Plan B

...it's time to push back the regressive forces in Congress. Support the Freedom of Choice Act.

Step 1:
Join NARAL Pro-Choice America in our National Call-In Day to Support the Freedom of Choice Act
- Wednesday, April 25
- Call 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to both of your senators and your representative
- Use the following script:
“Please cosponsor the Freedom of Choice Act (H.R.1964/S.1173) to codify Roe v. Wade and guarantee the right to choose for future generations of women.”
- Click on the link [on the page linked above] to find out what other organizations are participating.

Step 2:
Fill out the form [on the page linked above] to urge your members of Congress to sign on as cosponsors, and then forward this action to your friends.

Who's involved?

NARAL Pro-Choice America is co-sponsoring the national call-in day with the following coalition partners:
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Advocates for Youth
Alliance for Justice
American Association of University Women
American Civil Liberties Union
Catholics for a Free Choice
Center for American Progress Action Fund
Choice USA
Feminist Majority Foundation
Law Students for Choice
Medical Students for Choice
National Abortion Federation
National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Women’s Organizations
National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association
National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health
National Organization for Women
National Women’s Law Center
People for the American Way
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Reproductive Health Technologies Project
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States
Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective

The pro-choice community is working to guarantee the right to choose through the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). 

• FOCA will restore the reproductive rights recognized under the vision expressed in 1973 in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, before anti-choice legislators and courts chipped away at these rights. 
• FOCA will secure the right to choose by establishing a federal law that will guarantee reproductive freedom for future generations of American women.  This guarantee will protect women’s rights even if President Bush and his allies are successful in reversing Roe v. Wade or imposing even more restrictions on our right to choose.

Click here to learn more about President Bush's Federal Abortion Ban and the Supreme Court's recent decision.

This is going to be a long battle in the war to establish and defend women's rights. I'm under no illusion that the current Congress, what with forced-pregnancy advocates sitting on both sides of the aisle, will pass this legislation, but showing support is a first step towards getting our elected officials to realize that the vast majority of Americans don't want the government controlling family planning.

...this can happen. It's a truly disturbing story. Horrifying.

This is a cautionary tale for the so-called "pro-life" movement, which has been clamoring for government control of family planning as well. The only difference is that the "pro-life" folks want the government to force pregnancy, while the Chinese government is forcing abortion of pregnancy.

Either way, the government decides and the woman, the family, the people directly involved have no say in the matter.

As Ann says at Feministing:

Bottom line? Despite what U.S. anti-choicers say, no one who is pro-choice is pro-forced abortion. We are against government intervention in personal reproductive decisions -- whether it be by the U.S. Congress in banning abortion or by the Chinese government in forcing it.

The issue is this: Who decides?

Our country has an unfortunate history. When the state and federal governments have meddled in human reproduction, horrors have resulted, including forced sterilization of women and men deemed undesirable by the government. That was plenty bad enough.

Imagine now an officially sanctioned governmental policy to control human reproduction in America. If the government can force a pregnancy, it can force an abortion. Family planning in all its subtleties and considerations becomes the government's decision. In fact, it's a mockery to even call it "family planning" anymore since, in effect, family planning is taken out of the family and placed in the smoke-filled rooms of the legislatures and Congress.

Is family planning really something we want the government controlling?

Really?

Egalia reports this nuttiness:

Republican Lawmaker Wants State to Issue Death Certificates for Abortions

Remember Stacey "Black Caucus is More Racist than the KKK" Campfield? Well, the looney Republican lawmaker is at it again.

Campfield -- the blogging legislator -- has a little bill that would require the state to issue death certificates for every abortion performed in this state.

Of course, to be consistent, they'll have to issue death certificates for every miscarriage -- along with coroner inquiries as to why each woman had a miscarriage, perhaps. And just to cover all their bases, how about death certificates for every period any woman who has had sex in the past 4 weeks?

Never mind little things like logic, or the real world tradition of issuing death certificates to beings who actually have something called birth certificates!

Every day is a Blog for Choice day here, but this post is a few days late.

When it comes to abortion, there are a lot of nutters who believe that a woman's only proper function is as a baby factory. Many, if not most, of these folks would deny it, but when you get down to their opposition of birth control and sex education, and their calls for government-enforced pregnancy, it becomes pretty clear that a woman's right to her own body -- and even her right to her own life -- is at best contingent upon absence of the presence of sperm within a stone's throw of her womb.

Then there are those folks who find abortion to be "icky" and just don't like to think about it.

The big buzz phrase now in this current period of ephemeral desire for "bi-partisan" solutions is "common ground." Find "common ground" on abortion.

Can there be common ground? Really?

The fundamentalists pushing for criminalization are not just against abortion, they're against birth control and sex education. To them, the problem isn't that teenagers are getting pregnant, it's that teenagers getting pregnant should be punished for getting pregnant. Heck, not just teenagers -- let's throw in adult women. Let's throw in married adult women. Let's throw in married adult women who've already borne familes.

They're against pharmacists even providing birth control. They're against Plan B. They're against the HPV vaccine.

What they don't talk about, but what is the obvious result of their ideological

How do you find "common ground" with such people?

Links to other posts I saw:

PunditMom writes:

As a young adult in the late '70s and early '80s, trying to juggle two or three jobs, a full college classload and an unstable husband (now ex-husband), I hoped and prayed that I would not find myself pregnant or that I would ever have to make a decision about what to do about an unwanted pregnancy.

But I felt safe knowing that, even with the precautions of birth control, that if one little sperm got through, the government would not be able to intrude in my personal decisions about my body, whatever I decided.

Jessica Valenti puts it plain on HuffPo:

Today--on the 34th anniversary of Roe v Wade--I have a request. Instead of writing about the legislation, the rhetoric, or the politics surrounding reproductive rights and justice, let's keep it simple. Let's just trust women.

Seems easy enough, I know. But given that over 30 years after Roe women are still fighting the same battles, maybe we need a remedial course.

A better run-down is over at Fetch me my axe.

Now that it's legal, are you sure Plan B is available at your local pharmacy? Time to help make sure:

Tell national pharmacy chains - CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens - to adopt a corporate policy requiring every one of their stores to stock Plan B.

After three years of delay, the FDA recently approved the emergency contraceptive Plan B for over-the-counter sales for women over the age of 18. Plan B will arrive on drugstore shelves across the country this week. We must ensure that all stores stock it.

Take action and tell these national pharmacy chains to adopt a policy about stocking Plan B. It's one of the best ways we can maximize this safe and effective form of birth control's full potential to prevent unintended pregnancy.

Follow this link and fill out the easy form to be heard.

This link is where you can get Plan B emergency contraception.

Welcome to Emergency Kindness, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing emergency contraception for women in need.

Emergency Kindness is run by a team of "Janes" spread throughout the country. EC is hard to get in America due to the widespread practice of doctors and pharmacists refusing to give the pill because it conflicts with their personal beliefs. If you are having trouble procuring EC, we will do everything in our power to get it to you before your 72 hours are up.

And this link is the Emergency Kindness blog about emergency contraception.

Unfortunately, these kinds of efforts are necessary so that women in need of contraception are not held hostage and victimized by pharmacists who want to play doctor. If a pharmacist has "moral objections" to dispensing legal pharmaceuticals, such as Plan B emergency contraception birth control pills, then he or she should find a different profession.

The FDA has shocked me. After stonewalling their own doctors and scientists, the politicians in the agency have decided to act rationally, perhaps as a ploy to help the Republicans you've seen frothing at the mouth over the past two years whenever they talk about sex to seem more reasonable.

It's a partial victory:

Girls 17 and younger still will need a doctor's note to buy the pills, called Plan B, the
Food and Drug Administration told manufacturer Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc.

The compromise decision is a partial victory for women's advocacy and medical groups that say eliminating sales restrictions could cut in half the nation's 3 million annual unplanned pregnancies.

The pills are a concentrated dose of the same drug found in many regular birth-control pills. When a woman takes the pills within 72 hours of unprotected sex, they can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. If she already is pregnant, the pills have no effect.

I hope the nutters out there will note that last sentence. The fact is that Plan B prevents conception. With this "morning after" pill, there is no abortion at all. It's not even an issue.

What's at issue for Plan B opponents is whether the man's sperm can claim dibs on a woman's body, even if they're just wiggling around in there without fertilizing an egg (conception), without even an egg's being there to be fertilized. It's one of the most absurd arguments for patriarchal privilege out there.

Of course, we can expect the nutters to continue to distort and lie about Plan B. Anything that gives women power over their own bodies is bad, according to them. Just wait. You'll see them all over cable news today (if you can stomach watching that crap).

The fear and unreason is already out there:

Bravo folks! let's give our kids one more reason to have sex like rabbits!

"Yeah, it's much better to have pregnancy as punishment! And kids will have sex because the girl will then get to take a pill!"

Don't worry, though. It seems that most people see the positive side. This could reduce the number of aborted pregnancies significantly. That should be good news for everybody.

Sometimes people can find just the right words to distill an issue into clarity:

No court has ever ruled that one person can be forcibly operated on for the benefit of another. The law cannot demand that you give up your kidney or bone marrow or even blood to save another life. Nor does it charge you with murder if you refuse.

Yet, only a pregnant woman loses the right to question doctor’s recommendation. Pro-Life legislation refuses the pregnant woman’s right to make medical decisions for herself and her fetus?

That is from Lee Salisbury, a former evangelical preacher who questions the current trend in politics.

In January, a doctor at a Salt Lake City hospital told Rowland she should have an emergency C-section if she wanted to save the life of one of the twins she was carrying. Rowland delayed, but eleven days later had the C-section and one of the babies was born dead. An autopsy showed the baby would probably have lived had the C-section been performed when the doctor ordered it. Prosecutors in Utah charged Rowland with first-degree murder, citing "depraved indifference to human life." Police immediately imprisoned Rowland and held her on $300,000 bail.

The result? "Effectively, the pregnant woman is a human incubator and has no rights." Salisbury wonders what this atmosphere does for women "desirous of becoming mothers."

What if a doctor decided on fetal heart surgery? Would it be murder if a pregnant woman said no?

It's a post worth reading -- especially the end.

from Talk to Action

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto sounded a long-delayed alarm in Contra-Contraception, a comprehensive overview of the religious right's war on birth control. It was past time for a publication of influence to "discover" what many of us have known for years.

The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground. For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

Well, yes and no. While Judie Brown and her allies in the Protestant ranks are waging a full frontal assault against contraception, they declared war on birth control some time ago. The only thing new is that these days -- flushed with victory over the Roberts and Alito confirmations, and in giddy anticipation of the arrival of the South Dakota abortion ban's arrival before a more conservative Supreme Court – they've gotten a little braver about admitting it.
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