In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Health

Susan Wood, an Interview

The Village Voice has a great interview with Susan Wood, the former director of the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health, who resigned after a sneaky move to keep the morning-after pill, called Plan B, off pharmacy shelves even after some called it the “safest product they had seen in years.”

Who made the decision to postpone selling Plan B in pharmacies?
I don’t know. It did not appear to me that any of the professional staff were involved. At every level of the review process, we agreed that this was safe, effective, and appropriate for over-the-counter use. The decision was not made in the usual passage.

Opponents call Plan B an “abortion pill.” Is there any logic to this?
The only connection this product has with abortions is that it prevents them. The public debate baffles me. It’s extraordinary. Plan B delays ovulation. No matter when you believe life or pregnancy begins, this product is unlikely to ever involve a fertilized egg.

Italicized emphasis mine.

via Feministing

Mission Accomplished II

I have not had much to say about the situation in Louisiana because I am floored at the footage I have been watching. Not having access to anything but the night’s half-hour of evening news, I was appalled at the destruction waged on New Orleans and Biloxi, the fact that the structures meant to keep the water out flood the city further, that this hurricane target was so unprepared for disaster, the people and pets hacking through their attics, waiting on rooftops to be saved from endless spans of water.

The damage will be long-lived: streets covered in mud and sand, houses coated in petroleum, a city overrun with mosquitos and disease, lives ruined, people dead and dying, a national landmark city leveled.

I read this story and cried for a long while, thinking of the horror of yet another Sophie’s Choice. The loss, real and imagined, is overwhelming.

And while the Gulf Coast drowned, Nero strummed his gee-tar.


How infuriatingly cavalier.

Only in the face of a national disaster did Bush cut short his five-week vacation, but not before a valuable photo-op.

via The Heretik

UPDATE: For many, many pictures of the situation in the Gulf, see Kathryn Cramer’s collection of pictures found about the internets.

UPDATE II: In other news, it’s not looting if you’re white. Also, a reader clues me in to the video footage noted above.

USDA Official Steps Down Due To Morning-After Pill Politics

Susan Wood, a senior member of the FDA and women’s health advocate, stepped down from her position because of the decision to delay the morning-after pill again despite being found safe for over the counter availability.

Her letter of resignation says in part:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I regret to tell you that I am leaving the FDA, and will no longer be serving as the Assistant Commissioner for Women’s Health and Director of the FDA Office of Women’s Health. The recent decision announced by the Commissioner about emergency contraception, which continues to limit women’s access to a product that would reduce unintended pregnancies and reduce abortions is contrary to my core commitment to improving and advancing women’s health. I have spent the last 15 years working to ensure that science informs good health policy decisions. I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled. I therefore have submitted my
resignation effective today.

I will greatly miss working with such an outstanding group of scientists, clinicians and support staff. FDA’s staff is of the highest caliber and it has been a privilege to work with you all. I hope to have future opportunities to work with you in a different capacity.

Had I been in her position I too would have been frustrated all to hell. The Bush administration record on scientific accuracy is poor at best. I only wish she hadn’t left. It appears we’ve lost a significant ally.

Can You Be a Feminist for Life?

Sure. I’m a feminist for life. I like life. I think mine is important enough to preserve, and I think yours is too. I think we should do all we can to sustain life and to make it as good (or at least as livable) as possible — I support life-affirming things like poverty relief programs, environmentalism, reasonable gun control laws, and universal healthcare. I don’t support things that result in the unnecessary taking of life, like the death penalty and preemptive wars based on untruths. Because I value women’s lives, I believe that everyone deserves access to medical care and family planning tools.

But the anti-choice group Feminists for Life is a different story. On the surface, they’re decent, as far as anti-choice groups can be decent. They promote education and childcare for women with children, and adequate campus housing for students with children. These are good things. But as Katha Pollitt discovers, they aren’t exactly a progressive’s dream (in more ways than being anti-abortion):

The problem is that FFL doesn’t just oppose abortion. FFL wants abortion to be illegal. All abortions, period, including those for rape, incest, health, major fetal defects and, although Foster resisted admitting this, even some abortions most doctors would say were necessary to save the woman’s life. (Although FFL is not a Catholic organization, its rejection of therapeutic abortion follows Catholic doctrine.) FFL wants doctors who perform abortions to be punished, possibly with prison terms.

They also subscribe to the theories that abortion causes breast cancer and birth control pills are “abortifacients” — despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. FFL claims that women choose abortion because of a lack of other options — if they had a better education, or access to childcare, or were making more money, they’d have that baby in a heartbeat and abortion would cease to exist. I agree that it’s tragic that some women do “choose” abortion simply for lack of other choices. I think it’s disgusting that right-wing legislators in states like New Jersey have created laws that limit poor women’s choice to have children — for example, penalizing welfare recipients if they give birth while on state assistance. Make the world a friendlier place for women by truly allowing us the fullest range of choices in all areas of our lives, and you can bet that the abortion rate will drop right along with the unintended pregnancy rate.

But if you don’t give women the opportunity to determine the number and spacing of their children, we aren’t going to be able to achieve things like fair pay, white-collar jobs and higher education on the mass levels that men have been able to. If you don’t believe that women are entitled to control what goes on within their own uteruses, if you don’t trust women to make their own decisions — indeed, if you think that the government should be allowed to legally force women to give birth — then you aren’t a feminist. “Feminists for Life,” aren’t. I’ll let the much more eloquent Katha Pollitt finish it out, but I’m curious if any feminists here think that you can be anti-choice (and I mean broadly anti-choice, in that you think abortion should be illegal, not just anti-abortion on a personal level) and still be a feminist.

Exposing the constraints on women’s choices, however, is only one side of feminism. The other is acknowledging women as moral agents, trusting women to decide what is best for themselves. For FFL there’s only one right decision: Have that baby. And since women’s moral judgment cannot be trusted, abortion must be outlawed, whatever the consequences for women’s lives and health–for rape victims and 12-year-olds and 50-year-olds, women carrying Tay-Sachs fetuses and women at risk of heart attack or stroke, women who have all the children they can handle and women who don’t want children at all. FFL argues that abortion harms women–that’s why it clings to the outdated cancer claims. But it would oppose abortion just as strongly if it prevented breast cancer, filled every woman’s heart with joy, lowered the national deficit and found Jimmy Hoffa. That’s because they aren’t really feminists–a feminist could not force another woman to bear a child, any more than she could turn a pregnant teenager out into a snowstorm. They are fetalists.

Women With AIDS on the Rise in China

HIV/AIDS rates are on the rise in China, especially among women. Experts believe part of the problem is lack of education and information on sexual health.

“The number of women infected with HIV/Aids is climbing,” Wei Jian’an, an official with China’s Aids Prevention and Treatment office, told the China Daily.

…Health Minister Gao Qiang blamed the increasing numbers on a lack of knowledge about the disease, especially among women in poor rural areas.

“Women on the whole know less about the disease than men,” Mr Gao reportedly told a recent Beijing conference, adding that fewer than 40% of women in the countryside knew how to prevent Aids.

China estimates that 840,000 of its citizens are infected with HIV, including 80,000 with Aids. But international groups believe the real figure is much higher.

The United Nations’ Aids agency says that up to 10 million Chinese people could be infected by 2010 without more aggressive prevention measures.

The BBC has a comprehensive section on the disease, and our failures and successes in the fight for the cure, on their website.

Last week the only straight man I know in town who is open and honest about having HIV sang at an open mike night in a local bar. Several good ol’ boys didn’t like the looks of him so he mocked them from the stage. The last song of his set he sang with a foot-stompin’, loud, rowdy growl, aimed at the guys down the bar. Shock and awe. I would have loved to see that.

The last song of his set: A cover called “HIV Blues.”

Living in the Green

President Bush claims that signing onto the Kyoto protocol would “wreck” the U.S. economy. And the lovely Portland, Oregon — one of my personal favorite U.S. cities — is proving him wrong.

Newly released data show that Portland, America’s environmental laboratory, has achieved stunning reductions in carbon emissions. It has reduced emissions below the levels of 1990, the benchmark for the Kyoto accord, while booming economically.

What’s more, officials in Portland insist that the campaign to cut carbon emissions has entailed no significant economic price, and on the contrary has brought the city huge benefits: less tax money spent on energy, more convenient transportation, a greener city, and expertise in energy efficiency that is helping local businesses win contracts worldwide.

Now, which city would you rather have your county’s environment modeled on: Portland, which is beautiful, healthy, green and experiencing an economic boom; or Dallas, Texas, which under GWB’s leadership quickly rose to be one of the most polluted cities in the country? No one is arguing that the economy is unimportant. But environmentally-sound policies can help to create jobs, not destroy them. And if the rest of the developed world can stick to Kyoto, why can’t we at least give it a shot?

Rare Case of Menstruating Boy

Despite the very real dangers inherent to this case, I’m wondering what “behavior and traits like a woman” means. He must have a fluff blog.

In an extremely unusual case, a Kolkata doctor is treating a teenage boy who has been showing symptoms of menstruation.

The 15-year-old ‘effeminate’ boy’s bleeding has been occurring in the second week of every month and lasts three days. During the period he experiences stomach aches, cramps, nausea and mood swings.

“We examined the boy. Though he has male organs, his behaviour and traits are like a woman,” said physician Sudip Mondal.

“If tests of blood samples prove the presence of ovum, this would be a very rare medical case,” he added.

Tarak, the boy who was identified by only one name, works as a domestic help in Kalna town, some 200 km north of Kolkata.

He began ‘menstruating’ more than a year ago, but hid the fact from his employers and his impoverished family for the fear of losing his job.

Doctors, who say this is a very rare case but not unprecedented, are now planning chromosomal and hormonal tests on the boy.

“The presence of female functional endometrial in a male prostrate gland can cause this type of anomaly,” said Pradip Mitra of the West Bengal Gynaecological Society.

“The boy needs immediate medical attention or else this could cause fatal complications,” Mitra warned.

via Disenchanted Forest

Breasts, redefined

According to the LA Times, a growing number of American women are getting breast implants — and many want the FDA to speed up its approval of silicone implants, despite the fact that the safety of silicone is questionable.

Now, I tend to have a live-and-let-live mentality when it comes to beauty regiments, including plastic surgery. But I think it’s overly simplistic to say that women who get breast implants just “do it for themselves,” and that it’s not at all problematic. I’m getting kicked out of this internet cafe, so I can’t say everything that I want to right now, but I’ll end by saying that, culturally, we’ve gotten to a dangerous place when so many women feel the need to risk their health and decrease their sexual function for the sake of having boobs that fit a narrow ideal.