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

Tag: Human Rights

…and after you’ve stopped with the bathing suit pictures, maybe stop having breasts.

The following may be triggering for some, as it concerns the physical abuse of young girls.

I can’t even. What the fuck.

I’m working on the afore-mentioned “white Jewish lady” post (more accurately: I appeared on Russian TV yesterday to discuss Israel/Palestine but am having a hard time embedding the video) but in the meantime, just saw this, and: What.The.Fuck.

Breast ironing sparks anger in Cameroon

Every morning before school, 9-year-old Terisia Techu would undergo a painful procedure. Her mother would take a burning hot pestle straight out of a fire and use it to press her breasts.

With tears in her eyes as she recalls what it was like, Terisia tells CNN that one day the pestle was so hot, it burned her, leaving a mark. Now 18, she is still traumatized.

Her mother, Grace, denies the incident. But she proudly demonstrates the method she used on her daughter for several weeks, saying the goal was to make her less desirable to boys — and stave off pregnancy.

A study found that one in four girls in Cameroon have been affected by the practice.

The U.S. State Department, in its 2010 human rights report on Cameroon, cited news reports and said breast ironing “victimized numerous girls in the country” and in some cases “resulted in burns, deformities, and psychological problems.”

There are more than 200 ethnic groups in Cameroon with different norms and customs. Breast ironing is practiced by all of them.

“To stave off pregnancy”… Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about the ways in which the world tries to own and control our bodies, you get slapped upside the head with something new.

Breast ironing sparks anger in Cameroon.

The Rise of Afghanistan’s Fearless Young Feminists

A must-read over at UN Dispatch. A taste of the interview with feminist activist and Dickinson College sophomore Noorjahan Akbar:

UN Dispatch: The abuse of women in Afghanistan is generally associated with rural conservatism and lack of education, but you recently initiated a facebook debate about sexual harassment and highly educated men from Kabul responded with statements such as “If you dress immodestly, prepare to be treated immodestly,” excused violence against “bad girls” and even blamed Afghanistan’s corruption problems on the “wishes of women.” At least one woman in the discussion agreed with those sentiments. Why do you think such resentment toward women persists among the upper strata of Afghan society?

Akbar: I think part of it is competition in the workforce and opposition to affirmative action policies that are creating opportunities for women. But the reality is that a person doesn’t need to be a suicide bomber to think like a Talib [a member of the Taliban]. I know many educated men who think of themselves as intellectuals but would never let their mothers leave the house, would never let their sisters attend a concert.

I know a couple of men my age who are egalitarian in the way they think about women, but they are not the majority of intellectuals or the majority of university students. Just two days ago, I had a conversation with a few university students in Kabul who believed that women should be allowed to show only their eyes and nothing else. They thought that was required by Islam. They thought that should be the reality of our lives. It’s going to be a long journey and ten years is not enough time to change the minds of the majority.

Another issue is that when the government proposes regulations that restrict women’s behavior, conservatives are encouraged. For example, you have the government’s proposed regulation for weddings. If this becomes law, it won’t just limit how much people can spend; it will also regulate how women can dress at weddings. And there has been talk in the government for years of reinstating a moral police. These policies support the Taliban worldview.

UN Dispatch: Do you think the current trend is toward increasing conservatism?

Akbar: Yes. I’ll give you an example: two years ago men would not stop me and question me if I was alone in a car with a man. Today the police in Kabul do this all the time and the government supports them. Nobody stops the police from harassing me. Men who think like the Taliban are encouraged by this kind of behavior.

Go read the whole thing.

Catholic Pro-Life Warriors Still OK with Women and Girls Dying

How very pro-life of the Catholic Church:

Today marks the opening of a United Nations general assembly “high level meeting” on Aids in New York City that will evaluate the progress of that body’s response to the pandemic over the past five years and set the agenda for the next decade. Serra Sippel, president of the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (Change), declares that “this meeting is where we decide how serious we are about beating HIV, and how serious we are about women’s equality.” If so, the Holy See has left no doubt about their stance on either issue.

For months now, their all-male team has been trying to strip all references to sexual and reproductive health and rights from the meeting’s declaration; gutting all mentions of education and prevention other than marriage and fidelity; and insisting that “families” be replaced with “the family”, as though that monolith even exists or that it provides some kind of magic shield against HIV.

Either the Holy See does not understand, or does not care that their hardline stance is not actually “pro-life” in any sense. They ask that paragraph 60 of the declaration, which addresses research and development for treating and curing HIV, delete all mention of “female-controlled prevention methods”. This despite the fact that female condoms and the very promising looking microbicides now being developed have no relation to abortion and represent the single greatest potential life saver for women worldwide.

Ditto for paragraph 58, which makes the all-important and entirely sensible promise that the UN will “commit to ensuring that national responses to HIV and Aids meet the specific needs of women and girls”. The Holy See, allied with the African Group and Iran, asks for the deletion of the very sentence that spells out what that really means:

“… by ensuring that women and girls can exercise their right to have control over, and decide freely and responsibly on, matters related to their sexuality in order to increase their ability to protect themselves from HIV infection, including their sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.”

Heaven forfend.

Control over women’s bodies > women’s actual lives.

The Evangelical Adoption Crusade

Go read this article by Kathryn Joyce. Be horrified.

Adoption has long been the province of religious and secular agencies, but in the past two years evangelical advocacy has skyrocketed. In 2009 Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of the 2009 book Adopted for Life, shepherded through a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) resolution calling on all 16 million members of the denomination to become involved in adoption or “orphan care.” Last year at least five evangelical adoption conferences were held, and between 1,000 and 2,000 churches participated in an “Orphan Sunday” event in November. And in February, the mammoth evangelical adoption agency Bethany Christian Services announced that its adoption placements had increased 13 percent since 2009, in large part because of the mobilization of churches.

“We expect adoptions will continue to rise as new movements within the Christian community raise awareness and aid for the global orphan crisis,” Bethany CEO Bill Blacquiere said.

One result has been the creation of “rainbow congregations” across the country, like the congregation Moore helps pastor in Louisville, Highview Baptist. An active adoption ministry has brought 140 adopted children into the congregation in the past five years. These children don’t recognize the flags of their home countries, Moore proudly noted at a 2010 conference, but they can all sing “Jesus Loves Me.”

Adoption can be a good thing for children and families, but only when it’s done ethically — and that’s not what’s happening at a lot of these organizations that serve Americans who feel entitled to “orphans” from all over the world. When desperately poor parents are being paid to place their children for adoption so that American families can have babies, that’s not ethical and it’s not best serving children. When the rules are fudged because this is the Lord’s work, that does not serve children. Read it all.

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‘And for how long will we let ideological agendas kill women in silence?’

I want to share with you a speech given by a young Moroccan doctor and sexual and reproductive rights activist by the name of Imane Khachani. I’ve been extremely fortunate in securing an interview with Dr Khachani – ! – which I’ll share with you quite as soon as it’s conducted. This is a video I found during the course of my research, and it’s well worth a viewing. A transcript follows.

Read More…Read More…

Sending mentally ill people to Siberia

“He’s really really old and has therefore earned the right to say what he thinks” doesn’t really apply when the old person in question suggests sending mentally ill people to Siberia so that they can die of exposure, and when he says that Hitler did something right. Especially when the person in question is a New Hampshire Republican state senator, whose views actually determine what programs — and what kind of people — receive state funding.

Injustice at Every Turn

The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) just released a report on discrimination against trans and gender-noncomforming people, and the results are (predictably) horrifying. The report is based on the largest survey of trans and gender-nonconforming people ever taken in the United States, with 6,450 participants. Among the key findings:

-Survey respondents were nearly four times more likely to live in extreme poverty (household incomes of less than $10,000 per year)
-Respondents of color were especially at risk for discrimination (although discrimination was widely reported by respondents of all backgrounds). African-American trans and gender-nonconforming people reported the most severe discrimination.
-Health care access is a major problem. One in four respondents reported being HIV positive. Nineteen percent reported being refused care because of their trans identities, or non-conforming gender presentation. African-American respondents reported even higher numbers of health care discrimination.
-Survey respondents were twice as likely to be unemployed compared to the population as a whole. Half of respondents reported workplace harassment or mistreatment, and a quarter had been fired because of their gender identity or expression.
-Nineteen percent of respondents reported being refused a home or apartment; 11% reported being evicted from their home because of their gender identity or expression. One in five survey respondents experienced homelessness.
-Twenty-two percent of respondents reported feeling uncomfortable asking law enforcement for assistance.
–Forty-one percent of survey respondents reported attempting suicide. Only 1.6% of the general population has reported attempting suicide. The rate of attempted suicide among trans people and gender-nonconforming people is significantly higher even than the attempted suicide rate of people who are diagnosed with chronic depression.

As Nancy Goldstein says in the American Prospect, it’s crucial that this survey even happened in the first place:

Currently most surveys — including the census and epidemiological studies — contain zero questions about sexual orientation, never mind gender identity and expression. The consequences of not being counted, of being invisible, is that no one knows who constitutes the transgender community, what its members experience, or what their challenges or needs are. The many costs to transgender people include the fact that they are allotted little if any funding or resources on the state or federal level. That’s even true of resources spread within an LGB community that often forgets the “T.”

Much of this discrimination, it’s worth noting, is entirely legal. Trans people are routinely left of out anti-discrimination laws that protect citizens from discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, nationality, etc. And the breadth of problems faced by trans and gender-nonconforming people all tie together: It’s awfully hard to keep a job if you can be legally fired for being trans and if your co-workers routinely harass and discriminate against you; it’s hard to stay above the poverty line if you’re not employed; it’s hard to avoid homelessness if you’re living in extreme poverty and if landlords routinely refuse to rent to you; it’s hard to enforce even existing anti-discrimination laws if you don’t trust the police (and for good reason — twenty-two percent of respondents reported being harassed by law enforcement); it’s hard to stay healthy when health care providers refuse to care for you.

This kind of discrimination, bias and hate kills. Trans and gender-nonconforming people attempt suicide at astounding rates. When health care providers refuse to help, patients die (and trans people have died because doctors and emergency workers didn’t do their jobs). When people are desperate for a place to live and for food to eat, and when above-the-board employers won’t hire them, sometimes the only option is to enter underground economies, which (especially for marginalized populations) can bring with them higher incidences of drug use, higher-risk sexual activity and incarceration — all of which may be factors in higher rates of HIV. And of course, trans and gender non-conforming people aren’t just killed by suicide, poverty, discriminatory medical workers and health issues — they are also sexually and physically assaulted, abused and murdered. Back to Nancy (trigger warning):

There’s a direct link between being able to earn an above-board living, having stable housing, and staying alive. The results of facing continual job discrimination, combined with being refused housing (19 percent) or being evicted (11 percent), and having a nearly 1-in-5 chance of being homeless at some point, are not only painful, stressful, or unhealthy but catastrophic. Those who have been fired due to anti-transgender bias are far more likely to enter the underground economy, where sex work and drug sales expose participants to a range of increased risks, including incarceration and a higher incidence of intravenous drug use and HIV (with rates in the survey at four times the national average). No wonder respondents, when asked to list their policy priorities, threw the biggest numbers (70 percent) behind protection for transgender/gender nonconforming people from discrimination in hiring and at work.

Transgender people often suffer harm from the very systems designed to protect most citizens. Twenty-two percent report being harassed by police, but the problem extends beyond law enforcement. In 1995, D.C. resident Tyra Hunter died from entirely treatable injuries incurred in a car accident. First, the firefighters who arrived at the scene stopped emergency medical treatment once they cut away her clothes to discover male genitalia. (One witness reported hearing a firefighter say, “This bitch ain’t no girl. … It’s a nigger, he got a dick.”) Once they stopped joking around and got her to the emergency room, the doctor refused to treat her. She died there of blunt force trauma and medical negligence. Fifteen years after Hunter’s death, the survey’s numbers still stink: 19 percent of respondents reported being refused care because of their gender identity or expression, with even higher figures for respondents of color. Nearly 3 percent reported being attacked in emergency rooms.

This is despicable. Mainstream American society has created the conditions that harm and sometimes kill trans and gender non-conforming people. Federal bills protecting the most basic human rights of trans people are non-starters. Even “LGBT” groups routinely throw trans rights under the bus to accomplish other parts of their agendas.

Do read the whole report — it’s depressing and heartbreaking, but necessary.

#DearJohn: The GOP Seeks to Re-Define Rape and Restrict Reproductive Health Care

It’s not surprising that with large numbers of Republicans elected to Congress, we’re seeing major assaults on reproductive rights. What is shocking is how aggressive and heartless they are. A new bill, which has a good chance of passing, will deny abortion services to rape survivors; cut abortion care from private insurance policies; and remove exceptions for abortions that preserve a pregnant woman’s health.

The “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, which is sponsored by vocal anti-choice republican Chris Smith, does the following:

-Re-defines rape. As it stands, federal dollars do not cover abortion, except in instances of rape, incest or a threat to the pregnant woman’s health or life. This bill requires that the rape exception only cover “forcible” rape — so if you’re 14 and you’re impregnated by your 30-year-old “boyfriend,” that’s not really rape and you’d better start saving up your allowance if you want to terminate the pregnancy. “Forcible” isn’t defined in the bill — if you’re drugged and then raped, that might not count, since there wasn’t force involved. There’s also an incest exception, but only for minors — so if your father rapes you and you’re 18, too bad.

-Removes exceptions for the woman’s health. This bill allows federal funds to cover abortion if a physician certifies that the pregnancy will kill her, but allows no exceptions for the pregnant woman’s health. So if, for example, continuing a pregnancy will damage the woman’s kidneys so badly that she’ll need to be on dialysis for the rest of her life? Too bad, that’s not life-threatening.

-Requires that the government continue to fund entities that discriminate against women and endanger women’s health. The text of the bill reads “A Federal agency or program, and any State or local government that receives Federal financial assistance (either directly or indirectly), may not subject any individual or institutional health care entity to discrimination on the basis that the health care entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.” So health care facilities can not only refuse to provide abortions, but can also refuse to refer women out for abortion coverage — even, I assume, if it’s an emergency situation and the woman’s health or life is on the line — and the federal government cannot withdraw funds. This is particularly troubling when the term “abortion” is being regularly re-defined to include even birth control and emergency contraception. It’s already law that doctors and nurses don’t have to provide elective abortions, and that health care facilities are not required to offer abortion services. But this bill gives any health care provider full reign to discriminate when it comes to reproductive care. If, for example, you’re a rape victim and you go to the emergency room of a Catholic hospital, not only does that hospital not have to offer you emergency contraception, but they can also refuse to refer you to a hospital that does. We’ve seen how this can play out — in Arizona, a nun who worked on a hospital’s ethics committee was excommunicated when she allowed an abortion for a woman who would have died without one. This bill seeks unprecedented protection of health care entities that refuse to provide a full range of health care for pregnant women.

-Cuts tax benefits to any organization or individual that selects an insurance policy that covers abortion. As it stands, most private insurers cover abortion care. This bill, though, cuts tax subsidies that are given to small business owners if those business owners select insurance plans that cover abortion. The same is true for individuals who purchase insurance. This bill would virtually ensure that private insurance companies drop abortion coverage — even where abortions are medically necessary.

This is very, very bad. So we’re organizing an opposition. Here’s what you can do:

-Contact your representatives. You can find them here. Tell them that this bill is unconscionable. Tell them that re-defining rape in “pro-life” terms is disgusting and cruel. Tell them that disallowing funding for abortions to preserve a woman’s health is horrifying. Tell them that the federal government shouldn’t be encouraging private insurance companies to offer less coverage.

-Spread the word. Yes, there is a Twitter hashtag — #DearJohn. You can also tweet directly @JohnBoehner. I tend to look at Twitter campaigns with a bit of a jaundiced eye, but this bill is so outrageous that ringing the alarm through social media could do some real good. Anti-abortion measures like this one tend to get branded as simply no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion (see, e.g., the name of the legislation). But that’s not what this is about at all. This is about targeting rape survivors whose rapes weren’t violent enough to please Chris Smith or John Boehner. It’s about deciding that lasting physical damage to a woman’s body isn’t enough to merit an abortion. It’s about blocking businesses and individuals from selecting insurance policies that cover all of their necessities. Keep that message going, loudly and in public.

-Put some fire under the feet of the bill’s co-sponsors. Here they are. Let ’em have it. Tell them exactly what it is that they’re sponsoring (and tell everyone else, too).

Sady has more about how we can mobilize. So let’s get on it.

On second thought about Kermit Gosnell

He does tell us a few things about abortion. They just aren’t what William Saletan thinks.

The Gosnell case shows us the worst of what happens when abortion isn’t accessible. Gosnell’s “clinic” was nothing short of a house of horrors, and he preyed upon women who couldn’t get abortions anywhere else or who were unfamiliar with the American medical system — poor women, immigrants, minors. Michelle Goldberg writes:

No woman would subject herself to such a place if she thought she had somewhere else to go. Forty-one-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, who died after being given an overdose of sedatives at the clinic, was a refugee who had recently arrived in the U.S. from a resettlement camp in Nepal. She couldn’t read English and may not have had any idea how to find a decent clinic. Minors went to Gosnell’s clinic—it was the one place they could skirt state law and get abortions without parental consent. Gosnell performed illegal late-term abortions on women who should have been cared for months earlier.

As Florence pointed out in a comment on the previous Gosnell post, “It also says quite a bit about how important it is to give laws teeth. The laws were in place to prevent this from happening, but despite numerous complaints the state couldn’t or didn’t intervene.”

Gosnell’s clinic hadn’t been reviewed by the Department of Health in 15 years. Members of his staff were unlicensed and not properly trained. And Gosnell knew that he could get away with offering sub-par care to women who he thought were less likely to complain — young women, immigrants, poor women and women of color. As Lori Adelman details:

As you may have witnessed, media coverage of these charges against Dr. Gosnell and nine staff members of his clinic has been rife with gruesome details like this one, which have understandably generated public reactions of horror and disgust. But buried deep in articles describing “bloodstained furniture” and ” jars packed with severed baby feet,” is a less gory but equally as horrifying insight that, at Dr. Gosnell’s clinic, “white women from the suburbs were ushered into a separate, slightly cleaner area” than Gosnell’s regular clientele, which was comprised primarily of poor minority women, including many immigrants. Gosnell reportedly treated these white suburban clients to a more pleasant and sanitary experience because he believed they were “more likely to file complaints” about substandard care.

He was right about that for a long, long time. Lori continues:

The crimes of which Gosnell is accused are exceedingly serious; he must be prosecuted for them to the fullest extent of the law. But the undeniably racialized elements of his practice reflect a need to explore the bigger picture of this story, beyond Gosnell’s presumed guilt or innocence: why Gosnell’s clinic was allowed to continue for so long, and why Dr. Gosnell’s patients, who were overwhelmingly poor minority women, had come to expect their health care needs to be met with such inadequacy that they were forced to accept Gosnell’s “care”.

Gosnell tells us quite a bit about the state of health care in the United States — and especially about abortion care. His clinic was by all accounts a disgusting, flea-infested mess. It doesn’t sound like the kind of place that women would go if they felt like they had any other options. Obviously anti-choice advocates are latching onto this story as an illustration of the horrors of abortion, even though most abortion clinics don’t look like Gosnell’s and are in fact subject to must stricter rules than other medical facilities — but there are more than a few health clinics, abortion-related or not, that are decrepit and run by incompetent practitioners. Those sub-par centers almost exclusively serve communities that are poor, of-color, immigrant, or non-English-speaking. It is absolutely a crisis.

But that’s not the story that you’re going to hear from anti-choicers and conservatives. You’ll hear “abortion is bad” without any recognition that outlawing abortion would have done absolutely nothing to help the women and babies who died or suffered in Gosnell’s care. You won’t hear about how affordable and accessible health care for everyone could have alleviated this situation, or how greater government oversight and enforcement of health care laws could have shut down Gosnell’s operation years ago. To prevent this from happening again — to stop other predatory clinics that offer a variety of health care services, not just abortion — we’d have to get into the hard stuff of recognizing the socioeconomic and racial inequalities in our current health care system. We’d have to admit that for many Americans, decent health care is inaccessible, and reproductive health care is especially poor. There’s a reason we have one of the highest infant death rates in the developed world. There’s a reason that in Washington D.C. the infant death rate is 14.1 per 1,000 live births, while in Connecticut it’s 5.5.

If we want to actually help women and babies (and men and children too), we can increase access to health care and increase government oversight of health care facilities and practices. We can give government entities greater ability to enforce existing laws, and we can push for new laws across the spectrum of consumer safety — in health care, in food regulation and in consumer goods. But those are tough, across-the-board changes. They take (yikes) taxes and government involvement. They require recognizing that we have a problem, and that the USA is not #1 where health care is concerned.

Which is to say that enacting those changes is almost certainly a pipe dream. But that would be a whole lot more life-affirming (and life-saving) than simply using the Gosnell atrocity to fall back on the same old “make abortion illegal” position in the abortion debates. Illegality doesn’t end abortion. Demonizing abortion doesn’t end abortion. Using the Gosnell case as an example of why abortion is bad doesn’t end abortion. But affordable and accessible health care, including abortion care, for everyone regardless of socioeconomic status or location or immigration status or race or English language skills? That saves lives. That decreases the abortion rate. And that’s how we make sure that women aren’t forced to accept inadequate and dangerous “care” because they have no other options.