Abortion Gang

I remember the kerfuffle caused when Gwen Jacobs walked down the street topless in Ontario. I was 11 at the time of the court case in 1996 and I remember thinking, good for her. I also remember thinking how terribly unfair it was that men were allowed to walk around topless but women couldn’t. I can’t imagine actually walking around topless but I am glad that I have the right to do so since the Federal law criminalizing it was struck down. This case could be said to be a precursor to the now famous Slut Walks taking place around the world after a Toronto cop ‘confided’ to a group of York University students that the way to prevent sexual assault was to just not dress like sluts. The story became international news and feminists around the world responded with one simple message: women never ask to be raped.

When a woman cannot dress however she wants without be subjected to constant sexual harassment, I will show you a woman who may be forced to have a sex-selective abortion or be murdered for the want of honour. I will show you a woman who is not respected, and is in fact disrespected because she is a woman. Women in the U.S. and Canada are certainly subjected to sexual harassment but the situation in India is extreme. Women in India are raped wearing traditional saris just like women here are raped wearing track pants, but the extreme violence against women in India is captured well by the Indian expression for sexual harassment: eve-teasing. As if sexual harassment is just school-yard teasing.

On the whole, women in North America have greater reproductive freedom due to a range of factors from financial resources to the law, but to trivialize Indian women’s attempts to empower themselves by declaring their right to dress however they please is to continue to oppress them. The author is correct: Indian women do have bigger fish to fry, but it’s a good idea to gut the fish before you fry it.

Slut walks have nothing to do with “self-objectification.” Women are objectified by society. There are native cultures where women walk around naked and that’s just the way it is. Objectification comes from outside, not from the individual woman. To suggest that women dressing so as to “reveal their breasts” is focusing attention on their body parts is the same as suggesting men who walk around shirtless are showing off their “breasts.”

A guest post from Education for Choice.

Many pro-choice Americans think we in the UK have it all: free abortion on the National Health Service (NHS), providers who don’t have to wear bulletproof vests to work, and the general acceptance amongst society that abortion is a medical procedure that women should be able to access whenever they need it.  Growing up in the Midwestern U.S., I thought these same things. Because women have free access to abortion on the NHS, even a heck of a lot of Brits think that there is no work to be done here, but I’ve been working at EFC since January 2010 and I’ve learned that there’s no room for complacency. People here are always surprised to hear that anti-choice organisations are using American-style tactics to spread lies and misinformation in schools and at crisis pregnancy centres across the UK every day.

In the U.S. there are numerous inspiring and active pro-choice activist organisations, groups and advocates, but in the UK Education For Choice (EFC) is the only educational charity dedicated to enabling young people to make and act on informed choices about pregnancy and abortion. We at EFC are here to say out loud that abortion is not a dirty word and that our abortion rights should not be taken for granted.

This month, the new Government is having a Spending Review which promises drastic public sector cuts and the strong chance that some key public health strategies will not be renewed. EFC will no longer be able to rely on funding from the Government so we are looking at alternative sources of support. We met with a professional fundraiser recently. Her first suggestion was that we should leave the word abortion out of our organisational description. She described it as ‘the A word’ and explained that ‘it puts people off’.

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By now, I think everyone knows that HIV/AIDS is a major problem, especially in Africa. Poor medical care and lack of knowledge on the disease (even here in the U.S.) have caused fear, misconceptions, dread, and depression for those who contract it. For years, becoming pregnant after contracting HIV was a death sentence for the resulting child.

A few years ago, scientists discovered a “miracle” treatment for pregnant women with HIV–a way for her to deliver the baby without the child contracting HIV. Doctors and humanitarians alike cheered this wonderful treatment. Finally, a solution to the problem of mother-to-baby transmission.

I’m kicking myself at the moment for not being able to find the interview I heard on the radio, on NPR I believe, in which a doctor discussed this procedure. However, I did find a study done in Africa on the treatment.

The woman is given a shot of nevirapine, one drug of a three drug “cocktail” used to help the immune system in AIDS treatment, during labor. The child is then given a shot of it after birth. The majority of the time, this treatment is effective in preventing the transmission, and the child is spared from the terrible life of an HIV patient.

However, what other scientists have just discovered is that the use of nevirapine during labor is actually detrimental to the mother’s treatment later. There is a chance that the mother will become resistant to nevirapine, which renders useless the three drug “cocktail” used for HIV/AIDS treatment for her later. She will die sooner because of this. Her child will be without a mother.
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I’m getting extremely tired of the situation affecting women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am frustrated because I feel that the United States is not taking action on this issue—there are organizations working on this issue, but there is so much more work to be done.

Just a couple of days ago, the Lord’s Resistance Army killed 321 civilians in a massacre. Approximately 80 children were killed and 250 civilians were abducted. The Lord’s Resistance Army has been raising hell for Congolese civilians for 23 years! Where is the action? Where is the help? The army pillages communities throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo; in this massacre alone they killed many women and mutilated many women and young girls. The UN Peacekeeping Mission in Congo has sent 1,000 peacekeeping troops to areas affected by the LRA’s reign of terror. I believe we need more civic action.
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Over spring break, I visited my four cousins.  Two of them look enough like my brother and I to pass as our other siblings.  The other two are adorable girls adopted from China.  My uncle and aunt decided to adopt when they realized they were unable to have children and “too old” to adopt a young child in the United States’ adoption system.  They also are humanitarians who decided to do some good in the world.

So why China, and why girls?  Half the Sky, an organization devoted to making sure children in Chinese orphanages have proper care, estimates that 95% of healthy children in orphanages are female.  The ratio of females to males is leveling out a bit as more families give up children of either gender because of financial hardships, but there are still disproportionately more females than males in the social welfare system.  These girls will not grow up in a “socially acceptable” class, even if they had come from a good family, and therefore will probably not find husbands anywhere but in the lower class.  They will not have the same level of education as children allowed to stay with their families.  Most of them will never know who their parents are.  Some of them, but not many, will be lucky enough to find loving homes in the United States or Europe.

There are many, many girls in the orphanages because of China’s one-child policy.  This policy’s purpose is to control China’s outrageous population growth.  Families incur huge fines for having an illegal pregnancy—that is, one that happens without the couple first asking the government’s permission to have a child that year (and yes, the Family Planning office can tell them no).  Some provinces require women of reproductive age to take a pregnancy test every 2-3 months to try and catch pregnancies early.
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