Kathryn Joyce has a great piece up at The Nation about how crisis pregnancy centers "encourage" adoption.
Apparently Showtime is creating a reality tv spin off of the L Word. After the way they botched the last few seasons of that show, I'm not looking forward to this one.
Lil Mama from America's Best Dance Crew has issued an apology about her comments to Leomy from Vogue Evolution that Jos wrote about yesterday.
Lil Mama: "I would like to clarify anything that was misunderstood from Sunday's show. My remarks were never meant to be disrespectful regarding Leiomy's gender nor offensive to the LGBT community, which has been a community that has supported me in all my endeavors. However, in hindsight, I recognize that my words may have come across as hurtful. I spoke with her privately after the taping to express that it was not my intent to offend her or any member of the transgender community and that I still live for Vogue Evolution."
A nasty tell-all piece in Vanity Fair about the Palin's accuses Sarah of being a bad wife and mother. Despite all my feelings about Palin, this was pretty low.
Apparently the feel-good story that Courtney wrote about last week, that the rapper Roxanne Shante getting her PhD paid for by the label that mistreated her is not true, or at least seems impossible to verify.
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I was on a CPC website a while ago and I was reading how they describe the options. They say that abortion is a lose-lose situation, the "baby" loses and the women lives in guilt for the rest of her life. Parenting is a win-lose situation, because even though you didn't choose abortion, you still lose because you have to deal with a child now. Adoption is a win-win situation, because no woman EVER regrets giving up her child for adoption, and ALL adoptions turn out just fine and dandy. All the time.
They way they describe all of these options is infantilizing. It completely disregards how a lot of women feel about their choice, whether that choice is abortion, parenting, or adoption. Anti-choicers love to tell women how they feel about their choices. Who do they think they are, really? Who knows the woman better than herself?
"Apparently the feel-good story that Courtney wrote about last week, that the rapper Roxanne Shante getting her PhD paid for by the label that mistreated her is not true, or at least seems impossible to verify."
It seem possible to verify that it is untrue - why hedge? At a minimum - no PhD, no BA... there are any number of reasons that the story might spread the way it did - but it helps nothing to hedge when something like that is revealed as untrue.
Lil Mama didn't apologize. Rather, she went the "I'm sorry... that you misunderstood me" route.
Right. And what's with all this soft language? "what I said *may* have offended people." Just say it!
"What I said was offensive and wrong and there is no excuse for my words. I'm sorry that I offended you and will work to better myself so that it doesn't happen again."
That's an apology. Why is it so hard?
This whole Levi Johnston thing reminds me of everything I hate about soft news sensationalism as practiced by the mainstream media.
It is often unfair to criticize parents for the bad behavior or poor decisions of their children. I'm sure if my mother had been running for office then someone might have dredged up embarrassing things I'd done when I was younger. We all have skeletons in our closet and I have my share, for sure. And since I have a younger sister who ended up falling for a Levi character, getting pregnant, and then having an abortion, I can understand the circumstances to a painful degree. My parents tried their best to prevent us from making epic mistakes like that but some lessons have to be learned the hard way. I don't fault them for that.
Criticizing people for bad parenting skills often doesn't take into account the complexities. There are, of course, times where parents are so obviously negligent or abusive that we can safely come to that conclusion, but when discerning that is more difficult, then at times we tend to project our own anxieties and fear onto the situation.
and somehow i think levi "left my fiance/babymama and child for a spot at the mtv movie awards" johnston doesnt have much room to speak about what constitutes good parenting.
Ugh, it pisses me off that one of those crisis pregnancy centers is just down the street from me, around the corner from the Planned Parenthood I go to.
They do that on purpose!!
I wonder how fast the news would cover people protesting the CPCs. I'd be tempted to street council women with the truth about those places if 1. it wasn't completely out of line for me to tell a woman what to do and 2. the news coverage wouldn't turn into a anti-choice debacle.
What are our options for cutting the funding to CPCs?
Someone at Feministing should probably update that previous post to point out that the Shante story is not true.
I read about the Crisis Pregnancy Center stuff earlier today on Broadsheet. I think it's a good article and I'm definitely not a fan of Crisis Pregnancy Centers however, when taken out of context, I think the suggestion that they amount to "adoption rings" is just as dangerous as conservative propaganda. When I saw that headline on Salon I though, "This is going to create some nasty backlash..."
I'm all for exposing Crisis Pregnancy Centers for the horrible, malicious places that they are but it has to be done responsibly. Any hint of sensationalism and the conservative media is going to launch straight into martyr mode.
mmm. i dont think there is anything overly sensational with the article - granted i didnt read all of it, it was too difficult and ive read it all before. the plain fact is anti-choice proponents of adoption rarely mention any emotional repercussions of losing a child to adoption or emotional "blackmail" if a mother changes her mind.
there is much incentive to get the right women (white) to surrender their child, even if it means flat out lieing (especially about "open" adoptions). hell, i was given a pampelet about surrendering my child when i went to a cpc and my test was negative!
this is also covered in "the girls who went away," a book about adoption pre-roe.
Broadsheet's original headline was sensational but they seem to have changed it. I just had a semi-horrified moment where I imagined Bill O'Reilly saying that, "the feminists are saying adoption rings are commonplace now! They're ruining America!!!".
It's a knee jerk reaction. For every feminist argument I see the anti-feminist counter argument. I'm stuck in perpetual damage control.
uberhausfrau, you are awesome!
gee, thanks. *blush*
I get the impression you don't like adoption.
Speaking for me? It worked out great.
And I'd really rather not be dead, if it's all the same with you.
Liebling, don't presuppose. No one hates adoption. We hate coercion. We hate lies, misinformation, being pushed towards one option and told we're selfish if we pick either other option.
Furthermore, had your birth mother chosen abortion (assuming you were born post-Roe), you wouldn't be dead. You'd've never've been born, you'd have no conscience of the fact that you may have ever been, you'd be nonexistant and therefore without an opinion as to your own life or death. Saying, "I'd rather not be dead" sounds great when you're trying to play to the emotions of anti-choicers, but not so well around people who are actually intelligent about these things.
It is not sensationalizing the issue of the CPC. This has long been an issue. Many of the CPCs are connected heavily to the adoption industry. It has been that way for years. I am very thankful that Kathryn Joyce wrote that article. It exposes why the original birth certificates are sealed for adult adoptees in the country. Even the relinquishing mothers are not allowed access to them either. It is long past the time to end these kinds of practices.
I agree completely and I'm aware of all of this. I just think the term "adoption ring" needs to be avoided. That was Broadsheet's original headline.
That CPC article was nothing short of heartbreaking and angering. I don't even know what we as feminists can do about it.
It's just another example of how evangelical Christianity has shamed and degraded women, taking advantage of them at the most vulnerable.