The Pittsburgh audience was polite and attentive, at least while I was talking. But once the discussion portion began, it soon became clear that a number of members of the local Feminists for Life chapter and other anti-choice audience members would be satisfied with nothing less than raising their voices, calling me a liar, refuting the nonpartisan sources I used for research purposes, and willfully take both my written words and spoken answers completely out of context. The hour that I spent in a nonstop whirl of questions, comments, answers, and thinly veiled insults was quite unlike any other experience in my life.

At the end, a woman approached me. She had spoken several times, once sharing a very personal story involving her own pregnancy. While it was clear that we didn’t agree about much involving reproductive rights, I was touched by her openness and sensitivity, and thanked her for attending. In turn, she graciously thanked me for my talk, and we smiled at each other. It was one of the kindest, most human moments I’ve experienced in all of my talks.

And then an acquaintance of hers broke in. After scolding her friend for thanking me, she turned to me and began berating me for—I’m paraphrasing a bit—using my writing talent for evil. And then this happened:

Woman: Sarah, what is your book about?
Me: Choice.
Woman: No, Sarah, what is your book about?
Me (wondering if this is a trick question): Choice.
Woman (sighing softly and smiling patronizingly): No, it’s about abortion! You’re telling women to have abortions!
Me: I’m talking about women’s choices, not telling women to have abortions.
Woman: No, you’re not. Your book is about … (pauses, presumably for me to agree with her.
Me: Choice.

That conversation was just plain perplexing, because really, what was she hoping to prove? I spent four years working on this book; I know it inside and out. I’m not sure if she just wanted to annoy me or really thought that I would buckle under the repeated questioning and suddenly agree with her.

So, that was strange. But what really saddened me was how she dismissed her friend, how she automatically rejected any overture between two people on different sides of the reproductive rights debate to get along. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by doing that; such actions only serve to perpetuate the notion that common ground is nothing more than an illusion.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There is no reason that people that feel differently about abortion, contraception, and pregnancy shouldn’t be able to talk to each other on a polite, intelligent level. I’m not talking about the obnoxious anonymous comments or thoughtless insults so often found on blogs and any online news articles on these subjects. I mean real conversation between people that can hear each other’s voices and see each other’s faces, that want to both talk and listen.

And when this does happen—like with that first woman in Pittsburgh—it can be fantastic. I just wish that her friend had been half as open-minded.

After reading Bruce Feiler’s column in yesterday’s New York Times, I’m tempted to call my dad and tell him how lucky he was that the sweater covered my chest and arms and the skirt reached my knees. Feiler, and the various experts he quotes, discuss what to do when daughters decide that they want to dress in a more provocative manner than their parents think they should. I’m already anticipating having many clothing arguments with my daughter in about a decade, so I was glad that several common-sense tactics were suggested.

But one perspective was missing from the article: any acknowledgement that boys should be taught that a girl’s clothes are not an automatic reflection of her or any aspect of her sexuality. Yet this is a necessary lesson to teach, for the sake of both our sons and our daughters. This idea that women and girls must take care to dress certain ways to avoid sending a particular message, or not be taken seriously by their employers, peers, or teachers is pervasive and repeated ad nauseum in thousands of ways in our society and media. And always the onus is on girls and women to present themselves in a certain way, never on men and boys to stop investing more power in appearance than it deserves.

It is no secret that our culture has a double standard when it comes to male and female sexuality. It is also no secret that the sexualization of girls starts early, at least when it comes to how clothing companies and popular culture presents images of how girls should dress and look. But just because these messages are all around us does not mean that we have to be complacent. Indeed, all of these messages present ample opportunity to push back against a narrative that presents girls and women as nothing more than objects to be viewed, and boys and men as nothing more than viewers incapable of independent thought.

This refusal to examine the role of men and boys in how girls and women are treated is repeated over and over in other areas of our society. Just look at reproductive rights, which have long been assumed to concern only women. Yet how many men and boys have benefited from access to reliable contraception? How many men have been able to become fathers when they’re ready because their partners had safe abortions? How many men would want to turn the clock back to the pre-Roe, pre-Griswold era? 

Sexuality, reproductive health, how we treat each other … these are not “female” issues or “male” issues. They are human issues, and they should be treated as such.

And guess what? Dr. Carhart said absolutely nothing that contradicted the medical examiner’s report. He also talked to the women posing as patients about their entire range of options, including adoption and parenting. He reassured them that if a baby was born alive during an abortion procedure, he and his staff would do what they could to save the infant, including calling for hospital care.

Wow – a doctor that treats his patients with respect and provides competent, caring advice! Who answers all their questions and explains complicated medical issues in layman’s terms! Who takes the time to meet with a patient before she undergoes a procedures! I wish that I’d had a doctor like that in even one of the six complex surgeries I’ve endured in my lifetime.

Live Action is completely irrelevant and ridiculous. If group leader Lila Rose and her minions really wanted to help women, they wouldn’t waste thousands of dollars paying pregnant women to sneak hidden cameras into abortion clinic appointments. They wouldn’t take up valuable time that clinic staff, counselors, and physicians could be spending helping women that actually need assistance. And if Live Action really believed in the value of their message, they wouldn’t exploit a woman’s death or resort to lies and sensationalism.

One show that did meet my parents’ criteria for worthwhile entertainment was the Canadian teen show “Degrassi Junior High,” which evolved into “Degrassi High” and, after an extended break in the late ’90s and early ’00s, lives on today as “Degrassi: The Next Generation.” Revolving around a group of students at the titular school, all of the “Degrassi” iterations dealt with a range of teen issues including, but in no way limited to, drug abuse, depression, eating disorders, suicide, sex, and peer pressure.

Given that list, it’s no surprise that abortion has been addressed on the show in various ways over the years. The first teen-pregnancy storyline on the show, way back in 1987 on “Degrassi Junior High,” was resolved by the pregnant girl, Spike, deciding to become a parent. But in 1989, on the first episode of “Degrassi High,” Erica becomes pregnant after a brief relationship. Despite the objections of her twin sister, Heather, Erica has an abortion — a decision which plays out over subsequent episodes, as Heather deals with her guilt about the abortion and Erica is harassed by an anti-choice classmate.

The timing of this episode is worth noting, as it came the year after the landmark Morgentaler decision. Often called the Canadian Roe v. Wade, R. v. Morgentaler ruled that the abortion provision in the Criminal Code of Canada violated a woman’s rights and was unconstitutional; since that time, there have been no criminal laws regulating abortion in the country.

This decision was issued in early 1988, and Erica’s abortion storyline first aired in Canada in the fall of 1989, to an audience that had recently seen major real-life changes to how their country addressed abortion. Yet in the U.S., which had legalized abortion sixteen years earlier, the idea of a teenager choosing abortion and not suffering for her decision was apparently too controversial to broadcast. A scene in which Erica and Heather fight their way through a crowd of anti-choice protestors in front of the abortion clinic was deleted from the U.S. version, which also declined to explicitly state what Erica’s decision was. However, the episodes dealing with the effects of Erica’s abortion did air in the U.S.

In 2004, another abortion storyline, this time on “Degrassi: The Next Generation,”  encountered censorship. This time, it was from the cable channel TeenNick, which aired the show in the U.S. When fourteen-year-old Manny finds out that she is pregnant, both her boyfriend and her best friend want her to continue the pregnancy. Manny eventually decides that an abortion is the best decision for her, has the procedure, and has no regrets. While TeenNick initially refused to air this two-part episode, petitions and protests from fans led to the channel airing the episodes in 2006, two years after they aired in Canada.

That both storylines were edited or flat-out censored for U.S. audiences is particularly curious when considering how the issue of abortion was addressed. Both Erica and Manny sought out advice and support from family or friends, and the messages that they received were neither 100% anti-choice nor 100% in favor of abortion. Manny’s best friend, Emma, was the daughter of Spike, the young woman who became pregnant while in junior high. Because of her experience of having a teen mother, Emma was vehemently opposed to Manny having an abortion; in fact, it was Spike who supported Manny’s decision. Manny’s boyfriend also wanted her to continue the pregnancy and to parent the child with her. Likewise, Erica’s sister Heather did not want Erica to choose abortion, even though she did ultimately support her sister. In both instances, a wide range of viewpoints and arguments were on display, as were mentions of the importance of contraception and the difficulty both of making the decision to abort and being a teen parent. In short, both storylines displayed the sort of thoughtfulness and discussions that we should want teenagers to be having around sex, unplanned pregnancy, and responsibility. The reluctance of American broadcasters to show these episodes is reflective of our society’s continued reluctance to address abortion, sex, and reproductive health in any sort of nuanced and realistic manner.

This is the resurrection of a short series I did in 2010 for Feminists for Choice. I’ll occasionally examine how abortion is portrayed in film, television, books, and music. Feel free to offer suggestions via Facebook or Twitter.

 The first time I saw Dirty Dancing was at Space Camp. All of us campers were in a large room while the staffers attended to various administrative duties, and someone had the bright idea to fire up the VCR and distract us from the general boredom and disorganization with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. This plan worked pretty well, until a counselor decided to hold a piece of paper over the television during the racy scenes. That was when a room full of pre-adolescents, most of whom had been half-watching the film, decided that we really, really wanted to see what was going on behind that lined notebook paper. There were catcalls and complaints and then the movie was swiftly turned off.

Johnny and Baby in bed may have been deemed too adult for a group of middle school kids, but it is a testament to the creative team behind Dirty Dancing that a movie whose plot point hinges on illegal abortion was so skillfully done, most people forget that abortion is even an element of the film. Yet Penny’s illegal abortion is the very reason that Baby and Johnny were thrown together in the first place.

 “If you do a documentary on coat hanger abortions, the only people who see it will be those who agree with you anyway,” Eleanor Bergstein, the film’s writer, said in a 2010 interview with Gender Without Borders. “If you put one in a wide-based musical with pretty clothes, and lots of romance, it may surprise people and make them think of things they didn’t think of before.” In the same interview, Bergstein explained that the illegal abortion plotline caused some pre-release controversy:

“Right before we opened, we were told there would be a national sponsor, and we were very excited, because we thought that meant big time – and that meant a tube of acne cream on every poster. And I was horrified. And I couldn’t do anything about it. And then the sponsors found that there was an illegal abortion, and they were worried that there would be a backlash, or that the Catholic Church would protest, so they came to me and said, ‘We’ll give you money to go back into the editing room and take the illegal abortion out.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’d be so happy to, but as it happens, it’s so into the plot that if I took it out, there’s no reason for Baby to learn to dance. There’s no reason for her to dance with Johnny, to dance at the Sheldrake, to fall in love with him, to make love with him, so the whole plot falls apart, so I can’t do it.’ And they said, ‘Oh jeez, too bad,’ so the tube of acne cream disappeared, to my joy, and [the abortion] stayed in.

I always thought if you were going to put any kind of message in, it has to be as carefully plotted in as that, because if it’s at all adjacent, it’s going to end up on the cutting room floor. So that was fine. Not many people talked about it, except that we got a very, very big feminist audience.”

It’s also interesting to look at the character of Penny. She’s very much an integral character, a caring young woman who is supported rather than judged by her community. Indeed, the only person that says anything negative about Penny is Robbie, the medical student that gets her pregnant, refuses to help pay for the abortion, and is generally shown to be an arrogant jerk. And unlike many movie and television characters that choose to terminate a pregnancy, Penny is not made to suffer for her choice: her illness is treated by Baby’s father, a physician who treats Penny kindly and reassures her that she can still have children in the future, as she wants.

Penny’s experience was hardly exceptional for the early 1960s, or indeed any of the years before abortion was legal. While many women were fortunate to find competent physicians to terminate their pregnancies, hundreds of women became ill or infertile, or died, as a result of illegal abortion. It’s important, then, that Dirty Dancing showed both the positive and negative in Penny’s situation: that she had a supportive group of friends and was able to find a provider, but also that she suffered complications that resulted from the illegal nature of the procedure. (It is implied that if a properly trained physician in a sterile environment had performed the abortion, then Penny would not have gotten sick.)

In Penny’s storyline, Bergstein subtly illustrates both the dangers of illegal abortion and the necessity of choice. Dirty Dancing is almost thirty years old, yet its unapologetic messages about abortion, stigma, and women’s sexuality are more fresh and modern than many movies and television shows being produced today. Dirty Dancing is truly a movie for the ages, and should be required viewing for anyone interested in abortion rights and reproductive health.

On Sunday, April 14 the Times published “Courage in Kansas,” an op-ed in support of Julie Burkhart and the South Wind Women’s Center. My response, which can be found online and in the April 17 print edition, read:

Today’s ruling by District Court Judge Daniel P. Jordan III blocks the remaining forms of enforcement of this requirement, and prevents the state Department of Health from revoking the clinic’s license for being unable to comply with the admitting regulation. In his opinion, Judge Jordan wrote that “Closing its doors would — as the state seems to concede in this argument — force Mississippi women to leave Mississippi to obtain a legal abortion.” The judge also stated that Mississippi’s position in the case “would result in a patchwork system where constitutional rights are available in some states but not others.”

The bill does more than include language about when life begins. It would also mandate what information clinics must give women about abortion risks—including the medically inaccurate claim of a possible link between breast cancer and abortion—and fetal development; prohibit clinic employees from providing sex education in schools; ban terminations performed solely because of the sex of the fetus; and prohibit the use of tax credits, tax preferences, and public funds for abortion services, as well as prevent public health-care services provided by the state from being used in any way to carry out abortions.

Removing the tax benefits would result in tax increases not just for abortion providers but also for women and their families; and terminations performed to save the woman’s life would not be considered a deductible cost, according to Elise Higgins, the Kansas coordinator for the National Organization for Women. Higgins also raised concerns about the requirement that women be given medically false information from their doctors: “It’s an obvious intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship by making them get this inaccurate information.”

According to Elizabeth Nash of the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute, seven states—Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and Ohio—already use language stating that life begins at fertilization. If Kansas does adopt such language, it will not take precedence over the existing state law that prohibits most abortions after the 22^nd week of pregnancy. But, Nash said, “It’s a statement of intent and it’s a pretty strong statement. … Should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade or should the court come to some different conclusion, the state legislature would be ready, willing and able to ban abortions.”

Kansas’s assault on choice is just the latest draconian measure to be considered this year. If this trend continues, we could soon be looking at a country divided into “safe” states for reproductive health care and “unsafe” states—just as it was over forty years ago, before Roe.

During a recent political hearing in Florida, Planned Parenthood’s Alisa LaPolt Snow was asked what the organization’s response would be if, in the case of a failed abortion, the fetus was born alive. Snow’s answer? “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”

That seems like a perfectly reasonable response to me. After all, who else should be asked to make a decision in that moment? Isn’t that what happens with any child, whether they’re five minutes old or five years old? Let’s say that a five-year-old was gravely ill. Who would be in charge of making his medical decisions? His parents and physician. That doesn’t mean that I’m advocating killing five-year-olds. It means that in America, as in much of the world, parents are the ones that make medical decisions for their children.

Thiessen goes on to cite medical statistics regarding how many abortions result in the delivery of a fetus from exceedingly biased anti-choice “news” sites, rather than turning to nonpartisan and reputable sources such as the CDC and official state and country figures. And he attempts to link Snow’s answer with the case of Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia physician who ran a dangerous medical clinic for decades despite scores of former patients reporting him to city and state authorities. Gosnell is currently on trial for, among other offenses, allegedly killing seven fetuses that were delivered during or after the sixth month of pregnancy.

What Gosnell is accused of doing is unconscionable and horrifying. Everything about his clinic and practice is chilling, including the fact that authorities ignored his abuses for so long. But there is no connection between Gosnell’s atrocities and Snow’s statement. By all accounts, Gosnell was acting without the knowledge of the women involved; he was not trained in abortion care, and did not employ licensed medical professionals. That bears absolutely no resemblance to a scenario in which the woman, family, and trained physician work together to decide what to do in the case of an abortion in which the fetus survives.

Thiessen also ignores the response that the CEO of a South Florida Planned Parenthood gave to the question that Snow was asked: “If confronted with a situation like that, our physicians would provide the appropriate care for both the infant and the woman.” That hardly sounds like a statement in support of infanticide. But apparently Thiessen wants to judge an entire organization based on one not-very-damning statement, rather than consider other perspectives.

But then again, such a reasoned and sensible approach has no place among Thiessen’s inflammatory and manipulative rhetoric. Like many in the anti-choice movement, he prefers to focus on buzzwords and biased sources instead of discussing substantive issues. He pays no attention to the fact that many women who had abortions later in pregnancy for reasons other than fetal abnormalities or their own health risks did so not because they wanted to wait, but because it was difficult for them to raise the money and access a clinic in a more timely manner. Thiessen also ignores the reasons that Gosnell was able to stay in business for so long—there’s the inattention of authorities, of course, but there’s also the fact that Gosnell offered inexpensive abortions to low-income and immigrant women that couldn’t afford the quality healthcare that they deserved.

But that would mean actually talking about education, poverty, and the complicated yet common realities of many women’s, and families’, lives. It’s much easier to just throw around inflammatory rhetoric that doesn’t even skim the surface of the important conversation about reproductive rights that our country could—and should—be having.

Tallahassee Medical Hospital’s response was particularly puzzling because they had previously allowed other employees who had temporary physical disabilities or on-the-job injuries to be transferred to lighter duty. Yet in Crosby’s case, she was told that if she did not return to work by April 11, she will be fired even though the hospital still refuses to follow her doctor’s request. 

“I had been working as a cleaner for almost a year when I was forced onto unpaid leave,” said Crosby.  “I often lifted 25-50 pounds of linen and trash. I was a hard worker. When I asked whether I could avoid lifting heavy items for a few months based on my OB-GYN’s advice, I was able to do all the other parts of my job. But I was simply told to pack up my things and go home.”

Unfortunately, Amy Crosby is far from the only woman that has suffered on-the-job discrimination due to being pregnant. The NWLC, along with A Better Balance, American Civil Liberties Union, California Women’s Law Center, Equal Rights Advocates, Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center, Legal Momentum, and the National Partnership for Women and Families, has compiled stories from pregnant women that were denied adjustments to their jobs that would enable them to work safely during their pregnancies.

These stories clearly display the necessity of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a bill that is scheduled to drop in April or May. Learn more about the act here, and tell your representatives to support it!