i love shoes, feminism, equality, gender nonconformity, activism, and calling out the patriarchy. i am the former president of the jackson area national organization for women http://jackson.nowms.org and currently an intern at planned parenthood.

i have a blog with a lot of varying themes http://ladylamia.wordpress.com but i wanted something that was strictly for my activism and feminism, so here you are!

the views and opinions expressed in these blogs are my personal views and opinions, they are not the official positions of the national organization for women (NOW), planned parenthood, or any other organization that i am or have been affiliated with.

follow me on twitter @femmefeminist

11th February 2011

Link with 2 notes

Why Title X is Critical - Cecile Richards →

great article, definitely worth reading the whole thing!!

Some 60 percent of women who receive care in a Title X family-planning health center say it’s their main source of health care — not a supplement but a lifeline. That’s because 85 percent of them live at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level, and two thirds lack health insurance. What do the House Republicans have in mind for these women and families? Gail Collins distilled their attitude beautifully in a recent New York Times column: “Let Them Use Leeches.”

Tagged: family planning,planned parenthoodtitle Xgovernmentpoliticswomen's healthreproductive justicehealth carehealthcare

20th January 2011

Link with 7 notes

Send health care hypocrites the form to repeal their own insurance →

Fill out this form on Credo to send your rep a form to repeal his/her own health insurance.

Who would have the audacity to vote for repealing affordable health care for 32 million Americans while gladly accepting generous, federally subsidized insurance for themselves? 237 congressional health care hypocrites!

Call out this hypocrisy by sending your Representative who voted for repeal the actual form to cancel his/her own federal insurance - we’ll send a fax for you right now!
(If your Rep. voted against repeal, or has opted out of federal benefits, we’ll send your message to Republican leadership.)

Tagged: health carehealth care reformrepublicansbullshithypocrisy

12th January 2011

Link with 1 note

My husband brought a knife to a political rally →

this is a moving account of what it is really like to live with and love someone with severe mental illness. the stigma is still far too great in this country. mental illness can range from mild to severe, and no matter what it is - depression, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, social anxiety - it is not something that a person should be vilified or blamed for. it is also not something that they can wish (or pray) away, just “get over”, or erase with positive thinking. 

if you are not able to understand what it is like to live with mental illness, either that of a loved one or something that you experience yourself, you are lucky. that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t educate yourself about it, and that people who do deal with it don’t deserve understanding, respect, and empathy.

He returned to work and everyone pretended nothing had happened. But it had. Anyway, he didn’t get better. He’d get far worse before he’d get better.

Stew lost his job because he couldn’t work. He had six months of disability, and during that time we had insurance through Cobra. He had a psychiatrist, a therapist and many meds. Some made him sleepy, some made him angry, mostly they made him dull and foggy, and he became a ghost of himself. He saw things that weren’t there. He heard voices that weren’t there. He struggled with knowing what was real and what was not.

The diagnoses changed, he didn’t fit into a category. And then the disability and the health insurance ran out.

follow the link to read the full story at salon.

Tagged: mental illnessmental healthpoliticshealth carehealthcare reformawareness

10th April 2010

Link

Abortion foes find fertile ground →

Regardless of who pays for what coverage, access to abortion is already shrinking. States keep enacting more and more barriers. Waiting periods. Mandated counseling. Parental involvement. Additional requirements for physicians and hospitals.

“Their real plan is to ban abortion,” says Elizabeth Nash, who oversees state actions for the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.

Until they can win an outright ban, the anti-abortion rights people keep hammering away at access. They know that a right isn’t much good if people can’t actually use it.

Tagged: feminismhealth careabortionpro-choice