Tag Archives: Reproductive Justice

  

How Fetal Personhood Laws Promote Rape Culture

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Photo by William Murphy from flickr.com

During Wednesday’s hearing on Arizona Representative Trent Franks’s proposed 20-week abortion ban, Franks claimed “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” Using the same pseudo-scientific reasoning as Todd Akin (who infamously said pregnancy by “legitimate” rape was unlikely because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down”), Franks joined the ranks of conservative rape-deniers who privilege “fetal personhood” over a pregnant person’s autonomy.

Similarly in 2012, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Murdock said, “When life begins with that horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen.” Murdock was supported by Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas who said it is a “gift from God.” Although Franks backtracked and clarified his meaning later on Wednesday (“I’m talking about the incidences where pregnancy from rape results in an abortion after the sixth month or beyond are very rare”), his attitude is indicative of a knee-jerk hostility on the Right toward sexual assault survivors and people seeking abortions.

Contrary to Franks’s assumption, pregnancy from rape represents a significant minority of unwanted pregnancies in the U.S. A 1996 study of rape-related pregnancies estimated that 32,000 pregnancies each year were due to sexual assault – with a majority of assaults committed by someone known (often related) to the survivor. Of the survivors who became pregnant, thirty-two percent did not know they were pregnant until the second trimester. Fifty percent of pregnant sexual assault survivors sought abortions.

In the current ultraconservative political climate, “fetal personhood” arguments have gained political traction (fetal personhood laws have advanced in North Dakota and Arkansas) and function as a way to reduce the pregnant person to a host status and imbue fetuses with human rights. Put simply, a fetus’s interests always trump those of the pregnant person.

Defending Reproductive Justice, a recent publication of Political Research Associates, explains that rape exemptions put antichoice activists on the defensive because “prochoice advocates sometimes point to rape exemptions as evidence that opposition to abortion is based on a desire to control women’s sexual freedom, rather than concern for the fetus.” In other words, rape exemptions expose inconsistencies in the Right’s opposition to abortion. Further:

The lack of concern for rape survivors’ rights is part of the Right’s broader failure to take the country’s rape problem seriously. Would murder or any other violent crime be similarly painted as “something God intended”? The right-wing perspective that supports controlling a woman’s body when it comes to reproductive health decisions feeds the fundamental lack of respect for the right to bodily autonomy that enables rape culture.

The mainstream discourse on abortion has shifted significantly rightward now that lawmakers are debating whether to allow rape exemptions. The conversation about rape exemptions, while critical, reframes the debate on reproductive justice in conservative terms. Progressive activists must expand the debate outside the confines of a worthy/unworthy abortion dichotomy to demand that abortion be accessible (legally, financially, and geographically) to sexual assault survivors and everyone else who seeks abortion care. Only when people have full control of their reproductive capabilities can a semblance of gender justice be achieved.

Right-Wing Fabricates “Dangers” of Increased Access to Emergency Contraception

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The Justice Department recently decided to comply with a judge’s order to allow minors to purchase emergency contraception without a prescription or age restriction. While reproductive rights and justice groups applaud this progress for women’s health, antichoice groups denounce the decision, also claiming to have women’s well-being in mind.

Human Life International, a Christian Right antichoice group, issued a press release soon after the news became public. Despite the fact that medical experts such as American Academy of Pediatrics agree the pill is safe and have recommended that the pill be made available to teens of all ages, HLI president Father Shenan J. Boquet called the decision “dangerous and a threat to the health of young women and unborn life.”

Emergency contraception works by preventing ovulation. It contains the same hormone found in normal contraceptive pills, but at a higher dose. If taken within 72 hours, the pill drastically decreases the chances of pregnancy; it has no effect on existing pregnancies. Yet in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, Father Boquet suspects subterfuge, saying that “Plan B is most likely not a contraceptive at all, but an abortifacient pill.”

Beyond the false claim that the pill will harm unborn life, HLI and many other conservative groups claim to be worried about the safety and health of girls. Access to emergency contraception will send “the dangerous message that there is a ‘safe’ way to avoid the natural consequences of risky sexual behavior,” says Boquet, “… leading young women to objectify themselves for use by men.” Evidence has shown, however, that access to emergency contraception does not increase sexual activity among teens, nor does it decrease use of normal contraceptives. Read More →

Slavery and Holocaust Used to Defend 20-Week “Fetal Pain” Bill

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Rep. Trent Franks addressing Arizona Republicans. Photo: npr.org

Rep. Trent Franks addressing Arizona Republicans. Photo: npr.org

Last week, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Arizona) introduced a bill that would prohibit abortion access nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy – with no exceptions for rape, incest, or health of the mother — based on the scientifically unsound claim that fetuses have developed the ability to feel pain by then.

Initially applicable only to Washington D.C., Rep. Franks broadened the scope of the D.C. Pain-Capable Unborn Protection Act (HR 1797) on Wednesday to affect all fifty states in the U.S. The bill’s introduction followed a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that deemed a similar 20-week ban in Arizona unconstitutional. Nevertheless, Franks and eight members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution (a group with no female members) considered the law on Thursday.

Speaking with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins and antichoice activist Lila Rose on Thursday, Rep. Franks compared the antiabortion movement to the abolition of slavery and the Holocaust. He said, “We are the ones that rushed into Eastern Europe and arrested the Holocaust, we are the ones that said no more to slavery after thousands of years, and by the grace of God, we’re going to be the ones that say that we’re going to protect our own children.”

Franks’s invocation of the Black abolitionist struggle and trauma of the Holocaust equates abortion with genocide and slavery, a right-wing framework designed to evoke emotional and moral outrage from people who, rightly, abhor racially-based violence. Appropriating progressive rhetoric and others’ heritage of suffering to advance the antiabortion agenda attempts to shroud the antichoice movement with historical legitimacy and righteousness. Furthermore, this framework puts antiabortion activists, ostensibly, in solidarity with antiracist struggles.

Under the guise of racial justice, antiabortion activists have developed legislation introduced in sixteen states that prevents abortions based on race and sex discrimination. Antiabortion advocates use the language of nondiscrimination to advance their decidedly reactionary agenda of preventing abortion access from several angles. For example, in April the “Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act” (HB 845) was passed in Florida, which requires a person performing an abortion to sign an affidavit confirming they are not terminating the pregnancy based on the fetus’s potential race or sex. Champion of the bill, white Rep. Charles Van Zant (R-Keystone Heights) claimed, “In America alone — without the Nazi Holocaust, without the Ku Klux Klan — Planned Parenthood and other abortionists have reduced our black population by more than 25 percent since 1973.” Black members of the House in Florida were insulted and Rep. Cynthia Stafford of Miami said the premise that white antiabortion legislators were trying to protect women and Black children from discrimination was a “bald faced lie.”

Barriers to abortion access promoted under a facade of justice obscure the Right’s underlying goal of ending abortion access altogether. This type of insidious legislation conceals the Right’s strategy of erecting so many bureaucratic hurdles and obstacles that abortion providers limit their services, for fear of being on the wrong side of the law, and people (especially immigrants and people of color) are discouraged from obtaining legal abortions.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Target Black Communities

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This is an excerpt of an article originally published at Colorlines.

Last December, Care Net—the nation’s largest network of evangelical Christian crisis pregnancy centers—featured a birth announcement of sorts on the website of its 10-year-old Urban Initiative. Under the headline, “Plans Underway for Care Net’s Newest Center in Kansas City, Mo.!” a block of upbeat text described how a predominantly white, suburban nonprofit called Rachel House had “made contact” with “various African American pastors and community leaders,” who helped them “plant” a “pregnancy resource center” in a predominantly black, poor section of downtown Kansas City.

Evangelicals have long approached their anti-abortion work with missionary zeal. But over the past four years, national anti-abortion strategists have designated “urban” and “underserved” women and babies as a priority for saving. In practice, these terms tend to be euphemisms for “black” and, to a lesser extent, “Latina.”

Because crisis pregnancy centers are independently run and unregulated, it’s hard to say for sure how many there are in the United States. In a frequently cited 2010 report, the Family Research Council, a Christian right organizer and think tank, says there are more than 1,900 centers in the country affiliated with three major networks: Care Net, Heartbeat International and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates. An entire section of the report is devoted to the “urban” work of pregnancy centers. “The concentration of abortion facilities in urban, minority and poorer areas of the U.S. is well-known,” the report declares.

The “concentration” claim has already been thoroughly debunked, but many anti-abortion activists still believe deeply in it. It’s that belief, in part, that’s stirred outrage over the gruesome story of Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia clinic in recent weeks. Gosnell is being prosecuted for conducting illegal, dangerous late-term abortions, and rightwing pundits have argued that mainstream media ignored the story because it drew unflattering attention to abortion providers in poor, black neighborhoods. The implication is that anti-abortion activists care more about poor women of color than do the Planned Parenthoods of the world.

In its 2011 federal tax filing, Care Net reported spending nearly $1 million trying to “educate inner-city communities” and develop centers in “underserved areas.” In talking about this work, Care Net typically promotes North Philadelphia’s black-owned Hope Center as a model. But Rachel House offers a window into a different story, one that has unfolded in a series of headline-grabbing controversies over the past three years.

Fueled by a race-baiting, national marketing campaign and the missionary-like evangelism of its affiliates, Care Net has turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story. In that story, poor black women who have abortions are the unwitting victims of feminists and morally deficient reproductive healthcare providers, embodied in sadists such as Gosnell. Crisis pregnancy centers, in this fable, are the best place those women can go to be saved. Read More →

Reproductive Justice Activist Resource Kit Launches at CLPP Conference

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On April 12th, Political Research Associates (PRA) debuted its 2013 Defending Reproductive Justice activist resource kit at the annual Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP) conference.

Since its creation in 2000, the activist resource kit (ARK) has been used by thousands of reproductive justice advocates nationwide to understand and challenge right-wing messaging and strategies. The new edition, launched during the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, acknowledges that despite the groundbreaking decision legalizing abortion, many women and transgender individuals remain unable to access their reproductive rights.

In addition to exploring attacks on abortion and contraceptive rights, expanded sections provide in-depth analysis of reproductive abuses and additional right-wing frames, such “Black genocide,” “fetal personhood,” and “abstinence-only.” The overview written by Malika Redmond, former PRA lead gender justice researcher and currently Executive Director of Spark Reproductive Justice Now!, looks at the Right’s racialized strategies, “religious liberty” argument, and targeting of rape survivors.

PRA and CLPP, both founded about three decades ago, share a long history of opposing attacks on reproductive rights and health. We were proud to launch the 2013 ARK at the CLPP conference, “From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom,” where Redmond, PRA researcher Rev. Kapya Kaoma, and PRA Executive Director Tarso Luís Ramos all spoke on panels.

Defending Reproductive Justice is now available online for free download by social justice advocates, journalists, scholars, and the public. Also watch for additional online resources include a listing of organizations supporting and opposing reproductive justice; profiles of antichoice actors; and other supplementary materials.

The updated ARK would not have been possible without the insights of our advisory board, with participants from Law Students for Reproductive Justice, The Feminist Women’s Health Centers of California, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, New Voices Pittsburgh, Choice USA, Advocates for Youth, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and CLPP. Other organizations that contributed information included the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Native American Community Board, and Ipas.

If you find Defending Reproductive Justice to be a valuable resource, please consider a donation to our ongoing fundraising campaign–only 10 days left!

Right to Discriminate: HuffPost Live Discusses Religious Liberty

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“Religious liberty was meant to be a shield, not a sword,” says Jay Michaelson, author of PRA’s Redefining Religious Liberty report (pdf). “Religious liberty has become a code word, kind of like family values.”

Michaelson, appearing last week on HuffPost Live, explained that many groups enjoying “religious liberty exemptions,” for instance allowing Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide abortions or contraception, receive a majority of their funding from the federal government. Current lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act’s required contraception coverage for employee insurance, such as the Hobby Lobby suit brought by the Becket Fund, want an expansion of these  religious exemptions to corporations.

From the opposition, Charles LiMandri, President and Chief Counsel of the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (FCDF)–defense counsel for ex-gay therapy organization Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH)–parroted misleading right-wing rhetoric about the “targeting of Christians.” He gave an agitated denial when Michaelson pointed out that these are “the same arguments used in the 70s and 80s around racial discrimination.” Michaelson warned that, as anti-LGBTQ Christian Right organizations lose on same-sex marriage, they are inserting religious exemptions to render marriage equality “effectively meaningless…basically separate but unequal.”

Beth Corbin, National Field Director at Americans United for Separation of Church; Will McGuinness, HuffPost College Senior Editor; and Ed Krayewski, Associate Editor for Reason 24/7 News also participated in the conversation. If you missed the livestream, watch the video below for more discussion of the conservative Christian campaign for the right to discriminate:

Spiritual Warriors with an Antigay Mission: The New Apostolic Reformation

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The New Apostolic Reformation, an aggressively political movement within Christianity, blames literal demonic beings for the world’s ills and stresses the power of “spiritual warfare” to deliver people and nations from their power. It is rapidly gaining influence in the United States and around the globe, and it aims to advance a right-wing social and economic agenda—all while reinventing the structure of Christianity.

An August 2007 TheCall gathering in Nashville, TNPhoto: thoughtquotient.com

An August 2007 TheCall gathering in Nashville, TN
Photo: thoughtquotient.com

In the late summer of 2000, Rev. Lou Engle, a political activist and Charismatic religious leader, organized an all-day prayer rally in Washington, D.C. As Engle explained later, the event originated in a pressing question that he couldn’t shake: “How can I turn America back to God?” In a dream, Engle “felt overwhelmed by the impossibility” of achieving that goal, but then he saw a vision of a verse from the Bible: “And he will go on before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous.”1 From that dream, and a subsequent “supernatural series of events,” a giant prayer rally was born. Engle named it TheCall.

By Engle’s account, TheCall drew 400,000 people to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and changed the course of the 2000 election. The prayers of the faithful were answered when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Bush v. Gore decision, giving the election to George W. Bush. On the heels of that success, “the inward voice of the Lord . . . reverberated strongly in his spirit,” and Engle decided to organize a similar event in another city in 2001. At the suggestion of Sam Brownback, now the governor of Kansas and then a Republican U.S. senator, he chose Boston. Brownback had told him that “you need to dig the wells of revival in New England and close the doors to false ideologies that have found entrance through Boston.”2

Since then, Engle has staged more than 20 similar rallies, and each has attracted tens of thousands of participants to stadiums across the U.S. He and his organization have also become deeply involved in U.S. politics, especially in antichoice and antigay organizing. Engle staged TheCall San Diego, for example, the week before the 2008 election, with the explicit purpose of bolstering support for Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative and constitutional amendment that limited the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. Engle’s organization mounted a radio campaign and sent out email and phone blasts in support of Proposition 8, and he urged attendees to be martyrs for the cause.3 James Dobson, founder of the Christian Right organization Focus on the Family, later cited TheCall San Diego as the reason for Proposition 8’s success. 4 In 2010, an estimated 10,000 people attended TheCall Houston, whose purpose was “to contend for the ending of abortion and to spark an adoption revolution.” Antichoice activism was a major focus, as well, of TheCall Detroit in November 2011.5 Read More →

Profile: The Becket Fund

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becketfundNamed for the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, the Becket Fund was founded in 1994 by attorney Kevin ‘Seamus’ Hasson. Originally nonpartisan and an advocate on behalf of many religious interests, the Becket Fund has become more conservative under the leadership of William Mumma. It is the intellectual leader of the right-wing “religious liberty” campaign—it recently litigated and won the landmark Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC case in 2012, allowing religious groups to hire and fire clergy without regard to employment discrimination law. In 2010, it drew in a revenue of $2,692,006.

Notwithstanding Becket’s intellectual orientation, it has advanced the specious claim that marriage equality laws will force Roman Catholic churches to perform marriage for gay or lesbian couples. Becket is also at the forefront of the spate of adoption cases in Massachusetts and Illinois, where Catholic Charities pulled out of adoption networks rather than place children with gay or lesbian couples. The Becket Fund names the Affordable Care Act as one of the top religious freedom issues facing the United States, and has filed seven suits against it. Not all its projects, however, are culture-war related. For example, the Becket Fund has prosecuted cases in international fora, including representing Muslims before the European Court of Human Rights.

Organizationally, the Becket Fund is a public interest law firm that represents states, municipalities, and members of many different religious faiths with the goal of defending the constitutional right to free expression of religion. The Becket Fund is at the center of a small, Roman Catholic-dominated group of “religious liberty” activists. Its entire leadership and funder base is made up of conservative Roman Catholics: current executive director William Mumma, founder Kevin Hasson, general counsel Anthony Picarello (who joined the the Knights of Columbus and USCCB in 2007 as its general counsel to work against marriage equality, and who recently led the bishops’ campaign regarding “religious liberty”), board members Robert P. George (coauthor of the Manhattan Declaration) and Mary Ann Glendon (former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See and a leading antichoice theorist). Read More →

Help Distribute Our 2013 “Defending Reproductive Justice” Activist Resource Kit

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Political Research Associates launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign today to produce and distribute the 2013 “Defending Reproductive Justice” ARK to women’s rights groups and educators across the country.

Forty years after Roe v. Wade, reproductive health in the U.S. is still widely under attack. New legislation has appeared in several states restricting access to healthcare and birth control, and in Mississippi, the last abortion clinic is hanging by a thread. The 2013 edition of “Defending Reproductive Justice” will serve as an updated and thorough resource to women’s advocates in today’s political climate, highlighting new legislative challenges, analysis of right-wing messaging strategies, and methods to combat antichoice movements domestically and abroad.

PRA plans to provide this resource free of charge to as many activists, educators, and gender justice organizations as possible–but we need your support. Your donation will help us:

  • Complete production and printing of hundreds of copies of the resource kit
  • Debut the Activist Resource Kit at this year’s CLPP (Civil Liberties and Public Policy) conference
  • Provide the kits free-of-charge to women’s rights groups everywhere
  • Fund the updating and dissemination of Activist Resource Kits in the future

If we exceed our goal of $5,000, we will use the additional funds to create a resource guide for youth on harmful abstinence-only programs and other sexual health issues facing young adults. We will also use it to provide further research and analysis to reproductive justice organizers, as well as legislative groups like Choice USA and Advocates for Youth.

PRA is committed to fighting for the promise of Roe nationwide. Learn more about the campaign here.

New Study Shows African-Americans Reject Right-Wing Position on Choice

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antichoicebillboard

Photo: Creative Commons

In the face of African-American voters’ overwhelming support for President Obama in the 2012 election, some right-wing pundits dismissed this as simply racial allegiance rather than an embrace of liberal positions. A recently released poll demonstrates, perhaps to their chagrin, that the Christian Right’s investment in Black antichoice leaders, such as Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation and Bishop Harry Jackson, was unsuccessful in moving the African-American community on reproductive justice. It seems that the Radiance Foundation’s provocative 2011 billboard campaign with statements like “the most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb” fell short.

Conducted nearly two weeks after the 2012 election, the poll asked African-American adults for their views on hot button issues like sexual health education and abortion.  The majority of participants—who represented different religious and political affiliations, and ranged in age, education, and income—mirrored the President’s positions on women’s rights, including support for abortion (79%) and contraceptive access (94%). When asked about teen sex education, the majority supported a comprehensive curriculum that includes “prevention of HIV-AIDS and STDs, sexual and domestic abuse, unintended pregnancy, abstinence, and healthy romantic relationships.” Reproductive justice activist Jasmine Burnett, whose innovative work helped bring the infamous billboards down, confirms: “The propaganda used by the right-wing to frame our community as being aligned with their political interest to end women’s access to reproductive health is wrong.” Read More →