Amanda Marcotte writes for and manages the blog Pandagon, blogs for Slate's Double X, and has two books out: "It's A Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments" and "Get Opinionated: A Progressive's Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action)". She's written about politics, pop culture and feminism for outlets such as Slate, Salon, the LA Times, the Guardian, Bitch, and the American Prospect. A former resident of Texas, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.
The outcome of the law is likely to be that girls who are already suffering from a public shaming will be charged with delinquency, all for sending a picture to a boy.
Continuing to fight science and common sense on Plan B isn’t serving anyone’s interests. Pro-choicers are mad, anti-choicers aren’t placated, and women are hurt in the process. So why does the Obama administration insist on keeping up this pointless fight?
Doctors and researchers agree: Over-the-counter birth control pills are good policy for women’s health. Pro-choicers might be reluctant to pick this fight, but if we start pushing hard now, it will pay off for women in the long run.
Five Black female state lawmakers in Florida walked out of a house debate over a law requiring doctors to insult women of color seeking abortions by asking them if there’s a race-based reason for doing so.
Sam Brownback decided to give up the pretense that there’s a secular justification for a massive anti-choice bill passed in Kansas. The AP photographer took a picture of Brownback’s notes, where he wrote “JESUS + Mary” in big letters at the top.
Unable to muster actual compassion for Gosnell’s victims, anti-choicers got right to work seeking ways to exploit his crimes to further reduce access to safe, legal abortion, and to create more Gosnells in the future.
It’s such a disappointment to hear that Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor apparently presents HIV not only as if it’s some kind of karmic punishment for female sexual misbehavior, but also as if having the virus makes a woman permanently unlovable and asexual.
The science is in and has been for awhile: Emergency contraception prevents fertilization. But anti-choicers continue to push quack science asserting the opposite. Why?
Make no mistake, efforts to ban abortion have nothing to do with fetal life but are simply a symbolic gesture to enshrine fundamentalist piety about sex and gender roles into law, and punish those who don’t obey.
One part of the strategy of anti-choicers is to demonize women who have abortions portraying them as “fickle, foolish, or lazy.” So it was just a matter of time before the implicit argument of the Arkansas ban would be made explicit by a legislator defending the law.
