Keep your opinion polls off my body

2008-08-15T17:52:46+00:00

I, personally, am entirely convinced by the Health and Human Services Secretary blogging that the leaked draft regulation doesn’t have anything to do with contraception.

After all, redefining abortion to be possible before implantation (“any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”) based on, I kid you not, polling data (“A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49% of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term ‘abortion.’”) is totally innocent. Now, recently studies have indicated that oral hormonal contraception, even at emergency contraception levels, doesn’t seem to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, but I’m pretty damn sure that polling data would not reflect that research, so that’s easy to get around. Science always is. Heck, the regulations are about the conscience of health care workers, so what matters isn’t whether the patient’s contraceptives prevent implantation, but whether the health care worker feels they will.

The leaked document, by the way, is also worrying gay rights advocates who think the guidelines will allow health care workers to refuse treatment or medicine to gay and transgender patients based on their religious convictions. Woohoo!

Here is the leaked document in PDF, and the Washington Post’s original coverage. Thrill to such features as (quoting the later article I first linked) “a major section of the draft regulation titled ‘The Problem’ [that] cites state laws designed to make sure that women have access to birth control pills and Plan B.” Many of those laws are about emergency rooms providing emergency birth control to rape survivors. Isn’t it good to know our friendly ~~Gilead~~ U.S. Government really cares about its ~~handmaids~~ female citizens?

Update, 8/23/08: The rule has been officially proposed. This is not just dangerous because it’s vague or because it redefines scientific terms by popularity contest. It’s dangerous because the officials who are supposed to care about and provide for people’s health in this country assume “that a patient could go to another provider”, in short are unconcerned about widening the healthcare gap and denying services to those who don’t have the coverage, time off work, or transportation money to go to another provider.

A question of names

2006-08-28T15:15:05+00:00

I am in the midst of writing a response/commentary to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopia based on Fundamentalism’s grab for reproductive control of women. And I continuously run into one stylistic question: what do I call the protagonist?

So far, I am using, well, “the protagonist,” but it is cumbersome. The issue is that her ‘name’ in the novel, “Offred,” is not her name. It’s a possessive title indicating she is the property of Fred (and which applies to her only so long as she is assigned to him.) By using this name, I feel I would be somehow complicit, legitimizing the protagonist’s reproductive slavery. (Yes, I know she’s fictional, but I am an English major. Words have power and I have ethical qualms about my treatment of fictional characters.)

She has a name, this fictional woman, but it is never stated. A good guess is possible from a close reading, but it’s hardly clear communication to use the possible answer to a riddle as a fact. So, I struggle on with “the protagonist,” using “Offred” only in scare-quotes, and suspecting that this quandary was precisely Atwood’s intention.

Posts tagged with "handmaid's tale" - Faerye Net

Keep your opinion polls off my body

A question of names