Wtf Meghan Murphy

i agree to a point, medical access should never be a political point but sadly in these times they are. some may see it as over reliance but with how common conditions like endo and similar are - it’s a large proportion of women.

@Alwaystired94 sorry to hear, it sounds tough. I'm not advocating against contraception or abortion. Some women will need this and it should be available. I don't think reproductive healthcare should be a political issue. I guess I am arguing that women with solidarity from other women might opt to look at things through a different lens sometimes, because reliance on the medical industry (which is what it is) isn't freedom.

I think one of the first things Boden did after taking office was to effectively sign away the definition of women with a jubilant, be-kind flourish probably having no idea what the implications were.h

www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/02/02/fact-check-biden-executive-order-discrimination-transgender-women-sports/6686171002/

unfortunately for many women (like me) we suffer with things like endometriosis or adenymosis and need access to contraception.

before i was diagnosed i was very wary of it as id been taking it for over 10 years straight and had many years struggling to conceive which i had attributed to the contraception use.

Sadly I see the term "feminist" used now as a shortform for group think in many quarters. By those women for whom my generation fought for the right to think and stand and speak and make sensible policy. So I don't use it any more. Things were really bad when I was young - women couldn't have a bank account for example. As for the right to abortion, forget it! I am advocating for thoughtfulness and consideration of different points of view, in a nuanced and intelligent way. That was original feminism!

I'm not sure that she's doing any of that in the tweet you originally posted, though.

just imagine calling yourself a feminist and not caring about abortion access or putting proven rapists into power

@CassieMaddox re I cannot believe any feminist would advocate removing the choice of reliable contraception from women.

I'm not advocating removal of contraception.

I agree women should have choices - but the choice is not down to pharma or western medicine alone. There are other choices. An over-reliance on the provision of reproductive "health-care" is not freedom. That's all. And again I say for the generations past this chemical control of our reproductive agency wasn't available. Some of the issues of the past around women were heinous, of course. But I think these issues are massively oversimplified or simply unquestioned by many women now.

Ah. she's just a common or garden trump supporter then.

My mistake!

Condoms, decent education about tracking my cycle and my likely fertility window, (which would have likely led me to abstain from sex even with condoms during it) and decent access to morning after pills would have screwed me and my hormones up a lot less than the daily dose of synthetic oestrogen and/or progesterone for a couple of decades did.

I don't think she's advocating for the removal of contraceptive choices - I think she's advocating for better knowledge and education around things like hormonal contraceptives, and their likely short and long term effects on the body, and the choices that we have.

Out of interest, which part of the anti-"big pharma" flavour of it is problematic to you?

I'm not in the least against Western medicine and pharma, it has saved my life and my health many times. But I'm also living with the long term repercussions of 20+ years on hormonal contraception, (something that Eastern medical systems call a mass genocide of women because fucking with women's repro hormones has some likely unwanted long term side effects for the whole body's system), and have had to fight quite a lot to get my sex-based health problems even just considered in a holistic (not woo woo, as in whole-of-my-body-systems) way by my NHS women's health GP who kept on parroting the line that she couldn't help me if I didn't want to take a medical course that was known to worsen my condition. I ended up vastly improving it to the point of a non-issue with the assistance of a herbalist (from Vancouver!). I'm a biologist, and a pragmatic realist, and I agree with her that I'd like to see women's health and knowledge about how to support it in our own hands, not that of any government, and that herbal medicine and nutritional knowledge are two examples of ways that this could be supported. I don't think that's particularly controversial of me, and I don't think she's saying any much different to me...?

For goodness sake, American feminists ( not that MM is) face a similar dilemma to many of us faced in the UK faced in our recent election, but turned up to 11. Two parties who are both shit for women, but on different issues and different ways.

I don’t see what it achieves to attack or criticize a woman thinking through this horrible state of affairs and deciding which of shit and shit they think is less shit. Reserve your blame for the people who created the shit, not those faced with the voting for the shit..

As has been discussed many times in the run up to the election, if the left political factions choose to not listen to or care about women's rights, and leave all that to the right political factions, it's pointless them acting all surprised when women voters are driven to voting for the right.

Possibly as a short term measure to try and drag the pendulum back, possibly in desperation, what does it matter?

But the days of saying 'even if the left want to burn your house down and eat you for lunch you still must vote left, obviously, because not voting left makes you a terrible person' are probably over. The results of the election showed: the electorate want middle ground. They didn't vote 'for' the left, they voted for change. Reluctantly. Not really wanting any of the options. Tribalism is a bit fucked.

Would you consider for a moment that women are free-er in the bodies in which they were born, that develop naturally, and freely operate within female reproductive cycles than they are in dependency on medication/manufactured hormones or reliance on the provision of surgery. This might seem far fetched, but to women of my generation there was no automatic provision of abortion or contraception. It is my sense that women were far free-er for say no to unwanted sex and to have a feeling of ownership of one's own biology/sense of self. It is really worth thinking hard about this. I'm not anti-abortion, but the idea that this is a right does a lot of heavy lifting, and to my mind it doesn't serve us in the way many young women seem programmed to believe.

Trump is horrendously harmful towards women's rights. His ideas on contraception, abortion, Christian values, traditional families, women's rights, gay women and so on - there's no way he's at all progressive regarding women.

However I know women who voted for Farage just on this issue and he is just as regressive, so I'm not surprised to hear a feminist advocating for Trump.