This isn’t a topic I usually wade (so to speak) into on social media, but after the recent election, reading comments/posts by people whose sole voting issue is abortion – whose start-to-finish interest in a politician is their stance on abortion – I just… I need to say something.
Or rather, I need to ask something:
Do you want to BAN abortion?Or do you want to do something to STOP abortion?
Because banning abortion does not stop abortion. It never has. It never will. There were abortions in the US before Roe vs Wade. There continue to be abortions in countries that have banned them.
We can argue all day long about this and why you still believe it should be criminalized and why I still believe it shouldn’t, but that’s not the point of this post. What I want to talk about is what actually WILL reduce abortions. Because believe it or not, we both want the same thing here: fewer abortions. Where we seem to differ is on how to accomplish that.
If you really truly want to do something about abortion, you need to do more than elect pro-life lawmakers and then dust off your hands because they’ll take it from there. The issue is far too nuanced and has far too many factors in play to simply say “No more abortions!” and call it a day.
If you want fewer abortions to happen, then you need lawmakers who…
1. Support affordable, accessible healthcare. A first trimester abortion is usually $1,000 or less. An uncomplicated vaginal birth without insurance can easily be 10x that much, if not more. That’s to say nothing of prenatal and postnatal care, C-sections, complications, stints in the NICU, etc. Even with insurance, it’s not unusual for new parents to take huge bills home along with their newborn, who they now also have to feed, house, and clothe. For someone barely staying fed, housed, and clothed already, those costs can spell disaster.
2. Support raising the federal minimum wage and other means of reducing poverty. Diana Greene Foster, a professor at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research group at the University of California, San Francisco, states that the single most common reason women cite for wanting an abortion is because they cannot afford to raise a child (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-abortion-hardship/denial-of-abortion-leads-to-economic-hardship-for-low-income-women-idUSKBN1F731Z). The more women you have in poverty, the more abortions will happen.
3. Support better protection for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. In some states, if a rapist impregnates his victim, he has parental rights, which he can use to have access to both the child and the victim for the next 18 years. Domestic abuse survivors often still have to interact with their abusers due to shared custody situations. Rapists and domestic abusers rarely see the inside of prison cells, never mind for any length of time. Instead of passing laws that require women to obtain permission from the father to get an abortion, even if that father raped her, we need lawmakers who believe victims should be protected from their abusers. Until such time as we do, none of us get to judge women who choose abortion so they won’t be shackled to their rapist for 18 years.
4. Don’t demonize late term abortion. I know this is one’s an extra hot button, but it’s important. Contrary to popular belief, liberals aren’t a bunch of evil people who encourage moms to abort at 37 weeks just because they feel like it. The vast, vast, VAST majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester, and the later they’re performed, the more likely they are to be for non-elective reasons. Putting severe limitations on late term abortions might make people feel better, but in practice, it does nothing to actually reduce elective abortions. What it DOES do is does cause serious red tape and heartache for the majority of people seeking late term abortions: those who are terminating wanted pregnancies due to catastrophic incompatible-with-life defects or to save their own lives.
5. Support comprehensive sex ed in public schools. The more kids know, the better. You’re not doing kids any favors by keeping information from them or leaving it to their parents to teach it at home.
6. Support affordable, accessible birth control. I genuinely don’t care if you think we should be “subsidizing people’s sex lives.” Accessible birth control means fewer unwanted pregnancies, and fewer unwanted pregnancies mean fewer abortions. If fewer abortions really is your goal, then there’s no logical reason to be against making birth control as readily available as possible.
7. Support better support systems for working parents and parents attending school. Childcare costs are through the roof, and many women cite “having a child would interfere with education” as a reason to have an abortion (https://www.verywellhealth.com/reasons-for-abortion-906589). If someone is already working three jobs to keep their head above water, an abortion may very well be the solution to avoid financial disaster.
8. Support mandatory paid parental leave. And not just 6 weeks, either. The rest of the world provides months and upwards of two years of maternity leave without their economy imploding. The US has no excuse, and no leg to stand on to shame mothers who abort a pregnancy because they simply won’t be able to survive taking even a couple of unpaid weeks off to recover from having a baby.
9. Support affordable higher education. Seeing a pattern yet? The things people need in order to have the stability to cope with an unexpected pregnancy are astronomically expensive, putting them well out of reach for many would-be mothers. Education is one of those things.
If your candidate claims to be pro-life, but either doesn’t support or actively opposes any of the above, then why are you voting for them? Why are you choosing candidates who call themselves pro-life, but who aren’t actively working to reduce *demand* for abortions?
Which brings me back to my original question, one I hope you will consider before the next election:
Shout out to all my straight sisters I’m so sorry 😞
Jesus, leave his ass.
We learn fast to be very kind and attentive, tho.
My mom, who got her degree in Marriage and Family Counseling when she was 60, says studies show that women will sometimes sometimes leave a long term relationship to live on their own for a while before seeking a new relationship, but men will almost never leave a long term relationship without having a new relationship either in progress or just beginning. They don’t want to give up the caretaker they have without another one on deck or in the wings.
This is so sad
This isnt cute or quirky. This means hes a fucking hopeless user
Please date a man who actually acts like an adult.
Ok I lived with my ex for 2 years and he literally wouldn’t be able to get his own food if I wasn’t at home, I’d get home from work and he’d be angry at me for “making him starve”
My current partner has lived on his own for 8 years and the absolute most I have to help him with is maybe sending him $20 so he can make a bill payment on time
It made me realise for 2-4 years I wasn’t a girlfriend I was a fucking mother
Men who have been independent are capable of reverting if given the slightest excuse. When we married, my ex husband was 10 years older than me and had lived on his own for 8ish years. Yet (and I allowed this until I finally got fed up and took us to counseling) I did 80% of the cooking, because I was better at it. Same with the cleaning, shopping, social planning, etc.
After I left, in the first six months I got texts or calls asking me to please tell him:
The online banking password (dude, I left you, you should really change that)
Where I ordered his special-wecial organic underwear
Where the good cutting board was (my dad gave it to us at our wedding, genius, I took it with me along with the rest of the stuff from my family)
What brand butter we bought
What brand of local kielbasa we bought
Who his doctor was
What RMV office had the shortest lines
Where the old tax returns were (in the fucking box labeled tax returns)
The phone number for his best friend
I shit you not.
Then he had a heart attack (mild) and none of his family or friends were around to take him to the hospital. But instead of calling 911, he called me, who by then lived 45 minutes away. He lived 5 minutes from an EMS dispatch location. He called me, despite the fact that he didn’t believe me 8 months prior when I was feeling suicidal and I had to call a cab to go alone to check myself into the hospital for a 72-hour hold. I told him to call 911, hung up on him when he whined about “making a fuss”, called 911, called his siblings and then texted them “your brother is having a heart attack, I called 911 for him, come home,” and washed my hands of it.
Emotionally vacant men who won’t do household labor or emotional labor are not Nazis, but they aren’t good people, either, and you don’t have to put up with their shit.
Millennial women of Tumblr, please read this post.
And then please: make the decision for yourself to never stay with a man who expects you to be his mother and servant.
This is my grandma to a T. She has lived with the same man for a good 60+ years now and her literal words quoted: “When I’m not home for an extended period of time (week or more) I worry about him eating and then when I get home he’s been eating fish and potatoes for the whole time, even though I left heatable meals in the fridge for him” My grandma pays ALL THE BILLS. Yes ALL OF THEM. The only bills my grandpa puts any money into is car payements and some land-deed tax stuff. He refuses to cook, clean, wash his clothes, any of it.
The whole family is currently waiting for my grandpa to die so my grandma can finally go free, because she’s so stuck into her role as a caretaker that’s the only way to force her to let this shitbag go.
Tumblr, keep circulating this. This is not the 1960s, a dude’s gotta wash his own fucking clothes in our lord’s year of 2018.
Writers?
Write your contemporary stories where the guys abhor this bullshit. Yes, the guys. (We all know most gals hate this bullshit; that’s a given.)
Show your guys doing all the emotional labor of managing doctors appointments and taking kids to band practice and making lunches for the kids, and–what, you wanted me to say half of it?
Nope. I’m done with that. So over and done with it.
I’m with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on tis one. When asked how many women on the Supreme Court will be enough, she replied ALL of them being women, because people were fine for centuries with it being all men, so why not all women?
The thing about showing the guys doing all of that (or at least 90% of it!) is that there have been studies done where if you show men in a story doing 50% of the work that women do…the guys you show it to will do up to…25%-ish of the work. Instead of 10% or less.
So overclock those stories. Drag the expectations well past the 50% mark…and if you get half of 90%-of-the-effort…that’s 45%, and that’s close enough to half-of-the-work to be within acceptable reach.
Plus, if you model how to do it in your stories, guys can’t use the excuse of not knowing how. (I am so sick and tired of that one.)
One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit – but rarely articulated – assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.
During the medieval period, work was intermittent – called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was “simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.”
The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official – that is, church – holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.
A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor
“So you want a return to medieval servitude?” NO. We’re simply pointing out that Capitalism bring unique forms of exploitation, one of them being a life where you have barely enough ‘free time’ to get ready for your next working day, and not at all enough to do any actual living that isn’t focussed on getting ready for work again. Our whole lives are stolen from us.
Organized Chaos 