In the U.S., Bush wants health care programs receiving federal aid to sign certificates promising they won’t refuse to hire health care workers who won’t provide or discuss abortion and/or birth control and other forms of contraception.
Meanwhile, birth control isn’t something McCain really cares to discuss. He’d rather keep it light, I guess.
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A pregnant illegal immigrant gave birth under custody, and then had her baby taken from her, because of local charges on driving without a license:
Weikal said the sheriff’s office knew the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency planned to release Villegas on her own recognizance because of the pregnancy, but she had to stay in jail until she had seen a judge on the local charges.
Villegas’ attorney, Elliott Ozment, said Villegas was still in jail awaiting a hearing on the driving charge when she went into labor on the night of July 5. She was taken to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry, where she was handcuffed to the bed by her right wrist and left ankle until shortly before the birth.
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Indian sanitation workers were invited to walk the catwalk by the UN:
Today Sharanya at the Indian feminist blog Ultra Violet has a post about a recent UN conference in which Indian sanitation workers walked the runway alongside professional models at a charity fashion show. (Sanitation workers, also called scavengers, are usually Dalit women whose job it is to remove the human and animal excrement from the homes of higher-class Indians.)
What a treat.
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This is amazing: some very young children in Yemen are standing up for themselves against the grown men their families have sold them off to:
Together, the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.
The average age of marriage in Yemen’s rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
(via Feministe)
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And we complain about taking our shoes off:
NPR covered a story about security in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which centered specifically on one woman’s protest against the type of body scanning used: it doesn’t see hair or clothing, but sees the body, (I’m assuming metal) jewelry, and any prospective weapons. The body is rendered essentially naked (pictured here; picture from NPR).
Farah al-Jaberi’s objections (which are shared by other female workers) are mainly to male guards seeing their bodies through the scanner, and the worry that “images of their bodies can be saved and viewed by anyone later.”
(There’s an image at the link of what the scans look like.)
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And, as always, to “rape” is not to “have sex with” – and the media should respect the distinction.
