Rape Victims Deserve Choice

This powerful ad ran on CNN after the debate, according to Americablog:

Transcript:

[Young woman narrator] I was raped and then I got pregnant. Sarah Palin believes that the government should be able to force me to carry the pregnancy to term. Sarah Palin believes that the government should make that choice, not me. Governor Palin, I didn't have a choice about being raped, but I should have a choice about this.

The Wasilla Project: #1

Video with residents of Wasilla, Alaska revealing Sarah Palin's history of charging rape victims for rape kits.

The Real John McCain is Anti-Choice

73% of female pro-choice McCain supporters in battleground states do not know McCain's position on abortion. 1 in 4 believe he is pro-choice.

In the Senate, John McCain has cast 119 votes on abortion and other reproductive-rights issues. 115 of the votes were anti-choice.

John McCain Is No Feminist

John McCain's campaign registered and opened a website called, get this, VoteForTheMILF.com.

Vote for the MILF.

Owned by the McCain Campaign, the website directed you to a speech by Sarah Palin.

For those of you unfamiliar with the acronym "MILF", it stands for "Mother I'd Love to Fuck".

Fuck you, Johnny Mac. Just fuck you.

So don't let anyone tell you that the nomination of the comically unqualified Sarah Palin was anything but an insult to women. They further insulted her by buying this IP address.

I wonder if the website "JohnMcCainHasaTinyPenis.com" is available? I'd like to register that one.

John McCain can kiss my feminist ass. He'd probably like to as he can't look at a woman under the age of 70 without twisting his wedding ring and thinking about his days of running amok in the pheromone pool.

Keep his wrinkled old man ass out of the White House.

Slideshow of Palin Protest

A friend sent me this slideshow of the protest against Sarah Palin in Anchorage, Alaska earlier this month. Now that we are seeing how comically underqualified Palin is, these protesters seem prophetic:

1400 protest Palin nomination, Alaska, September 14, 2008

New Obama Ad: McCain Needs Education on Women's Issues

Lilly Ledbetter rocks. She narrates the ad:

"I worked at this plant for 20 years before I learned the truth. I'd been paid 40% less than men doing the same work. John McCain opposed a law to give women equal pay for equal work. And he dismissed the wage gap, saying women just need education and training. I had the same skills as the men at my plant. My family needed that money. On the economy, it's John McCain who needs an education."

You Won't See This On Brain-Dead Cable TV

Joe Biden & Hillary Clinton webcast on women's issues. Well worth the 32 minutes:

John McCain, Feminist

hat tip to the JedReport

Best Posts Of The Week

George Eastman House: Woman in kitchen peeling vegetables
Date: ca. 1910


Mocking the Republican spin machine's latest lie, that McCain can't use a computer because of his war injuries: John Cole's Balloon Juice (coup de grace: he threw out the first pitch at the 2001 World Series.)

Digby at Hullabaloo on Sarah Palin, Feminist Icon (she's not)

A very powerful post from Christy Hardin Smith at firedoglake: In Support of Choice telling her personal story of having a medically necessary abortion.

Women Aren't Fools

"Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving."
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Sarah Palin's no feminist. Over 100,000 women agree:

Women Against Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin Is a Token

Sarah Palin in 30 years

So sez one of the great feminists of our time, Gloria Steinem:

Gloria Steinem, LATimes: Palin: wrong woman, wrong message
Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need.

We Love Lists

AP Photo (via salon.com)
Martha Gellhorn with Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley, Idaho, November 1940

takepart: Happy Women’s History Month! Top 10 Inspiring Quotes From Inspiring Women

6. People often say with pride, “I’m not interested in politics.” They might as well say, “I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future, or any future.”

Martha Gelhorn, Novelist, essayist, and war correspondent

Answered Prayers

There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

St. Theresa of Jesus


Well, I got my New York Times obituary of Barbara Seaman. I don't like it. It's pretty nasty, and they go out of their way to acknowledge her critics.

NYTImes: Barbara Seaman, 72, Dies; Cited Risks of the Pill

There's more criticism of Barbara Seaman in one page than is contained in all three pages of the obituary for the loathesome William F. Buckley, which is headlined: "He elevated conservatism to the center of American political discourse." Elevated? He wanted people with AIDS to be tattooed. Please. Multisyllabic does not equal smart or revolutionary, both of which are apt descriptions for Barbara Seaman.

Here are the passages in the Times obituary I object to; my comments are italicized.

Ms. Seaman’s first book, “The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill” (P. H. Wyden), was considered groundbreaking when it was published in 1969. [emphasis added]

It wasn't just "considered" groundbreaking; it WAS groundbreaking.

Though the publication of “The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill” made Ms. Seaman an enduring heroine of the women’s movement, her work did not find favor everywhere. As some reviewers saw it, Ms. Seaman’s passionate polemic sometimes got the better of scientific argument.

Writing in The Washington Post in 2003, Liza Mundy reviewed “The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women,” about the potential risks of hormone-replacement therapy:

“Seaman is a conspiracy theorist by temperament and training,” Ms. Mundy wrote. “In her presentation, every drug company is working against the interests of its patients, and every journalist who fails to question this or that bad study has probably been bought off; she uses the phrase ‘organized medicine’ in what seems a direct echo of ‘organized crime.’ ”

While it may be true that Ms. Mundy wrote that, it is irrelevant. As usual, Barbara Seaman was right. Drug companies are not nonprofits; they are concerned with sales and spreadsheets, not with health. Many doctors today are glorified pill-pushers who do what they have to do to get paid by insurance companies. The press HAS been bought off; the giant media conglomerates are concerned with their bottom lines, and one of their greatest advertisers is the pharmaceutical industry. That's why Barbara Seaman kept getting fired from magazines for speaking the truth.

The truth about HRT, the subject of Seaman's book in Mundy's review, is that HRT raises the incidence of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and dementia in women taking this dangerous cocktail. The Times obituary does not address the health risks of HRT or the fact that research has borne out Ms. Seaman's criticisms of HRT.

In the 1990s, Ms. Seaman also began to speak out publicly against domestic violence, from which she said she had suffered during her marriage to Mr. Forman. Though she did not identify Mr. Forman by name in the news media, court records show that in 1988 he was arrested and charged with assault after Ms. Seaman accused him of punching her in the face. The criminal case against Mr. Forman was later thrown out, Dudley Gaffin, his lawyer at the time, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Reached by telephone on Thursday, Mr. Forman denied having assaulted Ms. Seaman, calling the accusation of assault “a divorce tactic” on her part.

What could better demonstrate society's attitude towards domestic violence than the New York Times seeking out the batterer for a denial quote? Because even in death, Barbara Seaman, feminist pioneer, cannot be believed. And you can't get a fresh quote from her, now can you. But you can smear her a little in her own obituary. This is really disgusting.

Final thought: The obituary from the site Dog Flu Diet & Diseases is better.

Dog Flu Diet & Diseases: Female Reproductive Health Advocate Dies At 72

Wall St. Journal: REMEMBRANCES
Barbara Seaman (1935 – 2008)
Advocate for Women's Health Care, She Agitated to Make the Pill Safer

The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH): Barbara Seaman, Oberlin grad, women's health pioneer

RIP Barbara Seaman (Updated)

Power Surge: Interview with Barbara Seaman
Exploding The Estrogen Myth

Barbara Seaman's book The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, and her later book about hormone replacement therapy, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones, her later books about DES, Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones, and hormone replacement therapy, The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women, were seminal feminist tracts. My copies were dog-eared because I was always lending them to friends who were considering the pill or HRT. She was right on about both: huge experiments by the male medical community, where healthy women were given untested and experimental drugs for perfectly natural conditions that were not illnesses. A woman who needs birth control is not sick. A woman experiencing the symptoms of menopause is not "ill"; she is experiencing part of life.

Barbara Seaman was fired from almost every magazine she ever wrote for, when the pharmaceutical companies threatened to pull advertising if her work was published. She was a real feminist pioneer. Not surprisingly, the corporate media is ignoring the death of this influential feminist. As of the time of the post, only 8 media outlets have published the AP an obituary of Seaman.

She will be missed.

HuffPo: Leora Tanenbaum
Your Pill is Safer Because of Her

HuffPo: Jennifer Baumgardner
Remembering Barbara Seaman

TPM Cafe: Let us remember Barbara Seaman, crusading pioneer of the women's health movement

Chesler Chronicles: An Elegy For My Friend "Babz," aka Barbara Seaman (1935-2008) (a tribute by another feminist writer, Phyllis Chesler, the author of Women and Madness)

Newsday: Barbara Seaman, women's health advocate, dead at 72

Our Bodies, Ourselves: Remembering Barbara Seaman

Women'sSpace: “Dear Injurious Physician” — In Memorium: Barbara Seaman, Sept. 11, 1935-Feb. 27, 2008

UPDATE: As of 10:00 a.m. on Friday, only two additional corporate media outlets have published an obituary of Barbara Seaman: the Washington Post (and not just the AP obit, they wrote their own) and the Philadelphia Daily News. Is the corporate media ignoring the death of this feminist pioneer to keep their pharmaceutical advertisers happy? I emailed the NYTimes last night lamenting their lack of an obit, and got a form email in response, but neither the Times, the Boston Globe, nor the LATimes reports on Seaman's death today. Shame.

UPDATE 2: Updated to correct my mistake in confusing Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones with The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women.