Here’s a guest blog by Madison Burnett, rising 3L at Georgia State University and recently elected LSRJ national board president.

Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia is not an easy place to be a reproductive justice advocate. Abortion rights are constantly threatened at the state level, and every legislative session in Georgia provides new laws that undermine a woman’s decision to have an abortion or bills that serve as an attempt to challenge to the constitutional right to abortion. Anti-choice groups continue to disproportionately target the South and rural areas where they think- with some reason- that they will be more successful.

The week of July 14-20 served as a harsh reminder to the South’s reproductive justice community that our rights continue to be threatened. The anti-choice group “Operation Save America” came to Atlanta last week. The group, formerly known as Operation Rescue, has a history of blocking access to abortion and family planning clinics and some members have advocated violence against abortion providers. Their threatening activities of the week included throwing a brick through an abortion provider’s window, but luckily no one was injured.

Apparently even anti-choice conservative Christian churches aren’t acceptable enough for OSA. The group even protested at a church in the Sugar Hill suburb because the pastor had the audacity to indicate that women who have abortions shouldn’t be demonized. They also targeted moderate churches who support abortion rights and welcome gay parishioners.

OSA targeted Atlanta in an attempt to pervert our city’s history in the civil rights movement, twisting civil rights language with the goal of restricting women’s power to control their bodies and lives. This majority white, majority male group have gone so far as to accuse Black women and their families as “perpetrators of black genocide.”

The RJ community in Atlanta responded with strength and intelligence. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, SPARK Reproductive Justice Now , and Planned Parenthood of Georgia led the way, organizing a press conference, counter-protests, and informative workshops. I have never been prouder to be a part of the RJ movement then when I read Spark and SisterSong’s joint statement. Spark also beautifully co-opted the group’s “sidewalk counseling” practice outside a OSA rally.

OSA’s presence is a reminder to all of us of the importance of standing up for reproductive justice, both as citizens and as future lawyers.

I have been talking to mothers a lot lately, in part because my peers are increasingly married and starting families, but also because I am increasingly engaged in feminism and reproductive justice. Discussion about women’s rights, health, and experiences lead inevitably to motherhood and its place in our female identities—and often to conflict over what that place should be.

I myself am not a mother, nor do I particularly want to be. I am not motherly. I have always put other priorities above reproduction–education, career, activism–and besides, babies terrify me with their helplessness and fragility. Handed an infant, I hold it gingerly as I might an oddly shaped, wriggly Ming vase until it bursts into tears, at which point I relinquish it with a deep sense of relief. Nevertheless, I am assured by older female relatives that the maternal instinct will manifest, like some latent superpower, “when you have your own, of course.” I find this unlikely, and I’m suspicious of the implication that all women must have this aptitude. That if I do not have it or want to have it, there is something not quite right about me, even in this day and age. That all women want to be mothers. “Of course they do…”

But in talking to women who are mothers–feminist women, women of all generations, not just my “Gen Y”–and particularly to those who have chosen motherhood over a career, I hear, over and over, a sentiment that, at first, surprised me. That motherhood is devalued in our society–that other people, other women, look down on mothers for abandoning their career, implying that a woman cannot be a mother and a feminist. That they must work to gain respect and social status, when in fact motherhood is “the most important thing a woman can do with her life.” Even Rebecca Walker, the prominent third-wave feminist, recently had some harsh words to say about feminist devaluation of motherhood by her own mother, Alice Walker.

Knowing what I know about the abortion debate in the U.S., the ongoing erosion of Roe v. Wade, and the constant pressure brought to bear on women’s autonomy in the law, at first I couldn’t understand where these women were coming from. My experience, of course, is quite different. I see the message of exalted, sacred motherhood at every turn, at every level of public discourse. I see motherhood placed at the center of what it means to be a “real” woman, “natural” motherhood raised above all, my own choices dismissed as just a stage, an anomaly. “You’ll change your mind, you’ll see.” (And I do catch myself wondering, sometimes, what is wrong with me that I don’t want that.)

But then I took a step back, and I realized something stunning (to me.) They were right.

(more…)

I (your regular blogger) am traveling this week, so in my stead we’ve got a great guest post from another law student leader in LSRJ….

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This is a slight departure from the current events/political slant usually taken by this blog.  It’s more personal in nature- I’ve been thinking about what the connection is between being a law student and being a reproductive justice advocate, and this is one of those connections for me.  The thought stemmed from a discussion I had with my law professor who led the legal clinic I worked in last semester, which provided services for low-income families:

Law professor: you have a really great, distinctive counseling style.  Where did that come from?
Lowly law student:  hmmm…actually, it came from working in an abortion clinic.

I started working in the clinic right after college, while trying to figure out the next steps in my life.  I was a counselor.  Every day the waiting room would fill with women and girls, mostly pregnant and not wanting to be.  I would meet with them after their lab work and sonogram confirmed the pregnancy and how far along they were.  It was my job to learn about their situations, discuss their options, and support their decision- in short, to be an advocate.  Here’s what it taught me that will make me a better lawyer:

•    Start with an open ended-question.  Both at the abortion clinic and the legal clinic, that was usually, “Could you tell me about what brought you here today?”  Allowing people to tell their story is incredibly important.
•    People in crisis need someone to be calm.  Having an abortion can be an incredibly stressful experience, and so can walking into a lawyer’s office for the first time.  Many women seeking an abortion, and many people seeking the help of a lawyer, have been living in perpetual crisis for some time.  Providing a measured, sympathetic presence is one of the most important things an advocate can do.
•    The best way to figure out what’s really going on is just to let someone talk, with an occasional question or reflection.  Immediately launching into a speech, a list of options, or interrupting someone is a sure way to mask the true situation and shut someone down.
•    A problem does not stand on its own.  A woman may come into the clinic because she is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, but may also be dealing with other issues, such as lack of child care, an ill parent, or an abusive relationship.  These problems may be keeping her from being able to deal with the immediate problem.  The same thing happens in legal situations- a client may come into a lawyer’s office for a divorce, a will, or to sell a piece of property, but is simultaneously dealing with multiple other issues.  It is the responsibility of the advocate to find out what else is going on, and address the problems together, because that’s how they got to be problems in the first place.
•    Time constraints are real.  Sometimes you might have only 15 minutes with a client.  However, when working at the abortion clinic I learned to never be afraid to ask the client to come back before taking action.  If your instinct says, “something isn’t right here,” you’re probably correct.  At the abortion clinic it often meant that someone (a boyfriend, a husband, a mother) was pressuring the woman into having an abortion, and she wasn’t ready yet.  In a legal context, it could mean that you haven’t had time to fully explore what is going on with the client, and if someone needs to end the meeting, you should make a follow-up appointment rather than rushing into something without all the information.
•    Sometimes you have to ask for help.  If there’s a situation you don’t know how to handle, there’s almost always someone to talk to about it.
•    This isn’t about the advocate, it’s about the client.  Trust their judgment.  They’re the one who has to live with the decision.

So there you go.  Want to be a better lawyer?  Work in an abortion clinic.

Editors’ Note: Today we’ve got a very special guest post from Kara Loewentheil, the president of the LSRJ board and a 3L at Harvard Law School. Kara brought this story to my attention and I suggested she write about it, since I couldn’t think out of fear that my head might explode. Luckily, Kara was able to keep it together. Here she is:
Although the conversation in question took place over the summer, it is only now making its way through the blogosphere: a taped recording of a phone call in which an anti-choice organization, posing as a racist prospective donor, offers a donation to Planned Parenthood of Idaho if they will use the money specifically to perform abortions on African-American women because, the fake “donor” said, “the less black kids out there the better.” It’s hard to even know where to start with how disturbing this story is, on multiple levels. First, of course, there is the fact that anti-choice organizations are using their time and money to try and trick reproductive health care providers into saying or doing something that can be used to stir up negative publicity. It’s this kind of duplicitous behavior aimed at not only tarnishing the reproductive justice movement but diverting its resources away from patient care and into defensive action and media response that many reproductive justice activists find incredibly frustrating.

But more important, of course, is Planned Parenthood of Idaho’s reaction to the fake donation offer. The charge of racism is particularly weighted in the reproductive health care and reproductive justice movements. While reproductive justice itself is a movement that was born out of the experiences of women of color in particular, the mainstream reproductive health and rights communities have often unfortunately been out of touch with the needs of marginalized populations, particularly poor women of color. The history of experimentation on the bodies of poor women of color in this country has given rise to a healthy skepticism about the ways that the mainstream medical community behaves in treating the reproductive health needs of women from these communities. It’s thus clear that even assuming the best of intentions, reproductive health care providers must go above and beyond in distancing themselves from this legacy.

Planned Parenthood of Idaho apologized for the caller’s responses and called her approach “a serious mistake.” Bloggers and activists have disagreed on how to interpret the tape - whether the Planned Parenthood employee was happy and eager to accept the donation, whether she was confused and flustered, etc. It’s impossible for us to know. You can hear the tape recording of the phone call here and read the transcript here, and see what you think for yourself.

Hopefully we can all at least agree not only that reproductive health care providers should be very clear about their rejection of such offers, and that we would all be better off if the anti-choice organizations making these calls would put their time, money, and volunteer energy into doing something that actually improved reproductive health care for women and their families.

..But not in the way you might think.

For some time now, abortion rights advocates and other social justice activists have been pushing to bring women’s rights into the rubric of human rights. A Center for Reproductive Rights button that I’ve often seen pinned to jackets and bags at rallies reads: Reproductive Rights are Human Rights. The same could of course be said for women’s rights more broadly — women’s rights are human rights. But the U.S. has been slow to recognize them as such, and has snubbed international human rights bodies (like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) even when it does recognize something as a human right. Women’s rights organizations fight against sexual exploitation and the enslavement of women around the world, again relying on human rights norms.

Which is why it’s so jarring to see radical anti-woman and anti-abortion activists trying to usurp these terms. As Salon’s Broadsheet reported yesterday, “a group of African-American antiabortion activists will be holding three events in the Bay Area this month in support of the idea that “abortion is the Darfur of America.” The leader of the event will be San Francisco’s Walter Hoye, the founder of the Issues4Life Foundation, who calls abortion “the leading cause of death in the African American community.” The rally’s organizers, like George W. Bush and other anti-abortion extremists, also compare abortion to slavery, and Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. Hoye also likens opposition to reproductive justice and abortion rights to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. From Broadsheet:

“‘It is not the first time a segment of the community has had their rights denied,’” he’s quoted as saying. “‘It is a civil rights issue because it is dehumanizing and not giving proper status as a citizen. Most people on the opposite side think it is not a person, just like they did during slavery. It is not the first time this country has done something wrong.’”

While I would agree with him that Dred Scott was wrong and that the U.S. has an ugly history of treating Blacks as less than full citizens, that’s where our agreement ends. And it’s worth noting a gaping hole in Hoye’s legal argument. Again from Broadsheet:

I have to admit to being a little confused by the logic here. Are we calling abortion genocide? Or are we saying that fetuses are slaves? Can you have civil rights if you don’t have fingernails? And do either of these comparisons make any sense? It seems as if they share the same general tactic: Think of something really, really bad, and then say it’s like abortion. This could lead to great bumper stickers: “Abortion = Auschwitz.” “Osama Bin Laden [hearts] Planned Parenthood.” “Your Doctor Raped My Fetus.” Attention-grabbers, sure — but not the most logical arguments on the block.

What’s more, Hoye, like so many other anti-woman extremists, not only fights against abortion rights, but also against the comprehensive sex education programs and healthcare reform that could prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place, and could bring birth control usage rates among poor communities to levels equaling its use in wealthier areas. So Hoye, again like so many others with whom his views are aligned, pushes a lose-lose situation for women: continued lack of access to information and contraception coupled with an inability to terminate pregnancies that a woman does not want to or cannot bring to term.

And Hoye does all of this in opposition to the NAACP, the Nation’s leading Black civil rights organization. Rev. Amos Brown, the President of the San Francisco NAACP, isn’t mincing words. He says:

“San Francisco’s top civil rights issues are education, economic empowerment and political engagement,” Brown said. “African American students are behind every ethnic group in this city academically. People who are learned and informed do the right thing. If not, they engage in destructive behavior. These pro-life people are demagogues and ideologues…”

The bottom line is that abortion is a civil rights and human rights issue, but not in the ways that Hoye thinks it is. Abortion rights, and related reproductive justice initiatives, protect and advance the civil rights of women in the U.S. An expansion of funding for education and contraception and an end to the Hyde Amendment would ensure that no woman is denied her right to self-determination (a right so central to civil rights) simply because she is poor or because she lives in a certain part of the country or a certain state. If we really care about civil rights and not just the rhetoric surrounding them, this is the side we should be on.

(Caption: Huckabee loves babies. The women who give birth to them? Not so much.)

Feministing’s Jessica Valenti has snagged a guest-blogger gig at the Nation, and she’s making the most of it in her first post, taking on Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s views on women and abortion. She writes:

Papa Huckabee is on one heck of a sexist roll.

Just this past weekend Huckabee said, “I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that’s why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor…I think you don’t punish the woman, first of all, because it’s not about … I consider her a victim, not a criminal.”

Now, you have to love that Huckabee assumes abortion providers are men (I suppose that makes it easier to paint them as taking advantage of poor widdle women), but even worse is the assumption that women don’t realize that when they get an abortion, they’re getting an abortion” (emphasis in original).

Paternalism like this from the men in positions of power in the U.S. is nothing new. But it kills me that the more Huckabee says stuff like this, the higher he polls in Iowa and other places. He is ascendant even as he is increasingly public with his antiquated and evangelically-motivated views of women (and gay people, and people who are HIV-positive). All this despite the fact that it turns out that Huckabee has accepted over $50,000 in speaking fees from groups that support stem-cell research and increased access to emergency contraception.

This tactic of blaming the doctor and excusing the woman as not accountable for her own actions is old hat for the anti-woman anti-abortion brigade. It’s a hypocrisy they don’t often address. So perhaps we should give Huckabee props for coming out and saying what his fellow misogynists think: the reason we shouldn’t punish women for seeking abortions but should punish their doctors is that women are not sound moral actors while doctors are. Shocking and saddening that in the year 2008 this notion still gets so much traction…but it does.

All that said, the Iowa caucuses tonight and the primaries that follow over the next month or so will be at least in part a measure of what’s more important to Republican America: culture-war type misogyny and closed-mindedness or real-world credentials and plans to deal with the mess of a situation the Bush Administration has left. I don’t want any of the GOP candidates as my President, but I’d certainly be more disgusted and less hopeful about the coming years to see Huckabee’s name on the ballot than some of the others.

[Note: the political opinions discussed in this post and on this blog are the author’s alone and do not represent the views of LSRJ, which is a non-partisan nonprofit organization].

[and I’m back!]

The South Dakota abortion ban, which was handily rejected by voters in 2006, is making an unwelcome return.  Despite the fact that state legislators last year refused to resuscitate a statewide abortion ban (after a statewide organizing drive), a group of lawmakers (and others) are circulating a petition to get an abortion ban referendum on the ballot next November (this time with exceptions for rape, incest, and a woman’s health). They need about 16,000 signatures to get it on the ballot; there are 800 abortions performed annually in South Dakota.

The kicker in all this? One of the legislation’s sponsors is an Ob/Gyn who for one year worked at a Planned Parenthood.  From the Rapid City Journal:

Thirteen people sponsored the petition, including Dr. Patricia Giebink, a Chamberlain obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions at Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls in 1996 and 1997. In 2006, she started working on the campaign to ban them.

The proposal would effectively prohibit abortions as a means of birth control, Giebink said.

“This is what the people said they wanted after the 2006 campaign. And a number of polls since then indicate a majority of people believe abortion should not be a method of birth control,” Giebink said.

“We have worked with a panel of experts to ensure this bill will make a good law. We went with what we did before, plus we made the changes that we said the people wanted.”

Ok, first, as Cara points out, abortions are a method of birth control in the most formalistic sense — they prevent births.  Second, is anyone else sick of this birth control as straw man argument? Because I sure am. There’s more than ample proof that the vast majority of women do what they can to prevent pregnancies. What’s more, discussing abortion as birth control as in “an easier substitute for the pill” shows a total lack of understanding of the intricacies of women’s lives — the fact that some women cannot afford or do not have access to birth control, the fact that cultural barriers or domestic violence prevents a woman from using birth control when she would like to, the fact that sometimes pregnancy just … happens. Pretending for your own PR that women are just too damn irresponsible to prevent pregnancy in the first place is both condescending and flat-out not true.

The great irony, of course, is that the rhetoric surrounding the push for an abortion ban in South Dakota has been all about how abortion “hurts” women (though notably lacking any proof that it does). But I can’t think of much that would hurt women more in the long run than talking about them (us) as if they (we) were five year olds who just didn’t think of the consequences of their (our) actions.

The blogosphere has been a-twitter with the news this week of a proposed Missouri ballot initiative that would virtually ban abortion in the state. Unlike the South Dakota ban that was defeated last year, this ballot initiative does not come right out and admit its intentions to bar the procedure; instead, it would create such onerous requirements that no doctors would be able to perform abortion in the state and it would become de facto illegal. Insidious, huh?

Here’s why: According to the Jefferson City (MO) Star, the Missouri ballot initiative “would require doctors to extensively review the medical literature on abortion and investigate each patient’s background and lifestyle. It would require doctors to certify that the abortion was better for the woman than a full-term pregnancy.”

Taking a page right of Justice Kennedy’s Gonzales v. Carhart play book, in which he more than implied that women should not be trusted with a “decision so fraught with emotional consequences,”  this ban suggests that women are not…smart? autonomous? adult?…enough to decide for themselves whether or not to end a pregnancy. Instead, doctors need to protect the poor little women to make sure they don’t make a mistake. And if the doctors “fail” and a woman later regrets her abortion? The doctor would be subject to civil suit.

Missouri’s ballot initiative makes clear how worried we should be about the emergence of the “abortion hurts women” argument - a line of “reasoning” that first appeared in the fight over the South Dakota ban. That the “abortion hurts women” line resonates with so many people is worrisome. Not because it’s true (which, on the whole, it is not), but because it validates the antiquated thinking that women are not men’s equals and not entitled to the full autonomy that citizenship provides. And because so many people seem to want that idea validated to begin with.

Over the past few years, the RJ community has been watching the Right’s shift in abortion rhetoric. The forced pregnancy folks went from talking about dead fetuses to focusing on how abortion is supposedly bad for women.

Or so we thought.

This week, two proposed state bills would bring the those fetuses back…with a vengeance.

In Colorado this week, the state Supreme Court cleared the way for a ballot initiative that would change Colorado law to recognize a fetus as a person from the moment of fertilization. That’s right. Before there’s even a pregnancy (which doesn’t occur until the fertilized egg implants in the uterine lining and starts to produce the hormones that sustain it), there would be a person. With full constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. Which makes me think that anything from using embryonic stem cells to having your period could make you at best responsible for a violation of someone else’s constitutional rights and at worst a murderer. Not sure what I mean? As bean at Lawyers, Guns & Money puts it:

If the law were to pass, it would mean no abortion. No selective reduction for women who become pregnant with several embryos through IVF. No stem cell research. And, yes, no menstruation. Because about 1/3 to 1/2 of fertilized eggs fail to implant and are flushed out of the body during menstruation. Which, as Amanda notes, would make “your average tampon a potential scene of negligent homicide.”

Echidne wonders:

And do pregnant women count as two persons if this measure is passed? Do they have to pay for two at theaters and at movies? Do they get double rations in the military? What about a pregnant woman who watches an R-rated movie? Should we punish her for exposing the microscopic American to filth?

Funny, but only because it’s so damn appalling.  What’s worse, it’s not unique. Today, the National Partnership for Women and Families reported that a Montana legislator has proposed a similar bill to define person as beginning at fertilization. Rick Jore, the bill’s sponsor, had this to say:

According to Jore, the measure would not directly outlaw abortion but would establish constitutional rights for a fetus or human embryo, so they could not be deprived of “life, liberty and property” without due process of law, Jore said. “There’s been an effort across the nation to go to this strategy in the pro-life arena, to challenge the whole notion of Roe v. Wade by establishing the definition of a person,” he said.

The good news is that he proposed an identical bill last year, and it failed. The bad news is that he got 45 votes in support of it (and 53 opposed). It can’t be that 45 of 100 average Americans think fertilized eggs are constitutional people too, can it? If I’m wrong, we might have even more work to do than I thought.

A book to add to my very long list of books to read: Dr. Susan Wicklund’s “This Common Secret:  My Journey as an Abortion Doctor.” In her book, Dr. Wicklund, an abortion provider who flies into underserved areas to perform abortions, takes on the abortion taboo.

We don’t talk about it,” she said in a telephone interview. “People say, ‘Nobody I know has ever had an abortion,’ and that is just not true. Their sisters, their mothers have had abortions.”

She’s right. We don’t talk about abortion. We don’t talk about how common it is. We don’t question loudly enough our tacit acceptance of abortion as something shameful. And - and this is a hard pill even for many RJ advocates to swallow - we don’t talk about how even with all the prevention in the world, abortion would still exist, would still be central to women’s reproductive health, and must still be legal.

That said, Dr. Wicklund’s not perfect. It seems she too is focused on the line of rhetoric we have been fed — the idea that the central problem of abortion opponents is that they do not support prevention, say. Yes, this hypocrisy is central to their advocacy, but it’s only one of many many hypocrisies. What about the fact that the antiabortion movement is also, on the whole, against childcare subsidies and universal healthcare, and even SCHIP?  What about the fact that a so-called “pro-life” stance should include helping protect the lives of teenagers by teaching them, through comprehensive sex-ed, how to prevent STDs? What about public financing for abortions (are you listening Mr. Hyde, you freedom of medal winner you?) so that women who want to terminate their pregnancies can do so as early as possible - when it’s safest and when Dr. Wicklund actually performs abortions?

I don’t want to bite a generous hand - and Dr. Wicklund certainly gets a lot of it right. But if we’re going to stop being so ashamed to talk about abortion, we’ve got to really talk. Not only about abortion per se, but about abortion as an integral part of a patchwork of social justice initiatives and conversations.