Harry Potter and the cauldron of STIs...

That headline doesn't quite capture all the cheekiness, humour, irreverence and tongue-twisting (at times!) facts overload (but in a GOOD way) of an Insight Theatre *show*.  

You must attend one to get their infectious (ouch!) jokes and insightful moments.  I won't give away any punchlines; suffice to say JK Rowling's penchant for quirky names is amply explored in the naughty bits... err, skits about Sexually Transmitted Infections.  Hilarious, inspired and clever! 

The lively and talented writers/performers are adolescents who work with Planned Parenthood Ottawa staff to produce this amusing and informative show.

Last evening I spoke with Catherine Macnab and Lauren Dobson-Hughes who are respectively director and board president.  Insight Theatre is a gem in a crown of multi-faceted education and community outreach programs. We spoke about advocacy, the challenges of reproductive justice issues, pro-choice and The March for Lies, since the event is one that DJ! mines shamelessly for its unintended humour.  

Since hundreds and hundreds of Catholic Schools students who are bussed to Ottawa for the March wander about downtown Ottawa afterwards, volunteers wearing PPO shirts show up to give out information packets with its own PPO branded condoms in the ByWard Market, on Elgin Street and around Parliament Hill. 

The range of programs offered by PPO can be found here.

Unfortunately there are no videos posted yet from this year's repertoire, but here's a golden oldie from 2013:

To book a performance: all the information.

Respectability vs RESPECT: Part One

R•E•S•P•E•C•T  is of course:

Respectability is a different kettle of fish, however.  The very foundation of patriarchy is cemented with the premise that only some women are respectable - that is, worthy and deserving of respect - and others are NOT.

My co-blogger fern hill recently addressed the *stigma* of abortion. And we have many more blogposts at DJ! that challenge the notion that respectable women should grieve, do penance, and wear ashes on their head when a pregnancy - their OWN, in fact - is terminated. By choice.  Or when it's forcibly rejected by the body, an occurrence that happens regularly.

By way of an example, Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis' disclosure of how and why she had two abortions, illustrates the division between what is considered a 'respectable' abortion and what is not. 

"For a woman to reveal she has had an abortion because she wanted one, because she couldn't emotionally sacrifice for another child, because she was remiss in her use of contraception, and, further, to declare she has only felt happiness towards her decision is truly groundbreaking. Davis' abortion narrative has helped diminish the social stigma surrounding abortion. But until the “bad” abortion stories are just as acceptable, pro-choice advocates have a long way to go."

From must-read: _Wendy Davis and the 'Good Abortion' Myth_ found here.

Respectability is at issue with regard to abortion because when women have sex, consensually or not, that can produce a pregnancy - unwanted or planned.

Sex as procreative versus sex as a recreative activity.  Also, sex as gender bigotry.

Yesterday some hack writer, compensating for whatever pathetic sense of inadequacy seized him, dismissed Naomi Klein and her recent publication in calculated, malevolent, gendered, barnyard animal terms.  

Not even bothering to address or refute her arguments, he deems her stupid. 

There you have it. But wait, here is more to consider.

As observed: "...the word cow is a put down to women but the term bull is considered a compliment for men." 

Note also in the exchange cited above, the comparison used when vilifying mayoral candidate Olivia Chow.  Her competitor John Tory said that she had "more positions than Masters and Johnson".  

"Respectability" is a toxic judgement passed on women and the last remaining double standard for judging women's choices and behaviours as indecent.  Feminists of African, Indigenous and Asian ancestry have identified the use of "respectability" politics as a weapon specifically used to target women of colour (WoC) for social opprobrium.

An incident that unfolded in Los Angeles last week gained publicity when Danièle Watts, intimidated and humiliated by police who profiled her as prostitute, spoke up.  

Her experience is not unusual. As evident from the insult slung at Ms Chow by her opponent, these assumptions of impropriety about racialized women are claimed by men who reduce them to female beings unworthy of respect, with little or no resources other than the unbridled hyper-sexuality that others project upon their bodies.

Next: Part Two will examine how respectability politics reinforce whorephobia as a partisan neo-conservative tactic to divide women and destroy solidarity among feminists. Read the blogpost from @kwetoday that I've linked to, above.

March4Lies Part 2: Faith and truthy-ness

So, this happened on Thursday May 8.

There was a lame attempt by antiChoice Faith Goldy, a StunTV performance-artist-wannabe-Ann-Coulter, to bully members of the Radical Handmaids as well as other proChoice counter-protesters into saying something, anything while the camera was recording that could be edited and spun into a sensationalistic GOTCHA! - à la Ezra Levant school of faux-journalism.

What is it with StunTV media circus performers and their penchant for fake or trumped up news? Their broadcasts are never-ending infomercials, infotainment or simply outrageously skanky and amateurish filler engineered by Levant and his entourage.

Fortunately the media-savvy Julie Lalonde was one of the protesters approached by Goldy.

A pro-life rally in Ottawa Thursday that drew thousands of people to Parliament Hill got wall-to-wall coverage from Sun News Network, but some of the pro-choice activists who staged a counter-demonstration say the conservative news channel’s Faith Goldy crossed the line with her aggressive questioning.

Ottawa-based social justice activist Julie Lalonde said Goldy and a cameraman approached her and other pro-choice demonstrators and began peppering them with questions without introducing themselves or asking what brought them to the annual March for Life event.

“They were super fast, rapid-fire questions and the very first one was something about whether I supported abortion after 32 weeks. No ‘Why are you here today? What’s your group about?’” she wrote in an email to Canada.com. (Full disclosure: Lalonde has previously contributed to our site.)

“She filmed me extensively, even when I asked her to back away and leave us alone. She actually did a close up on me when I told her to leave us alone and said, ‘Or else? If I don’t walk away, what are you going to do?’

“She was clearly trolling and trying to provoke us to build some outrageous footage.”

From here.

She called out the unscrupulous tactic and followed up on Twitter and sent a media advisory to actual professional journalists and legitimate news gathering organizations.

And thus, just like the two FEMEN protesters, Goldy and her agit-prop shenanigans became the subject of other news media coverage of the March4Lies.

Fitting, is it not?

March4Lies Part 1: Tits 'n Tots

As fern hill reported, this year's March For Lies had a theme: RU4LIFE.

When I arrived on Parliament Hill, where antiChoice and proChoice converge momentarily before we separate into our camps - their parade, our protest - a young woman was urging the crowd to call a number on their cell phones to enter a contest. Technology assists fundraising!

I missed the ruckus that occurred when two Femen interrupted the usual blathering by priests at the microphone.  QMI photographer Tony Caldwell took a series of photos, here's the gallery.  In this one, appalled antiChoice parents cover their children's eyes because NEKKID BREASTS!  Never mind there's a truck driving around town plastered with 3 x 10 metre photos of medical detritus claimed to be the results of abortion.

So I found my proChoice posse and down Elgin Street we went, to a location between the provincial court house and the ugliest human rights monument in the world.

The Radical Handmaids contingent arrived shortly thereafter and our group positioned itself to meet the onslaught of Marching Catholic Schoolchildren. (photo from @ArielTroster)

Thousands of adolescents are bussed in from Catholic schools in Ontario and Quebec, though not as many as claimed every year by the March4Lies organizers.  They make up roughly 90% of the parade. The rest are, in descending numbers: Knights of Columbus bedecked in cloaks and plumes, priests, elderly people, couples with their progeny.  Total? About 500 of them.



And the signs they carry! Next year I will bring a proper camera to document every stoopid, illogical and ignorant utterance that is displayed on those signs.

This year's winner was a reversible sign.  One side said: "I regret my abortion"; the other read: "I regret lost fatherhood".  The irony that most of these folks marching were the product of PREGNANCIES that their mothers and fathers regretted (shotgun weddings!) and punished them for (child abuse!) - was clearly not within the realm of their comprehension.

The newest member of the Radical Handmaids is a wanted and cherished child:

Part 2 will cover the tactics of one StunTV performance-artist-wannabe-Ann-Coulter as she ambushed some of the prochoice women in our group.

Bring out your human incubators.

A confession: whenever I encounter the fundamentalist glurge of Blob Blogging Wingnut, I say a little secular prayer for HER girls, as I do for my own daughter.

Because SHE is all about the fetus, 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, all the time. SHE ripped through Joyce Arthur's thoughtful opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press and pulled out sentences like a CSIS operative looking for evidence of terrorism in illicitely recorded phone conversations.

Here's a good one. Blob Blogging Wingnut quoted Arthur: "Medical procedures, however, are governed by policy, not criminal law." but SHE deliberately left out the rest of the paragraph: "Doctors already adhere to a Canadian Medical Association policy that permits abortion after 20 weeks only "under exceptional circumstances." Less than 0.4 per cent of abortions occur after this point, all for compelling reasons such as serious fetal anomalies or life-threatening maternal health problems. This means that current abortion practice already matches the preferences of the vast majority of Canadians."

But never fear, SUZY ALL-CAPS added HER own embellishments: "If you practice medicine without a license, you will be charged with a crime. There can be criminal penalties for medical malpractice."

The reader is left wondering if there is any logical or a rational connection between HER comments and Arthur's observation. Is SHE suggesting that abortions in Canada are not being done under physicians' care? Clearly, SHE wants abortion criminalized and doctors prosecuted.

Blob Blogging Wingnut's never-ending intellectual dishonesty is unrelenting and is only matched by HER views that pregnant women are powerless incubators who must be forced to gestate their embryos and fetus. Nothing else matters. Does SHE envision rows upon row of pregnant women, artificially maintained in a state of coma, kept on life support so that every one of the fetus they carry is brought to term?

When I pray for BBW's daughters and my own, I have a thought for my mother who died in 2006. She did not want to be a mother; she miscarried once before she became pregnant with me. Had abortion been available from a doctor in a health clinic, instead of being a life-threatening and illegal procedure, she might have aborted.

And you know what? When I consider the grand scheme of life on Earth and in the Universe, it does not destroy me to envisage that my mother might have chosen to terminate the fetus I once was. That thought will not move me to join the mobs of shrieeekkking religious zealots who cannot imagine that a woman once had that power over them.

Here's my belief regarding my mother' pregnancy: it was her choice to make. As it was my decision to give birth to my daughter and it will be her choice whether she becomes a parent or not. Women's bodies are neither prisons nor incubators. They are powerful and that power belongs to each woman.

I will continue to oppose Blob Blogging Wingnut’s ill-conceived and grotesque rhetoric with arguments that are fact-based, reasoned and compassionate. And I will also hold HER up to ridicule whenever SHE claims that HER crusade is the same thing as the civil rights movement.

Does Kay remember the fear of getting pustules on his willy?

There doesn't really seem to be any other rational explanation for Jonathan's bizarre foray into self-righteous moralizing.

Did he suffer great personal trauma in high school when his phys. ed. teacher showed the boys a slide show of photographs of male genitalia that displayed symptoms of advanced sexually transmitted diseases? Did it permanently affect his sex life? Is he now bitter and therefore advocating for a similar approach as a way to justify and enforce female abstinence?

One of the lamentable results of the culture wars is that women have been taught to regard abortion -- a medically profound event that either kills, or pre-empts, a unique, genetically determinate human being -- as if it were merely an act of feminist self-empowerment. Showing a mother an image of her "soon-to-be-dead fetus" will disabuse her of that myth."

uh-oh. It sounds like Jonathan was fed anti-feminist ideology in his mama's milk. That might be the explanation for his holier-than-thou, punitive approach to controlling women's access to medical services.

Be thankful that Kay is only a pissant opinion columnist.

Won't someone please think of the kidneys?

I think it is essential for a society to value its kidneys. The importance we give our organs pre-removal affects the importance we place on them post-removal.

In Canada in 2008, our kidneys have no economic status while in the bodies of its carriers. We are completely alone in the world in this regard as most countries have MASSIVE regulations around the management of kidneys.

Most Canadians would agree that you should not be able to remove your kidney and sell it on eBay to the highest bidder. Although it's your body and your kidney, this would not only be a poor bioethical choice, but it is in fact illegal under our laws. As well, it is a nasty procedure; most doctors will not remove a kidney unless forced by medical considerations so those who attempt to remove one or two kidneys from their own bodies are messing around with natural law.

Most Canadians would also agree that a mature kidney, should not be eligible for an elective removal. However, regardless of the fact that this would be an extremely poor bioethical choice, it is in fact legal. As such, Canada should have far greater protections for human kidneys than we do for kids.

By assigning no commercial worth to our unremoved kidneys, we set the stage for a society that continues to lose out on a lucrative source of income. The study of the economics in our country has been clearly addressed by Stephen Harper, and the numbers are stark. Is there a correlation between our nation's deficit and our legal and economic devaluation of kidneys? Of course there is.

Obviously, the greater number of unremoved kidneys, there are the greater the population loses in profitability. And more subtly, by valuing a kid more than an unremoved kidney, we are educating our citizens to believe that there is little importance in enhancing the growth of the next generation of Canadians.

This mindset is not sustainable, nor is it psychologically healthy. Can it be changed in the short term? And will Canada be open to revisiting our views on the advantage of the commerce in organs, specifically kidneys?

I have no choice but to advocate for the kidneys and seek to have their value restored in my Canada. Our collective future depends on it.

The original opinion piece by Rod Bruinooge appeared here. Kidneys as an allegory for pregnancy was first addressed in God wants you to carry your kidney stones to term.

9 to 5 and beyond

My work history:

- cashier, grocery store

- teacher

- daycare co-op mom

- volunteer, SOS grossesse phone line*

- a variety of jobs in non-profit community organizations as la francophone de service

- assistant to the assistant to the Communications Director

- program administrator, first in a governmental agency, then in an educational institution

- assistant to the Communications Director

- program administrator, charitable organization

* I have given hundreds of hours of volunteer time to other community groups and causes over the years. This is the one that helped me develop a coherent pro choice perspective, as the mother of an infant daughter.

Is there anyone left to tag? How about brebis noire at the black ewe, the regina mom and montreal simon?

The right to choose to give life.

JJ writes about the Blob Blogging Wingnut’s most recent post. While BBW might not personally be a white supremacist, she projects the zygote zealots’ own double standard onto those who support the right to choose.
Birth Pangs addressed that slimy sleight-of-hand argument last year, in The Putrid Smell of Opportunism. Here’s the irony: BBW claims higher moral ground with a specious attempt to equate no-choice supporters with abolitionists. Yet, when one reads anti-abortion, pronatalist comments at right-wing discussion boards, one notes their rabid, braying fear and hatred of black, brown and beige-skinned hordes who, it is claimed, breed more than people of pallour.

Here’s one typical racist pronatalist opinion piece:

On the May 11 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story, host John Gibson advised viewers during the “My Word” segment of his program to “do your duty. Make more babies.” He then cited a May 10 article, which reported that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson added: “By far, the greatest number of children under five are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.”

And then, there are BBW’s no-choice allies at Freaked Minions who rant obsessively about the fact that many First Nations and Muslim people have big families while most of European descent do not.

In the comments that follow BBW’s blogpost, Christina shows her bias: “That “clump of cells” is a highly organized and sophisticated organism. Without any input from the outside, it will develop into a fully-formed newborn. Everything necessary for the adult is present in that clump of cells — all it needs is time, nutrition, and a hospitable environment.”

Scientists have attempted to grow embryonic cells outside a woman’s womb, eventually they fail to thrive and develop. A pregnant woman is more than a vessel or “a hospitable environment” for fertilized ova. Pregnancy is complex: a psychological and physiological, synergetic life-giving process. The choice to give life - or the inability to do so - is equally complex.

No-choice says that it is immoral for a woman to refuse to give life.

Pro-choice says that it is immoral to force a woman to bear a pregnancy that was unintended and unwanted or that may in some circumstances, kill her.

Finally, BBW: you keep whining that feminists won’t debate you on your circumscribed playing field, where the term you use to describe the choice to terminate a pregnancy is “murder”. While that’s a belief you have the right to hold, it is not mine. I do not choose to use your subjective, pronatalist and thus racist terms to discuss a woman’s right to choose to give life.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

More SHRIEEEKKK needed for the perfect storm ….

Many fundamentalist fanatic, rightwingnutter and fetus fetishist bloggers are on SHRIEEEKKK mode today. It’s rumoured that Dr Henry Morgentaler will be awarded the Order of Canada on July 1st. Normally, only the Governor General’s staff and the recipients know in advance who will be receiving these awards.

It would appear that someone in The same-old same-old New™ Government leaked the information to Lifeshite. Pro-choice groups have observed over the years the multitude of slurs that anti-choice organizations have spewed about Dr Morgentaler. And of course, we have seen how some PredaTories view Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean.
All that would be required for fundamentalist fanatic, rightwingnutter, and fetus fetishist heads to irrevocably explode would be if Tomson Highway and his partner were to be married by the Honourable Madam Justice Louise Arbour, at Rideau Hall on Canada Day. Just saying.

The gentleman receiving the Performing Arts Award in that photograph is Peter Boneham and yes, that is k.d. lang in the background.

UPDATE: An article in today’s Globe and Mail seems to confirm that it’s official. It provides a timeline that succinctly sets out Dr Morgentaler’s role in ensuring that women have the right to choose. Controversy has occasionally been sparked by the Order of Canada awards, starting with its creation in 1967.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

We *heart* Quebec, Part deux

Again, we get further proof that our sisters and allies in Quebec totally get the danger posed by Bill C-484, aka The Kicking Abortion's Ass Bill. (Our deBeauxOs does a round-up of Quebec organizations and bloggers opposed to the bill here.)

Yesterday, there was a kick-ass demonstration in Montreal. La Presse reports that there were 1,500 protesters.

At babble, poster martin dufresne gives a first-hand account:

The demo was TREMENDOUS!!! Between 1,000 and 1,500 people, bilingual speeches and chants, walking and almost dancing to Aretha's RESPECT and local feminist bands on the sound system, applauded by onlookers. The organizers were a kick-ass group of young feminists and despite the pouring rain it was easily the most empowering demo I have seen in decades. A local sexploitive sect (Raelians) tried to crash the event, insinuating itself in the march, with their website plastered on their garish pink get-up: it was a hoot seeing these fifty-something men, bluetooth in ear, with pink t-shirts proclaiming "FEMININITY is the future of humanity". They were booed and finally pelted with a few chocolate cream pies.

The post also helpfully includes this translation from La Presse story:

Dueling sounds

On the front steps of St-Jean-Baptiste church, organizers used a megaphone to denounce the "Religious Right". The church bells started ringing and went on for more than five minutes. A few of the demonstrators entered the church to play the djembé.

Fun.

(First published at Birth Pangs.)

One body. One person. One count. -- The Roundup

Wow. That was impressive. Yesterday, twenty-two bloggers participated in the 'One body. One person. One count' blog-burst in opposition to Ken Epp's private member's bill, C-484, a back-door attempt to create fetal rights as the necessary first step in recriminalizing abortion.

Some, including Scott Tribe and In the House and Senate, posted a few days earlier.

We at Birth Pangs were pleased to see the turn-out by the usual Vicious Abortion Crusaders. ;) But we were very pleased to read this from Blast Furnace Canada. Blast Furnace is Catholic, Liberal, and, soi-disant, 'pro-life'. But BF is obviously rational with the concomitant bullshit-spotting ability.

For the record and in no particular order, here's the list of participants. (We've no doubt missed some. Please let us know and we'll add.)

Why a coat hanger as pro-choice meme?

They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. It appears that Manhattan Mini-Storage, long known for its edgy advertising strategies, has decided that it’s time for the coat hanger meme to come out of the closet, so to speak.

Many young pro-choice supporters are unfamiliar with this symbol, and why it was chosen to eloquently express the commitment to refuse to be pushed back to those awful days. Veterans of the pro-choice struggles know at least one family who lost a daughter, a sister or a mother to a self-induced or an illegal abortion. In this post, mention is made of other illicit methods used in the past, to precipitate a miscarriage. However, the coat hanger technique is the one that resonates the most, when held up as a powerful symbol of this dark and shameful era of women’s history. Here is one account. There are others too.

O.G., a neighbour that I befriended back in the seventies recounted an incident that occurred right after she just graduated from nursing school, in 1971. O. was working a night shift in the ER of an urban hospital in Alberta. A man in his forties brought his wife for medical attention. She was delirious, weak, and gasping for breath. As O. installed her in a bed, the women moaned loudly with pain. O. recorded her vital signs, which were not good - dangerously low blood pressure. The smell of fresh blood as well as the distinctive odour of a septic infection grew stronger as O. removed her patient’s underclothing.

When the doctor stepped into the cubicle he looked at the patient, sighed, examined her and probed her abdomen as gently as possible. “A burst appendix?” asked O., quietly. The doctor shook his head, ordered an IV, saline solution, oxygen and prescribed antibiotics to be administered immediately. He and O. swiftly attended to her medical needs in heavy silence. Then he asked O. to direct him to the patient’s husband and told her that she needed to decontaminate immediately, as some of the patient’s fluids has splattered her.

A senior RN debriefed O. after she had removed her uniform, all other clothing and her shoes, thrust them into a garbage bag and put them in a specific hazardous waste bin. Freshly scrubbed after a vigorous shower and dressed in borrowed scrubs, O. was informed by a colleague that her patient had died. Although the cause would not appear on the death certificate, the doctor had confirmed that her symptoms were consistent with septic shock due to peritonitis, brought on by a perforated uterus.

O. was aghast. “Why had this woman waited so long to get medical treatment?” she asked. “She must have known, from the bleeding, the swelling and the pain, that she was dangerously ill.” “She was probably afraid that the doctor would recognize that her miscarriage was self-inflicted and that the hospital would report her to the police”, the older nurse said. “She hoped that she would heal on her own. She wasn’t aware that she was developing a deadly staphylococcus infection.”

“Does her husband know?” asked O. The older nurse shrugged, “He now has five orphaned children under the age of 10. Will telling him that his wife probably used a knitting needle or a coat hanger to abort her pregnancy help him cope better? Officially and medically, it’s a case of advanced peritonitis that did not respond to treatment. There won’t be an autopsy.” Then she looked directly at O. and told her, “Remember this patient. Her life shouldn’t end like this.”

After O. finished her recollection we sat in silence, in her cozy suburban family room, watching our toddlers - my daughter and her son, play with colourful and educational toys. Finally I asked her, “What did you do?” O. answered, “I kept working as a nurse until I got married and became pregnant with this little guy. And I did - still do - volunteer work for Planned Parenthood. Necessity is the mother of prevention. No woman deserves to die that way.”

More information about the history of abortion rights in Canada can be found here.

Originally posted at Birth Pangs.