April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

women

And so it ends..

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I had a bad feeling about this year, and I was unfortunately right about that.

Personally I lost a mom, a cat, two jobs, and had two serious health scares.

Politically saw the election of Harper and crew, a renewed and emboldened attack on women’s rights and freedoms, the realization that though the wheel was invented, many still want to put corners on it and have a nuanced discussion over who should be using it, continued death and destruction by the powerful who stand to gain more.. upon the many who have nothing left to lose, and the death of a puppet who had turned on his masters. [Read more…] about And so it ends..

But honey..housework is good for you!

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I can see it now.

Women the world over smiling from ear to ear, gleefully singing while cleaning house, with rubber gloves stamped with little pink ribbons, pink ribbon stamped dust clothes, pink handled scrub brushes, happy in the knowledge they are saving their health.

Yes ladies break out the pumps and the pearls and the “mommy’s little helpers” cause it turns out that housework is good for you! [Read more…] about But honey..housework is good for you!

Problem Solved?

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I was thinking more of the interest lately some “progressives” have been showing in the disingenuous remarks made by Elizabeth May. The responses made to those who reject the notion that anyone has the right to take a “nuanced” approach to their reproductive rights has been interesting to say the least.

We have been accused of being Green bashers, dinosaurs, radical, reactionary, Stalinist, unable to see shades of grey ( I love that one. As if there are shades to human rights. )

These same defenders of Ms Mays’ right to call women frivolous, have no qualms about trying to shut down discussion when women — remember us guys? we’re the ones with the wombs — express their discomfort and displeasure with the fact that those so willing to score political points and street cred with their reputed support of feminism and feminists are unwilling to show actual support of so fundamental an idea as reproductive freedom.

This even as they claim that their voices are being silenced.

We are allowed to be feminists just as long as we are nice little feminists who listen when the boys tell us what feminism means, how feminists should act and what issues we should see as meaningful.

Our anger is being used against us in ways that must have even the nastiest of misogynists gaping.

As if anger is an inappropriate response when ones rights are seen as fodder for debate. As if anger is inappropriate when one is asked to repeat a tour of duty. As if anger is inappropriate when the speaker of the words cozies up to the friends of the people who do this.

Anger is neither inappropriate nor enough. It is not time for nuances nor debates.

It is time to choose up sides, you believe that women have the right to live as autonomous human beings or you do not. You believe our society is better served when all people are free and equal or you do not. You believe that women’s voices are important or you do not.

You believe the behaviour shown in the shirt above is an appropriate response to women defending what has been shown to be important not only to women’s health but also to society as a whole, or you do not.

Away in a manger

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Christmas Eve many focus on a birth of long ago, and so I give you a story of birth.

From the Independent

In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem – but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.

Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. “What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured,” she says.

Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. “It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on,” she says. She was already nervous about the birth – her first, and twins – so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. “Obviously, we told them we couldn’t wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn’t understand.”

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. “I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,” she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could “certainly” have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

Foodbanking Women’s Issues

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I’m sure when foodbanks first started popping up they were considered a stop gap. A temporary fix to a major problem.

I’m sure there was an assumption that advocacy and research would be done to target the reasons for and solutions to most of the underlying causes.

Of course capitalism itself requires a certain level of poverty and unemployment to continue, it therefore, owes something to those upon whom the illusion is built.

Of course we know that despite the studies and proposed solutions the Liberal and Conservative governments have seen fit to reward corporations with tax cuts, and creating class warfare upon the poor.

The Conservative government has now taken the same approach to women’s issues. [Read more…] about Foodbanking Women’s Issues

Rebick showers on May

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Judy Rebick is no stranger to the abortion debate.

She is one of those who helped in the fight to provide women with a choice.

Ms. Rebick is seen here fending off an attack on Dr. Morgentaler at the opening of a clinic in Toronto.

Too bad the debaters club doesn’t realize that this sort of thing still happens. It happens to ordinary women making perfectly legitimate choices for themselves and to the doctors who provide needed medical procedures.

In Ms. Rebick’s own words;

Dear Elizabeth,

I would have written sooner but I have been travelling.

Since I got back, I have carefully reviewed your statements on abortion and I have to say that I am sorry but I will no longer be supporting you or the Green Party in any way.

As you know I was very supportive of your running as leader of the Green Party and despite my differences with some of the platform of the Party I have up until now felt that your presence added a great deal to the federal political scene. But now you have questioned the most important victory of the women’s movement of my generation.

If you had said that you personally oppose abortion but you support a woman’s right to choose, I would have been fine with that. Instead you said that a woman’s right to choose, something tens of thousands of Canadian women fought for for decades, was trivializing an important issue. It felt like a slap in the face.

Since you have so little respect for me or for the women’s movement which mobilized for so long to win this hard-earned right, I hope you will understand that I ripped up the cheque I had written to the Green Party and you can no longer rely on me for support.

ETA:Apparently someone at this site either thinks I am anti abortion or that it would be a hoot to send the anti choicers my way. Why do the anti choice crowd make it so easy to question their intelligence?