Also Effective Immediately: Abortion

Re: Karen Handel Exits Susan G. Komen: The Resignation Letter

I would guess Karen Handel’s about to go tell breast cancer’s secrets downstream where they don’t cry because they’re sociopathic; and live lies; and worship poppas, but their toilets do flush.

In week’s review, it’s endearing to watch people stand for accessible health care. Hundreds of thousands of patients remembered their roots and paid forward. Facebook blew up with hot pink everything. Top news lines questioned the scape-goating of Planned Parenthood health centers*. Mayor Bloomberg wrote a fatty check.

Meanwhile, most Abortioneers just kept working. Their donations made daily, care of their modest paychecks and additional hoops they navigate to stay safe (see also: last week's Staying Afloat ). It’s nice to know we have Planned Parenthood Federation of America to rally the country and collect the support, but victories and non-victories aside, we’re still hoping for the love for abortion.

Bright Light of Hope: On Prop 8 Decision, we love when people are seen as people

*Just in-case you forgot:

Abortion, A Gift from God

I love the Super Bowl. Really, I do. While the general population curls up to watch larger-than-average men in tights pile-up on a field somewhere, there is a stillness outdoors, a vacancy on the streets, an unlikely but pleasant solitude.

I do also enjoy the rude, anti-abortion controversies that threaten everyone’s chip-dip and light-beer, good times. And by enjoy, I do mean, loath.

No doubt, Abortioneers can appreciate an aggressive, even extreme campaign for change. To prove this, we’ll share an extreme campaign that aims to change the state of pregnancy, motherhood, and (imagine this) working conditions around the world: Mispolis, Abortions for Successful Living.

While the content may be shocking, it is a parody designed to bring light to alllllll kinds of labor injustices. Alternatively, the shocking anti-abortion commercials desecrate a motherly sacrifice and exploit the loss of human life.

The biggest difference between anti-abortion Super Bowl commercials and Misopolis, however, is that you have a choice whether or not you wish to view our recommendation. It won’t appear without warning and it’s aimed at helping women, real women living and breathing on this round earth. Also, working their asses off. Also, having desire.

We know Randall Terry is a deprived man deeply afraid of sensual, assertive women. Just a tad psychotic, just a tad. We know he threatens the lives of every single Abortioneer. A godly devil, if you will, with way too much money and an army of dummies.

We’re wary of such sad beings, such losers, such beasts. But we’re not afraid. We know the world is getting smart.

MISOPOLIS

Abortions for Successful Living

For more information:

Women

on Waves

Fashion Industry Violates Women's Rights

Men are from Earth

I want to talk about sexual health. Abortion. Yes, abortion is a part of the sexual health spectrum but I want to talk about something else my clinic offers.

Cancer screenings, STD screenings, contraceptive consultations. Yes, we offer these too and they are a part of the sexual health spectrum as well.

But I want to talk about how not every man who walks through the clinic doors is a man involved with a doomed pregnancy. We offers services for men.

In fact, men have sexual health, too.

An integral part of Abortioneers’ work involves normalizing functions of the body and discussing best practices for a best life. Is the scent odorous or just human? Are the size, texture, color, and frequency desirable, creepy, animalistic? Yes, all of the above.

Stinging, burning, itching, round sores, and flesh-tone skin tags probably not normal, but treatable. Everything is treatable. Some things are curable. But only when people know they have them.

An integral part of my work as an Abortioneer involves discussing sex lives namely with women—identities, preferences, mishaps, cycles, outcomes, rape, and abuse. Fluids. In turn, I regard life with awe. We are such wondrous beings. So much inside us still to come.

This week, I met with a man in his mid-twenties seeking a routine screening for sexually transmitted diseases. He had no symptoms but had never been tested despite several sex partners. A partner three years past informed him of a longstanding Chlamydia infection so he was catching up. Chlamydia can have no symptoms.

In completing his routine screening, we discussed another matter. Discharge. He wanted to know if it was normal to have discharge during initial erection when aroused. I suppose he could have asked his friends. Instead, he was asking me. Yes, yes that is normal pending it’s clearish, non-odorous, non-irritating, and normal for him. He had been wondering that for a loooooooong time.

I suppose he could have asked his friends or any one of his past partners. But we live in a strange world where body fluid is rarely addressed despite so much of it. They’ve probably watched porn together and discussed tits and cunts. But then there is actual desire and inherent need. Not just vessels of god’s creation, bloody, wet animals.

All of them. All of us.

Sunday's abortion wants to be bonny and blithe and good and gay

As the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade approaches, it feels a bit (or a ton) like there’s little to celebrate.

Honestly, according to Guttmacher Institute, 92 anti-abortion provisions passed in 24 states in 2011. Ho Hum.

But supposing 2011 is inconsequential and everything of 2012 is new and either headed for a new world or truly doomed...

Eloquently, Whole Woman’s Health issued a press release over a new sonogram law passed in Texas, including this fine gem: “We know that every day, good women have abortions.”

Read the entire release here: Whole Woman’s Health: Official Press Release Regarding the Texas Sonogram Bill

Holistically, there is also this historical perspective from a professor and advocate, Dr. Jeannie Ludlow: "I propose that we look again at illegal, extralegal, and legal abortion and reshape our understanding to focus on the difference between harmful, exploitive practices and safe, compassionate care. "

Read the entire article here: Reframing Compassionate Care: Of Madame Restell and Other Outlaws

(Pleasantly) surprisingly, Forbes magazine features the National Network of Abortion Funds: "In short, requiring women to carry every pregnancy to term would plunge a far greater number of women and children into poverty than are already there.

Those Privileged Among Us Who Continue to Have Choice Have an Obligation to Our Sisters Who Do Not..."

Read the entire article here: After She Sold Her Wedding Ring

However lightly, for those who follow football: Should You Fuck Tim Tebow? Have I mentioned my new year's solution is to convert TIm Tebow? Mountain man...

AbortionRight

Re: Abortion doctors charged with murder in Maryland

I once volunteered for an organization that helped women afford safe abortions regardless of their income. I still do work for an organization that helps women afford abortions regardless of their income but it’s a different organization. There are many of us but never enough. There is never enough money in the right hands to make the world so safe for everyone.

I once worked with a woman who made too much money to qualify for the organization’s modest fund. She lived paycheck to paycheck but within comfortable means. Because my organization, as well as several other organizations, could not afford to assist her, she chose to obtain surgery at one of Steve Brigham’s clinics in Maryland—one of the cheapest clinics in the region.

She delayed her surgery to accrue the money on her own and spoke with me throughout the process because she intended to tell no one. Our conversations were completely centered on the expertise I could provide but there were limits to my services and I could offer little beyond confidential abortion information and referrals over the phone.

The conversations were brief but serious. At times, I felt her calls were taking over my life: on lunch, at the laundromat, making dinner, late night. She called me after her second trimester procedure. She was driving and pulled over to vomit. She had been sedated and released from the clinic without an escort to drive her home.

Avoiding and counter-referring the cheapest clinics in the Mid-Atlantic region is difficult and bothersome at best. Demoralizing, confounding, heart breaking that this is how the system works.

The existence of terrible abortion providers—those who make a business out of the desperation women feel when they know they cannot carry a pregnancy to term—creates an ultimate conundrum for Abortioneers—those who believe abortion helps society because they see how often it does. Abortioneers spend free time helping women navigate barriers to obtaining safe abortion care.

Case managers and patients alike desired abortions from Steve Brigham’s clinics because they needed to end pregnancies that were not meant to be but also feed children, pay rent, pay for school, pay bills. In a field so terrorized by anti-abortion monsters, there is urgency in the fight for women’s proper destiny that transcends the demand for safe health care. In other words, history has proven over and over that women will risk their lives to end doomed pregnancies.

An abortion at a shady clinic that’s not a back alley kitchen table seems somewhat more promising—the only option for some of your neighbors and you're okay with that as long as you don’t have to really talk about abortion, the abortions women are actually having, not the political weapon invented by the GOP.

My dear colleague and I visited one of Steve Brigham’s clinics soon after the case of the woman who drove home quasi-sedated. I took a pregnancy test. The medical assistants were kind and accommodating but the atmosphere was unsettling. My dear colleague and I resolved to find the money to help women get to the good clinics, the slightly higher-priced clinics—licensed and certified to provide safe, legal abortions.

In other words, as a non-medical, grassroots organization, we were not obligated to care whether the women we assisted received licensed and certified surgeries but we did care because we’re Abortioneers. The United States of America was founded under the governing principle that all people are inherently free, equal, and due justice. I would add that most people are just trying to get by. Laws have been implemented to protect the general good from the (rare) deviant.

Placing further limitations on the abortion procedure and tighter regulations on abortion facilities in the state of Maryland will not necessarily catch the rare and deviant Brigham-types any sooner in the grand pile of paperwork. However, caring about women having abortions will.

Most to the point, how about cracking down on New Jersey for failing to provide adequate health care? Often, abortion restrictions involve room measurements, time periods and additional hoops for abortioneers and pregnant women to meander through, or just plain prohibit necessary health care all together. I’m all for each state getting to know its abortion providers. Many abortion clinics in this country are quite stellar, but damn if a congressperson or state official ever walked through the doors just to say hello and thank you/ how can I help?

I can’t think of how this story might unfold in any other field of medicine because I do not know. But I can suggest that persecuting perfectly good abortion care providers—arguably some of the best in the country—detracts from a far more pertinent need: taking care of our pregnant citizens.

Steve Brigham was operating a business off the inevitability of abortion. He had a record. He was criminal, a rule-breaker who spotted a need and families willing to pay him for his supposed expertise.

Send him to jail but please do not hunt down the good clinics and treat them in the woods where no one not having an abortion cares to hear. There is a noble world ahead. One where Cheryl of Operation Rescue is not quoted in the Baltimore Sun like she’s some kind of reasonable and credible source.

When a woman resolves to have an abortion she has no choice. There is no world where some pregnant women will not have abortions. In exploring our disgust and misconceptions with abortion we find a real world—one where humans make complicated decisions and dying is a part of living—interwoven, like, death is happening right now inside and everywhere at the same time as life.

Your support starts with listening. Like, being able to hear the truth.

Double Edge Wands

I live a double life. I am artist and patient advocate. I am not completely in either world.

When I gather with fellow artists, I am my selfest self, on the edge, whimsical and seeking. But also, the conversations become painfully existential, the dramas seem overdone.

When I create, I am alone. The art unravels itself and I am simply there to witness.

When I go to work, I am my best self: present, compassionate, intelligent, and thorough. But also, the conversations become hilarious and rich, life seems full and incredible.

Something about becoming a patient advocate at an abortion clinic has taken me to another place where things are stripping themselves and the earth seems on the edge of aborting everything. That every time I tell a woman it is okay, if I am dead wrong then this is hell and I am burning.

As I traverse between art compound and health center, I miss things in both. Sometimes puzzling are the things I miss among the artists. The scholarships, the rewards, the feeling that my art is enough. They will suspect I am not involved in the community though I help them with their health care one at a time while keeping it confidential because I am an Abortioneer and that’s what Abortioneers do. They keep the secrets.

They also keep abortion sacred and clean for little pay and precarious support outside the walls of the clinic.

It’s okay. I don’t suspect I need my fellow artists to create the art but I do need my co-workers—the manager, doctor, nurse practitioners, my fellow advocates, the volunteers and external support folk—to be able to serve others well.

No matter where, there is love.

Their hearts opened when they had abortions

“As a woman exercises her power to create life she is given a glimpse of wholeness.” –Linda Weber

Every so never until now, a book comes along that makes an Abortioneer feel like they’re reading their creed. Linda Weber does such declarative magic with her new book, Life Choices: The Teachings of Abortion, and this Abortioneer is willing to bet that the smartiestpants among us are already stocking entire waiting room bookshelves with this universal masterpiece.

Weber interweaves abortion’s historical, medical, political, and cultural context in the US, with thoughtfully meditated reflections on the spiritual, emotional, social, and physical consequences of the abortion experience. With a gift for exalting the essence of pregnancy termination, Weber offers a deep and compassionate perspective on surprise pregnancy, life planning, and sexual fulfillment.

Um: “Women who choose abortion often achieve significant personal growth because the creative essence of pregnancy is redirected. Pregnancy as a profound inner experience directs us to do this.”

But also: “The way most abortions are performed within the medical system denies and distorts the experience. Choosing to have an abortion is an expression of a woman’s power in Life, but the medical system often reinforces the victimization of women by treating us as if we were being rescued.”

One more: “From Nature’s point of view, pregnancy is quite unremarkable and ordinary. It occurs in spite of and beyond anyone’s idea of it or feelings about it. It is arbitrary and almost careless in its placement and in its outcome.”

But really. I hope you read it soon and then knowing what you already knew and now have documented, I hope you share it the good way. Give it to someone who needs to cuddle up to truth, inspiration, and (authentic) hope as they ride the abortion roller coaster.

Life Choices Website

Feature article: No Apologies Necessary

Buy it Right Now

Title extracted from page 32

HATE MAKES DUMB

Is it just me, or is 40 Days for Life like every day.

Lately, we’ve had no protestors, which is dandy. This community doesn’t tolerate them but every so often they sneak up to the corners with their grotesque posters, baby dolls, crosses, and high water khakis. Last week, we had rare but always disturbing protest activity. At the end of the day, they followed my colleagues to their cars. There was damage to bumpers backing out. My colleagues were shaken.

Dummies. It was Thursday. They were protesting annual exams, infection checks, STD testing and treatment, and birth control consultations. They were protesting the woman who just moved here because she lost her job/insurance and will be living with her brother but contracted a bacterial infection along the way. They were protesting the seventy-five year old man desiring routine testing because he was entering a new relationship. They were protesting cancer screenings, bump checks, treatment for variable degrees of genital discomfort and dysfunction. They were protesting women attempting to prevent pregnancy with contraceptives.

They are dumb.

I keep thinking one day everyone will go to sleep and have the same dream, the one about abortion being necessary. The next day everything will just fall into place.

A Novelistic Abortion

I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children. I would bear children, but I would never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god. I would bear children in the morning, I would bathe them in the morning with a water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once. They would live and then they would not live. In their day of life, I would walk them to the edge of a precipice. I would not push them over; I would not have to; the sweet voices of unusual pleasures would call to them from its bottom; they would not rest until they became one with these sounds. I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst, a thirst that could never be quenched. I would condemn them to live in an empty space frozen in the same posture in which they had been born. I would throw them from a great height; every bone in their body would be broken and the bones would never be properly set, healing in the way they were broken, healing never at all. I would decorate them when they were only corpses and set each corpse in a polished wooden box. It is in this way that I did not become a mother; it is in this way that I bore my children.

Excerpt from Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

Once upon a long long time you will wait for an abortion so bring a good book for heaven’s sake

Ever notice that people will wait in line sometimes for days to attend sports events, grand openings, musical concerts, royal weddings, holiday season sales, reality television auditions, presidential inaugurations, a hand shake with the Pope…but come to their crucial, medical appointments hungry and late with somewhere else to be in no time?

I believe this is yet another hairline repercussion/inevitably of obtaining and providing stigmatized services in a degraded society where notions of spirituality have been reduced to owning new things.

Hell is the plastic island in the Pacific.

Once, abortion was sacred. Both tea parties and recovery involved delicious cake.

Featured photo by Anne Geddes, of course

PURPOSE THEN

Sorry folks, it's pure prose this time around:

PURPOSE THEN

The doctor delivers the bystander at Locust County Hospital. Taken home to an apartment set in the bassinet and footsied from the porch smoking cigarettes once more. Bottle-fed and babysat, the bystander sent to school early age four sucks thumb while the others play. Bible school like Catholic school only free always talking about innocent babies over snacks. God songs all day.

Bible school wants the bystander to go back because it is silent there, to find that a father beautifully and wonderfully makes souls. They want to meet their maker there. They hold the protestor’s hand at the pregnant uterus letting go of life behind the cowbell bulletproof door. Can’t help but to watch them kill the doctor.

The bystander goes to church every Sunday, most Wednesdays, sometimes Fridays or Saturdays. Likes to get down on knees and pray. Likes the holy water in the glass bowl entrance to splash it and stick tongue in air for a taste. Likes the making the cross. Knowing the prayers. Sometimes the bystander grows rare tenderloin tears sometimes torn some love’s such sin.

The bystander social butterfly makes church school friends fast. Grows past the naps. Stops sucking thumb but in bed on Saturdays, takes to between legs. Teeth slightly buck still singing guitar songs about unconditional fathers. Bystander’s father shy to talk about the whacking off. Bystander forgets he’s human. Some order from the sky. Some list of commands. Purpose then.

Bystander sent to Bible school early so everyone could go on working and father would drop him off and mother pick him up at the bus stop. Glossy posters of fairy man in robes kneeling on rocks with hands held open. Crosses over every doorway. White tea candles in front of a baby on the lap of a Virgin Mary. Everything under heaven, heaven, heaven.

The bystander social butterfly makes church friends fast. Tells stories about thrones and towers to the sky at his home a bus ride away. Gives orange peanut butter cracker sandwiches away at lunch. The bystander lets others pick toys first. Doesn’t read books. Doesn’t play with blocks. Dances his cracker fingers across white walls. Watches others. The bystander social butterfly first in line at snack time. First in line to bust down doors to recess. To turn around to watch others.

Bible school with always the best playground equipment and blacktop painted with hopscotch, foursquare, map, maze, sports courts. An ark. Wooden boat with a hollow woodchip-floor inside. The bystander would try to get there first alone to piss inside on the chips. Once the boat to float the terrible away with water until the lord giveth land again.

Bible school believes the bystander is past that. Jesus came to earth to save the bystander and the Bible school and those with open hearts to holy, wholly anti-abortion. Jesus nailed to a cross so the bystander can cross into heaven after death. Life not enough. Not sure off in their dollar sign worlds parents are saved. Bible school not always making sense, hard to carry all the way home on the bus.

Home upstairs, bystander goes to room to watch Super Mario Brothers rise from the dead.

The Caged Bird Sings of Freedom

What if your mom was pregnant? Your lover? Whichever person draws from your vein of empathy, go with her—

She can be six weeks, sixteen weeks, or thirty-six weeks pregnant. When you love her, it doesn’t matter.

She lives in any one of the several states where legislatures spend hours from day to day contemplating the width of the cleaning closet at the few abortion clinics that struggle to remain.

As a result, individuals, families, national family and freedom organizations, corporations, collectives, and health care providers spend hours day to day challenging these compulsive and degrading policies. Federal judges spend hours day to day evaluating the constitutionality of these compulsive and degrading policies.

Meanwhile, there are children going to school with empty bellies in her state.

Your mom is pregnant. Your lover is pregnant. You know what this does to her body. They wake her startled in the morning with twenty-five sirens. They take her toilet so she has to pee in the yard. They take her food, her car and/or bike, her phone, her clothes, and her neighbors, but not her five-dollar bill, so she tries to walk barefoot to the market to eat before she vomits. Overnight, they demolished the nearest market. She tries the coffee shop, but they’re out of everything but caffeine.

By the time you find your pregnant mom or your pregnant lover, she is collapsed and weeping in the parking lot behind the Laundromat in the line of the pipe that deposits those fresh-scent carcinogenics into the air (your mother’s/lover’s womb). She’s withering, but they've taken the doctors too.

Same stuff is happening at the state level of most states in this country right now—metaphorically speaking. But every metaphor applies when your mother or your lover is carrying life and resolving that responsibility and you love them.

The time for alarmists is now.

*Title inspired by Maya Angelou's poem

Viva la Doula Project

If you've never visited The Doula Project website, you are missing something beautiful and evolutionary.

"So much is always different and one thing that never changes: no matter if I’m supporting a pregnant person through an abortion or a birth, I am simply standing with a fellow human being as close to the fuzzy line as most of us come in this life. So close to the threshold of being and not being. It’s not a place many modern humans want to be without company. This is my job. I’m helping her find her strength there, a hand to hold as she walks the line. I’m helping her across." -Janna, LA Doula Project

For now, there is no in-between

To declare that The Wichita Divide evoked emotions I did not know I had would be making an understatement.

Rather, one evening after a long day of providing comprehensive, reproductive health care, I opened this newly released, 350+-page, hardbound account of the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the battle over abortion, then proceeded to carry it with me everywhere for seven lunches and seven bedtimes.

Some excerpts inspired web searches, journal entries, and visions of perfect health care in a perfectly open-hearted world, while chapters leading to the climax conjured sobs from my throat I’ve never heard before.

Do I recommend you read the truly terrifying Wichita Divide? Absolutely, but not because it’s painful. Because it is necessary. A master hate-crime writer, Stephen Singular will cushion your grief with big-picture facts.

You knew so much about Dr. Tiller, and if you didn’t know, you found out once he was murdered: his commitment to helping women in the face of humiliating and dangerous opposition, in and out of the court room, arranging adoptions to pro-choice parents, providing free services to nine-year-olds, loving husband, father, and grandfather, abiding spirit gifted to lead and to sooth those in their deepest hour of need, the day to day regimen of a terrorized abortioneer.

Singular presents Dr. Tiller sheer as he was. Yet, unlike abortioneers who’ve returned to clinics with resolved *attitude is everything* to continue to provide and expand compassionate health care, Singular has been connecting with the murderer’s wife, Lindsey Roeder—a brave woman liberated by her ex-husband’s sentence to imprisonment for the rest of his life. He also presents a picture of rising American hate and seedy blending of church and state. He wraps a variety of stories into a compelling narrative with a neutral yet urgent tone.

I cannot recommend this book enough. We know what it is we provide. We know it is always crucial and often good. Do mild-manner, one-track-mind, pro-life activists know what they snowball? Is the violence inevitable, fact-of-life statistical in light of mental illness, greed, narcissism, capitalism?

The question remains: who will stand to care...

Reading this book will either shake you like a 2-year-anniversary/every-day-the-dumb-and-dangerous-stigma-you-face monster, or it will sadly dash right over your head as you kneel in the gutter before the abortion clinic and shoot bullets in the backcountry soil.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet." - William Shakespeare

As summer rolls forth and the roses bloom, I contemplate one, sad rose: Lila Rose, aka. Live Action cover girl and puzzling breed of UCLA alumni.

For every schizoid, Scott Roeder, there is a seemingly sane and quasi-educated (well, if being home-schooled doesn’t delude—she was first inspired by her parents’ book, Handbook on Abortion, which is dubbed hella-anti-choice by Amazon, and it’s worth noting she’s even *exposed* UCLA’s student health center), anti-abortion obsessianado to startle us in our tracks, if not to inspire tears the size of a seven-week embryo.

Somewhere between the man-crazies who are somewhat, simply corralled into one, large lump of woman-haters, Anti-Anti’s sexy antis, the nuns, and the innocent children antis—there perched, is a Lila Rose, and her dozen or so minions, hell-bent on clawing abortion’s eyes out.

But, really. I don’t care to wax on this poor, misguided girl. I, too, was a too-devout Christian once and said fantastical things just like Lila Rose:

I believe with my whole heart we will be victorious, just as I pray and believe in the Kingdom of God and that we can do God’s will on earth. We have a perfect loving God who inspires and authors our work. If we lay down our lives, we cannot fail.

Luckily, I went to college (after public school and reading books like The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and Light and Matter: A Physics Textbook) and discovered THE PATRIARCHY.

Ever think about how *God* and *Jesus* of *The Bible* are both detached *men* (ahem. Please excuse me, I mean, a *father* and a *son*), exalted as all-powerful, all-omniscient, and all-loving, yet neither could hold a candle for even one woman but virginal Mary. Totally weird. I’m sorry.

However pretty or presidential or conniving or meditating Lila Rose and her blah blah mission to save innocent life may be, if she were walking into any medical arena other than the ever-non-judgmental and accommodating world of reproductive justice, she’d be slapped with the paranoid schizoid label and medicated into a California corner where she could write, unplanned parenthood, all over the walls into eternity.

And for the record: there was no rapture. Yet, I had hoped we’d have this place to ourselves—this Kingdom of Earth, this age of the present moment (where abortion helps women). Instead, I’ll keep reminding myself that my conversations may be recorded for ignorant purposes…

Author’s note: This Abortioneer knows well that wherever there’s a *president* such as Lila Rose, there’s a Board of Operational Rescuers and a team of $upporters giving her the go-ahead.

PS. This post lacks links for obvi reasons.

PPS. Beware the anti-Girl Scouts. Yikes!

Herstory, circa 1730: She was probably pregnant

Placenta Sandwich is such a smartypants. She shared this: Poor Jane's Almanac

PS. Thanks for rising from the dead with sheer beauty, humor, and grace. I love the heart of every single Abortioneer. Here's an Easter video about resurrection:

Sweet Tooth Sez Who?

Check out this REALITY-BASED pie chart of services offered by Planned Parenthood. Nom Nom (we're still hungry)

How the Pro-Life Movement Killed America

I live in a town where organic, local fare reigns supreme and there is but one franchise where I can buy my mass-produced, rubber-brush, chemical mascara: Target—that red encircled wonder where hipsters flock to stay hip and purchasing more than one cotton/spandex T-shirt and colorful socks that bear holes with one wear, feels powerful.

While American-pretty, God-washed zealots try to sting Planned Parenthood, National Public Radio, try to capture national and state Congress and hold us hostage on the edge of the Lake of Fire; while infertile-looking folk with dirty baby dolls and gross signs, babble angry travesty into our neighbors’ ears as they enter the only non-judgmental, comprehensive healthcare clinic around; there appear to be vast cracks in our manmade inventions, our towers of potential nuclear disasters.

Vast cracks in our handlings of our planet, our life bread. Vast cracks in the bounty of our smaller delights (shopping at Target to afford everything while next door neighbors get laid off and global neighbors Made in China get dismally, dreadfully paid off). Vast cracks in mis-talk and publicized fantasy about healthcare and well-being. Ever going to see the cracks before it’s too late. Never wanted the earth to fury for someone’s so-sad, daddy dream.

Evolution's Coming Out of Its Shell

I went to a poetry reading at a bookstore strictly devoted to poetry (and café fare) last week. It was a nook of thing—twenty by twenty shelves of chapbooks and one long table nearly the length of the bookstore. A poet and sitar player performed translation of the Gita Govinda for this degraded age where god is the body—what’s left of it.

I stood in the back, against the bookshelves. A striking woman with a fur lined hat sat toward the front. A striking woman with a fur lined hat sat toward the front but never removed her hat so I was reminded how comfortable privilege can be, how blind.

(Speaking of lost sight, Ohio, you clown show. Get some sunshine. )

A woman wrote a book about being the opposite of a tiger mother—leaving her children behind—the antithesis to loving kids is leaving them if you are a woman. What is the opposite of a tiger mother? Lilith? A deadbeat dad?

I digress and recommend, “Why Men Need to Speak Up About Abortion.” Aaron Traister reports: “I think this may be one of the reasons so many men have trouble talking about this issue. For me, it represents my low point as a human being and as a man: I was a failure, I couldn't take care of myself let alone a child, I couldn't provide for myself, or a wife, or family. My weakness and carelessness resulted in people hurting. I was not a man, I was something so much less than that. Why would anyone ever want to talk about something like that? I recognize that not every man out there has found himself in my situation specifically. I've been told a lot of pro-choice guys don't talk about "women's issues" for fear of saying the wrong thing. All I know is: We're not talking -- as if it doesn't have to do with us, as if it's "their" problem, not ours.”

I still believe we’re waking. I still believe.

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