April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month The Pro-life Women’s Conference is observing Sexual Assault Awareness Month (for which the teal ribbon is the symbol) by asking women to share their stories of overcoming sexual assault (#ITSNOTOK). Of course, “awareness” isn’t the final goal, but one means to achieve the goal, which is to end sexual assault completely. While pregnancies resulting from sexual violence lead to arguments over a “rape and incest” exception on abortion, the most obvious point is that sexual violence is intolerable and should be stopped.
Alternatives to Planned Parenthood: Mammograms
We’ve added a new page to our Grassroots Defunding campaign website: Mammograms. Several years ago, when the Susan G. Komen foundation tried to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, there was an uproar, and they backed down. The uproar was based on the idea that Planned Parenthood did a lot of work to counter breast cancer, and indeed, they do breast exams. Yet many people were left with the impression that they also do mammograms. They don’t do them at their centers. This gap in PP’s services opens up an opportunity in our campaign to find PP alternatives. Currently, people refer women to PP for mammograms, then PP refers those women elsewhere. The logic of having the original referrer refer to the final place instead may seem obvious, even to strong PP supporters. This part of the campaign requires a rather limited amount of time. Students, for example, could make a mammogram research and action project, as explained on the page, one that can get done in one semester. It could also be a good start for people who want to have a tangible goal reached before working on an ongoing campaign that may well take years.
Latest CLN Blog Post In How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled, Sarah Terzo talks about how suicide prevention is treated differently for people with disabilities as compared to others, even by the American Association of Suicidology, which exists to promote suicide prevention. Jack Kevorkian also got a light sentence for his killing spree (130 people) – could that have happened if the people saying they wanted suicide were able-bodied?
Quotation of the Week Wendell Berry, author and environmental activist The Consequences of Treating a Fetus as a Human Being, June 22, 1986
What if we did treat our "fetuses' and our "foreign enemies' as human beings? It would be fearful indeed, no one can doubt it. For then we would have to take up living in reality. And reality always instructs us, when we become bold enough to venture into it, that we do not know enough to kill a human being. We are not eligible to accept that responsibility. Reality informs us that we live in mystery. A child may be a great burden or a great privilege. An enemy may become a friend, a friend an enemy. The value of a human life can only be determined by experience. That is our problem, and we have plenty of reasons to regret it. But the problem is only made worse by the assumption that there are simple technological remedies.
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