After being emailed by my union

I was emailed by my union, Usdaw, which is a union that represents shop, distributive and allied workers. It is the fourth largest union in the UK with over 400,000 members, and it is growing all the time. Its dues are among the lowest in the UK, because it represents some of the most poorly paid workers in the UK. The bulk of its members work in shops like Tesco, Asda, Argos, Primark, Morrison’s, etc. My dues are £1.43 a week. So as you can imagine, workers in this union often live in very precarious conditions. Like many trade unions in the UK, this one supports the Labour party.

In the email, I was asked to vote Labour, and told that a vote for the SNP would harm low-paid workers and make a Conservative win more likely.

Here is the email that I sent back:

“Dear Mr. Hannett,

Thank you for your message.

If Labour is willing to work with the SNP, then there is no danger that a vote for the SNP will cause a Conservative government. Since Labour are unwilling to work with the SNP, I can only conclude that Labour do not care about the democratic voice of working people in Scotland, and that they would rather have a Tory government than work with a progressive Scottish political party! After considering the SNP’s progressive politics, including their stance on Trident, I can’t vote for Labour. Labour has betrayed working people and trade unions time and again.

After considering Labour’s strong anti-immigrant stance and xenophobic rhetoric as Labour tries to appeal to Tory and especially UKIP voters, it would be impossible for any socialist – or indeed anyone with an ounce of international solidarity among workers – to support Labour. A left wing party would place the blame for poverty on its real causes, instead of giving in to far-right rhetoric which places the blame on immigrants and allows capital to continue to exploit workers to its heart’s content.

I hope that trade unions continue to support workers and push for a left wing narrative in society and in politics, rather than simply supporting Labour – no matter how right wing they tack – to keep out the Tories. Workers are tired of this tactic, which – in the long run – makes us poorer. As someone who lives under the poverty line, I am tired of it.

Kind regards,

Hanna Moy”

My email was sent to the communications team, and I hope someone reads it.

Here is the email I received:

“Dear Member,

80% of Usdaw members say they are worse off than 5 years ago. That’s mostly down to decisions by politicians – to keep wages low, to cut tax credits and child benefit, and to stand by while utility companies rip people off. On Thursday you can change all that.

A Labour Government will support working people: Raising the minimum wage to at least £8 an hour by 2019 – 70p higher than inflation. That’s £26.60 a week more if you work 38 hours, £14 a week more for 20 hours. Increasing tax credits and child benefit at least in line with inflation – unlike the Conservatives who will freeze them for 2 more years, costing families with 2 children another £480 a year. Freezing heating bills until 2017 so they can fall but not rise, and give the regulator the power to cut bills when wholesale prices fall.

The next government will be led by the Conservatives or by Labour. A vote for the SNP makes it more likely that the Conservatives will be the largest party at Westminster and will form a government to impose cuts far worse than those we have seen so far. That’s why it is important for Usdaw members – and all working people – to vote on Thursday.

Yours sincerely,

John Hannett

General Secretary”

Is legal abortion more radical than equal marriage? Is this the right question to be asking?

Response to this article:
http://www.thenation.com/article/205049/theres-reason-gay-marriage-winning-while-abortion-rights-are-losing

I am from Texas, where the fight for both gay marriage and keeping clinics open has been fierce and intensely painful, and honestly, I disagree 100% with the premise of this article. I think it’s naive about how fundamentally gay marriage has challenged traditional ideas of gender and religious beliefs, and also about the potential for legal abortion to reshape society and cause some kind of feminist groundswell – a potential I think is not really all that strong, because legal abortion is, at heart, something that does not really challenge the status quo in any way. It can challenge the status quo if it became part of some radical movement (and feminism in the USA is nothing like a radical movement), but by itself, it doesn’t accomplish much. So in this way, I don’t see why it’s very different from equal marriage.

This article has some good points. It’s true it’s hard to argue against love and marriage, which are enshrined as cultural ideals and romanticized from birth and seen as the birthright of all human beings – so much so that even young (only young ones, mind) conservative evangelicals are now more likely to support gay marriage than to oppose it. I think the best insight from this article is that gay white men used their considerable economic and cultural power to mainstream gay marriage, and that being queer happens across class lines, making it much easier for gay people to win acceptance. In the USA, the entire economic system depends on white supremacy and the existence of poverty, but queers can win a variety of freedoms while leaving capitalism untouched. That’s why the issue is about culture, instead of genuinely opposing the status quo. If only people’s ideology can change, the issue can be won. It is much easier to win someone over to an ideology than to get them to do something which is against their interests.

However, the article was a bit incoherent in a few areas. Why, exactly, was the pro choice fight struggling? Because of patriarchy – women’s needs are stigmatized? Because of funds – gay men have more money than straight women? Or because gay marriage is a conservative, pro-family movement that supports conservative ideas about gender and sex, and the fight for reproductive choice is a radical, anti-family, pro-sex movement?

The thing is, the pro choice movement is a pro-free-love movement because it has been entirely shaped by the needs of middle class liberal women. The fight for abortion rights has been a diverse movement (as has the equal marriage movement), and both have a deep, radical potential. I agree that equal marriage has been stripped of its radical potential, but so has the pro choice movement – which is why “one is more radical” just doesn’t cut it for me.

When I say the pro choice movement is liberal and middle class, I am not erasing the contributions and ideas from working class women, but just saying that their voices have been consistently suppressed and erased and the movement as it stands seems entirely shaped by the concerns of middle class liberal feminists – and the discussion about working class women’s needs is usually also voiced by middle class liberals who speak *for* marginalized women, rather than listening to them or repeating the concerns they hear from them.

Liberals tend to focus only on abortion rather than reproductive justice, and you have women like Hillary Clinton who don’t give a shit about working class women taking a pretty fierce pro choice stand and being lauded for it. Hillary is no radical, and her feminism, while part of a greater “feminist movement” as referenced in the article, is certainly not one of the few kinds of feminism that genuinely challenge social and economic norms. So why pretend legal abortion, in itself, somehow supports deep and radical change? As far as I can tell, the entire narrative around abortion and contraception in the USA is an extremely liberal one – “individual right to choose”, with lots of “I can have sex with whomever I want” feminist anger from university students, with no analysis of structures of oppression. The idea is somehow that if women have the freedom to decide not to continue a pregnancy, that they are free and they have reproductive justice, and thus oppression crumbles. Yet abortion has been legal for decades, and no crumbling happened.

On the other hand, you have working class and marginalised voices such as Hispanic women’s groups in Texas fighting not *only* to keep clinics open (to provide not only birth control and abortions but also care for pregnant women and important gynecological and oncological services) but for economic equality, which would mean that low-income women who desperately want to keep their pregnancy, but who are forced into abortion due to poverty, would actually have the right to make a choice. Choice can *only* happen in a context in which there is no poverty. This perspective is almost never heard.

Liberals seem to imagine that as long as abortion services are available, there is justice, when in reality, this is very far from the case. You have a very different interest between pro choice middle class women, who need clinics to be open so that they can make the choice between keeping a pregnancy, and, for example, continuing a university course until a few years down the road when they are economically comfortable and can easily afford kids “at the right time” – the righteous, “make something of yourself” liberal abortion narrative Americans are going to hear during the Presidential elections.

And then you have women who can never, ever afford children – for whom children are a burden that is absolutely impossible to carry, who will never have a time in their life when they can choose to have children. Maybe they already have a few children, and they have to choose to abort a child they want or risk forcing the kids they have into homelessness. Poor women who end up homeless don’t get support – they get their kids taken away and put into foster care. American foster care is so underfunded and dangerous that kids are routinely beaten and abused and even killed in it, at a death rate much higher than normal.

And then take religious rights – if women are religious but in poverty, many are forced into an abortion that goes against their beliefs and religion. Many women who are politically pro choice personally do not feel at all comfortable having abortions, and although some liberals pretend that no women ever struggle or feel guilty or regret abortions, some women do – those who were coerced into abortion due to poverty, or domestic violence, or other horrible circumstances in which they were given no support. Those women who are happy with their choice are usually happy because the choice was not coerced and was genuinely in their best interest. When the alternative is destitution, there is a factor of coercion.

Who is demanding that people have a real choice? The conservatives aren’t, because they are using anti-choice narratives in order to draw voters to their economically conservative policies, and because their rhetoric is so deeply anti-poor and anti-women. And the liberals aren’t, because they are liberals – they fight for middle class women, which means keeping abortion legal is the only thing worth fighting for. Making it affordable? Changing the structure of working life so that women can have kids and work? Getting rid of poverty wages? Making child care affordable? Pipe dreams that aren’t the priority. That’s why the Clintons slash welfare while fighting to keep abortion legal, while being bankrolled by banks & PACs.

I agree that women just don’t have the cultural or economic influence to fight for their own rights, even with hard hitting wealthy neoliberals like a Clinton fighting for them – but I still think that the liberal narrative around abortion and birth control in the USA is a non-threatening narrative that leaves capitalism untouched, and even works in its interests. So honestly, I think both movements are extremely liberal, should-be-easy-to-win movements that leave the status quo intact. The reason one is doing well and the other is struggling isn’t because one is more subversive, but because of how these controversies have been whipped up and made into poker chips between the two neoliberal parties, and about how people are reacting to that.

And you can bet that this same liberal ‘pro-choice’ narrative will be arguing that when women have fewer children, they can work longer hours, they need less welfare, and they are more valuable to bosses. Are we hearing about how Texan women are now unable to access desperately needed health services, such as cancer screenings, because of clinics being shut down? Not really – because the narrative is entirely focused on how giving women access to abortions makes them more productive workers, with more skills, and more time to offer employers, and gives them the ability to succeed and realize the American Dream. It’s an aspirational thing. The idea that human beings should be able to choose to have children or add new members to their family, or not, as part of their intrinsic human rights, in an economic system without poverty and which is structured around the needs of mothers and families instead of being structured around the needs of those who can get someone else to watch their kids (men and, now, wealthy women, who get poor women to watch their kids for low pay) is not even on the radar.

The fight is being cast as a “sexual freedom” fight by women who aren’t facing any other struggle than the struggle to have sex when they want, with whomever they want, and to be able to have birth control options. The actual, desperate needs of women with families are being utterly ignored – Republicans who pretend to have ‘family values’ do not genuinely care about families, women, or children, and honestly, neither do liberals. For either political party, poor women can go die under a bridge as far as they’re concerned. I am all for having sex when you want, and having access to abortion, but honestly, this is not all that radical, as far as movements go. I think both equal marriage and legal abortion are desperately needed civil rights that help people, but both are liberal band-aids (plasters, if you are from the UK). It’s as naive to argue that legal abortion will become some left wing feminist revolution that changes the shape of society and the economic structure of a nation as it is to argue that equal marriage will sweep in the radical change that angry queers have been fighting for and end the impoverishment and murder of trans women, for example.

Honestly, I think both sides of the abortion debate are extremely neoliberal, with no left wing or working class voice *at all*. So I think it’s genuinely about a culture war – about two different ideas about sexual freedom, and religion, and all of that – and not, really, in the end, about anything that harms the status quo. Yes, low income women desperately need access to abortion services, but no one really gains anything from cutting them off – again, it’s a pawn used by both parties.  This article has a few misleading ideas. One is that government funding is involved in abortion, and people don’t want to pay for it. This is not the case. In the USA, it is illegal for any federal funding to be used to provide abortions. No government money funds abortion. It is 100% down to ideology, not money. Another is that ‘gay’ marriage doesn’t take power from clergy and from men, but that abortion does. I think it’s pretty clear that gay marriage attacks both patriarchal masculinity and women’s dependence on men, as well as the power of clergy. Providing abortion services costs society nothing (no pennies from any taxpayer) and takes no power away from anyone. Male economic power is kept intact, and women are still the ones shouldering the financial burden of birth control and abortion. My theory is that it’s a poker chip used by the Republicans to distract from economic issues and recast themselves as the “moral party”. The reason I believe this is that it is a manufactured moral issue – American protestants were pro choice until about the 1970s and early 1980s, when Republicans realized that race issues (like fighting to keep segregation) were not going to work anymore, and they had to move on to other hot-button social issues, and embarrassingly openly settled on abortion. The Republicans manufactured the abortion issue in order to control religious groups and gather them as a voting base. The “culture war” issues are extremely new issues that no one cared about just a few decades ago.

The pro choice movement is a mainstream movement, promoted by extremely rich women (regardless of what the article said), and entirely shaped by wealthy women’s ideas and by the ideological needs of the Democratic party. The massive mainstream discussion of the “war on women” is almost entirely focused on birth control and abortion. That is why the narrative around leaves out cuts to WIC, and focuses on female CEOs and ‘Lean In’ type policies when looking at the wage gap, instead of the needs of women who are working horrible minimum wage jobs and who are unable to pay for child care. Who is talking about how the USA is the only economically ‘developed’ country in which more and more women are dying in childbirth – and where the rate of maternal death for inner city women approaches that of subsaharan Africa? No one – especially not the “general feminist movement” that this article says will sweep in if abortion rights are protected. There is intense energy and passion in the hardcore fight to keep abortion legal, which is raging fiercely in the USA (see the passionate support for Wendy Davis as governor for Texas after her filibuster, and the defeat everyone knew she would face, partly due to the gerrymandered voting districts in the USA). And this is great. When clinics are closed, poor women are forced into dangerous childbirth and into poverty and horrible conditions (and their choice is taken away from them), women die giving themselves abortions/being given unsafe abortions, and it’s a horrible situation for everyone. But keeping clinics open is not the revolution – ‘free love’ already happened 50 years ago and doesn’t threaten capitalism at all, and works out great for men, so I’m not sure why it’s seen as all that radical, in the end.

I agree that marriage equality won’t fundamentally alter social and economic arrangements, but I fail to see how legal abortion alters social or economic arrangements, either. How is legal abortion more linked to the “larger project of feminism” and more radical than equal marriage – considering that abortion was made legal decades before having gay sex was made legal? What “larger project of feminism” is the author talking about – mainstream, middle class, white liberal feminism, which has already failed to be radical or a challenge to the status quo? With so many FeminISMS, I am not sure speaking of the movement as one umbrella movement is useful or accurate, or even gives us any information about what such a movement would accomplish. I fail to see how legal abortion will alter social and economic arrangements, when it has already had decades to do so and not accomplished this radical sea-change. Equal marriage was a genuine force for change, but that change only goes so far – it can be continued in a further fight, but you’d need people to take the fight further, and the more it challenges other interests, the harder it will be to win. Exactly the same can be said for birth control and abortion rights.

Just my input on this article.

Off the cuff remarks on addiction, and hope for healing

Sociologists have been arguing that addiction is caused by a variety of factors, including oppression and social exclusion, for years – but now, scientists have done studies with rats which support the findings of social scientists, and suddenly the theory is in the news.

Example: This casually transphobic article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

And this unbelievably unhelpful article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carole-bennett/the-road-to-addiction—1_b_232674.html

I am shocked and made quite unhopeful by articles like these. To me, they are evidence of a cold world in which even those who are supposed to understand addiction have no idea what to do.

As a Christian, I see this in a particular way.

Human beings have been called the “spiritual animal”. This means many things, but almost universally, it is about a yearning, an emptiness, a hope for deep connection and intimacy with others and with God, a hope for love and for communion and for being known and cared for in a powerful and deep way. When someone experiences this feeling, maybe they just feel that life is empty, something is missing – they need to connect, they need to make sense of things, and if they underwent trauma, they need some way to heal from it. Everyone has undergone a bit of trauma, but the worse it is, the more desperate the need for healing – which often means finding someone who can respectfully, lovingly listen to the horrors, and help you come through those horrors alive.

In human society, though, human beings face an obstacle. Human beings are hierarchical – this leads to the popularity contests and horrible victimization and bullying in school, and the competition of a capitalist economy, where those with mental health problems, trauma, or disabilities are often left behind. Friendships can be shallow or rare, and it is easy for someone to feel utterly lonely and abandoned in a harsh world.

I’m not sure the solution is in the lonely person “reaching out”. Many try this over and over until they give up, and often trying to reach out and build connections with people can backfire – people see them as “desperate”; “needy”; “a loser” – reaching out often does not work. I am surprised to see the addiction counsellor in the second article I linked explain that they were telling patients (I am paraphrasing) – “Just try not to be lonely. Cut off the part of yourself that yearns for more. It is so pathetic that you became an addict – your suffering and sadness is temporary and you should get over it without the use of drugs or alcohol, and if you have clinical depression or a mental illness, why, just turn to the doctor and get some pills!”

This will never work. When my dad looks back on his years drinking, he says “I would get sober because life was impossible while drunk, and drink because life was impossible while sober – sobering up didn’t fix anything, and drinking didn’t fix anything either.” It is useless to see the insight that people drink or use drugs because life is impossible as a way to solve *the addiction*. The addiction is a symptom. It cannot be solved. What needs to be solved is the person – their anguish, their inability to carry on. Perhaps if they stop drinking or using this will become easier, but then they run the risk that those around them say “Oh, they quit drinking -problem solved!” In addiction, like self harming, there is at least the comfort that you are communicating to those around you that something is wrong, and there is at least the support you get from drinking/self harming/addiction that helps you bear your pain and make it through.

You may have heard the famous line that “The majority of people lead lives of quiet desperation.” Can we solve what apparently the majority of people experience? How? 

Modern secular tricks like “positive thinking” are useful to a degree, but only to a degree. When someone is awake at 3 am thinking, “No one really knows who I am or loves the real me, and I am such a loser. Why am I even alive?” – what can you say to them?  I want to say that God loves them, but how will that help, if they cannot feel it, and if saying that feels like a callous attempt at conversion – which will make them feel even less loved and understood? You can say that you love them, but that only works if you do love them, deeply and passionately – and so many people who have friends do not have a single friendship of this quality.

It seems that for many Finns, alcohol becomes an excuse that *allows* lonely people to try and connect with one another – what do you do then? An alcoholic who quits drinking in AA is told to abandon all friends who are still addicts, to avoid temptation – which can mean leaving behind all of their friends. What hope do they have of solving their loneliness and suffering then? To make all new friends and find meaning in a world that is famously difficult to find meaning and joy in – and avoid the temptation to go back to drinking?

 

English-speaking Christians traditionally call life a “vale (valley) of tears” for a reason – because for many people, the Christian urge to be joyful means being joyful *despite* life, and in the midst of suffering, not *because* of it. I have always been moved by the hymn “It is well with my soul”, written after the death of the writer’s wife and child. That kind of peace despite circumstances and grief and suffering can offer support to a religious person, but makes no sense to the non-religious – if you lose the deep connection you have with a few special people, through death, divorce, etc, what do you do? Connections with people are precious and rare, and can take years to be built. And if you don’t have a connection like that in the first place, what can you do? Meeting a good friend is like falling in love – you can’t alleviate someone’s deep, existential loneliness unless you deeply love them, and you can’t make yourself deeply love someone like that out of a sense of charity. There are still small moments of connection – little moments in which someone shows that they know what you have experienced, and know you. These are meaningful, but can be a bit of torture – instead of everyday, sustained relationships, there is just this little, tantalizing moment of what you are missing. Many people feel lonely in their marriage, and with their children, and often with their friends – what can they do? As the song goes, “I’m completely alone at a table of friends”. I am often amazed that we have only language as a tool to make ourselves understood to one another – a tool so incredibly frail and prone to misunderstanding.

Christians are called to be God’s presence on earth – to work for good, to be kind to others – but there is an infinite love and communion between God and a believer that it is possible to attempt to recreate only in a few lifelong friendships and in marriage. Everyone needs connections like that, and of course, one of the ways in which banning LGBT marriage is cruel is because it cuts off the possibility of that relationship – leaving only friendships, which may or may not be intimate and passionate enough to make up for them. In the modern world, outside of a monastery or nunnery, platonic friendships just lack that passion, and banning equal marriage is an attempt to condemn LGBT people to a life of deep anguish and loneliness. Social isolation and oppression is the reason LGBT people are so much more likely to turn to drugs and alcohol.

 

But at least being aware of the causes of addiction can help provide an argument against the judgemental and punishment-oriented way people deal with addicts and alcoholics, both in the justice system, and in everyday life. I’ll never get over how people with all kinds of extra luck and privilege, all kinds of support networks and opportunities, manage to look down on, and feel superior to, ‘weak’ people who are going through addiction. In my experience, I find it rare for any person I meet not to be extremely haunted by their experiences and by big questions, and I had thought that deep loneliness was part of the human condition – more intense for those without friends or a lover, but still a part of life for those who have them. I am not sure how it can possibly be solved. I know that drugs need to be legalized, and I have argued over and over with conservative people who argue in totally unrecognized irony “I don’t care if it saves lives or helps people – legalization is immoral!”, but how to solve the deep yearning and loneliness that can lead a person to addiction? I have found that people who are extremely intelligent or sensitive – those with a lot of empathy and who reflect deeply on life – are much more likely to struggle with addiction or alcoholism. Sometimes, instead, they get addicted to politics, or addicted to religion – big movements that can keep someone from feeling small and isolated, and feel that they are connected to something bigger, working together with other people. So far, the way to deal with the human experience, in my view, seems to be either addiction, politics, religion, or throwing yourself into capitalist competition – having the best job, the nicest house, and the most accomplished children.

Those who feel peace and can have a drink, take part in a cause, pray to God, or plan after-school activities for their children without any tinge of existential crisis – with nothing that they are running from, to make them run to these things – amaze me. They are so different from the norm. Are they just not worried about the big questions? Have they never experienced horror, abuse, pain? Are they not aware of the suffering in the world? Do they, in a Buddhist way, decide to have compassion but also a sense of distance, and cease to view it as a crisis? Do they not need healing? Did they get healing? Do they just shut off a part of themselves? I feel like I spend a good deal of my time as a Christian crying out to God in anguish – heal my family, my community, my world – find the raped children someone who will rescue them, find the isolated someone to love them, find the hungry someone to feed them. I am one person. I cannot do these things. I cannot even heal the pain of the few people I know and love and can reach out to. God’s healing is either slow to come, or is not on its way. So what is there left for me to do? I pray, hope, and muddle through this world of suffering – blessed with so much intimacy and connection, friendship and support, and yet still often exhausted, lacking wisdom, and isolated.

 

Some modern churches promise happiness in God, but of course that is an empty promise. We humans struggle along, and for those who believe, God is sometimes extremely present and sometimes much more distant, sometimes offering strength and support beyond description, sometimes causing us to cry out in anger and exhaustion “Where did you go?!” – that is the experience, as far as I can see. One that has left plenty of extremely devout alcoholics weeping in prayer in their living rooms, cars, and bars, drink in hand, asking “Why won’t you help me?”. Willpower doesn’t work – all the deep wounds have to be healed. And how do you heal someone? I would give anything to know. I have seen, over and over, how mental health professionals have no idea how to heal, and I have watched Christian therapists heap blame and religiosity on people’s already burdened shoulders.

How do you heal someone’s deep wounds, and make sure that not only do they have enough for their physical life, they have enough for their emotional and spiritual life as well? The success rates for medicine that treats depression is hardly distinguishable from the placebo. It does not answer any of these questions. Addiction counsellors, as well, apparently do not answer these questions. The church, traditionally, answers either that addiction is weakness, that God will magically make all believers happy if they have enough faith, or that one needs only to be patient through suffering and trust God. These answers do not help.

Where is the magic help I can offer people? Honestly, I think that life is just deeply lonely and full of suffering, and that it is my role to find joy where I can, be grateful for my good friends and the deep, life-giving love between myself and my partner (every day, I am grateful, and every day, I am so afraid of what I would do if she died). And when I love my friends and want them to open up to me, I can try and avoid patronizing anyone who comes to me with their suffering. 

Maternal death risk in USA same as in Iran or Romania due to for-profit health care

“Surprisingly, the U.S. has made very little progress since 2000 in terms of maternal care. The risk of maternal death has actually risen by a rapid pace, going from from 1 in 3,700 to 1 in 2,400. A woman giving birth in the United States is now at the same maternal death risk as a woman giving birth in Iran or Romania.”

This is happening even though the US A spends more on health care than any other country and more on pregnancy and childbirth-related hospital costs, $86 billion, than any other type of hospital care.

Compare the American maternal death risk, which is at 1 in 2,400, to 1 in 14,000 in Poland. 1 in 16,300 in Belarus. 1 in 25,100 in Estonia. 1 in 15,300 in Singapore.

In 2014, the World Health Organization released a study which found that while most countries around the world — both developed and developing — have seen a decrease in maternal deaths, the U.S. maternal mortality ratio has increased 136% since 1990.

How can people possibly think that ‘socialized medicine’ is bad when American private medicine is obviously the most expensive and ineffective system imaginable? Money lines the pockets of corporations and buys nothing for the American people.

Of course, the statistics are hiding inequality – the ‘average’ American woman isn’t anything. Rich, usually white American women are giving birth in luxury and safety, with the best facilities possible. Middle class women are much worse off than their European neighbors, but can generally scrape together enough money to pay for prenatal care. Poor, usually black or minority ethnic American women face incredible danger and loss. The risk for African-American women is almost four times the risk for white women. 

A 2010 report by Amnesty International revealed that severe pregnancy-related complications that nearly cause death — known as “near misses” — are rising at an alarming rate in the USA, increasing by 25 percent since 1998.

Finland was the safest place in the world to have children for the second year in a row….it is also cheaper than the American system. It’s not perfect, and Finland will become worse as it swings to the right, but that’s a whole other issue.

 Americans think it’s the 50s and 60s and we’re number one. We’re really not….we’re really not anywhere close to number one in anything, except war.

Reproduction is a feminist issue. Why is abortion such an important issue, but the 2-3 women dying every day during pregnancy and childbirth are ignored? How can pro-lifers can get away with pretending abortion is dangerous (it’s much safer than deciding to go through with a pregnancy) while childbirth kills women and babies, and pro-lifers don’t care at all? This is never going to change in the USA without a radical shift to the left. When the quality of health care that women can access depends on their wealth, then women and babies will continue to die. Health care is a human right, not a privilege for the wealthy elite. As long as there is no public health care system, as long as health care is for-profit, as long as there is a class system, we are sacrificing women and children on the altar of capitalism.

More conclusions from Amnesty International:

• Burdensome bureaucratic procedures in Medicaid enrollment substantially delay access to vital prenatal care for pregnant women seeking government-funded care.
• A shortage of health care professionals is a serious obstacle to timely and adequate care, especially in rural areas and inner cities. In 2008, 64 million people were living in “shortage areas” for primary care (which includes maternal care).
• Many women are not given a say in decisions about their care and the risks of interventions such as inducing labor or cesarean sections. Cesarean sections make up nearly one-third of all deliveries in the US A – twice as high as recommended by the World Health Organization.
• The number of maternal deaths is significantly understated because of a lack of effective data collection in the US A .

http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/campaigns/demand-dignity/maternal-health-is-a-human-right/maternal-health-in-the-us?id=1351091

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/27/the-50-best-places_n_4493695.html

http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.8585863/k.9F31/State_of_the_Worlds_Mothers.htm

Cecily McMillan: Or, Police Can Do Whatever They Want To Us and We’ll Be Punished For It

 

 

 

 

Cecily McMillan is getting three months in prison for elbowing a police officer who grabbed her breast from behind. She presumably didn’t know he was a cop. After she elbowed him, a bunch of cops beat her up. The jury wrote to the judge asking for leniency after it was revealed she could get up to 7 years in prison for assaulting a police officer.

Reminds me of when the same thing happened to me in a club – I elbowed a bouncer who grabbed me from behind, since that’s my reaction to that common “Oh I’m being groped because I’m a woman in public” moment, and the bouncer got angry, screamed at me, and then threatened to kick me out. I didn’t know it was a bouncer when it happened.

Bouncers aren’t armed, which is good for me. Honestly, Cecily is lucky to be alive, and to have escaped with only a beating, and incredibly lucky to get 3 months instead of 7 years. American police are terrifying. But it really shows who is allowed self defense in the USA – killing people in ‘self defense’ is fine if the person in question is a minority, but in case after case, when women defend themselves from violence or sexual assault, whether the attacker is a police officer or not, women end up in jail.

There’s the extra issue of this being seen as fair punishment for protestors (Cecily was an Occupy protester), but genuinely, there are lots of cases of non-activist women, especially black women or trans women, going to jail for using self defense when attacked.

Check this out:

http://the-toast.net/2014/04/14/silencing-cecily-mcmillan/

Please tell me how the USA isn’t fascist

America might as well get rid of warrants, since they’re already spying on everything that goes on online or in phones. People were all freaked out that the USSR had a secret police with little physical files on people, but they would have never imagined having everything the USA has. The USA seems to be able to have a secret police it can use to spy on the leaders of other countries *and* just kidnap people it doesn’t like (like the President of Haiti in 2004). Iran, Chile, Guatemala, the amount of places where we have taken down progressive democratic leaders and replaced them with fascists, permanently disrupting democracy and leading to mass slaughter, is just incredible. I’m sure if I ever become a real activist, everything I wrote about my horror at the USA murdering innocent children and grannies with drones will be held against me. We all know about the way Einstein was spied on for being a socialist, and how Helen Keller was discredited as soon as she got involved with the socialists. We all know how MLK, jr was spied on and disrupted by the FBI, and he wasn’t even that far left – just an anti-capitalist anti-Vietnam Christian preacher who wanted to speak truth to power. 

Somehow we can have secret police (which MERKEL, of all people, compares to the stasi), no civil liberties, and depose unfriendly governments and replacing them with puppets while still thinking we’re a beacon of democracy. This probably explains why we think Israel is a democracy, no matter how many children it tortures or how many international laws it breaks while carrying out ethnic cleansing. 

Quakers & Islam, a quick glance at progressive religion

This blog is just a collection of quotes that I found useful. 

It’s not that hard to be a Christian feminist. If you want to read some radical theology that tackles misogyny and antisemitism, read Rosemary Radford Ruether (she’s Catholic). Plenty of queer theology and eco-feminist theology too. You might also want to check out the Quakers – they had women preachers from the late 1600s onwards, and unanimously embraced LGBT equality back in the 1980s.

“Quakers actively promoted the education of girls as well as boys. As early as 1668, George Fox set up Shacklewell School “to instruct young lasses and maidens in whatsoever was civil and useful.” In Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr was founded in 1833 as a liberal arts college for Quaker women. Quakers were also among the first to encourage women into medicine, founding the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850. In the first year, eight women, five of them Quaker, enrolled for the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Those students included Ann Preston (1813-1872) who later became the first woman dean of the college and campaigned to have female students admitted to clinical lectures at Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Hospitals.

In 1848 Lucretia Mott, a Quaker prominent in the abolition movement, was one of a small group of women, almost all Quakers, who organised the First Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York – often seen as the birthplace of the modern Women’s Movement.

In Britain, the role of Quaker women in the Women’s Suffrage movement is less well known but nonetheless significant. Anne Knight, an elderly Quaker, published the first leaflet that advocated votes for women in 1847. In the 1870s, Ann Maria Priestman and her sister Mary were first suffragists to use the method of non-payment of taxes as a means of protest. They also saw beyond the question of women’s suffrage and campaigned against the exclusion of women workers from skilled trades.

In 1876, Helen Bright Clark (1840–1927) gave a speech in favour of a Bill to remove voting disabilities for women, in opposition to her own father (a liberal MP). Her daughter, Alice Clark (1874–1934) founded the Friends League for Women’s Suffrage in 1912.”

Quakers are a “peace church” and were against the war in Iraq (and all war), and take a pretty firm stand against imperialism. 

I’m not pretending that first wave feminism was perfect or that Quakers were perfect, but many Quaker women were respectful enough to speak well of Islam, too, which is much more diverse that stereotypes would have it (as anyone who has studied the history of Spain, for example, would know). I’m going to link you to an academic paper which argues:

“Elements of a culture of tolerance in early modern Islamic societies thus filtered through to the West through the pioneering work of the extremely influential Quaker movement. The Quakers adapted this seed of Islamic tolerance that was lacking in their own culture of seventeenth-century England, and they developed it in their own way into a worldview that would evolve with time to promote radical social activism.”

http://muse.jhu.edu/…/summary/v100/100.1.vlasblom.html

Information on Quakers:

http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/166

On academic pretensions

I came across this excellent quote today:“Immigrants, poor people, queer people of color, disabled folks, women (esp trans women of color) and gender-nonconforming folks if you are in academia and you don’t feel smart enough, remember that you are in the playground and training grounds of the elite. academia was not designed to include you. you are surviving something that has been systemically designed to exclude you in order to keep power in the hands of white, middle class, able bodied cis-men. knowing this, don’t let academia train you to believe that elitism is the right way to make it through school. you can learn shit, hold the knowledge of your people in your heart, discard shame for your humble beginnings and/or marginalized identities. move through this experience knowing that the changes it offers you don’t have to include accepting academic elitism, inaccessible language or superiority. you can can simultaneously own the privilege that comes with being college educated and connections to your roots. academia does not have to kill your spirit.”
— Fabian Romero

For me, not feeling smart or educated enough when I moved to Europe from Texas and when I began my degree made me panic intensely and want to know *everything*. It felt like constantly scrabbling up an infinite mountain and feeling like I had to get to the top before I could value myself. It’s really hard, if you feel inadequate and are trying to learn everything you can get your hands on, to then not be pompous to people you now suddenly know more than – even if what you know is bullshit like what Kant said one time, and they still have all kinds of wisdom you don’t have. When you’re playing the game and other people are telling you you’re just not smart enough by their standards, it’s hard not to buy into those standards and then look down on other people when you do start to begin to be ‘smart enough’ by the standards of academia. It’s hard to learn not to placing everyone on a hierarchy. Valuing yourself as you are is really important to not being intimidated by rich academic types and also not looking down on the people you know and love because rich academic types wouldn’t respect them. When you don’t value yourself, you can’t value the people around you. If you’re marginalised, self-respect is subversive and radical.

Part of the problem comes down to valuing only certain academic types of knowledge and looking down on other types of knowledge. It’s interesting to me how even the most ridiculous stuff that old white dudes sitting by themselves thought is seen as valuable (philosophy), but the wisdom of women is “old wive’s tales”.I hate inaccessible language, and I hate ‘lefties’ who defend it. Elite language is often used to wield power over other people. This can even be seen as “progressive” by liberals who imagine that because many conservative people are less educated, then elitism is an anti-conservative force. In reality, elitism is deeply conservative and right wing.

If you can’t explain something in simple language, you don’t understand it. A real education means that you should be able to respectfully talk through your ideas with anyone. It means gaining new ideas because they will be able to help people – whether that means you know sociological ideas that help explain the world and liberate people, or artistic ideas that are about creativity and meaning, or scientific ideas which explain the world and will help manage and take care of it. 

I’ve really struggled with the feeling that since I’ve lived in different places and since I’m getting a Master’s degree, I’m better than people who don’t have an education or who have never left their own country. Every time I start a conversation, I can catch myself talking down to people when I talk about something obscure like Finnish politics. Yet during the course of the conversation, I am guaranteed to learn something new from the person I am talking with. Why can’t I understand that everyone has different kinds of knowledge, and we can all be respectfully learning from one another as equals? Why am I always trying to wield my privilege as a weapon or a sign of superiority? When I have talked with genuinely excellent professors, they have never made me feel small, and have encouraged me, making me feel like my ideas are valuable and that my perspective is important. This is the mark of someone who is really switched on and knows what’s up – they are humble enough to not feel like their tiny piece of knowledge is the whole picture, and to be constantly learning from everyone around them. It’s a mark of being able to be secure in one’s self and one’s finitude and limitations, and of knowing how to respect other people.My hope is to be more like this as I grow older.

 

“Selfish reasons to have an abortion” and Josie Cunningham

I just want to post a trigger warning – since 1 in 3 women have had an abortion, and it’s incredibly common, I just want to flag up that this post may be especially upsetting to these women, since I’m going to be talking about arguments used to shame women who have abortions.

Recently, this woman decided to have an abortion at 18 weeks and it has become a huge deal and elicited a lot of judgement:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/04/20/josie-cunningham-nhs-boob-job-abortion-big-brother_n_5181670.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

I think this just ends up being the same old “If you’re classy and have an abortion, I’m sympathetic, but if I think you’re ‘trashy’ and don’t conform to my ideas of how a woman should behave, then shame on you and you’re bringing feminism down – not wanting a kid is not reason enough” stuff. “She’s aborting because she wants to get famous, not because it’s a difficult time in her life for a child. So she’s sacrificing a life for personal gain.”

What this argument means is that if women are possibly able to have a child, then they shouldn’t have an abortion. This does not make any sense – surely women have a right to choose to terminate a pregnancy simply because they do not want a child, even if they could physically or financially have one. Women are not required to bear children just because they are financially or physically able. Choice means that they can also choose abortion just because they don’t want to be a parent. It also means that women shouldn’t have to have their lifestyle deemed ‘acceptable’ before their decision to get an abortion becomes valid. A low-income woman, a sex worker, a black woman, or a young person shouldn’t receive any more judgement if they make a choice to have an abortion than a wealthy white woman or a woman who is married with children.

I don’t think I’m ‘pro-abortion’, but I’m just not ready to shame women for their reasons to choose abortion. I think abortion on demand up until the cutoff date just isn’t controversial. I don’t think I would ever have an abortion at this point of my life, but knowing how incredibly destructive and painful pregnancy is, and how miserable and gruelling childcare can be, I just don’t see how it’s at all controversial to decide not to have a kid, for any reason.

Personally, I don’t understand why “I got a job I wasn’t expecting and so I’m getting an abortion now” is surprising, so I guess I am still misunderstanding the problem. I just don’t think there is a “selfish” reason for abortion before the cutoff, if we believe that a woman has an absolute right to her body and a fetus is not a person. If the woman does not have an absolute right to her body and is balancing her right to good quality of life with the fetus’ right to life, only then can a reason for abortion be morally questionable or “selfish”. So I guess it depends on how you approach the issue of abortion – whether a woman has an absolute right to her body, or whether she is depriving the fetus of life and should only do that with good reason. 

I would say that the reason her feelings about her abortion are valid and other people’s are not is because it’s her body and not public property. Everyone has feelings on things like whether someone wears makeup or shaves their legs or the fact it’s raining outside, but if they are trying to say there is a moral issue going on rather than an emotional one, that’s a different story. It sounds like some kind of internal struggle between whether all reasons are valid, or whether some are immoral. I understand that struggle –  it’s a struggle I went through when trying to figure out what I believed about abortion, and whether I thought the cutoff date for abortion on demand should be lowered.

People seem shocked that her choice is too “flippant”. I don’t understand. Having a child is a life-changing event. Choosing not to have a child is not necessarily a life changing or even a major decision. It depends on the woman’s experience, but I don’t see why it’s at all necessary that it be at all emotional to decide to *not* do something, or why that should be a decision made with gravity. If I believed that abortion was the sacrifice of a baby which should only be done when it’s absolutely necessary, that’s when I would believe that it should be done only for unselfish reasons and with gravity and emotion.

Abortion on demand is just that – whatever your reason is, it’s your reason and your body, and it’s a neutral decision, and you should have access to an abortion on demand without judgement up to the cutoff date. The issue then becomes the cutoff date – is it too late? Would it be better to, say, have abortion on demand up until 12 or 14 weeks like most of Europe, and then only for medical reasons after? My own stance is basically that whichever cutoff date I happen to support, up until that cutoff date, a woman’s right over her body is absolute. If I’m not willing and able to say that about any and all abortions done up to 24 weeks, then I believe the cutoff date should be lower. That’s how I try and avoid internal contradiction. So let’s look at cutoff dates.

I’m not sure that health and safety of the pregnant woman makes much sense as an argument for lowering the cutoff. Abortion isn’t more risky than childbirth. Normally, childbirth is much more dangerous than a legal abortion. After 20 weeks, in the USA, abortion is statistically *as risky* as childbirth, not more. I couldn’t find statistics about British risks because all my searching only led me to pro-life religious articles! So lowering the cutoff can’t be about protecting a woman’s health – it all comes down to the fetus, and when a woman’s absolute right to sovereignty over her body and to abortion on demand ends. 

I really struggled with the cutoff date when I first started thinking about abortion. Premature babies run in my family. I was born at 33 weeks, and my cousin was born much earlier, with a hole in her heart, though she survived and is now a healthy 15 year old. Some premature infants have survived at just shy of 22 weeks. So if your cutoff is related to fetal viability, then it probably actually should be earlier, though the cutoff date is just going to keep decreasing every few years until they’re able to just pop out the zygote and raise it in a robotic womb. I don’t think I would be ok with that – if there was technology to make sure it could survive at any stage, I’m not comfortable with that meaning that abortion was 100% illegal. I’m not sure if that’s too much of a “slippery slope” argument, I just am not that convinced by ‘viability’ as the deciding factor.

Personally, my own ideas about the cutoff date are related to whether a fetus can know anything is happening – are they conscious, can they suffer. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists argues that “Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks.” (source linked at bottom)

Honestly, an 18-week fetus doesn’t suffer and isn’t conscious. It’s at week 31 that a fetus can start to sense things – to hear voices speaking through the amniotic fluid and recognise its mother’s voice, taste the food she eats, etc. I would never want the cutoff date in the USA lowered because the very small (less than 2%) percentage of abortions which happen after 20 weeks are usually late-term because the woman couldn’t access an abortion earlier due to all kinds of structural reasons, and is usually young and poor. In a country where women could immediately access abortion on demand and in which abortion was free, I might be more willing to accept a lower cutoff date than 24 weeks  – maybe 22, before the thalamocortical fibers begin appearing, for example, in order to be entirely sure – but it seems that there is no need.  Almost all the medical evidence agrees that there’s no ability to feel pain before 24 weeks. 

Honestly, I desperately want children in the future, and have an emotional response towards abortion – it really disturbs me to think of my beloved child not being born. What convinced me was that I had a dream where I was discussing abortion with a friend and somewhat smugly telling her that I would never have an abortion. Then, in the dream, I became pregnant, and suddenly realized I had absolutely no possibility of choosing to terminate and was going to be forced to keep it. It was really horrifying. I immediately woke up and realized that all the niceties aside, sovereignty over my body was incredibly important to me. My emotional response about abortion had been me imagining having a desired child and that conscious child experiencing death and rejection. But the reality of a termination is the death of an unconscious fetus that would never know the difference, experience pain, or develop enough consciousness to be awake. Honestly, for me, I think it’s very similar whether it’s 4 weeks or 18, since in both cases, the embryo/fetus is just not conscious or able to suffer.

There’s really an argument about whether it’s more cruel to slaughter conscious, intelligent animals for meat than to have an abortion and kill an unconscious human fetus that can’t experience pain. I just don’t think the line between a human animal and another animal is that rigid, and it all comes down to consciousness and suffering. I would argue that the implications in the fact that we have a later cutoff date for foetuses with disabilities is obvious, but opens an entirely different debate about the intersections of ableism & disability and feminism which I am not qualified or prepared to explore.

Sources:

http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/25/why-abortion-is-less-risky-than-childbirth/

http://www.acog.org/~/media/Departments/Government%20Relations%20and%20Outreach/FactAreImportFetalPain.pdf?dmc=1&ts=20130917T1043566042

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=201429

It’s counterproductive to call rapists “evil”

Trigger warning: rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence

 

I was reading this Christian article which was written in order to shed light on the Evangelical problem of rampant sexual, physical and emotional abuse in the church, linked below.

http://religionscell.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/the-evil-how-to-identify-them/

I appreciate what it is doing – calling out child abuse and sexual abuse in the church. This is right and good. I just don’t think that the method of identifying abusers as “evil” helps rape and abuse survivors. People still don’t come in”good” and “evil” – they are incredibly fickle, ambivalent creatures who commit good and evil actions. That’s one of Jesus’ main teachings, and while this may strike Christians as overly compassionate, in reality, it’s an absolutely necessary teaching if you want to hold people who commit evil acts to justice. Saying that people are either good or evil confuses the issue and will lead to rapists and abusers not being held to account.

For example, an abused child who grows up to abuse his or her children is not “evil”. Life is more complex than that. However, this doesn’t mean it’s ok for victims to continue the cycle of abuse – depending on the severity of the crime, they still need to either be in prison and lose their kids forever, or have their kids in temporary foster care while they go through parenting training. People who rape and abuse the vulnerable should be in prison, but pretending that they are 100% evil does everyone a disservice. Many women who have been raped know their rapist and often these people are not only respected, but often do things that are genuinely good, because they are complex human beings with the capacity for both good and evil. This doesn’t mean that they are not a rapist, or that this rapist is somehow different from normal, “evil” rapists. It does not mean that if someone is capable of good or is complex, then in this case, that woman is not really a victim. It means that even if someone is not “evil!!” they are capable of actions of great evil and need to be held accountable- maybe with prison, maybe with other methods which will bring about justice and teach them to be safe/hold them to account. Victims need justice and protection, and the emotional situations is often incredibly complex. Applying black and white labels is not liberating and will backfire and make them argue that they weren’t really perfect victims and the other person isn’t 100% evil. Why create that situation? Why not make it clear that, for example, even if someone was abused themselves, even if they were under stress, even if you called them a curse word, even if you cheated, even if you were screaming in their face, even if they cried after, you don’t deserve to be hit, ever, in any circumstance?

In the same way, children who were abused by parents who they know loved them but who just didn’t have good parenting skills and who had emotional problems or problems with addiction know their parents aren’t “evil” – and this accounts for the majority of abused and neglected children. Pretending rapists or abusers are all evil is damaging for victims, because when they notice their rapist or abuser is a complex person, they start feeling like maybe they deserved what happened. Why is it so difficult to hold people to account without pretending people are good or evil? Why can’t we acknowledge that someone who victimises a child is still a complex human being, and that there is still grace for them, while still immediately exposing them, protecting the child, firing them, and putting them in prison, and hopefully keeping them there? Pretending that rapists are evil monsters means that when your brother, who you love, who was always good to you, is accused of rape, you automatically defend them, thinking “But rapists are evil people….I know my brother…my brother is good…..so he’s not a rapist.”

Yes, there are manipulative sociopaths, and they exist and are destructive, and they deserve to be in prison, but I just don’t think this kind of language helps anyone. A sociopath deserves to be in prison, but so does the complex man who “just made one mistake”. I am not arguing that if there has been incredible abuse by a group of people who are absolutely sick and horrific, that they need to be protected from being CALLED “evil”. It is absolutely fine to call them evil, and it’s important to identify that they will go to great lengths to protect themselves, to refuse to listen to any condemnation, and may never be rehabilitated. This is true and important to note, and the article does well to say this. My point is just that pretending that ALL rapists fit the profile of the sociopath allows all the others to get away with their crimes, and creates an atmosphere of impunity. What feminists call “rape culture” is an atmosphere of general misogynistic and patriarchal culture, in which violent attitudes towards women flourish. The conservative, Evangelical church is very patriarchal, and because of this, these attitudes flourish and are supported by church teaching. The solution is not to focus on particular “evil” individuals, but on an entire social and religious narrative that fosters violence, as well as the individuals who take advantage of this narrative. We need to look at how everyone is implicated, and work together to change this, whole also holding abusers accountable and bringing them to justice. Only this can bring about healing.