from Talk to Action

We all have heard South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli's description of a woman who might qualify for an abortion under the rigid strictures of South Dakota's draconian abortion law '

from Talk to Action

Your wife, your mother, your sister, your daughter . . . or somebody else's criminal? A woman you love, or what Covenant News calls just another murderous mom?

Thoreau said, "The soul of man exists in the Contemplation of the nature of women behind bars." In this, as in so many other things, he appears to have been right.

from Talk to Action

While the Bible that many South Dakotans are substituting for the Constitution these days maintains that "her price is far above rubies," those same people have decreed that the worth of any woman, no matter how virtuous, plummets at "that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum." From that moment forward, not only her body, her hopes and her dreams, but sometimes -- despite the hollow promise of a tacked-on provision allowing "a medical procedure designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant mother" '

from Talk to Action

One can almost hear Mark Twain snorting in disgust.

(Image by Kafka/AP)
This week Governor Mike Rounds of South Dakota finally ended the suspense. After a prolonged, tantalizing and agonizing period of presumably sober deliberation, Rounds signed the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act. The law protects human life beginning at "that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum." Unless, of course, the live human in question is a woman who wants an abortion '

I'm tired because I couldn't sleep last night. I kept waking up and staring at my scars which were barely visible in the light of the lamp on the nightstand next to my bed. I kept the light on because I couldn't bear to be in the dark again.

As I watched the Olympics last night I couldn't concentrate. My eyes invariably went back, time and again, to the scars.

I remember so clearly what the doctor said to me when I woke up in the hospital. He told me the scars would never go away, that when I looked at them they would remind me how close I had come to the end of my life.

He was wrong, when I look at the scars it never crosses my mind how close I had come to death. When I look at the scars I'm reminded of the end of my childhood dreams. I'm reminded of how many things ended in those days and months. I'm reminded of the terror I felt, the horror of not being in charge, the outrage felt by others shaping my future.

When talking to your daughters about their vaginas, what do you call them? I'm curious from reading a thread over at feministe about the Vagina Monologues and there just seems to be so much anxiety about one simple word.

I've used various euphemisms and I've used the word vagina when talking to Ashanti. Some of the euphemisms: privates, booty, chocha, chochita, cooch, cat. Does that seem silly? I should mention that she doesn't respond negatively or positively to one word over the other. I'm just glad that she's not at the age yet where hearing her mom talk about body parts makes her go "ick!"