What are you reading and writing? Here’s a few of the things I’ve found to be good reads lately.

Breastfeeding children and women a “low priority” – Western Australian parliament

Remember the protests in Perth last year about Premier Barnett’s party failing to bring WA into line with the rest of Australia with laws protecting breastfeeding families from harassment? In which Barnett insisted that there would be no need for a law if only women were “courteous” and “modest”? Even after a woman was ejected from a restaurant for merely asking for a more private place to breastfeed; even after a woman was follower and questioned in her workplace by police for expressing milk behind a curtain in a parenting room? In which Barnett pouted that any change to the law would be merely “symbolic” as far as he was concerned?

The GroundSwell Project: social change and global conversations about death, dying and bereavement

The GroundSwell Project is a not-for-profit organisation committed to developing innovative programs that engage young people in community arts projects and global conversations about death, dying and bereavement in order to contribute to social change.

The abortion doula

Before I became a doula, I was pro-choice because I grew up in the rural Midwest and saw how abstinence only education, coupled with limited access to abortion, exacerbated class disparities in my hometown. Since I’ve become a doula, my views on abortion have become more immediate and nuanced. The decision to have an abortion is never an easy one. No one makes choices about their reproduction on a whim; I trust the decisions that women make because they are hard-fought. I hope that my continuing work as a doula and as a reproductive justice organizer honors each of the women that I have met in the hospital waiting room.

My Ob said what?!

“Oh for God’s sake why didn’t somebody give this woman an enema?” -OB to woman birthing in 1969.  She still remembers these words to this day.

Tags: breastfeeding, human rights, reproductive freedom
Filed under: Uncategorised, careproviders, consumers, consumers' rights, don't label me!, feminism