Obvious Child: The Other Taboo

By Holly Grigg-Spall

[Originally Published in Society for Menstrual Cycle Research]

The recently released rom-com ‘Obvious Child’ has been discussed far and wide for its mature, sensitive and funny approach to the topic of abortion and yet I have not seen one comment on the fact that this movie also makes mainstream (and yes, funny) the topic of cervical mucus.

In the opening scene stand-up comedian Donna (played by real-life comedian Jenny Slate) is performing on stage at her local open mic night. She wraps up with a joke about the state of her underwear and how, she describes, her underpants sometimes look like they have “crawled out of a tub of cream cheese.”

She claims that they often embarrass her by looking as such during sexual encounters, something she feels is not sexy.

Of course, by “cream cheese” I immediately assumed Donna meant cervical mucus. Unless she is supposed to have a vaginal infection – which seeing as it is not discussed amongst the other myriad bodily function-centric conversations in the movie, I doubt to be the case – then it’s clear she is detailing her experience of cervical mucus.

Later on that night, when Donna meets and goes home with a guy, has sex and then wakes up in bed with him the following morning, she sees that her underwear is laying next to the guy’s head on the pillow. Not only that, but this is one of those situations she finds embarrassing as the underwear is actually covered in the aforementioned “cream cheese” or cervical mucus. She cringes, retrieves the underwear and hastily puts it back on under the covers.

At this scene we can assume that the presence of visible cervical mucus indicates that the character is in fact fertile at this time during the movie. Even if we didn’t know this movie was about unplanned pregnancy, perhaps we would know now. Apparently Donna is not on hormonal birth control, and she’s not sure if, in their drunkenness, they used a condom properly. So, I speculate, if Donna had known she was fertile and that the “cream cheese” in her underwear was actually one of the handy signs of fertility her body provides, then she may have taken Plan B and not had to worry about an abortion. But, then, of course, we wouldn’t have had the rest of this movie. We would have had a very different movie – a movie someone should also make.

But it goes to show how some body literacy might go a long way in helping women make more informed choices. The abortion sets her back $500 and causes some emotional turmoil. A dose of Plan B is cheaper and easier to obtain, although not without some side effects. Maybe even, we can speculate, if Donna had known she was fertile she might have avoided PIV [Penis In Vagina] sex that night.

It’s great to see a movie approach the choice of abortion as though it really were, well, a choice. But isn’t it interesting that in doing so it shows how women can be hampered in their choices by a lack of body literacy?

We often see women in movies discussing their “fertile time” in regards to wanting to get pregnant – and so meeting their husbands to have sex at the optimum time in usually funny, crazy scenarios. Sometimes we have seen women taking their temperature or using ovulation tests and calendars to figure this out. However, I think this might be the first mention of cervical mucus in cinema.

I had the honor of seeing this movie with longtime abortion rights and women’s health activist Carol Downer and getting to discuss it with her after. Carol pioneered the self-help movement and self-examination, adding much to our collective knowledge of our bodies. 

This is what she had to say:

"I enjoy the genre of romantic comedies with all their faults; I’m not as critical of them as I am of other genres, and ‘Obvious Child’ more than met my expectations.

I particularly liked ‘Obvious Child.’ I liked the uninhibited tipsy lovemaking scenes that showed casual sex at its best. Then, the complications that arose when she found out she was pregnant and needed to have an abortion and when he continued to be very interested in having a real relationship rang absolutely true to me. It’s just our luck, isn’t it, to get pregnant when there’s no realistic way to continue the pregnancy? The women, married or unmarried, who get abortions have some variation of this experience. When we have such bad timing, it’s the pits! I loved that their relationship grew in facing the regrettable necessity of the abortion and the recovery together, and you get the feeling that the relationship has a good future ahead of it. A darned good story."

Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull, road map of the Christian Patriarchy Movement

By Carol Downer

I recommend that you leave the frothy page-turner at home when you do your summer reading. Instead, read Quiverfull by Kathryn Joyce--every single word of every single page, with my comments about Joyce’s antinatalist bias in mind, as though your reproductive freedom depends upon it, because it may.  Joyce (a contributing writer for Nation Magazine) does an excellent job of reporting the self-labeled Christian Patriarchy Movement, a counter-culture which lives the values of sixteenth-century Calvinism, where the father is the spiritual and earthly leader of the family. 

Through her interviews and participant observation, Joyce found that Quiverfull families model themselves on the white settler families of pre-Revolutionary English colonies in North America whose economy was based on forcibly exploiting the natural resources of the indigenous people, the slave trade and slave labor.

You will get a glimpse of how women in this movement see the shortcomings of our feminist movement, and you may be uncomfortable with how well the shoe fits.  Hopefully, rather than dismissing these womens’ criticisms, you’ll ask whether our feminist movement has stayed true to its goals of liberating ourselves, and if present-day mores have improved women’s lives or created a more equal society.

Reading Joyce’s description of the movement in the first 12 chapters prepares you to understand Chapters 13 through 18.  Starting with “Trust and Obey” and “Blessed Arrows”, Joyce gradually introduces the reader to the foundational beliefs underlying pronatalism, “the policy or practice of encouraging the bearing of children, especially government support of a higher birthrate.”

Chapters 15, 16 and 17, “The Natural Family”, “Return to Patriarchy” and “Godly Seeds” digs a little deeper into history and politics, presenting an excellent review of nationalists’ and nativists’ use of social policy to advance national interests through tax policies favoring large families, and their use of strategies, such as homeschooling, home businesses and home-based churches to spread the ideology and the theology of patriarchy.  Denying racism, the Christian Patriarchy Movement, seeks to “be fruitful and multiply” to increase white Christians, but at the same time accepts converts to Christianity and recommends that white Christians adopt children of color.

Studying these chapters provides the basis to understand Chapter 18, “Demographic Winter”, the blockbuster centerpiece of Joyce’s book.  The various strands of history, politics, and religion are pulled together to showcase the Christian Patriarchy Movement’s vision of the death of Western Civilization unless the United States and Europe start producing enough babies to the replace the old and dying.  And, they have the cold, hard demographic facts to back them up.  It’s being called, “the baby bust,” “the birth dearth”, “the graying of the continent”.  Joyce attributes this to a “race panic” as low fertility among white couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe.

As one reads this book, one begins to conjecture that perhaps the current race of State legislators to pass TRAP laws (Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers), and the increasingly reluctance of the Supreme Court to rule regulations that raise barriers to women seeking abortion as unconstitutional is this fear of “demographic winter”.  Joyce seems to be implying that this is “just a prelude for a new cold war, a ‘clash of civilizations’ to be fought through women’s bodies, with the maternity ward as battleground.”

So, Joyce has done a brilliant job of observing, describing, quoting and analyzing the pro-natalist underpinning of the Christian Patriarchy Movement, and she has educated her readers about all the dry-as-dust pronatalist tax policies and the demographic realities internationally.  We will be wise to understand the gravity of her message; pronatalists are determined to encourage the Western world to make more babies, therefore they respect women’s reproductive rights only as long as those rights are to have as many babies as possible.

BUT, we feminists will never start to effectively fight this battle to control our own sexuality and reproduction if we forget that there are two sides to this battle.  It is not the right-wing versus the feminist and their liberal friends.  It is the right-wing pronatalists versus the wealthy and influential anti-natalists.  These are the families, such as Bill and Melinda Gates, the Rockefellers and Warren Buffet, and other capitalist friends who have no more regard for a woman’s freedom to control her body, than the right-wing, pronatalist Koch Brothers, et al.  They just favor a different way of solving social problems, such as global warming and poverty.  They believe that these problems are caused by too many people.  They don’t put their efforts toward changing consumption patterns, having a more equitable distribution of the wealth and allowing the occupants of the land, rather than corporations, to use resources to benefit their own people.  They are doing everything possible to discourage women from reproducing.  They’re against “teen pregnancy”.  They’re for any social trend that reduces women’s fertility: gay and transgender lifestyles, women going to college and having careers, later marriage, and the use of contraception such as the Pill, abortion, and sterilization.  (The Christian patriarchal right opposes each of these social trends).  There is a anti-natalist equivalent policy to those pronatalist policy listed in the book.

And, for every bombastic quote of a pro-natalist leader, such as Yasir Arafat’s “the womb of the Arab woman is my best weapon” can be matched with a quote from an antinatalist, such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the “Population Bomb”.

I hope I’ve encouraged people to read the book.  It’s time that feminists who oppose policies that control women’s reproduction, whether it be employed by the pronatalists or the antinatalists start developing our own strategies, independent of the anti-natalist-controlled “pro-choice” movement.

"Home Made Menstrual Period for Game-Playing With Doctors” by Holly Grigg-Spall

Friends:

I’m sharing this blog by Holly Grigg-Spall, author of Sweetening the Pill because, like Holly, I think The Abortion Handbook, written by Lana Clarke Phelan and Patricia Maginnis, is as timely today as it was when it was published over forty years ago (with some outdated sections, of course). 

Holly’s comments about how Lana’s and Pat’s tips on “faking our periods” fit right in with women’s performance art work designed to bring menstruation out of the closet.  This reminds us that our work on our reproductive and sexual health cannot be divided into departments of menstruation, birth, birth control, abortion, menopause.  All these aspects are interconnected, and if we’re working for reproductive and sexual control, all our projects must be interconnected too.

http://menstruationresearch.org/2014/05/14/home-made-menstrual-period-for-game-playing-with-doctors/

We need to take back the Campus!

This article has an exciting title, “Take Back Your Campus”.  Unfortunately, even though it is a beautifully written expose of the epidemic of campus rape, it’s “call to action” is in fact an invitation to get on our computers and ask universities, governments and the police to continue their ineffectual policies. 

In the late 60’s and early ’70’s, college women were forming groups to stop rape on campus.  Actions included confronting a man identified as a rapist en masse, outing the same with leaflets posted strategically and forming all-women escort groups to take women through sections of the campus where rapes were occurring.

What was patriarchy’s response to the blatant actions of “strident” feminists?  They studied the problem.  They created task forces.  They devised new rules and structures, combined with educating men to respect women and women to take precautions.  The U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance Agency was funded to replace community-controlled women’s projects with professionally-run rape crisis centers where rape victims would answer questions, submit to pelvic examinations to make rape kits (many of which would languish on police departments’ shelves).  Women were pressured to become complainants; the goal was to arrest and imprison perpetrators. 

Almost fifty years later, The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Assault is continuing in patriarchy’s efforts to “protect” women rather than giving them more power. The Task Force has found that, (after having co-opted authentic action by the women themselves), their paternalistic, police-state programs have not improved the situation.  In fact, it seems to be worse.

Chandler McCorkle does urge readers to engage fellow students and citizens, presumably multi-gendered, to help change the way campuses are run across the nation.  Let’s learn from history.  If we want to recapture the outrage and the energy of the Second Wave, we females will organize ourselves, whatever gender we identify ourselves as, to fight against our common problem.  Collectively, we can demand better policies, such as using university or government budgets to fund our collectively controlled projects. 

We demanded sexual liberation in the 70’s; instead we got license to like sex, to want sex and to have sex, but we have not achieved the ability to exercise that freedom to have sex without fearing rape.  Why not?  What happened to those many thousands of women who took to the streets and who made these outrageous demands.  Did they all just give up?  Is it that women aren’t interested anymore?  No, from the moment we started raising our voices, patriarchy has been using all its weapons-- its universities, its foundations, its publishing industry, its police powers, to quell our movement.      

But, besides the benign takeover of women’s projects by government's pale imitations and strings-attached funding and academic jobs, independent women’s organizations have been hounded and harassed, many out of existence.  We at the Feminist Women’s Health Centers, one of the most successful and influential of outspoken women’s groups working for female control of sexuality and reproduction, were arrested for looking at our own cervixes in 1972.  Even though American women were given permission by the U.S. Supreme Court to have abortions and risky, medically-controlled methods of birth control at our clinics, our centers were not allowed to use cervical caps, herbal remedies or other women controlled methods of safe birth control or to have participatory clinics in which non-licensed health care workers shared self-examination skills with groups of women. 

Women are licensed to get abortions, but we don’t have the freedom to seek abortion without going through a gauntlet of screaming fanatics.  The government refused for several decades to enforce simple “disturbing the peace” type laws to restrain protestors from accosting women who try to use abortion facilities.  Finally, the reign of terror culminated in burning and bombing clinics, killing abortion doctors and their staff and supporters.  Our clinics have been repeatedly investigated for such things as use of guns and non-doctors to do abortions.  We’ve been charged with fraud.  Payment for medical services rendered at the clinic have been withheld due to suspicion of overcharging.  In all of the above situations, the investigations have found nothing.  Charges have been dropped and payment for services has been restored. 

We need to take back the Campus!

Emergency Actions to Stop the War on Women

Dear Friends:

I’m inviting you to come to a program, “Emergency Actions to Stop the War on Women” on April 11, 2014. This program will be presented in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago.  If you cannot attend this program in person, you can watch the New York City Program webcast on StopPatriarchy.org at 7-9:30 P.M. EDT. 

In Los Angeles, you are invited to participate in a Bloody Coat-Hanger Street Action at 1:00 P.M. on April 12, 2014.  This action will be at the Santa Monica Pier and Ocean Avenue.

I agree with StopPatriarchy.org that the time is now to raise our voices to protest the state regulation that is forcing the closure of abortion clinics in Texas right now, and may soon be forcing the closure of abortion clinics in Mississippi if the 5th Circuit Court finds the same clinic regulation (clinic doctor has to be on staff of hospital within 30 miles of clinic) to be constitutional on April 28th.

Even if this particular regulation is found to be unconstitutional, the War on Women is raging and the time is now to organize protests and other types of events or social actions to push back against the offensive.

I hope that StopPatriarchy.com’s call for action will spark many women and men to become involved.  Right now, they’re the only group that is putting their computer aside for a few hours to leaflet, organize, hold programs and get out in the streets. 

When I started working to get abortion repealed in 1969, there was a lively interest in the broader community in decriminalizing abortion, but we had to go out to speak to various groups, hold demonstrations and even learn how to do abortions ourselves, so I know only too well how much has to be done.  I see that after 40 years, we need to rekindle the fire!

Hope you can attend either a program or the webcast.

Carol Downer

Hyde Amendment Alert

By Carol Downer

This September, President Obama will be presenting next year’s proposed budget to Congress. Last year, he included the Hyde Amendment language! This year, we must not let this go without objection. He needs to submit a “clean bill”. We have 6 months to plan campaign. 

More specific information about the Hyde Amendment and what women are doing about it coming soon with my report on the Women’s Policy Summit.

About Us

womenshealthinwomenshands.org is a project of Women’s Health Specialists in Northern California. Carol Downer heads up the project.

WHWH director, Carol Downer

Carol co-founded the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Los Angeles in 1971. The FWHC pioneered the “self-help clinic”, a type of meeting in which women learned vaginal self-examination using a plastic speculum. They travelled around the country sharing the self-help clinic concept forming a loose network of on-going self-help groups. After Roe v. Wade, self-help women across the country started women-controlled abortion clinics and joined together in the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers. The Federation clinics influenced most abortion practitioners to abandon the old-fashioned “D&C” (dilation and curettage) procedure for the less traumatic vacuum aspiration method using smaller, flexible plastic instruments. They also fought TRAP laws (Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers) that would have blocked the establishment of abortion clinics.

The Federation has produced slide shows and films, and has published several women’s health books, A New View of a Woman’s Body”, “How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office”, “Women-Centered Pregnancy and Birth” and “A Woman’s Book of Choices”.

Women’s Health Specialists, WHWH Sponsor
WHS has six sites in northern California, which provides an array of women’s health services, predominantly birth control and abortion and adoption since 1975. WHS was a co-founder of the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers in 1975.

Chico FWHC 1975

WHS, originally the Chico Feminist Women’s Health Center, was formed by 8 women in Chico. The immediately successful health center quickly gained acceptance in the rural community where the California State University at Chico is located, however they fought a legal battle against local physicians to force them to provide back-up for their clients who may experience complications requiring hospital facilities. Later, the staff successfully defended itself against charges of fraud from the Republican administration of Deukmajian. Some of the later attacks are well-publicized, like the ongoing raucous, hate-spewing protests from anti-abortionists and violent attacks like stink bombs and arson which destroyed the Redding WHS twice. Others, like repeated ill-founded investigations by the State Department of Health and Welfare attract less notice from the media, but require vigorous, lengthy and expensive defense efforts by the staff, its legal counsel, its board and its supporters. Throughout this tumultuous history of attack and victory, the Chico FWHC has expanded to become the Northern California WHS with 6 sites and enjoys the respect of pro-choice legislators, law enforcement agencies, other providers of women’s health services, and women in the community.

Many other women-controlled clinics, including most of the FWHC’s, closed during the 80’s. Today, Feminist Women’s Health Centers are located in Washington State, California and Georgia. There are 13 women-controlled clinics in the Feminist Abortion Network, FAN.

REMAKING THE WORLD WITH A FEMINIST VISION

This website is designed to provide women with the information to control her own body, to counter centuries of systematic attack by patriarchal institutions against women’s freedom to enjoy their sexuality and to control their reproduction. When women share our sexual and reproductive experiences frankly and openly in a supportive environment, we cast off the invisible shackles caused by shame and ignorance, and are empowered to remake the world according to feminist values, such as equality between all people, social justice, and promoting a society that creates a healthy environment and nurtures our children.

A Gentle Revolution
WHWH believes that it is a revolutionary act for a woman to learn to use a speculum, a mirror and a light to look at her own cervix, and to share this knowledge with other women. “Women’s Health in Women’s Hands” means educating ourselves about our bodies and our healthy functioning, and helping each other, so that we are empowered consumers. WHWH also means establishing women’s clinics to provide abortions and birth control or birth centers; it means using self-help principles to become midwives, doulas, and lactation consultants to rebuild the knowledge and lore of natural childbirth.

FULL SPECTRUM
womenshealthinwomenshands.org has a Pro-Woman Agenda which comes from the perspective that in order for a woman to control her sexuality and reproduction, she must enjoy the full spectrum of her sexual and reproductive rights. womenshealthinwomenshands.org opposes all state restrictions on women’s reproductive rights, whether it be laws prohibiting or forcing abortion or those prohibiting pregnant women choosing work or lifestyles that might pose risks to her fetus, or laws limiting women’s options in the birthing process.

Hyde Amendment Update

By Carol Downer

New Hyde Amendment--never discussed in Committee, much less debated on the floor of the Senate--and only discussed in Democratic-dominated Committee in the House last Friday and resulting in the decision of the Republican-dominated Committee to send a favorable “message bill” including the provisions that would expand last year’s Hyde Amendment.  This “message bill”, which doesn’t legally constitute an amendment, apparently wafted through the Halls of Congress and landed on the desks of the top level congressional negotiators to become a rider on the omnibus spending bill which will be voted on by both houses by this Saturday. 

The negotiations between the “appropriators” from both houses were secret, but everyone speculates that they vigorously debated this and other controversial items, and the language in the bipartisan spending bill contains the provisions of the democrat-sponsored Senate bill, S.142, and some, but not all of the provisions of the House H.R.7.  Significantly, the part of the message bill that died along the way was the provision to interfere with the provision of abortion coverage by private insurance companies.  Not coincidentally, this provision would have expanded Hyde to ban coverage to middle-class women who have insurance coverage.  Medicaid-eligible poor women and many women of color have once again been left out in the cold.

So, what are we to conclude?  Once again, despite the new and very welcome efforts of the All Above All organizations, including strong leadership from organizations of women of color, this anti-woman legislation has passed without the fingerprints of the legislators.  Once again, we’re told that the Democratic Party, who most of us faithfully support, has done its best.  Has it?

The Hyde Amendment has done more harm to the unity and strength of our women’s movement than all the right-wing fanatic attacks combined, because we have not made the fight against it the top priority.  After the significant but not unmarred victory of Roe v. Wade, Henry Hyde figured out a way to finagle his way through the congressional maze to strike a grievous blow against American women.  He used the ancient tactic of “divide and conquer”.  This idea of attaching the legislation to the appropriations bill was brilliant; it put congress members, both Democrats and Republicans, in the position of having to vote the budget down in order to defeat the ban on abortion funding.  But, over the 37 years that have passed since the Hyde Amendment slid through, both Democrats and Republicans have obviously had to cooperate in order for this strategy to work.  After all, both parties have had ups and downs, and the Democratic Party, which has a pro-choice platform, has enjoyed sessions where they had much more power than today, but still they winked at the legislative sleight of hand.

In the meantime, women’s organizations and abortion providers have all worked very hard to ameliorate the impact of the Hyde Amendment.  Many abortion providers offer sliding scale fees and both local and national fund-raising efforts have been able to offer full or partial help to women who could not afford their abortion.  THESE EFFORTS HAVE BEEN BAND-AIDS ON THE WOUNDS OF AN UNJUST SYSTEM.  Many individual women have been helped, but the fact remains that the Republican Party has been successful in keeping poor women and women of color down, and the Democratic Party has participated in this devious legislative charade to throw poor women under the bus in the name of the larger needs of the Democratic Party.

But, social injustice is only part of the harm.  Another, equally important is that we allowed the anti-abortion forces to separate us; of dividing us by race and class. 

We need to get real about this fight.  It’s not enough to decry the Hyde Amendment.  All Above All is correct in identifying the racist and classist Achilles Heel of the white, middle-class women’s movement, but we will make the same mistake today if we don’t go past this necessary step and start making the pro-choice advocates stop being apologists for the Democratic Party.    

We have to insist that they throw a spotlight on the back room deals.  We need to question the automatic support of the democratic candidate, especially if he’s anti-choice.  Democratic Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania may have personal feelings toward abortion.  He may even exercise those convictions by choosing to vote to outlaw abortion.  That’s something he’ll have to explain to his constituency.  But when he takes the lead in proposing Hyde Amendment legislation (S.142), then he is colluding with this deceptive process where bills are proposed and never get out of committee, but end up magically being hidden in the Budget Bill, so that Democrats can merely pretend to recognize the fundamental right of a woman to control her body, but vote for anti-abortion legislation. 

We must hold the Democratic National Committee accountable for supporting a Democratic legislator who is actively working against their pro-choice platform.

September is our next opportunity to force our pro-choice advocates in Washington, D.C., to stop pleading political expediency to justify their silence.

Hyde Amendment - Where Is It Now?

By Carol Downer

Where is this year’s version of the Hyde Amendment, a rider that Congress tacks on the Appropriations Bill?  In the House, it was in the “Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice” until Thursday, January 9, until Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes-Norton announced that the Republican-controlled Committee had decided to send a “message bill”, a way that gets around having to send the proposed legislation to the full House for debate and a vote.

Norton shed a spotlight on the hearing on this nasty piece of proposed legislation which expands the usual Hyde Amendment prohibition of federal monies to fund Medicaid abortions, when she spoke from the House floor to complain about the Committee’s chairman,Trent Franks (R) not having permitted her to speak before the Committee hearing even though her district would be directly impacted by the proposed bill which would prohibit the District of Columbia from spending its local funds on abortion services for low-income women, and define the D.C. government as part of the federal government for the purposes of abortion.

In the Senate, the Hyde Amendment has been lying dormant in the “Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee” since January 24, 2013.  This legislation’s sponsor is Senator Robert “Bob” Casey, Jr. (D, PA). Casey, this Democrat who is a liberal on all other issues than abortion, was given the dubious honor of leading the Democrat-controlled Senate in this war on women.

Now, leaders of both parties are expected to meet secretly and hammer out a much-delayed budget agreement and avoid another government shutdown. Somehow the House and Senate Appropriations Bills will appear magically containing some or all of the prohibitions of abortion funding listed in these two bills with no legislator’s name on it, and most, if not all, of the members of the House and the Senate will okay the budget.

Once again, the Hyde Amendment will get its annual lease on life, and we won’t be able to hold anyone accountable except the outspoken anti-choice legislators.

Whenever a pro-choice advocate talks about “repealing” the Hyde Amendment, you can bet that they know that the Hyde Amendment is a rider that lives only a year and it has to be re-attached each year, but they don’t want to risk revealing that for 38 years, no matter who was in power in the Congress, both Republicans and Democrats have voted for it.

The old saying is that no one would eat sausage if they could see how it’s made. This week - the money runs out Wednesday - the sausage-making is happening, and women will be the losers.