What up?

First off, if you're aggravated with my lazy ass and dearth of blog posts, please click on the link on the right to "subscribe to posts" so you won't have to keep coming back, disappointed or perhaps vindicated. A special interweb shout-out to my friend LS for setting it up for me, because I sure as shit couldn't.

This week I recieved an email from Planned Parenthood, urging me to blog about the clinic situation in Aurora. Although they have been allowed to open (just having to type the words "allowed to open" irritates the living shit out of me) the battle will continue. Pro-Life activists have shown up and are taking pictures of the license plates of workers and patients with the intent to make their lives hell, and Safeway is letting these folks use their property to stage their protests. Planned Parenthood is urging people to call Safeway and find out what's what. Calling them, I think is a waste of time. But choosing not to shop at their stores (which include Dominic's) is something that might get their interest. So goodbye Dominic's, hello Jewel.

Now that we're on the subject, and I'm firmly positioned on my soapbox, is anyone else in awe of Pro-Life activists? Over the summer I was coming back from lunch and Michigan Avenue was lined on either side for several blocks with these people holding larger-than life posters of aborted fetuses. Lovely. Where the protestors came from, or why they weren't at work, I don't know. Maybe they parachuted from the sky, or base jumped from atop the Art Institute, or even crawled up out of the ground in Grant Park like cicadas. Anyway they were there.

And as I studied each one carefully while I walked up Michigan, I wondered, for a moment, what this country would be like if they took a few days off from that drama, and really worked to support the women and children of America. What if they urged their leaders to support living wages so that a woman could maybe raise a child. What if they marched on Washington and demanded healthcare, and childcare for these women and that baby they want so desperately to see the light of day? What if they were holding up signs with pictures of all the Chicago Public School children killed this year by gang violence, and demanded a safer environment for poor kids in a city that they likely drove into from the suburbs? Hell, what if they spent more time being parents themselves so that their daughters would know that they have an education and life waiting for them and that getting pregnant too soon is a pretty bad idea.

In my mind, the bottom line is this. If you don't support a woman's right to an abortion, and a woman's right to have access to a Planned Parenthood for all the OTHER services they provide which, obviously would make an abortion unnecessary, then you are anti-woman and by golly, anti-child.