Mumsnet demanding that I change my nickname

Yeah me too. Coming from a country where abortion is illegal, those sort of posts strike me as immensely blinkered

GeorgeYeats Right. I'm just gobsmacked by some of these posters.

Supplying contraceptive pills to a woman undergoing a crisis pregnancy is pointless. MNHQ, I hope, won't dream of reporting the OP.

I dunno I'm on the fence about it.

Medically speaking my head is telling me if a woman does have complications after taking misoprostal she can just attend her nearest hospital and say shes having a miscarriage. And then get treated for that.

I do feel that activism would be better placed protesting for relaxation of abortion laws and more clinics. But I guess you can do both. And doing this doesn't help women in the mean time.

Doesn't matter if you're selling them or not, it's the dispensing of them which is illegal.

I do think the state of abortion provision in USA,
Ireland and I'm sure plenty of other countries is awful. If I was the mother in the link I provided Id probably have done what she did, and Id be in prison for it now no doubt.

So where are you getting these pills? as far as im aware they don't sell them in boots!

I am sure what this person is doing is illegal and against medical advice. People taking these pills should be under the supervision of a qualified medical practitioner. Horrified at this tbh.

Fairy godmother, I suggest you advertise your business somewhere else.
And oh yeah , your name is very distressing.

abortion are you american? Isn't what you're doing a felony?

www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/19/jennifer_whalen_is_arrested_for_ordering_abortion_pills_for_her_teenage.html

I disagree. Lots of women in Ireland send away for abortion pills; it's an absolutely essential service for those who can't afford to go to England.

Can't believe this peddling of abortion pills is being condoned and in fact applauded. These women probably don't have access to good medical facilities if things go wrong. What if they take the pill at the wrong stage of pregnancy and it causes fetal abnormality or other side effects. Don't suppose that happens in the world of fairy godmothers.

I've never sold any product. I've only given things away.

Actually lem has a point. I didn't think of it that way. My DP has asked me plenty of times to talk about his buisness on here which I've always refused.

I don't like the original username. I think it flippant and trivialising.

I agree I'm also not sure the provision of abortifacient pills without seeing the patient is problematic; and probably illegal.

I also think it was stupid and inconsiderate to try to put the MN web-site owners in a position where they were hosting the OP's service.

The OP should have been banned! peddling abortion pills on here - fuck me, if i came on here and tried to advertise my DP's business i would be given a stiff talking to no doubt, and if i continued to do so and made a whole thread about the right to do so, i'd be kicked off the site.

Your username is vile, and i would have thought sending women abortion pills without medical exam is dangerous actually, so much for the sisterhood eh. Its like backstreet abortions.com

You should be ashamed of yourself

And the OP has changed her username.

So all's well now.

Several points most of which, if not all, have already been put.

1. Using a name to advertise a service or product is out of order.

1. People can very well approve of choice and the right to abortion without wanting to see the word abortion all the time. It's an upsetting thing however necessary or good it can be.

If I sold a really good product that cleaned the shit off nappies for example, it may be a revolutionary product but I wouldn't use 'shitoffnappies' as my username as shit isn't a very nice thing to think about.

It's very simple.

'P.S. the name originally comes from a woman in South America who I shipped pills to. She had seven kids. I guess her need doesn't count as much as some posh mumsnet moms' need to take offense. For women on the bottom of the economic ladder, an abortion fairy godmother isn't offensive, but something you might wish for desperately. What a classist place this is.'

That was the OP's actual comment.

And sorry, I shouldn't have put the quote marks in there, because those were not the OP's exact words, and I get very irritated when people do that to me.

But I didn't say that. There's nothing Western Saviour about discussing women's rights abroad or supporting women in other countries.

There is about saying (in the second post) that the fairy godmother part is in reference to helping a woman in South America. 'WOC call me a fairy godmother' is about the closest I've seen to someone actually saying I am a Western Saviour. And the person making a first world problems type comment on this thread is the OP.

Not long ago Buffy posted about the Stanford free online course on International Women's Health and Human Rights. As well as covering the disability and death caused by lack of access to abortion, it covered a lot about the world's missing girls, forced abortions (particularly on immigrant populations) and the misuse of contraception on women in poorer countries. Doing that course has made me more aware that for many women, reproductive rights are about the right not to have abortion and not to be forced to have contraceptive implants or the coil.

I would recommend the course to everyone. The boards have feminists from all over the world on them. It is very much about women's material reality, and the one poster who started on the 'this is cissexist' argument got a very cold reception.

Greer has also talked about this - women getting anaemia from the coil due to development programs, cultural issues around abortion.

So I don't associate abortion with being overwhelmingly a positive thing. It very much depends on the context. And it is very hard to get across a context in a username.

Well, I didn't know any of the back story when I first encountered her name - but I was aware of the situation in various other countries, the constant erosion of reproductive rights in the US and the way right wing MPs in this country are starting to learn from US republicans (i.e. that you're unlikely to get the law changed by a direct approach - so instead try and pass lots of seemingly innocuous pieces of legislation like lowering the time limit, insisting on scans and counselling by "independent" organisations, in the US insisting doctors performing abortions have "admitting privileges" at local hospitals when the only nearby hospitals are run by church related charities etc... just make it de facto impossible if you can't make it de jure impossible). I always read her user name as a kind of "Vera Drake figure" protest, to say, "actually women need these services and it is not morally bad to provide them."

Now I know the work she does, I'm even more impressed. And I'm glad people do care about other countries as well as their own. (Interestingly, it's another case of women can't win - try to discuss women's rights in your own country and you get accused of "worrying about first world problems when women have it so much worse elsewhere", try to discuss women's rights abroad and you're a "Western Saviour". Damned if you do, damned if you don't... again!)

But none of that is coming across in her username.

And if she isn't actually from those countries, there is a real element of Western Saviour about the username, not the OP's work.

I took it that AFG's original name was in reference to her work helping women in countries with no safe access to legal abortion - fantastic work driven by a passion for her fellow women, for women' s rights and anger at the injustices they'd suffered. I meant anger in that sense - justified outrage at human rights abuses - not anger in the sense it's sometimes used as a passive aggressive silencing technique (the sort of post which says "ooh, OP, youssound a bit angry".) I was actually trying to make a distinction between the two precisely because accusations of the second kind are often used to prevent women expressing anger about social injustice. Perhaps another way of saying what I was trying to get at might be: AFG was a provocative user name but that in and of itself is not a sufficient reason to request it be changed - sometimes people choose to be deliberately provocative to draw attention to things that need to be thought about (and given the huge tracts of the world where women have no control over their fertility and the ongoing undermining of reproductive rights in eg the US this is actually an issue that needs to be kept at the forefront of women's minds).