In November of 1866, a minor sensation rocked the Albany area following the death of the young widow Elizabeth Dunham, who passed away at her mother’s house on the third of the month under, as the Albany Argus primly noted, “suspicious circumstances.” The Argus’s suspicions quickly proved sound. An inquest performed the next day revealed… Read more →
Tag: Abortion
Friday Night Rights: Abortion in Small-Town Texas
Two recent events have made me return to my favorite TV show of all time, Friday Night Lights, a well-written and riveting drama about football and small-town life in West Texas. First, I recently saw Connie Britton, aka Tami Taylor outside a restaurant in Beachwood Canyon, Los Angeles. I got so excited I stalled my… Read more →
Female Presidential Candidates Aren’t the Answer: Republicans and the Reframing of the War on Women in 2016
There seems to be some confusion about what the controversial term “the Republican war on women” actually means. Most became familiar with the concept during the 2011 midterm elections when Republicans swept the majority of seats. Left-leaning media outlets began wringing their hands over the kind of restrictive anti-abortion legislation they feared would pass, and… Read more →
Archiving Abortion: Sharing One Story At A Time
“I feel like nobody should have to experience anything in life without sharing it. I feel like through our experiences it teaches us a lesson and I feel like we owe it to the world to share it.” That was Nikki’s response when I asked her the question I ask everyone who shares their story with… Read more →
Agency and Abortion in Brazil
Two women’s deaths resulting from clandestine abortions recently shocked the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In August 2014, 27-year-old Jandira dos Santos Cruz died during an illegal abortion procedure. Her body was later found burned and dismembered to avoid identification. The following month in the nearby city of Niterói, 32-year-old Elizangela Barbosa died from… Read more →
Adventures in the Archives: The Dangers of Legal Abortion
This summer I worked with Professor Carolyn Herbst Lewis and three other students on a research project in which we explored the history of reproductive health care in Chicago. Part of our summer included a trip to Chicago to do archival research on our subjects, and, after a month of poring over secondary research, I… Read more →
Craftivists v. Hobby Lobby
by Rachel Epp Buller
Creative stamp arrangements. Cross-stitched fallopian tubes. Knitted uteri. This summer’s social media circulation gave witness to all manner of artsy protests surrounding reproductive rights. Practitioners of this sort often call themselves “craftivists,” a portmanteau that makes clear the use of craft for activist ends. (“Lactivism” indicates a similar word blend, regarding activists who mobilize around issues of lactation.) Guerrilla knitting, yarn bombing, yarn storming, and granny graffiti are all terms in the craftivist lingo (some lovely examples of which can be seen here). To get their message out, craftivists often work in public spaces – sometimes in a guerrilla, dead-of-night manner – and their colorful, even fanciful creations can provide a non-threatening point of entry for public discussion of serious issues. In July and August this year, craftivists made sneaky appearances at Hobby Lobby stores around the U.S. to leave art-based messages for the retail giant as well as for their fellow crafters.
Make Love Not War: Changing the Conversation on Abortion
By Jacqueline Antonovich
Things have been pretty hectic lately for the folks who work and study in Lane Hall, the small, historic building at the far end of University of Michigan’s central campus. Over the past two months the building that houses the Women’s Studies Department and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) has been the target of anti-choice protesters. Lane Hall has been peppered with anti-choice leaflets, the main entry steps have been vandalized with chalk, and protesters have picketed the sidewalks in front of the building. Staff in Lane Hall have also been fielding phone calls from angry activists, alumni, and others. As Debra M. Schwartz, senior public relations representative for IRWG told me recently, “Some of us in Lane Hall and a few other university offices have been distracted from our routine work. But, in general, the protest has scarcely been noticed on campus. It feels like a tempest in a teapot.”
If the IUD is an Abortifacient, Then So Is Chemotherapy and Lunch Meat
When I criticized Hobby Lobby for its attempts to evade the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, a friend of mine thoughtfully replied, “Lara, I don’t think the Hobby Lobby case has anything to do with the daily birth control pill — it is only dealing with not wanting to cover drugs and medical devices that actually “end”… Read more →
The Pain of Choice: Late-Term Abortion and Catastrophic Fetal Diagnoses
By Ginny Engholm
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk in both the political sphere and the blogosphere about the magic twentieth week of pregnancy. For some women, blissfully unaware of the fragility of modern pregnancy, it’s the date at which they find out if they should paint the nursery pink or blue. It’s the date that they schedule the “gender-reveal” party. It’s the date at which the baby goes from being an “it” to a “he” or “she.” For others, it is the thin red line of the abortion debate, the indisputable moment of personhood, the fractious moment where anti-abortion advocates can say, “Aha! It’s really a person after all. You couldn’t possibly think that having an abortion is okay now, could you?”, the moment at which so-called late-term abortion becomes unthinkable for a large majority of the public. For some unlucky women, women like me and like Phoebe Day Danziger, it’s both.