Human Rights – Page 4

Meet the Foreskin Restoration Movement

I think the title pretty much sums it up, right? But it’s an interesting and well-balanced article.

Reproductive Justice and the Law

Law Students for Reproductive Justice commissioned a study of reproductive rights legal courses in American law schools, and the results are pretty predictable: Only 18% of U.S. law schools have offered reproductive rights law courses at some point over the last seven years, and half of those courses were only taught once. On the LSRJ blog, Liz Kukura writes:

Having dedicated reproductive rights law courses in the course catalog is critical—not only as important training for those law students who will pursue careers in reproductive justice and social justice work, but also as an opportunity for all future lawyers to be exposed to the many complex and compelling reproductive justice topics that raise issues of criminal law, constitutional law, property law, contract law, health law, family law, bioethics, and more. We miss entirely too much when discussion of reproductive rights is limited to a day’s worth of Griswold and Roe in con law class.

Above the Law’s writers and commenters, though, seem to disagree. Ami Cholia says:

But given that most lawyers take constitutional law (to say nothing of the interested parties who take family law, health law, and whatever the hell else 3Ls take in order to maintain an unblemished GPA), is a specific course in reproductive rights even necessary? Academic classes rarely give one a true representation of how the concepts we study play out in real life (think back to your middle school sex-ed class for a minute). That is usually learned on the job. You are trained to ask the right questions and argue your point effectively — a rounded understanding of law, then, should prepare you to take on a reproductive case, regardless.

Should we interpret the dearth of repro-rights courses as representative of gender-imbalance at schools and within the profession at large? Again, I don’t think so. It’s not about man v. woman or even life v. abortion. It’s about rights. And as a trained lawyer, you are taught about those rights. Reproductive rights aren’t special rights, are they?

But am I missing something entirely?

I think what Ami is missing is that reproductive rights law is a highly contentious, continually evolving area of law that in part because of its divisiveness isn’t given the class time necessary to really feel out all of the issues involved. And, while this probably wasn’t LSRJ’s point, one of my biggest frustrations with law school was that the reality of how the law impacts peoples’ lives was totally divorced from what we were learning in class. Class discussions were rarely justice-based; we were taught how to pick apart a legal theory or cobble together a “correct” conclusion based on legal precedent, but didn’t get so much into how a common-law system normalizes certain experiences and erases the realities that a lot of people live (and particularly realities lived by marginalized people). Reproductive justice coursework, I would hope, might force students to get a little bit beyond the comfort that reliance on consistency can bring. It’s not just that the topic itself is important (although it is) but also that legal discussions about the fundamentals of human existence — sex, reproduction, birth — inherently require law students to diverge from the hyper-logical, consistency-above-all pattern of thinking that we spend three years relying on. That of course doesn’t mean that you take the legalism out of it, or that repro justice courses would be more like liberal arts classes than law school ones; it does mean that when we’re discussing how the laws actually impact the human body, it’s a little harder to take the human being involved out of the conversation.

And my personal theories about how legal education could be improved aside, reproductive justice courses should be logical offerings in law schools that regularly feature classes on things like environmental law, immigration law, art law, health law, critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and on and on. All of those specialized courses address legal issues that are dynamic and important, but aren’t covered in-depth in other law classes and may not end up being what one does as a career. Reproductive justice fits into the type of legal coursework that law schools and law students value, and I suspect that the reason it’s avoided is because it’s so controversial. That’s a shame, and law students are missing out because of it.

Arizona Funding Cuts Cause Patients to Be Dropped From Transplant Lists

In further news that the U.S. residents among us can be unspeakably proud of, the state of Arizona has, thanks to budget cuts, stopped funding some life-saving organ transplants for patients who cannot pay for them themselves. The result is that those who cannot come up with the money to fund a potential transplant — and let’s face it, if one was relying on state Medicaid, one doesn’t have endless supplies of money to pay for highly expensive medical procedures readily at hand — are being dropped from transplant lists. The NY Times reports:

Even physicians with decades of experience telling patients that their lives are nearing an end are having difficulty discussing a potentially fatal condition that has arisen in Arizona: Death by budget cut.

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.

“The most difficult discussions are those that involve patients who had been on the donor list for a year or more and now we have to tell them they’re not on the list anymore,” said Dr. Rainer Gruessner, a transplant specialist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “The frustration is tremendous. It’s more than frustration.”

Organ transplants are already the subject of a web of regulations, which do not guarantee that everyone in need of a life-saving organ will receive one. But Arizona’s transplant specialists are alarmed that patients who were in line to receive transplants one day were, after the state’s budget cuts to its Medicaid program, ruled ineligible the next — unless they raised the money themselves.

If one can get past the unbearable horror of the situation long enough, they will also find the irony to be quite rich:

State Medicaid officials said they recommended discontinuing some transplants only after assessing the success rates for previous patients. Among the discontinued procedures are lung transplants, liver transplants for hepatitis C patients and some bone marrow and pancreas transplants, which altogether would save the state about $4.5 million a year.

“As an agency, we understand there have been difficult cuts and there will have to be more difficult cuts looking forward,” said Jennifer Carusetta, chief legislative liaison at the state Medicaid agency.

During the debate on health care reform, many on the right-wing used scare-mongering tactics to suggest that a public health care system would result in “death panels” as the government rationed resources. This argument ignored how commonly insurance companies deny medical procedures and how frequently those without insurance are already unable to access care — but they also ignored that if anyone was going to favor balancing a budget over human lives, they were certainly not primarily going to be leftists. If anything in existence deserves to be called a death panel, it did not result from a commitment to public health care, but from the refusal to recognize health care access for people of all income levels as a human right. These cuts are not public health care gone wrong, but the devaluation of public health care systems reaching its logical conclusion.

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Transgender Day of Remembrance

This is a guest post by C. L. Minou. C. L. Minou has written on trans and feminist issues for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, Change.org, and Tiger Beatdown. She blogs at The Second Awakening.

[TW for transphobia]

I don’t remember when I first heard of the Trans Day of Remembrance. It must have been at least five or six years ago, when I was just beginning to connect the private tortures of my transness to larger societal concerns. I can’t, to be honest, remember very well my reaction to it. Probably something along the lines of “that’s a good idea.”

I mention this not to give you insight into the Banal Morality of C. L. Minou, but because it seems that nowadays some trans folks are turning against TDOR. Not just the various observances of it, but against the entire concept of having a day to remember the murdered trans people of the previous year. “It’s depressing,” say some. “Where is the positive day?” say others. “Why do we only talk about the depressing deaths, when trans people have accomplished so much?”

And some say, “why should I care about a bunch of prostitutes who have no bearing on my life?”

I’m not going to dispute the first two points. Yes, indeed, remembering the deaths of people who died simply because of who they were is depressing–horribly depressing, and it’s horrible that every year there isn’t a shortage of names to add to the list. And of course trans people are doing amazing things: becoming judges, working in government, bravely taking a stand against ongoing discrimination. These are all amazing things and we should celebrate them.

But that still doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a day to remember the dead, or exchange that day for one of unfettered celebration.

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Taking Babies from Undocumented Immigrants

Encarnación Romero was an undocumented immigrant working at a poultry plant in Missouri when she was arrested in 2007 during a raid by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was jailed for two years for federal identity theft, because she used a fake name and Social Security number when applying for her job (those charges, notably, would not stick if they were filed today — the Supreme Court rejected the use of identity theft prosecutions in simple immigration cases like this one). In prison and unable to care for her infant son herself, Romero did what many parents would have done (and what my own parents certainly would have done): She asked her sister to look after the baby, Carlitos, until she could come home. The sister was already overwhelmed with her own three children, and sought help through her church. An acquaintance took Carlitos to the home of the church’s minister, and the minister and his wife contacted another couple who were looking to adopt.

Romero’s parental rights were then terminated, and Carlitos was adopted by Seth and Melinda Moser.

Unsurprisingly, Romero did not have adequate legal representation, and does not speak English. Lawyers for the Mosers, who adopted Carlitos, say that Romero abandoned her child, and “She went by different aliases, and therefore all the correspondence that the court sent her, and that I sent her, even that her attorney sent her, all came back refused.” Romero’s attorneys, though, say that while she did seek employment under an assumed name, she gave ICE officers her real name shortly after being arrested. The fact that she was booked under a false name doesn’t mean that she abandoned her child — it means that there was a clerical error (and possibly that there wasn’t proper translation, and that she didn’t have a lawyer).

The whole thing is horrifying. And of course the public argument is coming down to nice adoptive parents vs. illegal immigrant jailed mother — with “the best interests of the child” used as a tool to advance injustice:

Rick Schnake, the Joplin attorney representing the Mosers, said that removing the child from the family he has known for the past few years would only compound the tragedy. He argued that the best interests of the child are served by keeping him with his adoptive parents.

“This little boy is four years old. He doesn’t speak Spanish, he speaks English,” Schnake said. “I don’t mean to be caustic about it but it’s not the child’s fault she was (in jail).”

Considering that Romero would not be jailed for the exact same act had she been arrested today instead of in 2007, it’s not so clear that it’s totally her fault she was in jail, either. And it’s not her fault that her parental rights were terminated, and that her son was taken away from her. It’s not the child’s fault that he was part of a predatory adoption, but that doesn’t mean that it’s in his best interests to stay with those adoptive parents. Adding to the mess is the fact that the adoptive parents hired the attorney who acted on behalf of the birth mother during the court proceedings to terminate Romero’s parental rights.

A lot of the commentary on this story says it’s a “tragedy for all involved” and that we’re all hoping for “the best outcome for everyone.” Except, well, no. It is a tragedy for all involved, but it’s more of a tragedy for the woman who had her baby taken from her and for the baby who was taken than for the couple who knew that parental rights hadn’t properly been terminated, but apparently thought that their desire for a child trumped another woman’s rights to raise the child she carried, birthed, loved and raised for his first six months of life. I don’t want to impute too many motives on the Mosers, because who knows what the whole story is from their perspective. But I do think it’s fair to expect that adoptive parents will make every reasonable effort to figure out where their baby is coming from, and will act as ethically as possible in a situation which is often fraught with inequality and injustice and coercion. I’m not sure it’s clear that the Mosers did that here. I can understand why, having raised this child for four years, they wouldn’t want to give him up. But unless I’m missing something (and I might be), it seems that they made a whole series of unethical, bad decisions on the front end and now want everyone to look the other way. I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for that position.

The undercurrent in all of this is the idea that the Mosers are de facto better parents than Romero because Romero is brown and “illegal.” And that’s an idea that plays pretty well in much of the United States. I hope Romero gets her son back, and that this case can be a lesson that predatory adoptions and aggressive anti-immigrant policies only serve to harm women, children and families.

Cholera Outbreak Worsens in Haiti

PHOTO: A woman hold a small child, who receives IV treatment for cholera in St. Marc. Image provided by Partners in Health, with more available here.

At this point, you’ve likely seen news of the cholera outbreak in Haiti. As of the NY Times’ latest report, there have been over 900 deaths, and experts are worried that this is only the beginning:

The death toll in Haiti’s cholera epidemic has reached more than 900, the government reported Sunday, as aid groups rushed soap and clean water to a disaster-wracked population to fight the disease.

The Ministry of Health reported that as of Friday, there had been 917 deaths and more than 14,600 were hospitalized with cholera-like symptoms. That is up from the 724 deaths and 11,125 hospitalizations reported a few days before.

The disease has been found in 6 of Haiti’s 10 provinces, known as departments, and is most severe where it originated, in Artibonite, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the deaths.

Several epidemiologists have said the disease has not peaked and will likely worsen and break out in other regions of the country, with United Nations health officials estimating about 270,000 may be sickened in the coming years. Several new cholera treatment centers are springing up in the capital and other areas.

Unfortunately, this slow-burning epidemic is not receiving the same kind of international attention and pledges of aid that the earthquake in Haiti at the beginning of this year. This is ironic if sadly unsurprising, since the cholera outbreak is largely a result of the earthquake and certainly compounded by the severe inadequacy of the earthquake response. As Alanna Shaikh said at the Progressive Realist a couple weeks ago:

Haiti is currently facing its first cholera outbreak in a hundred years. It’s not a surprise, exactly. It was something public health experts have been afraid of since the earthquake. But after nine months, we were starting to hope maybe it wouldn’t happen.

According to the BBC, 196 people have now died, and 2,634 have been hospitalized as the result of the cholera outbreak. It is most likely the result of drinking water from the Artibonite River. A few of the sufferers report drinking only purified water, but they may have gotten the disease from accidentally swallowing bathing water or from food prepared by an infected person.

Cholera is exactly the kind of diseases you worry about after a natural disaster. It comes from drinking water tainted with fecal matter, which is what happens when infrastructure is destroyed and people don’t have access to clean water or functioning toilets. Cholera is especially hard of children, who dehydrate and very quickly from the diarrhea caused by the disease.

Yes, experts predicted the likely outbreak of deadly disease not long after the earthquake, yet infrastructure in preparation for the outbreak was still lacking when it hit. Indeed, as of two months ago, a mere 2% of the earthquake debris has been cleared; I’m unsure if more recent figures are available, but it’s doubtful that two months managed to magically accomplish what nine months did not. With this being the case, it’s less than shocking that there is also a severe lack of working toilets and uncontaminated water.

If you have money to spare, Partners in Health is an on the ground organization in Haiti that takes a community-based approach to providing free health care. They have been responding to the cholera outbreak by treating patients both at special treatment centers and in their communities, distributing soap and water purification supplies, educating communities on prevention, building showers, and working towards long-term water security in Haiti. You can support Partners in Health’s efforts to respond to the cholera outbreak and save lives by donating here.

Many of the links in this post via abby jean, who has stayed on top of news from Haiti consistently.

New Report Shows Trans* People Experience Huge Gaps in Health Care Access

Earlier this month, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force released the National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Health Care (pdf). Reliable statistics on trans* people are notoriously difficult to come by, and among those that exist, many are outdated and/or derived from very small sample sizes. This U.S. survey included over 6,400 trans women, trans men, and people imperfectly grouped together as “gender non-conforming,” from all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. That makes it really big news, and a really important resource for information.

Sadly but far from surprisingly, there’s a lot of bad news. From the key findings of the report:

Survey participants reported very high levels of postponing medical care when sick or injured due to discrimination (28%) or inability to afford it (48%);

Respondents faced significant hurdles to accessing health care, including:

Refusal of care: 19% of our sample reported being refused care due to their transgender or gender non-conforming status, with even higher numbers among people of color in the survey;

Harassment and violence in medical settings: 28% of respondents were subjected to harassment in medical settings and 2% were victims of violence in doctor’s offices;

Lack of provider knowledge: 50% of the sample reported having to teach their medical providers about transgender care;

Despite the barriers, the majority of survey participants have accessed some form of transition-related medical care; the majority reported wanting to have surgery but have not had any surgeries yet;

If medical providers were aware of the patient’s transgender status, the likelihood of that person experiencing discrimination increased;

Respondents reported over four times the national average of HIV infection, 2.64% in our sample compared to .6% in the general population, with rates for transgender women at 3.76%, and with those who are unemployed (4.67%) or who have engaged in sex work (15.32%) even higher;

Over a quarter of the respondents misused drugs or alcohol specifically to cope with the discrimination they faced due to their gender identity or expression;

A staggering 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6% of the general population, with unemployment, low income, and sexual and physical assault raising the risk factors significantly.

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Weak and Despicable

Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, has come out against the gays. Paladino, notably, is the guy who forwarded emails onto his coworkers which contained racially offensive “jokes” (including jokes characterizing black people as monkeys), images of Barack and Michelle Obama dressed up like a pimp and a ho, and a picture of a woman having sex with a horse (the emails are detailed and depicted here — as a warning, though, my characterization of them as “racially offensive” is… understated, to say the least). Anyway, Paladino is a Tea Party candidate who has all of his morals in the right place, is my point.

And despite being pro-beastiality — or at least pro-women-having-sex-with-horses — he is apparently anti-homosexuality. Because homosexuality is just so unnatural.

The Republican candidate for governor, Carl P. Paladino, told a gathering in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Sunday that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable, and criticized his opponent, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, for marching in a gay pride parade earlier this year.

Addressing Orthodox Jewish leaders, Mr. Paladino described his opposition to same-sex marriage.

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said, reading from a prepared address, according to a video of the event.

And then, to applause at Congregation Shaarei Chaim, he said: “I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.” Newsday.com reported that Mr. Paladino’s prepared text had included the sentence: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” But Mr. Paladino omitted the sentence in his speech.

Newsflash to New Yorkers: We are not all nearly as progressive and open-minded as we apparently think!

What’s most interesting about this story, though, isn’t the brazen homophobia in a city that has long been a haven for gay people and lefty folks generally; it’s the insistence that disgust with and discrimination against gays doesn’t amount to homophobia at all.

About an hour after Mr. Paladino’s remarks, [Democratic candidate for governor] Mr. Cuomo’s campaign released a statement condemning them.

“Mr. Paladino’s statement displays a stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality,” it said. “These comments along with other views he has espoused make it clear that he is way out of the mainstream and is unfit to represent New York.”Mr. Paladino declined a request to be interviewed after his appearance. His campaign manager, Michael R. Caputo, denied assertions that Mr. Paladino was antigay, and noted that he employed a gay man on his campaign staff.

“Carl Paladino is simply expressing the views that he holds in his heart as a Catholic,” Mr. Caputo said in a telephone interview. “Carl Paladino is not homophobic, and neither is the Catholic Church.”

“The majority of New Yorkers agree with him,” Mr. Caputo added. He said the campaign had done its own polling.

During his appearance at the synagogue, with reporters in attendance, Mr. Paladino said: “Don’t misquote me as wanting to hurt homosexual people in any way. That would be a dastardly lie.”

Apparently you’re only homophobic now if you want to physically harm gay people. Just hating them, well… that’s expressing your heartfelt belief.

Paladino defended his remarks this morning, saying that he doesn’t hate gay people but that gay pride parades are no place for children, and I think we could use a morning laugh so here you are:

“Young children should not be exposed to that at a young age. They don’t understand, it’s a very difficult thing,” said Mr. Paladino. “And exposing them to homosexuality, especially at a gay pride parade — and I don’t know if you have ever been to one, but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other and it’s just a terrible thing.”

Less funny is the fact that Paladino’s statements come the same weekend three gay men were imprisoned and tortured in the Bronx. In response to those attacks, New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg asked, “How can one human being be so inhuman to another simply on the basis of who they are? What kind of twisted logic spurs a large group of men to show off their toughness by ganging up on helpless individuals? That’s not showing you’re tough, that’s just showing that you’re weak and despicable.”

I’d like to pose the same question to Carl Paladino.

Reconsider Columbus Day

In the U.S., today is the National Observance of Columbus Day. While perhaps the least celebrated of all U.S. public holidays, its continued existence and observance is incredibly disturbing, as the video above by Reconsider Columbus Day notes. Transcript:

The black and white video features a number of alternating unidentified individuals facing the camera and speaking a single line at a time:

October 12th is Columbus Day
A day that our government has deemed worthy of remembrance
But with all due respect
With all due respect
With all due respect
There’s an ugly truth that has been overlooked
For way too long
Columbus committed heinous crimes
Against the Indigenous people of the Caribbean
And millions of natives throughout the Americas
And Columbus set the stage for the slave trade in the new world
So please
Please reconsider if this is a man that you want to honor
Reconsider if you want to celebrate the crimes of Columbus
It’s not your fault
It happened a long time ago
But remaining neutral
And pretending like it didn’t happen
Or that it doesn’t still impact us today
So please
Take the day to learn the whole story
Celebrate the people who were here first
Petition for a nationally recognized Indigenous holiday
So please
Reconsider how you plan to spent October 12
Reconsider the story of Columbus
Visit ReconsiderColumbusDay.org

The petition is available here, and here is a list of the Reconsider Columbus Day partners that could use your support.

Cleveland American Indian Movement (AIM) also has more information and resources on why Columbus Day should be opposed. And Jessica Yee has written a post at Racialicious on the subject of Columbus Day and Canadian Thanksgiving, which is also today. Please feel free to leave additional resources about Indigenous rights and/or Columbus Day specifically in the comments.

The Alt-Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team

This is a post by pro-BDSM activist Clarisse Thorn, who blogs at Pro-Sex Outreach, Open-Minded Feminism.

BDSMers face a lot of stigma around our sexuality, and this can be a major problem when BDSMers are trying to deal with abusive situations. I’ve written before about generally negative conceptions of BDSM — they can briefly be summarized as:

* S&M is wicked,
* abnormal,
* a sign of mental or emotional instability,
* inherently abusive,
* or even antifeminist.

Given this climate, it’s not surprising that two things almost always happen when BDSM and abuse come up:

1) People of all genders who are abused are often unwilling to report. People of all genders who are abused within BDSM relationships tend to be particularly unwilling to report. Victim-blaming is already rampant in mainstream society — just imagine what happens to, for example, a woman who has admitted that she enjoys being consensually slapped across the face, if she attempts to report being raped. And that’s assuming the abuse survivor is willing to report in the first place; ze may prefer not to negotiate the minefield of anti-SM stereotypes ze will be up against, ze may be afraid of being outed, etc.

2) Members of the BDSM community sometimes push back against real or perceived anti-SM stigma by talking about how abuse is rare within the BDSM community. This BDSM blog post and comments claim that not only is abuse within the community rare, but abusive BDSM relationships seem more likely to happen outside the community. In fact, if you look then you can find posts from submissive women who found that getting into the BDSM community, being exposed to its ideals and concepts, helped them escape or understand their past abusive relationships.

I tend to think that #2 is a really good point — particularly the bit about how abusive BDSM relationships are more likely to happen outside the community, due in part to lack of resources and support for survivors. For this reason, I tend to stress the role of the community in positive BDSM experiences, and I encourage newcomers to seek out their local community. But lots of people don’t have access to a local community at all, especially if they’re not in a big city. Plus, lots of people have trouble enjoying their local community for whatever reason, perhaps because they have nothing in common with local S&Mers aside from sexuality, or because they don’t have time to integrate into a whole new subculture.

There’s also the unfortunate fact that point #2 sometimes reacts with point #1 in a toxic way — that is, it can ironically be harder for abuse survivors to talk about abuse within the BDSM community because the community is pushing back so hard against the stereotype of abusive BDSM. I’ve spoken to BDSMers who feel that the S&M community pushes back far too hard, and that survivors are being aggressively silenced simply because the rest of us are so invested in fighting mainstream stereotypes. I have never personally experienced this, but I would not be surprised if I did. And the fact is that I’m sure there are toxic dynamics in some BDSM communities — we aren’t a monolith, folks — and that even in 100% awesome communities, I’m sure there are at least a few abusive relationships. And even one abusive relationship in the community is obviously too many.

As Thomas MacAulay Millar wrote when the most recent abusive BDSM case hit the media, “Our declaration that the abusers are not us has to be substantive.” This is something we should be taking action on. But how?

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