Radical Doula

There was quite a bit of noise last week around this article written for Slateby William Saletan about his opinion on ultrasounds and abortions. Many awesome bloggers have already responded to it, so I’ll just link you to their own great opinions. They’ve said it all.

A Bird and a Bottle, Feministe, Feministing, Echnide, Lawyers, Guns and Money

One thing that is interesting to add is that ultrasounds have not only changed our opinions about abortion, but also about childbirth. Birth advocates understand that fetal monitoring and other technologies that serve to monitor the fetus independent of the mother can also be blamed for a lot of unnecessary interventions during childbirth. Another piece of proof that technologies that serve to isolate the fetus from the mother–serve also to limit her choices around pregnancy and childbirth.

There is a growing field of natal surgeons and specialists who focus entirely on the unborn fetus, even doing extremely experimental and dangerous surgeries in the womb. I’ve been told they have scary brochures for their practices where the fetus is depicted (usually by ultrasound) completely absent from the mother’s body. As if children are all of a sudden gestated in space. Creepy.

The evening before the decision on the Federal Abortion Ban came down (which is why it has taken me until now to post this) I attended an event hosted by H*yas for Choice, the Pro-Choice student group at Georgetown University. Note the star in their name–it’s the result of Catholic censureship at the university, who refused to allow a pro-choice group to affiliate itself officially. They can’t get money from the University, and they can’t use their mascot–the Hoyas. Nevermind freedom of speech, or preserving an academic environment that fosters dialogue and dissent. This is the same university that won’t stock birth control or condoms on its campus, and that is threatening to pull financial aid from law students affiliated with the law students for choice group. But I digress.

Luckily though the University’s efforts have not stifled pro-choice activism on campus. A really committed group of students continues to try and promote dialogue within an extremely hostile environment. The event I attended was part of a “Choice week” and the students brought together a panel of people to talk about abortion within the broader context of reproductive justice. Speakers included Marissa Valeri from Catholics for a Free Choice, Kierra Johnson from Choice USA, Emily Goodstein from Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and lastly Professor Maggie Little of the Georgetown Philosophy Department.

It was the arguments of Professor Little, who focuses her research of questions of ethics (particularly within Bioethics), that really resonated with me. Here are a few highlights from her presentation, and her answers to some really irrational and irritating questions from the almost entirely white & male anti-choice students who showed up at the panel.

• The law has no place in regulating a woman’s continuance of gestation. There is a really strong equality based argument that pregnant woman are being treated unequally by being forced to continue gestating.
  
• It is precisely because women take motherhood seriously that they might want to make the decision not to mother.
  
• The law shouldn’t oblige me to provide my body for the use of another citizen. No other individual is forced by law to do so (for example in the case of a child who needed his father’s kidney to survive).

She rocks–and in a really radical way. She’s also currently writing a book about abortion, which I am really excited to see, because her arguments really cut through a lot of the emotional and political aura around the abortion issue and talk about the things that are really at stake: ethics, morality and what the government should and shouldn’t be allowed to legislate (particularly when it comes to an ambigious issue like abortion).

You can read more about her work on her website.

Last week was the 51st Annual UN Commission on the Status of Women, being held in New York City. I attended a parallel event to the commission, entitled Abortion Providers Attitudes toward Women, hosted by the Guttmacher Institute, Ipas, Human Rights Watch and Gynuity Health Projects.

It was a great panel, but there was one particular presentation that stuck out for me, and seem to have the most relevance here. Dr. Beverly Winikoff, the President of Gynuity Health Projects gave a talk entitled “Giving Women Choices: Access to New Technologies in Abortion.” I particularly appreciated the logic with which she began her discussion, which focused on the new technologies for “medication abortion” or the abortion pill (aka RU-486). She explained that we need to keep in mind that the technology exists such that presumably all women could simply have a set of pills in their medicine cabinets at home which could be taken if she had a late period, or discovered she was pregnant. She went on to say that it is a complicated and overtly hostile political climate which has prevented this from happening, even five years after the introduction of these abortion options. The nuances of this opposition are interesting, and very related to the pharmaceutical industry as well as provider issues, and even logic that argues that these technologies make abortion too easy.

What I think is interesting about this, and what connects it to the birth activist movement, is its focus on woman-centered care. Actually, this idea is not really woman-centered care, but woman controlled care. Because of such intense barriers and restrictions placed on access to reproductive health care services, particularly in relation to abortion, activists have begun to argue for policies which allow women to decide when to use them—removing the intermediary that is the physician or clinician. We have seen this effort with Emergency Contraception, which has recently been approved for access without a prescription (at least for women over 18). Here we see women taking control and autonomy over their reproductive health, with a possibility of making their own decisions in the privacy of their own home. I see a strong connection between this and the midwifery movement, which works to place the woman at the center of care, and the midwife-woman relationship one based on equality and mutual respect, rather than hierarchy and control.

Obviously there are drawbacks to these modes of access, mainly when the woman may not be seeing a provider at all. Both in the case of EC and the abortion pill, if a woman has had unprotected sex, she may be at risk of exposure to an STI and this necessitates follow up with a health care provider. It’s also easy to see why the anti-choicers are doing whatever they can to stop these technologies from becoming accessible, since that would conflict with their ceaseless fight to win back control of women’s bodies.