Tuesday June 1st at 7 pm
Author Carole Joffe discusses her book:
Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us
Carole Joffe has written an important, shocking book, one that people who care about the lives of women must check out!
After thirty years embedded in reproductive-health research, Joffe relays compelling testimony from doctors, health-care workers, and patients as they struggle against these barriers that shame women and marginalize physicians, even within the medical community. Real-life stories include those of poverty-stricken rape victims scrambling—and sometimes failing—to cover the cost of abortions that should be covered by Medicaid; a doctor having to beg her superior for permission to perform in-hospital a medical abortion too dangerous to handle at a clinic; and a woman whose miscarriage is causing septic shock refused care and bundled off to another hospital.
Joffe’s book and research continue to be ever more timely and the circumstances for women around the world are both an outrage and an emergency. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, she wrote:
After months of wrangling and immense concessions from abortion rights supporters, abortion still has the capacity to derail Congressional passage of a health reform bill, as some House antiabortion legislators remain dissatisfied with the actually quite onerous funding restrictions of the procedure in the Senate measure. A woman in Nicaragua, the mother of a ten year old girl, is denied an abortion even though she is a suffering from cancer, and is not allowed to start chemotherapy as long as she is pregnant.
And antiabortion fanatics in state legislatures continue to pass laws that are truly hard to parody. The latest of these is a Utah measure which would permitted life imprisonment for a woman "whose intentional or reckless behavior" caused the death of her fetus—if implemented, this bill which would have the effect of making suspect every miscarriage occurring in that state. (Though the bill passed in the Utah legislature, its sponsor withdrew it for revision in the face of massive national criticism.
Indeed, one of the few genuine abortion parodies around-- the Onion's hilarious account of a law requiring women seeking abortions to first name the baby and paint the nursery-- is actually not that far removed from a real-life incident I recount in my book, Dispatches from the Abortion Wars. In this case, a pregnant woman with the life threatening condition of DVT (deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot in the leg), was scheduled for an in-hospital abortion. While hospitalized for a flare-up of her condition several days before her abortion, she was forced by an anti-abortion doctor to tour the newborn nursery!
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Carole Joffe is professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis and a researcher at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco. She is the author of several books, including Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe v. Wade.
This event is free, donations greatly appreciated. Revolution Books is wheelchair accessible.
