Hello, guys. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but in my beloved, you’d think civilised, beautiful country, located in central Europe, Poland, the basic human rights are about to be taken away from women. Why is that? The Polish government, inspired mainly by the Catholic Church (that has definitely too much power in Poland), has created an anti-abortion project. For now, abortion in Poland is legal in case of rape or if the mother’s/child’s life is in danger. If the anti-abortion project comes through (which is very likely) the situation of Polish women will change dramatically:
– aborting a pregnancy that has started because of rape will no longer be legal (3 months to 5 years of prison for the mother and the doctor),
– aborting a pregnancy that endangers the mother’s life will no longer be legal (3 months to 5 years of prison for the mother and the doctor),
– aborting a pregnancy in case of a fatal disease of the fetus will no longer be legal (3 months to 5 years of prison for the mother and the doctor),
– the project says that whoever puts the woman in a situation of a probable miscarriage could be charged of 3 years in prison, which in practice means that some of the medical exams (like the prental exam which helps to indicate if the fetus is healthy) could not be available because of the doctors being afraid of going to prison,
– it all also means that men could get easily away with rape, since the women would be afraid of going to the police in case they got pregnant and didn’t want to get birth to the rapist’s child (which they will now be forced to do),
– also, on the side of this project, the Catholic Church wants to make in vitro even less available for families struggling to have children, since apparently “it’s basically just killing unconcieved babies” (?? fuck logic),
– what’s more, they’ve recently withdrawn chemical contraception for women from the pharmacies (things like spermicidal gels, liquids, creams, vaginal suppositories) cause they’re apparently “dangerous for women’s health”, so now the only contraception available without a prescription are condoms,
– don’t even get me started with the level of sexual education in Poland which is basically non-existent. Recently, just this week, a 12 year old girl gave birth to a child. A fucking 12-yr old. She had sex (they said it was consensual, but who fucking even believes this shit) with a 29 year old man. The doctors said she didn’t even know what was going on during the labour, she of course had to have C-section because her body was obviously not ready to have a baby at such young age. There are so many cases like this.
– all of this is supposed to “help” with the demographic decline and to “encourage” people to have more kids. Let me tell you something – if anything this encourges me to is to not have babies a t a l l.
Let me also show you some of the social media responses of “pro-life” activists and give you a glimpse of what kind of shit Polish women have to deal with:
“If the pregnancy started because of rape, the only victim is the child that can lose its life.”
“If abortion is such a dramatic decision to make, it’ll be better to not let women make it. To ban abortion.”
“Womanhood is all about being in service of life. Women/female MPs who are against life, contradict their own womanhood.”
“All of these women screaming that “their belly, their choice” [should know] that the life in their bellies belongs only to the child. Selfish women, assassins like during Holocaust. You just lend your body to give new life. You should be happy you were not killed. There should be no abortion.”
“Abortion is barbaric (…) and it will be remembered as equally bad as genocide and gas chambers.”
I found these in 5 minutes. Women are treated with no respect, they’re believed to be stupid and as not able to make their own choice about their own body. Men leading our country (most of them are very religious) want to decide about what we should do with our bodies. Please, help us. Spread the word. We are trying to fight this, but we’re in the minority… The world needs to know!!
“I’m pro-life and I don’t apologize for it,” he said during a town hall meeting here. “We’ll see Roe vs. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs.”
So when we talk about stakes being high this election it is not just hyperbole. Whoever is the next president will decide at least the next four judges on the Supreme Court. If Donald Trump wins Roe v. Wade is gone. Affirmative action is gone. The Voting Rights act is gone. The gains LBGTQ have made in the last 25 years will be erased. Citizens United will stay the law of the land and become even stronger. It will lead to the most radically to the right Supreme Court in the history of the country and erase close to 100 years of progress in this country. And if they have a Republican Congress with a Republican President it will make George W. Bush look like kindergarten.
Y’all better register to vote. Why are Republicans so concerned with or wombs?
If you don’t think the GOP is coming for your reproductive freedom, guess again. #ImWithHer #Hillary
Woke up scared. We have the ability to stop the apocalypse. I’m worried for the future.
Like they’re going to build that wall, lol? Also, AT LEAST four judges?? I doubt it.
Donald Trump is marginally pro choice, look at the interviews he has done on the subject in the past. The problem for him now is that the conservative voter base sort of knows this. In order to court their vote he’s making wacko promises like this.
I’m all for not voting for Donald Trump, but let’s all try a little more to understand wtf is going on…
“Marginally pro-choice” can very easily become “ehhh fuck it” if it becomes politically expedient.
Let’s not be so naive as to think Trump is principled enough; he’s a mercenary shill whose policies, such as they are, are aggressively anti-woman and anti-feminist.
hi all, my friend is currently in Greece helping out at a refugee camp and she urgently needs funds in order to provide abortions for refugees who are pregnant. its hard enough being in a refugee camp but if you have to keep a pregnancy you dont want because its seen as a non-emergency procedure, then its 10x worse. please reblog and donate if you can.
Guadalupe was 18 years old when complications with her second pregnancy led to a miscarriage. She was working as a housekeeper for a well-heeled Salvadoran family, who kindly rushed her to the nearest hospital after she collapsed on the job.
Unfortunately for Guadalupe, the San Bartolo National Hospital is a public health clinic. Doctors took one look at her then called the police, who arrested her on suspicion of murder.
All forms of abortion are illegal in El Salvador. And though there was no indication that Guadalupe, a mother of one, intentionally terminated her pregnancy, the doctors snitched her out to save themselves from any criminal liability.
Guadalupe, who never saw the inside of a fifth grade classroom, was interrogated in her hospital bed without a lawyer. The Kafkaesque trial was brutal and swift. Before Guadalupe knew what was happening, she was sentenced to 30 years in jail and thrown behind bars with convicted murders.
If Guadalupe’s story sounds crazy, that’s because it is. Not only does El Salvador have one of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the world, but authorities there apply the tyrannical law with an aggressiveness that borders on obsessive. Dozens of Salvadoran women — mostly young, and all poor — are behind bars for homicide
The good news is that some government authorities are starting to realize the madness of their ways.
Today— on the 23rd anniversary of El Salvador’s Peace Accords — Congress will vote on a resolution to pardon Guadalupe, who has already served 8 years of her sentence. The vote, expected to be a rubberstamp approval following Monday’s unanimous ruling by the bipartisan Justice and Human Rights Commission, would be a major victory for Central America’s feminist movement.
“Guadalupe could be released from jail as early as next week,” Salvadoran feminist leader and former FMLN guerrilla fighter Morena Herrera told Fusion in a phone interview. “This represents new hope for us. Now we’re going to have to fight to get pardons for the others on a case by case basis.”
The “others” that Herrera is referring to are a group of young women known collectively as “The 17,” all of whom are serving sentences of 12-40 years. The oldest member of the group is 29, but many are in their teens.
And there are others. At least 29 Salvadoran women are currently behind bars for having illegal abortions, but a dozen of them are still appealing their sentences in court. The 17 women for whom the #Las17 campaign is named have exhausted all judicial options and must appeal for a political pardon. For some hardline feminists, that was a hard pill to swallow since the concept of a pardon still implies guilt and doesn’t address the systemic injustice of the situation.
“Unfortunately, we have no other alternative for those 17 women,” Herrera said.
Any sister for whom this idiocy is reality has my political sympathy. But before any idiot starts saying “well not in the US,” YES. IN THE U.S.TOO.
Females are LOSING rights. Losing them. Because of their sex.
On June 21, a drone will fly from Ireland to the region to deliver abortion pills to spotlight the lengths to which people in Northern Ireland must go to for a safe abortion. The Abortion Drone is a joint effort between Alliance for Choice, Rosa, Labour Alternative and Women on Waves. This drone is important because in Northern Ireland, abortion is a felony with very limited exceptions.
Also a drone was sent to Poland recently for the same reason.
whenver i see pictures of a pro-life protest i mostly see men in the picture. why are they allowed to have an opinion on something that doesn’t even affect them at all??
On my Facebook. This is supposed to be a “good” thing…
Text reads: “Ireland is a first world nation where abortion is illegal. This can happen in the United States. Don’t give up hope.”
Ireland killed a woman because they’re so ‘pro-life.’
Wealthy Irish women just go to other countries to get abortions instead. Their law predominantly affects poor people, who are the ones more in need of abortion services in the first place. Outlawing abortion does nothing to combat the issues that lead to poor people needing abortions in the first place. How prolife. -V
Ireland let a woman die instead of giving her an abortion. Neither life survived Ireland let a woman die because it felt her fetus was more important than her cancer treatment. Neither life survived. Ireland refused medical treatment to 100′s of women whos wanted and loved pregnancy was dangerous to them, dead inside them, would suffer greatly if born. Ireland emotionally and physically tortured a rape victim who was already under suicide risk until she refused to eat and drink, then they forced a c section on her. Ireland tried to force a 14 year old suicidal rape victim to stay pregnant, she subsequently miscarried. Ireland sends it’s women across the waves to clinics to who give us fucking discounts because they know the burden Irish women have to bare just to get some mother fucking basic health care. Ireland tried to pass a law where women couldn’t travel to these clinics, meaning they could be forced to stay pregnant by the state. You think Ireland does this because it cares about life? It does this because it’s so far up the churches arse, it can see out it’s mouth. And the church wants control. Always has, always will.
So fuck whoever made this picture, and fuck their whole movement.
You know how anti-abortion propaganda pegs women as emotionally distraught, sad and alone after their abortions? I was one of them.
I never expected it. Leading up to the procedure, I was laughing my ass off in the clinic, joking with my best friend about how we wanted to keep the “sack of cells” to put on the mantle.
But in the three weeks following my abortion, I sobbed at everything. Being alone was debilitating. I lost my shit and banged my head. Laugher was a foreign concept.
I was everything the pro-lifers said I would be.
When I wasn’t sobbing, I was rolling around in bed, with just enough energy to want to get out of bed, but too little to put my feet to the floor. And when I was up, I snapped. I screamed when something went wrong—or just not right.
As in not finding a spatula—this was grounds for a full-on breakdown in the kitchen, because not finding it meant not making myself lunch, which meant eating out, which meant spending money, which meant time not working and not working meant I wasn’t functioning.
I was equating my self-worth to my ability to find a spatula.
I threw the rest of the utensils on the floor, partly out of desperation, partly out of rage. I slammed the drawer. I hit my head with my palm. I wanted the mess in my head out. I wanted out.
It was ironic though, that I, the usual dreamer of escape plans, of plan Bs, Cs and Ds, was unable to see the several other spatula-like utensils in my kitchen, or recognize the other lunch options crowded in the fridge.
I was not myself.
On less volatile days, I begged my husband to stay. I begged him to come for me at lunch, to leave work early, to arrive at work late. I was being clingy—I, the one who shoos everyone out of the house on the regular, because they disturb my sacred workspace.
When my husband did leave for work, I created imaginary situations about how I was going to end up alone. He was going to leave. He was just waiting for the right day. Surely he would reach a breaking point with me. Surely everyone would. How much of my emotions could anyone take? Even I couldn’t take much more.
Logic was gone from my brain and my body. I couldn’t make sense of anything. My head was constantly spinning in some vicious cycle. I wasn’t myself. I felt powerless.
I was everything the pro-lifers said I would be—except regretful. I didn’t regret the abortion. At all.
That’s when I understood what was really happening to me. It was the hormones.
I remember the day. I was in the shower. I couldn’t get over this idea of loneliness. Sure, I had outbursts before, courtesy of synthetic hormones. But never had I felt so alone. I loved being alone. It wasn’t like me to be distraught over it.
And then it hit me.
“Oxytocin! It’s the oxytocin!!!” I blurted out. My mouth hung open as I stared into space processing it all. “It’s the oxytocin.”
Somehow my mind had wandered back to ninth grade health class in—guess what—Catholic school. The lesson was on hormones. While the teacher brushed as quickly over the topic as possible, he did manage to sputter out a few facts on oxytocin, AKA the bonding hormone. We learned it was what connected mothers and children and husbands and wives. That was it.
What the teacher really wanted to say was that oxytocin plays a major role in pregnancy, and it gives your orgasms that toe-tingling wow-factor. But you know, this was Catholic school—where the smoke from the burning fires of hell clouds the curriculum.
Somehow this nugget of information stuck with me, all the way to my post-abortion meltdown.
So I thought: If oxytocin was responsible for bonding, could the lack of it be responsible for my loneliness? And if my body was producing more of it because of the pregnancy, did production stop as the sack was yanked out of my uterus? And did this send a shock through my body and mind?
I was betting yes. I set to researching as soon as I got out of the shower. My hormones were way imbalanced. This I knew. The powerless feeling reminded me of all those times they gave me depression and bipolar meds and nothing changed until I threw away my birth control pills.
My weepiness was so absurd it had to be related to estrogen. My mood swings and racing thoughts were just like those I would get from the pseudo-bipolar hormonal imbalances.
But all this from the voluntary expulsion of some cells? This was new territory.
I knew women suffered from some pretty messed-up hormonal imbalances after giving birth. Post-partum depression is a widely recognized issue, even if it isn’t completely understood.
So I researched that. And what did I find? Oxytocin. Turns out that women with lower levels of oxytocin are at higher risk for post-partum depression.
Hmmmm, I thought.
So what about miscarriages? After all, your body is used to producing extra pregnancy hormones and then it stops.
And then what about abortions? Technically, it’s the same in the eyes of the uterus. This search took a little more effort.
While I did find evidence claiming that miscarriages cause hormone imbalances and emotions like that of post-partum depression, it wasn’t as forthcoming.
We talk a lot about women being depressed after a miscarriage, but not in a physiological context. The tone set by the American Pregnancy Association and the American Psychological Association is that these post-miscarriage emotions happen because of the sadness caused by the loss of the baby, as if hormonal changes are a mere add-on.
But that’s not always true. I wasn’t sad that I lost a baby or killed some cells or however you want to see it. I didn’t regret it. But I was still so, so sad.
Unfortunately, no one gives you a pamphlet in the abortion clinic warning that your hormonal changes may fuck up the next month of your life.
Other countries do, but not ours. Australia, even Canada, and the most Catholic Ireland acknowledges the hormonal changes that lead to emotional distress (within the context of a miscarriage, of course).
These are just the facts we need to be spreading. This is the dialogue we need to be creating.
I’m not crazy. We’re not crazy. The ones who dismiss physiological issues for psychological concerns are the ones who need to be examined. Not us.
Kudos to the women who already know this and thank you to the ones who are sharing it.
For more on the subject of abortion and hormonal imbalance, check out Period Makeover and PASS Awareness.
Yes! After losing a pregnancy to abortion or miscarriage your hormones change dramatically. It is completely normal to be very emotional during this time. I’d like to add that it’s also normal to have a lot of emotions that have nothing to do with the hormone changes. Any and all post abortion emotions are real and valid no matter how or why you’re feeling them.
@xojane-yahoopartner thank you so much for writing this. i never fully understood my post abortion depression quite this well before.
holy shit yall, signal boost the FUCK out of this.
I’m reblogging to add that we need this science to protect women from being emotionally manipulated into unnecessary guilt by the far right.
Women who terminate are not validating anti-choicers by experiencing these emotions.
Celtyradfem 