• From Daily Kos and Netroots Nation: activists from the Pretty Bird Woman House shelter speak about sexual violence against Native women and their struggle for justice. Because of jurisdictional uncertainty, the non-Native perpetrators responsible for 86% of assaults against Native women are rarely arrested or prosecuted. Video here (sorry, couldn’t get it to embed properly.)

• Politico “discovers” the pro-choice spiritual left. It’s actually a pretty savvy article. I think that it’s long past time the religious/spiritual left got some recognition as a political force–from everyone, including the spiritual left itself. Learning to approach reproductive justice from a faith-positive perspective can only help our movement. Some of us may have a hard time getting our head around this, in the context of so many decades/centuries of religiously-motivated attacks on women, sexual freedom, and reproductive rights. (I myself split from Christianity years ago, citing irreconcilable differences.) But as this article points out, the religious Right has done a very good job of hijacking God and spirituality for their own oppressive purposes, and as in many other areas of politics, the left has long allowed them to frame the discourse. Hopefully we’re now seeing the beginning of a push to reclaim it. Combined with the momentum towards framing reproductive rights as human rights, there’s a lot of space in that direction to movement-build.

• Most of the readers here have probably already seen this, but President Bush has proposed new regulations for the Department of Health and Human Services that, among other things, redefine abortion to include some forms of contraception. Under the regulations, health providers, researchers, and medical schools would only receive federal funding if they sign “written certifications” promising that they won’t discriminate against employees who would rather not perform essential reproductive health services. (Rep. Nita Lowey and family planning activists respond.) Looks like Bush is hard at work on his legacy, intent on leaving the country in as much of a mess as possible come January.

• Queen Emily, guest blogger at Questioning Transphobia, has begun a really great series on transphobic tropes. Her second post, Patriarchal Privilege, addresses transphobia in feminism. To some extent, this comes from a lack of understanding; women feel transwomen are “really” men trespassing in women’s spaces. Emily deconstructs this idea, outlining the discrimination and violence faced by trans people. As she says, “Trans people are systematically disempowered, on macro and micro levels. Why on earth does any of this sound like we’re getting monthly muffin baskets from the Patriarchy?” No kidding. The exclusionary “feminism” she calls out looks a lot to me like the operation of unexamined privilege. And like bisexual people facing monosexism, trans people fall into that interstitial space between hard and fast categories that makes them targets of prejudice from all sides–even within the LGBTQIQ community. Why is it that even among those claiming to fight for equality, there’s so often some group considered less equal than others?

–Erin Simonitch

Some days, I wonder whether certain prosecutors learned about a little thing called legislative intent when they were in law school. The reason I’m wondering this today is this: in Alabama, a prosecutor is charging a woman who is addicted to methamphetamine and who was unable to kick her addiction during her pregnancy with “chemical endangerment,” a new offense created in 2006 to protect children who live in homes where methamphetamine is produced. The law was envisioned as providing a tool with which to remove kids from homes where parents were producing meth.Operating on the theory that a fetus is a child, and paying no mind to the legislative intent motivating the law, the county prosecutor has used it to charge several women whose infants test positive for meth immediately after birth.  The prosecutor tries to sell the law as being about insuring maternal and fetal health:

 ”We are doing this for the sole purpose of trying to make sure both the mother and the child have a healthy pregnancy,” he said.  ”We’re not trying to throw these women in jail. That’s absolutely not the goal of it.” 

Putting aside for a moment the fact that he is in fact throwing women in jail, this statement is totally wrongheaded.  Expert after expert has asserted and article after article has shown that jailing pregnant women and new moms who struggle with addiction does not ensure healthy pregnancies — in fact, it has just the opposite effect.  Prosecutions like this one drive pregnant women away from seeking the prenatal care that is so vital to their health and that of their fetuses.  Feminist Law Profs has a laundry list of just some of the negative consequences of these prosecutions:

They deter women from getting drug treatment; they restrict reproductive freedom by incentivizing abortion; they are inevitably selectively enforced against the poor and minority; they remove the focus from the very real problem of lack of prenatal care for poor pregnant women; they take the attention off proven risks to fetuses such as fetal alcohol syndrome and tobacco use during pregnancy; they put hospitals and medical care providers in an adversarial relationship with their patients; they lead to absurd results, such as prosecuting women for not getting prenatal care or having a miscarriage; and so forth.

And yet, the prosecutions continue. Despite the fact that drug treatment programs are less expensive than incarceration and are more effective and ensuring healthy pregnancies and helping women get off drugs, treatment continues to be offered very little and funded even less. In some states, there is not a single drug treatment program that is aimed at or has space for a pregnant woman or mother and children. Given all these facts, the Alabama prosecutor’s pledge of purpose becomes even more laughable. The facts are out there to prove that his prosecutions are counterproductive. But at least the healthy child routine provides a good facade to mask the other, less socially acceptable, purposes of these prosecutions.  If this prosecutor (or the others out there pushing punishment on pregnant women and mothers) really cared about making sure pregnancies resulted in healthy births, they’d have halted the prosecutions yesterday.  

It’s no surprise that pregnant teens face unique challenges. As if finishing high school weren’t difficult enough for a pregnant woman or a young mother, some school districts count the days she misses before and just after birth as unexcused absences.  And then today there’s news, via Cara, that a Maryland school district has decided to inform parents whenever a student is is pregnant, regardless of the student’s wishes. This despite the fact that, under state law, teens have a right to make decisions about their reproductive lives independent of their parents. Not only that, but pregnant teens also have the penumbra of federal constitutional privacy rights that other women have too. What’s more, there’s broad agreement that the policy is bad for the health of both pregnant teens and their fetuses.  

Health experts say that students’ willingness to seek care will decline.“There’s no question this will have a chilling effect on kids coming forward,” said County Health Officer Peter Beilenson. “It’s going to slow down health care.”Howard’s policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health. “It’s not going to be in the best interests of young people in Howard County,” she said.  

What’s the school district’s response to all this? Well, just that “parents have a right to know.” Implicit in that statement is the idea that the parents’ right trumps the young woman’s right…which in this context seems totally preposterous. Especially since, as Cara points out, the policy is also probably gender discriminatory:

The thing is that these girls are getting f—-d over on every count. You can bet that the school isn’t going to demand the name of the father, and then call his parents if that boy is a student. Because what boys do with their penises is almost always ultimately up to boys. And these pregnant teens aren’t exactly going to “get away” with not telling their parents, anyway.  

This policy is just another example (others include states’ prosecuting pregnant women who are addicted to drugs) of states, cities, and other governmental entities taking steps that are ostensibly to “protect” fetuses and women but that ultimately endanger them. These policies push women away from seeking pre-natal care, which has been proven time and again to be vitally important to maternal and fetal health. 

(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].