why should we feel the need to point out that Planned Parenthood don't just provide abortions, but also provide mutiple other crucial sexual health services such as smear tests, contraception, STI testing, tubal ligations (the woman I mention above, who I witnessed being handed a picture of blood and body parts after she emerged from the clinic, visibly woozy, told me that she had just had that very procedure) and that terminations constitute a miniscule percentage of their overal services? As Imani Gandy says, it doesn't matter how much of PP's services are abortions. It wouldn't matter if 100% of them were. Abortion is legal. They are not doing anything wrong. Except in the eyes of anti-choicers, who will always say that PP are doing something wrong, however we try and mollify them. So why do we bother?

On that note, this pro-choicer is announcing that I'm done with respectability politics. And I'd like to thank the anti-woman morons who reminded me of that fact by taking time out of their day to post the most predictable, easily debunked propaganda on my Facebook wall (oh, and for giving my writing more exposure! Really. Cheers, guys). I'm going to say it all, loud and proud.

I don't care if Planned Parenthood provide nothing but abortions. I don't care whether they make money from it. I don't care if they make use of their legal right to pass on foetal tissue for stem cell research. All I care about is that women who need abortions have access to them.

I don't care if women abort in the 9th week or the 24th week, and I don't give a damn what the foetus might look like at any of those stages. All I care about is that women who need abortions have access to them.

I don't care if a woman has an abortion "as a form of birth control," if she has ten abortions in a row, if she has an abortion at 24 weeks because she just lay around eating chocolate and watching Netflix for the previous 23 weeks and then suddenly decided to get off her butt and do something about her situation. I seriously doubt that's ever actually been the case, but my point is, I'm here for that woman's rights just as much as I'm here for the women who were raped, who were let down by contraception, whose circumstances changed, who got cancer, who were already mothers and couldn't care for more kids. I'm here for all those women. I don't need them to pass a respectability test for me to believe in their right to do what they fuck they choose with their bodies.
Because that's a right that men sure as hell enjoy every single day.

*I refuse to use the term "pro-life" as I believe it's a deceptive and manipulative term that paints those who would deny women access to safe and legal abortion as somehow merciful and positive. They are anything but. They are not pro women's lives, safety or autonomy. They are not pro unwanted babies being supported by the state, or pro single mothers, or low income mothers of colour. They are pro sadistically mandated births, and thus they are anti-woman and anti-choice and deserve to be described thus.

Latest Posts By Me

A review of Hillary Jordan's excellent When She Woke - a feminist dystopian novel envisioning the US if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned - for Bitch.

A piece for Women's Views on News about North Wales judge Niclas Parry, who told a rape victim she 'let herself down badly' - even as he was sentencing her GUILTY attacker.

The madness has been setting in....

...and I've been too busy to write about it, unfortunately. That is, the madness of so-called 'Women and Equalities Minister' Maria Miller suggesting that the abortion time limit needs reducing to 20 weeks, and then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt deciding to run with the baton and saying actually, it needs cutting to 12 weeks.

So it's just as well some other writers have been on the case. Wendy Savage asks "Where's the evidence, Mr Hunt?".

Laurie Penny wonders about Hunt's ulterior motives in "The right time for a debate, or the right time for a diversion?"

Mary Ann Sieghart points out Maria Miller is not just misguided, but downright wrong, as "advances in medical science have had no effect on babies’ survival rates below the legal limit of 24 weeks."

Tanya Gold suggests "Miller does not understand why any woman would want an abortion, because she has never needed one".

And Sarah Ditum simply calls Miller's stance what it is - simplistic and dishonest.

On a related note, this excellent video from Guttmacher institute shows that "Some of the highest of abortion rates are where abortion is highly restricted. The world's lowest abortion rates are where the procedure is legal and highly accessible. The way to reduce abortion is not to outlaw it."

One might add that another way to reduce abortion is not to try to erode existing laws that are working fine and pretend you are doing it out of 'concern for women'. MPs Hunt and Miller, take note.

Saturday Morning at the Clinic

It was a hot and sunny Los Angeles morning and we were standing on the dirty paving stones as the traffic blasted past. The sidewalk was narrow, with a constant flow of people trying to get past, to the 7-11, to the dry-cleaners - it was not a comfortable place to be. So why we were there? Because they were there.

They were a mixed group - from a young, olive-skinned man who looked to be in his 20s, to a white man probably in his 60s. A Hispanic lady in her 30s had brought two beautiful young boys with her, wide-eyed long-lashed angels no older than five. A tall, grey-haired man in a light green polo shirt with mirrored aviator shades walked up and down the pavement handing out small business-size cards. And a lady with a too-perfect dyed red bob cut and a face that betrayed the effects of more than one cosmetic procedure slithered up and down the pavements at such an eerily slow pace she appeared to be in a trance. There were a few others, but they were the ones I noticed.

What did this diverse group have in common? Well, they were all clutching rosary beads. They were all murmuring in prayer, and at one point recited the entire rosary in one voice. But the thing that united them was something no one actually mentioned - that they were all anti-abortion, and they were there to try to persuade, intimidate or emotionally blackmail the women who passed them into eschewing the services of the women's clinic around the corner.

They couldn't go any closer to the clinic than this sidewalk, which gave those entering the clinic a buffer zone and, if they came in via car, a chance to enter unmolested. But anyone on foot would have to walk the gauntlet of people praying, swaying, murmuring, and be handed a card depicting pictures of miscarried foetuses.

We were a smaller group, but still diverse. Male and female, white and Hispanic, mothers and childfree. Orange-vested, we stood and chatted and smiled, breaking away every now and then to tell a passer-by 'These are protesters. You don't have to listen to them, you don't have to take anything from them' or to offer to dispose of the disturbing card they'd just been handed. A young woman who was clearly disgusted by the image she'd just been presented with gratefully handed the card over saying, 'Yes, please, throw it away'. A young man looked at the card and boomed 'I don't need to see that shit, I got one on the way'.

A Hispanic lady left the clinic and leaned against the outside wall, clearly waiting to be picked up. Green Polo Shirt swooped in like a vulture, handing her a card. I followed quickly and asked if she wanted me to throw it away. She said it was OK, then asked me what we were doing. I explained that we were volunteers there to help women get into the clinic without harassment, and that the other group were anti-abortion protesters. The woman told me she had just had a tubal ligation and was feeling dizzy. I found it hard to quash my anger that in the middle of a sweltering day, having just had an anaesthetic and an invasive procedure, this woman was being bothered by proselytisers handing her an image likely to make most of us feel queasy even if we hadn't just undergone an operation. The woman pointed out that the clinic provides many other services other than abortions, and delicately said of the protestors 'I think these people are a little confused'.

A college-age white woman stood looking at the protestors for a while. I stepped forward and told her she could ignore them. 'Oh no,' she said, breaking into a smile. 'I think they're great!'. She gave the group a thumbs up as she walked past them. I cringed inside to see a young person so supportive of those wishing to take her bodily autonomy away, but I suppose her 'Catholic University' hoodie should have given me a clue that I wasn't going to win this one.

A fellow escort told me that she had formed a 'good relationship with some of the protestors', and that she even swapped stories of motherhood with one of the anti-choice women. The shouting, confrontation and violence my partner and I had been expecting were nowhere to be found, although we were told that this was not necessarily a typical example, with other clinics being much more beseiged. Instead, the protestors murmured their prayers, and the two little boys played on the sidewalk, at one point even wrapping their mother's rosary beads around themselves and pretending it was a seatbelt. I had to laugh at that one.

It was the later shift so most women were already inside the clinic and we didn't have to do any real 'escorting' - it was more just like a quiet turf war to see who could influence pedestrians the most. So many people accepted the dead-foetus-picture cards without a blink, and only a few threw them away. I suppose it's just a reflex to put out your hand when someone comes towards you offering something. Some groups walked through the protestors totally oblivious - the most likely group, I was heartened to see, being teenage girls, preoccupied with their cellphones and conversations. The protestors didn't even register to these groups, and for once I was grateful for the self-obsession of adolescents.

Gradually the protestors peeled off, and as the mother walked her two boys away they grinned and shouted a cheery 'Goodbye!' to us. Their mother pulled them away angrily. We waited until the last protestor had left, then called it a day. 

I hoped we had done something good, but I couldn't be sure how effective we'd been. Despite our orange shirts stating 'PRO CHOICE ESCORT' in huge letters, many people seemed unaware of what we were doing. A man even congratulated us, under the impression that we were protestors. 

What I wondered most was how the protestors would have been able to justify their actions without religion to hide behind.

Finally.

Doctors confirm what feminists have been pointing out for a long time. Namely, that abortion
a) is actually medically safer than continuing a pregnancy
b) isn't linked to psychological trauma
c) and it'd be a good idea to let women know this.

Thank god some level-headed medics have cut through the ridiculous scare-mongering (the next person who mentions 'post-abortion trauma' will be required to go through a mandatory pregnancy and report back to me which they think is more traumatic) and spoken sense. Of course, anti-choicers are already decrying the supposedly 'liberal agenda' that led to this study...I'm thinking what really led to it was a group of people deciding they'd had enough of women-hating freaks distorting the facts.