August is nearly over and I have only written a single entry this entire month. My blog is most certainly mirroring the identity crisis I am (hopefully) in the middle of having. I've been thinking of changing to a different site to host it and or MAYBE starting my own site. I've been worrying about copyright and legality issues (almost unreasonably so) and I am almost thinking that I may close the whole thing down and work solely on pieces geared towards being published online or in print. There are so many things that can be related to Feminism and Women's rights- A TON of things. My focus is mostly on Reproductive Rights and Abortion. Secondarily, I have written a lot outside of this blog about Pornography and the relationship it has to Feminism. As of right now, I am drawn to the exclusion of minority and African American women in mainstream Feminism and the disservice that results in allowing white women to speak for all women.
A lot of....THOUGHTS I guess. I will leave you with some items that have stuck out to me in recent weeks and then continue meandering through all my thoughts and my current crisis of self.
The President of the League of Women Voters in the US wrote this blog post for the HUFFINGTON POST on Women's Equality Day- the day commemorating the passage of the 19th Amendment. She also talks about the current status of voting rights in the United States.
The ONLY thing that I've shared or cared about regarding Miley Cyrus and her VMA performance SOLIDARITY FOR MILEY CYRUS
This blog post really struck me. It popped up on FB a couple weeks ago and whether you are in a relationship or not it's a must read TOXIC RELATIONSHIP HABITS
What difference does it make if you can't take a day off during the week to get an abortion? ALABAMAS SATURDAY WOMEN
Until next time...
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Six Week Timer (or Would You Know You were Pregnant?)
North Dakota is trying to ban abortions after 6 weeks. North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple signed a bill into law in March and did so with the expectation that it would be ruled unconstitutional. Thankfully, it was. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the law, siding with reproductive health advocates and stating in no uncertain terms that the law is clearly unconstitutional.
Republicans in both Arizona and Arkansas passed 20 week and 12 week bans (respectively) within the past year. After the 20 week ban in Texas passed the Republican law makers drafted their own legislation to bring a proposed 6 week ban into effect. The bill would require women seeking abortion to first undergo an ultrasound, and if the fetal heartbeat can be detected she would be banned from having the procedure. The fetal heart beat is usually detected around the sixth week of pregnancy.
The tactics of Republicans and the Pro-life movement have long been rooted in creating obstacles for women to obtain a legal abortion. The 20 week abortion ban in Texas for instance, not only made it illegal to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks but simultaneously closed down most of the abortion clinics in the State who could not afford to make the unnecessary changes to be licensed as surgical ambulatory centers which was called for in the bill (i.e. wider hallways).
While Republicans spend an enormous amount of time, energy and resources on drafting these bills and attempting to push them through their respective state legislatures, the end goal is to overturn Roe v.Wade and in the meantime prevent as many women from obtaining legal abortions as possible. With bans in place women have a limited time in which they can find out they are pregnant, decide to terminate said pregnancy, gather funds in which to pay for the procedure, make an appointment, find a ride, take the day off from work and so on and so forth. Of course, the longer one has to wait to obtain an abortion the more expensive and more complicated the procedure will be.
This is why the ban on abortions starting as soon as a fetal heart rate is detected is absolutely ridiculous. Women often find out that they are pregnant at the 6 week mark or for some much later. For anyone who has the opinion that women have to know the second they are impregnated, you are wrong. Simple as that. If you don't have a female reproductive system your opinion on the matter is null and void, if you do have a female reproductive system and you still can't believe that women cannot know that they are pregnant then you are also wrong. It happens.
The exact statistics of these instances are hard to pin down. It seems that the most recent statistics claim it occurs between 1 in 475 women and 1 in 600 women (though European data seems much lower at 1 in 2500 women as of 2009). Upon further inspection the difference in statistics is that the 1 in 475/600 is in the case when a women discovers she is pregnant late into the actually pregnancy and the 1 in 2500 is for women who actually go into labor without knowing they were pregnant at all.
You may be asking yourself the question- "how is it possible to not know that you are pregnant?" Let's discuss how this is possible.
First and foremost you may take one or more pregnancy tests that come back negative. Okay, easy enough to understand right?
What about missing your period? Doesn't that make it obvious? Some women get their periods (menstrual cycle) every 21 days, menstruate for 4-7 days and then start all over again. A more average occurrence may be every a period every 24-35 days and actual menstruation of somewhere between 2-7 days. This is just an average and the point is that there are women who's cycles are completely irregular. Sometimes stress, weight loss or gain or environmental circumstances can cause missed periods or cycle changes. Some women may have very light periods that often include minimal spotting or barely any fluid at all. Everybody is different! There are women who spot throughout their pregnancies too. So saying that a woman would automatically know she was pregnant because she misses her period is not accurate.
What about getting pregnant when you're on birth control? There are a lot of methods of birth control out there; the pill, the patch, the implant, IUD's (Intrauterine devices implanted along the wall of the uterus), the shot, the ring and more still. Each method has a varying rate of failure. IUD's can be up to 99.9% effective, BUT the only way to absolutely avoid being impregnated is to not have sex. So in theory, no matter what birth control method you use there is a chance that you COULD become pregnant if you engage in intercourse. BUT the odds of becoming pregnant while on birth control are much lower than if you aren't and it isn't hard to imagine a women who may not have any symptoms of pregnancy and have an IUD in place think that she couldn't be pregnant- add in a false negative on a pregnancy test and it becomes even easier to see how this can happen.
There is also EC (emergency contraception). EC is a pill you can take up to 72 hours after unprotected sex to greatly reduce the risk of becoming pregnant. If you are already pregnant, EC won't work. However, if you take EC right after unprotected sex your odds of becoming pregnant goes down significantly. Without additional symptoms you may think that you couldn't be pregnant.
If you want to hear specific stories about women who didn't know they were pregnant then you can look up the TV reality show that aired on Discovery Health between 2008-2011, "I Didn't Know I was Pregnant." Yes, there are obvious over dramatizations and sensationalism on this and every other reality shows but it does provide some food for thought about the topic.
So, to tie all this back into abortion bans- when States make it extremely difficult to access first-term abortions by placing obstacles in front of women (waiting periods, mandatory counseling, little to no clinic availability) the result is that women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies much longer into term than desired which in turn hurts everyone.
Yes, it does get trickier to talk about abortion when you get to a certain gestational age. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be talking about it though. The obvious focus shouldn't be on banning late term abortions but about ensuring accessibility to all women seeking abortions earlier in the pregnancy. When abortion access is not readily available to certain women because of their income level or geographical location the time it can take for that woman to gain access can turn a first-term abortion in the second or even third trimester. Most states do not allow third-term an abortion, the limit in the United States is about 26 weeks and this is only allowed in the event of severe fetal abnormalities or if the health of the mother is in serious danger.
The goal of states like North Dakota, Arizona and Texas is to make abortion so inaccessible to women that they need to be either extremely wealthy or extremely fortunate in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Abortions will happen. They will occur no matter what. If women cannot access them early and safely than there will be women who will be so desperate that they will take matters into their own hands. Bans do nothing but further the disconnect between what Anti-choice individuals want and what all women in every state deserve; early, safe and affordable abortions.
Republicans in both Arizona and Arkansas passed 20 week and 12 week bans (respectively) within the past year. After the 20 week ban in Texas passed the Republican law makers drafted their own legislation to bring a proposed 6 week ban into effect. The bill would require women seeking abortion to first undergo an ultrasound, and if the fetal heartbeat can be detected she would be banned from having the procedure. The fetal heart beat is usually detected around the sixth week of pregnancy.
The tactics of Republicans and the Pro-life movement have long been rooted in creating obstacles for women to obtain a legal abortion. The 20 week abortion ban in Texas for instance, not only made it illegal to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks but simultaneously closed down most of the abortion clinics in the State who could not afford to make the unnecessary changes to be licensed as surgical ambulatory centers which was called for in the bill (i.e. wider hallways).
While Republicans spend an enormous amount of time, energy and resources on drafting these bills and attempting to push them through their respective state legislatures, the end goal is to overturn Roe v.Wade and in the meantime prevent as many women from obtaining legal abortions as possible. With bans in place women have a limited time in which they can find out they are pregnant, decide to terminate said pregnancy, gather funds in which to pay for the procedure, make an appointment, find a ride, take the day off from work and so on and so forth. Of course, the longer one has to wait to obtain an abortion the more expensive and more complicated the procedure will be.
This is why the ban on abortions starting as soon as a fetal heart rate is detected is absolutely ridiculous. Women often find out that they are pregnant at the 6 week mark or for some much later. For anyone who has the opinion that women have to know the second they are impregnated, you are wrong. Simple as that. If you don't have a female reproductive system your opinion on the matter is null and void, if you do have a female reproductive system and you still can't believe that women cannot know that they are pregnant then you are also wrong. It happens.
The exact statistics of these instances are hard to pin down. It seems that the most recent statistics claim it occurs between 1 in 475 women and 1 in 600 women (though European data seems much lower at 1 in 2500 women as of 2009). Upon further inspection the difference in statistics is that the 1 in 475/600 is in the case when a women discovers she is pregnant late into the actually pregnancy and the 1 in 2500 is for women who actually go into labor without knowing they were pregnant at all.
You may be asking yourself the question- "how is it possible to not know that you are pregnant?" Let's discuss how this is possible.
First and foremost you may take one or more pregnancy tests that come back negative. Okay, easy enough to understand right?
What about missing your period? Doesn't that make it obvious? Some women get their periods (menstrual cycle) every 21 days, menstruate for 4-7 days and then start all over again. A more average occurrence may be every a period every 24-35 days and actual menstruation of somewhere between 2-7 days. This is just an average and the point is that there are women who's cycles are completely irregular. Sometimes stress, weight loss or gain or environmental circumstances can cause missed periods or cycle changes. Some women may have very light periods that often include minimal spotting or barely any fluid at all. Everybody is different! There are women who spot throughout their pregnancies too. So saying that a woman would automatically know she was pregnant because she misses her period is not accurate.
What about getting pregnant when you're on birth control? There are a lot of methods of birth control out there; the pill, the patch, the implant, IUD's (Intrauterine devices implanted along the wall of the uterus), the shot, the ring and more still. Each method has a varying rate of failure. IUD's can be up to 99.9% effective, BUT the only way to absolutely avoid being impregnated is to not have sex. So in theory, no matter what birth control method you use there is a chance that you COULD become pregnant if you engage in intercourse. BUT the odds of becoming pregnant while on birth control are much lower than if you aren't and it isn't hard to imagine a women who may not have any symptoms of pregnancy and have an IUD in place think that she couldn't be pregnant- add in a false negative on a pregnancy test and it becomes even easier to see how this can happen.
There is also EC (emergency contraception). EC is a pill you can take up to 72 hours after unprotected sex to greatly reduce the risk of becoming pregnant. If you are already pregnant, EC won't work. However, if you take EC right after unprotected sex your odds of becoming pregnant goes down significantly. Without additional symptoms you may think that you couldn't be pregnant.
If you want to hear specific stories about women who didn't know they were pregnant then you can look up the TV reality show that aired on Discovery Health between 2008-2011, "I Didn't Know I was Pregnant." Yes, there are obvious over dramatizations and sensationalism on this and every other reality shows but it does provide some food for thought about the topic.
So, to tie all this back into abortion bans- when States make it extremely difficult to access first-term abortions by placing obstacles in front of women (waiting periods, mandatory counseling, little to no clinic availability) the result is that women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies much longer into term than desired which in turn hurts everyone.
Yes, it does get trickier to talk about abortion when you get to a certain gestational age. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be talking about it though. The obvious focus shouldn't be on banning late term abortions but about ensuring accessibility to all women seeking abortions earlier in the pregnancy. When abortion access is not readily available to certain women because of their income level or geographical location the time it can take for that woman to gain access can turn a first-term abortion in the second or even third trimester. Most states do not allow third-term an abortion, the limit in the United States is about 26 weeks and this is only allowed in the event of severe fetal abnormalities or if the health of the mother is in serious danger.
The goal of states like North Dakota, Arizona and Texas is to make abortion so inaccessible to women that they need to be either extremely wealthy or extremely fortunate in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Abortions will happen. They will occur no matter what. If women cannot access them early and safely than there will be women who will be so desperate that they will take matters into their own hands. Bans do nothing but further the disconnect between what Anti-choice individuals want and what all women in every state deserve; early, safe and affordable abortions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)