“ For so many of us the lines are not always clear between the people who love us and the people who hurt us. Most of us can say that if someone hits you, that’s pretty shitty; that’s an identifiable thing, a bad thing. When I worked in shelters even women who had had that kind of violence so inculcated into them that they would explain to me how they actually deserved it understood that it was not normal, to hit another human being. It is a thing that must be justified, explained. But there is a lot that can happen up to that point, the point of physical assault, that is not so easy to define. How many of us have traded some measure of safety for the feeling that we are loved? How many of us have seen people we thought we were safe with transformed into people willing to do us harm?

“ They found that a year after the event, the women who were turned away from an abortion were more likely to rely on government assistance, more likely to be living beneath the poverty line, and less likely to have a full-time job than the women in the study who had obtained abortions. They also registered more anxiety a week after they were denied an abortion and reported more stress a year out. They were no more or less likely to be depressed. And women who gave birth suffered from more serious health complications—from hemorrhaging to a fractured pelvis—than the women who aborted, even later in their pregnancies.

Happy home lives also failed to materialize. The women who were turned away were more than twice as likely to be a victim of domestic violence as those who were able to abort. The researchers found that “a year after being denied an abortion, 7 percent reported an incident of domestic violence in the last six months,” compared to 3 percent of the women who received abortions. The researchers concluded that this “wasn’t because the turnaways were more likely to get into abusive relationships,” but that “getting abortions allowed women to get out of such relationships more easily.” Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term helped abusive men stay in these women’s lives, but it didn’t encourage delinquent new dads to stick around: The researchers found that “men were no more likely to live with a turnaway who’d borne their children than they were to live with a woman who had an abortion.”

The abortion debate often focuses on a woman’s health during those first nine months. This study shows that an unwanted pregnancy can have long-lasting effects on a woman’s body and well-being far after she carries it to term.

“ [W]omen of all ages are swooning over this guy and misreading his obsessive, cruel behavior as evidence of love and romance. Part of the reason for this is that his wealth acts as a kind of up-market cleansing cream for his abuse, and his pathological attachment to Anastasia is reframed as devotion, since he showers luxury items on her. This is a very retrograde and dangerous world for our daughters to buy into, and speaks to the appalling lack of any public consciousness as to the reality of violence against women.

“ And then there’s Charlie Sheen. Sheen’s sordid history includes shooting Kelly Preston with a .22 calibre pistol, throwing chairs at his then wife Denise Richards, being sued by a UCLA student for allegedly hitting her in the head after she refused to have sex with him, allegedly strangling at least two of his former girlfriends and just generally being a god-awful d-ckmonger. Yet none of that mattered to Chuck Lorre and the other people making squillions of dollars from the long running Two and a Half Men, a televisual fart that didn’t just succeed in offending the tastes of thinking people everywhere but also legitimised Sheen as some kind of raffish japester. In the end, Sheen was fired not because he’s a disgusting human being with a gross history of violence against women but because he had a drug problem and was publicly rude to his boss.

“ What we didn’t hear about was a how an African-American women who in the course of protecting herself from an abusive husband who beat her while she was pregnant, shot a gun that she legally owns into the air. No one was hurt, but she is now looking at 25 years. Yes indeed, you read that right, facing 25 years.. Her name is Marissa Alexander, she lives in Florida, is a mother of 3 and everyone should know her name and her case.The person who prosecuted her case is Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case.

“ The “success” of the battered women’s movement has proven to be a double-edged sword. In order to gain public support, domestic violence advocates portrayed abused women as innocent victims who suffered at the hands of particularly deviant men. While this narrative perhaps sought to combat the idea that abuse was a woman’s own fault, it drew upon dominant ideas of “innocence” and “victimhood” and required that women represent themselves in particular ways in order to be recognized as deserving of assistance. This requirement to pass as a “good victim” reinforced dominant gender norms and also marginalized women of color, immigrant women, working-class women, homeless women, lesbians, gay men, transgender people, and anyone who did not or could not fit these norms.