Let's begin by acknowledging gladly that 77 percent of all Americans support the legal right to abortion — that's seven in 10 citizens of the United States who believe abortion should remain legal and accessible. And let's acknowledge that telemedicine, for use with medication abortion, has been a boon to women. But let's also understand that Ohio has just banned the use of telemedicine for precisely that purpose. And let's further understand that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, states will be the main abortion battleground in 2021, that abortion rights are in grave peril, and that 2021 has already set a record in terms of abortion restrictions. An ordinance recently passed in Texas is one example, as are more under-the-radar local ordinances in other towns and cities. The Texas Legislature has approved first of its kind legislation for the tactics it uses to prevent access to abortion. It paves the way...
Since interviewing Maria Ressa recently for “Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan,” I've been haunted more than usual by thoughts of my special sisters, women journalists. Ressa, a former CNN Bureau Chief, is one hell of a journalist, and founder of Rappler.com, an online news site under fierce attack by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s authoritarian government. Me, I'm a journalist, yes, but. I'm also an activist, who believes that "objectivity" is usually subjective. And I'm basically a writer, one all over the map. My foundational rock is poetry. But having fallen in love with the English language and decided I wanted to be a "woman of letters" when I was about nine, I grew up into someone who writes novels, stories, plays, essays, editorials, works of feminist theory, political analyses, polemics, and any other form of writing I can lay hands on—from grocery lists to broadcast/podcast commentaries to, now,...
So, serious stuff is happening. Like yet another Senate attempt to delay but later slither through a health bill that would literally kill thousands of Americans. Like Antarctica's ice-shelf calving an iceberg almost as large as Delaware. Like the United Nations closing down its cholera-vaccination campaign in Yemen because the rampant spread of the disease there, combined with growing famine—both of which are side-effects of the devastation of war—would obliterate vaccination efforts. Not that anyone really gives a damn about Yemen, where a proxy regional power struggle, 1400-years-old, is being waged between (Shiite) Iran and (Sunni) Saudi Arabia, currently proxies in turn for (pro-Iran) Russia and the (pro-Saudi Arabia) U.S. Except now that Russia might be TrumPutinizing the U.S., well, Yemen's dispensable, like road kill. Can you imagine just how bad things must be for the U.N. to announce it's triaging an agonized little failed state—the poorest in...
