Blog Posts

15 warning signs of reproductive coercion (and 6 steps you can take to protect your health)

Jen R

Great article by Lynn Harris at sexreally.com about recognizing and resisting reproductive coercion: 15 Warning Signs He Doesn’t Support Your Contraceptive Choices.

A sample:

  1. Does he refuse to wear a condom? “That’s near-universal with reproductive coercion, and can start on sexual-date-one,” says Heather Corinna, founder and director of Scarleteen and author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.
  2. Does he equate birth control with cheating? As one woman (“Erika”) reported to the FVPF: “He said the pill made women want to have sex all the time, and that I’d cheat because I wouldn’t need to use a condom.”
  3. Do you go behind his back to get contraception? “Erika” snuck to a clinic for the pill. “For a year, I made sure he never saw them,” she says.

As they say, read the whole thing. And then pass it along to someone who might need this information.

Blog Posts

Antonin Scalia: born males are Fourteenth Amendment persons. The rest of us? Not so much.

Jen R

You've probably heard that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told an interviewer for California Lawyer that the Constitution doesn't guarantee women equal protection under the law.

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. … But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.

What you might not know is that the man considered one of the most stalwart pro-life votes on the Supreme Court also thinks it's wrong to consider human beings persons before they are born.

They say that the Equal Protection Clause requires that you treat a helpless human being that's still in the womb the way you treat other human beings. I think that's wrong. I think when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons.

Remember, pro-lifers are supposed to elect Republicans so they will appoint more judges like Antonin Scalia — who believes only born men and boys qualify as persons deserving of equal protection under the Constitution. Forget it. We are women who believe that we and our children are human beings worthy of respect and protection, so we're sure as hell not going to accept any so-called pro-life strategy that requires us to sell out our personhood and theirs.