When a player is accused of assaulting a woman, perhaps the team doesn’t have to trot him out, front and center, every time it holds an event. Maybe we don’t need to schedule a bobblehead night for a player accused of raping a woman before the police investigation is completed? It’s possible a trial for domestic battery should be a disqualifier for being named first star that particular week.
Currently, the league and teams pretend everything is hunky dory and practically dare anyone to mention accusations against a player. When one does dare question a team’s handling of an accusation, a dedicated hoard of online attack-dog fans routinely threaten and harass the interloper into silence. It works out great for the NHL.
From time to time, NHL teams make announcements that they’re “reaching out” to female fans in an attempt to grow the fan base. Women don’t want “ladies nights,” pink jerseys or Hockey 101 sessions with the hottest players. What women do want is to feel that the league and their team values them as much as their male counterparts.
That starts with the way the league addresses violence against women.
As a transgender man who is going to be having a baby, I am so glad that by technicality my child will be able to fulfil the prophecy and defeat Macbeth.
To be on the safe side, get a C-section? Macbeth really needs defeating.
Ironically I do have to have a C-section due to a hip problem I have. So it’s double accurate.
I like how this post implies that Macbeth is still out there, most likely terrorizing people, and no one has been able to stop him
So i work as your friendly underpaid barista and currently we’re having problems with one of our regulars hitting on our women staff members. The first woman he hit one, he wrote a note to her….as in elementary school note passing. Now of course, she’s at work and the model in f&b and retail is that you do everything in your power not to piss off the guest.
So in hopes of not causing a scene, she kindly wrote on the note that she appreciate the interest but she’s a lesbian. Now, 1) she shouldn’t have to out herself to a complete stranger all to avoid a bad yelp review. 2) She shouldn’t be forced into a situation where she has to entertain a guests unwanted attentions to avoid at the least, a negative review on yelp.
So once she passes this dude the note, he then starts jokingly exclaiming “I always fall for lesbians” in the middle of our cozy cafe, effectively outing her to anyone within earshot. Now my co-worker isn’t closeted, she’s out and proud etc, etc. However, that doesn’t give someone else the right to disclose her sexuality without her permission, and especially not after he effectively coerced her into outing herself in order to avoid his come-ons.
Another one of our regular guests, hits on one of our baristas on a regular basis. No matter how much she casually brings up her boyfriend. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve had to literally stand in front of her so he can’t force eye-contact with her (Naturally we do this kind of thing in a low-key manner so that we don’t actively piss off guest and thus put our jobs at risk).
I’ve had to actively shut down people on behalf of my women co-workers (Nah dude, she’s seeing someone. She’s not interested in that sort of thing. Dude, chill out.) because they simply can’t understand the fact that they are at their jobs and simply just want to get their jobs done and go home. Stop taking advantage of the unequal power dynamics to force her to engage you. She’s seem nice? Of course she is, her job revolves around being nice. She seemed into you? No, I can promise she’s not, she’s doing her job and told me five minutes ago how you were clearly staring down her chest.
“But how am I supposed to let her no I’m interested in her?” you might say. My answer, that’s not my fucking concern. There are plenty of opportunities to meet people in this world that don’t revolve around you forcing them into an uncomfortable position while they’re literally trying to earn a living. Not every person your interested in obligated to entertain that interest.
Simply put, stop being goddam creepers and let people do their goddamn jobs.
Fuck off. Some of us have a hard enough time talking to people without shitheads like you guilting us over it.
No one’s guilting you over anything. The point of this post is for you to stop doing it, not to do it and feel guilty.
If you feel awkward hitting on someone who’s not in a position where she can safely be honest with you or leave if you make her uncomfortable, that’s good. Listen to that awkward feeling. It’s telling you that you’re transgressing a boundary.
Now, if you feel like you’re always awkward and always crossing a boundary, then posts like this should be a gold mine. It’s telling you in clear terms where boundaries actually exist and why.
Story time:
There was this dude I knew through a monthly infosec meeting. He knew me and my fiancee and my friends through this meeting and he started coming to the coffee shop while I was working. He took a shine to one of my coworkers. He started asking me when she would be on shift and when I wouldn’t tell him he started showing up every night just in case. So she took on afternoon shifts and he started showing up in the afternoons. So she took morning shifts and he started showing up in the morning. So she started taking random shifts and he started showing up all day, from four thirty am when we opened until close at one am.
The thing is, while this is creepy in hindsight he wasn’t doing anything overtly creepy. The shop billed itself as “Smalltown’s Living Room” and there were a few regulars who hung out all day. And this guy bought endless iced teas and ate all his meals off our menu and bought ice cream for regulars and tipped extravagantly. He must have been spending close to a hundred dollars a day at the shop and never did anything beyond placing his order, chatting for a minute, and sitting in a chair where he could always watch the counter. Sometimes he’d talk to me after I locked up and asked if she liked him and ask me how he could get him to like her and no amount of “dude, it’s not going to happen, she’s not interested” could convince him. “But she’s so nice to me,” he’d say, “she smiles when she sees me and listens when I talk to her. No other girls do that for me.”
The owner felt a little hogtied by the whole thing – the guy hadn’t DONE anything, except spend more money than my coworkers and I made on a shift each day to have the opportunity to see her. At least five hundred a week on product. Almost the payroll of a full-time employee every week. And there was always a ten or a twenty from him in the tip jar at the end of every shift – five or ten dollars that represented about an extra hour’s worth of labor to everyone working there. So my co-worker and I felt bad too – he wasn’t really being THAT creepy, was it worth it to deprive our other co-workers of this extra income? (Spoilers: yes)
After a couple months of this (and yes, it was terrible that it went on for that long) my coworker got a better-paying, stalker-free job at her university and nobody was happier for her than me. It was my stupid bullshit that had infected her life and if I hadn’t told this acquaintance to swing by the coffee shop sometime she wouldn’t have had to deal with being scared and tense and having to hold a brittle smile every day at work just so that five or ten would reliably show up, so that someone’s hours wouldn’t get cut because of the dip in sales.
And when she left this guy was crushed. Didn’t show up for a month. Then he started coming in again. Started talking to me about how heartbroken he was, hanging out for my entire shift and thanking me for being such a good listener and marveling over the fact that my fiancee, his friend didn’t appreciate me the way I deserved. He’d follow me out on my lunch break and sit at my table. Eventually I went to the Smalltown Police Department and asked what I would need for a restraining order.
“Well, have you told him in clear words that he is not to speak to you and to leave you alone?”
“I can’t, he’s a customer and he only speaks to me in front of other customers.”
“Well, unless you tell him to cut off contact and he violates that there’s nothing we can do.”
And that was the real nastiness of this trick – always being in front of other customers. When you’re on register you can’t tell a customer never to speak to you again then casually move on to the next person in line. When you’re getting a muffin out of the pastry case you can’t tell a customer “go away and never come back” in front of some soccer mom who believes the customer is always right. You can drown someone out with a blender or an espresso machine, but only temporarily. There was a cubbyhole where we put our purses under the register – eventually it got to the point that if I saw him through the windows I’d let my coworker know then crawl into it to hide. Sometimes I’d spend half a shift doing dishes and making sandwiches in the back where he couldn’t follow me. At least we’d never run out of clean mugs, right?
It was too much. I told my fiancee and a couple other infosec friends what he was doing. He’d stopped coming to the meetings months before over a tiff with another dude so they weren’t seeing him. The had jobs to go to, they didn’t have the time to sit at a coffee shop with me all day. So they took a day off work in the middle of the week and when this guy followed me outside on my lunchbreak I texted them that he was there with me. I didn’t respond to anything that he said during that lunch, I only said “I don’t want to talk to you anymore, please leave me alone.” I said it quietly, but I said it in clear words, per what the police department had told me. He continued to talk while I continued to look at my book and try to eat my food when my fiancee and his friend showed up and joined us at the table. My fiancee (who is, by the way, over six and a half feet tall and built like a fridge) sat down next to him, our other friend sat down on the other side. They both very casually asked what he’d been up to recently. He didn’t say anything, just bit his lip, glared at me, and stormed off. He never came back to the coffee shop.
He DID email a friend of mine to rage about how I’d broken his heart and lied to him and misled him and sent mixed signals – how it was so nasty and two-faced to be smiling and nice one minute and turn on him the next, how he thought we had a connection, and why would I spend so much time listening to him and laughing at his jokes and smiling at him otherwise?
For two months nothing happened, then he showed up at the infosec meeting and as my fiancee and I were getting into the car to leave he charged at us and started trying to hit my (once again, goddamned enormous) fiancee and trying to push past him to come at me. This guy was about five ten and not terribly strong, and while we were scared we didn’t want to fucking KILL him, so my fiancee just sort of knocked him down instead of having a serious fight. The guy got into his car, rushed around bunch of us in the parking lot, which was genuinely terrifying because we thought he might try to run someone over, then sped away into the night. We called the cops to file a report of assault. The cops didn’t want to talk to me, said I wasn’t involved in the altercation. They took a statement from my fiancee and two other guys who had been in the parking lot, then took down my number and a note that I claimed he’d been “close” to me. I told them he’d been harassing me but they just said that it wasn’t harassment if he just showed up at my job and didn’t actually DO anything.
Well, it turns out that while we were making our report this guy had driven to our friend’s house and rammed the house repeatedly with his Honda. He completely caved in the garage and tried to charge the living room but was stopped by a reinforced concrete wall. When the cops showed up there he was on the lawn raging about how we were all against him and trying to control him.
I missed all my classes the next day because I went to my college campus police department and said I needed a restraining order. I explained what had happened and their first question was how long I had dated the guy. Why did he think we were dating if I hadn’t been flirting with him? Had I led him on or tried to make it seem like I was interested in him? They escorted me to the women’s violence prevention center on campus and I spent approximately six hours filling out paperwork before the director of the center drove me to the county courthouse and made sure I was granted a temporary restraining order that day. It was made more difficult because I only knew this guy’s first name. At every step I had to reach out to my infosec friends or my fiancee to ask for his address, to check the spelling of his name, to confirm the make and model of his vehicle. This guy had chased my coworker out of a job, been showing up on every one of my shifts for months, and I didn’t know anything about him because to me he was just a customer who was an annoyance that had become a threat. But in his head I was the nice girl he’d had a meet-cute with at a fucking hacker hangout who blossomed into a romance in the goddamned coffee-shop AU he was scripting in his imagination, who spurned this rich, considerate, shy boy in favor of her lunk of a boyfriend who wasn’t good enough for her. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to explain a fifteen-year-old gray-hat hacker meetup to a judge in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you’re selling heroin? Calling it a professional infosec networking group didn’t work well enough to include it on the list of places on my restraining order. He couldn’t come to my coffee shop, my home, or my school but was free to return to the meeting where he’d attacked us that was full of my friends who DIDN’T have restraining orders so long as he left when I showed up.
I hate coffee-shop AUs, in case that isn’t clear. It perpetuates this idea that the person behind the counter is your ONE if only you’re persistent and sweet and generous and bashful enough to keep forcing them to endure your presence in their place of employment.
Look, it sounds fucking shitty to say it but most customer service jobs can be accomplished by machines. Automated phone trees can take the place of receptionists, you can get a latte as good as anything you’d get from a Starbucks out of a machine, cashiers can be replaced by self-checkout. Even bartenders can be replaced by some tubes and buttons if you have enough money to burn. The reason customer service still exists is because it is emotional labor that the customer is paying for. An automated phone tree can’t reassure you that it’ll pass your message along just as soon as possible and that we’ll make sure the tech gets back to you. An automated espresso machine won’t smile at you and ask if you’re having a good day. A self-checkout doesn’t make small talk about how great that ice-cream is or how nice the day is outside. A drink machine may be able to listen to your problems but it won’t say “I feel you,” and tell a funny story to make you feel better. We live in the fucking future, almost everything you could want can be accomplished with an machine an a cellphone. If you’re interacting with a human it’s because you want to interact with a human and you want that human to be nice to you. You are paying for their kindness, for their smiles when their feet hurt and their questions about your day when they haven’t had lunch yet.
Flirting with customer service workers at work, asking them out when they’re on the clock and paid to make you happy, telling them you think they’re attractive and expecting a gushing response – that’s breaking the rules. That’s a lose-lose situation that you’ve set them up for. If they continue to do their job and be nice to you they’re “leading you on” and if they react negatively and ask you to leave or to not speak to them that way it’s “bad customer service.”
A good rule of thumb if you’re thinking about asking someone out or flirting with them is to ask yourself this question: “if do this thing and it makes them uncomfortable can they leave this place without it impacting their livelihood?”
If the answer is “no” and you do it anyway you’re a jackass. That person is trapped. You have cornered them. You have put your desire to flirt with them over their ability to earn a living.
“Oh good, I’ll do it now, when they can’t get away” is not an effective dating strategy. It’s abusive, it’s creepy, and nobody is well-paid enough to put up with unwanted sexual or romantic advances while they’re trying to do their job.
Don’t pull this shit.
^^^^^^^that was intense
My god what a maddening story. And of course, there will be many who read it and dismiss it as one in a million or the actions if a particular weirdo. It’s not.
When I worked on the shop floor of Waterstones it was at a branch that opened till 10. The evenings were when the creeps turned up. I am not exaggerating when I say not a single female member of staff at that place was without at least one ‘customer’ (mostly they weren’t paying customers, more people making use of our seats and charging their phones) developing a fixation on them. One guy had transferred his stalking of our (gay) assistant manager from her previous branch. One friend used to gave her boyfriend meet her when she finished to avoid the guy who would like to walk ‘with’ her to the station. I’ve previously mentioned my own experience, which was a less extreme version of the above story. No violent response or campaign of real stalking, just lots of aggressive messages and slagging me off to my friends.
(If you think you shrug this stuff off, I was more affected by my experience than I realised till later. I feel angry that a guy’s sense of entitlement to my time, good will and then to take out his hurt feelings on me, resulted in a shaken confidence that had noticeably negative consequences within my life afterward. How dare someone think they get to do that?)
I’m describing the experiences of about ten women (some of them as young as 19) in about a two year period. Every single one got at least one borderline stalker, some a honest-to-goodness stalker.
I should mention the male staff didn’t get off entirely Scott free, our handsomest make colleagues tended to get taken for lunch by an older, creepy local author. But the fact that they WENT says a lot about the difference in conditioned fear responses.
This happens to women in retail all the time.
And the men who whine we are changing the rules… have you considered you are meant to be an adult which means you don’t GET a set of rules? You’re meant to navigate for yourself how to deal well with other people. And you do that by listening when they say they gave a problem and not whinging it’s haaarrrddd not to be creepy.
a woman literally died yesterday because she needed medical treatment and couldn’t get back into the country she’s lived in since 1995. you utter. fucking. morons.
update: a four-month-old baby who lives in Iran but has family who are American citizens in Oregon was scheduled to undergo urgent heart surgery at a hospital in Portland on February 5; she and her parents are now being denied entry to the United States. these kinds of surgeries take months to plan, and doctors have advised the family that the procedure needs to happen as soon as possible to save the child’s life.
so far, the consequences of the executive orders that “aren’t going to take anything from you or hurt anyone” include the death of a 75-year-old woman and the denial of life-saving medical treatment to a 4-month-old baby. get your fucking heads out of your asses you insensate bastards.
Sources please
there are literally links right there in my comments. what do you want me to do, come to your house and click them for you?
My grandfather was a generally peaceful man. He was a gardener, an EMT, a town selectman, and an all around fantastic person. He would give a friend – or a stranger – the shirt off his back if someone needed it. He also taught me some of the most important lessons I ever learned about violence, and why it needs to exist.
When I was five, my grandfather and grandmother discovered that my rear end and lower back were covered in purple striped bruises and wheals. They asked me why, and I told them that Tom, who was at that time my stepfather, had punished me. I don’t remember what he was punishing me for, but I remember the looks on their faces.
When my mother and stepfather arrived, my grandmother took my mother into the other room. Then my grandfather took my stepfather into the hallway. He was out of my eye line, but I saw through the crack in the door on the hinge side. He slammed my stepfather against the wall so hard that the sheet rock buckled, and told him in low terms that if he ever touched me again they would never find his body.
I absolutely believed that he would kill my stepfather, and I also believed that someone in the world thought my safety was worth killing for.
In the next few years, he gave me a few important tips and pointers for dealing with abusers and bullies. He taught me that if someone is bringing violence to you, give it back to them as harshly as you can so they know that the only response they get is pain. He taught me that guns are used as scare tactics, and if you aren’t willing to accept responsibility for mortally wounding someone, you should never own one. He told me that if I ever had a gun aimed at me, I should accept the possibility of being shot and rush the person, or run away in a zig-zag so they couldn’t pick me off. He taught me how to break someone’s knee, how to hold a knife, and how to tell if someone is holding a gun with intent to kill. He was absolutely right, and he was one of the most peaceful people I’ve ever met. He was never, to my knowledge, violent with anyone who didn’t threaten him or his family. Even those who had, he gave chances to, like my first stepfather.
When I was fourteen, a friend of mine was stalked by a mutual acquaintance. I was by far younger than anyone else in the social crowd; he was in his mid twenties, and the object of his “affection” was as well. Years before we had a term for “Nice Guy” bullshit, he did it all. He showed up at her house, he noted her comings and goings, he observed who she spent time with, and claimed that her niceness toward him was a sign that they were actually in a relationship.
This came to a head at a LARP event at the old NERO Ware site. He had been following her around, and felt that I was responsible for increased pressure from our mutual friends to leave her alone. He confronted me, her, and a handful of other friends in a private room and demanded that we stop saying nasty things about him. Two of our mutual friends countered and demanded that he leave the woman he was stalking alone.
Stalker-man threw a punch. Now, he said in the aftermath that he was aiming for the man who had confronted him, but he was looking at me when he did it. He had identified me as the agent of his problems and the person who had “turned everyone against him.” His eyes were on mine when the punch landed. He hit me hard enough to knock me clean off my feet and I slammed my head into a steel bedpost on the way down.
When I shook off the stunned confusion, I saw that two of our friends had tackled him. I learned that one had immediately grabbed him, and the other had rabbit-punched him in the face. I had a black eye around one eyebrow and inner socket, and he was bleeding from his lip.
At that time in my life, unbeknownst to anyone in the room, I was struggling with the fact that I had been molested repeatedly by someone who my mother had recently broken up with. He was gone, but I felt conflicted and worthless and in pain. I was still struggling, but I knew in that moment that I had a friend in the world who rabbit-punched a man for hitting me, and I felt a little more whole.
Later that year, I was bullied by a girl in my school. She took special joy in tormenting me during class, in attacking me in the hallways, in spreading lies and asserting things about me that were made up. She began following me to my locker, and while I watched the clock tick down, she would wait for me to open it and try to slam my hand in it. She succeeded a few times. I attempted to talk to counselors and teachers. No one did anything. Talking to them made it worse, since they turned and talked to her and she called me a “tattle” for doing it. I followed the system, and it didn’t work.
I remembered my friend socking someone in the face when he hit me. I recalled what my grandfather had taught me, and decided that the next time she tried, I would make sure it was the last. I slammed the door into her face, then shut her head in the base of my locker, warping the aluminum so badly that my locker no longer worked. She never bothered me again.
Violence is always a potential answer to a problem. I believe it should be a last answer – everything my grandfather taught me before his death last year had focused on that. He hadn’t built a bully or taught me to seek out violence; he taught me how to respond to it.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk recently about how, after the recent Nazi-punching incident, we are in more danger because they will escalate. That we will now see more violence and be under more threat because of it. I reject that. We are already under threat. We are already being attacked. We are being stripped of our rights, we are seeing our loved ones and our family reduced to “barely human” or equated with monsters because they are different.
To say that we are at more risk now than we were before a Nazi got punched in the face is to claim that abusers only hurt you if you fight back. Nazis didn’t need a reason to want to hurt people whom they have already called inhuman, base, monsters, thugs, retards, worthless, damaging to the gene pool, and worthy only of being removed from the world. They were already on board. The only difference that comes from fighting back is the intimate knowledge that we will not put up with their shit.
About a year and a half ago, artist Hélène Gugenheim met Marie. The two women were getting changed near one another, and Hélène caught sight of Marie’s mastectomy scar: where Marie’s left breast should be, scar tissue dashes across her chest. Upon seeing it, Hélène immediately thought, “I have to put gold on it.” And so the Paris-based artist’s project Mes cicatrices, Je suis entièrment tissé (My scars, of them I am fully woven) was born. The project uses photo and video to document the ritual application of gold leaf onto scars, in a custom protocol the artist has developed…
Kintsugi, or kintsukoroi, is a Japanese method of mending broken pottery, and literally means “golden joinery” or “to patch with gold.” A mixture of gold with lacquer or epoxy is poured into an item’s broken crevices, rejoining the fragments. The busted object is transformed, functional once again and with its fractures exalted in gold. Visual tribute is paid to the break as well as the repair, as flaws become virtues. Already familiar with and personally inspired by kintsugi method, Gugenheim knew exactly what to do when she saw Marie’s scar. Via Skype, the artist divulges, “When I saw Marie’s scar, I saw a mix of strength and fragility. It was amazing. I saw not only the injury, but the healing. At one point or another, you’re hurt: in your skin, in your heart, sometimes. You have to go on with that. And you can’t go on exactly the same way you were used to: you have to create a new way to go on.”
[…] Gugenheim plans for the project to culminate in about ten documented performances. She half-whispers to me, “the goal is that people who are looking at the photos and videos see into them like a mirror. You ask yourself, where are my scars? How am I rebuilding myself, inside and out?”
n.b. at the moment (2/8/16) the artist is actually looking for participants in this project! she’s based in paris and encourages anyone who’d like to participate to get in touch
the nhl: we want to attract more women to the games, get them excited about hockey
also the nhl: names Patrick Kane, accused multiple times of sexual assault and all round terrible human being, one of their all time greatest players
Nazis want Jews, Muslims, POC, LGBTQP people, ‘non-contributing’ disabled people dead just for existing.
Antifas want Nazis dead because they are aware of the above and want those people to be safe.
It is not “the same thing”. It is not “more hate”. It is defending the world against people who want most of the people in it dead.
I got pregnant three years ago. I was 22, it was a brand-new relationship, but I was adamant that I was having a baby. I’ve always taken motherhood very seriously. I was abused — the product of people who shouldn’t have had kids — then adopted. I felt so strongly that this was the most important job of my life.
I wasn’t at risk of genetic defects, so during the anatomy scan it didn’t even occur to me that they were looking for abnormalities. Me, my boyfriend, and my parents all went to the appointment, and when they said I was having a girl, my mom jumped up and down hollering as if she were at a football game. My boyfriend cried.
I was home alone when I got a call from the genetic specialist who told me that the tests were positive for trisomy 13. I thought that was Down syndrome and thought, Okay, I can do that. But then she started apologizing: “I’m so sorry, these babies usually miscarry. It’s a miracle she’s made it this far.” I said I didn’t understand, and she explained that my baby could pass any day, be still-born, or die soon after. I Googled “trisomy 13” and saw horrific pictures of babies without noses or mouths. I sat there and sobbed while I held my belly apologizing to her over and over and over again. I called my mom and said, “My baby’s going to die. My baby’s going to die.”
The doctor cleared her schedule and saw me later that day. She said: “You need to make a decision. You’re already 23 weeks and the state of Ohio has restrictions that impact your options.” She explained I could terminate or carry the pregnancy to its extent. At the time, 24 weeks was the cutoff for abortion in Ohio or else you had to travel to another state. [In December 2016, Republican governor John Kasich signed a law that reduced this cutoff to 20 weeks.] We only had days to decide, and even then there were waiting lists and the expense was horrendous. I had never felt so alone.
The counselor said my baby wasn’t in pain and there was no risk to either of our lives if we continued the pregnancy. I thought, Let’s try to make some memories while we can. I really enjoyed being pregnant. I loved having this purpose, and I thought as long as she’s not suffering, I think that her being here with us right now is the best we can do. And so … we tried.
At 29 weeks, my ankles and legs got extremely swollen. I was disassociating and became lightheaded, so I left work. I started cramping and ended up in the hospital. There were so many tests, which ultimately concluded that this was an emergency situation. [Jessica was at risk of having a seizure, and potentially dying, if labor wasn’t induced.] I wasn’t thinking, I’m terminating this pregnancy in order to save my life, but that’s what my paperwork said.
The doctor was very clear. He said, “You need to decide whether you want to induce now or come back in a week and get your blood pressure checked again — and I will induce you then.” I lived 45 minutes away from any hospital, on a farm without neighbors. It was a bitterly cold January. He was afraid I’d have a seizure and not get to them in time. That worried me, too.
But I knew that if I was induced, there was no chance my daughter would survive. Even if I carried her to term, her survival rate was very low, less than 5 percent. Another decision I had to make was telling the doctors that I did not want them to resuscitate the baby.
I was in labor for 32 hours.
I declined to have her monitored during labor because I didn’t want to sit there listening to her pass away. So they’d periodically come in and quietly listen for a heartbeat. The last time, at 1 a.m., they couldn’t hear it. I made them bring my family back into the room, and about a half an hour later it was time. She was born after three pushes, and at just two and a half pounds. Her heart was still beating, but she didn’t cry or breathe or make any sort of sound. There was mention of oxygen, but I said, “Please, just let her go.” They put her on my chest, and my boyfriend came and cut the cord.
She stayed alive for two and a half hours. They called it when her heart stopped.
When I made the decision to “voluntarily” induce, I felt like I was picking myself over my child. I wouldn’t wish that on the most evil person on Earth. A funeral director arrived with a huge white cloth. He said, “I have to cover her face so people don’t know when I’m walking down the hall [with such a small body].” I handed her over, and that was the last time that I saw her. I didn’t want a casket on display at the funeral; that tiny box would have been way too much. I collected her ashes a week later.
Many people don’t understand why this experience reinforced my pro-choice beliefs. Now more than ever, I firmly believe: No conditions. No restrictions. I can’t imagine being in that situation and being denied the dignity of making a choice. That little bit of control was so empowering. Nobody just wakes up after being pregnant for over 20 weeks and says, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
When Trump said those things about late-term abortion during the debate, I was so angry. What must the rest of the world think of us? I have friends in the U.K. and Canada saying, “What the hell? You can have 30 guns but you can’t have a dignified, comfortable abortion?”
And while we’re getting abortions and making painful decisions about our bodies, Trump is fucking tweeting.
Steel Phoenix Studios 