My aunt, whom I love to the depts of the oceans, spontaneously visited this weekend, along with my two little cousins (10 ish and 13 ish)
I hadn't showered and was distracted by the "should I put on a bra, but i'm in my own home, how much walking around will I be doing while they're here, I'm wearing a white tshirt, but there's big bold lettering, I love my breasts" going on in my head.
I digress..
We chatted, my cousin is doing horseback riding lessons (when I was her age, I understood horseback riding as only being for rich people) and I envy what she gets to be doing (she trick-or-treated on horseback!)
And then "cuz he's a white guy" came out. My aunt was letting me know the status of my uncles application to be an RCMP officer. After reading an article about the RCMP recruiting women, aboriginal people and people of colour, their conclusion was that he wasn't getting the job "cuz he's a white guy".
First, I should state that I distrust the RCMP completely. Recruiting strategies are bullshit until the agency itself does a major overhaul of its cultural practices, working approaches and serious work with the individuals who perpetuate hate within their ranks. The RCMP is so far down the racism rabbit hole, I'd much rather abolish the institution, but that's for a whole other post.
I think she must have been confused when I quikly responded with a sincere "a good!". I then tried to explain that these are just recruitment strategies, and rather meaningless for making the RCMP actually able to do its job (which is...) properly.
I wonder what this could have done for their perspective. Alas, this is where we're at.
"White people with white privilege, censoring any mention of white privilege, because they have the (white) privilege to do so. how predictable. and unoriginal." - Suzy Yim
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
40 days of city-sanctionned intimidation and harasment
“40 days for life” has once again set itself up on Bank Street in Ottawa, across the street from the Morgentaler abortion clinic. Anti-choice protesters are carrying signs that read things I’d rather not trigger readers with. Its sensationalistic, sexist, shame-based bullshit, ‘nuff said. For 40 straight days on Bank Street, an empty baby carriage is symbolically bungeed to a post. Pamphlets are distributed that spew out misinformation already debunked by countless reputable health organizations. Street counselors sent by the Helpers of Gods Precious Children intimidate, harass, and bully women as they enter the building. Catholic school groups travel from Peterborough to visit the “ground zero” site.
The 40 days for life is an anti-choice campaign, aimed at “saving the unborn” where “the most visible component is the prayer vigil outside the Abortion Mills in every participating city throughout the 40 days, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.” While the measures of success are questionable, the organizers claim that “the results of the 40 Day Campaigns have been outstanding with hundreds of mother and their babies being rescued from despair and death.”
While this particular form of harassment and intimidation tries to target cis-gendered women, the same groups organizing and participating in the 40 days of harassment and intimidation campaign have targeted the queer community, sex workers, and young people wanting comprehensive sexual health education.
“40 days for life” is promoted by the haters at Campaign Life Coalition. This group runs many hate-promotion campaigns, which currently include one against comprehensive sexual health education, and another that opposes policy like the Liberal government’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, “which will lead to the normalization of homosexuality”. I sure hope it does.
R.E.A.L. Women of Canada actively imposes their supposed “pro-family” stance by endorsing the 40 days for life campaign. This group promotes a traditional wife-and-mother role for women and is stridently anti-feminist and anti-gay. R.E.A.L Women is a strong cheerleader for social conservative causes and has been at the forefront of several battles, including fighting against gay marriage, intervening at court to uphold Canada’s harmful prostitution laws, cutting funds to women’s groups, and interfering at the United Nations to curtail human rights for women everywhere.
With their “I regret my abortion” signs, the Silent No More Campaign is often present on Bank Street. A project by the male-led Anglicans for Life and the Priests for Life to help support various anti-choice "awareness" efforts, they solicit tearful testimonies from guilt-ridden religious women who regret their abortions. Women experience all sorts of emotions following their abortions, relief being the most common one, and few women suffer long-term negative psychological effects because of their abortion. While I would agree that women need more safe spaces to discuss all of their emotions following an abortion, there is no organization out there with ready-made sandwich boards stating “I regret choosing to parent” and it is unfair to state that your experience will be the same for someone else.
“Join us in this campaign. Help us save more lives. And, eventually, by God's grace and with enough prayer, fasting, peaceful witnessing, and plenty of courage, we can rid our culture of the scourge of abortion forever! What will God accomplish when people of faith across our community and throughout our nation unite for 40 days of prayer and fasting, pulling out all the stops to end the violence of abortion”
“40 days for life” has impressive organization, including coordinators, a user-friendly website, and many churches and Catholic schools – each responsible for one day of harassment. This ensures city-wide participation and strong people power.
Anti-Choice groups protesting in front of abortion clinics have a significant detrimental effect on society’s efforts to maintain safe and secure access to abortion care. By attempting to prevent access to abortion services, these groups launch direct attacks against women’s freedoms.
Abortion protesters, with their gruesome photos and their rhetoric of blood and murder, disturb the peace, offend public decency, and inflict psychological damage. Their manipulative methods can shock, unnecessarily upset, and even traumatize women who have had an abortion, are about to have one, or may consider one in the future. Their attempts to block access to abortion clinics are against the law and are a violation of privacy. Most alarmingly, many Ottawa anti-choice individuals have engaged in overt violence against providers and clinic staff, most of which is caused or encouraged by protests outside abortion clinics. As a pro-choice sexual health educator, I’ve received death threats, and my vehicle was vandalized with the words “ there is a bomb inside” as well as “murderer”.
To comply with the Canada Health Act, as well as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, abortion clinics need to have an accessible, safe and private environment for women seeking their Medicare-funded procedure.
The province of BC with its Access to Abortion Services Act, clinics in Calgary, Toronto, and Hull to name a few have complied and enforced bubble zones, protest-free zones around abortion clinics. Consistently, rights to freedoms of expression are trumped by rights to access to health care.
Despite this being highly inappropriate considering the precedent all over the country, the city of Ottawa has sanctioned harassment of women for far too long by giving a permit to protest to the “40 days for life” campaign.
Public health and pro-choice organizations are under-funded and overtaxed already. Currently, organizations in Ottawa don’t have the capacity to offer a viable counter to this campaign of misinformation, harassment, and intimidation; they are too busy supporting their current clients. Under a conservative government, pro-choice organizations are validly concerned with their funding and charity statuses, leaving meaningful pro-choice activism to grassroots organizing.
Here comes the Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa, a small and dedicated group of sexual justice activists. In response to the 40 days of harassment and intimidation, PCCO-CPCO has organized an online petition and letter writing campaign demanding that the City revoke the anti-choicers’ permit. We believe that women should not have to run a gauntlet of anti-choice activists in order to access legal health services. The City of Ottawa must immediately revoke this permit in order to respect the dignity, privacy, and legal rights of women to unimpeded access to health services at the Morgentaler Clinic.
We are also organizing a Nov 1 fundraiser for Canadians for Choice’s abortion access fund, called “Bodies of Dissent: a panel on building radical support for our sexual justice movements.” When abortion services are only offered in 15.9% of all Canadian hospitals, and half of these hospitals only provide abortion services up to 13 weeks gestation, with wait times of up to 6 weeks and judgemental gatekeepers who impose their moralistic misinformed ideas, abortion is most certainly not as accessible as it should be.
We are frustrated with constantly having to act in reaction to well-funded and well-established anti-choice actions. While we are spending so much energy trying to support those traumatized by sexist and intimidation-based campaigns like the 40 days, most of us in the pro-choice movement would rather invest our energies in tackling issues of poverty, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism. Instead, we are stuck battling against harassing anti-choicers, uninformed health care workers, indifferent municipal employees, an organized “pro-life” caucus in government, and well-funded anti-choice lobbyists.
Along with fighting the antis on Bank Street, we’re also fighting them in Parliament. Bill C-510 is a private member's bill that would amend the Criminal Code to prohibit coercing a woman into an abortion via physical or financial threats, illegal acts, or through “argumentative and rancorous badgering or importunity”. It was introduced in April by the chair of the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge of Winnipeg South.
This bill promotes abortion stigma, paternalizes women, and puts providers at risk. The bill is redundant and misguided. The bill patronizes women by implying they are frequently coerced into abortion, but the vast majority of women make their own decision to have an abortion and take responsibility for it, and abortion clinics ensure that women are making an uncoerced choice of their own free will. If coercion is present, it’s usually in the context of domestic violence. If the intent is really to protect women from abusive partners, we need better and more comprehensive solutions for supporting women living in abusive situations, perhaps with funding for women’s equity seeking groups.
When it was confirmed that the 40 days campaign would still be allowed to happen in Ottawa this fall, the pro-choice community came together to respond to the Morgentaler Clinic’s request to organize volunteers who would stand outside in front of the clinic. Planned Parenthood Ottawa (PPO) and Canadians for Choice (CFC) collaborated to train volunteers to provide pro-choice support and accompaniment. The role of the volunteers is mainly to act as a peaceful pro-choice presence for clinic patients, and to protect patients from the harassment of anti-choice ‘street counsellors’ if necessary. When I did my first 2-hour shift at the Morgentaler Clinic, wearing a bright pink t-shirt trying to be a pro-choice presence, about sixteen people came up to thank us. One woman just wanted to talk and another got off the bus just to come and thank us (which led to a longer conversation on sexual justice). One man also stopped, presenting himself as a lawyer and asking why we didn’t already have a bubble zone in Ottawa. He asked if we could call the hate crimes unit, and I reminded him that gender isn’t a basis for a hate crime in Canada.
Another man walked by, quickly interrupting the conversation to state that “I am from a family of 9 children”, as if to say that being pro-choice means that we are pro-abortion. While there are many feminists that identify as pro-abortion as a political stance, they certainly do not impose abortion as the sole option for people facing unintended pregnancy. This would be anti-choice.
What does it mean to be pro-choice? It means having the liberty and ability to make your own choices, uncoerced, regarding your sexual and reproductive health, and having control over your own body. The Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa affirms a definition of pro-choice that is inclusive of all aspects of sexual and reproductive health and honours the right to bodily integrity and privacy. This can include whether or when to have children, how to respond to pregnancy (whether with abortion, making an adoption plan or becoming a parent), whether to have sexual relationships, when to have them and with whom, and how we choose to configure our relationships. Pro-choice includes having the right to choose which birth control option works best for you (if any), which methods you wish to use to practice safer sex, who you wish to include in making decisions about your sexual and reproductive health, how you wish to express your sexuality, and choosing to come out or not, choosing whether or not to label your sexual orientation or gender identity without fear of discrimination. Pro-choice information is evidence-based, legal, and inclusive and shared in an unbiased and factual manner. Pro-choice allows for all of the above to remain safe and accessible. Lastly, being pro-choice means respecting the decisions that others make with regards to their sexual and reproductive health, and trusting them to be the expert in their own sexual well-being. For some people, pro-choice extends beyond the realm of sexual and reproductive health and each person’s definition becomes personalized for them.
The Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa envisions a community that celebrates healthy sexuality, its diversity of expression and reproductive choice as fundamental human rights for individuals throughout life.
Mélanie Stafford
Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa / Coalition pro-choix d’Ottawa
For more information:
Anti-choice organizations:
Helpers of Ottawa
40 Days For Life Ottawa
Campaign Life Coalition
Pro-choice organization:
Canadians for Choice
Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada
Planned Parenthood Ottawa
Get involved:
Bodies of Dissent: a panel on building radical support for our sexual justice movements
Online petition: Revoke the 40 days for life’s permit to protest
The 40 days for life is an anti-choice campaign, aimed at “saving the unborn” where “the most visible component is the prayer vigil outside the Abortion Mills in every participating city throughout the 40 days, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.” While the measures of success are questionable, the organizers claim that “the results of the 40 Day Campaigns have been outstanding with hundreds of mother and their babies being rescued from despair and death.”
While this particular form of harassment and intimidation tries to target cis-gendered women, the same groups organizing and participating in the 40 days of harassment and intimidation campaign have targeted the queer community, sex workers, and young people wanting comprehensive sexual health education.
“40 days for life” is promoted by the haters at Campaign Life Coalition. This group runs many hate-promotion campaigns, which currently include one against comprehensive sexual health education, and another that opposes policy like the Liberal government’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, “which will lead to the normalization of homosexuality”. I sure hope it does.
R.E.A.L. Women of Canada actively imposes their supposed “pro-family” stance by endorsing the 40 days for life campaign. This group promotes a traditional wife-and-mother role for women and is stridently anti-feminist and anti-gay. R.E.A.L Women is a strong cheerleader for social conservative causes and has been at the forefront of several battles, including fighting against gay marriage, intervening at court to uphold Canada’s harmful prostitution laws, cutting funds to women’s groups, and interfering at the United Nations to curtail human rights for women everywhere.
With their “I regret my abortion” signs, the Silent No More Campaign is often present on Bank Street. A project by the male-led Anglicans for Life and the Priests for Life to help support various anti-choice "awareness" efforts, they solicit tearful testimonies from guilt-ridden religious women who regret their abortions. Women experience all sorts of emotions following their abortions, relief being the most common one, and few women suffer long-term negative psychological effects because of their abortion. While I would agree that women need more safe spaces to discuss all of their emotions following an abortion, there is no organization out there with ready-made sandwich boards stating “I regret choosing to parent” and it is unfair to state that your experience will be the same for someone else.
“Join us in this campaign. Help us save more lives. And, eventually, by God's grace and with enough prayer, fasting, peaceful witnessing, and plenty of courage, we can rid our culture of the scourge of abortion forever! What will God accomplish when people of faith across our community and throughout our nation unite for 40 days of prayer and fasting, pulling out all the stops to end the violence of abortion”
“40 days for life” has impressive organization, including coordinators, a user-friendly website, and many churches and Catholic schools – each responsible for one day of harassment. This ensures city-wide participation and strong people power.
Anti-Choice groups protesting in front of abortion clinics have a significant detrimental effect on society’s efforts to maintain safe and secure access to abortion care. By attempting to prevent access to abortion services, these groups launch direct attacks against women’s freedoms.
Abortion protesters, with their gruesome photos and their rhetoric of blood and murder, disturb the peace, offend public decency, and inflict psychological damage. Their manipulative methods can shock, unnecessarily upset, and even traumatize women who have had an abortion, are about to have one, or may consider one in the future. Their attempts to block access to abortion clinics are against the law and are a violation of privacy. Most alarmingly, many Ottawa anti-choice individuals have engaged in overt violence against providers and clinic staff, most of which is caused or encouraged by protests outside abortion clinics. As a pro-choice sexual health educator, I’ve received death threats, and my vehicle was vandalized with the words “ there is a bomb inside” as well as “murderer”.
To comply with the Canada Health Act, as well as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, abortion clinics need to have an accessible, safe and private environment for women seeking their Medicare-funded procedure.
The province of BC with its Access to Abortion Services Act, clinics in Calgary, Toronto, and Hull to name a few have complied and enforced bubble zones, protest-free zones around abortion clinics. Consistently, rights to freedoms of expression are trumped by rights to access to health care.
Despite this being highly inappropriate considering the precedent all over the country, the city of Ottawa has sanctioned harassment of women for far too long by giving a permit to protest to the “40 days for life” campaign.
Public health and pro-choice organizations are under-funded and overtaxed already. Currently, organizations in Ottawa don’t have the capacity to offer a viable counter to this campaign of misinformation, harassment, and intimidation; they are too busy supporting their current clients. Under a conservative government, pro-choice organizations are validly concerned with their funding and charity statuses, leaving meaningful pro-choice activism to grassroots organizing.
Here comes the Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa, a small and dedicated group of sexual justice activists. In response to the 40 days of harassment and intimidation, PCCO-CPCO has organized an online petition and letter writing campaign demanding that the City revoke the anti-choicers’ permit. We believe that women should not have to run a gauntlet of anti-choice activists in order to access legal health services. The City of Ottawa must immediately revoke this permit in order to respect the dignity, privacy, and legal rights of women to unimpeded access to health services at the Morgentaler Clinic.
We are also organizing a Nov 1 fundraiser for Canadians for Choice’s abortion access fund, called “Bodies of Dissent: a panel on building radical support for our sexual justice movements.” When abortion services are only offered in 15.9% of all Canadian hospitals, and half of these hospitals only provide abortion services up to 13 weeks gestation, with wait times of up to 6 weeks and judgemental gatekeepers who impose their moralistic misinformed ideas, abortion is most certainly not as accessible as it should be.
We are frustrated with constantly having to act in reaction to well-funded and well-established anti-choice actions. While we are spending so much energy trying to support those traumatized by sexist and intimidation-based campaigns like the 40 days, most of us in the pro-choice movement would rather invest our energies in tackling issues of poverty, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism. Instead, we are stuck battling against harassing anti-choicers, uninformed health care workers, indifferent municipal employees, an organized “pro-life” caucus in government, and well-funded anti-choice lobbyists.
Along with fighting the antis on Bank Street, we’re also fighting them in Parliament. Bill C-510 is a private member's bill that would amend the Criminal Code to prohibit coercing a woman into an abortion via physical or financial threats, illegal acts, or through “argumentative and rancorous badgering or importunity”. It was introduced in April by the chair of the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge of Winnipeg South.
This bill promotes abortion stigma, paternalizes women, and puts providers at risk. The bill is redundant and misguided. The bill patronizes women by implying they are frequently coerced into abortion, but the vast majority of women make their own decision to have an abortion and take responsibility for it, and abortion clinics ensure that women are making an uncoerced choice of their own free will. If coercion is present, it’s usually in the context of domestic violence. If the intent is really to protect women from abusive partners, we need better and more comprehensive solutions for supporting women living in abusive situations, perhaps with funding for women’s equity seeking groups.
When it was confirmed that the 40 days campaign would still be allowed to happen in Ottawa this fall, the pro-choice community came together to respond to the Morgentaler Clinic’s request to organize volunteers who would stand outside in front of the clinic. Planned Parenthood Ottawa (PPO) and Canadians for Choice (CFC) collaborated to train volunteers to provide pro-choice support and accompaniment. The role of the volunteers is mainly to act as a peaceful pro-choice presence for clinic patients, and to protect patients from the harassment of anti-choice ‘street counsellors’ if necessary. When I did my first 2-hour shift at the Morgentaler Clinic, wearing a bright pink t-shirt trying to be a pro-choice presence, about sixteen people came up to thank us. One woman just wanted to talk and another got off the bus just to come and thank us (which led to a longer conversation on sexual justice). One man also stopped, presenting himself as a lawyer and asking why we didn’t already have a bubble zone in Ottawa. He asked if we could call the hate crimes unit, and I reminded him that gender isn’t a basis for a hate crime in Canada.
Another man walked by, quickly interrupting the conversation to state that “I am from a family of 9 children”, as if to say that being pro-choice means that we are pro-abortion. While there are many feminists that identify as pro-abortion as a political stance, they certainly do not impose abortion as the sole option for people facing unintended pregnancy. This would be anti-choice.
What does it mean to be pro-choice? It means having the liberty and ability to make your own choices, uncoerced, regarding your sexual and reproductive health, and having control over your own body. The Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa affirms a definition of pro-choice that is inclusive of all aspects of sexual and reproductive health and honours the right to bodily integrity and privacy. This can include whether or when to have children, how to respond to pregnancy (whether with abortion, making an adoption plan or becoming a parent), whether to have sexual relationships, when to have them and with whom, and how we choose to configure our relationships. Pro-choice includes having the right to choose which birth control option works best for you (if any), which methods you wish to use to practice safer sex, who you wish to include in making decisions about your sexual and reproductive health, how you wish to express your sexuality, and choosing to come out or not, choosing whether or not to label your sexual orientation or gender identity without fear of discrimination. Pro-choice information is evidence-based, legal, and inclusive and shared in an unbiased and factual manner. Pro-choice allows for all of the above to remain safe and accessible. Lastly, being pro-choice means respecting the decisions that others make with regards to their sexual and reproductive health, and trusting them to be the expert in their own sexual well-being. For some people, pro-choice extends beyond the realm of sexual and reproductive health and each person’s definition becomes personalized for them.
The Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa envisions a community that celebrates healthy sexuality, its diversity of expression and reproductive choice as fundamental human rights for individuals throughout life.
Mélanie Stafford
Pro-Choice Coalition of Ottawa / Coalition pro-choix d’Ottawa
For more information:
Anti-choice organizations:
Helpers of Ottawa
40 Days For Life Ottawa
Campaign Life Coalition
Pro-choice organization:
Canadians for Choice
Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada
Planned Parenthood Ottawa
Get involved:
Bodies of Dissent: a panel on building radical support for our sexual justice movements
Online petition: Revoke the 40 days for life’s permit to protest
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