This month Pennsylvania joined the ranks of state legislators completely ignorant of the basic workings of human reproduction. There's Texas, where the co-author of one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country thinks that abortion requires "cutting on people's bodies." There's Indiana, where on March 24 the governor signed into law a requirement that "a miscarried or aborted fetus must be interred or cremated," unaware, I guess, that most miscarriages occur in the first trimester, can last for several days, and look like a heavy period with clots and clumps. Sorry, but what exactly are women supposed to inter? Blood-soaked sheets? Sanitary pads? The entire toilet? Then there's Utah, where on March 29 the governor signed a law requiring that a fetus is administered anesthesia before an abortion... but how do you administer anesthesia to a fetus? Oh, there it is, on line 55, in the section that removes any choice in the matter: "through the woman." So women are forced to undergo a potentially dangerous and completely unnecessary medical procedure.
And now there's Pennsylvania, where on April 1, Representative Kathy Rapp, based on the extensive medical training she received from her paralegal certification at Slippery Rock University, introduced to the Health Committee PA House Bill 1948. The bill eliminates dilation and evacuation abortions (though the author substitutes her own made-up word. She also doesn't seem to know the word "fetus."). Further, the bill bans any abortion after 20 weeks gestation unless two physicians certify in writing that the pregnancy will cause death or substantial and irreversible impairment of a major organ. No other reason for abortion is allowed; the bill specifies that even if there is "a claim or a diagnosis that the woman will engage in conduct which would result in her death or in substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function... no abortion shall be deemed authorized." In other words, if a woman is so desperate or determined that she will risk her life to end her pregnancy, the state says, go right ahead and die (the Texas law includes the same language). And of course 20 weeks is around the time that many fetal abnormalities are detected, so Pennsylvania is joining Indiana in saying that women cannot choose an abortion based on such a diagnosis. The bill passed the Health Committee on April 4 by a vote of 16 to 10 without hearing any input from any doctors.
Of course these lawmakers are neither ignorant nor unaware about the facts of life. They know exactly what they are doing: controlling women, controlling women's bodies, controlling women's lives.
If you live in Pennsylvania, or even if you don't, please contact the Pennsylvania House of Representatives about HB1948.
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Book recommendation: "Slavery by Another Name"
When did slavery end in the United States? In 1863 when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation? In 1865 when the 13th Amendment was ratified?
According to Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, slavery continued in the United States until the 1940's.
It's an amazingly well-researched, eye-opening, horrifying book.
Douglas Blackmon is not comparing Jim Crow laws to slavery. He's not using slavery as an analogy for poverty. He's talking about actual, forced-labor, legally-owning-another-person slavery. He begins with the Civil War, takes us through Reconstruction, which saw some real gains for former slaves, and then explains the system of convict leasing that fueled the industrialization of the South, using tens of thousands of Black slaves primarily to lay railroad tracks, clear forests, mine coal and process iron.
Here's how it worked. The 13th Amendment said that, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." That loophole was enough to create an entire new system of slavery that I, at least, had never heard about before. In my mind, the period after Reconstruction in the South was associated with sharecropping, not coal mines. Blackmon explains how beginning in Reconstruction, laws in the South "criminalized Black life." Laws made it a crime to not be employed by a White man or to change employment without permission from the White employer. When a Black person broke such a law, they were arrested by local law enforcement, who then turned around and sold the prisoner's labor to a coal mine, a timber company or an ironworks. This was called "convict leasing." Often scouts for the companies would identify good potential workers and notify the local sheriff, who could make arrests based on trumped-up charges and then profit from the sale of the new labor. Enormous mines and factories were worked entirely by slaves. Slaves literally built the modern cities of the South.
Physical abuse of convicts was such that 30-40% of slaves died during their forced labor. Perversely, while before the Civil War slaves were viewed as property that had some financial worth, in post-Civil War slavery, the slaves were leased, so when a slave died he or she was simply replaced with no financial loss.
What this means is that there was legal slavery in the United States, not when my great-great-great-grandmother was around, but when my mother was a child.
"Let us define this period of American life plainly and comprehensively," writes Blackmon. "It was the Age of Neoslavery. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's grip on U.S. society - its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life."
Slavery by Another Name won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
You can watch an interview with the author at www.slaverybyanothername.com
According to Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, slavery continued in the United States until the 1940's.
It's an amazingly well-researched, eye-opening, horrifying book.
Douglas Blackmon is not comparing Jim Crow laws to slavery. He's not using slavery as an analogy for poverty. He's talking about actual, forced-labor, legally-owning-another-person slavery. He begins with the Civil War, takes us through Reconstruction, which saw some real gains for former slaves, and then explains the system of convict leasing that fueled the industrialization of the South, using tens of thousands of Black slaves primarily to lay railroad tracks, clear forests, mine coal and process iron.
Here's how it worked. The 13th Amendment said that, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." That loophole was enough to create an entire new system of slavery that I, at least, had never heard about before. In my mind, the period after Reconstruction in the South was associated with sharecropping, not coal mines. Blackmon explains how beginning in Reconstruction, laws in the South "criminalized Black life." Laws made it a crime to not be employed by a White man or to change employment without permission from the White employer. When a Black person broke such a law, they were arrested by local law enforcement, who then turned around and sold the prisoner's labor to a coal mine, a timber company or an ironworks. This was called "convict leasing." Often scouts for the companies would identify good potential workers and notify the local sheriff, who could make arrests based on trumped-up charges and then profit from the sale of the new labor. Enormous mines and factories were worked entirely by slaves. Slaves literally built the modern cities of the South.
Physical abuse of convicts was such that 30-40% of slaves died during their forced labor. Perversely, while before the Civil War slaves were viewed as property that had some financial worth, in post-Civil War slavery, the slaves were leased, so when a slave died he or she was simply replaced with no financial loss.
What this means is that there was legal slavery in the United States, not when my great-great-great-grandmother was around, but when my mother was a child.
"Let us define this period of American life plainly and comprehensively," writes Blackmon. "It was the Age of Neoslavery. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's grip on U.S. society - its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life."
Slavery by Another Name won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
You can watch an interview with the author at www.slaverybyanothername.com
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