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

Month: March 2009

New documentary on abortion in Ethiopia

Ipas has a launched a website for its upcoming documentary, “Not Yet Rain,” due to come out in April. The documentary explores the subject of abortion in Ethiopia through the voices of women who have faced the challenge of trying to access safe abortion care. There’s a trailer on the website you can check out.

From Ipas:

Our goal for this project is to educate U.S. audiences about the unseen epidemic of unsafe abortion – the most preventable cause of maternal mortality. Despite the fact that unsafe abortion claims the lives of nearly 67,000 women and injures millions more each year, the religious and political controversy surrounding abortion has kept this global public health problem relatively hidden. With this film, we hope we can shine a light on what remains a taboo topic, and contribute to a conversation that will help to reveal abortion as a part of the reality of women’s lives around the globe.

The website goes on to mention that, since 2006, Ethiopia has had one of Africa’s most progressive abortion laws, which I did not know. Every day with the learning. I dug around around their website a little more to find this:

[I]n 2004, the Ethiopian Parliament promulgated one of Africa’s most progressive abortion laws. Under the revisions, the new penal code expanded the indications for abortion, adding rape, incest, fetal abnormality and a woman’s physical or mental disabilities. The Parliament also approved abortion for minors who are physically or psychologically unable to care for a child. This is a particularly significant change for Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists estimates that 45 percent of those who seek abortions are younger than 18.

I’ll be interested to see, though, how this translates to the average woman’s experience. Having a law on the books certainly doesn’t guarantee meaningful access to abortion care. Like here, it doesn’t address cultural or religious obstacles. But, still a move in the right direction.

In news that will make you want to quit life:

According to a UK survey, one in seven people think it’s ok to hit a woman if she wears revealing or “sexy” clothes in public. Similar numbers think it’s ok to hit a woman who “nags.” An even higher percentage — a full one-quarter of respondents — believe that a woman who wears revealing clothing should be held responsible if she’s the victim of sexual assault.

Thanks to Laurence for the link.

Breaking: Obama Overturns Ban on Stem Cell Research

I just watched it live on CNN.com!  Whoa!

The executive order is a reversal of an executive order issued by President Bush in 2001:

Because stem cells have the potential to turn into any organ or tissue cell in the body, research advocates say they could yield cures to debilitating conditions such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and spinal injuries. But because work on embryonic stem cells involves the destruction of human embryos, many conservatives supported the limits Bush imposed by executive order in 2001.

Dr. Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and co-chairman of Obama’s science advisory council, said Sunday that Obama will “endorse the notion that public policy must be guided by sound, scientific advice.”

Obama’s order will direct the National Institutes of Health to develop revised guidelines on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research within 120 days, said Varmus, who joined Barnes in the conference call with reporters.

“The president is, in effect, allowing federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research to the extent that it’s permitted by law — that is, work with stem cells themselves, not the derivation of stem cells,” he said.

Obama also said that he hopes Congress will continue to support stem-cell research legislatively.  All of this is incredibly excellent news, and I cannot possibly express how very happy I am about the development.  It looks like we may in fact be moving towards a real “culture of life,” which values the lives of actual people.  Go President Obama!

h/t HollyOrd’s twitter

Weekend Reads

JOBLESS: Everyone’s been talking about the interactive map published by The New York Times on unemployment rates in the U.S. This instructive piece of info is useful for finding the areas of the country most affected by downturns in manufacturing and housing bubbles. Unfortunately the map is also accompanied by one of those class- and gender-dumb articles that asserts men and rich people are “more affected” by the economic crisis than everyone else, which is important because they’re more important. SEE ALSO: If you’re as lost as I am on the causes of the economic crisis, check out this collection of simple guides on how our economy went into the shitter.

NEIGHBORS OF JUAREZ: Violence along the U.S.-Mexico border is spreading and requires solutions other than superficial chest-beating, passive-agressive walls and empty sentiments about protecting “our” “borders”. We *must* protect Central American borders and people as well, and the poison that crosses from our state to theirs. (H/T)

WHAT IF HE DID IT?: Considering that the percentage of false rape reports is in the single digits, and similar to the incidence of false reporting with other crimes, why do people turn out in droves to defend public figures who have been accused of rape? It’s like rape is a special kind of crime that everyone hears about but no one actually commits. Maybe women just rape themselves.

SEX SELLS: Sure, but when naked ladies are the primary imagery used to push a product, it’s implicit that “primarily, women [are] sold to (presumably heterosexual) men,” and worse, that as women we have our status as sexual objects of the het male gaze sold back to us again, and again, and again, and again. No wonder people have body-image issues.

GENDER JUSTICE: Men of color are not the only people affected by police brutality. Also, police murders of men of color are a feminist issue.

SPEAK!: This women of color-led media collective of artists from all over the country put together a CD of spoken word poetry and song last summer, and it’s now available here for purchase. (H/T)

LITTLE KING: Lawrence “Larry” King was a biracal, openly gay, feminine-identified youth who was shot to death by his classmate, Brandon McInerney, on February 12, 2008, at E.O. Green Junior High School. Despite a documented escalation of behavior between King and his killer, all authorities turned away as they allowed children to beat their gender atypical peers, encouraged homophobic youth by remaining complacent to their homophobic behaviors, and wrote it off as mere “bullying.”

SEEING IS BELIEVING: The way we visually represent sexually transmitted diseases in sex education is revealing of class-related health care issues and also affects the way we seek treatment for them once we may be infected.

MISSING: Missing from conversation about abortion and ethics on Hardball: Women.

SCREENING: In the U.S., you will almost never hear about the downsides of breast cancer screens, in that “none of the literature [describing mammography] had even mentioned the major harm of screening: overdiagnosis and subsequent unnecessary treatment of healthy women. About a third of the literature even told women that screening leads to less invasive surgery or simpler surgery, when ‘it actually results in 30% more surgery, 20% more mastectomies and more use of radiotherapy.'” Not that I’m suggesting people don’t look out for their health, but more that much of the health care industry as it exists is about marketing to consumers, not patients, and driving up fear about disease.

TRANS 101: In which Helen lets cis people know what’s what.

Posted in Uncategorized

Shorter Catholic Church: The Right to Life Ends at Birth

This is an interesting piece, but one part in particular stands out:

I asked my colleague Elizabeth Tenety, producer of Divine Impulses and our former “Campus Catholic” blogger, to explain [why the Church targets Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, but not those who favor the death penalty]. “From a Catholic perspective, I don’t think it’s about diminishing the death penalty’s wrongness, but saying that the right to life is the primary dignity afforded human beings,” she said. “Once you get out of the womb, life gets a lot more complicated and so does the working through of the ‘seamless garment,'” she said.

“Seamless garment” is a New Testament phrase. In 1983, the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, then the most influential U.S. archbishop, used the phrase to defend linking opposition to capital punishment and nuclear weapons to opposition to abortion. He argued that all of these “prolife” policies constitute a “”consistent ethic of life,” a “seamless garment.”

In other words, the right to life isn’t absolute — it ends at birth.

Dear Everyone:

If you feel inclined to ask yourself “Can Chris Brown’s career survive?” — as far too many people these days seem to — you really, really need to sit down and get your priorities in check.

And if you can’t manage to do that much?  At least shut the fuck up so that you don’t say horrifying things like this, which indicate that poor Chris Brown messed up by not proactively “framing” his brutal assault in a sympathetic manner:

Killeen said Brown’s representatives may have erred by waiting a week before issuing a statement.

“By then everybody had an idea and a vision as to what happened,” she said. “Unfortunately if you don’t speak and frame the issue, state what happened, state the facts that you know, someone else is going to do it for you and you lose your position of being proactive and owning the story.”

That is all.