Viewpoint – A Mennonite recipe for abortion

By: MaryLou Driedger
Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024

Last month I went to see the play The Recipe at Winnipeg’s Warehouse Theatre. The script was the work of well-known Manitoba Mennonite writer Armin Wiebe. It featured characters Wiebe developed for his highly successful 1984 novel The Salvation of Yasch Siemens and its sequels all set in the fictional community of Gutenthal.

The recipe referenced in the title of Wiebe’s drama was, to the surprise of some theatre goers, actually a home remedy for bringing on a woman’s period. It was, in essence, a natural medicinal alternative to a clinical abortion.

Continued: https://www.thecarillon.com/local/2024/12/07/column-viewpoint-a-mennonite-recipe-for-abortion

07.12.2024

Mennonite abortion remedy

USA – “We Never Assumed Anything”: A Lifetime of Providing Abortion Care

In their new book We Choose To, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their decades helping women who needed abortions—before, during, and after Roe.

Regina Mahone
November 29, 2024

Five years ago, when Curtis Boyd, MD, and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, PhD, RN, set out to write a book about their lives and 50-year-career providing abortion care in Texas and New Mexico, Roe was still the law of the land. But their book, which was published in September, made its debut two years after that landmark case was overturned and just a few short months before Donald J. Trump will retake the White House. As they explain in the Afterword of We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe (Disruption Books), the work they devoted their lives to, expanding access to abortions, is being undone—and once Trump is back in power, that reversal will only accelerate. We can expect that Trump will seek out ways to impose international abortion bans like the global gag rule, and his supporters would like to see him enforce the Comstock Act, which would ban mailing abortion pills. Knowing all of that, Glenna’s question in the Afterword hits hard: “Why did we bother?”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/curtis-glenna-boyd-abortion-provider-interview/

Young, British and Anti-Abortion review – surely gen Z are too smart to devalue women’s lives like this?

This documentary meets the young people trying to fight against reproductive rights – and exposes the problems in their world view

Lucy Mangan
Wed 20 Nov 2024

Documentary-maker Poppy Jay’s new film has a title guaranteed to make my hackles rise, and perhaps the hackles of many others in a country that polls nearly 90% support for a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy: Young, British and Anti-Abortion. It’s an investigation into gen Z’s increasing presence among those who would seek to circumscribe or cancel that right. It looks at how they are looking to reposition the debate as a human rights issue rather than a religious one, and how they are emboldened by the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US two years ago. Jay meets a variety of young activists who hope that once again when the US sneezes, we will catch cold.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/nov/20/young-british-and-anti-abortion-review-surely-gen-z-are-too-smart-to-devalue-womens-lives-like-this

20.11.2024

Film, Art, Books

abortion film

Abortion Resistance

Centre for Bio-ethical Reform UK

UK – BBC Factual announces Young, British and Anti-Abortion (w/t)

The documentary sees film-maker Poppy Jay meeting the new and surprisingly young faces at the frontline of the UK anti-abortion movement.

25 October 2024

BBC Factual today announces Young, British and Anti-Abortion (w/t), a 1x60’ documentary for BBC One and iPlayer.

The abortion rate in Britain is at the highest on record*. While opposition to abortion remains a minority view – a recent British poll found nearly 90% of respondents saying they were pro-abortion – film-maker Poppy Jay wants to explore whether there is a new demographic galvanising the UK anti-abortion movement: Gen Z.

Abortion rights are being widely debated in the US, but is a new generation campaigning to row back abortion rights in the UK too?

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2024/bbc-factual-announces-young-british-and-anti-abortion

25.10.2024

Film, Art, Books

anti-choice youth

Daisy Scalchi

Head of Religion and Ethics

The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Relentless. But So Is Jessica Valenti.

She once worried there wouldn’t be enough abortion news to cover. Now she’s just trying to keep up.

Ruth Murai
Oct 8, 2024

“Today’s newsletter will probably overwhelm you,” Jessica Valenti wrote in a note preceding the Wednesday, September 25, edition of Abortion, Every Day, the Substack where she breaks down the news on reproductive rights. The first order of business: an explanation of how a powerful anti-abortion group is directing an ad campaign that blames pro-choice advocates for the deaths of Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman. Miller and Thurman were two Georgia women who, according to a ProPublica investigation, died because of the state abortion ban. “Honestly, how dare they,” Valenti wrote. “How dare they use these women’s names; how dare they use their pictures. It’s just beyond the pale.”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/jessica-valenti-abortion-book-profile/

London play paused after theatregoers felt faint during abortion scene

Mainly male audience members had to step out of preview performance of The Years after graphic scene

Nadia Khomami
Wed 31 Jul 2024

An award-winning play premiering in London had to be stopped for 10 minutes during a preview performance on Monday after several mainly male audience members called for medical assistance after a graphic abortion scene.

The Years, directed by Eline Arbo, is about one woman’s personal and political story, set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing postwar Europe – from advances in reproductive rights to setbacks such as sexism in the workplace.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/jul/31/london-play-the-years-paused-after-theatregoers-felt-faint-during-abortion-scene

31.07.2024

Feminist Film History Is Alive in Bologna

Revival festivals like Il Cinema Ritrovato drive home the importance of funding for and preservation of the arts. Long live feminist cinema rediscovered!

PUBLISHED 7/21/2024
by MAGGIE HENNEFELD, Ms. Magazine

Three thousand cinephiles congregated at dusk in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy, on June 27 for an outdoor cine-concert of The Wind (1928)—a silent film about desperate love in bad weather—with the message “FREE ABORTION” projected on a church at the side of the square. The people hummed in euphoric anticipation. But they were not alone. Lesbian vampires, cross-dressing gun slingers, communist sex workers, feminist cinematographers and a woman whose bad date literally turns out to be Satan—these hell-raising dissidents all had pride of place in the feminist programming at Il Cinema Ritrovato.

The annual archival film festival draws thousands of spectators from all over the world to Bologna every June. The Ritrovato’s rallying cry is to spotlight long unseen, unjustly forgotten but urgently timely works from the celluloid archive and unleash them onto the volatile, open-ended present. A pride parade, reproductive rights activism and pro-Palestine student protests intersected with a nine-day festival whose programming ranged from Japanese costume dramas and Napoléon biopics to Algerian feminist essay films, 16mm queer body poems, and “second wave exploitation” comedies about utopian-socialist polygamy.

Continued; https://msmagazine.com/2024/07/21/feminist-film-history-bologna-italy-il-cinema-ritrovato/

21.07.2024

Film, Art, Books

Delphine Seyrig

Ellen Burstyn

feminist film history

Hillary Clinton Has Some Tough Words for Democrats, and for Women

In an interview for a forthcoming book, Mrs. Clinton also suggested that if Donald Trump won in November “we may never have another actual election.”

By Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias
May 25, 2024

Hillary Clinton criticized her fellow Democrats over what she described as a decades-in-the-making failure to protect abortion rights, saying in her first extended interview about the fall of Roe v. Wade that her party underestimated the growing strength of anti-abortion forces until many Democrats were improbably “taken by surprise” by the landmark Dobbs decision in 2022.

In wide-ranging and unusually frank comments, Mrs. Clinton said Democrats had spent decades in a state of denial that a right enshrined in American life for generations could fall — that faith in the courts and legal precedent had made politicians, voters and officials unable to see clearly how the anti-abortion movement was chipping away at abortion rights, restricting access to the procedure and transforming the Supreme Court, until it was too late.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/us/politics/hillary-clinton-abortion.html

A Necessary Kindness by Juno Carey review – demystifying abortion: an insider’s account of its long and painful history

Eight years working in abortion provision led the author to make this frank and moving case for safeguarding reproductive freedoms – and ending the culture of secrecy and guilt

Barbara Ellen
Sun 7 Apr 2024

It isn’t long into reading Juno Carey’s book that you realise it also serves as a meditation on women and shame. A former NHS midwife who moved into abortion provision (first in clinics then on aftercare helplines), Carey (not her real name) was asked how she could do both, but in her view: “The gap between helping women deliver babies and helping them terminate unwanted pregnancies no longer seems wide to me.” As the title says, it is “a necessary kindness”, another way of aiding pregnant women. While acknowledging the complexities, Carey seeks to demystify abortion – the fact of it, the need for it, the processes of it – to rid it of the long, painful history of judgment, blame and misogynistic juju, and stress its rightful function in a civilised society. Abortion, she asserts, is healthcare.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/07/a-necessary-kindness-by-juno-carey-review-stories-from-frontline-of-abortion-care

07.04.2024

Breaking the Silence: Abortion Rights in Kenya

WATCH: Our documentary investigates Kenya’s hidden crisis, claiming the lives of more than 2,000 people a year

18 March 2024
Open Democracy
Film: 45 minutes

Legal ambiguity over abortions in Kenya pushes thousands of women into unsafe reproductive health care services each year. It’s a hidden crisis that has claimed the lives of over 2,000 people annually, while many more end up facing life-altering complications.

In this openDemocracy/BBC joint investigation, Linda Ngari explores how abortion is shrouded in stigma and misinformation, with desperate women turning to dangerous methods.

Who is responsible for this public health crisis and what can be done to save these lives? Interviewing Kenyan women, doctors, campaigners and religious groups, Ngari breaks the taboo around abortion – and shows how controversial ‘crisis pregnancy centres’ have been allowed to flourish.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/breaking-the-silence-abortion-rights-kenya/

18.03.2024