yonmei

11:30 am: Because abortion rights are human rights
Abortion is illegal under most circumstances in Northern Ireland. Women in NI pay the same taxes for the NHS as people in the rest of the UK, but when they need to have an abortion, they have to travel to the mainland at their own expense, find a private clinic, and pay for their own abortion. They're not allowed to access NHS services, even though they're UK taxpayers.

There's currently a petition to the Prime Minister (whoever that may be in October 2010) to demand redress for this injustice: regardless of regional law in Northern Ireland, a UK resident is justly entitled to the same NHS services as anyone else, no matter where she lives.

If you're a UK citizen, you can sign it: whether or not you're a UK citizen, please consider linking to it at your journal or blog. Because abortion rights are human rights.

<a href="http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AbortioninNI/"><img src=http://www.fpa.org.uk/News/Campaigns/womensrightstoabortioninNorthernIreland/main_content/Wy8n/small></a>


SPUC recently won a nasty victory in Northern Ireland: they claimed the guidelines on termination were "ambiguous" and needed to be redrafted.
The guidelines say, with regard to women who need an abortion but won't be allowed to have one in Northern Ireland because they're not actually going to die if they don't get one:

Health professionals should explore the woman’s concerns and expectations to establish what kind of support she is getting or may expect to receive from her partner, family, social services, work colleagues or school/college authorities. It is important to discuss any difficulties she foresees if she continues with the pregnancy as well as any concrete measures that can be taken to help her particular situation. A woman should be offered information about alternatives to termination such as continuing with the pregnancy, adoption, etc. She should also be offered information on organisations which can offer support and advice.

You may wonder, what's ambiguous about that? Well, for SPUC: the guidelines do not say, unambiguously, that health professionals are not allowed to point out to a pregnant woman that it's totally legal for her to travel to the mainland, get an abortion there, and here are contact details for organisations that can offer support and advice when she does so. What SPUC wants is a gag rule for health professionals in Northern Ireland.

And they won their court case.

Tags: abortion rights are human rights, evil british politics, evil religious politics, i am an angry feminist

09:42 am: I know where my moral compass points
I've been having a discussion with someone over somewhere else about abortion, and we've been having the usual back-and-forth over details and such, and he (I'm fairly sure it's a he) added in passing to a much longer comment:

But I seriously and sincerely believe that you are grievously in error, and I don't find that state of affairs to be good--not only because it leads you to empower and enable the culture of death in our nation/world (and enable the toleration of mass murder on a mind-boggling scale), but because it threatens your own immortal soul... and I really don't want to see you lost.

As it happened, in 20 minutes from when I read that comment I was about to go out to my local pro-choice activist group where we were to discuss Alex Salmond's recent assertion that he's got a moral compass and he knows how to use it, and I didn't have time to follow my usual strategy of responding calmly point by point.

I wanted to assert my moral compass, so I did, writing:

I am an atheist, and normally I take "concern for my immortal soul" as a kindness - an expression of warmth, despite the fact that I don't believe in either an immortal God or immortal souls.

But in this instance, you see, you are advocating support for a mass movement to treat women as slaves, animals, or incubators - to regard human beings as creatures to be bred by force, or machines that can be used to produce babies without regard for any harm done. This "pro-life" movement that advocates dehumanising women, that murders doctors, attacks clinics and health care - I would no more support it, ever, than I would support a pro-slavery movement, or a pro-death penalty movement, or a pro-war movement.

Treating other human beings as lesser creatures, to be used and destroyed, is to me a sin. Cruelty and dehumanisation such as you advocate are, to me, the ugliest of sins - and I would fear for the best part of me, for whatever integrity and kindess I possess, if I were ever brought low enough not to opppose* such ugliness whenever I see it.

To me, your advocacy of forcing women through pregnancy and childbirth, no matter what high-sounding excuses you make to yourself, is as ugly as slavery and rape. There is no excuse for it.

I support a woman's right to safe, legal access to abortion, because I believe: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." And, so we include sisters in "brotherhood", I would never turn away from that to the horrors of the "pro-life" movement.



---
*Okay, given "oppose" may include anything from going to a demo to writing a brief to just a moment of sheer rage: but I'm always in the opposition to this.

Tags: evil religious politics, feminism, i am an angry feminist

03:37 pm: Dragoncave's back!
The small daughter of Feministe (stolen as an egg) and Smokey Seizure (who is the son of Art Seizure and Smokey Dragon):

The even smaller daughter of Blake Feministing (who is the daughter of Feministe and Jekesta) and Skycloak (stolen as an egg):

And a frilled dragon without name or lineage:

In a world where, in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, the Pope advocates barebacking, we have need of dragon silliness.

Tags: dragon eggs need clicky, dragons, evil religious politics

08:46 pm: Justice is not achieved with e-petitions
Hwaet! Give ear to!

This afternoon a friend sent to my work address (I think hoping I might use my work resources to publicise it) an e-petition that begins:

Outrage in South Africa

Last week a 3 year old girl in South Africa was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on.

The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. (Note: that part is perfectly damnably true.)

The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town , a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will? Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know.

If you are signature no.: 1000 - please forward the mail-list to c h i l d p r o t e c t p c a @ s a p s . o r g . z a

There are 643 names on the copy that reached me, beginning with a name in Australia.

When this e-mail arrived, I glanced it over, and thought my usual think: E-petitions are no good, why do people keep forwarding them? and a less-usual think, because I was at work: I should look this up and see if I can publicise it, or if I can't, suggest better ways to the friend who sent it to me. A Facebook group, I thought. Something.

This specific kind of petition, where the author asks you to add your name and forward it to "everyone you know" is a kind of viral meme. It can be worthwhile in drawing attention to a specific issue (as with the Afghan women petition of a few years ago), but actually regarding it as a petition to be sent to an e-mail address where "someone" will do something about it is pointless: an e-mail petition of this kind is regarded about as highly as a blank sheet of paper, and the influx of e-mails to the e-mail address given will, soon or late, mean that e-mail address has to be shut down due to overload.

This, however, is a more treacherous kind of petition; it's a hoax. As I found in five minutes googling, this is a known hoax that's been circulating on the Internet for at least eighteen months. The Child Protection Unit in South Africa is not being closed down: it's being expanded, restructured, and renamed the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit. (The e-mail address given is not a valid police address.)

There is a grain of awful truth in the e-mail.

The Virgin Cure belief isn't specific to South Africa - in fact, it may have come to southern Africa with European colonists in the 19th century:

The myth of the Virgin Cure has a rich and culturally diverse history stretching back to 16th century Europe, and more prominently to be found in 19th century Victorian England, where, in spite of the emphasis on morality, rectitude and family values, there existed a widespread belief, that sexual intercourse with a virgin was a cure for syphilis, gonorrhea, [and other STD's]. (HIV/AIDS, the stats, the virgin cure and infant rape)

The phenomenon of infant rape in South Africa is very real:

"In our culture, as a woman, you don't say no to a man. Sex is not open for discussion," [Rose Tamae, a survivor of gang rape] says.
"So they think they can do as they like.
"In a place like Orange Farm, where most people are unemployed, and the women have to go looking for work far away, often the children are left at home in the care of men, or strangers.
"They are vulnerable. In one case a little girl was being given food in return for sex, and she didn't want to go home empty-handed to her mother, who had Aids and was sick. " (BBC)

But though rape reporting to the police is on the rise, the actual figures of rape may not be, and may not be connected with the "Virgin Cure" phenomenon:

Dr Jewkes and two of her collaborators, Dr Lorna Martin (Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, University of Cape Town) and Ms Loveday Penn-Kekana (Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand) believe other factors are to blame for these violent acts.
"The idea that having sex with a virgin cleanses you of AIDS does exist in South Africa and there have been reported cases of this as a motivating factor for child rape, but the predominant evidence suggests that this is infrequently the case," Dr Jewkes says. She quotes Mr Luke Lamprecht, the manager of the Teddy Bear Clinic in Johannesburg, which is the referral point for all child sex abuse cases in the metropolis. According to him, he has only seen one child rape case where the perpetrator believed the myth. This happened some 4 years ago - and the child's mother agreed that the HIV-positive man could rape her 4-year-old in exchange for cash.
"According to another report on child rape which investigated injury patterns, management and outcomes, there was a 1% sero-conversion rate.* This was, for most cases, in the absence of anti-retroviral therapy and therefore suggests that this myth is not an important cause of rape. If it had been, in view of the extensive injuries common in child rape, a higher rate of sero-conversion would be expected," says Dr Jewkes. (The 'virgin myth' and child rape in South Africa)

These are horrors. There are real things people can do: get involved with your local World AIDS Day event; donate to the AIDS Foundation of South Africa; read more about AIDS in Africa; support Rape Crisis NGOs in South Africa (the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust is one of the oldest and does work around the country as well as in Cape Town); if you live in the UK, you can support Community H. E. A. R. T, a UK charity that supports "Health Education And Reconstruction Training" in South Africa: if you live elsewhere, you can find a similar charity based in your country. These are useful things to do. Forwarding an e-mail petition isn't going to do a damn thing, ever, even when it's actually factually true.

(On the other hand, I wouldn't want to discourage you from e-mailing Pope Rat at benedictxvi@vatican.va, or ringing him at the Vatican Switchboard (+39.06.6982) or even writing to him at Vatican City (you will have to address the envelope "His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, 00120 Via del Pellegrino, Citta del Vaticano": I imagine envelopes sent to Pope Rat or That Nazi Bastard just get weeded out at the sorting office): and asking him why the Catholic Church is spending more resources to oppose condoms in Africa than it is on opposing the lie of the Virgin Cure.)

Tags: evil religious politics, feminism, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, venting

11:39 pm: "Catholics refuse abortions with anguish"
When I read in the Guardian about Catholic schools in Northern Ireland shutting down Amnesty International letter-writing groups, I wrote a long-ish response (too long to be a letter) and thought about trying to reduce it to the 50-100 words or so that would have stood a chance of being published. But, I thought, probably I'm too late, there will be several such letters already in (in my experience of letter-writing to the Guardian, it's best to have composed and sent your letter by lunchtime the day of publication) and besides, reducing that spluttering wordage to publishable length felt too exhausting.

Someone did respond, though, and not briefly. His letter is entitled Catholics refuse abortions with anguish. There are two ways that could be intended, and given that this argument is all about Amnesty's decision to support the victims of rape and incest, developed with reference to the mass violations in war zones such as Darfur and Congo, you might think that it's by a Catholic woman explaining that as a Catholic she refused an abortion with anguish.

No, of course not. (Catholic women are, according to statistics from the US, as likely to abort an unwanted pregnancy as women of other Christian denominations: more likely to need an abortion, given their religion's rigid opposition to birth control: and are, doctrinally speaking, actually sinning less if they avoid contraception and just have an abortion whenever they need one.) Nor is this from a Northern Ireland Catholic who is actually affected by the decision to ban Amnesty International from NI schools. Nor from someone living in Darfur and the Congo. No, this is from a man living in Congleton, Cheshire. He writes:

I just cannot express the anger I feel at the unfair diatribe by Zoe Williams against Catholics who are taking a stand against Amnesty International (Faith schools should not be tax-funded, and here's why, September 19).

Nevertheless, he's going to try.

It was a Catholic who founded Amnesty

True. However, had he had any interest in the historical roots of Amnesty, he would know it had its roots in the Communist Party and in Quakerism as much, if not more so, than Catholicism.

it has been supported throughout its whole existence by the Catholic church worldwide, down to every local parish

Actually, the Catholic Church has always opposed Amnesty when Amnesty supports a woman's right to choose.

and only now that Amnesty has decided to support abortion has the church withdrawn its support.

Amnesty has decided that in certain limited circumstances - which fall well short of the legal status of abortion in this country - the denial of abortion to women who have been raped will be regarded as a human rights issue which Amnesty International will support. For example:

• In Guanajuato, Mexico, Human Rights Watch interviewed a woman who had been sexually abused by her father at least since the age of six – and who also faced criminal charges for “incest.” She had two children as the result of these rapes. The official legal record from her complaint against her father in 2002 reads: Then my father took me to a hostel.... He penetrated me, and it hurt a lot when he penetrated me. I cried and I said to my father that it hurt a lot.... I want to declare that I don’t want to have the child that I am expecting, because I will not be able to love it. Because it is my father’s, I will not be able to love it. (The authorities did not authorize a legal abortion.) (cite)
  
• 24-year-old Marija, an ethnic Croat virgin living in northern Bosnia ..... For two months she was held in a Serb brothel-camp and raped daily by five or six men. Captured during an afternoon walk near her village in northern Bosnia last autumn, Marija was imprisoned in a small room in a house in Obudovac and abused each evening by Serb irregulars. From other rooms she could hear the screams of other women, but never saw them. When she was released in a prisoner exchange earlier this month, she was pregnant. cite (She was able to get an abortion.)
  
• [Congo] Later the man [who raped me] came to my house. He found my parents there and he threatened them. So, my parents sent me to live with other family members. Then I realised that I was pregnant. When my parents found out, they chased me away. They told me that they couldn't take care of the baby as they were already having difficulties. I was very worried. Now I live with a neighbour who has a distant relationship with my mother. It is a life of suffering there. We eat with difficulty, even to find soap is difficult. It is hard. I regret I will have a baby soon. I have nothing to eat and to clothe it with. I was raped against my will. It is terrible because it isn't just me affected by this. There are many girls who visit me who also say that they are suffering. cite

</ul>
Amnesty International decided formally, in April this year, that from now on the denial of abortion to women made pregnant through rape/incest, and especially when rape is made use of as a war crime, would be treated as a human rights issue. The response of the Catholic Church was immediate and definite: they withdrew support from AI, and - as we see in NI - this decision is even trickling down to kids in Catholic schools who form Amnesty letter-writing groups to support prisoners of conscience.

The writer of this letter to Guardian claims:

And why? Not because it is indifferent to the awful sufferings of women made pregnant through rape or lack of birth-control facilities, but because it faces an almighty dilemma. Is the child in the womb a human being or not? Does it become one at some stage in the pregnancy or is it one from the moment of conception? And as we do not know the answer, can abortion be justifiable?

The assertion that if a fetus is to be regarded as a human being from conception that means abortion is not justifiable is rank illogic. My rights as a human being do not include the right to make use of another human being against their will. Termination of pregnancy remains justifable, if the pregnant woman can justify it, at any point during pregnancy: there is no point during pregnancy when a woman ceases to be human or loses her human rights.

To claim that the Catholic church is "not indifferent" to the sufferings of a 16-year-old girl, raped by her father for ten years, desperate for an abortion because "I will not be able to love it", or "not indifferent" to a girl rejected by her family because she is unmarried and pregnant from rape, is about as believable as their claim that they oppose equal human rights for LGBT people because they "love the sinner".

(Cardinal O'Brien celebrated the New Year in 2006 with a sermon preached about the awful moral degeneration of permitting two men to imitate marriage by having a civil partnership: I never liked The Herald so well as when they responded with an editorial inquiring of the Cardinal exactly what moral degeneration he thought was being imposed on society by giving a man the legal right to be with his dying partner in hospital, and what business it was of the Cardinal when these were civil partnerships, not religious? Since then the Cardinal has continued to demonstrate his "love" for LGBT people by accusing same-sex parents of being morally equivalent to child molestors. I am not joking or exaggerating. And this is what Catholics call "loving the sinner".)

It is a frightful problem not even addressed, let alone resolved, by Ms Williams blithely stating she is "happy ... to defend the right to abortion to all women everywhere at any time". If the foetus or child in the womb is a human being, has it no rights, not even that most basic right, to life?

Again, see above. If I am dying of liver failure, and it turns out this man is a perfect match, do I then have the right to have him tied down on an operating table and half his liver cut out - to his possible death - because I have the "right to life"? I used to be a blood donor: I stopped after ten years because the vein in one arm had collapsed and no donation was possible, and the other one would (apparently) go too after a while. I have B- blood, and no infections: I was a useful blood donor. Nevertheless, I had the right to decide for myself when to start being a blood donor, and I had the right to decide for myself when to stop. The notion that it's a "frightful problem" whether or not to deny that right to a woman (far from ignoring that problem, Zoe Williams noted the difference in the death rates between countries where abortion is legal, and countries where abortion is not). Oh, wait: this man wasn't interested in whether or not women die when legal abortion is denied...

There isn't a single Catholic doctor or nurse anywhere who refuses to assist in an abortion in the circumstances Zoe Williams describes without intense pain and anguish.

You know, when you read of teachers (in the bad old days when teachers were allowed to beat schoolchildren) claiming that "this hurts me more than it hurts you" as they prepared to beat the crap out of some small kid with a length of rattan cane, it really is, in a mordant and nasty kind of way, sort of funny. Not if you were the kid who was about to be beaten, but at a distance in time... well, yeah. It's sort of funny.

I looked up a number of sites to find examples to quote for this journal post. The more I read, and thought of this man claiming that what the doctor or the nurse feels is intense pain and anguish, when they refuse to help one of these women - I feel sick. I feel incredulous and sick and angry that this man thinks that it's the trained medical personnel who are willing to let a woman die or suffer horribly, a woman who has already suffered intense pain and anguish - but it's the doctor or the nurse who deserves our compassion, says this man: it's the Catholics who are refusing for the sake of a doctrinal belief that a pregnant woman is an incubator and only the fetus has human rights who deserve our compassion? I may vomit. I won't, because my keyboard will seize up.

But wait, there's more.

And that is because they - Catholic doctors, nurses, nuns, brothers, paramedics and priests - have been devoting their lives for centuries to founding hospitals and clinics for the poor of this world. Their history is absolutely heroic, their contribution indescribable, their dedication unsurpassed.

Actually, in the specific area he's talking about: I do not consider it "heroic" to decide that you would rather let a woman suffer and die than oppose the Church to which you belong; I find the Catholic church's contribution perfectly describable, and so did Zoe Williams, and so have many AIDS activists combating the anti-condom propaganda spread by priests: and the "dedication" of a doctor or a nurse who put their religion above the needs of their patients is easily surpassed by any doctor or nurse who would, professionally, put the health and wellbeing of their patients first.

I would love to see Zoe Williams spend a few months in their company - in the dangerous war-torn jungles of the Congo, or the dry and bitter plains of the Sudan, or the jobless impoverished townships of Mugabe's Zimbabwe - and come back and tell us then what she thinks of the Catholics she writes about with such contempt.

I doubt that he would change his mind merely faced with the actual victims of rape whom he dismisses with such indifference for their sufferings and such concern for their doctors, any more than I think Zoe Williams would suddenly discover that it's the Catholic medical personnel who deny these women abortions who really deserve her compassion and respect, as this man seems to think she would. So I would like to transform this man into a woman, and put him into a hotel room in Mexico, or rape cell in Croatia, or an undefended village in the Congo, and have him raped and made pregnant, and let him consider whether he himself has no right to human life, but is only an incubator for the fetus conceived of rape.

Tags: evil religious politics, howls of rage, i am an angry feminist, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, war

10:26 pm: Brokeback Mountain, a day later
I went to see Brokeback Mountain last night with hfnuala. It is easily the most depressing film I've seen in a long, long time.

( spoilers )

Tags: angry queer, brokeback mountain, evil religious politics, films

04:17 pm: So we all know Orson Scott Card is a homophobe...
As Obsidian Wings point out, to be opposed to same-sex marriage you must be:

1. anti-Liberty
2. anti-Sanctity or
3. anti-Equality

Most opponents of same-sex marriage are frankly anti-Equality or anti-Liberty - they believe LGBT people shouldn't have the same rights as straights, or they believe that the government damn well ought to prescribe who you can get married to.

Interestingly enough, while Card is both anti-Liberty and anti-Equality, he's mostly anti-Sanctity - he believes that gays ought to make false marriages against their own inclinations. This isn't a new idea: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson had a very successful marriage of exactly the kind Card proposes. It was a damned unusual success, however, and as Portrait of a Marriage records, it very nearly failed at the start. And though their marriage was a success, both of them (though Vita far more than Harold) left a trail of failed relationships with others in their wake. (Furthermore, it's clear that while the marriage would certainly have failed without their mutual affection for each other and their strong shared interests, it's also clear that another reason why the marriage never failed was that they could afford to lead very separate lives: they never shared a bedroom, and at Sisinghurst, they didn't even sleep in the same building.)

Card's bigotry makes me uncomfortable: this nastiness and false rhetoric (he's claiming that his civil rights are being trampled upon because, forsooth, judges are deciding issues of constitutional law and mayors are taking part in civil disobedience) makes me outraged. Card isn't stupid: he's intelligent enough to see how dumb his arguments are. He's being hateful, and I have already seen his most hateful and lying arguments quoted, unacknowledged, by other anti-marriage bigots.

Tags: angry queer, evil religious politics, orson scott card