Status Updates From Pro. Odzyskajmy prawo do ab...

"For those who are troubled by America's high abortion rate, the good news is that we already know what will lower it: more feminism. More justice. More equality. More freedom. More respect." BOOM.

"Instead of seeing a low-income mother as a burden to society to whom government grudgingly doles out dribs and drabs of 'services' that are never enough to lift her out of poverty or change her children's prospects, we need to flip the equation: What does this woman, and the millions like her, require to raise her children to be decent, healthy, well-educated, productive, happy adults—and to be one herself?"

"What would the United States be like if we really valued motherhood? Not in a sentimental, flattering sort of way, as when we say motherhood is the most important, hardest job in the world. That's obviously false." HA.

"On average, child care consumes 49.5 percent of a low-income household's monthly expenses."

"The whole world runs on women's unpaid or grossly underpaid labor, and it always has. When that work is an extension of female domestic roles—caring for children or the elderly, preparing food, cleaning houses—it is ill paid, insecure, low skilled, and low status. But when it is done within the family, it is so deeply mystified and romanticized..."

"The ability to end a pregnancy is deeper than a right: it is basic self preservation. Maybe there could be a society in which women were legally compelled to bear every child they conceived and yet did not find themselves thereby hampered, impoverished, trapped, chained to a hated partner, consigned to a lesser life. But that society would look nothing like the one abortion opponents want to bring about..."

"We think we value mothers in America, but we don't... The work of mothers is so unvalued that a judge in Nebraska, previously a lawyer for Operation Rescue, can deny a sixteen-year-old in foster care the abortion she wants on the grounds that she isn't mature enough to choose that abortion—but apparently is mature enough to go through with pregnancy and childbirth and raise a child. Anybody can do that."

"It's only nine months, how selfish not to make some nice couple happy... [but] one study found that twelve to twenty years after the adoption three-quarters of birth mothers still felt grief and loss. Curiously, no one is suggesting this long-lasting suffering means women need to be counseled out of it, much less that adoption should be banned."

Oh, and shocker: "The ten states where women's status is lowest are solidly Republican with churches wielding a lot of political and cultural power." Who would EVER have guessed? Sigh.

Apparently, I've lived in five of the "ten states where women's status is highest (measured by economic security, leadership, and health)." They are all democratic with strong secular cultures. Makes sense!

"Why do they cling to the notion that the Pill causes abortion? Why don't they welcome recent studies showing that emergency contraception prevents ovulation, not implantation? The fact that they grasp at straws suggests what they really object to is sex without a significant threat of pregnancy and the social changes connected to that."

"Modern contraception works pretty well: The two-thirds of women who use it consistently account for only 5 percent of abortions. And yet, not one major anti-abortion organization supports making birth control more available, much less educating young people in its use."

"Republicans seem fairly oblivious to the many contradictions in which opposition to abortion involves them... the party that claims to care about 'life' is tightly allied with the National Rifle Association. Guns don't kill people, pregnant women kill people."

"What if Beethoven's mother had aborted him? That's a question that pops up over and over in anti-abortion literature. (Oddly, no one asks what if Hitler's mother had aborted him...)" Ha!

"...what it's really all about: pushing women back into the home and recreating the 1950s, which were only really the 1950s on television." As a big fan of American literature from roughly the 1930s-50s, it's amazing how our quaint view of sexuality in those days differs so greatly with the reality. (Spoiler alert: they too had gays and lesbians and abortions and tons of extramarital and kinky sex!)

She just used the phrase "concern-trolling"! I love her. This is why I'm still reading at 12:16 am despite being exhausted. This book is too good to put down.

"In fact, about half of all fertilized eggs fail to implant and are simply washed out of her body with her menstrual flow. If fertilized eggs are persons, God is remarkably careless about them." LOL! I officially love Katha Pollitt.

OH MY GOD. Not even abortion related, but did you know a 2011 poll found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans think interracial marriage should be illegal?!?!?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH AMERICA. This is why I am a hermit. People are the WORST.

"I am beginning to suspect that your position is not all that carefully considered. You are just expressing your dislike of abortion and the women who have them, and you're not really thinking about the real-world implications." PREACH IT SISTER.

The amazing thing about 84% of people saying they approve of abortion if it endangers the life of the woman is that must mean 16% of people are TOTALLY COOL with a woman dying during pregnancy because she gave it the ol' college try.

"Motherhood is the last area in which the qualities we usually value—rationality, independent thinking, consulting our own best interests, planning for a better, more prosperous future, and dare I say it, pursuing happiness and dreams—are condemned as frivolity and selfishness."

"Andrew Sullivan, another reluctant semi-pro-choicer, thinks 'abortion is always and everywhere a moral tragedy.' Always? Everywhere? The safest position for a member of the commentariat seems to be: You can have your abortion as long as you feel really, really bad about it. I'm not going to take that route here."

"How often have you heard abortion described as 'the hardest decision' or 'the most painful choice' a woman ever makes, as if every single woman who gets pregnant by accident seriously considers having a baby, only a few weeks earlier the furthest thing from her mind and for very good reason?" YES. As a woman who doesn't want children...ALL OF THIS.

"...'fetus' inaccurately suggests that late abortion is the norm. In fact, two-thirds of abortions take place at eight weeks or earlier, when the fetus is still an embryo. If all along abortion opponents had talked about 'embryonic rights' and 'the embryo's right to life' I wonder if they would have gotten as far as they have." I love this author.

"It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door..." I'm only in the introduction and already I'm getting fired up. This writing is passionate and blunt and awesome (and will not convince any pro-lifers but, really, what would?).