And fuck you folks who keep throwing around Roe as an extortion threat. Your supreme leader is an ass, a sexist, and a forced pregnancy blowhard.

I had a late term abortion (24 weeks) for issues of mental distress. Obama doesn’t think that’s a good enough reason. Let’s see, what did mental stress include for me…..

A still nursing 2 year old (thats why it was late term, I wasn’t having a period at all), gripping poverty, 8 bucks an hour at a crappy job an hour and a half away with no health insurance or paid maternity leave, 600 bucks a month in child care for one child, no child support, an ex with a restraining order because he tried to kill me in a parking lot and 56 violations of that restraining order (with no jail time, not even one day), and the knowledge that my last pregnancy had nearly killed me and another could really do me in.

So this means war. If Obama wins the presidency, the Democratic party is ruined forever, and women in the entire country, regardless of their political views, are screwed.

PUMA!

Mostly from Shakes cause I’m lazy

Hurray! After 6 years in captivity, Ingrid Bettancourt is finally free.

Go Read Liss and Zuzu’s fabulous two parter on Destroying Hillary in the Guardian
Part one
Part two

Reason number 874 why I am writing a book about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and has an abortion- because if we were to go by the crap that counts as entertainment in this country you would think abortion never existed.

For as tough as my own history of abortion is, I am incredibly lucky that it has always been legal for me. I have never had to risk myself with a scary back alley moment or had to try to get rid of it myself with poison or punctures.

A WORLD WITHOUT ABORTION

H/t Feministing I think.

Via Jezebel comes the story of pregnant 16 year old girl. She tells her boyfriend. Boyfriend tell his mother. Mother tells girl not to tell her parents, forges parental notification form, pushes girl into getting an abortion, and pays for abortion.

Afterwards girl tells her parents and they, being obviously pissed, press charges. The woman gets a year in jail.

Perhaps the girl would have chosen abortion on her own. Perhaps if she had told her parents they would have supported her in that choice. Or perhaps she would have decided to keep the baby. But she would have gotten to choose.

Parental notification laws do not make more pregnant girls talk to their parents. Most pregnant teenagers DO tell their parents. But parental notification laws make it so that the girl has less say in what happens to her own body. If she wants an abortion and her parents do not, that’s it. No help for her. Hello motherhood! It also makes her vulnerable to people like the mother in this story. I don’t have to imagine how scared the girl was. I know it.

I’ve talked a little about my own experience. I’ll do it again here.

When i was 16, my mother was in a mental hospital and I lived with foster parents. They were people who had become foster parents only because it made them better candidates for adoption. (They told me that on almost my first night there). I had been with them for about 2 months when I found out I was pregnant. I knew before I even had the test that I wasn’t having a baby.

I arranged the money, the transportation, the time off school so that I wouldn’t be marked for ditching. I told my own mother and talked to my wonderful school counselor who was prohibited by law from telling me about abortion options, so she slyly slid a piece of paper with a phone number on it to me and told me not tell anyone where it came from. She didn’t do that until after I told her there was no way in hell I was having a baby.

The day before the abortion, my foster mother (who I am pretty sure is the poster example of an emotionally abused woman, but that is another story) pulled me into my room and asked if I was pregnant.

She didn’t ask with concern. She didn’t ask with worry. She didn’t ask with anger. Any of those I would have understood. When she asked me her eyes were lit up with potential happiness. She was almost fevered in her looks. Like a junkie asking if I had a spare rock.

I didn’t have a problem telling people who would be helpful and supportive to me. But in about half a second I decided that telling her the truth would be bad news for me. I could see the hopeful desperation in her eyes. I knew that if I said “Yes, I am pregnant. Tomorrow I am having an abortion and everything has been worked out” that at the very least I would spend the entire night up with her and her husband while they tried to talk me out of it. I knew that it was far more likely that they would prevent me from having the abortion in any way they could. And Foster Pop was a cop. He had numerous ways of preventing me from doing things.

So I lied. I went the next day and had the abortion. I figured out that my state medicaid for foster kids wouldn’t pay for an abortion, but it covered the cost of the anti-biotics and other prescriptions I needed afterwards. My boyfriend went with me and took excellent care of me before, during and especially afterwards.

I told my foster parents several days later. I was homeless less than a week after that. My stuff was all bagged up in big black plastic garbage bags and left in the driveway while they went on vacation to Disneyland.

Had parental notification laws been in place at the time, I would have been forced, at 16, to have a baby I didn’t want. My only other option would have been adoption, which is exactly what my foster parents wanted, but not something I have ever considered. Ever.

I was responsible. I talked to adults who I knew were supportive and wouldn’t pressure me. I think the girl in the Jezebel story would have too, but instead she got stuck talking to someone who did not have her best interests at heart. And that is what parental notification laws do. They remove from the girl the ability to find the kind of support she needs. Sometimes that is parents, usually that is parents. But sometimes it is not. Those are the worst situations. How can we ever know what the girl might have wanted for herself, when so many people with conflicting opinions get to control her.

To follow up on my pro Hillary post, here is why I will not now, not ever vote for Obama.

Sexism, sexism, sexism. I have no intention of voting for a person or a party that uses misogyny as a campaign tactic. Obama has shown his own sexism , and that is bad enough. But the real problem is that he has used misogyny to benefit his campaign and has never, not once, spoken out about it. If he did now, it would be a blatant campaign move instead of any real change of feeling.

Abortion. Is he for women’s control over their own bodies? Against? Does he waffle depending on who the audience is? Are women full people or do we only deserve “some” control over our own bodies? We don’t know. And since he has already shown his sexism, I can’t trust his wishy washy record on bodily autonomy.

Economics. He knows very little about economics to begin with, but what he likes is Republican style to the winners go the spoils kind of policies. Capital gains taxes, won’t raise them any higher than Reagan. Torte reform- let’s make it harder for the American people to use the one remedy they have available when business screws them. Corporate deregulation, well we’ve seen how well that works (Enron, ecoli spinach, downer cattle in the food supply, FDA approving drugs that kill).

Reagan worship- no no no no no no no no no no no.

The poor- while Obama talks nice about opportunities, truth is that he knows which side his bread is buttered on. While getting unicorn sweet deals on real estate from Tony Rezko, Rezko was screwing the poor in Obama’s district by taking public money and leaving them in rat infested, unheated, low income slums in the middle of Chicago winters.

That hypocritical campaign funding stance. Sure, you think Obama is only getting money from small, individual donors. Do you also think he shits rainbows and pisses chocolate milk. He’s backed by banking, insurance, nuclear power companies, etc. etc.

Healthcare- perhaps all the insurance money is the reason why Obama has the most craptastic plan ever.

You may have read some of the blog rage for a certain study about how a woman’s prenatal diet can influence the sex of her child (huh- I thought sperm determined sex, but that eliminates blaming the ladies don’t it). But of course they ONLY talk about how it influences the birth of boy babies. Cause who in their right mind would want a girl?

My answer at Shakes was:

Huhm, my pre-baby-boy gestation diet was diet coke and marlboros (I was 19 and he was a surprise) so I am going to say diet coke and malboros makes boys. Maybe for girls it’s mountain dew and camels.

But, that is a wee bit unfair. I can’t really pick on people for wanting a child of one sex over another. When I was pregnant I wanted a boy. I grew up in house full of cruelty directed at me purely because of my sex. My mother hated me because I was a girl. I was given twice the work, none of the encouragement and resources such as clothing only grudgingly (and then with months of guilt, anger and actual objects thrown at me for needing anything). My birthday was regularly forgot (My brother’s birthday is a month before mine so there wasn’t any money left for presents or cake by then anyways). And that is just the easy stuff, only my therapist knows the worst. I am told that my aunt cried when I was born because I was a girl (not that she hates girls, she has 2 daughters who she loves and supports unconditionally) but because she knew my lot in life was going to suck with my mother.

So when I found out I was pregnant at 19, I did not think I had enough strength or distance from my own childhood to give a daughter a fair chance. I wanted a boy because at least I had seen how to raise a boy with love. And a boy is what I got.

Now with 13 years of mommy experience and almost as much therapy, I think I could raise a kick ass girl. But I’ve come a long way to be able to say that.

It is easy for us to cringe at the idea of sex selective abortions and to bemoan the fate of all the little unwanted Chinese girls. We can push for restrictions on sex selective abortions all we want, but that doesn’t change the culture that values boys over girls. It just gives girls to parents, like my mother, who don’t want to raise them. We can find it disgusting that so many people, men and women, want sons to pass on the family name or give the birth of a boy more value than that of a girl.But we really aren’t that much different than the Chinese. We still value boy children over girl children.

And until we change that value system, until a child is valued because it is a child and not because of it’s xy chromosomes, then complaining and restricting doesn’t do a damn thing but put girls into homes where they are despised. Trust me, I know.