There were more of these “graphic tees” featuring close-ups and odd angles that cut off women’s heads and focus solely on sexualized parts of their bodies. As I expected, a quick look around confirmed that there were no analogous women’s (or men’s) tees featuring men in spandex or close-ups of their sinewy muscles. Driving home, these shirts occupied my thoughts. I was trying to figure out what bothered me about them. There was the obvious implicit male gaze of the photographs, the objectification of a woman’s body, and the slicing up of that body into only its desirable parts. But there was something else that was bugging me about the photographs. It was their voyeuristic quality–the idea that they were literally taken without the knowledge of their subject from a vantage point of behind or below her. It reminded me of the “Creepshot” community on the popular website, Reddit, which featured “upskirt” photos and pictures of women taken without their consent. I wondered whether the model whose body was on display knew she would be reduced to her butt covered in a patriotic bikini on a tee-shirt for men? With the retail clothing industry’s history of stealing images without the knowledge of their rightful owner, this didn’t seem like a far reach. I also wondered who this tee-shirt was being marketed to–who was the man that would see this disembodied female body on a tee-shirt and think it would look really cool in their summer wardrobe?

H&M was recently celebrated in some zones of feminist media for their advertisement for “normal” clothing featuring a “plus-size” model. Though I was far from cheering at that excuse for progress, it reinforced for me the vigilance we must have as feminist consumers. Companies are not in the business of making a feminist revolution (obviously,) they are in the business of making profits (capitalism, people).  So, get on Twitter and tell H&M you are #NotBuyingIt!

Dove is one brand that is owned by the massive multinational corporation, Unilever, whose dozens of brands make everything from soap to ice-cream to cleaning products to teabags. Unilever owns brands like TRESemme, Vaseline, Suave, Noxzema and most noxiously, Axe. Each brand owned by Unilever markets itself individually– of course, this is why we see such faux body-positivity when Dove is advertising soap and such blatant teenage-boy level sexism when Axe is marketing its shower gel.

Dove launched their “Real Beauty” Campaign in 2004 and consumers are still buying it, despite numerous criticisms of the brand’s methods and messages. They are buying it because it is good marketing. It is targeting the people it aims to target–everyday, “average,” (mostly white) women who feel like they do not live up to society’s beauty standards. While we’re on the subject, let’s return back to Alexandra Brodsky’s point that Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign reinforces Western beauty ideals like thinness, whiteness, and small features (to name a few). Dove’s campaign also targets mostly white, middle-class women. “Real beauty” only applies to a specific kind of beauty–and we can bolster that argument with the fact that Unilever also owns the brand Fair and Lovely, which makes skin-lightening creams that are popular in India because of the globalization of Western beauty ideals.

The solution to the problems and contradictions of Dove’s ad campaign is not to stop buying soap, to protest all Unilever products, or even to reform marketing, as I’ve previously suggested. I’m pretty sure I am drinking tea made by Unilever as I write this. The problems with Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign are created by monolithic issues like capitalist ideologies, market monopolies, racism, sexism, and the like. But as consumers, we must challenge Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign by pointing out the contradictions in Unilever’s marketing strategies and telling them that we are #NotBuyingIt!

There is a special place in my heart reserved for British television and period costume dramas–anything from Pride and Prejudice to Bleak House to Downton Abbey.  So, when I heard that BBC’s newest period drama combined fierce independent career women with 1950s hoop skirts, I knew I had to check it out.

Call the Midwife is a television dramatization of the memoirs of Jennifer (Lee) Worth¹, a young nurse and newly qualified midwife who takes a job in the impoverished East End of London in the 1950s. In the show, nurse Jenny Lee is shocked when she finds out her new job is not at a small hospital, but at Nonnatus House, a nursing convent that houses nuns (who are also nurse midwives) along with young secular nurses. The show is realistic and gritty, detailing poverty in its worst forms–pregnant women infected with syphilis, patients traumatized by workhouses,  and bugs crawling over tea-plates. Alongside their grittiness, Call the Midwife episodes all end with a silver-lining: some sort of lesson that is learned and narrated over each episode’s closing by an older, wiser, Jenny.

Bitch Magazine has already tackled some of the important connections between Call The Midwife and reproductive justice².  Although in the 1950s birth control had been developed and used by wealthier married women in the United States, most forms of birth control were non-existent for the women in Call the Midwife. Married women gave birth to baby after baby whether they wanted to or not, and women who had sex outside of marriage took the enormous risk of pregnancy “out-of-wedlock”.  Though the nuns and nurses of Nonnatus House are all midwives, their reproductive health practice goes beyond simply attending births. The show addresses STDs, incest, miscarriage, and infectious disease prevention. We see the nuns and nurses care for premature infants, veterans, mother’s who’ve lost babies, and people at the end of their lives. Perhaps most importantly, and most interestingly to me, Jenny Lee and company provide emotional as well as medical care to their patients.

In the second episode of series one, a young Irish girl stops nurse Jenny Lee on the street and begs her to change a bank note for her, revealing that she hasn’t eaten in two days, but is afraid someone will think she stole the money if she uses it to purchase a meal. Jenny immediately notices that the girl looks pregnant, and takes her into the restaurant for some food. The girl, Mary, reveals that she ran away from a rough family situation in Ireland and was taken in by a man named Zakir and forced to work as a prostitute. After they share a meal, Mary, who is only fifteen years old, tells Jenny that she can’t go back to the brothel because she is afraid that they will hurt her and force her to have an illegal abortion. Mary tells Jenny that she sometimes slept with three or four men in a night and tells a shocked Jenny: “God love your innocence, Nurse Jenny Lee. Which of us is the oldest now?”

Sister Julienne, the nun in charge of Nonnatus House, finds Mary a place to stay at Father Joe’s home for unwed mothers. After discovering that Zakir has been following and watching Mary, Jenny and Father Joe quickly transfer her to another home far outside of the city, where she gives birth to a baby girl called Kathleen. Jenny visits Mary, who tells Jenny about her experience giving birth.  ”The midwife had a mustache… I yelled a little bit. She kept on saying ‘Nearly over’… All I kept thinking was, it’s nearly starting. I’m nearly a mam.” Jenny returns to Nonnatus House, pleased that she was able to help Mary and her child.

A short time later, Jenny receives a letter in the mail, with a messily written note stating, “baby gone please come”. Jenny immediately knows it is from Mary and rushes to the home to check on her. Jenny finds Mary sobbing and screaming for her baby, who has been placed for adoption by Father Joe. Jenny is furious as Father Joe tells her “Babies are always placed for adoption in these cases. It’s thought to be in the child’s best interest.” Jenny asks, “What about Mary’s best interest? She is that child’s mother and she did not consent!” Father Joe responds: “She can’t consent. She’s only fifteen. She’s legally a child herself… it was a case of which child should we choose.”

This exchange between Father Joe and Nurse Jenny Lee is fascinating. While Father Joe displays a paternalistic concern for what he thinks is right for Mary, his concerns should not be written off. He later brings up issues of economic justice, mentioning that Mary has no home, no education, or skills other than prostitution. He stresses that without a baby, Mary will be employable. He says: “She could find love. She could have another child.” Jenny asks “Do you think that will console her?” and Father Joe replies, “It consoles me.” Jenny then cares for Mary, physically and emotionally, though there is nothing she can do to reconnect Mary with her wanted child.

In many ways, these strict traditions about unwed mothers and babies born out of marriage are a thing of the past. But shaming teen mothers who choose to parent is not a relic of the 1950s. New York City’s recent ad campaign³ against teen pregnancy has been heavily criticized by feminists for shaming teens who choose to parent, whether their pregnancy was planned or not. NYC’s campaign echoes Father Joe’s concerns that a teen parent will not have the economic ability to care for a child and therefore should not be given a chance to parent.

This episode of Call The Midwife does not leave viewers feeling like either Father Joe or Nurse Jenny were correct. As the episode closes we see Mary leaving the home without her child and into an uncertain future as adult Jenny tells us: “Mary was never reunited with her child. She might look for her, but her name would not be Kathleen anymore.” Mary’s blank face in this final scene reminds us that Mary was not allowed to control her reproductive future. While the nuns at Nonnatus House were able to save Mary from a forced abortion, they were not able to assist her in keeping and parenting the child that she very much wanted. In the reproductive justice movement, there is often a focus on making sure all people can access safe and legal abortion, but Call the Midwife is an important representation of the range of issues that reproductive justice must address in order to truly allow every person to determine their own lives.

¹ Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth (please buy from local/independent bookstores when you can!)

² Call the Midwife: What Nuns Know about Reproductive Justice by Jill Moffett. Bitch Magazine (29 Oct, 2012)

³ New York City’s teen pregnancy campaign 

This post was inspired by Steph Herold, who recently tweeted this picture:

Honestly, it was no surprise to see that public perceptions of feminist movements are often way off the mark. But when I started doing some Google research of my own, I found some more harmful ideas emerge. (Trigger warning: transphobia):

What is Rape Culture? 

“In a rape culture, people are surrounded with images, language, laws, and other everyday phenomena that validate and perpetuate, rape. Rape culture includes jokes, TV, music, advertising, legal jargon, laws, words and imagery, that make violence against women and sexual coercion seem so normal that people believe that rape is inevitable. Rather than viewing the culture of rape as a problem to change, people in a rape culture think about the persistence of rape as “just the way things are” (Definition of Rape Culture from FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture).

What is Consent?

Consent is a major weapon in the fight against rape culture. Consent is…

• A voluntary, sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual, honest, and verbal agreement
• An active agreement: Consent cannot be coerced
• A process, which must be asked for every step of the way; if you want to move to the next level of sexual intimacy, just ask
• Never implied and cannot be assumed, even in the context of a relationship. Just because you are in a relationship does not mean that you have permission to have sex with your partner. (from SAVP and Consent is Sexy¹).

Why is this so difficult for people to understand?

As simple as consent sounds, many people in our sex-negative, rape-excusing, patriarchal culture find the idea to be controversial. Realizing how vital consent is to healthy intimate relationships requires a lot of relearning. A lot of mainstream/violent pornography, music videos, lyrics, and ads enforce the idea that women* are always willing and ready for sex. Movies and television shows regularly create story-lines and plots that revolve around acquaintance rape involving drugs and alcohol².

Consent is not merely, “Do you want to have sex with me? (Check YES or NO). Consent is “…a process, which must be asked for every step of the way; if you want to move to the next level of sexual intimacy, just ask”. That idea scares people for a few reasons. Images of sex in the media enforce male entitlement to women’s* bodies as objects to be used for one-sided pleasure².  ”We raise women to be nice, please others and put their needs last; we raise men to be entitled douchenozzles who don’t take no for an answer; and then we put the burden on women to be gatekeepers” (from Yes Means Yes). Images of sex in the media show sex as spontaneous, serious, and always pure sexy. Participants hardly ever speak or laugh (unless the scene is meant to be humorous in some way) and especially never communicate about their desires.

These images, coupled with the “process” idea of consent, have created a lot of satire and mocking of the idea of consent, beginning with the infamous Antioch College Consent Policy in the early 1990s. The idea of consent as a process was mocked as an unrealistic radical feminist ideal meant to shut all men up into prisons as rapists. One major reason that this belief is still held is because we do not have images in our media of people communicating their sexual desires or affirming consent during sexual activities without it being mocked. Consent is not solely verbal and it is performed in different ways depending on the context– people in a long-term sexual relationship will have different ways of affirming consent than people engaging in sexual activities together for the first time. I believe that including images of consent in our popular culture is a major stepping-stone in transforming and eventually ending rape culture.

Transforming Rape Culture

This Is What Consent Looks Like is a collective social media project to show media creators that erasing rape culture and celebrating consent is not difficult. It asks participants to “rewrite” rape culture in our popular media. So, pick a scene from your favorite film or TV show, figure out where consent is not articulated, and then rewrite the scene to include consent. The main purpose of this project is to show fans and creators of popular media that getting rid of rape culture and inserting consent into their media creations is not difficult and will not “ruin” their creative vision.

____________________________________________

*I’ve used the word “woman” here because when looking at society and culture as a whole, women are represented in the media and in crime statistics as the majority of rape victims. However, it is vital to feminist thought to acknowledge that women are not solely rape victims and men are not solely rape perpetrators.

¹Many feminists take issue with the phrase “consent is sexy,” insisting that basic bodily integrity should not need to be sexualized in order to be respected. I wholly agree with this view, but I am not against the use of the slogan in all cases. I think that consent needs to be a part of our cultural narratives about sex– a major way of doing this is by showing consent as sexy or as part of “sexy” situations to encourage the dialogue about promoting consent and fighting rape culture.

² For more, see Dreamworlds 3,

This move by Planned Parenthood is concerning in more than a few ways.

To begin, it is disappointing that Planned Parenthood used such cissexist language in this latest video. It is not hard to say that “people need abortions” rather than “women need abortions”. The video not only relies on female pronouns and identities for its cartoon patient–it also genders the politicians, congressmen, and presidents male. This blatantly erases that fact that there are women in positions of political power at all. And it ignores the fact that quite a few of the congressional representatives who continue to vote to limit access to abortion services are women. The fight for abortion access is not men against women, so why is Planned Parenthood representing it that way?

Okay, so you might say I am nitpicking. Let’s return to the larger issues represented by the “Not In Her Shoes” video. For many people seeking abortion in the US, “choice” is not really an option that can be exercised at will. Bills that limit state funding for abortion services for poor people, laws that keep underage teens from getting abortion without parental consent, and the mere fact that there is only one abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi is a very good reason to abandon the “pro-choice” label. Abortion access is not merely about having a legal choice anymore. To encompass this range of issues regarding access, affordability, and stigma, young feminists have been using the label “reproductive justice”.

It is understandable that Planned Parenthood, which continuously fights for its federal funding and its right to keep clinics running, is maybe a few steps behind the modern feminist movement. They are right to emphasize that “pro-choice” and “pro-life” labels seem to ignore certain complexities in the issue, and perhaps most importantly, they create a hostile environment between the two sides with no room for dialogue about the real issues that people face. But the announcement to abandon the “pro-choice” label still makes me wary, and here’s why:

“It depends on the situation,” reported the majority of voters when asked their personal view on abortion. Planned Parenthood wants to interpret that as “abortion is complicated and should be left a private decision”. I interpret that as “sure abortion is sometimes necessary for rape or incest but some sluts use it as birth control and that is just wrong and we should stop them no abortion on demand!”. Let me emphasize that this survey asked for personal views on abortion. The people who said “it depends on the situation” were really saying: “to me, some people’s choice to have an abortion is morally acceptable and some people’s choice is morally unacceptable.”

The pro-choice label emphasizes the fact that having or not having an abortion is a personal choice. I fear that by abandoning that strong label, Planned Parenthood is allowing people to continue to believe it is up to them to decide when abortion should be “allowed”.

Though I stood in line for the midnight release of almost every Harry Potter book, I was a bit more hesitant about reading J.K. Rowling’s newest book.  The Casual Vacancy has been hailed as an “adult” book, something vastly different from the author’s previous series about wands and wizards. Set in a small British town called Pagford, The Casual Vacancy follows the town’s residents through intertwining narratives, all surrounding the political issues brought forward by the death that occurs in the book’s first chapter.

Most reviews of Rowling’s newest tome have been lukewarm at best–critics and readers were put off by her very realistic prose which features swearing, drug use, depictions of rape and abuse, explicit sexuality, and references to Facebook. In contrast to Harry Potter’s magical world, where nobody ever needs to pee and magical teenagers left mostly to their own devices never progress past snogging, Pagford seems shockingly realistic. Many reviewers have blamed this feeling on Rowling “trying too hard” to show her worth beyond children’s fantasy. However, I found that the disingenuous feeling of Rowling’s realism came from somewhere else: the extreme representations of poverty in The Casual Vacancy.

   (My discussion from here forward will contain spoilers from The Casual Vacancy.)

Though Rowling’s mess of characters share screen-time pretty equally, much of The Casual Vacancy centers on the character Krystal Weedon. Krystal is the character who represents “the Fields,” a contentious area of Pagford that borders the larger town of Yarvil and contains unkempt public council housing and the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic. The Weedons are the only of Rowling’s main characters who live in poverty– though her remaining characters suffer from abuse, self-harm, and mental illness, they are all characterized as solidly middle class. The characterization of the Weedon’s poverty sets them apart from the other residents of Pagford, as does the fact that they serve to represent the entire idea of “the Fields,” a subject that crosses the minds of the rest of Pagford’s residents due to its political impact in the central plot point of the parish council elections.

The Casual Vacancy, and along with it, the characterization of the Weedon family, suffers from the extreme situation of poverty that Rowling chose to describe. It isn’t that the Weedon’s situation is not realistic– of course, stereotypes of poverty are informed by real brushes with it. The problem is that by representing social issues like poverty in extremes, we often cannot recognize the problem in any of its other forms.

The argument against extremes was first articulated to me through a feminist lens in a 1989 bell hooks article, “Violence in Intimate Relationships: A Feminist Perspective”. Hooks argues that while feminists have had to focus on extremes to bring an issue to the attention of the public, this same focus can be harmful when addressing more common forms of the problem. In the essay, hooks uses the term “battered women” to illustrate her argument. “Battered woman” not only defines a victim of intimate partner violence by their injuries, but implies repeated, visible, and ongoing physical abuse. When the term “battered woman” is translated into a representative figure in books, television, or film, we get the typical image of a battered wife– visibly bruised, emotionally shaken, and marked with a token black eye. This image erases many other forms of intimate partner violence that occur, most notably, emotional abuse that does not leave such visible scars.

The argument against extremes has been brought up in many feminist issues. In 2011, feminist activists convinced the FBI to change its definition of rape, which had not been updated since 1920. The FBI’s old definition included the phrase, “forcibly and against her will,” which (despite the obvious gender pronoun issues) placed pressure on rape survivors and law enforcement to prove whether the rape was “forcible”. The FBI definition was influenced by larger myths that we have about rape in society: that rape is usually committed by an evil stranger in a dark alley who physically injures their resisting victim. As feminists, we know these myths are wrong, but society continues to focus on “extreme” versions of the crime, which is represented and then echoed through our media and laws.

The same problem of extremes exists in society’s treatment of poverty. I am speaking from an American perspective, which of course differs from the exact issues of poverty that are prominent in Britain, specifically regarding issues of race. But here are just a handful of ways society creates a specific idea of what “poor” is supposed to look like:

Poor folks are regularly ridiculed for using food stamps to buy basically anything (soda, “junk food,” or treats for children). Poor people who buy new shoes must not really be poor. Poor people should stop having children, but we don’t want to pay for their contraception either. If you are not homeless, you are not really poor. If you buy fast food, you aren’t really poor. If you have money to celebrate birthdays/holidays/etc, then you’re not really poor. And so on. 

In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep this past September, Rowling touched on her own experience with poverty in Britain and how it informed her writing of The Casual Vacancy. Rowling said: “It’s not my story, but it does address themes, subjects that are very important to me”.  She may have been better off writing something closer to her story. Rowling is well-known for her period of poverty while she was writing the first Harry Potter book as a single mother. This time in Rowling’s life is almost mythical in the media, which likes to toss around stories about her writing the novel on napkins because she couldn’t afford paper. The media has also written that Rowling’s habit of writing in cafes was directly related to her poverty– she was escaping her unheated flat. Rowling has denied such myths, complicating the portait of her time of poverty. Those myths, along with many others, feed our desires for a romantic and extreme form of poverty. But the reality of Rowling’s situation did not fit our poverty narratives. She was a poor single mother from a middle-class family, educated at the University of Exeter, divorced after an unsuccessful marriage in Portugal, and unemployed and on welfare benefits so that she could finish writing a book about a boy wizard. Rowling’s life does not fit into stereotypical poverty narratives, but it is an image of poverty nonetheless.

The Casual Vacancy is very much a book about politics and class wars, so Rowling may have intentionally created the Weedon family as a stereotype for poverty in the UK. If this was the intention, I believe she failed. Rowling herself articulates the problem that I find with her book in this quote: ”One of the great problems for me is that the poor … are so often discussed just as this large, shapeless mass. You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience…”¹ .

It is unfortunate that the extreme and stereotyped description of the Weedon family represented the poor as something Rowling wished to avoid: a large, shapeless mass of stereotypes.

“Nobody is pro-abortion,” says a pro-choice activist trying to find common ground between herself and a pro-lifer who just called her a “pro-abortion, pro-death, baby killer”. From the old “safe, legal, and rare” mantra to the “nobody is pro-abortion” line, activists on both sides of the abortion debates have subtly and not so subtly expressed their discomfort about the medical procedure of abortion.

In this political battlefield over abortion, there has been much discussion recently regarding the nomenclature used for the opposing positions in the abortion debates. The tradition framework is this: pro-life vs. pro-choice. Pro-choice people traditionally believe that when faced with a pregnancy, a woman should be able to choose for herself based on her personal situation whether she wants to continue the pregnancy, give birth, and parent; continue the pregnancy, give birth, and place the baby for adoption; or terminate the pregnancy through abortion. Pro-life people believe that abortion  should never be an option for women making decisions about a pregnancy; the choices become limited to parenting or adoption.

We see a pattern here: both groups technically advocate making a choice. Pro-lifers simply remove one of those choices based on their beliefs about personhood and when life begins. They also believe that when you become pregnant, you better stay pregnant. There is no weaseling your way out of that.

If both groups are technically pro-choices, the terms that we have been using to describe positions on the abortion debate are fundamentally inaccurate. The point of contention here is abortion. Groups should define their position with terminology that accurately represents what they actually mean.

Pro-life people are not pro-life. We see this in their inability to grasp the facts about women who die from unsafe and illegal abortion, their frequent support of the death penalty, and their lack of interest in supporting born persons through social welfare programs and universal healthcare. Pro-life is not a universal philosophy or ideology about human life; it is an upbeat and positive name for the movement against abortion. So, let’s call them what they are: anti-abortion. 

If pro-lifers are anti-abortion, not anti-choice, then their opponents should be pro-abortion, not pro-choice! It is not choice we are fighting about. It is abortion. I argue that the pro-choice movement needs to embrace the pro-abortion label in order to resist the mounting political attacks against abortion access and Roe vs. Wade. Firmly standing in the pro-abortion camp is the only way to hold our ground and move forward as a society with reproductive justice. We cannot play nice anymore. We cannot try to reason with people whose only mission is to get rid of safe and legal abortion completely.

Claiming the pro-abortion label does not mean that we believe that abortion is always good, positive, or necessary. It does mean, however, that it can be. That abortion is an option for someone facing a pregnancy, and that it is an option that is just as valid as the choice to parent or pursue adoption.  Abortion can be an empowering experience. When you are pregnant and you don’t want to be, the ability to take control over your life, your future, and your body can be positive. Claiming the pro-abortion label reflects these diversities of women’s lived experiences and accurately reflects what we are fighting for.

I’d love to hear opinions on this in the comments. Do you think that pro-abortion is a term that can be used in politics? Where do you fall in the abortion debate and what term would you use to describe your position? 

This tiny sliver of common ground feels like progress to some– but to me, the “there should be exceptions for rape and incest” rhetoric is very destructive to the future of the abortion debates and to my position as an activist. This position suggests that legally and morally, only certain people are “allowed” to have abortions. It divides women with unintended pregnancies into categories of moral “good” and “bad”. Not to mention (and pay attention, MRAs) that if being raped is the only way that a woman would have access to safe and legal abortion, false rape accusations would skyrocket. 

Especially within the pro-choice movement, using “What about a woman who has been raped?” as your primary argument for abortion access is ineffective at best, because it does not get to the heart of the issue. We cannot decide who is more deserving of an abortion. We cannot judge whether a woman’s reason for having an abortion is legitimate or not. We need to trust women.

I am fiercely pro-choice and do not mind calling myself pro-abortion either (a post on that for another day) but even I would like to see later-term abortions (when a fetus is closer to medical viability) be as rare as possible. This does not mean we should make them illegal, or only accesible to women who fit certain frameworks set by the government. This means we should encourage comprehensive sex education, safe sex and contraceptive use; make all forms of contraception accesible and free; and make abortion within the 1st trimester easily accesible and free. That will reduce late-term abortions. Making exceptions only for rape will not.

I’ve heard a lot of folks say they are pro-choice, spit out a “what about rape and incest” to make their point, and then degrade women who have abortions for “convenience.” This line of thinking is so destructive. What is your definition of convenience? Is it convenience if you don’t want to be a parent, took every precaution not to become one, but became part of that 0.1% of people whose birth control fails? Is it convenience if you are a single mother of an infant who knows she won’t be able to afford food and childcare for two children under three? Is it convenience for a fifteen year old who has only known abstinence-only sex education and was told by her boyfriend that she couldn’t get pregnant the first time?

These weak arguments against abortion only show that the anti-abortion movement is more interested in controlling people’s bodies and sexuality than they are in ending abortion.