Perhaps you don’t follow a million feminists* on Twitter like I do, so you may not be aware that they/we are all pissed about the Tebow Super Bowl ad. If you’re like me and you weren’t watching Super Bowl 44 either, then you really have no idea what I’m talking about.
Let me set the stage:
The notoriously anti-choice organization calling themselves “Focus on the Family” paid umpteen millions of dollars to run an ad during the Super Bowl that depicted Pam Tebow (the football player’s mom) being faced with the choice to either abort Tim, or keep the pregnancy. Um, you can guess which she chose.
Now, the reason this is pissing feminists off is that CBS has never allowed this kind of controversial ad during the Super Bowl before, and we believe that a sporting event is no place for abortion politics. But CBS decided to scrap their previous anti-advocacy ad policy and took the paycheck from Focus on the Family – a paycheck, as so many feminists have already noted, that could have gone to HELP women faced with unwanted pregnancies. You don’t see Planned Parenthood generating Super Bowl ads because they use the money they get to help women. What a novel concept.
So, the feminists and the Women’s Media Center were all over this one – even sending in the President of WMC, Jehmu Greene, to make an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor. Unfortunately, as much as I think O’Reilly is a jackass who never lets anyone talk, I also think Jehmu lost the argument. By the end of his stupid rant, he even had me thinking “Yeah, what’s the big fucking deal? It was her choice.”
Now wait, I still know what the big-fucking-deal is – I am a pro-choice feminist after all – but it got me thinking that we had a whole lot of other feminist fish to fry this week that the mainstream feminists, and the Women’s Media Center, seemed to flatly ignore.
Yeah, I get it. We’re pissed that some organization shelled out millions of dollars (making them poorer, btw) to put out some vague ad on the Super Bowl that probably didn’t influence anybody to do anything except go,
“Hey look – it’s Tebow. And his mom. That’s sweet. But I’d rather see Danica Patrick’s tits in another Go Daddy commercial. Now pass me the nachos.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the influential media last week…
There’s a woman strapped to an operating table, live on the Today Show, undergoing a cesarean delivery with no medical indication to warrant this major abdominal surgery, which the Today Show Talking Heads falsely touted as “medically necessary” for reasons that the ACOG do not even support.
And the feminists uneducated about cesarean awareness issues will say,
“Who cares if she had a cesarean! It’s her choice!”
To which those of us educated on cesarean awareness issues would respond,
“It’s not an informed choice when someone tricks you into it. Talking a woman into major abdominal surgery for your own convenience and without any true medical indication is deplorable. And selling your viewers that same snake oil is even worse. That surgery just compromised that woman’s uterine health and patient autonomy forever, and probably for no good reason. THAT is why we care.”
And then the woman’s doctor told her on national television that she was free to birth vaginally next time, and what he must have meant by that is that she’s “free” to have a VBAC as long as she can find one of the few doctors or hospitals left that will truly support her decision to birth vaginally after a cesarean. And if you’ve ever been a mother looking for a supportive VBAC provider, you know what an impossible task this can be. My OB also told me I could have a VBAC when I was strapped to that OR table. What he meant by that was,
“as long as you don’t try to birth vaginally during my daughter’s birthday party, because if that happens, I’m going to try to force you to have a cesarean, which you will spend 38 hours fighting off, and eventually you will birth vaginally, but I will have ruined your birth experience in the process – so yeah… birth vaginally on my terms, and on my schedule, or suffer the consequences, lady, because now that you have a nice uterine scar, all I have to do is say the words ‘uterine rupture’ and I can get you to do pretty much whatever I want.”
Oh, and then on Good Morning America, Giselle Bündche’s graceful, natural home birth in a tub has some talking heads over there spouting off all the “risks” associated with water birth – you know… the “risks” being that if you’re birthing comfortably in the water, then you might have a less painful childbirth, and the hospital then will not get to poke you with all their pharmaceuticals and non-evidence based, non-woman-friendly policies. Water birth is very bad for hospital business, you know.
So all the while that women’s reproductive choices are being trampled on in mainstream media outlets last week – where are all the feminists? Where’s the Women’s Media Center? Where, Where, Where?!?!
I’ll tell you where – they’re busy paying more lip service to a Super Bowl commercial than it deserved. They’re busy pretending that most women would elect a major abdominal surgery even if they truly knew the risks involved, and that abortion is the only reproductive justice battle we have to fight.
Well, I’m one feminist who will spend my fight on the women who are being cut into without informed consent, and on the women who want to give birth where ever they need to even if it won’t make the local hospital a nickle.
I just wish the Women’s Media Center would report on these crimes against reproductive rights. They can start by sending a letter to NBC.
Tell me, if you’re a feminist, what have you done to help birthing women retain their legal rights to patient choice and informed consent? If all you’re fighting for is abortion access, think about moving a step beyond that every once in awhile, and helping the women who choose to continue the pregnancy. They need justice too.
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*oh, and don’t get all nit-picky with me, I know there are some wonderful feminists fighting for birth choice – you know who you are, and so do I, so I didn’t mean you.
Stacy, if you can't find "A more despicable human being" than Margaret Sanger, I believe you know little of history, and walk around wearing blinders.
For the record, she was no great supporter of abortions:
"While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization." -Mrgaret Sanger.
She did believe in both positive and negative eugenics. She was a product of her times. But if you look at some govt policies, ie; immigration, you'll see that these have almost been state sanctioned. I'm not going to touch the subject of eugenics with a ten foot pole though.
"All you feminists who support organizations like Planned Parenthood and think they are “helping” women only show your total ignorance of WHO Margaret Sanger was and what she believed in and what she wanted for the world. A more despicable human being is hard to find. A lot of her eugenics beliefs came straight out of Nazi Germany. Read it for yourself."
Berating others for supporting PP based on some of Margaret Sanger's beliefs? I hope you don't drive VW or a Ford.
I'll defend anyone's right to bodily integrity. And I'm afraid that includes defending awoman's right to not carry to term an unwanted pregnancy. I'll never understand anyone thinking they've a right to tell someone else what they can do with their body. More importantly I voaclly encourage the use of appropriate birth control. Abortion for me would only ever be a last resort in desperate circumstances.
Now I think that is enough muddying the waters.
Back to the point of TFB's post:
I loved your post! Beautifully written, and to the point. Breeding Feminists, and any birthing woman, including those who would not identify as feminists, need there to be as big a fuss about birth politics as there is about pro life/choice.
We owe it to ourselves and our daughters to fix what is broken in modern birthing.
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