Abortion resources

Fierce Planet Posted on by

You might notice I’ve added a new page for abortion resources. So far I’ve only added the links I’d surfaced when Roe v. Wade was murdered. Over the next week or two I’ll add in a few lines about the various organizations, their services, note locations (particularly which orgs are outside the US). I intend to keep the info up to date and online indefinitely. If you know of orgs that aren’t included but should be, let me know.

Meanwhile, the free states where abortion is still protected are ramping up services as they must now embrace an increased wave of abortion patients who can no longer access healthcare services in their home states. This report is from my own state of Colorado.

Mobile clinics in border towns, stockpiling Plan B: Colorado’s new reality as abortion bans kick in across the country

Colorado reproductive health clinics say the number of patients from outside of Colorado has in some cases doubled in the two weeks since Roe v. Wade was overturned, triggering abortion bans in other states, and a fund that provides financial help for people seeking to terminate a pregnancy has provided money to 71 people, more than twice the number served in all of 2021….

On Wednesday, Polis signed an executive order directing state agencies to continue protecting access to reproductive health care in Colorado. The order directs state agencies not to cooperate with any criminal or civil investigation initiated by another state for any conduct that would be legal in Colorado related to providing, assisting, seeking or obtaining reproductive health care…..

“I have seen it in the faces of my patients: When people don’t want to be pregnant, they will not be forced into a situation where they have to give birth,” she said. “Birth slavery should be illegal in this country. We’ve fought over this. We’ve talked about this for generations, and for hundreds of years.”…

 

Services in other states are innovating too. This article is about a plan to hold abortions in international waters in the Gulf of Mexico, an approach pioneered by Women on Waves, a charitable organization registered in the Netherlands.

As always, whenever you can, please donate to an abortion fund. I guarantee they are all overwhelmed with people who need help in these desperate times.

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They are just getting started

Fierce Planet Posted on by

As I said earlier, it is important not to accept this Roe decision as normal, or as status quo. The Christian Nationalists have no intention of stopping here, no intention of letting those of us still living in free states live our lives as we wish. They intend to stomp on us all unless we conform to their religious dictates—no feminists, no queers, no history or discussion of the lives of people of color, certainly no movement forward on issues of equality and justice for workers, families, or those who live in poverty.

This New York Times article reports on their intentions very clearly.

Gift link, should get you past the paywall for the next week or two:

Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next

The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed over the past half-century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.

And much as happened with the alt-right and QAnon types of ideologies, Christian Nationalists recruit with propaganda in the social media spaces where young people spend much of their time, and where they can perhaps be influenced to join in the hate. Please be aware that this is going on, every day.

Christian Fascist Propaganda Is All Over TikTok

Christian nationalists believe that their country’s policies and laws should reflect evangelical Christian values, and culture war issues like LGBTQ rights, “critical race theory,” or immigration, are regarded as signs of moral decay that imperil their nation’s future.

Christo-fascists take that one step further, and believe that they’re fighting primordial battles between West and East, good and evil, right and left, Christians and infidels. These two labels, however, sometimes overlap….

It’s no accident that this community is expanding on TikTok, of all places, according to Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University in Iowa who focuses on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “You build your audience with a young demographic, and then you spread your ideas that way. This is how you build the next generation of fascists,” he said.

It is essential that we fight back in the upcoming elections, but also with our bodies, our voices, our money, as well as with our votes. Protest, talk with your friends and family, write and call your Congresspeople, and let everyone know you are paying attention.

I think there is actually a good chance we can hold the Senate this fall, and I’ll say more about that soon.

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Thread

Fierce Planet Posted on by

Read it all.

Edit to add, 7/22/22: Maybe this will be averted. It’s hard for me to trust Russia right now.

Russia and Ukraine agree to release blockaded grain exports

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These things are all connected

Fierce Planet Posted on by

I think Laurie Penny said this well in her substack column. You should read the whole thing. But realize that most if not all of the crises happening in the world today are the outcome of the same problem: the violent response of a white patriarchal order which sees its power waning.

So much for the Land of the Free.

…And no, I’m not interested in playing the weaponised pedantry game today. It is possible to acknowledge that the forced birth movement is deeply rooted in misogyny while respecting trans identities and making it clear not all pregnant people affected by these laws will be women. For a start- because patriarchy is exactly this ugly – some of them will be children.

So no, I’ve got no time to pay attention to boring edgelords whimpering ‘what is a woman?’ when the whole point is that no state and no nation should ever be allowed to define anyone’s life on the basis of their designated sex. Funnily enough, the crackdown on abortion and contraception, the war on sexual freedom, the strategic attacks on gay rights and trans and queer identities around the world are all part of the same violent right-wing backlash against a future they’d rather burn down than share. They are all part of a violent response by a patriarchal order that sees its power slipping away….

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Yes, killing Roe is a racist act

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Jane Elliott is famous for her exercises teaching about racism, exercises she presents at various schools and to different groups of people. Below she reports about the ideology behind the movement to stop abortions in this country. I’ve transcribed her words beneath the video, and any transcription errors are definitely my own.

Jane Elliott:

“And right now white people are really frightened. If you don’t understand this discussion of Planned Parenthood offices and you don’t understand the Wall that we’re going to build on the southern border of the United States, you haven’t read the book “The Birth Dearth” by Ben Wattenberg. Ben Wattenberg was a brilliant Jewish man who was a member of the American Enterprise Institute. And he wrote a book the first paragraph of which says, “The main problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born in this country.”

He was an adviser to the President of the United States. He wrote the book in 1987. He says there, “If we don’t change this and change it rapidly, white people will lose their numerical majority in this country, and this will no longer be a white man’s land.”

Now I am not misrepresenting this, I’m telling you exactly, almost exactly what he said. He said, “There are two things you can do to solve this. Number one, we could pay women to have babies, as they have been doing in Western European nations for years.”

Then he says—and these are his words not mine—”Unfortunately, we would have to pay women of all colors to have babies, so we don’t want to do that.”

He says, “The second thing we could do is increase the number of legal immigrants that are allowed into this country every year.” Then again he says, “Unfortunately, the vast majority of those wanting to come to this country today are people of color. We don’t want to do that.”

The third thing he says, “And white women had better pay attention to this, 60% of the fetuses aborted every year are white. If we could keep those 60% alive, that would solve our ‘birth dearth’.”

Does that sound like racism to you? And if it doesn’t, I want to know why it doesn’t.

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And in Ukraine

Fierce Planet Posted on by

Putin is a pure terrorist.

6/28/22 ETA: Word is currently that 25 people are known dead, 21 others are missing.

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