JESSICA, Susan Swartz raises a good point re vocabulary that hits. TO ALL:, please IMPROVE THESE SUGGESTIONS: REMEMBER, WE'RE TRYING TO REACH THOSE WHO ARE NOT OUR STRONGEST PARTISANS.
= Vaginal-Uterine Rape = Church-State Inquisition = Slaved Girls Party = Slaved Wives Party, etc. Innuendo carries over to Republican politicians by using "Party".
2. Pro-Choice = Use 2 images side by side: (1) show a mother holding an infant: caption is "Baby". (2) show a dot to depict a human fertilized egg: caption is: "Egg". TRY USING VISUALS. This one appeals to COMMON SENSE, challenges their (religious) Doctrine of Ensoulment that "Life Begins At Conception", authored by Pythagoras, the noted Greek mathematician who lived a few hundred years before Jesus., and promotes the Biblical view (in the Books of Genesis and Exodus) that a new life begins at birth rather than as a fertilized egg cell. THE ENEMY COMES FROM THE PRE-CHRISTIAN SOURCE; WHY NOT STAND FOR THE BIBLE? YOU HAVE TO ATTACK YOUR FOE'S INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION TO NOT ALWAYS BE ON THE DEFENSIVE.
3. PRO-CHOICE = FREE WILL (PICTURE OF MAN AND WOMEN) AND AMERICAN FLAG, WORK IN SMALL BIBLE & CONSTITUTION IMAGES IF YOU CAN. = text of free choice of religion (First Amendment) = ban on slave labor select text from Thirteenth Amendment, etc., etc
4. American Heritage - Self-Determination, Individualism, Liberty VS. Government-Clergy Religious Doctrine by Force = Slaved Old Europe BEFORE the Western Enlightenment .
5. Pro-Choice in Religion and Bodily Labor = allowed to follow the Bible and fight for the First and Thirteenth Amendments for EVERY AMERICAN.
This right here, "Reintroduced again and again, the language and extremism of his bills stayed the same. But because voters heard about them over and over, something once shocking eventually turned into background noise." It is like watching Nazi's take over Europe piece by piece. Thank you Jessica for continuing to report on these atrocities. We will no go blindly into the night because we know and we can see. I am so grateful you are a voice of light in an increasingly dark world.
Lesley, I am a member of Seniors Taking Action and we participated in a zoom call with Ms Cheng. I assume that video is private so I cant share it. However, she was quite compelling in describing the obstacles facing the amendment’s adoption, including a hostile Supreme Court. On the other hand, as you say, many (Indivisible, the League of Women Voters, Kirsten Gilliband) are urging publication. After her presentation however, I reluctantly found myself agreeing that we should wait.
You can google the Center for Gender and Sexuality at Columbia. The ERA is topmost amongst their priorities so their counsel to delay at least should be considered. Its maddening, I know.
Republicans are so much better at framing their positions than Democrats. It’s time for us to rethink what words we use. “They are killing us” is a good way to start. Anyone have an idea? Forced birth may be correct but it doesn’t sing. Lynching doesn’t work either…women being enslaved is another concept but you get the idea. Pro Life is a short, powerful term. We need to replicate that.
No matter what they say, or do; no matter how much they take steps to remove evidence that women are dying because of abortion bans or prevent investigation of maternal deaths by disbanding the investigation of maternal morbidity and mortality; no matter how many SCOTUS Justices rule in ways that diminish women's living and dying...THIS IS NOT NORMAL. No, No, NO. It's like toothpaste in a toothpaste tube. If there are holes in the tube, and one puts their finger over them but persists on squeezing the tube...toothpaste will squirt out the holes under pressure. These things will not go away. Letting women die when the medical expertise exists to save their lives is NEVER NORMAL. I don't care how hard the liars lie and the forked tongue people repeat the lies. The voices that they think they silence, will not be. Justice screams out and will not be denied.
Yes, Jessica, this is the new normal. And as exhausting and soul destroying as keeping abortion front and center in all our interactions is, we have to keep doing it. I have been handing out stickers for Plan C to young women telling them to stockpile abortion meds and morning after pills before the inauguration. They ask me if they are going to lose abortion rights under Trump. I tell them we are at the precipice of an unbelievable rollback of women's rights. Most of them have never thought about abortion and women's rights before. They are thinking about them NOW! I know you are exhausted and demoralized, but keep doing what you are doing. We depend on you. Thank you.
I know it’s easy to feel defeated but as bad as all of this feels and it fucking does, there is something happening that I’ve never seen before. I have worked in public schools nearly all of my adult life and one things that’s true about the profession is that it’s people oriented. We have this common thing that build camaraderie and we like to talk to each other.
But it wasn’t until now that you could openly talk about abortion. You were careful never to mention it just in case someone was pro-life. We held our shame. Even if we didn’t feel it ourselves. The worry that someone would apply that to you, kept us silent. That is no longer true. I’m having these conversations all over the place and a good number of women I know have recently shared their abortion story or that of a friend or sister. This simply did not happen before.
We will keep fighting in all our little individual ways and hold each other up along the way. I have honestly never felt so much solidarity as I do with the women in my life, not because of the horror we are experiencing, but because the language and tenets of feminism are going full on mainstream. It’s all just patriarchy.
Nothing like eating our own! While abortion is surely a difficult issue for President Biden personally, he has been staunch supporter of women’s reproductive rights during his presidency. Getting the ERA amendment adopted as part of the Constitution is far more complicated than Biden instructing the archivist to publish it.
There is excellent scholarship in support of DELAY at this time. Ting Ting Cheng, Director, ERA Project, Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School (who has been working at this for years) counsels that this is NOT the right time and we run the risk of the amendment being defeated - returning us to square one.
No one is more frustrated than I am that this amendment, which has passed in the requisite number of states, still must jump through hoops to be adopted. But let’s put the blame where it belongs: Republicans and the reactionary Supreme Court!
Hopefully you can watch the Director Cheng’s remarks here….
Unfortunately, this link doesn’t work for me. I would love to hear an explanation. All I’ve managed to find is a couple of articles putting the blame squarely on Biden. If you can illuminate, it would be much appreciated. I actually understood that Biden wants us to start at square one. You can find my post with links below.
Don't forget, they're trying to kill trans kids too. I'm various states, and the children of our military population. (The Defense Authorization passed by the house yesterday prohibits gender affirming care from being covered by the VA.)
I just sent yet another letter to the editor to the New York Times asking why they are neglecting coverage of the maternal healthcare crisis in this country. I think we need to inundate mainstream media with thousands of demands for coverage. Right now, even politically engaged news junkies can miss (avoid?) seeing coverage of women's deaths, rising maternal and infant mortality rates, closing maternity wards, fleeing doctors and attacks on EMTALA unless they consume feminist media or deliberately seek it out. You can't avoid coverage about Ozempic; why is coverage of maternal morbidity and mortality so invisible? There's so much noise right now, we've got to find a way to rub these stories in peoples' faces.
Thank you. What I find personally interesting and frustrating is mainstream churches rarely say anything. A statement comes out initially regarding the Dobbs decision, a couple sermons but that’s it. Prayers for Gaza, gun violence, refugees. BUT Women dying, nothing. Female issue don’t make the cut. WTF !!
My friend tells me that the New Yorker is providing a lot of coverage of women's health. But how many people actually subscribe? And with pay walls, we can't get the word out by sharing.
Honestly… I’m a journalist covering the space and I feel like I’m being gaslit every single second and if I hadn’t opened my email and read this piece from you today, I think I would’ve fully imploded this morning. Thank you for everything you do and for keeping us feeling seen. I’m in Tennessee covering the bills being drafted for this upcoming session and oh my God it’s truly horrific.
The only thing I’ve taken away from this year is that there’s a sizable chunk of men in this country who hate us and want us to die. I knew that chunk existed, but it’s a bigger chunk than I thought. And the white women who tried to have their cake and eat it too - the ones who voted for Trump but voted FOR overturning state bans - are about to find out they aren’t exempt.
They're killing us and at some point we will have to admit that no amount of words is going to change that.
When you look at the states that have the most progressive laws concerning pregnancy care, birth and abortion-- you are looking at states with a half century long tradition of radical activism rooted in the 1970's Feminist Self Help movement, which itself was rooted in the Self Health movements of the 1960s.
Yet to speak of it still raises eyebrows. Isn't Self Help either the woo adjacent section at every library (outside of academia) or else that outré, if provocative, moment when women started looking inside their bodies (inside of academia)???
And the answer is the same as it was half a decade ago... Direct Action and Mutual Aid is always so much more, and so was with the Self Help Movement. There is a path of disobedience that speaks louder than any march, rally, or publication ever could. If we are bold enough to to take it.
Thank you Jessica. Appreciate your work
JESSICA, Susan Swartz raises a good point re vocabulary that hits. TO ALL:, please IMPROVE THESE SUGGESTIONS: REMEMBER, WE'RE TRYING TO REACH THOSE WHO ARE NOT OUR STRONGEST PARTISANS.
1. Pro-Life = Slaved Daughters = Slaved Wives = Slaved Mothers = Vaginal Birth Rape
= Vaginal-Uterine Rape = Church-State Inquisition = Slaved Girls Party = Slaved Wives Party, etc. Innuendo carries over to Republican politicians by using "Party".
2. Pro-Choice = Use 2 images side by side: (1) show a mother holding an infant: caption is "Baby". (2) show a dot to depict a human fertilized egg: caption is: "Egg". TRY USING VISUALS. This one appeals to COMMON SENSE, challenges their (religious) Doctrine of Ensoulment that "Life Begins At Conception", authored by Pythagoras, the noted Greek mathematician who lived a few hundred years before Jesus., and promotes the Biblical view (in the Books of Genesis and Exodus) that a new life begins at birth rather than as a fertilized egg cell. THE ENEMY COMES FROM THE PRE-CHRISTIAN SOURCE; WHY NOT STAND FOR THE BIBLE? YOU HAVE TO ATTACK YOUR FOE'S INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION TO NOT ALWAYS BE ON THE DEFENSIVE.
3. PRO-CHOICE = FREE WILL (PICTURE OF MAN AND WOMEN) AND AMERICAN FLAG, WORK IN SMALL BIBLE & CONSTITUTION IMAGES IF YOU CAN. = text of free choice of religion (First Amendment) = ban on slave labor select text from Thirteenth Amendment, etc., etc
4. American Heritage - Self-Determination, Individualism, Liberty VS. Government-Clergy Religious Doctrine by Force = Slaved Old Europe BEFORE the Western Enlightenment .
5. Pro-Choice in Religion and Bodily Labor = allowed to follow the Bible and fight for the First and Thirteenth Amendments for EVERY AMERICAN.
This right here, "Reintroduced again and again, the language and extremism of his bills stayed the same. But because voters heard about them over and over, something once shocking eventually turned into background noise." It is like watching Nazi's take over Europe piece by piece. Thank you Jessica for continuing to report on these atrocities. We will no go blindly into the night because we know and we can see. I am so grateful you are a voice of light in an increasingly dark world.
Lesley, I am a member of Seniors Taking Action and we participated in a zoom call with Ms Cheng. I assume that video is private so I cant share it. However, she was quite compelling in describing the obstacles facing the amendment’s adoption, including a hostile Supreme Court. On the other hand, as you say, many (Indivisible, the League of Women Voters, Kirsten Gilliband) are urging publication. After her presentation however, I reluctantly found myself agreeing that we should wait.
You can google the Center for Gender and Sexuality at Columbia. The ERA is topmost amongst their priorities so their counsel to delay at least should be considered. Its maddening, I know.
Republicans are so much better at framing their positions than Democrats. It’s time for us to rethink what words we use. “They are killing us” is a good way to start. Anyone have an idea? Forced birth may be correct but it doesn’t sing. Lynching doesn’t work either…women being enslaved is another concept but you get the idea. Pro Life is a short, powerful term. We need to replicate that.
Femicide
The word Genocide keeps coming to mind with this.
No matter what they say, or do; no matter how much they take steps to remove evidence that women are dying because of abortion bans or prevent investigation of maternal deaths by disbanding the investigation of maternal morbidity and mortality; no matter how many SCOTUS Justices rule in ways that diminish women's living and dying...THIS IS NOT NORMAL. No, No, NO. It's like toothpaste in a toothpaste tube. If there are holes in the tube, and one puts their finger over them but persists on squeezing the tube...toothpaste will squirt out the holes under pressure. These things will not go away. Letting women die when the medical expertise exists to save their lives is NEVER NORMAL. I don't care how hard the liars lie and the forked tongue people repeat the lies. The voices that they think they silence, will not be. Justice screams out and will not be denied.
Yes, Jessica, this is the new normal. And as exhausting and soul destroying as keeping abortion front and center in all our interactions is, we have to keep doing it. I have been handing out stickers for Plan C to young women telling them to stockpile abortion meds and morning after pills before the inauguration. They ask me if they are going to lose abortion rights under Trump. I tell them we are at the precipice of an unbelievable rollback of women's rights. Most of them have never thought about abortion and women's rights before. They are thinking about them NOW! I know you are exhausted and demoralized, but keep doing what you are doing. We depend on you. Thank you.
I know it’s easy to feel defeated but as bad as all of this feels and it fucking does, there is something happening that I’ve never seen before. I have worked in public schools nearly all of my adult life and one things that’s true about the profession is that it’s people oriented. We have this common thing that build camaraderie and we like to talk to each other.
But it wasn’t until now that you could openly talk about abortion. You were careful never to mention it just in case someone was pro-life. We held our shame. Even if we didn’t feel it ourselves. The worry that someone would apply that to you, kept us silent. That is no longer true. I’m having these conversations all over the place and a good number of women I know have recently shared their abortion story or that of a friend or sister. This simply did not happen before.
We will keep fighting in all our little individual ways and hold each other up along the way. I have honestly never felt so much solidarity as I do with the women in my life, not because of the horror we are experiencing, but because the language and tenets of feminism are going full on mainstream. It’s all just patriarchy.
I feel the same way 👍 Kerry ❤️. I’m a storyteller for Planned Parenthood. I’ve told my story many times. Abortion is self care.
Nothing like eating our own! While abortion is surely a difficult issue for President Biden personally, he has been staunch supporter of women’s reproductive rights during his presidency. Getting the ERA amendment adopted as part of the Constitution is far more complicated than Biden instructing the archivist to publish it.
There is excellent scholarship in support of DELAY at this time. Ting Ting Cheng, Director, ERA Project, Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School (who has been working at this for years) counsels that this is NOT the right time and we run the risk of the amendment being defeated - returning us to square one.
No one is more frustrated than I am that this amendment, which has passed in the requisite number of states, still must jump through hoops to be adopted. But let’s put the blame where it belongs: Republicans and the reactionary Supreme Court!
Hopefully you can watch the Director Cheng’s remarks here….
December 6, 2024
MFD_Ting Ting Cheng_12.6.24.mp4
Unfortunately, this link doesn’t work for me. I would love to hear an explanation. All I’ve managed to find is a couple of articles putting the blame squarely on Biden. If you can illuminate, it would be much appreciated. I actually understood that Biden wants us to start at square one. You can find my post with links below.
How can the amendment be defeated if we have the ratification by 38 states, and the ABA and the League of Women Voters have signed off?
The League of Women Voters, Senator Gillibrand, the Alice Paul Institute, and many others are saying to pressure Biden. I’ve never heard of Cheng…
Don't forget, they're trying to kill trans kids too. I'm various states, and the children of our military population. (The Defense Authorization passed by the house yesterday prohibits gender affirming care from being covered by the VA.)
I just sent yet another letter to the editor to the New York Times asking why they are neglecting coverage of the maternal healthcare crisis in this country. I think we need to inundate mainstream media with thousands of demands for coverage. Right now, even politically engaged news junkies can miss (avoid?) seeing coverage of women's deaths, rising maternal and infant mortality rates, closing maternity wards, fleeing doctors and attacks on EMTALA unless they consume feminist media or deliberately seek it out. You can't avoid coverage about Ozempic; why is coverage of maternal morbidity and mortality so invisible? There's so much noise right now, we've got to find a way to rub these stories in peoples' faces.
Thank you. What I find personally interesting and frustrating is mainstream churches rarely say anything. A statement comes out initially regarding the Dobbs decision, a couple sermons but that’s it. Prayers for Gaza, gun violence, refugees. BUT Women dying, nothing. Female issue don’t make the cut. WTF !!
My friend tells me that the New Yorker is providing a lot of coverage of women's health. But how many people actually subscribe? And with pay walls, we can't get the word out by sharing.
Honestly… I’m a journalist covering the space and I feel like I’m being gaslit every single second and if I hadn’t opened my email and read this piece from you today, I think I would’ve fully imploded this morning. Thank you for everything you do and for keeping us feeling seen. I’m in Tennessee covering the bills being drafted for this upcoming session and oh my God it’s truly horrific.
The only thing I’ve taken away from this year is that there’s a sizable chunk of men in this country who hate us and want us to die. I knew that chunk existed, but it’s a bigger chunk than I thought. And the white women who tried to have their cake and eat it too - the ones who voted for Trump but voted FOR overturning state bans - are about to find out they aren’t exempt.
I saw a reel on Instagram from a native woman in Canada (I hope I’ve got that right) who said “we’re supposed to die quietly”
Boom! kinda sums it up
They're killing us and at some point we will have to admit that no amount of words is going to change that.
When you look at the states that have the most progressive laws concerning pregnancy care, birth and abortion-- you are looking at states with a half century long tradition of radical activism rooted in the 1970's Feminist Self Help movement, which itself was rooted in the Self Health movements of the 1960s.
Yet to speak of it still raises eyebrows. Isn't Self Help either the woo adjacent section at every library (outside of academia) or else that outré, if provocative, moment when women started looking inside their bodies (inside of academia)???
And the answer is the same as it was half a decade ago... Direct Action and Mutual Aid is always so much more, and so was with the Self Help Movement. There is a path of disobedience that speaks louder than any march, rally, or publication ever could. If we are bold enough to to take it.