this is the christenin. ppl, i hope ya listenin. Says Uni Q. Mical , Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 4:16 PM, in

so, welcome to my bloggggg!!!! this goes out 2 all those folks that said i should start one. i'm a ridiculous, scatterbrained sagittarius, ascendant in gemini, moon in pisces (yep, took it there...shit is real). but i got dreams, man.
but--there are ground rules. i'm not big on capital letters, unless for emphasis, like THIS. that's minimal tho.
more importantly, for all those that kno me and those that don't, kno that i'm one of the most passionate ppl u could ever encounter when it comes to my views and writing...but this doesn't mean i'm closed to any new ideas. i love a good intellectual jerkoff just as much as the next book-beat college student. what i hold dear to my heart, tho, so nunnayall get it twisted, is my body. and no, not sexually (well, when the time is right), but my body, meaning the personal IS political. meaning whatever affects black people, women, the poor, the queers, the gays, the lezzies, the trans...affects me, too. my life is dedicated to breaking the silence surrounding our bodies and our liberation, and putting us one step closer to our self-determination and the telling of our OWN stories. whether this be through me writing about it, organizing, collaborating with others that think alike...we're gonna get closer. don't be fooled by the scapegoating. hell, we ARE closer. kno that.
annnnd, with all that being said, i wanted to share witchall this op-ed article i wrote a few weeks ago for The Atlanta Voice for my pheNOMenal internship with SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta this summer...right now. it was in response to an article by Judie Brown from American Life League who was ECSTATIC about their spreading awareness around how the birth control pill is not a contraceptive, but an abortive...ah, it speaks for itself. read on.

On reading Judie Brown’s “Revisiting ‘The Pill Kills’ Day!”, I must say it astonishes me how visibly upset and defensive pro-lifers become when they discuss such sensitive and necessary topics as birth control and abortion. Truthfully speaking, I should be more astonished, as a young black woman who must live and breathe in the same country as the members of the American Life League who, in reality, couldn’t care less if my child was aborted or alive.

The “Protest the Pill Day” is a movement that intends to tug at the moral heartstrings of many Americans, coercing them to believe that birth control is not at all a contraceptive, but an abortive that shatters the life of an egg inside of a woman’s uterus. Pro-lifers such as Judie Brown, in her attempt to expose “the ugly underbelly of the culture of death” surrounding abortion in this country, fail to locate themselves in this fight, namely their race, class, and gender positionalities. Of course, in their cases of extreme privilege, one would not expect them to see or even acknowledge the people who live in conditions that do not mirror their comfortable, autonomous lives. However, due to my positionality as a black woman, I am forced to not only be fully aware of my present and my history, but also that of my oppressors’. Because of this, I can only use my history as a reference point to the necessity of birth control for black women.

For black women, birth control is not just representative of the right to choose nor the right to privacy, but to self-determination, and liberation from the history of someone else deciding what we do with our bodies for us. In slavery, our bodies were mere vessels for us to produce, for the benefit of the masters, and the economy in terms of production. Though slavery was legally outlawed in 1865, the racist beliefs pervaded in the 20th century through public policies, with the black woman’s response being that of protecting her body by any and all means.

Since abortions were illegal, many women, regardless of race, went to desperate lengths to perform abortions, many of them self-induced. As stated by Loretta Ross in “Black Abortions,” Between 1965 and 1967, in Georgia alone, the black maternal death rate was fourteen times that of white women due to illegal abortions. The breakthrough was, indeed, the Griswold v. Connecticut ruling in 1965 of a woman’s right to sexual privacy, as well as Roe v. Wade in 1973.

While pro-lifers such as American Life League tend to entrench themselves in the rights of the fetus, I believe this deters attention away from the true issue at hand, which is a woman’s right to self-determination. When Judie Brown outlandishly uses such phrases as “culture of death” to describe what abortion ultimately leads to, this prevents a thorough analysis of the culture of death that occurs everyday in cities of concentrated poverty, due to structural and institutionalized racism. The schools in these cities are the best example of such institutionalized racism and sexism.

With schools that have federally-funded “abstinence-only” health programs, it is impossible for young black women to accurately understand themselves sexually, or the engendered power dynamics behind sex, which prevent them from ever becoming sexually autonomous. Judie Brown so eloquently describes sex as “belonging exclusively to the domain of marriage,” but these beliefs are not at all steeped in the reality of this country, and the health classes should mirror our realities, not our insurmountable hopes.

It is in any woman’s best interest, but particularly women of color, to have access to birth control as a sexual human right. For far too long, someone else’s story has clouded our own, that of whites, that of our husband’s, that of the Right believing they are speaking for us. For far too long, black women have had to walk thin lines, such as controlling their fertility against their boyfriend’s permission, while still believing in the same moral fabric as many Right-wingers who proclaim it is a sin to abort a fetus.

In the struggle against racism, sexism, and classism, black women and other women of color exist in a multi-layered world of oppression. Consequently, if this right to birth control is evident of our right to self-determination, it will certainly impact all women in the US as well. Once we have solidified our sexual autonomy, access to proper health care and information, proper and extensive education surrounding healthy sexuality, basic needs such as stable employment, income, food, and shelter, and for women on welfare, assistance with child care and welfare to work training, then and only then can we concern ourselves with what constitutes a “culture of death” in our society. The urgency of these needs in an already failing economy is no longer just a matter of choice, but a matter of survival.