This is the trauma of getting your period at Yarl’s Wood, by @SarahGraham7

Cross-posted from: Sarah Graham
Originally published: 17.11.17

“When you’re on your period, at the very least you want a clean environment, you want pads that are comfortable, and you want the freedom to eat what makes you feel better,” says Grace*, a 43-year-old refugee from Uganda.

Grace sought asylum in the UK after facing persecution and sexual violence in her own country because of her sexuality. She now has refugee status and the right to remain in this country, but in 2015 she was detained in the notorious Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre for seven months.
Read more This is the trauma of getting your period at Yarl’s Wood, by @SarahGraham7

Abortion Is Legal in South Africa — But Illegal Clinics Are Thriving. Why?, by @sianfergs

Cross-posted from: Sian Ferguson
Originally published: 03.04.17

faded poster with the word ‘ABORTION’ in purple capital letters is plastered on a lamppost near my house in Grahamstown, South Africa. At the bottom of the poster, a phone number is printed in large font. Similar posters can be spotted in cities like Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town. It might be on an electricity box in a small town, or on the side of a traffic light in a coastal area. The posters live all over South Africa — in fact, they’re so ubiquitous I rarely noticed them until a foreign friend mentioned them.

“Are these clinics legal?” she asked. “Because, I mean, abortion is legal here, right?”


Read more Abortion Is Legal in South Africa — But Illegal Clinics Are Thriving. Why?, by @sianfergs

The Racist and Sexist History of Keeping Birth Control Side Effects Secret

Cross-posted from: Bethy Squires at Broadly
Originally published: 17.10.16

In September, JAMA Psychiatry published a Danish study that found a correlation between the use of hormonal birth control and being diagnosed with clinical depression. The study tracked hormonal birth control use and prescription of antidepressants over six years for over a million women. They found that women who were on hormonal birth control—be it the pill or a hormonal IUD or vaginal ring—were significantly more likely to be prescribed antidepressants.

Since the news broke, many women reported feeling vindicated that science is finally catching up to their lived experience. “I’d used the pill for ten years,” says Holly Grigg-Spall, author of Sweetening the Pill. “One particular kind, Yasmin, had huge side effects —psychological effects, depression, anxiety, panic attacks. I didn’t make the connection between what was going on with me and the pill for two years.”
Read more The Racist and Sexist History of Keeping Birth Control Side Effects Secret

NEW MOUNTAINS, NEW MAPS. at Fish without a Bicycle

Cross-posted from: Fish without at Bicycle
Originally published: 15.03.15

…when women speak truly they speak subversively–they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want–to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you–I want to hear you. Ursula K. Le Guin

I have not been able to write. There is a weight on my chest that has been there for months. It heats up and swirls around and settles heavy when I endeavor to speak to the confusion, outrage and injustice as I take in another narrative of child sex trafficking, the dismantling of reproductive rights and a woman who was recently convicted of Feticide after having a miscarriage. My pulse quickens as I read the latest update of a rape case in which a boy chummily gave a thumbs up in a photo while he penetrated a 15-year-old girl from behind as she vomited out of a window. That split second in her life was memorialized, fed to and devoured by the millions of people in a culture that is fueled by images of female degradation. Rehteah Parsons hung herself in her home on April 4, 2013; her mother pushed open her bathroom door and held the body of her lifeless teenage daughter. In January, the boys involved with her rape and the photo of it were handed a 4-week course on sexual harassment because after all, consent is “complicated.” Mount Holyoke (a Women’s College) cancelled their production of the Vagina Monologues because some members of the student body have adopted the ideology that to stage a production that acknowledges and focuses on the experiences of women who have vaginas is “inherently narrow, reductionist and is exclusionary” to women who do not have vaginas. I can’t help but wonder what could happen if the same internet outrage that that was turned toward Eve Enlser for her work that “reduces gender to biological distinctions” was turned toward the hordes of men who perpetrate psychic gang rapes on Twitter by talking about how they are going to dismember, defile and denigrate the vaginas of women who speak out of turn. Feminist writers are putting down their pens and stepping out of public conversation because the hate speech, death threats, and the vitriol are all so much. Yes, we live in an era of “call out culture” but I have never seen a woman say she was going to sexually violate someone’s face and then murder them because she disagreed with something they said, nor have I seen men doing this to other men.
Read more NEW MOUNTAINS, NEW MAPS. at Fish without a Bicycle

ABORTION IS NOT A DIRTY WORD! by @extreme_crochet

Cross-posted from: A Woman Alone
Originally published: 25.07.15

As you know, I started a petition in Novemeber last year calling for buffer zones to be created out side of abortion clinics. Bpas also named me as one of their champions of choice for my campaigning after presenting the petition to No.10. Sadly, I haven’t been able to bring about change …. Yet!

I am heartened by the continued news coverage of abortion clinics and by research stating how most women do not regret their abortions (please read the article by Rebecca Schiller article on the statistics at the end of this post).
Read more ABORTION IS NOT A DIRTY WORD! by @extreme_crochet

Institutionalized Misogyny: Two Women Tortured and Publicly Shamed by Public Prosecutor in Ciudad Juárez by @Andrews_Cath

Cross-posted from: Hiding under the bed is not the answer
Originally published: 15.06.15

Two women from  Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua, were arrested and charged with provoking the abortion of one of the women’s fetus of five months gestation earlier this month. Both women do not have the resources to pay their own legal defense (they earn 700 pesos -3 pounds fifty in UK money, 42 dollars in US money a week as factory hands)  and were assigned public defense barristers. In every stage of their trial their human rights have been violated and their dignity trampled on. Both women allege that they were tortured by police authorities in Juárez: local media reports that one attended her trial in a wheelchair due to the physical and sexual violence she has suffered. Yet, at their trial their lawyers presented no arguments to defend them from the charges. As a result they were found guilty on the basis of the confessions they had made to the prosecutors and have been provisionally released.


Read more Institutionalized Misogyny: Two Women Tortured and Publicly Shamed by Public Prosecutor in Ciudad Juárez by @Andrews_Cath

When do women stop being people? by @Sianushka

When do women stop being people?

Actually, there are lots of times. When we’re treated like objects to be remarked upon on the street. When we’re treated like objects to be assaulted on the streets. When our utterly personal right to bodily autonomy is violated and stolen from us by abusers and rapists. When we’re reminded once again that men are default human, and we’re a vague category of ‘other’.

However, in this one particular post I want to talk about one particular moment when women stop being seen as their own person – pregnancy.


Read more When do women stop being people? by @Sianushka

Silence Equals Death: Why Women MUST Speak Out About Illness by @VABVOX

I came of age as a journalist at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Being a female reporter in a still-largely male profession, I got handed what then looked like a small beat that wouldn’t amount to much. Within a few years I was traveling across the U.S. covering breaking news on what was fast becoming an epidemic.

The mantra of AIDS activists in that period of the late 1980s into the 1990s was simple as it was graphic: Silence = Death.

Government officials refused to talk about HIV/AIDS, either at the federal level or the municipal level. I covered one demonstration outside the White House where AIDS activists kept chanting “say it, say it!” because then-President Ronald Reagan had refused to even say the word “AIDS,” even though his close friend, actor Rock Hudson, had become the first celebrity known to have died of the disease a few years earlier.


Read more Silence Equals Death: Why Women MUST Speak Out About Illness by @VABVOX

Fat woman and testing times by Fat Woman Fit

(Cross-posted by Fat Woman Fit)

Now that Fat Woman has Small Baby on board she is being treated by the NHS as an unexploded bomb. Rather than being regarded as an expectant mother Fat Woman is looked upon as a series of problems waiting to happen that must be managed in the most heavy-handed way possible. Fat Woman knew she was going to be in for it when practically the first thing she was given by the community midwife was a leaflet specially written for pregnant women with a BMI greater than 30. Fat Woman has said it before and will say it again: BMI is a statistical tool that is completely unsuitable for individual case management and unless you are going to talk body fat percentage with her she doesn’t care to hear it. Fat Woman scores very badly on the BMI scale thanks to all the weight lifting. Thin Husband delights in referring to Fat Woman as his dense wife. Fat Woman has actually read the policies held by the local NHS trust on dealing with fat pregnant women and is deeply unimpressed with the blinkered and frankly bigoted attitudes displayed. All this is covered in a veneer of “It’s for your own good” and topped with a good slice of “But think of the baaaaaby!” Fat Woman was most unimpressed by the decision that she should be on blood thinners. This was done purely because Fat Woman is fairly old for a first time mother and fat. Fat Woman then went through a huge palaver of getting the drugs, learning how to inject them, having horrendous allergic reactions, having to try two more brands in case she was allergic to the carrying solution and not the actual heparin, trying antihistamines to alleviate the effects, and then disposing of three lots of needles. Fat Woman was deeply annoyed at the hours she sunk into this only to find out that “double the risk” of blood clots meant the risk went from one in 6000 with the drugs to one in 3000. It turns out that exercise is a much more effective predictor of danger, but of course everyone assumes that fat women are lazy greedy couch potatoes.

Fat Woman would love to be a lazy greedy couch potato but can’t seem to get the hang of it.

One thing that came out of Fat Woman’s visit to the obstetric consultant was the request for a hospital administered glucose tolerance test. All pregnant women get a glucose test at their doctor’s surgery, but in the hospital they make you fast, give you a glucose solution and then make you sit down for two hours whilst they take blood at intervals. Fat Woman was rather pissed off at the form letter which said “You have been invited to take this test because you have shown signs of high blood sugar” because that was absolutely not true. Diabetes is the sword of Damocles that doctors and the media like to hold of the heads of fat people. It’s true that being fat and diabetic is a health issue that leads to complications but there is a convenient mis-thinking of the situation that means instead of referring to “fat people who have diabetes and who drink and smoke and take no exercise” as being a drain on the health system the media and the medical establishment have shortened that to “fat people”. Being fat in and of itself does not mean you have these problems, and if you are fat, have a healthy diet and take exercise you are going to be much more healthy than someone in with a lower body fat percentage who doesn’t look after themselves. Fat Woman has been mostly eating a diabetic diet for years because she eats food that is low on the Glycaemic Index. This mostly affects what carbohydrates you use- whole wheat everything, and brown basmati rice instead of any other – but also affects your choice of vegetables. Fat Woman doesn’t consider sweetcorn a useful vegetable because of it’s high sugar content and low fibre content. Fat Woman reckons that you might as well eat a boiled sweet and take a fibre pill as eat sweetcorn, This also means that Fat Woman doesn’t eat a lot of fruit usually, and certainly doesn’t drink fruit juice or smoothies on a regular basis. Fat Woman has managing her blood sugar down to an art, especially since she gave up Diet Coke, which was really fucking with her blood sugars, leaving crashing into sudden hypoglycaemia. Fat Woman hasn’t felt that awful, desperately empty feeling or the rage and fury that would come with it, since before Lent 2012, and is in no hurry to experience it again. Fat Woman is fairly sure that Thin Husband is grateful not to have seen it for a while as well.

Fat Woman consulted with her midwife and decided that she would take the Glucose Tolerance test at the hospital on the grounds that at least it could be properly measured whereas the one at the doctors’ surgery is rather hit and miss. The thing that Fat Woman was most worried about on the Glucose Tolerance Test was drinking the dextrose mix. Fat Woman can’t remember ever having had to do so before, but she really hates chemical drinks. It has been nearly fifteen years since Fat Woman was convinced that an electrolyte replacement packet (for diarrhoea sufferers) was a good cure for a hangover. Fat Woman was thoroughly ill after trying to drink the horrible stuff and avoids anything similar. There are numerous shared stories of women being similarly ill after drinking the dextrose solution at Glucose Tolerance Tests so Fat Woman was incredibly relieved when the blood tech gave her a bottle and a bit of Lucozade and said she had to drink that instead. Fat Woman fails to see the point of Lucozade as a drink in its own right, but it is at least reasonably inoffensive and doesn’t make her ill.

Fat Woman had to hang out in the hospital for two hour and get three blood tests in total, but despite feeling desperately hungry by half past ten she didn’t suffer too much and nor did those around her. Fat Woman had been briefed on the need to take food with her and had a careful schedule of eating and sleeping planned for the rest of the day so she could turn be functional at her shooting lesson. Fat Woman has found that low blood sugar means her shooting goes to utter shit.

Today Fat Woman got the results of her Glucose Tolerance Test. Fat Woman has learned to check the laboratory ranges for blood tests. Sometimes you can be told that you are “normal” when you are actually only just inside “normal” and will be left feeling utterly terrible when actually you could be greatly helped if your levels were considered as low or high in conjunction with how you actually feel. This is called “treating the patient clinically” rather than relying on laboratory results associated with a statistical distribution called “normal”. The lab print out stated that gestational diabetes millitus in pregancy is diagnosed by one or more results at or above the following:

Fasting 5.3 mmol/l
1 hour  10.0 mmol/l
2 hour 8.5 mmol/l

“mmol/l” stands for millimoles per litre. Fat Woman had to look this up, but her grasp of chemistry isn’t going much further than that so suggests you check out the wikipedia page if you want to know more.

Fat Woman’s actual results:

Plasma Glucose Fasting 4.2 mmol/l
Plasma Glucose 1 hour  5.4 mmol/l
Plasma Glucose 2 hour  3.9 mmol/l

What Fat Woman didn’t realise at the time was that the old blood sugar percentages are no longer used. Thankfully Diabetes UK provides a handy conversion form at http://www.diabetes.org.uk/Guide-to-diabetes/Monitoring/Testing/#HbA1c.

Plasma Glucose Fasting 2.5%
Plasma Glucose 1 hour  2.6%
Plasma Glucose 2 hour  2.5%

Fat Woman’s Glucose Tolerance Test results were so amazingly good that someone has actually written “Good result” in pen on the print out sent to her, with a little asterisk alerting her to the “normal range.”

Fat Woman was so pleased at this validation of her healthiness and the news that she is not any kind of diabetic that she ate a Rolo cookie and a piece of shortbread, partly because she likes cookies and shortbread but mostly because she could.

FatWomanFit: Fat Woman is a person. A fat person. A fat person who happens to be a woman. Fat Woman was the fattest person at the gym. Then Fat Woman met Personal Trainer. Now Fat Woman is an intellectual in a world where looks and lifts matter.

It’s only 9 months to save a life, by @Herbeatittude

(Cross-posted with permission from Herbs & Hags: Meanderings of a Hag)

“It’s only nine months! Isn’t that worth it, to save a human life?”

So goes the argument made by those idiots who are in favour of forcing girls and women who get pregnant with an unplanned foetus, to continue with the pregancy and give birth to it against their will.

As anyone who has actually been pregnant knows, it’s not 9 months, it’s 40 weeks, which is actually nearer to 10 months. The reason tradition has it as 9 months, is because in the old days most women didn’t know they were pregnant in those first few weeks.

There is a modern myth abroad which declares that “being pregnant is not an illness” and that it is in fact, nearly exactly like not being pregnant. Again, as anyone who knows anything about it knows, that is simply not true. However for many of us, we have NO IDEA, not a single conception, of just how unlike not being pregnant, being pregnant can be, unless we ourselves experience some of the risks and side-effects or know someone who has done so.

I did a little bit of research on this. Oh all right, I didn’t, I went on Mumsnet and asked them – this should not be taken as a comprehensive list or a serious meta-analysis. It’s just a list of things people on Mumsnet have had happen to them as a direct or indirect result of being pregnant and giving birth. Some of them are relatively trivial, some are vair serious indeed, like Death. Anyway it’s my starting point for a list of potential risks that women undergo, when they decide to keep a pregnancy. Or when somebody decides they have to keep it whether they want to or not. When you see it written down, you wonder how much hatred pro-forced-birthers have for women. For the real hardliners, none of this means anything, they hate us anyway and don’t believe our lives have any value. But for the thoughtless knee-jerkers who aren’t that committed to the forced-birth arguments, this list might be a useful thing to contemplate. Anyone wanting to add anything, I’d be interested to hear from you.

Anaemia
Anal fissures
Anal incontinence
Anaesthetic mistakes leading to permanent disability.
Asthma – 1/3 of women who have it finds that pregancy makes it worse.
Back pain
Bell’s palsy
Blindess (tearing retina during delivery because of pressure of pushing)
C-sec wounds getting infected, haematomas associated with C-sec wounds, keloid scarring.
Carpal tunnel syndrome
Cascade renal colic
Change in digestive system
Change of body shape – breasts and hips do not return to form prior to pregnancy. There are implications for psychological harm there alone.
Coccyx problems – some women have difficulty sitting down forever after.
Constant nausea sometimes for the whole 10 months
Cutting of bladder during caesarean
Death
Decreased suppleness (particularly bad for women who do sport).
Dental problems
De Quervain’s Syndrome or Mother’s Thumb?
Diarrhea and vomiting lasting for 2 or 3 years after the pregnancy.
Eclampsia
Eczema can be made worse
Episiotomy wounds can open up
Eye prescription changes.
Fistula
Gestational Diabetes. About 8% of women are affected by this.
Guilt and self-loathing from giving child up or not bonding if kept.
Gum disease and wobbly teeth
Haemorrhage
Hair colour change
Hands and/ or feet can grow and not go back to their old size.
Hernia
Hip pain
Hormonal effects on pre-existing conditions ie psoriasis, acne, etc
Hyperemesis, with severe dehydration
Increased risk of gallstones and kidney stones
Increased risk of osteoporosis
Increased risk 12 months post partum for Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (inflammation of the uterus, ovaries, FTs) – can leave permanent scarring, cause infertility, ectopic pregnancy etc
Iritis (a horrid auto-immune inflammation of the iris, which leads to blindness if not treated quickly and efficiently. A sudden change in hormones can cause an attack).
Less intense orgasms
Lochia can be retained, causing distention of the uterus.
Lowering of the immune system
Mastitis
Memory implications
Mental Health conditions are often exacerbated by pregnancy.
Months of sleeplessness. Sleep deprivation recognised as serious health risk by most medical authorities in the world.
Muscle tears
Multiple Sclerosis has been known to be triggered in pregnancy
Negative impact on finances that will affect mental health, lifestyle, access to jobs.
Nerve damage
Nipple thrush causing nipples to permanently invert. Leading to lack of confidence, lowered libido etc.
OCD can be triggered/get worse post partum.
Pain of the milk coming in.
Permanent increase in blood pressure
Piles
Plantar fasciitis
PND
Post partum hyperthyroidism, leading to the need to take thyroxine for the rest of ones days.
Post-birth complications. Poor stitching followed by repair operation months later.
Post natal psychosis
Pre-eclampsia
Pre-existing conditions like Arthritis, need drugs to control them. These drugs are harmful to foetuses and need to be stopped, leading to the woman with arthritis ending up in constant pain for years, possibly life and needing to use a wheelchair.
Pre-natal anxiety and depression is generally not discussed but common.
Prolapse
PTSD
Restless Leg Syndrome
Scarring
Sexual problems (libido, sensations)
Skin changes like patches, spots etc. Sometimes patches never clear up.
Snoring and sleep apnoea
Spinal migraine
Sore and painful joints, sometimes lasting months or years.
SPD – a syndrome which can lead to serious disability and pain, no cure.
Splitting of chest muscles (can’t remember term, but colleague could fit a fist in the space between her muscles)
Tears into urethra and clitoris as well as vaginal and anal.
Thrombosis- deep vein and superficial vein
Tokophobia
Urinary Incontinence – stress incontinence, urge incontinence and both. This would be considered a major effect in a man, but for some reason women are supposed not to mind. This can lead to lack of confidence, depression etc. (Which since this is how patriarchy likes women to feel, should possibly be seen as not a side effect at all, but a lovely womanly enhancement.)
Varicose veins
Women who suffer Gestational Diabetes are more likely than average to develop diabetes later on in life. Sometimes gestational diabetes will be permanent.

Only 9 months eh? I don’t think so. Now imagine telling a man that he should risk any of the more serious things on this list (or even some of the less serious things), in order to save the life of a child, because human life.

It just wouldn’t happen would it? Because unlike women, men matter.

HerbsandHags: Meanderings of a Hag: I have no fixed subject matter for my blog, it tends to be whatever grabs me, but for some reason lots that has grabbed me has been about rape or other male violence. It’s all with a feminist slant though. [@Herbeatittude]

Three Years in Prison Without Trial for a Miscarriage, by Cath Andrews

Cross-posted from Hiding Under the Bed is not the answer

Virginia, a young indigenous women from Guerrero, suffered a miscarriage in 2009. Since then she has been in prison in Huamuxtitlan, Guanajuato, charged with murder. There has never been an autopsy to determine the cause of fetal death. All judicial proceedings against Virginia have been carried in out in Spanish and she was not offered a translator who could explain proceeding in her native Nahuatl. Neither did she have access to a defense lawyer who could speak her language.

In January this year, thanks to the work of the NGO Las Libres and the volunteer law students from the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE) in Mexico City, a federal judge ruled that her human rights had not been respected. In the light of the fact that there was no evidence to support the charge against her, the judge also ordered that she should be released. However, this has not happened. Instead, the local judge re-issued a warrant for her arrest on the same charges.

Verónica Cruz, director of Las Libres, told news agencies that this new warrant was a “reprisal” against Virginia for exposing the abuses committed by the judicial authorities in Huamuxtitlan. She also observed that her plight was the result of the “triple discrimination” Virginia has been subjected to in the judicial process as a poor, indigenous woman.

As I reported last week, this “triple discrimination” is sadly the norm for the Mexican justice system. However, in the case of Virginia, there is also a further difficulty. Guanajuato is one of the most conservative states in Mexico. It was one of the first states to reform its constitution in 2010 in to declare that the right to life began at conception. As I reported recently, its governor has openly opposed federal directives which oblige health service providers to grant abortions to women who have suffered sexual assault.

Guanajuato has a long track record of imprisoning women for miscarriages and still-births. As is the case with Virginia, the strategy of the judicial authorities is to charge them with murder –which can be punished with sentences as long as 25 years– rather than for procuring an abortion, which has a five-year tariff. Two years ago, Las Libres and students from the CIDE law school successfully championed the cases of six women who had been in prison for as long as eight years. Like Virginia they were convicted of murder after losing their pregnancies. None of the women jailed had actually procured an abortion; rather each one had suffered a miscarriage, which due to family circumstances, poverty and/or ignorance they had tried to conceal. Once they had been forced to seek medical attention, one of the people who attended them (doctor/social worker) had then made the accusation with the relevant authorities. All of the women were from the poorest areas of the state and lived in conditions of poverty and social marginalization. They were unable to neither defend themselves personally against such charges nor pay someone competent to do it for them.

Cruz is certain that Virginia can be absolved if only the judicial process could be concluded. The fact that she is merely charged and not formally sentenced means that there is a limit to what her defense lawyers are able to do. It is evident that the local authorities in Huamuxtitlan know this and are purposely dragging their feet to stall the case being sentenced. As a result, Virigina has now been in prison for three years.

As I wrote last week, life is extremely difficult inside prison for women such as Virginia who don’t speak Spanish and are far away from home and access to support networks. It is testament to the deep misogyny of Mexican society that its most vulnerable women are treated in this way.

An edited version of this article was published on e-feminist

Hiding Under the Bed is not the Answer is the blog of historian of Mexican politics Cath Andrews who also writes for e-feminist and Toda historia es contemporánea. She tweets at @Andrews_Cath

Pro-Life is Lies, by The Real Thunder Child

Cross-posted with permission from The Real Thunder Child

Thanks to the recent underhand behaviour of the Telegraph regarding “sex selective” abortion, and the clear stated intent of the Times, I would like to re-iterate my own rebuttal of the pro-life narrative- a letter I wrote to the Guardian in 2011, as follows here;

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/27/abortion-debate-government-pro-life

In case the link doesn’t it I have re-produced it verbatim…..

“What the “pro-life” lobby fails to be honest about (which is why their influence is increasingly dangerous) is that – unlike the “pro-choice” lobby – they seek to remove from women their ability to choose a course of action best suited to their own circumstances and conscience.

I am a Catholic. I am against abortion*. But – as the mother of a girl – I’m fervently “pro-choice”. As much as it’s every woman’s right to choose not to terminate a pregnancy, it’s also her right to choose the opposite action. Every person has the right to complete sovereignty over their own body, and the right to deal with whatever consequences exercising that choice involves. “Pro-choice” only advocates a woman’s right to a termination if that’s what she chooses and, unlike “pro-life”, seeks neither to coerce or legislate (or coerce via legislation) over a person’s ownership of their reproductive destiny.

Medically speaking, allowing choice is ethical; removing it is not. Along with the abolition of the death penalty and the creation of the NHS, the 1967 Abortion Act stands out as the most ethical, humane piece of legislation in British history. It’s about time we of the “liberal left” grew a backbone and defended it as such.

Sinead Connolly”

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

* when I say I’m against abortion, I must clarify that I’d prefer to live in a world where it was never necessary. But that world MUST be created on women’s terms, not those deemed by patriarchy, or nothing will have changed.

** I have nothing further to add, anything else would be hyperbole – and the subject has enough of that without any of mine.

The Real Thunder Child can also be found on Twitter as @resurgamblog.