LAmom

EFFECTIVENESS VS. RIGHTS

Today is the selected day for the Pro-Life, Pro-Contraception Blogswarm.  Most of my contributions for the day are going to be cheating (referring to posts that I already wrote long ago).  But I'll add one thing that's currently on my mind.

When it comes to our support of the use of contraception, some pro-lifers want to put an onus on us to prove that contraception reduces the rate of abortions.  When statistics come out about the number of abortions going in one direction or another, they want to examine all the numbers to see whether allowing women to use contraception is "working".

But this ignores a larger issue.  That issue is whether a woman has a basic right to do whatever she chooses to do in order to avoid conceiving.  We assert that abortion is wrong because there are two people involved in the situation and one of them is going to end up dead.  But before a woman conceives, there is no other person in the equation.  One person, by herself, making her own decisions about what she wants to do.  What she decides is nobody else's business.  Whether the availability of contraception reduces the abortion rate or not does not change the fact that it is only right for women to have the right to use it.  If we want to reduce the number of abortions, we need to do it by preaching the true message of the sanctity of life of the unborn, not by denying women their right to prevent pregnancy through non-violent means (and I still don't see how people think that taking contraception away would reduce abortions anyway).

Similarly (and I shudder to think about it), there are some people who oppose allowing abortions to save the life of the mother because they fear it would be used as a loophole to achieve unrestricted abortion on demand.  The fundamental truth is that no one should ever be required to lose their life in favor of the life of another person.  Concerns about subversion of that principle to achieve other ends would have to be addressed in other ways, but not by denying someone their right to save their own life.

Similarly (if I may stray from today's subject), a lot of people try to look at capital punishment in terms of whether it has a "deterrent effect" on other would-be criminals.  I don't believe that the effect it has on other people should take priority over the principle of whether or not we believe that the government should have the authority to kill people.

So the overall principle is that if I believe someone has a right to something, I'm not going to be persuaded to trade their rights away to achieve some other goal.

(Ooh, now that's got me thinking about stuff like The Patriot Act.  Stay on topic, Joan.  Stay on topic.)

SOME PRO-LIFE LINKS

I should have done this one a while back: You are invited to sign a petition supporting the Pro Every Life, Pro Woman, Pro Reproductive Justice for All manifesto.  The manifesto was brought by Mary and Jen and supports both the sanctity of life of the unborn (and everybody else) AND the dignity of women and their right to self-determination when it comes to preventing pregnancy.

And this one is just in: Jen is proposing a Pro-Life, Pro-Contraception Blogswarm on May 31, 2008.  If you are anti-abortion and pro-contraception, blog about in on May 31st!  See you then!

BLACK PEOPLE'S DIRTY LAUNDRY

I'm realizing that the thing that most has my stomach in knots about Rev. Jeremiah Wright is maybe less about the effect he might have on the campaigns and more about the fact that I, and probably all black people, know people like that.  People who can be just fine in some areas, but they also have that freaky black-paranoid-rage streak.  And from time to time they say this stuff that make you feel so queasy.  And you get used to putting up with it, but you really, really hope that they never say it in front of non-black people, because you know that other people will think that black people are totally nuts.  And now, here's our dirty laundry on the front pages of major newspapers.  It's been a rough week.

NEW TREND IN CARDBOARD SIGNS?

Yesterday afternoon, I saw this guy holding his sign outside of Trader Joe's:

(click on photo to enlarge)

This is the first time I've seen a homeless person feel compelled to include information about his or her national citizenship.  It's getting weird out there.

Now, if the proposed immigration bill were to become law, would all needy people be required to disclose their residency status before asking for a handout?  Would it be against the law to give an illegal resident some money or a sandwich (or, in this case, a Trader Joe's gift certificate)?

By the way here's a link to my post about immigration from last year.

CHECK OUT MOMS RISING!

If you know me at all, you'll know that THIS is right up my alley:

Help America's Mothers and Families Now!

There is a silent crisis in America. Mothers and families are in trouble. The wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is now greater than between women and men: One study found non-mothers earn 10% less than their male counterparts; mothers earn 27% less; and single mothers earn between 44% and 34% less.

This wage hit has a direct impact on families--a full quarter of families with children under six live in poverty, at least 9 million children don’t have any health care, and far too many parents can’t afford to stay home with sick children. Working toward common sense family-friendly policies like those covered in The Motherhood Manifesto will help all families.

The Moms Rising campaign seeks policies that support parents and children, like parental leave, flexible work options, child care and after-school care, fair wages, and universal health care for kids.

I blog about pregnancy and motherhood discrimination all the time.  Moms Rising seems to be focused mainly on the motherhood side and less on pregnancy equality, but it's all good.

Go sign their petition.  Tell them LAmom sent you.

LISTEN TO THE UTERUS

(cross-posted to LAcrone)

This post ended up going in directions I had not originally planned :-)

So the preliminary results of a Dutch study say:

Women in stressful jobs who become pregnant should virtually halve their time at work right from the start of their pregnancy, according to Amsterdam specialist Gouke Bonsel.

Bonsel, a professor of social health at the well known AMC hospital in the city, says women should work no more than 24 hours a week, if their occupation is stressful.

Preliminary results from a recent study had shown surprisingly strong results, he said.

'We were astonished and we thought long and hard about publishing the results, but it is perfectly clear.

'Women who work 32 hours or more in a stressful position have noticeably lighter children, with all the consequences,' Bonsel says.

The study, a major long-term investigation into pregnancy, found an average weight decline in newborns by 150 grams, the same as that caused by smoking during pregnancy,

There are some instances where pregnant women need special consideration, but I don't think this counts as one of them.  I believe that many of us, male or female, pregnant or not, abuse our health by allowing ourselves to be put under chronic stressful conditions and accepting it as normal.  For us, the consequences may not manifest themselves for a long time.  Pregnancy just happens to be a time when the results of this neglect are more immediate and easier to recognize.

The right response to this data would be to conclude that overstressing people is bad.  The wrong response would be to decide that pregnant employees are a hassle because they can't take the heat.

These stressed-out pregnant moms and their low-birthweight babies are trying to tell us something about our lifestyle.  You can call them our canaries or you can call them our prophets.

All that hippy-dippy ecofeminist talk about the uterus being a cauldron of wisdom -- this is an example of what that means (at least what it means to me).  For instance, some say that the emotional changes women may get premenstrually are not indications that the women are losing their grip.  Rather it's that they are genuinely confronting feelings that they (and the rest of us) are usually in denial about.  We can either listen and learn or we can push it away -- Don't pay any attention to her.  She's got PMS.

PMS, menstrual problems, menopausal storms and more.  I think our wombs are sending us a lot of messages about the toxic (both physically and emotionally) environment we live in.  And a lot of treatments for those problems seem to be aimed at getting those uteruses to just SHUT UP, without looking at what the underlying messages might be.  Your hormones are making you unpredictable and unproductive?  Try these hormones in a bottle.  They'll regulate you nicely.  And if that doesn't do the trick, maybe we'll just take that uterus out.  OK?  Now, back to work.

Don't get me wrong.  There are indeed some instances where women have female problems because their reproductive systems are just plain broken.  But often, we're too quick to conclude that it's the woman's body that's at fault and needs to be either fixed, pitied, or ignored.

Similar ideas explored here, but not female-related.

PEOPLE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD?

Wow.  A cute little neighborhood park with no one in it.

Yesterday the little dudes and I had a lunch picnic at Mills Park, which is right by my parents' house in Carson.  Overall, Carson is a very diverse city, but the Del Amo neighborhood is a stronghold of the demographic that some call the Black Bourgeoisie.

The park is right in the middle of a residential tract.  It's pretty and well-kept, and it was completely empty when we arrived.  BT announced, "I can hear my echo!"  He ran up and down the grassy hills, listening to the reverberations of his voice and his clapping hands.  In the lower-income area where we live, we have never been able to hear echoes at our local parks.  Lynwood and South Gate Parks are always filled with the sounds of other people whenever we visit.  Not only was there no one at Mills Park, the surrounding residential streets also seemed desolate.  There wasn't a soul to be seen except for a couple of guys mowing lawns (I doubt that either of them were the actual owners of the lawns they were mowing).

I'm often struck by this irony in affluent neighborhoods.  Picture-perfect houses with no one in them.  In my neighborhood, the houses are older and the lawns get weedy, but they are inhabited.  In Lynwood, it appears that many more homes have mothers who don't work full-time, and/or have extended families living in one house together, so there are people at home while other people are working.  I'm grateful to inhabit one of those "lived-in" (both in appearance and in fact) homes.

Anyway, the picnic was fun.  BT seems to share my love for plants.  He correctly identified clover flowers, after having been told their name only once in the past!  He picked clover, dandelion, and wood sorrel flowers for me, and he and JG played in the sand.  After over an hour, some young adult men came to the park to play basketball.  They appeared to be on their lunch hour from work.  So at least the park wasn't completely uninhabited when we left.

COOL AERIAL PHOTO

This is from CODEPINK LA's Women Say No to War rally.

RACIST, CLASSIST, ANTI-LIFE AND ANTI-WOMAN'S-CHOICE, JUDGMENTAL . . . AM I LEAVING ANYTHING OUT?

I'm not making this up.  Check out this Dutch politician:

Alderman Marianne van den Anker for the Leefbaar Rotterdam (LR) party has called for a debate in Rotterdam on compulsory abortion and contraception for mothers she believes are responsible for raising unloved babies that fall victim to child abuse.

Yick.  Being pro-life, I know that some people like to call me "anti-choice."  If I'm going to be called that, do I get to define what anti-choice means to me?  Most people who identify themselves as pro-choice are "pro-pregnant-woman's-choice"; they want the woman to be the one who chooses.  To me, what Ms. van den Anker is proposing is a way different form of choice, one where outsiders are given the right to choose which babies will be born and which won't.  That's not anti-choice in my book; that's "pro-government-choice."  My vision of anti-choice would be that nobody would be choosing whether a fetus gets to live or not. But I do, of course, support pregnancy termination if a woman needs it for medical reasons, so I guess that makes me "pro-woman's-right-to-choose-to-save-her-own-life."

I have on rare occasions heard other people advocate compulsory abortion (e. g., in cases where both parents are minors).  But I've never heard anyone actually single out a particular race before:

The three target groups she has in mind are Antillean teenage mothers; drug addicts and people with mental handicaps.

Van den Anker said children from these groups run an "unacceptable risk" of growing up without love and with "violence, neglect, mistreatment and sexual abuse."

Antilleans are folks from the Netherlands Antilles, a group of Carribean islands with an 85% mixed black population.  So a white Dutch teenager is OK to have a baby, but a black one better not try it?  I am the daughter of a black teen mom myself.  Was I at an unacceptable risk of growing up unloved and mistreated?  Amazing how my parents beat the odds!  Of course, Ms. van den Anker might have granted me clemency because my mother was a married teen.

But wait, there's more!  I hope you're sitting down . . .

The politician told the newspaper the courts would decide on whether abortion was the right option. The decision would be based on experts and care workers who "who can see in 95 percent or even 100 percent of cases whether the child has a chance of growing up with love".

This part reminds me of those American politicians who say that under their proposed plan for administering the death penalty, they can guarantee that we will always be 100% certain that the prisoner is guilty before we kill them.

Please, dear experts and care workers, tell me now whether or not I am going to love my baby.  I won't get an abortion no matter what you say, but maybe you can convince me to give my baby to more worthy parents based on your infallible analysis.

Van den Anker supported her argument by suggesting that there were a lot of Antillean youth gangs in Rotterdam whose members come from loveless homes. The gangs, she said, committed rapes, were loverboys (pimps) and guilty of street terror.

"Antillean youths who commit serious crimes have been through everything themselves. History repeats itself and they visit the tragedy of their life history on others," she said.

Again, it seems to be all about the blacks immigrants.  Because white kids never have troubled childhoods or turn to crime.

Fortunately, Ms. van den Anker appears to be alone in her sentiments:

SWA, a foundation promoting health among Antilleans and Arubans in Rotterdam, said the alderman's comments were degrading. It called on the Mayor Ivo Opstelten and the LR's coalition partners, the Christian Democrat (CDA) and Liberal (VVD) parties, to distance themselves from Van den Anker's views. She has also received dozens of emails criticising her ideas.

As legal experts pointed out, Van den Anker's plan would never be permitted, a CDA spokesperson warned: "If Leefbaar Rotterdam raises this idea in the talks to form a new coalition, the CDA will not be part of such an executive."

STUDENTS CAUSE A STIR BY BELIEVING SOMETHING THEY WERE TAUGHT

I liked this story:

The widow of the man who ignited the low-carb craze said she will donate $16,000 to an elementary school where some students refused to sell candy as part of a fundraiser.

The North Side Elementary students said selling the chocolate bars and potato chips went against what they were taught in school about healthy eating. They were raising money for a field trip to Washington D.C.

Veronica Atkins said the donation will come from her foundation, which promotes her mission to combat Type II diabetes.

``I was so proud when the children said you're telling us not to go out and eat sugar and then you ask us to sell it,'' Atkins, 68, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Tuesday's edition. ``I said no way am I going to let them down and not let them go on the field trip.''

I'm not saying that I have a perfect diet, but I do try to limit my sugar intake.  And I do get tired of sweet-faced children asking me to support their causes by buying sugary stuff.  Sometimes, when I was single and had more money, I would give a dollar and refuse the candy.  These days I just say no, thanks.

In my younger days, the young women at our church (teens and early twenties) wanted to do a fundraiser once.  The first suggestion, of course, was a candy sale.  I suggested that instead of offering something that really wasn't good for people, we could offer something that would be more worthwhile, like maybe cleaning people's houses for money.  My idea was quickly shot down.