August 28th is my birthday. It's also the anniversary of the day I learned about my stillbirth fourteen years ago. (Never schedule a doctor's/midwife's appointment on your birthday--you may 1. change the day forever and 2. never be able to forget the date when.)
(Otherwise perfectly normal pregnancy; we'd passed the standard 18-20 week anatomy scan with flying colors. I found out about the fetal death when the midwife couldn't get a heartbeat on the Doppler. Nothing discernible happened--testing revealed no genetic abnormalities.)
That experience--the decisions I had to make then (deliver a dead baby? Go under general anesthesia and have them extract a dead baby from my unconscious body? Yes, this is awful, but these are the decisions that have to be made),
did two paradoxical things: it gave me an entirely different appreciation of the pain of pregnancy loss and stillbirth, and it made me irrevocably, implacably convinced that the only people who should make these decisions are the pregnant person and whoever she wants guiding her.
Her doctor, sure; clergy, if she wants them; anyone else she wants to consult with. Only them.

I had supported abortion rights before, for halakhic and general political reasons. That experience made it a burning conviction in my bones, to mis-quote Jeremiah.
No, I didn't have to make those particular choices. I wasn't terminating anything. My daughter's heart stopped on its own, for no discernible reason. But I had a whole other appreciation for what those decisions and choices could feel like.
Since then, I have comforted women who have experienced stillbirth and pregnancy loss.

And I have comforted women who, with the guidance of their doctors and rabbis, terminated yearned-for pregnancies.
The murdered George Tiller was right. Trust women. (Today he might say trust pregnant people, but he said trust women.)

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More from @Doc_RPS

2 Sep
אֶת־חֲטָאַ֕י אֲנִ֖י מַזְכִּ֥יר הַיּֽוֹם
I was once Mr. Logic Man. Everything was a debating society point; if I could argue my way around you I was right and you were wrong. (And I could usually argue my way around you.)
Not only were lived experience and feelings irrelevant, introducing them into the conversation proved the weakness of an argument that could not stand up to the rigors of reasoned debate.

(If this sounds like a whole lot of frum internalized misogyny, you are absolutely right.)
I remember in college at some point getting into a vigorous argument with someone about how disabled people would be best served by robust Access-A-Ride programs that would give them rides places, rather than retrofitting public transit stations. Cost/benefit analysis, you see.
Read 11 tweets
1 Sep
The ad hominems aren't worth addressing (and if I'm the staunchest proponent of abortion you know you should probably get out more), but there's something here that's either misinformed or dishonest, and is important to point out.
I know two married frum women--by know, I don't mean "heard about"; I mean "see/speak to weekly"--who terminated pregnancies for fetal abnormalities incompatible with life. They did so under the guidance of the greatest poskim in my community.
In one case, the pregnancy was the result of an expensive, physically arduous, and emotional taxing IVF process. Every day she carried the pregnancy with the doomed fetus was a day that she was suffering through well-wishes for the "finally!" pregnancy that wasn't viable.
Read 8 tweets
30 Aug
I started working in SAR High School in 2005.

On August 29, 2005, Katrina made landfall in Louisiana.
Years later, I met a student who had been in that first class that I taught. She said, "You know what I remember that you taught us? You taught us that people didn't evacuate New Orleans because Katrina hit on the 29th and they didn't have enough money left to fill up on gas."
(Or to buy bus tickets, or for motels....Evacuating costs money, and if you live paycheck-to-paycheck, you don't have a lot of it on the 29th of a 31-day month.)
Read 8 tweets
27 Aug
In the early 20th century, the United States fought a war of conquest and empire in the Philippines. (We can't call it that, because we don't conquer and we don't have an empire, so we just conveniently memory-holed that war.) It became a brutal counterinsurgency.
The Islamophobic apocryphal story about Pershing killing Muslim insurgents with bullets dipped in pigs' blood that Trump kept peddling in his 2016 campaign comes from that war.
As wars against local populations who don't want to be colonized are wont to do, it lasted a long time, with horrific casualties.

We would do well to remember our own history.
Read 6 tweets
26 Aug
Disagree with Dr. @HannahLebovits here, or at least with how this is being framed. (Maybe we agree pretty much, but choose different points of emphasis. Or not.)

It is certainly true that the comfort of straight, white, cis Orthodox men sets a lot of the parameters. But:
I don't think that if there's a rabbinic will there's a halakhic way.

I do think that if more voices were heard, more people included, more perspectives considered, things would change.

But Orthodox Judaism won't become egalitarian, across many axes.
I think @Mandalorthodox is right about this: Sometimes, the chicken is just treif.

Read 14 tweets
26 Aug
For many years, starting when I was in high school, I wrote with fountain pens. (What they say about lefties not being able to write with liquid ink is a vicious slander.) I loved the tactile experience of producing writing that way. And then at some point, I stopped.
I always wrote with gel or liquid ink pens, but it wasn't the same.
Recently inspired, I ordered a bottle of fountain pen flush (to get ten-year-old ink out of converters and nibs) and some new ink. Dug up two of my pens--I have to find the rest--cleaned them out, and am writing with some new blue-black (my long-time favorite) and red-black ink.
Read 4 tweets

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