Heard a terrific piece on Alternative Radio this morning [View all]

I missed the beginning and the end, so I don't know when or where the talk was originally given, but it was an (almost) hour-long speech by Katha Pollitt including Q&A.

I can't access the page from my work computer, but the program aired over Alternative Radio, and you might be able to stream it from that site.

It was a discussion of abortion rights and the decades-long attack they've endured in the modern world. Pollitt drew from her own late mother's experience with illegal abortion in the 1960s as well as her great-grandmother's experience in (I believe) tsarist Russia.

Utterly terrific from first word to last. She covered the subject on multiple fronts, but focused especially on the point that women's control of their own bodies is superseded by a zygote's purported ownership of it, and she spent some time exploring the idiocy of legal but effectively impossible abortion. She explored the challenge in defending abortion rights when someone in a progressive state with access to abortion services might forget that a woman in a more restrictive area like Wyoming or Texas might as well be living in pre-Roe v. Wade America. She also dismantled the bullshit propaganda that women who have abortions hate children or are anti-family, when a significant majority (61% IIRC) of women who have abortions already have at least one child, and most of the other 39% will have a child later in life.

I was driving and wasn't able to take notes, but she seemed to be springboarding off of a recent or new book, and she covered much more than I've briefly summarized here. Amazing presentation, very clear and succinct and wholly unapologetic. She handily crystalized more than a few points that I struggle to make, and I'll be following her example in future discussions on the subject.

A very impressive program. If you haven't heard it already, then I heartily recommend it.