I have been thinking a lot about what it takes to sensitize non-feminist folk to issues that have broad implications for women. I attend school in Michigan, where Dave Camp, Vernon Ehlers, Fred Upton, Bart Stupak, Candice Miller, Thaddeus MCotter, Dale Kilder and Peter Hoekstra all voted to write women out of affordable health care this week.
How do you talk to gender skeptics about feminism? Is abortion the place to start? Is there a feminist warm-up issue that is domestic in nature that the general public would agree is a clear manifestation of sexism? Is conversion the ultimate goal? How do you talk about these issues while also acknowledging that even though you are a feminist, you may not have the full truth on feminism, and that your feminism grows, evolves and even adapts?
I wrote the following column on the health care debate as a starting point to appeal to students, faculty and residents in the broader Michigan area:
*** *** ***
If you have been even halfway plugged to the healthcare debate this week, chances are you have caught wind that many women and their allies are not happy about the recent bill. H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, passed with a vote of 220-215 this past Saturday night. It is an achievement insofar as policymaking occurs at the speed of molasses and we finally have a health reform bill -- that includes a public option, ends pre-existing condition discrimination and extends healthcare to 36 million Americans -- that has been punted to the Senate. But one small step for healthcare reform has meant one giant leap back for womankind.
The current plan prevents millions of women from buying insurance plans that cover abortions, which impacts particular women who would seek to purchase a plan in the insurance exchange or through the public option. At issue is the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, a last-minute write-in that bans federal monies from being spent on health plans that cover abortions except in the instance of rape, incest and life endangerment of the mother.
For those who are getting déjà-vu, read the fine print. The infamous Hyde Amendment enacted in 1976 prevents federal monies from being spent on abortion -- not insurance plans that cover them. The Stupak Amendment ups the ante and deals a blow to insurance plans. As the name of the bill implies, bringing down the cost of insurance plans was one of the main objectives of reform. But this amendment creates an environment where women must choose between a more affordable plan and a private insurance plan that will likely be less affordable but more comprehensive in its reproductive health offerings.
Some of us work-world bound women may feel spared from all this drama because we assume that the professions we are headed for will provide comprehensive coverage. Not so fast, missy. The House bill's health care proposal imposes taxes on employers that provide coverage for their employees that could be up to eight percent of their payroll. While there is no way to know for sure, employer-sponsored coverage isn't necessarily guaranteed in your salaried profession. After this is over, women in large numbers may need to rely on public plans. Why should these plans not give them comprehensive reproductive health care options?
I wouldn't be so miffed about this doggone Stupak Amendment if its institution hadn't ousted a perfectly sound compromise on abortion. Under the previous compromise, formerly known as the Capps Amendment, the insurance exchange would provide one insurance plan in every area of the country that covered abortions and one that didn't cover abortions. In keeping with the Hyde Amendment, it would have subsidized abortions through co-payments and insurance premiums in the event that a woman needed this medical procedure. At the behest of the almighty Catholic lobby, and pusillanimous Democrats who keep late hours in terror of 2010's election cycle, this compromise was gutted.
This past Monday, President Obama expressed to ABC News his dissatisfaction with the Stupak Amendment. "There needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we're not changing the status quo," he said. To do this, the Senate must reinstate the previous compromise.
As a sexual health advocate, it's not lost on me that many abortions represent the possible transmission of an otherwise preventable STI or unplanned pregnancy. The truth is, underneath this long-held stalemate what we all truly want are positive sexual health outcomes and children that are planned and prepared for. While abortion is often a point of virulent disagreement, there are certainly ways to promote informed consent to sex that meet the objectives of anti-abortion and abortion-rights folks. These policies have the benefit of being outside of pressing health care reform and allow us to work together to promote strong families and efficient government spending.
One current plan of this sort is H.R. 3312, the Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act. This act prioritizes low-income pregnant women and girls and calls for an increase in access to health care, contraception and sex education. Abortion-rights opponents should know that restricting a woman's ability to use her own money to make decisions that she and her doctor see fit for her body, her family and her faith are not the way to reduce the number of abortions in America. Policies where coalitions are possible will lead to meaningful progress in American politics.
Reposted from the Michigan Daily.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Are abortion rights the best starting point? .
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/17111
I attend school in Michigan as well and I think you did a very nice and informative job on the article you wrote. Thank you so much for this and please keep writing! Hopefully we can find a way to fix this together as a community.
Good post, Rose, thanks. Reducing the feminism debate to abortion, is the equvalent of reducing a woman's life to just 9 months.
In a Feminism 101 book, I think abortion would be the last chapter. Not because its the least important, but because its a complicated subject, not in least part because the abortion debate is in part a meta-physical one. The debate involves individual notions of when life begins.
There's a lot of common examples of sexism (sexual & role based double-standards, workplace discrimination, etc) that don't involve abortion that create a common understanding before having the abortion debate. The other critical part of the abortion debate is that a large part of the pro-life movement is driven by a strong desire to 'raise the consequences' of sex. As strong as it is, its not necessarily readily apparent without some education & history. And since you can arrive at a pro-life position without being sexist, no, you can't start a discussion about Feminism by starting with abortion.
In a Feminism 101 book, I think abortion would be the last chapter...The debate involves individual notions of when life begins.
Would you change your opinion that abortion would be the last chapted in a 101 book if you reframed the abortion debate to be about women's autonomy and bodily integrity? What if you tied it to a woman's rights to determine who to have sex with/whether to have sex at all, the right to determine how to give birth and what doctors can do to her when she's in their care, and the right to determine how she expresses herself (whether or not to wear makeup/heels/hose/other things imposed by society/the workplace etc.)?
At a 101 level, I think this common nugget of determining how one's body may be used and having sole control of it illustrates feminism in a very clear way, and abortion is very much a part of that. Some people may frame the abortion debate as being about where life begins, but you'll also have pro-choice people saying, "It doesn't matter, women have bodily autonomy no matter where life begins."
Yes, because if you don't cover--and get agreement on--'bodily autonomy' BEFORE you get to abortion, you certainly won't be able to get agreement on it in the abortion debate itself. The issue is that there's not just 1 way to frame a debate (hence intersectional analysis).
Bodily autonomy by itself is insufficient in the abortion debate if you fully believe life begins at conception. Who's bodily autonomy counts more? Once you gain agreement on the fact that the question of when life begins is a meta-physical question, not a science question, then you can proceed on freedom of religion & patriarchy arguments...That is, when life begins is a religious question, we have freedom of religion, so stop being a patriarchal arse & let me decide for myself what I believe & what's right for me.
I agree with you.
When we put abortion on the forefront we put it BEFORE other things like rape, domestic violence, equal pay, and other issues.
Putting the onus of feminism on abortion implies that every woman would b in a situation to make that choice, alienating postmenopausal, sterile/infertile, transgendered women and women who would never get an abortion in the first place. I think when we discuss equality for women it can't all boil down to rights of the uterus when a huge part of feminism is the fact that not all women have uteruses for one reason or another.
Abortion shouldn't be the first chapter but I'm not certain I'd make it the last either.
Sorry, for the multiple posts. I have a question that I was wondering if anyone had any answers for. I've been troubled about the recent rise in support for the pro-life position. Its gained like 5-8 points over the last 18 mos & is now the apparent majority position. Any ideas why?
It seems odd that it coincides w/ Democratic victories last year & the huge support for Hillary Clinton during the primaries. Except for the numbers, I haven't seen any discussion of the forces behind it.
supremepizza, I heard that recently, that there is a majority of pro-life people in American now. And I wondered about it...until I did my own research. And I found out that out of dozens of polls done this year on the abortion issue the vast majority showed a pretty consistent pro-choice America. Here is where I got this information:
http://www.pollingreport.com/abortion.htm
Hope this helps. I read all of the polls from this year, and only the obvious ones seemed to be saying that there was a substantial increase in anti-choicers; namely, Fox News for example. So, while I can't say where you specifically heard this, it seems to be false information.
There are a lot of ties between bioethics and feminist issues, primarily because the vast majority of "controversial" bioethics issues are issues that concern female health.
Abortion, birth control, postmortem prenatal ventilation, enforced sterilization of welfare recipients, etc.
I would also posit the theory that a vast number of the other issues that face modern feminists are tied, either economically or psychologically to childbirth in one form or another.
Father's aren't expected, in many cases, to take the same burden of childcare/child-rearing as mothers are expected to take. Because of this innate, unspoken bias, a whole host of pre-feminist logic comes into play in the economical marketplace.
Even those women who choose to remain childless are still penalized economically during their fertile years, with the assumption that "she'll want the mommy track as soon as her ovaries catch up with her". Those women who *do* have children, and aren't wealthy enough to have live-in nannies, are often the caregiver that has to leave work, or take less demanding positions to be able to pick up a sick kid from school, or run them to a doctor's appointment, and all the other tasks that can fall into traditional working hours.
Example: Recently swine flu swept through my son's school. Dozens of kids were going home each day. In the times that I was in the school office, either picking up kids/homework/neighbor kids, or dropping off kids/homework/doctor's notes/neighbor kids, I saw lots of mothers. Most of them who had left work to come get their children. I didn't see any fathers.
Certainly that's anecdotal, and a non-scientific sample, but my point is this: Many feminist issues DO have a biological basis, even if that base isn't a bioethics base.
The field of feminist bioethics is a fascinating and vibrant one. Some of the most interesting living female philosophers are writing on bioethics.
I would disagree with SupremePizza who says that "In a Feminism 101 book, I think abortion would be the last chapter." While I understand her logic, and her subsequent defense of the argument; I would argue that the question of abortion is at the very crux of feminism. The abortion issue is about self-determinism. No human can be self actualized if another being (state or individual) has rights over their personhood.
There are no medical procedures for men where the state/other individuals feel that they have the right to come between the man and his doctor. Yet women have dozens of medical procedures where some other being can intervene.
Goodness...I'm about to get all thesis level long, so I'll stop. Suffice it to say that I've spent decades reading/researching/studying feminist bioethics...and it the last 20 years, we have lost ground, and we're losing it even faster now.
My generation is likely to be the only generation that had full reproductive freedom during our entire reproductive capacity. We were the first to come of age when Roe V Wade was decided, and we're likely to hit menopause as it disappears.
How sad is that?
Abortion is certainly a battlefield of feminism -- but I think it is among the worst as an icebreaker issue with non-feminists. Fully 40-50% of the population will physically or mentally walk away from the conversation (regardless of which position you take).
It seems like a better idea to start from a common-ground-type issue. Start with the less-controversial tenets of feminism -- areas that few people, aside from neanderthals, would disagree with. Domestic violence, rape, general sexism in media, distorted body images in media -- that kind of thing. If you can gain common ground on an easier issue, you can extrapolate to some of the harder ones.
kbz
Thats what I do
I always start with human rights and stem all my arguments from there, since, if feminism ever does accomplish gender equality, we'll all just be considered humans with rights. That idea that women's rights are human rights is not yet understood on a pervasive level is, I think, a great place to start. If the conversation heads toward abortion, then the argument that reproductive rights are human rights can be made quite simply. Especially when taken in the context of gender and development in underprivileged countries, this can make an impact that arguing through an American-centered pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy could not.
My two cents, anyway.
Read your article over lunch today. I don't have a lot to add to it other than agreement, but I wanted to address your question.
I think the starting argument is going to be based on how much time you have, and the specifics of your audience. If you've got only one encounter with a someone in which to make an argument and you don't know a lot about where they're starting from, the easiest one to make is probably pay equality. It's such a basic fairness argument, and it's something that everybody can relate to - they've almost all worked for somebody at some point, and gotten a pay check. Other issues tend to have less universal shared experience as a starting point for discussion.
I think healthcare in general is a wonderful starting point with non-feminists because you can take the subject in so many and really illustrate how women's unique healthcare needs aren't met--you can illustrate to pro-lifers that outside of abortion, there are many ways in which society and healthcare does not support healthy babies.
i.e. why is sterilization covered and not c-sections?
i.e. why are we having arguments for covering materity care? Why are some people opposed to covering procedures that they don't need because they are male/female bodied?
i.e. why are employers not flexible when it comes to taking care of sick children?