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Category: Human Rights

Support the Female Troops

Support the Female Troops

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Our government should provide the highest standard of care to women who have volunteered to serve our country. Federal law, however, does little to protect the reproductive rights of servicewomen. Why are servicewomen being denied birth control?

Not only are the 350,000 women (almost 15 percent of all active-duty personnel) banned from accessing abortion care at military medical facilities, but some cannot even obtain emergency contraception, which can prevent unintended pregnancy if taken soon after sex, at their base pharmacy.

Given both the restrictions on abortion care in the military and the growing number of reported sexual-assault cases among servicewomen, Congress bears the responsibility, at a minimum, to make sure that this important and time-sensitive method of contraception is available to women at all military health-care facilities.

In 2002 health officials at the Defense Department agreed, and approved Plan B® to be stocked at military medical facilities. However, weeks later, President Bush’s political appointees overruled the decision without discussion or explanation.

This week, Congress has an opportunity to improve health care for women in the military with a bill sponsored by lawmakers in both parties and on both sides of the choice issue. The Compassionate Care for Servicewomen Act simply adds Plan B® to the list of medications that must be stocked at every military health-care facility.

Please urge Congress to ensure that emergency contraception is stocked at every military health-care facility.

Check out NARAL’s list of the top five myths about Plan B®, and the real facts.

Restore Habeas Corpus

Restore Habeas Corpus

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Sign the Alliance for Justice Petition to Restore Habeas Corpus

Petition Text:

We call on the United States Congress to enact legislation that will restore our Nation’s commitment to law and freedom.

In the fall of 2006, Congress passed a law governing military commissions, which included a provision that stripped certain detainees of their habeas corpus rights. Habeas corpus has been the bedrock of our justice system for centuries. The Supreme Court asserted that it “is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.” Without habeas rights, detainees are denied a fair hearing in federal court to challenge the lawfulness of their detention. The government is left free to imprison people indefinitely without charge or trial or other fair hearing, no matter how inhumane the conditions of confinement or the treatment of the detainees. Such a policy is not only unconstitutional, it is also un-American and undermines our national character.

It is appropriate to join the scores of lawyers, law deans and professors, politicians, religious leaders and military officials who have condemned the denial of habeas corpus rights to detainees and have called for a restoration of our constitutional values. It is incumbent upon Congress to ensure that our laws reflect who we are as a society, that we are a people committed to accountability and basic fairness. In the face of adversity, adhering to our values strengthens us as a nation.

Protect freedom, fairness and due process of law. Restore habeas corpus.

Is it ever wrong to terminate a pregnancy?

Is it ever wrong to terminate a pregnancy?

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I ended up writing such a long reply to a question posed on a previous post that I’m posting it as well.

Vance from Meditations on an Eyeball asked:

Heidi, as a “pragmatic contextual ethicist with a spiritual sensibility” do you think there are situations where it would be wrong for a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy? I am assuming that you do not reject the concepts of right and wrong because in my understanding those notions are central to the work of an ethicist. I am not expecting you to generate a black and white decision matrix, but I would be interested in your shades of grey.

It’s a strange question. I am no fan of abortion per se, and I wish that all women were in a position to welcome their pregnancies. In my desire and fantasies, the world would be a happy place, full of joy and laughter and friendship and love. I wish a lot of things, but this is the reality in which we exist.

My answer is less than systematic, but I opted out of systematic theology/philosophy when I discovered how heartless it could be. I am not an absolutist, but rather a contextual (some would say “situational”) ethicist. I believe in thoughtful analysis, including all the factors that affect the choice in a specific instance, and in ranking relative priorities – including religious beliefs, community standards, material realities, and the like. For each person, in each community, at each point in history, these might be reflected differently. We each speak from where we stand, and we are in some sense projects “under construction” for our entire lives. Although complexity and some amount of ambiguity are very anxiety-provoking for some, I find in them a source of hope. It’s not “wishy-washy” to admit that life is a complicated matter at times, and that major decisions are worth thinking through in the context through which they have arisen.

So:

Yes, there are situations in which I believe it is ethically wrong for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. This is not an issue with easy answers. Abortion is not an easy decision to make, nor should it be. Abortion is a controversial subject for a reason.

My concern has more to do with the power of that decision – which is each woman’s to make – being taken from her. Perhaps it is unfair, but I can’t help believing sometimes that if men were the ones who got pregnant, the whole debate would be framed somewhat differently.

My own judgment is that the longer one waits – or has to wait – to terminate a pregnancy, the more problematic it becomes to do so. I would rather see an abortion done at 8-10 weeks than later. I would rather see a late-term abortion than a baby in a dumpster.

I do not approve of woman using abortion as a form of birth control, or being irresponsible about family planning in general (although men share in that responsibility, it more often than not is left up to the woman).

I do have problems with gender selection as a reason for abortion. If that is the only reason, it does not seem sufficient to me.

I have issues with women who use abortion as a way of punishing men – that’s not often discussed, but I don’t idealize people.

I wish that I could think of some way to preserve the rights of the father, but I can’t. Ultimately, the woman is the one who pays the price – with her body, with her life – and so she has to be the one who makes the decision. I think that most women involve the man who got them pregnant if they can. Sometimes a woman fears to bring a baby into the world because she doesn’t want to subject her own child to the abuse that she hasn’t been capable of escaping.

Having (like many women) been the victim of rape, it is difficult to imagine the strength that would be required to carry such a baby to term. Some people can choose to do that, and redeem the situation – for others it would be like being raped again. And then, what about the welfare of that child, born into that situation (especially if it was also an incestuous rape)?

Then there are other situations – abject poverty, drug addiction, psychologically disturbed women or those in a state of denial about whether they’ve even had sex, etc. When you are familiar with some of the seamier aspects of human existence, there are no end of examples of situations where, when you look at the entire set of circumstances, you can see the reasons why abortion might be the better choice. At the least, there should be provision for psychological and medical consultation for all pregnant woman – not to push a decision either way, but to help her make her own decision in a timely manner.

I count as friends a couple who were so opposed to abortion that they refused to do any prenatal testing – why would it matter if they weren’t going to consider terminating? (My own choice would always be to have all the available information – even if one chooses to go forward, it’s better to know in advance, and line up resources and so on. But that’s me.) Their little girl was born with what turned out to be a very serious, even fatal genetic defect. Yes, they enjoyed her, but not for very long. I don’t think they regretted their decision (although it would be difficult to admit to anyone if they did), but everyone should have a choice on whether or not to continue a pregnancy that will have disastrous consequences.

In my preliminary research on a doctor that I was referred to once, I discovered that there was a case in which he didn’t tell client that there was something wrong with the pregnancy. He was Catholic and evidently suspected that she would abort, so he simply withheld the information – effectively depriving her of the choice. The baby had a very short, painful life – and the parents found that there was nothing that they could charge him with – they tried “wrongful death” but of course it didn’t work. This same doctor chose to inform a girlfriend of mine that he was aware of her feminist political activity while he had her up in stirrups. Incidentally, as a result of a surgery he did on her, she had to have a hysterectomy. No, I don’t think I’ll go to a doctor like that – but where is the oversight?

In my own case, I had a pregnancy where there was no heartbeat at 8-9 weeks. It was an unexpected pregnancy, but not an unwelcome one. I went through a number of tests to make absolutely sure that the pregnancy was not viable, then – on the advice of my doctor – had a D&C when the miscarriage wasn’t happening. Earlier that year, I had an ectopic pregnancy that very nearly took my life and my medical team didn’t want to see me in the emergency room again, especially not so soon. They were concerned about my health. You see, my health counts too.

Some right-wingers would consider both of these scenarios to be abortions. Some right-wingers want to see to it that doctors are not trained even to perform these very necessary procedures.

When a baby is wanted and welcomed into the world, there is no greater experience. I loved being pregnant and I love being a mom to our son. I also still grieve my two losses. I was incredibly comforted when I learned that there is no brain activity that early in pregnancy. That’s one of the reasons that I feel that if an abortion felt to be the better choice, then it should be done as soon as possible. Sometimes that’s possible, and sometimes it’s not.

There are women who have had abortions or have given their child up for adoption, and have profound regrets about having done so. Their experiences count, too, and they should be heard. However, their experiences should not be generalized onto everyone. There are many, many women who are grateful that they were able to terminate a pregnancy early and safely. For them, even living with their regrets (and I think regret and grief are entirely appropriate) they made the choice they felt they had to make.

I would like to see a process – that wasn’t tilted to either side – to help women make decisions like this. In some cases, the choices on all sides are so difficult. Generally speaking, Americans seem to be a bit undereducated on how to make ethical decisions. Listen to the experiences of others, look at rules and traditions, ask yourself how your decision might be affected if the situation were altered, how you might feel about it in a year, in five years, in twenty years, etc. List out the pros and cons of all available options to you, and rank them according to their importance. Site quietly and ask yourself, in your deepest authentic self, what the answer is for you. We tend to simplify too easily. Sometimes the question of whether something is right or wrong needs a few more steps of consideration than we are willing to give it. We allow others to do our thinking for us, far too easily and too often.

The point is that there is a wide range of situations, attitudes, and realities to consider.

I would not be so opposed to this (stacked, divided) Supreme Court decision if it had included provisions for the mother’s health and for medical judgment to override the general rule. I would not be so opposed to it if family planning centers and education were not being cut, if women (and young or poor women especially) had the care they needed to make decisions earlier. Third trimester abortions are very problematic, but I still feel that it is out of place for the government to intervene in medical decisions or to step in to override the woman’s choice. There is some question as well about the extension of abortion bans across the board – even to early pregnancy.

People opposed to abortion are free to choose not to have one.

The thought of mandatory abortions fills us with horror. Then we feel the intrusion. Because we are so divided, because abortion is such a complicated, controversial and difficult topic, I think the government oversteps its bounds here. They’ve been eroding Roe v Wade for some time, even using a murdered pregnant woman to establish a new status for the fetus – one that didn’t even exist in the religious world (as I found out when I tried to find rituals or symbols to deal with my own grief).

As I pointed out in the post, it is the height of hypocrisy to oppose abortion while promoting abstinence-only sex education and enforcing a global gag rule (in countries where HIV/AIDS is rampant, opposing condom use could be considered genocidal). It’s pretty clear that the domestic agenda is to control women (as the religious right has no problem acknowledging) and to get votes from their somewhat manipulated base. Whatever their own personal views on abortion, American women – and men too – ought to be appalled to see women’s bodies and rights used as a playing card.

May She Be the New Jesus (so to speak)

May She Be the New Jesus (so to speak)

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I have something to say about the recent Supreme Court decision that upheld the ban on late-term abortions, whether or not the pregnancy endangers the woman’s life.

I’m a pragmatic contextual ethicist with a spiritual sensibility, and I cannot be silent. I cannot pretend that I don’t understand the next step in this game. If you stop for a moment to think about it, what will be required next is blindingly obvious.

A dead woman.

All you vultures will sit there and watch it happen. Obviously, a pregnant woman will not be able to bring a case where a pregnancy is endangering her life. The system just doesn’t move that fast. The situation is even worse than that. Not just any dead pregnant woman will do.

She has to be the right woman, doesn’t she?

I’m just cynical enough to realize that any number of women will die before anyone squeaks, before this debate will have a chance to heat up in America.

Don’t you understand that the simple death of a pregnant woman isn’t enough?

In this climate, the woman’s life will have to be perceived as “mattering” before anyone will risk the fight. She’ll have to be perceived as a true and noble victim, above reproach from any quarter. She won’t be a drug addict, and she won’t be poor. She’ll have to be married, I suppose, and maybe even a fundamentalist (that family will get the ultimate wake-up call!). She’ll be white… ya think?

Will the anti-choicers be so comfortable, even then, with the women-controlling agenda? Will they understand then the consequences of their ineffective abstinence-only pseudo-education, their hypocritical opposition to birth control and family planning, their avoidance of the contributing issues of poverty and ignorance and rape and domestic violence and drug addiction and all the rest?

Maybe it’s possible to oppose abortion in theory, because they haven’t thought it through to the moment when some “special circumstance” involves their kith and kin, when their daughter or sister or cousin or wife or mother or aunt or friend stares at death? Or will they be as fanatical as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refuse blood transfusions even to save a life?

I hope you hold this fatal reality as a heavy, heavy burden upon you. In many places, abortion is already legal, safe, but unavailable even in the first two trimesters. Here in Georgia, a pregnant woman now has to look at an ultrasound first, as though she were unaware of the reality, as though she were a child in need of a lesson from her superiors. Now, even saving the life of the woman isn’t enough to satisfy their heartless cause? What’s next, stoning?

Will you ignore her pleas (and perhaps those of her partner) as her death approaches? Will you continue to prioritize the life of a fetus over the life of a grown woman then? When she is dead, will you offer to support the motherless babe – if it lives? Will you offer to shoulder the burdens of whatever medical or economic issues may arise?

The legal system has no right to override the choice of a woman or the advice of her medical team, but that hasn’t stopped them from sentencing some pregnant women to death with this ruling. The ones who swung the new and harsher Supreme Court were male, of course, but these days there are actually women who would have done it (more’s the pity).

One woman will be chosen to represent all those women who will die because of this unethical ruling. She won’t want to be chosen. She will not have chosen this destiny for herself. You will have chosen it for her by allowing this country (in this way as in so many other ways) to become what it is today.

She’ll be your corpse, and her blood will be on your heads.

You will have killed her by intervening in realms where you don’t belong: entering into the arena of an individual woman’s hard choices, disrupting her rightful ability to decide what is best in her own unique circumstances, overriding the medical expertise of her doctor and medical team, stepping between a woman and her God, and disregarding the support (one can hope that all women have some support) and advice and help of her friends and family. You may create a widower or an orphan. You may induce trauma in cases where the man, who was at least equally responsible for the pregnancy, may well feel responsible for her death as well. Or you may reward a rapist, who will walk away unscathed, triumphant.

You will have killed her with all your little misrepresenting slogans. You will have killed her by refusing to be accountable to reality, by making it impossible to talk about this issue in any realistic way, such as one that actually takes into account the wide range of circumstances that a pregnant woman may be facing. Roe v Wade was the attempt to find a solution, and you’re on your way to overturning it.

You will have killed her by refusing to face a set of controversial and difficult issues as responsible adults, citizens and leaders. This is bigger than your little power struggles. You should be listening to a wide range of women’s experiences, in order to put together an understanding of the different kinds of situations that women actually face – including their regrets and their gratitude. Choices are hard, and situations are complex. We should be teaching contextual ethics, not inhuman dogmas.

Heartless cads you are, on both sides of the debate, if you cannot step back into the complexity of reality and the range of what matters in human experience.

When you’ve killed this resonant symbol of a woman, you will not be able to say that you did not know what it is that you did.

You’ll refer to her by her first name when you use her and punditize her and sling her name around in your mouths – as if you knew her, as if you cared.

I hope she has the presence of mind to cry out “why have you forsaken me?” as she dies, and I hope her husband and family distribute the video all over the world. I hope her image becomes an ikon.

Keep on the lookout for her corpse. It may take a while for the acceptable sacrifice to appear, the one who will be pristine enough to satisfy all of your many requirements – and yet lack the resources to leave the country.

Sooner or later one will come who will reanimate this issue – with her death.

May her resurrection in the public sphere be powerful.

May it blast you like the proclamations of the ancient prophets.

Pass it on.

What about the sexism, Imus?

What about the sexism, Imus?

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Ok, Don Imus was in the wrong, like Limbaugh with his feminazis, and Ann Coulter with whatever s/he has said this week, and all the other blowhards who are regularly hateful – and with more ooomph behind it.

Actually I think the guy was trying to be “cool” and he was the wrong guy, talking about the wrong women, at the exact wrong time. Of course, he has said a lot of nasty things in the past, and had even vowed to stop, so both public opinion and the voice of the marketplace have now spoken.

(By the by, let’s not pretend those young men at Duke are pillars of society, even if the charges have been dropped. It was a pretty unsavory scene – and a common one for the college sports community.)

Imus does do some good work in service to others, though, and that should be factored into moral judgments as well – as it seems to do rather easily for Sharpton and Jackson. Although they have been leading the attack (on the basis of race), they both have histories of inappropriate remarks of their own. For them to lead the moral outrage response on this is about as hypocritical as Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr attacking Clinton on grounds of sexual morality.

I’m always interested in what motivates someone to throw the first stone.

Here’s what is continuing to bother me about the coverage.

Everybody’s talking about race – what about gender? The sexism across all our communities – black, white, everybody – seems (pretty much) to go unquestioned.

Imus’s remarks were not only about a heavily racially-coded form of hairstyle with a cultural history. They were also sexist – a form of prejudice, contempt, and domination against women.

He called them whores! – or “ho’s” – and yet the pundits make no room for a feminist to speak on that issue.

The coach and the women on the team made the point, but who in the media will pick it up? Is it ok to call accomplished young women whores, but just not to do so in a racially-tinged way? Is that the message?

Vonnegut – so he goes

Vonnegut – so he goes

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So it goes, and he is gone. Good-bye, dear Kurt Vonnegut. I (for one) will miss you.

“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’” – , Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut

“My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn’t think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn’t think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, “If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?”

But if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.

I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”
— From A Man Without a Country (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. — from “Cold Turkey,” In These Times, May 10, 2004

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, ‘There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.’ Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut