I MISSED THIS AT THE TIME

Published October 2, 2024 by Nan Mykel

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I missed this at the time:

CNN — In some political careers, there comes a moment when you must stand up and say something you never wanted to say.

For Ohio state representative Teresa Fedor, that moment came in 2015, as she listened to her fellow lawmakers debate a bill that would forbid abortions once a heartbeat is detected, which can sometimes be as early as six weeks. A former schoolteacher who served in the legislature since 2002, she says she knew it was time to tell her own story.

“I knew when I decided to stand up, there was no looking back,” she says. Fedor, 59 at the time, began indirectly, noting that she had not heard any discussion of exceptions for rape. She said she respected her opponents’ reasoning. And then, a minute into her speech, she stunned her colleagues. On 25 March 2015, Fedor got so frustrated during the debate on abortion in the lower chamber of the state’s legislature that she stood up and revealed that she had been raped and terminated the resulting pregnancy. “You don’t respect my reason, my rape, my abortion, and I guarantee you there are other women who should stand up with me and be courageous enough to speak,” she said. “What you’re doing is so fundamentally inhuman, unconstitutional, and I’ve sat here too long.” Fedor was raped many years ago, while she was in the military. (^[16]

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CNN —

Former President Donald Trump cast himself as a “protector” of women at a Pennsylvania rally Monday evening and claimed that American women won’t be “thinking about abortion” if he’s elected.

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I wish I had saved the clipping, but not too long ago I read that one spokeswoman bemoaned abortions, because they might prevent one child from growing up to find a cure for cancer. [Statistics show that he would much more likely be a psychopath.]

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PUNISHMENT FOR SEX?

Is it my imagination or beneath the fire and brimstone’s energy against abortions does there lurk a brutal whiplash for females who make love, screw, get raped or are incested? Or for family size to increase in order to maintain the “white” civilization? Or to keep women out of competition with men at the workplace?

The question of how soon it’s possible to detect and confirm a pregnancy has come into focus as new abortion restrictions have been enacted across the country, including in Iowa, where a ban on most abortions after six weeks took effect in July. A similar ban took effect in Georgia, on May 1, although temporarily halted by a lower court judge.

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“SAY GAY?”

Published April 14, 2024 by Nan Mykel

IS ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT A SIGN OF MISOGYNISM?

Why are men Randomly Punching New York City Women? – The New York Times

Ms. Pires made a note to be vigilant when she was in New York. Heading to lunch on a bright and chilly afternoon at the end of last week, she was standing at an intersection on Delancey Street waiting for the light to change when she noticed a man, walking in the opposite direction, “studying” her. She registered that he was “quite well dressed,” but almost nothing else made an impression.

Before she knew it he struck her with his fist, hitting her on the right side of her head. He fled uptown on Essex Street. She reported the incident at the Seventh Precinct, where a detective told her that these type of attacks had become “kind of a big deal at the moment.” She was left with swelling in her ear; her face turned black and blue. https://www.nytimes.com

On March 27, the Council’s Women’s Caucus issued a statement confirming that reports of these attacks were not a hoax but instead part of “an alarming trend in violence against women.”

Were women panicking needlessly? It was hard not to interpret these recent offenses within the broader context of a roving and seemingly ever-more-insidious misogyny. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is available city data, women were killed by intimate partners at a rate 30 percent higher than the previous year. Reports of domestic violence also increased during that period, and nationwide, between 2018 and 2021, incidents of domestic violence involving guns went up by more than 7 percent. And:

Six Months Post-Roe, 24 US States Have Banned Abortion or Are Likely to Do So--Guttmacher Institute

SAY GAY, anyone?

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Let’s hang onto our right to vote!!!

I LOOKED UP “RETROGRADE”

Published April 10, 2024 by Nan Mykel

After reading that Arizona’s Supreme Court has ruled that a near total abortion ban from 1864 is enforceable, the word “retrograde” came to mind, and I looked it up on Google to see if I was right. I was: Among many definitions Google led me to, I liked best

“tending towards an earlier worse condition; declining or deteriorating.”

NBC News reports that The ruling is on hold for 14 days, and voters will likely have a chance to weigh in on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution this fall.

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WHY do I keep comparing the anti-abortion folks with our history of imprisoning suffragettes?

More than 300 suffragettes were incarcerated at during the early 20th century in one of the darker aspects of the campaign for the vote for women, and one that has historical and contemporary resonance for the women’s liberation movement. Built in 1852, Holloway prison became a female-only site in 1903.

The women of the National Woman’s Party sentenced to prison in November 1917 for picketing the White House had no idea what awaited them when they arrived at the Occoquan Workhouse. They endured brutality and abuse from the prison guards, but remained committed to their cause.

On Nov. 15, 1917, about 20 women were subjected to beatings and torture at Occoquan Workhouse, a prison in Virginia, in what became known as the “Night of Terror.” On the evening of Nov. 14, the superintendent ordered his guards to brutally assault imprisoned suffragists.

We’ll see if women nowadays are more “pushovers” than the suffragettes were, come November. Overcoming the throw of the dice that made us female presents a long row to hoe.

Image: Library of Congress

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Sorry, I couldn’t get rid of that blank space: nan?

OMG!

Published July 21, 2022 by Nan Mykel

What if a white woman was raped by a black man and became pregnant?

It’s mind-blowing, the path laid out by Republicans. Do you think they all might have caught covid of the brain? Poor dears. And here I was getting angry with them….

Hmmn…Where will it stop?

Published July 3, 2022 by Nan Mykel

As of July 1, 2022, 16 states had banned or made significant moves to ban abortions. Of these, 5 had dusted off centuries-old abortion laws. The figures are changing too fast for me to present them. The internet can tell you better than I can.

The question of contraception has recently been raised. I’m wondering at what level the curbing of rights at proseutorial levels will come to a rest:

___various stages of pregnancy?

___out of state medical prescriptions or operations?

___no rape or incest exceptions

___no life of the mother exceptions

___no use of contraceptions including i.u.d.‘s

___prosecution for all miscarriages

___no hysterectomies or tubal ligations

___no vasectomies? Whoah! I wouldn’t bet on that. There’s a difference between making and baking?

BRAVO FOR A SIGNIFICANT POSTING

Published June 22, 2022 by Nan Mykel

NATURE

Joe Quigley was writing for Daily Kos, but his essay deserves an even broader airing. I won’t dip into Joe’s well thought-out piece, but if you toddle over to it you may be impressed. I was, and am. It’s healined Finally.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/22/2105574/-FINALLY?utm_campaign=recent

WHEN WILL THEY TAKE OFF THEIR MASKS?

Published June 19, 2022 by Nan Mykel

No Way, not in my country

When will they take off their Halloween masks and admit it was all a joke, and dark humor at that? We already have the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households [Pew Research], and they pretend to suggest pubescent children be forced to deliver incestuously and other rapist-conceived babies on the chance the foetus might cure cancer one day? More likely he/she would become a gun-toting saboteur of democracy. Can you imagine growing up with a mother who was forced to have you?

In my state they’re even pretending to require that teachers receive less training than formerly to carry guns in the classroom. (Who could chew gum then?) Haw haw…

In the heart of our nation there’s a club that pretends to have an iron fist over our populis, chanting civil rights pride while encouraging adults–and some before their 21st birthday–to arm themselves without a permit against possible attackers.

I used to like the Lets Pretend program Saturday morning on the radio. I don’t like it played out in the United States of America. What happened to the “spiritual awakening” of the new century? Come on guys, please take off your masks of greed and cruelty and have a cuppa. Listen to your human heart…

And educate yourself. I found the following fantastically blaringly false statement in a recent National Review article: “Other than in cases of rape, which are quite rare, women don’t become pregnant absent a free choice to engage in sex, which often naturally results in the conception of new life.” O please admit you’re pretending…