Throughout the 1800’s American women had been undergoing illegal abortions, most of which were hugely unsafe, and even fatal. This practice was largely unregulated. In the early 1900’s, Margaret Sanger was an early proponent  of a woman’s right to contraception and sex education – this was many years before birth control became available to American women. It wasn’t until 1963 when the birth control pill was introduced to allow for women to plan their families. However, tremendous hurdles existed inhibiting abortion access. Many states banned the pill altogether, while some states only made the pill available to some women, and practiced various forms of religious oppression. By 1967, abortion was considered a felony in 49 States and in the District of Columbia.

Law of The Land

In 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of birth control and abortion access to single and married women in the case of Roe v. Wade, which overruled oppressive state laws and bans, citing a woman’s right to privacy. Roe v. Wade enshrined the legal right for couples to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children.  Women now had the legal right to decide whether to reproduce or terminate an unwanted or unintended pregnancy. Women could now make this decision free of discrimination, coercion or violence. This case law is the foundation of reproductive rights.

Some criticisms of Reproductive Rights are:

• It focuses solely on abortion
• It centers and largely focuses on the rights of White women
• It ignores many other factors women, particularly women of color, face in planning their families

What is Reproductive Justice?

Reproductive Justice is essentially the human right to have a child, not have a child, to plan a family, and to parent the child(ren) you have in a safe environment.  Reproductive Justice is based on a framework created by women of color to address how race, gender, class, ability, nationality and sexuality, intersect and influence family planning decisions.

Historically in the United States women of color, Native, Asian, Latina and African American women, have been forced to endure medical experimentation, sterilization, non-consensual medical procedures, and deceptive public health practices on their bodies. These oppressive, racially discriminatory practices have been overwhelmingly targeting the bodies of women of color. A few examples include:

• Forced breeding of African enslaved women
• Contraceptive pill experimentation on Puerto Rican women
• Environmental contaminants in poor communities of color resulting in higher rates of endometriosis, cervical cancer, low birth weight, fetal/infant mortality, etc.
• Forced tubal ligation post-partum of Latinas and African American women in order to receive entitlement benefits or other services
• Tuskegee Experiment (Syphilis 40-year Placebo Study on the sterilization of African American men in Alabama)

The term Reproductive Justice was coined in 1997 by SisterSong: National Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, combining the terms “reproductive rights” and “social justice.” Its origin began in 1994, in response to the Clinton Universal Healthcare Plan, by a group of Black women, named “Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice” in Chicago.  They published a full-page statement entitled, “Black Women on Universal Health Care Reform.” These women are: Toni-Bond Leonard, Alma Crawford, Evelyn Field, Terri James, Bisola Marignay, Cassandra McDonnell, Cynthia Newbille, Loretta Ross, Elizabeth Terry, Able Mable Thomas, Winnette Willis, and Kim Youngblood.

Reproductive Justice is based on the theory of intersectionality, which states that people have different life experiences and opportunities based on how their identity categories (race, class, gender, sexuality) interact with each other. Reproductive Justice explains how people oppressed by their marginalization and their intersectional identities also experience higher levels of reproductive oppression that impacts their reproductive lives.

Reproductive Justice goes beyond the singular “Pro-Choice” frame or Reproductive Rights that focuses solely on abortion access.  Reproductive Justice seeks to address the plethora of needs and challenges that women of color face due to access, cost, distance and other obstacles. It seeks to address other issues affecting the reproductive lives of women of color including trans* women, across identities and sexualities. This includes contraception, comprehensive sexual education, prevention, care for sexually transmitted diseases/infections, adequate prenatal  and pregnancy care, domestic violence assistance, adequate wages to support their families, safe homes, and environmental toxins.

Reproductive Justice addresses how different oppressions intersect and impact women’s reproductive lives. It centers the needs of the most marginalized (not the majority). Reproductive Justice asserts that reproductive oppression will not be eradicated until even the most vulnerable people are able to access care and achieve full human rights to live self-determined lives without fear of discrimination or retaliation.

Reproductive Justice moves past the legal and political debate to incorporate economic, social and health factors that impact women’s reproductive choices and decision-making abilities.

Yes, Reproductive Justice and Reproductive Rights are very different. Reproductive Justice embraces the totality of me as an African American woman, while Reproductive Rights protects my legal rights. Reproductive Justice fully recognizes me, my experiences, intersections, oppressions, and the historical context of my ancestors in the US; while Reproductive Rights enshrines my right to an abortion. I need both. As I type this, my legal rights are under constant attack, erosion and encroachment from religious exemptions to fetal heartbeat bans. As a Black woman my reproduction is challenged simply by walking down the street.

To learn more about Reproductive Justice, please consult the following texts:

• Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, 2017.
• Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutierrez, 2004
• Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts, 1997

The post Understanding Reproductive Justice and Reproductive Rights: Can The Two Co-Exist? appeared first on Parsing Truth.

When this farce in Florida took place in 2007, who, within the government had enough interest in Epstein to pressure Acosta to make this sweetheart deal?

Did Trump Influence Acosta on Epstein? Not so Fast…

It wasn’t Trump. He wasn’t holding any office at that time. He was doing The Apprentice. He could and probably would have spent a lot of money to keep Epstein quiet, but he had no power within the Justice Department. It might have been Barr but he wasn’t in government at that time, either. He had relationships with some of Epstein’s legal team, and within the Justice Department, but was that enough?

I suggest that anyone concentrating on Trump in this terrible situation is looking in the wrong place, unless the goal is to gather one more piece of misbehavior to hang on Trump. It is likely that one can find that misbehavior, but that won’t unravel the mystery of who in Bush’s Justice Department would have brought pressure to bear on Epstein’s behalf.

This was during the George W. Bush administration and Acosta apparently said during his interview with the Trump transition team that someone in the Justice department told him that Epstein belonged to the intelligence community and to make this go away. He was told it was “above his pay grade.” This was reported by Clair McCaskill recently on MSNBC and when researching I found this Acosta quote in several outlets – “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Was the Bush Administration Responsible for Epstein’s Sweetheart Deal?

So, to figure this out, focus has to shift off of Trump and back to the Bush administration, which was fertile ground for corruption.

At that time, Michael Mukasey was AG, Porter Goss was CIA Director until 2006, then General Michael Hayden took over. John Negroponte was DNI Director and Robert Mueller was FBI Director. Those names don’t set off my radar, but those are not the names that come to mind first in the Bush Administration.

I remember that time well.  There was so much going on in secret.  Everything was considered “intelligence.” This was in the post 9/11 era.  The USA PATRIOT ACT seemed to cover everything and justified many, many sins.

Dick Cheney?

This brings me to Dick Cheney.  I am not for a moment suggesting that Cheney was involved with Epstein.  I am suggesting that Cheney was the de facto head of government at that time, that nothing happened without his approval, and that he encouraged all government agencies to maintain as much secrecy as possible.  If you disagree with my assessment of Cheney at that time, I suggest you weren’t paying attention.  This nation was in a fever of fear and citizens were giving away their constitutional protections as fast as they could for the illusion of safety.

While I am not inclined to give Acosta a pass on his actions in this nasty mess, I think it is important for us to remember the atmosphere in this country when trying to get to the bottom of it.

Since the Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating Acosta’s actions in this affair, we have a chance to get some answers, but it won’t be easy.  The Trump administration is not known for its transparency, and while Trump himself seems to feel no loyalty to the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has a penchant for covering things up and Bill Barr is not known for his honesty.  My fear is that the convoluted mind of our President will somehow add this atrocity to his list of grievances against Hillary.  Crazy?  Just wait.

William Barr?

While we are waiting for someone, somewhere to take responsibility for prosecuting this rapist of children, we can only depend on the Southern District of New York US Attorney’s office, and yesterday, Bill Barr announced that he is assuming control of that investigation.  This does not bode well for justice.

The post Who Are Epstein’s Friends in High Places? appeared first on Parsing Truth.

In 1953, I started kindergarten in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1954, we moved to a nice little neighborhood in Northwest Atlanta.  We lived within 1 mile of the neighborhood school and all the kids on our street walked to school together, big kids watching the little ones.  We never thought about whether or not we were safe.  We were just kids and this was what we did.    We didn’t even realize we were all White kids, this was just our world.

In 1958, our world changed.  I was 10 when the house 2 doors down was sold to a White owned real estate company and rented to a Black family.  That company was all set with cash to buy up all the houses in the neighborhood that they knew would immediately come on the market at below market prices.  We moved back to rural Georgia within a month.  I have no idea how much money my parents lost, but I know they would have lost everything they had rather than let me go to a desegregated school.

To put this in historical context, 1958 was the year the Jewish Reform Temple in Atlanta on Peachtree Street was bombed.  You may remember that from Driving Ms. Daisy.  This was 4 years after Brown v. Board of Education and whispered conversations between parents contained phrases like “states’ rights” and for some of us, “lynching” and “castration.”  This was not just slow walking desegregation; this was armed insurrection and terrorism.

I tell you this little story to try to convey the depth of the feeling most White folks had in 1958 that desegregation was anathema to all their beliefs.  Nothing was too much to sacrifice to prevent desegregation, to protect their babies from the horror of race mixing.

The Rural South System

I began 6^th grade in a rural Georgia school and for the first time in my life I rode a school bus.  This was not “busing,” this was just our school bus, a vehicle to transport little White kids to a place safe from Brown v Board of Education.  I went to the same school my mother had attended.   Nothing had ever changed here and the adults believed nothing ever would.  They were willing to ensure that by any means necessary and make no mistake, every household had multiple guns they were willing to use to that end.

My county had about a dozen elementary schools and each school had a couple of buses that delivered us right to the door of our school.  The high school kids stayed on the bus and were delivered to another bus that continued their journey on to our one county high school.  This all took a couple hours every morning and every afternoon for the older kids, a little less for the younger ones.  This was the system for White kids.

There was another busing system operating concurrently for the Black kids in the county, but it was never mentioned and so invisible that I didn’t notice it until I started high school in 1962.

To get to the County High School, our bus delivered us to a central location where another bus waited for all the high school kids from the South end of the county to converge to continue the journey.  As I waited on that bus every morning, there was another bus that passed by, filled to overflowing with Black kids.  I don’t remember seeing another Black kid since we had moved there.  I had seen Black kids in Atlanta.  My father had driven a bus for Atlanta Transit, the system that later became Marta.  In fact, my first lesson in segregation came from a ride with my Dad on his bus when I was taught that it was disrespectful for me, a child, to sit toward the back of the bus because that meant the Black riders had to stand up and couldn’t sit in front of me.   I was about 7, I asked why, but never got an answer.  For context, Birmingham bus boycott – 1955.

It took time and a lot of questions to learn why there was another bus, one I had never known about, passing us every morning.  The separate bus system was just for Black kids.  There was a school I had never seen and never heard of.  It was the Black school, but you know that was not the descriptive word used at that time.  All the Black kids in my county went to this one school, first graders through seniors in high school, all together in what I later learned was an over-crowded, poorly maintained building, furnished with our discarded desks, books and equipment.

This was busing, masquerading as “separate but equal.” Historical context:  16^th Street Baptist Church Bombing, Birmingham, Alabama, 1963.

De Facto Desegregation

In 1964, the first Black students entered my high school. There were no major incidents that I remember, but that doesn’t mean there were none.  I remember one young lady’s name, although I won’t reveal it here.  That is her story to tell in her way.  Historical context:  Brown ordered desegregation “with all deliberate speed” in 1954. Historical context:  It would be another 8 years until Kamala Harris began her bus trips to a White school in Berkeley, California.

This is my story of busing.  It is a Southern story.  My part of this story ends around 1964 when my school was desegregated with no violence that I am aware of, unless you count hateful, hurtful comments to a couple of perfectly nice girls who didn’t deserve that treatment, and to be sure, there was a lot of violence in our communities that was never reported and was many times deadly.  The history of lynchings, castrations, burnings, is recorded and well known and cannot be separated from the history of desegregation but my story here has a narrow focus:  busing.

But the history and story of busing is not really a Southern story.  It is an American story, and most of the violent reaction to busing was not in the South.  Consider Boston from 1974 to 1988.  It took a court order to force Boston to desegregate its public school system; busing was the tool, and violent protests were the result.  The history of court ordered busing outside the South is long, broad and distasteful and I don’t have enough space here to fully tell it.

I tell this story, of course, in response to the exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden at Thursday’s debate. My very soul recoiled at Biden’s response to Harris.  This old White woman felt a bond to the young Black child that Kamala Harris had been, but my feelings of disgust were a reaction to Biden’s dishonest response, and it was dishonest – not untrue – dishonest.

Don’t Do This To Us,  Joe

Of course Biden had opposed court ordered busing.  That was no great revelation and it was an irrelevant distinction from busing in general.  In 1977, Biden introduced legislation to ban court ordered busing and in a very chummy letter to Senator James O. Eastland, he thanked Eastland for supporting that bill.  Court ordered busing was for the purpose of enforcing Brown vs. Education in areas that were resisting dismantling structural, systemic segregation in school districts.  The fact that he singled out Department of Education busing was a specious argument then and now. In fact, he called court ordered busing “an asinine concept.”  The “local control” argument was a thinly veiled reference to states’ rights then and now.

I am angry at Uncle Joe in a way that one can only be angry with a family member.  I want to say to him, “Don’t do this to us, Joe.  We want to support all the candidates.  We want to pledge to vote for the one who makes it through this primary process.  We don’t want to do anything that will make anyone stay home on election day.  We need you to be better than this.  We need you to own your history – our collective history – and condemn it.  We need you to show us that you have gained more than age in the intervening years, but also wisdom.”

In the end, I don’t think people will condemn Biden, or any of us, for our part in our sordid, collective racial history, but they will and should condemn those of us who deny and justify it now.

Don’t do this to us, Joe.

The post Memories of Busing appeared first on Parsing Truth.

I also generally refrain from making negative comments about the children of elected officials. Ivanka is exempt from that too, because she has assumed a role in our government and is happy to enjoy the benefits that come with that.

Having discarded those two personal guidelines, here goes.

Open Letter to Ivanka

Ivanka, sweetie, try some dark colors if you want to be taken seriously. Older people with experience can wear bright colors but they rarely wear ruffles.

Try some shoes that are a little more sensible. Spike heels are bad for your back, and they are more appropriate on a runway.

Tie your hair up and stop playing with it. Do you not know that is a stereotype? Please, God, don’t flip your head to show off your hair. Nobody cares that you are a blond erstwhile model. Well, they care, but not in a way you want. True, lots of young women do it, but sweetie, you are pushing 40. You are no longer an ingenue and you are playing with the grown ups. This is a habit you want to work on. I think I may have seen AOC flip her hair. When you win an election, you can. Until then, you need to work really hard not to look like your Daddy’s bimbo.

Please work on your poses. They all look like a layout for a fashion magazine. Your dental work is impressive, but not relevant to world economics.

The Real World for Women

You may be a very intelligent woman, I don’t know. I have seen no evidence of it, but I know you have many obstacles to overcome. Because you are your father’s daughter, and few world leaders take him seriously, being his appointed adviser, with no other relevant credentials means that like all other women, you have to work at being taken seriously, and you are not helping yourself.

Your assumed persona would not serve any serious woman in any professional arena. Serious women who have worked hard to get a good education, build credible resumes, compete against “the boys’ club” to be taken seriously, to get promotions and equal pay are all judged by the trivial standards I have just listed for you. Somewhere in their professional timeline, someone has given them this demeaning advice. Most professional women learn early that working hard, being ethical and dependable, intelligent and educated is not enough. They have to conform in ways that may not be relevant to the jobs they do.

Your behavior, your assumption that you deserve to stand up as an equal with world leaders without working for it is an insult to serious, capable women everywhere.

My last advice: your makeup will really clash with the orange jumpsuit. You might want to have your colors done.

The post Ivanka at the G 20 appeared first on Parsing Truth.

Trump’s Blame Game Has no Basis in Fact

Our President falls back on his regular habit of laying blame at the feet of Obama, the Democrats, Mexico – anywhere other than where it belongs – squarely at the feet in his own handmade expensive shoes.  And while Homeland Security attorneys argue with judges that soap, showers, toothbrushes and blankets are not a requirement for safe and sanitary conditions, Customs and Border Control personnel refuse donations of needed items saying, “We have all those things.  We don’t accept donations.” That may be the closest thing to truth we have heard about this sad state of affairs.  They have the money.  It was appropriated by the Congress Trump is trying to blame.  In fact, in many facilities we, the taxpayers, are spending $775 per day per child for their care.  That price should include soap, toothbrushes and blankets, plus a couple of good meals a day.

To add insult to injury, most of these children should never have been taken from the family members who are here in this country.  This was all unnecessary.  

This has become a Gordian knot, mostly I believe, because Trump sees it as a winning campaign strategy, and he doesn’t want it solved. What a pitiful excuse for this kind of wholesale cruelty.  

How Do We Cut Through This Knotty Problem?

Here is what I want to see.

I want all 25 Democratic candidates for President to convene a joint press conference outside the worst of the facilities where toddlers are being held in their own filth with no blankets, no beds, no soap, no showers. I want all the candidates, with no exceptions, to demand the doors be opened. I want them to demand a tour.

I would like the candidates to show up with people from the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF. I want the candidates to personally render aid to the children — on camera. At the very least, I want it on camera when officials refuse entry to a federal facility by senators, congress people, governors and the national press. I want to see the guards showing their guns to block them.

I want this planned carefully. I want it publicized before, during and after. I want Fox News shamed into being there, then I want Fox News shamed into showing it. I want the candidates to agree to stand together, unified, and be prepared to stay for hours. I want them to only grant interviews in teams and I want them to keep on topic. I want no self promoting words from anyone. I want them to allow their actions to speak.

I want the DNC to set up everything necessary for a rally — refreshments, stands, shelter — and make sure this event is open to the public and well publicized beforehand. I want to see everyone unified in naming this part of the USA’s new Concentration Camp system. No equivocating. I don’t want any more lip service to outrage — I want us to SEE the outrage in such a way that anyone who is turning a blind eye to the outrage can no longer deny its existence.

The logistics for this would be hard, but you cannot convince me it cannot be done, if there really is a will to save these children, there is a way.

Would that be blatantly using children for political props? Maybe, but it would definitely be an attempt to rescue children who are already being used as political props.

I want someone to do something for those babies. Now.

The post Democratic Candidates Must Step Up appeared first on Parsing Truth.