When I had my first child, I learned how to be a mother with chronic pain. The learning curve was so steep that my husband and I adjusted our expectations: instead of having two children, as we always assumed we would, this would be our only child. But after a few years, and an operation…
This week is National Infertility Awareness Week but for me, every week since December 13, 2011 is infertility awareness week. That’s the day a surgeon removed my lentil-sized embryo and the fallopian tube it was stuck in. Left to grow, the embryo that I wanted so badly to be my first child would have killed…
Recently at March For Life, an annual rally held in Washington, D.C., I hoped to meet and write about other pro-life Jewish marchers. The record-setting crowd was thick and palpably upbeat after the election of Donald Trump and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. With Donald Trump’s latest threats to defund the…
On June 22, 1989, I had an abortion. I’ve kept it a secret for almost 28 years. Why write about it now? On October 20, 2016, during a debate with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton said, “I will defend Planned Parenthood. I will defend Roe v. Wade and I will defend women’s rights to make their…
In Slate, Ruth Graham explores the surprisingly extensive history of pro-life rhetoric comparing abortion to the Holocaust. She traces the phenomenon to an analogy made by Pope Pius XII in 1951, a time when the specifics of Nazi ideology were still fresh in people’s minds: Catholics dominated the pre-Roe anti-abortion movement, and they saw an…
Oklahoma legislator Justin Humphrey is making the news rounds after telling the Intercept that pregnant women aren’t people but rather “hosts.” How progressive of Humphrey not to use ‘hostess’, or maybe this was about referring to women as non-human objects, which, in the English language, aren’t gendered? The question up for discussion in the Oklahoma…
I was 18 and in love. The diaphragm a Planned Parenthood clinic had taught me to use had failed. Or I had failed, in my clumsiness, to insert it properly. I was pregnant. I was in California finishing up my degree at UC Berkeley, trying to concentrate on papers and exams, but I also knew…
Anti-abortion protesters rallied at scores of Planned Parenthood clinics on Saturday to urge Congress and President Donald Trump to strip the health services provider of federal funding, while supporters of the organization staged counter-demonstrations around the United States. With anti-abortion groups expecting protests at up to 225 clinics, Planned Parenthood supporters organized 150 protests of…
