Sunday, June 26, 2022

Farm Rules

These are excellent guidelines
We don't have a lot of rules here on the farm.

We live in a (mostly) benign environment, after all, where guidelines and suggestions are generally adequate to ensure domestic tranquility. 

The rules we do have, though, we take seriously.

In no particular order they are:
  • Be kind
  • Don't eat the animals
  • Respect the environment
  • Abortion on demand without apology
That's it. See how easy?

I'm not going to sit here and tell you Singing Whale Farm was founded on all these principles. The first three, for sure, but the fourth was added only recently, to reaffirm the fact that women are fully realized people whose bodies belong to them.

We're sad and angry that the last one had to be added at all. We mistakenly thought that in this day and age, in "the greatest country in the world," decisions about one's own body were fundamentally not subject to debate. 

In a country teeming with hard-right authoritarians and fanatic religious disciples, though, that belief was naive. 

For millions of women, the right to self-determination has suddenly evaporated. Changes to long-standing laws by corrupt political figures will effectively turn women into breeding livestock controlled by government.

Across multiple states, officials who believe their religion and status as legislators give them divine power, forced-birth laws have gone into effect. These statutes make felons of women and clinicians who believe laws like those are retrograde, immoral, and contrary to the standards of first-world healthcare.

We agree with the women and clinicians. So we're declaring Singing Whale Farm a sanctuary for people who prefer "farm rules".

We are fortunate to live in a state that more than 50 years ago literally led the nation—by being the first to decriminalize abortion. A state where the constitution protects the right to privacy, which includes the right to an abortion as part of comprehensive reproductive healthcare. 

Our farm will always be a place where a woman has the inalienable right to make decisions about her own body, and act on them. If you need help achieving that, we'll be here to assist, no questions asked.

If our government enacts laws to the contrary, we will continue to support women and clinicians by whatever means necessary.

Women will never be someone else's property here on the farm. 

We don't have a lot of rules...but that's for damn sure one of them.

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