The Optics of abortion

In recent years, support for legal abortion has waned, which Lord attributes to the growing power of Christian fundamentalists: “We, like the good citizens of Iran, live in what amounts to a theocracy.”

A great article from Womens’ Enews showing how the media on abortion has been skewed to promote the anti choice agenda.

“Not one op-ed discussing abortion on the op-ed page of the most powerful liberal paper in the nation was written by a reproductive-rights advocate, a pro-choice service-provider or a representative of a women’s group,” reported the Prospect. “Instead, the officially pro-choice New York Times has hosted a conversation about abortion on its op-ed page that consisted almost entirely of the views of pro-life or abortion-ambivalent men, male scholars of the right and men with strong, usually Catholic, religious affiliations. In fact, a stunning 83 percent of the pieces appearing on the page that discussed abortion were written by men.”

Well isn’t that special! Nothing like equal time.

Pro choice cartoons are censored by a media afraid of the ravings of the anti choicers or as the article states; “sunnier sounding “pro-life” movement”

Last year, Reid, a self-syndicated cartoonist, created “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” a strip about the morning-after-pill. In Reid’s dystopian America of 2020, the Supreme Court has upheld a “Spermy Protection Act,” a show of power by the “sex-cell rights movement.”

Even one of Reid’s supposedly progressive clients, an alternative weekly newspaper in Rochester, N.Y., rejected it.

The idea for the strip was formed in Reid’s pro-choice knitting group, “which sounds hippie and granola but it’s not,” she says. “It’s a mini women’s think tank.”

“Every Sperm Is Sacred” reflects Reid’s anxiety about the crusade not only to overturn Roe v. Wade, but to limit the availability of contraception.

“They are saying that the morning-after pill is abortion, which it is not,” says Reid. “RU-486 is the abortion pill; the morning-after pill is a contraceptive . . . They are saying that the rights of the sperm and the egg override the rights of the woman.”

You can see the cartoon here

Reid,[…] believes issues such as the threat to legal abortion in the United States and the right-wing’s war on contraception routinely get short shrift from male colleagues.

“It is dismissed as a soft issue or a woman’s issue,” she says. “‘Oh you women, drawing your cartoons about abortion’ . . . Often there is this perception that we’ve come so far women’s issues aren’t issues anymore.”

How many times have we heard this?

Rights issues, daycare issues, abortion/contraception issues, disability issues, all seen as “soft” and things to “get to”.

It is time there was a recognition that the time to get to these issues is NOW.

Women represent a significant part of the population, it is ludicrous in the extreme to assume that the needs of half the population are frivolous.

It is ridiculous that the natural rights (and what should be legal rights*) of a woman to control of her body is given short shrift while those seeking to make sacred every sperm and egg is given free play.

(*hope that satisfies the natural v legal rights crowd)