After everything these girls had already been through, they would be hauled off to jail for an act of desperate and peaceful resistance, motivated only by a desire to go to school.
If you’ve read much science-fiction, you’re probably familiar with the idea that, at some scary point in the future, various aspects of mothering will be separated, enabling wealthy women to farm out component tasks to less-privileged women. That day is here.
While some states do criminalize HIV exposure, a U.S. District Judge does more than this – he imprisons a woman for the mere possibility that she might transmit HIV in the future.
Escorts stand shoulder to shoulder, bound to strangers in an effort to offer a kind word or two to clients who are exercising their right to make a compassionate, informed, responsible decision, a motherly choice.
O’Mara argues that parents’ freedom of conscience has been demonized – from a new mother, HIV positive, who was court-ordered to stop breastfeeding her baby and forced to give him AZT, to refusing to allow women the right to birth at home – intolerance for parents’ choices is growing.
Should the Army have exempted a mother from active-duty service because she has two young children, when her husband could have cared for them?
Have Safe Haven laws — in which women can lawfully relinquish their infants within 30 days of birth — become a substitute for universal health care and comprehensive sexuality education?
This Mother’s Day, move beyond brunch to acknowledge the courageous acts of all mothers, and wake up Monday morning ready to work toward a world in which pregnancy, parenting, abortion and adoption choices are all honored fully and equally.
Religious fundamentalists’ fear isn’t that feminism will lead all women to reject motherhood, but rather that in the capacity for choice, women challenge the notions that rationalize male domination embedded in traditional meanings of motherhood.
