# 510 Referendums/PP Closings/Pro-life Feminist Film May 8, 2020
Updates on Peace & Life Referendums
Colorado has a 15-day period, starting May 15, to get extra needed signatures on an initiative to ban late-term abortions. The state's “stay-at-home” order has been loosened to a “safer-at-home" standard.
Missouri had a May 3 deadline for turning in signatures on petitions to place referendums on the ballot this November. Fortunately, the Medicaid Expansion initiative turned in double the needed number of signatures, and awaits verification. It was the only petition of any kind turned in. This means two proposals thankfully won’t make the ballot. One required local governments to cooperate with cruel immigration enforcement. The other prohibited local people from changing historical memorials; given recent controversies, this probably includes preventing dismantling of Civil War Confederate memorials. Those two are now deleted from our list of 2020 referendums of interest.
Updates on Planned Parenthood Centers Some time in the middle of April, the number of Planned Parenthood centers in Connecticut listed on their website suddenly decreased from 16 to 7. No press coverage or explanation has yet been found, but apparently the state has cut its PP centers by over half. This brings to 24 the number of permanent closings of U.S. centers starting in March, 2020. The number of temporary closings currently stands at 45. So 69 of 593 U.S. centers (11.6%, over a tenth!) have stopped operating in the past two months. We keep updated information on closures on the Temporarily Closed page of Grassroots Defunding: Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood. The main point of the site, for those in the U.S., is to match your own local PP centers to nearby alternatives. If your local PP center is closed, now is a great time to help people get their medical needs met elsewhere. Even if the PP center re-opens, people might not go back if they're having their health needs met elsewhere.
Free on YouTube: “Pro-life Feminist” “Pro-life Feminist” is now available to see online. The blurb: “Can you be pro-life and a feminist? This half-hour documentary follows the candid journeys of activists Christina Marie Bennett, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, and Aimee Murphy as they work out the nuances of a non-violent human rights ethic against a backdrop of opposition and actual court audio from Roe v. Wade.”
Our Latest Blog Post
Julia Smucker offers thoughts on: To Know a Person is to Recognize a Human. She reflects on the difference between knowing as a fact and knowing as “being familiar with,” and how that works in dehumanizing people and rehumanizing them.
The Minimise Project, Ireland Restricting how we live our lives, so that others may live: COVID-19 and bodily autonomy April 5, 2020 A lot of abortion discourse is about the moral status or personhood of the pre-born human . . . By contrast, a bodily rights argument in favour of abortion argues that even if a pre-born human is as morally important as you or me, it’s still ethically justifiable for a woman to get an abortion when she chooses to, because of her own bodily autonomy . . . But our response to COVID-19 suggests that when it gets right down to it we are willing to dramatically curtail and restrict our autonomy to save people’s lives, especially vulnerable people’s lives . . . It’s not that the restrictions of autonomy made in response to COVID are too strong: it’s that if pre-born children really are our equals, our willingness to restrict our autonomy to save their lives is far too weak.
Responses/News Tips/Questions to share are all welcome.
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