Why We Need Late-Term Abortion Providers

like Dr. George Tiller, brutally assassinated yesterday in the lobby of his church in Kansas.

....a compassionate and courageous doctor who provided abortion services to women in some of the most distressing circumstances imaginable, when their pregnancies had gone horribly, tragically wrong.
Read the full story.

Every minute, around the world:

380 women become pregnant.
190 face an unintended pregnancy.
110 experience a pregnancy-related complication.
40 have an unsafe abortion.
1 dies as a result of her pregnancy.

Source: EngenderHealth

Multiply that by 60 minutes per hour. 24 hours per day. 365 days per year.

That's over half-a-million deaths per year from pregnancy.

Reproductive justice is integral to social, economic, political justice. If you don't own your body, you are not free. Access to safe, legal contraception and abortion are fundamental human rights.

According to NPR, Dr. Tiller was one of only two remaining physicians in the US who provide late-term abortions, under a comprehensive terror campaign from America's fascist Christian right. Now there's only one left.

Why is the need for doctors like him so great?

Fact: Poor women--teens or adults--are the only group in America, whose abortion rate is rising. Black women have an abortion rate nearly four times that of white women. Latinas and Asian/Pacific Islander women have an abortion rate about two and a half times that of white women.

Fact: The federal ban on abortion entitled the "Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003" outlaws a range of the safest and most common abortions, performed as early as 12 weeks and fails to provide any exception if a woman's health is at stake.

Fact: In the past 10 years, state legislatures around the country have passed or considered bills making it increasingly harder for women and girls to get safe legal abortions early in their pregnancies. Tactics include mandatory waiting periods, mandatory parental consent and state-mandated misinformation fed to women (like abortion increases your risk of breast cancer). Not to mention slashed state funding for abortion and basic contraception to the poorest, most vulnerable categories of women - the uninsured, women of color, new immigrants, low-wage workers, sex workers, minors.

If a woman in America has a late-term abortion, it's likely to be because she had to wait months to:

a) Find an abortion provider
b) Save, scrounge or borrow the money to pay for her abortion
c) Find the transport and funding to travel out of county or state for the procedure
d) Get the time off work - risking job loss, and permanent poverty
e) Find childcare for her other children
f) Go through state-enforced counselling and mandatory delay periods to make her change her mind

Think about Katrina. If hundreds of thousands of poor black Americans hadn't the resources to leave to save their lives, how many of them could come up with resources to access an abortion in the first trimester?

More Info:

Medical Students for Choice was created by my college friend, the brilliant, dynamic Dr. Jody Steinauer, to train the next generation of abortion providers.

Three Days: Eros, Ares, knots

Three days to Bwagamoyo Script Premiere.

I've been reading Chris Hedges and Barbara Kingsolver, two of my heroes. They are the pinnacles I reach for in my work.

Chris Hedges often moves me to tears. Not just his brilliance: I would make What Every Person Should Know About War, and War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, and American Fascists required reading on the US high-school curriculum. But his willingness to stand in the river of what he writes about. Be drenched. Feel.

What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? Hw do you cope with memories of children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?

And Barbara Kingsolver. What can one say about her sheer virtuosity? The Poisonwood Bible is another book that should be required reading for every teenager in the world. It breaks down Empire, power, love, adulthood, choice, truth, better than a hundred college philosophy, world politics, history courses.

Then there's Prodigal Summer. Singing bubbling joy from the first lines:

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

A book I wanted to re-read as soon as I'd finished it. And re-re-read. I feel a genuine, gut envy towards anyone who still has their first reading of it ahead of them.

On the writing of it, she says:

I can't say why other modern writers have turned their backs on Eros, but I can guess, because facing her head-on made me pretty nervous at first. Sex in our strange culture is both an utter taboo and the currency of jaded commerce. It's very tricky terrain to write about copulation, when the language seems to be held in the joint custody of pornography and the medical profession. But Prodigal Summer is about life and fecundity, and it could not be an honest book without sex at its very center. For this book to be taken seriously as literature, I realized I would have to invent a new poetry of copulation, and that is what I tried to do.

She succeeded.

Other gems I've culled for encouragement and guidance this week, from her site:

I immerse myself often in poetry, I guess, for the same reason painters rinse their brushes -- to keep the colors true.

When I begin a novel, I don't start building the story around pre-existing characters or incidents. I begin with theme. I devise a very big question whose answer I believe will be amazing, and maybe shift the world a little bit on its axis. Then I figure out how to create a world in which that question can be asked, and answered.

Like every infant and child I've ever known, I have a passion for making up stories, and an exacting need for truth. It's a heck of a life.

I'm also learning knots. Noose knots, to be precise. For the nine nooses I'll make on stage in three days time. Real nooses won't work structurally for visual impact, because they're designed to tighten around a neck. If the neck is absent, they slide up and vanish into the rope. So I have to figure out how to adapt the knots for what I have in mind - open hanging nooses. (First person to say "ah, a knotty problem," gets a rope thrown at them)

On the wall next to my desk are lines that struck me in a book randomly browsed at Stockholm airport: Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, by Gordon Livingston. Thoughts to work by for the next three days.

We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do.

In general we get, not what we deserve, but what we expect.

....the only communication that can be trusted: behaviour.

It is the act that defines us, not the cause we use as a rationale.

Finally, we are entitled to receive only that which we are prepared to give.

Writing's On The Wall

Few things are as monumentally ugly.....cutting through towns and fields, cleaving families from their homes, farmers from their land.
-- TIME Magazine, June 1, 2009, on Israel's Apartheid Wall

South African anti-apartheid activist, and respected religious scholar, Farid Esack, has written a letter to Palestinians which is being painted in 60-cm high letters along the wall near Ramallah. He says:

In your land, we are seeing something far more brutal, relentless and inhuman than what we have ever seen under apartheid.

and

I am astonished at how ordinarily decent people whose hearts are otherwise “in the right place” beat about the bush when it comes to Israel and the dispossession and suffering of the Palestinians. Do both parties deserve an “equal hearing” in a situation of domestic violence – wherein a woman is beaten up by a male who was abused by his father some time ago – because “he,” too, is a “victim?”

Read the full letter. It's one of the most heartfelt, moral, cogent pleas I've come across for Israelis, and supporters of Israel, to reclaim their humanity from the killing machine of the Israeli state.

To receive regular updates from Israel's peace movement, including the stories you'll never see in the NYT, on Israel's criminalization of draft resistance, and who benefits from Israel's war economy, subscribe to Jewish Peace News.

Six days

to script premiere of Bwagamoyo.

Six hours of rehearsal today.

Three hours of script work.

Had all kinds of brilliant insights to blog but

brain

has

clocked

out.

My task now is to get my body to leave my desk and walk home in the windy rain with bribes of hot bath and bed.

Death of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

I've just learned that Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem was killed last night in a car crash, on his way to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

Tajudeen was Secretary-General of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda and Director of Justice Africa, based in London.

This is a terrible loss to us all.

Tajudeen's Pan-African Postcard has been a regular weekly read for me. I grew as a writer and an activist from his breadth of vision and depth of analysis; his blend of critical thinking, satire and self-reflection; his constant linking of the bigger political picture to the daily lives of ordinary Africans.

In person, he radiated a rare combination of radicalism and humour, optimism and political rigour.

I am shocked and bereaved. My heartfelt sympathies to his family, colleagues, and community.

Camaiore Prize

A few weeks ago, I posted about Migritude being shortlisted for Italy's Premio Lettarario Camaiore.

The four finalists for the Premio Internazionale were:

Shailja Patel MIGRITUDE (Lietocolle)
Michalis Pieris METAMORFOSI DI CITTA’ (Donzelli)
Bozidar Stanisic LA CHIAVE NELLA MANO (Campanotto)
Birgitta Trotzig NEL FIUME DI LUCE (Mondadori)

I got an email from my publisher today telling me the jury awarded the prize to Nel Fiume di Luce by Birgitta Trotzig. Trotzig is a Swedish poet who happens to be Chair Number Six of the Swedish Academy , aka Nobel Prize Jury.

So the disappointment dissipated fairly quickly in a wave of hilarious wonder.

I was a finalist
alongside a poet
who votes
on the Nobel Literature Prize.