A great piece by Lynne Harris in The Nation about how sometimes "teen pregnancy is no accident."
Leyla W. couldn’t figure out where her birth control pills kept going. One day a few tablets would be missing; the next, the whole container. Her then-boyfriend shrugged and said he hadn’t seen them. She believed him—until she found them in his drawer. When she confronted him, he hit her. "That was his way of shutting me up," says Leyla, who is in her mid-20s and living in Northern California. (For her safety, Leyla wishes to withhold her last name and hometown.) He also raped her and, most days, left her locked in a bedroom with a bit of food and water while he went to work. (A roommate took pity and let her out until he came home.) Thanks to the missed pills, she got pregnant twice, the second time deciding against abortion.
Carole Joffe at RH Reality Check reminds us that May 31st was one year after the murder of the assassination of George Tiller.
Today, May 31 marks the one-year anniversary of the assassination of George Tiller, the Kansas abortion provider who was shot as he stood in the foyer of his church on a Sunday morning. The polarization that surrounded him in life—demonized by antiabortion extremists, cherished by his colleagues in the close knit abortion-providing community—continues after his death.
Those who hated him took no time off from their hating: On the day of his murder, Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, issued a statement stating that“George Tiller was a mass murderer.” The notorious Phelps family of Kansas, known for its rabid opposition to both homosexuality and abortion, and its high profile disruptions of U.S. soliders’ funerals, attempted to picket Dr. Tiller’s funeral. (But in a moving sign of the often unexpected alliances that Tiller evoked, the Phelps’ and other demonstrators were kept away by the Kansas Patriots, a phalanx of veterans on motorcycles, the Patriots were there to protect their brother veteran, as Tiller had served as a Navy surgeon.)
An interesting movie that we couldn’t ignore: THE HERETICS, the new film by world-renowned video artist Joan Braderman (JOAN DOES DYNASTY), focuses on a group of feminists, including Lippard and Braderman, who took matters into their own hands: they formed an art collective and put out a magazine that was as much about politics as it was about art. Filmed across the globe, THE HERETICS features interviews and artwork of the artists and critics like Lucy Lippard, Su Friedrich and Ida Applebroog, who grew Heresies into a feminist forum for revolution. Such luminaries as Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, and Barbara Kruger got their starts in the magazine that spawned ground-breaking photography, poetry, art and ideas. THE HERETICS will screen on June 3 at 92Y Tribeca and Joan will be in attendance for a Q& A. View a trailer here and don’t miss the movie.
You want more feminist links? Check back here next Tuesday! And, if you have links to share, please email them to us or leave them in the comments.
Comments are closed.