What a lot people -- mostly men -- don't seem to understand is that women's control over our own bodies is not negotiable. We are not slaves. We are not breeding machines to be regulated and controlled by the government.

Today, lorraine says it so well (quoted here in full for any non-Kossacks reading this):

This is my body . [Photo in original post]

Mine. Not yours. Not the government's. Not the property of rightwing nut jobs who hate their bodies, and want to control mine, too.

In October, a friend and I tried to organize an airlift of sex toys to Alabama. As we all know now, the US Supreme Court has declined to hear the case. It may seem silly to get in a huff about whether men and women in Alabama can use vibrators, but this is yet another attack on the right to privacy.

Then, there's the Kansas Attorney General who wants records of women who've had late-term abortions.

Our new Attorney General would rather pursue pornographers than war criminals.

It's now okay for pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control they object to, and Plan B contraception, which is a virtual no-brainer, will never be approved by this administration's FDA.

One of the results of the hate initiatives passed in November, the ones that denied rights to gay people, is to strip domestic violence protection for unmarried women.

We teach children that their bodies are disgusting, and we call it abstinence education. We deny them knowledge of contraception, and on average, they delay sex by 12 months, and when they do engage in it, they do it unprotected from disease or pregnancy.

America is turning into a kakistocracy, run by people who hate and so distrust their bodies that they seek to control ours.

Sex is unruly. Love is anarchic. Personal connections among us will keep us tied to personal loyalties, and we will be less prone to blind adherence to faceless, abstract concepts like patriotism.

Earlier today, someone on this site suggested dumping Roe v. Wade as a means of appeasing the right wing in this country so we could take our country back.

Sorry. I know it would be convenient to dump parts of us to take back the country for the left, but bodies are not negotiable. Bodies matter. They matter when they're being restricted, and they matter when they're being exterminated. And you know what? History shows us, time and time again, that those who seek to control bodies eventually want to destroy them.

Here's the radical thought that the neocons and friends oppose so vehemently:

Prevent abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancy.

• That means enacting and advocating effective means of birth control. (Sorry, "just say no to sex" is not effective.)
• That means making condoms and the Pill and emergency contraception (which prevents pregnancy, and does not induce abortion, unlike what the neocon artists say) available to anyone and everyone, without politicians getting involved.
• That means teaching real sex education -- you know, the "birds and the bees" stuff.
• That means treating adolescents (who are "old enough to breed") with respect and teaching personal responsibility instead of "magical thinking" platitudes.
• That means treating women as free human beings, and not as slaves to the government.

Do these things and watch abortion in this country all but disappear. And nobody needs to go to jail.

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media girl also blogs at other places.