M312: Suckering the Rubes

Of course somebody has figured out a way to make money off Woodworth's Wank, aka M312.

A set of postcards to send to MPs.

These people have obviously done extensive market research into the prime target audience for this scam opportunity.

Here's a look at our newest postcard design which is now at the printer. We are very excited about the message on this card and believe it will have a big impact on those who read it. Besides, who could help but love that beautiful pink little baby!

Coz PINK babies are the most wonderfulest!

Order yours today!

Birth is not Magical - Full Kit
This kit includes 320 postcards, enough for all our MPs plus a few to give to friends so they can see what you're doing and write a few of their own!

Included are
• 320 (4x6 postcards)
• full checklist of MP names
• instructions

Pricing includes
• 320 cards @ $0.042ea = $13.44
• Canada Post anywhere in Canada = $15.50
Total = $30.00

Racist Christaliban entrepreneurs suckering the rubes. Ain't Canada a grand place?

(If you'd prefer to express your opposition to opening the door to decriminalizing abortion to your MP, here you can get pro-choice postcards. FREE.

About Racism, Anti-Choice and Enslavement ...

Religious and fundamentalist gynophobes attempting to roll back women's sexual and reproductive rights typically use the struggles of oppressed groups. Abortion criminalizers try desperately to hitch their obfuscation propaganda & glurge wagons to accepted analysis and reflections.

Anti-choice zealots have exploited the historical realities of the Shoah and of the US Civil Rights movement, and they've cherry-picked bits of feminist theory to patch up their shoddy arguments.

Pro-choice advocates have considered connections between racist appropriation and reproductive rights, such as the original and trenchant one developed here:

Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called "Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom", presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”

I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen. They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion. Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin [...] “'If we could get a breed of gals that didn't care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice floes.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”

Urban US African-Americans are constantly besieged by disingenous campaigns.

Biologist and story-teller Boucar Diouf produced a witty opinion piece in response to CON MP Woodworth's odious M312, which was ridiculed by racist, CONdescending, and literal-minded anti-choice fetus lobbyists.

As a biologist, I always find it rude to hear men of a certain age openly advocate for the control of what happens inside women's bodies. It must be said that such male imperative is not new. After the discovery of sperm by the Dutchman Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in 1677, even the most respected thinkers of the time believed that women did not bring any contribution to the formation of the fetus. The sperm was presented as holding a tiny human being poised in its head. The woman's body, viewed as a flower pot, only served to grow this little male seed. It wasn"t until 1887 that scientists Oscar Hertwig and Herman Fol, challenged the supremacy of men by demonstrating the fetus was the result of a merger between a sperm and the ovum.

More than two centuries after this discovery, women's struggle for full human rights still meets resistance in Ottawa. And yet, isn't a man who opposes abortion, somewhat like a Black man who rails against tanning booths? In both cases, credibility is absent.

The whole Google-translated text is available here; the original - here. I suggested the white guy (@jasminll) working for the Catholic Church might be racist.

Blob Blogging Wingnut questioned my tweet. Confusing analogy with metaphor, SHE claimed that I was responding to his comment - "Vraiment?" - incorrectly.

My reply tweet challenged the notion that Black dermatologists would support tanning booths & reminded HER of a previous analogy FAIL on HER part, with regard to Bill C-484 (SHE'd compared a physical assault against a pregnant woman which resulted in miscarriage to a break-and-enter during which a parrot in a cage is stolen, as two separate criminal offenses).

SHE then declared that in actuality, Black people were against tanning and thus Diouf was wrong. I responded that SHE appeared ignorant of the pressures in the Black community to be "light-skinned".

Clearly out of touch with the specific ways racism manifests itself within the Black communities, with respect to degrees of skin colour, SHE blunders on, claiming that I didn't understand what SHE calls Diouf's "fallacious analogy".

Well, duh. It's not an analogy.

And get a clue, SUZANNE. Diouf is not only a biologist, he's also a story-teller who cleverly plays with notions of essentialism: male vs female, black vs white.

I'm now waiting for Blob Blogging Wingnut to state that Black people have the right to own parrots, just like men have the right to prevent pregnant women from obtaining abortions.

;^)

Yes, it's New Year's, but this is DJ, so...

...this year's inaugural post is about something!

What is that something? That something is an excellent comment by sooey at DrDawg's place:

Their argument against Muslims seems to come down to a fear of their numbers and is refueled every time any vaguely/possibly Muslim person commits a crime (thereby expanding their numbers exponentially). But "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" is only prong one of a two-pronged strategy against Muslim demographics. Prong two is an attack on Feminism. The goal is to discredit Feminism and roll back progress on abortion rights for women - here. Mark Steyn/David Warren, even Ezra Levant in his marketing strategy for tarsands development, ultimately blame western Feminists for what they claim is a Muslim threat to civilization. To them, I'm a traitor because I support the right of Canadian women to terminate pregnancy. Their real war is against Feminism.

That's right. Islamophobia is joined at the hip with white natalist paranoia. Natalism is always and everywhere the obverse of the racist coin (including---especially!---racism with a communalistic flavour like Islamophobia). It is both the origin and the conclusion of racist thinking.

Natalism is one of feminism's ultimate enemies. That's why it's so unintentionally funny when racists of the LevantSibleyWarrenSteyn human centipede chain claim that "The Left" is endangering women's rights by not being full-throated supporters of anti-Muslim wars. Because their logical solution, the sine qua non of their entire ideology, is that women must be more pregnant, and are not doing enough because feminism has given them the opportunity to choose otherwise. The only solution is to reduce those gains---which was what they claimed, with crocodile tears, was the reason to fear Muslims...

If racism and natalism are two sides of the same coin, then natalism's polishing agent is glurge. That, incidentally, is why DJ has such a strict anti-glurge policy.

And, on that note, Happy New Year's. May the world's 2012 suck less than 2011 did. Don't hold your breath, though.

Liars, Liars, Pants on Fire.

Radio-Canada is reporting that Harper government officials determined that Suaad Hagi Mohamud was an impostor and threw her to the Kenyan authorities as early as May 28. This is contrary to the story they previously stated to the media.

The 280 pages of documents the journalist obtained shows in e-mails that consular staff in Nairobi wondered if the burden of proving that she was the individual to whom the government had issued the passport was hers. Then a decision was made to give the passport to the Kenyans, tell them she was an impostor, and let them deal with her.

In fact, one of the consular staff speculated that Mohamud would have to challenge the Kenyan government and if she tried to sue Canada for "négligence, préjudices, etc. Mais la cour kenyane n'a aucune autorité sur nos frontière". In other words, the consular staff and other Harper government officials were counting on Kenya to charge her with identify theft and to keep her in prison.

Previous posts and background regarding how Suaad Hagi Mohamud was treated by officials of her country - Canada.

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.