Artists v. Zealots

by Suzanne Sunshower

I am an independent writer/artist from a quiet little burg called Detroit, who for six years has lived on a farmstead in the wilds of South Dakota. Recently I’ve been asked to write articles on the South Dakota legislature’s yearly attempts to ban abortion within the state. (In three years, there have been three attempts.) Through these articles I have tried to paint a picture of South Dakota’s oppressively conservative evangelical landscape, so that ProChoicers living in less reactionary regions can better understand the South Dakota (mostly male) legislature’s unusual preoccupation with female reproduction. Folks outside the state don’t understand the misogynist social construct in South Dakota, and so aren’t always sure how best to assist the saner South Dakotans who are on the front lines of an exhaustive battle with the extreme Right.

Frankly, I’m tired of the whole mess. I’m tired of writing context articles in which I attempt to explain the inexplicable. I’m tired of doing updates…

Uh-oh, wait, here’s another update: Lawmakers propose yet another ban in 2008 [surprise!], but they also want to make women who seek a legal abortion [try and find one here] to first view a fetal sonogram. Ironically, a sonogram is given prior to an abortion in order to make sure the woman is indeed pregnant, and to see how far along she is; however, she is not made to view it. I must also note that, according to a recent article on the U.S. Food & Drug Administration website, it is the recommendation of medical personnel that “having a prenatal ultrasound for non-medical reasons is not a good idea.” Therefore, one could logically argue that a legislated sonogram would be just such a “non-medical” reason. However, unfortunately for South Dakota women, their legislature is not made up of concerned medical personnel, or even particularly learned individuals; the true occupation of many legislators is farmer or rancher.

As I was saying… I wish the backward people in South Dakota would simply EVOLVE, so this matter could go away. Surely - in a state where book learning is viewed suspiciously, where there are more prisons than universities, a state which consistently ranks 49th in wages, and 50th in white women business ownership (imagine how well women of color are doing!) – you’d think lawmakers would be busy finding ways to make South Dakota a more civilized, modern state in which women would want to raise children. But no.

Perhaps South Dakota is at the tipping point; maybe folks are so tired of the subject they won’t fight another ban? Voters will likely support a ban with exceptions for rape and incest (unlike the 2006 ban); some of them will do so just to end the matter. I am sure the extreme Right hopes voter fatigue will lead to a ProChoice loss. Zealots – and these so-called Christians do believe they are religious crusaders - oft times win battles by simply wearing down their opponents. And, by taking many tiny bits of ground until all ground is lost.

I asked two ProChoice artists in South Dakota to share photos of their political artwork, and to make a few comments if they liked. The above ‘editoon’, starring Mona Lisa, is Scott Ehrisman’s favorite creation on the subject. It was published in the state’s largest newspaper. A prolific poster artist and editorial cartoonist, Ehrisman’s popular works often feature recognizable figures in contemporary society or popular culture, sometimes presented in an admiring fashion, other times in an iconoclastic way to make a political point. Even working in Sioux Falls, the state’s largest city, Ehrisman and his work cause no shortage of controversy.

“There are girls in South Dakota who are panicked if they aren’t married and popping out babies by a certain age!” Ehrisman told me, adding that he has met young women who accept the regional belief that female identity and self-esteem are tied to marriage and motherhood.

The ‘broken record’ editoon (above) sums up Ehrisman’s feelings about the legislature’s repeated attempts to ban abortion.

Ehrisman’s editoon, at left, speaks to the issue of South Dakota being a ‘pharmacist’s right to say No’ state. There are few urban (or even quasi-urban) centers in the state. Women in many small towns find that their local pharmacist will not fill birth control prescriptions of any kind. In South Dakota, a pharmacist can deny a woman birth control, if birth control is against the pharmacist’s religion - as if that made any medical sense. In South Dakota, women have no legal right to birth control.

ProChoice artist Joy Crane discovered first hand just how conservative a local South Dakota arts council could be when she submitted her work, “Chastity Belt Circa 2001”, for exhibition in a college town called Brookings (a town that refers to itself as “progressive” on its website). Initially not accepted for exhibition because the Brookings Arts Council deemed the mixed-media piece “not appropriate” for that community’s viewing, the council later agreed to show the feminist work after the National Coalition Against Censorship, in New York City, became involved in a First Amendment case on Crane’s behalf.

The artwork that made the council nervous is made of foam core board painted and fashioned to look like brick wall, upon which there is attached a ‘belt’, rusty links and a padlock. The ‘belt’ features these words written on it: IMPLANTS, GENITAL MUTILATION, UNEQUAL PAY, BUSH vs. ROE/WADE, RIGHT TO LIFE, CHAUVINISM, MARRIAGE, RELIGIOUS RIGHT, DOWRY, RAPE, ABUSE, and DOUBLE STANDARD.

Crane says, “The word “JUSTICE” also appears on a gold bead-encrusted key hanging on a broken link above the padlock on the back of the belt, representing the view that justice is the key that will free females from all of the injustices that are listed on the belt itself.”

“Chastity Belt Circa 2001” is clearly a women’s rights piece, which the artist says she made because she was “driven to express my views…in response to the oppression I saw in the state of South Dakota after living in other, much more open and liberal places.”

Her views on Choice are simple: “The fetus is not a human, but only has the potential to develop into one. It is inextricably tied physically via the umbilical cord to the pregnant woman’s body, and thus is part of her until the birth and cutting of the umbilical cord. Until that time, she has domain over her body and whatever is inside or attached to it! It’s her choice.”

In an email, she wrote: “There are radical, religious, right-leaning, Republican legislators in the SD legislature and the governor is of the same persuasion. The Republicans have been entrenched as the ‘ruling party’ here for decades.”

Crane was also frustrated by responses from national groups to the 2006 ban bill, which is something I’ve heard from other South Dakotans I’ve interviewed. “NARAL and Planned Parenthood were using the fact that the anti-choice bill had no exception for a woman’s health, but I knew that such a defense would come back to haunt all of us. I think they thought it was the only way to stop the bill from going through, and they were probably right.”

However, she believes that “the problem now is they [national groups] are finally going to have to ‘get down to brass tacks’ and hinge the [Choice] defense on the fact that abortion is nobody’s business but the woman’s who is pregnant. She is the one who has the supreme right to her own body and her decisions regarding it.”

So, take heed ProChoice activists. Locals battling here on the front lines keep saying that the best way to get through to Western rural voters is to frame Choice as a ‘privacy ’ or ‘anti-government meddling’ issue and to forget about calling it a women’s rights issue. The battle continues to rage because, as anyone in SD can tell you, women already have few rights, here.

“Chastity Belt Circa 2001” by Joy Crane, 2001; foam core board, glass beads, thread, plaster, acrylic paint and found metal objects (rusty metal links, padlock and broken rusty metal link)

Bio: Suzanne Sunshower is editor/administrator for www.QuietMountainEssays.org, an e-journal of women’s writing. Versions of her print articles, “South Dakota: Killing Ground for Choice” and “Women Warriors Help Stem the Tide in South Dakota”, can be found online. Read more about Joy Crane’s censorship battle at www.NCAC.org, enter “Joy Crane Chastity Belt” in the onsite search. Read excerpts from (SD Native American Choice activist) Charon Asetoyer’s speech at the 2007 NOW National Conference, at www.QuietMountainEssays.org/Conference.

Speech to Pro-Choice Rally for Women’s Right to Choose - 35 Years After Roe vs. Wade

by Lorna Dee Cervantes
(delivered 1/19/08, San Francisco, CA)

35 years ago the fog was so thick on the valley floor I couldn’t see my face. I couldn’t see the cars on the road or the bus as it pulled up out of the fog to take me to the east side hospital where, at 16 years old, I became the 6th woman in the state of California to receive a legal abortion. Three years before, at age 13, the fog was the same ornery stew as when someone grabbed me on the way to school, threw me to the ground in the empty lot left over from the freeway construction and raped me at knifepoint. At 15, I tried to heal by making sweet love to my boyfriend, a gentle baby-faced boy.

35 years ago a whiteness gripped my life and held me in its decisive grasp. I couldn’t get away from the mass that held me down: the
oppressive poverty, the ignorant faces that ignored me and what I could become, the fog that clogged my brain whenever I looked at the
books I loved and thought I would have to leave behind forever, my mother, passed out on the floor every day when I came home from
school, the days which seemed like another shovel of dirt burying me under a muddy future — at best. 35 years ago, my life was over before it had begun — just like every other girl I knew. I was pregnant.

35 years ago, there was no one to tell. No one, I felt, who could save me from my fate. My nights were blasted by the beatings my
mother received from the men she met in bars. My nights were sirens and broken bottles and locks on the door against the male heaviness I felt outside. My nights were jobless, hopeless, futureless, a black hole, a darkening suction pulling me from my dreams. I wanted to study. I wanted to attend college. I wanted to “make something out of myself.” I wanted to become an university professor. At that time, it was as if I wanted to visit Mars, or Venus, where I imagined all the women are small like me, but free. 35 years ago, my life was over — I was pregnant.

35 years ago I tried to end my life. I took my mother’s extra long knitting needles and a bottle of alcohol under the bed and inserted
the point into my womb. The pain was nothing compared to the inner pain I lived with during those dark misty days. I wanted to die,
rather than live my living death. At the hospital, a nurse told me about a new program. I was sent to a bright office where a psychiatrist asked me one single question: “Do you want to terminate this pregnancy?” “Yes,” I answered, without hesitation. And, like a dream, my boyfriend appeared in another office, and together we answered the same question: “I do.” Yes. I wanted to live.

I will never ever forget that first waking, that first coming out of the fog of anesthesia. I will never ever forget this day, 35 years ago, when I gave birth to myself by aborting — a decision I have always felt I had to live up to — to honor that postponed being by being all I could become. I will never ever forget that feeling of extreme relief or those first words that came to me out of the mist that was my mind: “It’s over.” It was as if the enemy had lifted the gate to the underground cave and I was free. “Free at last! Free at last.” Thank God, Almighty, I was free at last! 35 years ago I made a choice, for life. I made a change.

At 17, I moved out from the foggy alcohol fumes that was my mother’s house, into a place where I could study. I graduated from high school with high honors, and followed my vocational counselor’s advice — the counselor who believed that all Mexicans were stupid and “not college material” — and so I attended San Jose City College where I graduated with high honors and transferred to San Jose State where I graduated with the highest honors. Then I attended the University of California at Santa Cruz for my doctoral study, just as I had dreamed 35 years ago. And for the past 19 years I have lived my dream as an Associate Professor of English at a major university. Today I am an internationally recognized and critically acclaimed author. My poetry has been translated into at least six different languages and studied in universities all over the world. At age 40, when I felt I could afford a life that I never lived as a child, I gave birth to my son.
My choice. My life. My happiness.

And now, 35 years later, I come back to the city of my birth, San Francisco, out of the fog and into the sun, to pass on that life-force, and to preserve our right, as human beings, to define our own destiny, to pursue our dreams, even through the fog of these dark times, to fight here today — for freedom, for liberty, for justice, for all.

Preserve Roe vs. Wade. Preserve the right of a woman to choose her life. Today I stand here to say:

We make the choice
that is our change.

We make the choice
that is our change.

WE MAKE THE CHOICE
THAT IS OUR CHANGE!

Gracias.

Lorna Dee Cervantes is the author of 3 award-winning books of poetry.  Her last, DRIVE: The First Quartet debuted with a solo performance at   the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Visit her at her blog:  http://lornadice.blogspot.com.

Blog for Choice Day is January 22nd

Naral Pro-Choice America is committed to a woman’s right to choose, and supports legislation that advances shared values for all Americans, including prevention of unwanted pregnancies. Join us January 22nd for special blogs as we participate in this year’s Blog for Choice Day event.