Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. NOTE: The views and opinions of the participant expressed here on this site do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Regents of the University of California, UCSF, UCSF Medical Center.
In honor of Independence Day, Beacon Broadside asked author Carole Joffe (author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars) what she’ll be celebrating this July 4th.
While the stigma surrounding abortion within medicine may have lessened since 1973, in society as a whole it has worsened.
“40 Days of Prayer,” an effort by the pro-choice religious organization, Faith Aloud, has become the target of a vitriolic campaign by the Christian right. But Faith Aloud is determined to turn the hatred into love, through ongoing support of women in need of abortion care.
I suggest that that these doctors’ statements point to a paradox of the abortion conflict in the United States; whether abortion provider or supporter, engagement with this issue introduces these clinicians to a diverse group of allies, with a shared sense of mission, that is rare elsewhere in medicine.
The brewing fight over VAWA suggests there is today no common ground in American politics as to how best to wage the struggle for gender equality—or even if that is a shared desirable goal.
An unprecedented number of abortion restrictions have been introduced and eventually passed in state legislatures over the past two years, during a time when one might assume politicians’ focus would be on the economy. But there are real people behind the numbers and they are bearing the enormous toll of these laws.
![[img src]](http://rhrealitycheck.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/../../files/teaser-images/2012-01-09-joffe-187x125.jpeg)
Before marrying Rick Santorum, Karen Santorum lived with a pro-choice Ob-Gyn 40 years her senior. Today, Santorum the candidate believes the government should be able to ban contraception and abortion, and criminalize extra-marital sex and gay sex among other things. The Senator’s fervent desire to deny the rest of us the sexual and reproductive choices that his own wife once enjoyed is breathtakingly hypocritical and cruel.
A critique of reproductive politics written in the 1970s about events in the ‘20s and ‘30s is remarkably relevant to today’s leading reproductive controversy: the Obama Administration’s overruling of the FDA decision to allow over-the-counter status of Plan B emergency contraception for young women under the age of seventeen.
There is another 99 percent group in our country, distinct from but inextricably entwined with the now more familiar #99Percent. I refer to the 99 percent of American women who have ever had sexual intercourse and have used a birth control method at least some of the time.
Todd Stave, the landlord of the clinic where Dr. Carhart practices in Maryland, found that the best way to stop anti-choice harrasment was to use their own tactics against them. Carole Joffe interviews Stave for RHRC.
