4/2 Reproductive Health

• How do the reactions of others to the main character constrain her choices?

  • It makes it so that she is never offered help, only shame, and had to take matters into her own hands with a hanger, one of the deadliest options for abortions.

  • Her first person she turned to offered a home remedy of Comet and Johnny Walker and to jump 65 times, which could have killed her and thankfully she didn’t die.

  • The second person shut her out, the priest, and told her to go to a nun.

  • The third person, the nun, told her she had blasphemed and shamed her.

  • The last person, her mom, kicked her out and changed the locks.

• Why did Whoopi Goldberg use the character of a valley girl/surfer?

  • When thinking of a valley girl, this is what we usually picture: young, white, wealthy, “ditzy” girls.

  • For Whoopi, it was important to not think just about women of color when thinking about the issue of abortion. Think of young white wealthy women, because it is happening to them just as well as women of color.

  • This young girl has probably received no to little sex education. How many people have received this by the age of 13? No one, most likely.

Marilyn Frye’s oppression

• A group is oppressed if their options are very few and if one chooses one of them, any of them, one is penalized, censured, or deprived.

• Are women oppressed?

  • YES! No matter what choices women will be penalized, censured or deprived…examples…

    • Whether or not they have sex (slut-shaming/prude)

    • Way women dress (too revealing or slutty/too modest or not taking care of themselves)

    • Make-up (“put your face on, take care of yourself”/“you’re too vain”)

• Women’s lives are confined, shaped, barricaded by barriers (or wires) that are constant. The limitations are not accidental or occasional. Women are in a constant bind that restrict and penalize

• The Birdcage is a network/systemic. One wire does not confine the bird, all the wires, and the relation of each wire to the others, are confining the bird.

• Gender oppression isn’t just a matter of attitudes or behavior: it consists of real privileges.

What is sexism?

• Sexism is an ideology, a set of ideas that promote male privilege in part by portraying women as inferior to men. Individual men (depending of class, race, and age) will vary in their ability to take advantage of sexism and the benefits it produces.

According to Wells, it is harmful to women to hold the view that abortion should not be used as a birth control method, and how does this view reveal their ignorance about the various conditions that contribute to unwanted pregnancies?

• Ignorance comes from judging which women deserve to have abortions and which do not, and how many abortions they’re allowed to have as well. They have not done their research on the social and systemic constraints that cause women to have abortions in the first place.

How restricting abortion/contraceptives makes it unlikely that women will ever achieve equality with men?

• Women are literally being sent to jail and even given the death penalty for things as little as an unintentional miscarriage (aka an abortion), and as long as this happens, how are women ever able to

• Women being forced to have children will inhibit their ability to follow their dreams. It isn’t impossible, but it’s much harder when you have a child. The cost of a child is incredibly high, especially in the US where you don’t have free healthcare.

• the US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates for pregnancy as well.

What is reproductive justice: “reproductive health integrated into social justice”

• The enabling condition to realize the rights to (1) have a child, (2) not have a child, (3) parent the child we have, as well as to control our birthing options, such as midwifery/doula/natural birth/hospital/being sterilized only with consent

• Reproductive oppression: the control and exploitation through our bodies, sexuality, labor, and reproduction.