snowed

The best thing about being a teacher in New England is not the proximity to so many great institutions of higher learning where you may build your content knowledge and wear tweed. Nor is it the apple picking field trip, the general lack of environmental disasters, the ability to spew left wing rhetoric at your students without a single complaint.... no no. It is your governor on the radio, a full evening ahead of you, telling you to sit back, have a glass of wine, and just forget about going to work tomorrow.

The bliss ends there.

I hate to break this to all of you who are currently enjoying your reproductive rights, but the Bush administration has dealt a final blow to gender equality, human rights, etc. He hates that stuff!

I got this in the mail from my buddy Cecile Richards:

Minutes ago, President Bush's rule limiting the rights of patients to receive complete and accurate reproductive health information when they visit a federally funded health care provider was made official. And, unfortunately, it will take a great deal of work to reverse it — starting today. Please help.

We knew this was coming, of course. With your help, we've been fighting it for months. The rule is clearly a parting gift from Bush to the anti-choice fringe that supported him all these years.

Now, anti-choice medical staff can withhold information about abortion, birth control, and sex education from their patients. Facilities that receive family planning funding, like Planned Parenthood, will have to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control. For example, a doctor who opposes pre-marital sex could refuse to provide a prescription or even information about emergency contraception to an unmarried woman.

This is the most frightening thing I've heard in a long time. As if unwanted pregnancies weren't enough of a problem, it's going to get a hell of a lot harder for women to prevent them. Nay, it's going to get a hell of a lot harder to even get INFORMATION about BIRTH CONTROL. What?! Beyond that, this will disproportionately affect women with limited access to information (poor women, English language learners, you know, the vulnerable people who Bush loves to shit on.)

I debate this issue with my students all the time. Many of these girls have been, as it were, totally snowed. They learned to believe, at some point very early in their lives, that getting pregnant is a sacred gift from god and...well I'll put this in their words:

"If you open your legs, you have to pay the price."

Three things:

1. How sad to be the child whose entire life is payment for something the mother eternally regrets.

2. How much sadder to be the girl who has been so beaten down by society that she actually believes not only that she is powerless, but that she should be.

3. Okay, so you believe "life is sacred" - but should you really advocate for those beliefs to be legislated? Because the people who are stirring this pot you're in don't give a flying poop about life being sacred (or at least not military prisoners or Iraqi citizens or death row inmates...those lives aren't sacred). They want to keep power in the hands of men, and taking decision making power out of the hands of women is the quickest way to do that. The life is sacred thing is just a convenient slogan these power mongers capitalize on to advance their anti-woman, anti-parenting, anti-medical ethics, anti-American agenda.

What a great trick you've pulled, you murdering sexist bigot war criminal. I wish that shoe hit you right in the fucking smirk.