Therapeutic

Well, my brain is still fuzzy, but that's mostly due to margaritas, not LCD (although it really was HAWESOME).

There is often a discourse about abortion talking about the reasons why women do it, and dismissing them as "superficial" (thanks Elizabeth Hasselbeck, you really are a moron); using it as a form of "birth control" (see this excellent article up at feministe on that issue - if it's about controlling whether you give birth, then of course it's a form of "birth control"); dismissed for "social reasons" (as the FLS Republicans decried on the noticeboards around school last year).

I went to a very interesting talk recently about Jewish law and its tolerance (or not) of abortions which was illuminating, and the rabbi was wonderful, but again she repeated the rhetoric of not allowing abortions for "superficial" reasons, as "birth control." Which is shorthand for dismissing a woman's reasons for having an abortion because she is silly or frivolous and saying that women don't know what they want or what they're doing; all of which leads to the anti-choice conclusion that women should be punished for mistakes - in contraception, in choice of partner, in being not yet ready for motherhood but ready to have sex.

This is all depressing and familiar, but particularly interesting to juxtapose with last week's Human Rights Watch report Over Their Dead Bodies, reporting on the results of Nicaragua's recent blanket abortion ban. So far, there have been over eighty documented cases of women's deaths directly attributable to the ban. As the guardian reports today, that is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Utterly depressing, and what we may retreat back to in the US if the Supreme Court gets its way. Although rich women won't suffer. As always, the poor ones are suffering most in Nicaragua and that's what will happen here. UPDATE: Ye gods, I just read this post up at Trailer Park Feminist about some arsehole who says that HRW is making up these reports of dead women so that it can make money from abortions in Latin America. Fucktard.