Under legislation approved Monday night by Baltimore's city council, crisis pregnancy centers that do not offer referrals for abortion or birth control would be required to post signs saying as much. It seems like such a reasonable plea for transparency! After all, these types of centers are infamous for engaging in religiously- and politically-motivated deception of pregnant women -- and yet, if the city's mayor signs the measure, it will be the very first law of its kind in the U.S.
Time and again, we've written about how crisis pregnancy centers masquerade as legitimate healthcare facilities and target young, poor and minority women by offering free pregnancy tests and counseling. In reality, these centers, which are often staffed by unqualified volunteers, provide medical misinformation as a means of coercing women into going through with a pregnancy and, in some cases, to give the baby up for adoption (to a good Christian family, natch). Some clinics have been found to delay pregnancy test results so they can first subject patients to graphic anti-abortion imagery and propaganda.
This measure is bolstered by more than crisis pregnancy centers' well-established reputation nationwide: Last year, the NARAL Pro-Choice Fund sent staff members into 11 Maryland centers in particular to pose as potential patients and reported that "every CPC visited provided misleading or, in some cases completely false, information" about abortion and birth control." For good measure, the clinics also threw in "emotionally manipulative counseling" (for example, one worker told an investigator, "You need to come meet your baby before deciding what to do"). Worse yet, many clinics "purposefully schedule sonogram appointments two-three weeks after the initial appointment to ensure that there will be a heartbeat and that the pregnancy is larger than a grain of rice." (If you're short on outrage today, I highly recommend reading the report in its entirety.)
What makes these centers so pernicious is that they calculatedly project "an aura of medical authority," as the NARAL report puts it, when in reality they are largely "amateur-run." This measure aims to chip away at that facade. Frankly, the legislation could go much farther and actually require them to cop to the totality of their dishonesty -- these clinics should be happy they're getting off so easy.
What if you threw a protest and nobody came? Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry did just that in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the first stop on a planned 13-city tour in which Terry intends to inform people that the senate healthcare reform bill "will essentially fund abortions." According to the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, "A few reporters and photographers, Terry and two passersby were the whole rally. Terry's target, U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh and Bayh's entire staff inside the E. Ross Adair Federal Building, were no-shows." "
I'm really not qualified to speculate about what goes on in the minds of anti-choice protesters, but here are a few possible reasons why folks didn't show up for Terry's rally:
1) He's full of crap. As Tracy Clark-Flory wrote in Broadsheet last week, "The key details of the Senate bill are as follows: Both public and private plans are allowed to offer abortion coverage. It empowers consumers to use government subsidies to purchase insurance that covers abortion, but requires that their premiums (and not federal funds) pay for the actual procedures. The Health and Human Services Secretary is charged with evaluating plans to ensure that taxpayers do not pay for abortions."
2) "Taxpayers shouldn't have to fund things they find morally repugnant" is always a weak argument, but it's especially weak right now. I mean, I could give you a list of a dozen things I'm appalled to fund indirectly with my taxes, but these days, do I really need to enumerate any beyond "war" and "other war"? Oh, hell, let's throw in executions, too. Because if you really want anyone to take your "taxes shouldn't fund murder" complaint seriously, we've got a whole lot of dead autonomous human beings to account for at both the federal and state levels before we even begin discussing fetal personhood.
3) Most disturbingly, he's threatening violence, and not even trying to be subtle about it.
"If the U.S. Senate passes this bill and they try and force Americans to pay for child-killing by abortion, they are sowing the seeds of violence in this country," Terry said from the sidewalk in front of the Federal Building.
"We fought a war over slavery, we fought a war over a tea tax. What do people think will happen if they try to force us to pay for murder?"
Um, those most fiercely opposed to murder will start... murdering? Even more than they already have? That sure seems to be what you're saying, there, buddy. And despite a revolting amount of support for the monsters who assassinate abortion providers, most mainstream anti-choicers are not on board with that. At least, not openly.
But please, Randall Terry, do carry on with your campaign to raise awareness about made-up issues. We at Broadsheet wish you every bit as much success as you've already had.
Women have a simple plan for responding to the unpopular new guidelines on breast cancer screenings: ignore them. A Gallup poll shows that 76 percent of women disagree with the recommendation that women hold off on mammograms until age 50, and a whopping 84 percent of those between age 35 and 49 intend to reject the advice entirely. Women are going to get their mammograms when they damn well please.
The telephone poll of 1,136 women suggests that the objection to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's guidelines arises from a mistrust of the panel's motivations. Seventy-six percent of women believe the decision was based on cost, not science. That's no surprise considering that the results were released amid a contentious debate about healthcare reform and that the recommendations have been poorly communicated to the public. As Cristine Russell writes in the Atlantic, the panel's intent may have been to deliver the message "that individualized, informed decision making should replace blanket guidelines for universal, routine mammography screening of women in their 40s" -- but it failed spectacularly on that front.
No matter your personal take on the new mammogram guidelines, one thing is certain: There is a critical lack of information on the topic. The Gallup poll found that 40 percent of women believe that a 40-year-old woman has a 20 to 50 percent chance of developing cancer over the next decade, when her actual risk is only 1.4 percent. Clearly, we need to strike a better balance between effective awareness-raising -- like pink ribbon campaigns -- and communicating nuanced medical fact.
On the issue of whether Lady Gaga's left boob was visible for a nanosecond during her performance on Leno last night, Rachel Sklar at Mediaite concludes, "After careful review here's my unscientific analysis: Yes." Oh, Rachel, don't sell yourself short. Yours is the most astoundingly scientific analysis of a possible celebrity nip slip I ever did see. Consider: "At 3:26, a backup dancer lifted her (by the crotch no less!) and then, switching her position 90 degrees and lowering her, staggered just a touch. Gaga did not miss a beat but as he lowered her, she quickly adjusted her left breast and continued the song." Also, after she finished performing, Gaga "froze in place, with her microphone arm hugged tightly to her side. When Leno came over to greet her she extended the arm -- and that is when I am 99% positive the faintest, quickest glimpse of aureola [sic] was visible."
If all that isn't persuasive enough, a fuzzy screenshot of the moment is included so the Internet can weigh in on the question of the hour: Shadow or nipple? Says Sklar, "My last-night TV rewind told me nipple, but here's why I will argue for it based on a small, unclear still: Note the difference in how one side of the jumpsuit is cut to the other side. The 'V' of the decolletage is not symmetrical." Lawyered! Also, seriously?
I'm still not convinced there was visible nip, nor am I convinced I should care. If you'd like to investigate for yourself, Mediaite has clips. Personally, now I just want to watch the "Bad Romance" video all day instead of working. Perhaps you'd care to join me.
The words flash on screen: "The height of intensity." Next to the dramatic text is a photo of a young woman in a gown sitting in a limousine; she hugs a basketball like she might her non-existent date. Later, the screen announces: "A passion for commitment." We're shown a shot of another beautiful young lady wearing precious pearl earrings and a shoulder-baring dress, while staring directly into the camera with her smoky eyes. Such are the assets of Florida State University's women's basketball team, according to its spiffy new Web site.
The video introduction does show us several snapshots of the girls with sweat pouring down their faces and posing in their jerseys -- scenarios that are actually relevant to the game -- but the glamour shots are garnering controversy. Each player has a bio paired with a photo of her in a shiny dress lounging in or against a limo. One group shot captures the whole team inside the luxury vehicle, their uncomfortable grinning faces reflected in the metallic ceiling. As a university press release explains, the intended message of the site is: "Women athletes are powerful and beautiful" -- assuming they're gussied up like princesses. There's nothing subversive about the site. It's not like they're shown playing a game in their gowns, makeup smeared by sweat and dresses torn to tatters at their feet, or absurdly attempting to pass a ball between their legs while wearing a floofy floor-length skirt. This isn't a critical commentary on the sad limitations of beauty ideals, it's a desperate attempt to conform to them.
I suspect this isn't merely an attempt at sexing up female athletes in order to improve the team's visibility. Carnal Nation points to "Training Rules," a new documentary about homophobia in women's collegiate sports. The film focuses on the story of Rene Portland, the Penn State University women's basketball coach who was accused of repeatedly discriminating against players she suspected to be a lesbians. Female basketball players have long had to fight against the stereotype that they're gay and, after watching the preview for "Training Rules," it's hard not to wonder whether this straight-gals-going-to-the-prom photo-shoot is evidence that it's still the case.
No one knows the definitive difference between men and women. That may sound like the dubious thesis of a women's studies 101 essay, the result of feminist philosophy carried to its ultimate political extreme, but it's plainly true. For proof, you need only read Ariel Levy's sprawling article in this week's New Yorker about Caster Semenya. Not only does it offer the richest telling yet of the scandal surrounding the 18-year-old runner by grounding it in the history of sports and racism, and the culture of the 18-year-old's hometown in South Africa -- it also puts it in the absurd and unscientific context of sex testing.
We can all easily sketch out the differences between the sexes: Women have breasts, ovaries, a uterus and a vagina; men have testicles and a penis -- end of story, right? For most folks, it is, but then there are the exceptions: A person can be born with one testicle and one ovary, or with a penis, uterus and ovaries. Someone with XY chromosomes can have both a vagina and undescended testes because of a condition that blocks their bodies from responding to testosterone. You can have two X chromosomes, one of which is merged with a region of the Y chromosome. And, and, and ...
I could easily go on, if you had a couple of hours. As Alice Dreger, author of “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex,” tells Levy, "People always press me: 'Isn't there one marker we can use?' No. We couldn't then and we can't now, and science is making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much blending there is and how many nuances, and it becomes impossible to point to one thing, or even a set of things, and say that’s what it means to be male."
The International Association of Athletic Federations, which is investigating Semenya's sex -- still! -- "does not define the criteria that its group of experts must use to reach their determination," Levy reports. Dreger, a professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, refers to it as the unscientific "I know it when I see it" approach. Worse still, the organization allows for any athlete to undergo testing if someone, anyone raises a stink about his or her sex. In Semenya's case, all it took was a speculative blog post and the gender hounds were unleashed. The good news is that IAAF is holding a conference at the start of the new year to review its policy -- but it's hard to be too optimistic about the outcome considering that they're asking the wrong question to begin with.
Levy, however, asks the right question: "If sex is not precisely definable, how else might sports be organized?" She considers a couple of different solutions to this foundation-shaking query: There is the possibility of categorizing athletes "by size, as they are in wrestling and boxing" (downside: "women would usually lose to men") or "skill level" (downside: "the strongest elite female athletes would [almost always] compete against the weakest elite male athletes"). A more drastic scientific approach would be "to divide athletes biochemically" since testosterone has an enormous impact on athletic performance. In that case, "the division would be determined not by gender but by actual physical advantages that gender supposedly, yet unreliably, supplies," she concludes.
Of course, international athletic competition isn't about fairness and equality; ultimately, someone is supposed to win. "Different bodies have physical attributes, even abnormalities, that may provide a distinct advantage in one sport or another," she argues. For example: The many N.B.A. players with a condition that causes growth hormones to go into overdrive and the double-jointed Michael Phelps with his primate-like arms and legs. If the speculation about Semenya's biology is true, why is her particular abnormality worth policing? The IAAF attempts to control for potential physical advantages by dividing athletes by sex, as opposed to any other criterion because it's the easiest shorthand we have -- in sports and generally in navigating day-to-day life -- but this case shows just how incredibly fallible it can be. Unfortunately, Semenya is suffering now because it's so much easier to point the finger at her than it is to call into question the way we've organized sports -- and, as Levy puts it, "the way we've organized our entire world."
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