Radical Doula

An article in the newest issue of Mother Jones makes a great point:

And if the Supreme Court and abortion opponents really want to protect the lives of fetuses, they might consider this: Murder is the number one cause of death of pregnant women in the United States.

But of course we don’t really care about the women carrying the fetus, just the fetus itself. It’s frightening to think about the incidence of intimate partner violence and women as victims, the article also points out that one million women are stalked in the US every year. ONE MILLION women.

Another related crisis is the mass murder of women and girls in Guatemala. This is a human rights disaster, and its not being talked about. Women are being murdered simply because they are women.

Since 2001, more that 2,600 Guatemalan women and girls have been killed and the numbers seem to be accelerating – 110 were murdered in January and February this year alone. Only a negligible number of their killers has ever been convicted.

The scary thing about these murders? They are usually unprovoked. Similar issues have been documented on the US-Mexico border, as well as war-torn countries where rape is used as a weapon.

This weekend I finally saw the new Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and what struck me about their Global Feminisms exhibit is how violence is such a pervasive theme. Many of the pieces used shocking imagery to represent the effect of war and national struggles on women’s bodies, including a video which showed a woman hula hooping with barbed wire. It was painful, disturbing and moving all at the same time.

It’s horrible that we have to waste our energy on five anti-choice men on the Supreme Court, when we have such big issues at hand. BTW, it’s National Call-In Day. Call your Congress people and tell them to support the Freedom of Choice Act.