Snowed In

The Oklahoma Legislature has passed a set of laws which are now up for review by the Governor, who will choose whether to veto it. Among other things, the legislation requires women who want an abortion to submit to an ultrasound, which in the first trimester is likely to require a vaginal probe. Put more plainly, a woman who wants an abortion soon after they get pregnant will have to allow a doctor to insert one of these into her vagina, to get close to her cervix:

Which means that women who seek an abortion after being raped will be required by law to be penetrated by a doctor with a medical device.

Whether you believe abortion is right or wrong, abortion legislation terrorizes victims of sexual violence. Parental notification laws can effectively force children to have to notify their rapist that they are seeking an abortion. Laws criminalizing certain abortion procedures put womens’ health at risk. Laws requiring additional procedures like this one force women to undergo traumatic and unnecessary medical procedures. Laws mandating waiting periods or extra mandatory procedures serve to prevent poor women from seeking and getting abortions.

A woman who is raped should be allowed to walk into an abortion clinic and get an abortion anonymously, safely, quietly, affordably, and without further violence to her person. I believe that is the minimum of respect we as a community should pay.

If you want to fight what you believe are “frivolous” abortions, that’s fine. I won’t be fighting with you, but I applaud your conviction, and your desire to act on your beliefs.

But criminalization is not the answer. The side effects are too awful.

Update: I want to say that I’m only aware of this news because of the hard work being done by the folks at feministing and the dozens of other feminist bloggers I’ve read and women I’ve talked to who’ve been generous enough to put their words out there in a place where I can hear them. I’m just trying to pass the message along.

Update 2: To be honest, what sparked me to add that update was reading about a recent incident where Amanda Marcotte, a relatively high profile white blogger, wrote an article that, while not lifting text, lifted en masse the intellectual work of Brownfemipower, a black chicana? blogger. There’s some dishonesty I think in spouting off these ideas as if they came out of my head “knocked-kneed, fully formed, and upright” (to use a phrase I stole from my friend Tracy). Just last week my friend Lauren called me out for rattling off Audre Lorde quotes like I was a black lesbian.

So, I’ll add this to the list of sexist, racist things that I do that I’m trying to work on.

Warning: This blog post deals with sexual assault.

John F. Berger wanted to “have sex” with 100 women. Unable to find any women who would “have sex” with him, he began drugging and raping women. He was apparently close to his goal of raping 100 women when he drugged and raped Tressa Gross.

Unlike the previous dozens of women, the dose of GHB he gave Gross was fatal. It’s not clear if she was clinically dead before or after he raped her, and he wouldn’t really have noticed, but the drugs he gave her killed her.

On Friday, Berger was sentenced to five years in prison, with the option of parole after four.

For drugging, raping, and mudering a woman. Nearly the hundredth he raped.

…

On August 18th, 2006, a group of black lesbians were approached by a man named Dwayne Buckle, who threatened to one of them he would “fuck [her] straight,” spat on the women, and threw a lit cigarette at them. The women also allegedly spat at him, and verbally threatened him. A fight ensued, which was joined by two other male bystanders, and Buckle was allegedly stabbed by Patreese Johnson, one of the women, who testified she was trying to get him off one of her friends whom he was choking. Buckle was hospitalized for stomach and liver wounds. He was in a position to make jokes about the situation as of the 19th.

To my knowledge, Buckle was not charged. But four of the women involved were convicted of and sentenced to prison terms of three and a half years, five years, eight years, and for Patreese Johnson eleven years in prison.

For stabbing someone non-fatally in arguably self defense.

…

Rape and muder, part of a pattern of serial rape = 5 years

Stabbing someone in a two-way skirmish, arguably in self defense = 11 years

…

Not only is there sexism, racism, and homophobia evident in the distribution of justice, the media coverage is full of misogynist bias. Articles in the popular proess continually use the phrase “having sex” for what is clearly “rape”. Journalists commonly use the phrase “making advances” or “saying hi” to describe what should be called “verbal and physical assault, spitting, throwing a cigarette and threatening rape”.

The more I read, the more I am disheartened at the extent to which our justice system, a reflection of our society, is deeply, deeply corrupted.

I had this idea recently to use false names for people in blog posts, the idea being that this would allow me to write a little more freely. I expect people reading about themselves will know it is them, as will people close to them. But in that case, I’m not really revealling much they didn’t already know. It might not work, but I think I’ll give it a try.

I just read a passage in Confessions of an Economic Hitman in which John Perkins, the author, is essentially chewed out by a women who is one of a party he’s having coffee with. She is direct, telling him that what he’s doing, as part of the corrupt long arm of the global American economic engine, is doomed for catastrophe, and that we, as Americans must overcome or arrogance, or face certain demise at the hands of the rising Islamic revolution.

After quoting her at length, he says…

“The memory of that dalang stuck with me. So did the words of the beautiful English major.”

At this point in his life, Perkins was, essentially, hard up. He craved female contact, and was highly engrossed in any kind of female contact he made. I get the same vibe from Jeffrey Brown (a comic artist I’ve been enjoying) to some extent. And I feel that vibe in myself sometimes.

And I’ve been thinking about women who have played this role in my life. When I first started really spending time with Enomwoyi in college, we had extensive conversations about religion. She stated her beliefs and I probed them, questioning them relentlessly into the night. I loved it, she hated it. It was transformative for me, and I think it ended up being a bonding experience for us in some way. But I wonder if she would have preferred not to go through all of it.

And recently Hiari, and to a lesser extend Azibo, have played this role too. I have a lot of traditional beliefs about relationships and marriage and love and intimacy, and I brough all of these into my relationship with Hiari and she resoundedly rejected them. And since then I’ve questioned all of those things, usually in private, and sometimes out loud to her and other people, although I’m not sure I’ve found a receptive audience anywhere. Maybe Enomwoyi wasn’t really a receptive audience either, so much as a captive one.

But nonetheless, I think I’ve changed more in the last few months than I have in years, due in large part to Hiari’s rejection of my beliefs and my subsequent intellectual thrashing about. The fact that I thought she was beautiful and interesting, and that I was sexually attracted to her, and that I could easily imagine her in all sorts of romantic visions of the future certainly fueled this thrashing. And although I think I accept the course of our relationship now, and my interest in romance is highly atrophied, my continued self-analysis probably continues to be fueled by my desire to find a way though the thicket of rejection.

So here’s the punchline: all of this fits right in line with the old notion of woman as man’s conscience, and women as man’s muse. I’d always thought I was honoring women by paying such close attention to their beliefs and how they differed from mine, but I wonder if there’s a deeply set bit of sexism in these relationships in my life.