Sunday, April 29, 2012
Now It's Clear: “Pro-Life” Means “Pro-Imprisonment”
by Lynn Paltrow and Emma S. Ketteringham
April 17, 2012 - 8:46am
(Click here to read the whole article)
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed to consider an amicus (friend of the court) brief filed by the Liberty Counsel in support of the prosecutions of Hope Ankrom and Amanda Kimbrough. The Liberty Counsel describes itself as an organization whose mission includes protecting “the inalienable right to life guaranteed to all, including unborn children.” While a number of “pro-life” leaders claim that recognizing the rights of the unborn and re-criminalizing abortion should not and will not lead to the arrest or punishment of women, the Liberty Counsel has clearly and unequivocally taken the position that “restoring the historic right to life accorded to unborn children” requires that women, including new mothers who have given birth, go to prison.
Ms. Ankrom and Ms. Kimbrough are two of approximately 60 women who have been arrested under Alabama’s 2006 Chemical Endangerment law. The overwhelming majority of these women have given birth to healthy babies.
The Chemical Endangerment law originally was passed to create special penalties for people who bring children into methamphetamine labs. Despite the law’s clear purpose, prosecutors have argued, and the Alabama’s mid-level Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed, that the law may also be used to arrest and jail women who become pregnant, eschew abortion, and go to term, despite having used a controlled substance. In other words, the Court of Appeals has ruled that under Alabama’s Chemical Endangerment law a pregnant woman who has never been to a meth lab and who has never brought a child into a meth lab, can be punished for bringing a child into the world if she tests positive for a controlled substance—even one prescribed to her by her doctor.
According to the Liberty Counsel, the “convictions of the Defendants under the chemical endangerment law properly protect unborn children as preborn human beings. . . .” Forty-seven medical, public health and legal advocacy groups and individuals, who filed their own amicus brief in these cases, disagree.
These organizations and experts, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Nurses Association, have concluded that using the criminal law to address issues of drug use during pregnancy undermines, rather than protects, “unborn children.” One reason is that threats of arrest have been shown to deter pregnant women from drug treatment and prenatal and other healthcare that can help ensure maternal, fetal, and child health. Furthermore, if these prosecutions continue, pregnant women who are addicted to drugs and who cannot overcome that addiction in the short term of pregnancy will be pressured into having unwanted abortions to avoid criminal penalties. That is what happened in the Greywind case, in which a pregnant woman had an abortion in order to get the state of North Dakota to drop “fetal endangerment” charges against her.
So why would a group that claims to value life urge Alabama’s highest court to uphold an interpretation of the chemical endangerment law that coerces women into having abortions and punish the ones who don’t?
The answer, perhaps, lies in the Liberty Counsel’s brief that purports to document the historic view that the “unborn child is fully human” and protected by law. This brief references 19th century anti-abortion activists who firmly believed that the only proper role for women (white ones at least) is as wives and mothers. The Liberty Counsel’s brief quotes with approval one such activist who asserted that a woman who even considers having an abortion “. . .demoralizes her whole moral being. It is a prostitution of all her higher nature.”
Whatever the Liberty Counsel’s reasons, this “pro-life” group argues that the Alabama Supreme Court “should uphold the convictions and thereby move toward restoration of the life-affirming worldview that predated Roe.” It is difficult, however, to see what is “life-affirming” about hauling off to jail new mothers who just gave birth and leaving their children motherless? Penalties under the Chemical Endangerment law range from not less than 1-year-and-1-day to up to 99 years (life) in prison.
Since 2005, National Advocates for Pregnant Women has documented hundreds of cases in Alabama and elsewhere in which women have been arrested for allegedly endangering their pregnancies including: Christine Taylor in Iowa who was charged with attempted fetal homicide after she fell down a flight of stairs while pregnant, Jennie McCormick in Idaho who was charged with having an illegal abortion, and Bei Bei Shuai in Indiana who has been charged with murder for suffering a pregnancy loss after a suicide attempt.
The Liberty Counsel has established that the “pro-life” position is “pro-punishment,” not just for doctors who perform abortions, and not just for women who intentionally end their pregnancies and have abortions, but also for pregnant women who have no intention of ending their pregnancies and go to term.
Feminists for Life has, apparently, distinguished itself from this point of view. But what about all of the other groups including Priests for Life, Generations for Life, and Americans United for Life that have assured the public that women will not go to jail if their point of view becomes law? If “pro-life” does not mean “pro-imprisonment,” now would be a good time to speak up and stop the growing assault on the dignity, sanctity, and liberty of the women who bring forth life.
Where are they?
Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women
MoveOn.org
1) Republicans not only want to reduce women's access to abortion care, they're actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven't yet. Shocker.
2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to "accuser." But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain "victims."
3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)
4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.
5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.
6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids' preschool program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.
7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.
8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.
9) Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.
10) And if that wasn't enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can't make this stuff up).
South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers
By Kate Sheppard
Tue Feb. 15, 2011 4:00 AM PST
(Click here to read the whole article)
A bill under consideration in the Mount Rushmore State would make preventing harm to a fetus a "justifiable homicide" in many cases.
A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.
Jensen did not return calls to his home or his office requesting comment on the bill, which is cosponsored by 22 other state representatives and four state senators. UPDATE: Jensen spoke to Mother Jones on Tuesday morning, after this story was published. He says that he disagrees with this interpretation of the bill. "This simply is to bring consistency to South Dakota statute as it relates to justifiable homicide," said Jensen in an interview, repeating an argument he made in the committee hearing on the bill last week. "If you look at the code, these codes are dealing with illegal acts. Now, abortion is a legal act. So this has got nothing to do with abortion." Jensen also aggressively defended the bill in an interview with the Washington Post's Greg Sargent on Tuesday morning. We have more on Jensen's position here. UPDATE 2: Jensen spoke to Sargent again on Wednesday morning, and signaled he might be willing to change the bill.
"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers," says Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers. Since 1993, eight doctors have been assassinated at the hands of anti-abortion extremists, and another 17 have been the victims of murder attempts. Some of the perpetrators of those crimes have tried to use the justifiable homicide defense at their trials. "This is not an abstract bill," Saporta says. The measure could have major implications if a "misguided extremist invokes this 'self-defense' statute to justify the murder of a doctor, nurse or volunteer," the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families warned in a message to supporters last week.
The original version of the bill did not include the language regarding the "unborn child"; it was pitched as a simple clarification of South Dakota's justifiable homicide law. Last week, however, the bill was "hoghoused"—a term used in South Dakota for heavily amending legislation in committee—in a little-noticed hearing. A parade of right-wing groups—the Family Heritage Alliance, Concerned Women for America, the South Dakota branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, and a political action committee called Family Matters in South Dakota—all testified in favor of the amended version of the law.
Jensen, the bill's sponsor, has said that he simply intends to bring "consistency" to South Dakota's criminal code, which already allows prosecutors to charge people with manslaughter or murder for crimes that result in the death of fetuses. But there's a difference between counting the murder of a pregnant woman as two crimes—which is permissible under law in many states—and making the protection of a fetus an affirmative defense against a murder charge.
"They always intended this to be a fetal personhood bill, they just tried to cloak it as a self-defense bill," says Kristin Aschenbrenner, a lobbyist for South Dakota Advocacy Network for Women. "They're still trying to cloak it, but they amended it right away, making their intent clear." The major change to the legislation also caught abortion rights advocates off guard. "None of us really felt like we were prepared," she says.
Sara Rosenbaum, a law professor at George Washington University who frequently testifies before Congress about abortion legislation, says the bill is legally dubious. "It takes my breath away," she says in an email to Mother Jones. "Constitutionally, a state cannot make it a crime to perform a constitutionally lawful act."
South Dakota already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, and one of the lowest abortion rates. Since 1994, there have been no providers in the state. Planned Parenthood flies a doctor in from out-of-state once a week to see patients at a Sioux Falls clinic. Women from the more remote parts of the large, rural state drive up to six hours to reach this lone clinic. And under state law women are then required to receive counseling and wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure. (Click here for an interactive map of abortion restrictions.)
Before performing an abortion, a South Dakota doctor must offer the woman the opportunity to view a sonogram. And under a law passed in 2005, doctors are required to read a script meant to discourage women from proceeding with the abortion: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." Until recently, doctors also had to tell a woman seeking an abortion that she had "an existing relationship with that unborn human being" that was protected under the Constitution and state law and that abortion poses a "known medical risk" and "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." In August 2009, a US District Court Judge threw out those portions of the script, finding them "untruthful and misleading." The state has appealed the decision.
The South Dakota legislature has twice tried to ban abortion outright, but voters rejected the ban at the polls in 2006 and 2008, by a 12-point margin both times. Conservative lawmakers have since been looking to limit access any other way possible. "They seem to be taking an end run around that," says state Sen. Angie Buhl, a Democrat. "They recognize that people don't want a ban, so they are trying to seek a de facto ban by making it essentially impossible to access abortion services."
**There is more to this article.. and it's been updated.. Please go to the actual article and read it in it's entirety.**
Georgia State Lawmaker Seeks To Redefine Rape Victims As 'Accusers'
Amanda Terkel
First Posted: 02/04/11 03:38 PM ET
Updated: 05/25/11 07:30 PM ET
(Click here to read the whole article)
WASHINGTON -- A Republican state legislator in Georgia doesn't like the term rape "victim." In fact, he has introduced a bill mandating that state criminal codes refer to these people as, simply, "accusers" -- until there's a conviction in the matter.
The legislation introduced by state Rep. Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) would cover a number of crimes including rape, stalking and domestic violence:
To amend Titles 16 and 17 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to criminal law and criminal procedure, respectively, so as to change the term "victim" to the term "accuser" in the context of a number of statutes making reference to circumstances where there has not yet been a criminal conviction; to provide for related matters; to repeal conflicting laws; and for other purposes.
With Franklin's changes suggestions, the criminal code looks something like this:
Rape and sexual assault are chronically underreported crimes. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, "60% of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police, according to a statistical average of the past 5 years. Those rapists, of course, never spend a day in prison. Factoring in unreported rapes, only about 6% of rapists ever serve a day in jail." Under Franklin's definition, all of these people who didn't report their crimes aren't actually victims -- because there is never a conviction.
"To be classified, off the bat, as an accuser instead of as a victim places one more barrier to reporting the crime to the authorities," writes Amie Newman at RH Reality Check, who points out that Franklin's state of Georgia ranks 11th out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for incidences of forcible rape.
Jennifer White, attorney for legal programs at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, said that even when victims do come forward, prosecutions and convictions are still often incredibly difficult to get.
"Changing, just for these particular crimes, the word 'victim' to 'accuser' really buys into an outdated and disproved myth about victims who come forward with these kinds of allegations," said White. "I think it's a sad reality that for some reason, it's easier for society, in some respects, to believe that a victim would fabricate this type of crime than to believe that a person is capable of committing certain atrocities. And it really has a chilling effect for victims who already have an extremely difficult time coming forward."
Franklin did not respond to a request for comment.
After significant criticism this past week, House Republicans dropped language from legislation sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) that would have redefined rape in a bill prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds for abortions. While federal law has traditionally exempted restrictions on abortion access for women who were victims of rape or incest, the Smith bill would have narrowed the definition to "forcible" rape.
UPDATE, 4:10 p.m.: The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee writes, "To diminish a victim's ordeal by branding him/her an accuser essentially questions whether the crime committed against the victim is a crime at all. Robbery, assault, and fraud are all real crimes with real victims, the Republican asserts with this bill."
Scott Walker Quietly Repeals Wisconsin Equal Pay Law
Amanda Terkel
Posted: 04/ 6/2012 12:09 pm
Updated: 04/ 6/2012 2:19 pm
(Click here to read the entire article)
WASHINGTON -- A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.
The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.
In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.
SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.
Walker's office did not return repeated requests for comment.
State Sen. Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay) and Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), the authors of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act, criticized Walker on Thursday for not informing the public of his actions on SB 202.
“We are finally starting to see progress here in Wisconsin, yet like their counterparts across the country, Legislative Republicans want to turn back the clock on women’s rights in the workplace,” said Hansen.
Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it's 75 cents, according to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH), which also estimates that families in the state "lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay."
Business associations lobbied in support of SB 202, according to the state's Government Accountability Board. Groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and the Wisconsin Restaurant Association all backed a repeal.
Sara Finger, executive director of WAWH, said that the repeal was a "demoralizing attack on women’s rights, health, and wellbeing."
"Economic security is a women’s health issue," she said. "The salary women are paid directly affects the type and frequency of health care services they are able to access. At a time when women’s health services are becoming more expensive and harder to obtain, financial stability is essential to maintain steady access."
Walker is facing a recall election in June. The two frontrunners on the Democratic side who are competing to unseat him, former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, sharply criticized the governor for allowing the repeal bill to become law.
Falk said Walker has "turned back the clock for women across Wisconsin."
"As a woman and as a mother who worked full-time while raising my son, I know first-hand how important pay equity and health care are to women across Wisconsin," she said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
A spokesman for Barrett's campaign said that Walker's "ideological civil war includes a war on women, and repeal today of this protection against pay discrimination is a major step backwards for Wisconsin values and basic fairness."
"Tom Barrett knows equal pay for equal work is essential, and failing to stand up for Wisconsin women in the workplace is yet another reason he [Walker] must be defeated this summer," he said.
UPDATE: 2:17 p.m. -- The Plum Line reports that President Barack Obama's campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith responded to Walker's repeal, calling on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, to take a position on the issue.
"As he campaigned across Wisconsin, Mitt Romney repeatedly praised Governor Scott Walker's leadership, calling him a 'hero' and 'a man of courage,'" she said. "But with his signing yesterday of a bill make it harder for women to enforce in court their right to equal pay, Walker showed how far Republicans are willing to go to undermine not only women's health care, but also their economic security. Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?"
Posted: 04/ 6/2012 12:09 pm
Updated: 04/ 6/2012 2:19 pm
(Click here to read the entire article)
WASHINGTON -- A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.
The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.
In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.
SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.
Walker's office did not return repeated requests for comment.
State Sen. Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay) and Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), the authors of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act, criticized Walker on Thursday for not informing the public of his actions on SB 202.
“We are finally starting to see progress here in Wisconsin, yet like their counterparts across the country, Legislative Republicans want to turn back the clock on women’s rights in the workplace,” said Hansen.
Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it's 75 cents, according to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH), which also estimates that families in the state "lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay."
Business associations lobbied in support of SB 202, according to the state's Government Accountability Board. Groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and the Wisconsin Restaurant Association all backed a repeal.
Sara Finger, executive director of WAWH, said that the repeal was a "demoralizing attack on women’s rights, health, and wellbeing."
"Economic security is a women’s health issue," she said. "The salary women are paid directly affects the type and frequency of health care services they are able to access. At a time when women’s health services are becoming more expensive and harder to obtain, financial stability is essential to maintain steady access."
Walker is facing a recall election in June. The two frontrunners on the Democratic side who are competing to unseat him, former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, sharply criticized the governor for allowing the repeal bill to become law.
Falk said Walker has "turned back the clock for women across Wisconsin."
"As a woman and as a mother who worked full-time while raising my son, I know first-hand how important pay equity and health care are to women across Wisconsin," she said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
A spokesman for Barrett's campaign said that Walker's "ideological civil war includes a war on women, and repeal today of this protection against pay discrimination is a major step backwards for Wisconsin values and basic fairness."
"Tom Barrett knows equal pay for equal work is essential, and failing to stand up for Wisconsin women in the workplace is yet another reason he [Walker] must be defeated this summer," he said.
UPDATE: 2:17 p.m. -- The Plum Line reports that President Barack Obama's campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith responded to Walker's repeal, calling on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, to take a position on the issue.
"As he campaigned across Wisconsin, Mitt Romney repeatedly praised Governor Scott Walker's leadership, calling him a 'hero' and 'a man of courage,'" she said. "But with his signing yesterday of a bill make it harder for women to enforce in court their right to equal pay, Walker showed how far Republicans are willing to go to undermine not only women's health care, but also their economic security. Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?"
Female Veterans Say Military Kicked Them Out And Classified Them As ‘Crazy’ After Reporting Sexual Assault
By Annie-Rose Strasser
Apr 17, 2012 at 9:50 am
(Click here to read the actual article)
The U.S. military seems to be trying to deal with its troubling pattern of sexual assault cases. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the military will begin new procedures for handling sex crimes, including creating a minimum rank for service members who deal with those cases.
This news comes after a story that ran this weekend on CNN detailing cases of women in each branch of the military who were diagnosed with a mental disorder and dismissed from the military after filing a sexual assault or sexual harassment complaint.
The stories are gruesome, telling of several women’s experience of serious sexual trauma, who are then essentially rejected from the military when they share what happened to them.
Military sexual traumas, as they are called within the armed forces, are shockingly common and on the rise. 19,000 incidents were predicted (PDF) in the last year alone. But there is little transparency on sexual assault cases, and the ACLU has requested more information through a Freedom of Information Act. A judge ruled recently that the armed forces were too slow in fulfilling the request, and ordered the records released by this time next month. The military has not yet complied.
In the mean time, the new regulations announced by Defense Secretary Panetta will hopefully provide some relief to victims: Not only does it change minimum ranking, it also requires military investigators to be trained in helping sexual assault victims and requires troops to have sexual assault awareness training when they go into active duty.
Apr 17, 2012 at 9:50 am
(Click here to read the actual article)
The U.S. military seems to be trying to deal with its troubling pattern of sexual assault cases. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the military will begin new procedures for handling sex crimes, including creating a minimum rank for service members who deal with those cases.
This news comes after a story that ran this weekend on CNN detailing cases of women in each branch of the military who were diagnosed with a mental disorder and dismissed from the military after filing a sexual assault or sexual harassment complaint.
The stories are gruesome, telling of several women’s experience of serious sexual trauma, who are then essentially rejected from the military when they share what happened to them.
CNN has interviewed women in all branches of the armed forces,
including the Coast Guard, who tell stories that follow a similar pattern —
a sexual assault, a command dismissive of the allegations
and a psychiatric discharge.
including the Coast Guard, who tell stories that follow a similar pattern —
a sexual assault, a command dismissive of the allegations
and a psychiatric discharge.
Schroeder says a fellow Marine followed her to the bathroom in April 2002.
She says he then punched her, ripped off her pants and raped her.
When she reported what happened, a non-commissioned officer dismissed the allegation, saying,
“‘Don’t come bitching to me because you had sex and changed your mind,’”
Schroeder recalls.
She says he then punched her, ripped off her pants and raped her.
When she reported what happened, a non-commissioned officer dismissed the allegation, saying,
“‘Don’t come bitching to me because you had sex and changed your mind,’”
Schroeder recalls.
Moore says she was alone in her barracks in October 2002
when a non-commissioned officer from another battery tried to rape her.
When she filled out forms to report it, she says, her first sergeant, told her:
"Forget about it. It never happened,” and tore up the paperwork.
when a non-commissioned officer from another battery tried to rape her.
When she filled out forms to report it, she says, her first sergeant, told her:
"Forget about it. It never happened,” and tore up the paperwork.
“It felt like a punch in the gut,” Moore says.
“I couldn’t trust my chain of command to ever back me up.”
“I couldn’t trust my chain of command to ever back me up.”
McClendon says she was aboard a Navy destroyer at sea
when a superior raped her on the midnight to 2 a.m. watch.
After reporting the attack, she was diagnosed with a
personality disorder and deemed unfit to serve.
when a superior raped her on the midnight to 2 a.m. watch.
After reporting the attack, she was diagnosed with a
personality disorder and deemed unfit to serve.
ThinkProgress reached out to Kayla Williams, a female veteran and author of Love My Rifle More Than You, who has written extensively about women in the military, to see if the CNN report sounded correct to her. Williams not only confirmed the CNN article; she told a similar sexual assault experience she witnessed:
While I was at the Defense Language Institute, a woman reported sexual assault
– and was threatened with disciplinary action for having been
drinking underage when the assault happened.
She was later discharged with a personality disorder diagnosis.
Stories like that [discourage] victims from coming forward,
which prevents justice from being done.
Since those who commit sexual assault are often repeat offenders,
discharging victims while not vigorously prosecuting those who
commit assault could also ruin the careers – and lives – of multiple victims
while allowing criminals the freedom to continue.
The Department of Defense has been making progress in fighting
sexual assault within the military, but it has a long way to go.
Treating victims of sexual assault seriously and with the
dignity and respect they deserve, rather than sweeping cases under the rug
with this type of discharge, is an important step in continuing that progress.
– and was threatened with disciplinary action for having been
drinking underage when the assault happened.
She was later discharged with a personality disorder diagnosis.
Stories like that [discourage] victims from coming forward,
which prevents justice from being done.
Since those who commit sexual assault are often repeat offenders,
discharging victims while not vigorously prosecuting those who
commit assault could also ruin the careers – and lives – of multiple victims
while allowing criminals the freedom to continue.
The Department of Defense has been making progress in fighting
sexual assault within the military, but it has a long way to go.
Treating victims of sexual assault seriously and with the
dignity and respect they deserve, rather than sweeping cases under the rug
with this type of discharge, is an important step in continuing that progress.
In the mean time, the new regulations announced by Defense Secretary Panetta will hopefully provide some relief to victims: Not only does it change minimum ranking, it also requires military investigators to be trained in helping sexual assault victims and requires troops to have sexual assault awareness training when they go into active duty.
Ann Romney: ‘I Love The Fact That There Are Women Out There Who Don’t Have A Choice’ And ‘Must Go To Work’
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Apr 24, 2012 at 9:49 am
(Click here to read the actual article)
In an emotional speech about the difficulty of motherhood and life on the campaign trail, Ann Romney used an odd choice of words to discuss mothers who are forced to work while raising their children.
Ann Romney was at the center of a national discussion recently after a Democratic consultant charged that the would-be future first lady couldn’t possibly understand the plight of working mothers because she had the luxury to stay home and devote herself full time to raising her kids. The Romney campaign fired back, accusing Democrats of lacking respect for stay at home moms.
The issue was largely dismissed after a few days as a ginned-up “silly season” controversy, but Ann Romney’s comments last night at the Connecticut Republican Party’s Prescott Bush Awards Dinner could potentially reignite the issue. After discussing how she understands the challenges mothers face, Romney said, according to BuzzFeed:
Romney alluded to the fact that not all women can stay at home saying,
“I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice
and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids.
Thank goodness that we value those people too.
And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”
“I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice
and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids.
Thank goodness that we value those people too.
And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”
It seems Romney was trying to express empathy for women who don’t have the option to stay at home, as she did. But the comment that she “love[s]” that some women “don’t have a choice” and must work is unusual, to say the least, and could lead to a new round of charges that the Romneys don’t understand average Americans, given their enormous wealth.
Nearly two-thirds of women are the breadwinner or co-bread winner in their households. Nonetheless, the gender pay gap remains. And while Mitt Romney has broken with most Republicans to support the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, he has still not yet taken a position on the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Rush Limbaugh On Hillary Clinton: ‘All She Is Is A Secretary’ Who Needs To Wear Spanx
By Judd Legum
Apr 26, 2012 at 2:45 pm
(Click here to read the whole article)
Since March, advertisers have been abandoning Rush Limbaugh in droves following a series of sexist attacks on Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke.
Today, Limbaugh turned his attention to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Limabugh said that Clinton “has reached a pinnacle and all she is is a secretary,” adding that the left has “the strangest definition of success.”
Limbaugh then said he was being prodded to talk about Clinton’s need to wear “Spanx,” but suggested she had a greater need for “Spankles.” Spanx are undergarments designed to reduce the visibility of body fat. Listen:
Rush Limbaugh On Hillary Clinton
Giving Birth in Chains: The Shackling of Incarcerated Women During Labor and Delivery
by Anna Clark
July 6, 2009 - 8:00am
(Click here to read the entire article)
As birthing choices are increasingly prominent in the public conversation, pregnant women are more and more empowered to decide what sort of care is right for their bodies and their child.
Not so for pregnant women who are incarcerated. Not only are their decisions about care restricted, but many incarcerated pregnant women are physically restricted while giving birth: during labor and delivery, they are shackled.
Consider the case of Shawanna Nelson.
When Nelson was six months pregnant, she was incarcerated in Arkansas for passing bad checks. She went into labor during her short sentence. A correctional officer shackled her legs to opposite sides of the bed that transported her to a delivery room, removing them briefly during a nurse's examination. Nelson was re-shackled immediately after giving birth to her nine-pound son.
"She suffered both mental anguish and injury to her back, intense pain because she couldn't move or adjust her position through her birth process," said Dana Sussman, legal fellow at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Nelson later had surgery to treat symptoms resulting from the delivery of her son, according to The Arkansas Times. She sued the Arkansas Department of Correction, charging that her treatment violated the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
After winning her case at district court, Nelson's charges were dismissed on appeal by a judicial panel that said prison officials "couldn't have known the shackling was unconstitutional," said Sussman. Nelson was granted a rehearing before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project. Her case was argued in September 2008. A decision is pending.
Perhaps most surprising about Nelson's case is that it's not uncommon. Last month, a former Washington inmate sued the state for shackling during her birthing process and high-risk pregnancy, treatment that included a leg iron and a metal chain across her stomach.
Also last month, former inmates of Cook County jail filed a federal lawsuit in Illinois challenging the facility's shackling practice. Illinois was the first state to have legislation that prohibited shackling; it remains one of four states that make shackling explicitly illegal.
"I had no idea women were treated like that anywhere," said Tina Reynolds, who was shackled during labor and the birth of her son fifteen years ago.
"Shackling is a brutal and inherently unjust practice, so blatantly draconian," said Malika Saada Saar, executive director of The Rebecca Project (and contributor to RH Reality Check).
"The problem is that policies for incarcerated men are extended to women without adapting to distinct circumstances," Saada Saar added.
Top Republican Strategist Denies Women Are Paid Less Than Men
By Igor Volsky
Apr 29, 2012 at 11:54 am
(Click here to read the entire article and to listen to the video)
This morning, during a heated discussion with Rachel Maddow on Meet The Press, GOP consultant Alex Castellanos denied that women make 77 cents for a man’s dollar in the workplace and noted, “there are lots of reasons for that.” Maddow expressed shock at the assertion, but concluded that it explained why Republicans and Mitt Romney are so hesitant to embrace the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, a law that helps women hold accountable employers who discriminate in the pay practices based on gender.
“Now we know, at least from both of your perspectives,” Maddow said, pointing to Castellanos and Romney surrogate Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), “women are not fairing worse than men in the economy that women aren’t getting paid less for equal work.” “It’s about policy and whether or not you want to fix some of the structural discrimination that women really do face that Republicans don’t believe is happening,” she added. Castellanos responded to Maddow’s policy argument by remarking on her passion, to which the MSNBC host took offense:
CASTELLANOS: It is about policy and I love how passionate you are. I wish you were as right about what you’re saying as you are passionate about it. I really do.
MADDOW: That’s really condescending. This is a stylistic issue. My passion on this issue is actually me making a factual argument on it.
Watch it:
http://youtu.be/kne7X-_CDRE
In an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer earlier this month, Romney refused to say whether he would sign the Lilly Ledbetter Act, but claimed that he would not change it. Romney’s women surrogates — including McMorris Rodgers — all voted against the legislation. Castellanos himself consulted Romney during the 2008 presidential election.
New Romney Spokesman Used Twitter For Sexist Attacks
New Romney Spokesman Used Twitter For Sexist Attacks
Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s new foreign policy spokesperson Richard Grenell has an odd penchant for targeting the wives of male politicians and women in general on Twitter.
Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s new foreign policy spokesperson Richard Grenell has an odd penchant for targeting the wives of male politicians and women in general on Twitter.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Kansas to Pregnant Women: "A Little Lie from Your Doctor Won't Hurt You"
Posted by Jennifer Dalven,
Reproductive Freedom Project
It's what every pregnant woman I know dreads. Going into that big ultrasound, having the ultrasound tech, who had been so chatty, suddenly go silent. Having her do sweep after sweep across your belly without saying another word, until finally, she gets up and solemnly says, "I am going to get the doctor."
As far as pregnancy nightmares go, I thought that was one of the worst. But now politicians in Kansas are giving pregnant women and their partners something new to worry about. Buried in a sweeping anti-abortion bill is a provision that would immunize a doctor who discovers that a baby will be born with a devastating condition and deliberately withholds that information from his patient. That's right. If the bill passes, a doctor who opposes abortion could decide to lie about the results of your blood tests, your ultrasound, your cvs or your amnio. Lie to you so that you won't have information that might lead you to decide to end your pregnancy or that might lead you to learn more about your child's condition so that you are prepared to be the best parent you can be to your child.
Now, I have been working for a long time defending the right of a pregnant woman to make the best decision for herself and her family, whether that is continuing the pregnancy, adoption, or abortion, based on full, accurate information. I thought I had seen just about every manner of government intrusion into those fundamentally personal and private decisions. I thought I was past the point of being shocked and outraged. But as a mother who has been through those ultrasounds myself, the thought that my doctor could choose to withhold this information from me and take this decision away from me and my husband ... well, let's just say it really touched a nerve.
And, unfortunately, it's not just Kansas. Other states motivated by anti-abortion zeal are jumping on the it's-ok-for-doctors-to lie-to-their-patients-to-prevent-them-from-having-an-abortion bandwagon. Oklahoma recently passed a similar law. And, the Arizona legislature is considering a similar bill.
But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Despite the rhetoric of anti-abortion politicians about how all these restrictions are necessary to ensure that women's decisions are well-informed, it's never been about that. Doctors who provide abortions already work hard to ensure that every woman has the information she needs to make the best decision for herself and her family. What these bills are about is politicians who think they know better than women and who are trying to impose their own views on abortion on a woman and her family regardless of the circumstances: That's what's behind those now infamous ultrasound bills in places like Virginia, Idaho, and Pennsylvania. That's what's behind the bills in Georgia and Arizona that would ban abortion at the point when a woman often learns about a devastating diagnosis. And that is what is behind so many of the other bills working their way through the state legislatures right now. The Kansas bill is, in a way, just more upfront about it.
Well, enough is enough. We may not all agree about abortion, but we can all agree that these decisions ought to be made by a woman and her family, not a politician. So, whether you are a man or a woman; whether you are already a parent or think you might become one in the future; whether you are blissfully pregnant or unhappily so, if you care about your right to make your own decisions, I ask that you help get the word out. Share this blog on Facebook and Twitter. Send an email with this link to the President of the Kansas Senate. Tell the politicians all over the country to stop interfering in a family's personal and private decisions.
Reproductive Freedom Project
It's what every pregnant woman I know dreads. Going into that big ultrasound, having the ultrasound tech, who had been so chatty, suddenly go silent. Having her do sweep after sweep across your belly without saying another word, until finally, she gets up and solemnly says, "I am going to get the doctor."
As far as pregnancy nightmares go, I thought that was one of the worst. But now politicians in Kansas are giving pregnant women and their partners something new to worry about. Buried in a sweeping anti-abortion bill is a provision that would immunize a doctor who discovers that a baby will be born with a devastating condition and deliberately withholds that information from his patient. That's right. If the bill passes, a doctor who opposes abortion could decide to lie about the results of your blood tests, your ultrasound, your cvs or your amnio. Lie to you so that you won't have information that might lead you to decide to end your pregnancy or that might lead you to learn more about your child's condition so that you are prepared to be the best parent you can be to your child.
Now, I have been working for a long time defending the right of a pregnant woman to make the best decision for herself and her family, whether that is continuing the pregnancy, adoption, or abortion, based on full, accurate information. I thought I had seen just about every manner of government intrusion into those fundamentally personal and private decisions. I thought I was past the point of being shocked and outraged. But as a mother who has been through those ultrasounds myself, the thought that my doctor could choose to withhold this information from me and take this decision away from me and my husband ... well, let's just say it really touched a nerve.
And, unfortunately, it's not just Kansas. Other states motivated by anti-abortion zeal are jumping on the it's-ok-for-doctors-to lie-to-their-patients-to-prevent-them-from-having-an-abortion bandwagon. Oklahoma recently passed a similar law. And, the Arizona legislature is considering a similar bill.
But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Despite the rhetoric of anti-abortion politicians about how all these restrictions are necessary to ensure that women's decisions are well-informed, it's never been about that. Doctors who provide abortions already work hard to ensure that every woman has the information she needs to make the best decision for herself and her family. What these bills are about is politicians who think they know better than women and who are trying to impose their own views on abortion on a woman and her family regardless of the circumstances: That's what's behind those now infamous ultrasound bills in places like Virginia, Idaho, and Pennsylvania. That's what's behind the bills in Georgia and Arizona that would ban abortion at the point when a woman often learns about a devastating diagnosis. And that is what is behind so many of the other bills working their way through the state legislatures right now. The Kansas bill is, in a way, just more upfront about it.
Well, enough is enough. We may not all agree about abortion, but we can all agree that these decisions ought to be made by a woman and her family, not a politician. So, whether you are a man or a woman; whether you are already a parent or think you might become one in the future; whether you are blissfully pregnant or unhappily so, if you care about your right to make your own decisions, I ask that you help get the word out. Share this blog on Facebook and Twitter. Send an email with this link to the President of the Kansas Senate. Tell the politicians all over the country to stop interfering in a family's personal and private decisions.
Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds
BY JOHN SCALZI
MARCH 20, 2012
Where Is The Physician Outrage?
Right. Here.
I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics.
I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.
I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.
In all of the discussion and all of the outrage and all of the Doonesbury comics, I find it interesting that we physicians are relatively silent.
After all, it’s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.
Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.
It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.
It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.
Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.
1) Just don’t comply. No matter how much our autonomy as physicians has been eroded, we still have control of what our hands do and do not do with a transvaginal ultrasound wand. If this legislation is completely ignored by the people who are supposed to implement it, it will soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.
2) Reinforce patient autonomy. It does not matter what a politician says. A woman is in charge of determining what does and what does not go into her body. If she WANTS a transvaginal ultrasound, fine. If it’s medically indicated, fine… have that discussion with her. We have informed consent for a reason. If she has to be forced to get a transvaginal ultrasound through coercion or overly impassioned argument or implied threats of withdrawal of care, that is NOT FINE.
Our position is to recommend medically-indicated tests and treatments that have a favorable benefit-to-harm ratio… and it is up to the patient to decide what she will and will not allow. Period. Politicians do not have any role in this process. NO ONE has a role in this process but the patient and her physician. If anyone tries to get in the way of that, it is our duty to run interference.
3) If you are forced to document a non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound because of this legislation, document that the patient refused the procedure or that it was not medically indicated. (Because both of those are true.) Hell, document that you attempted but the patient kicked you in the nose, if you have to.
4) If you are forced to enter an image of the ultrasound itself into the patient chart, ultrasound the bedsheets and enter that picture with a comment of “poor acoustic window”. If you’re really gutsy, enter a comment of “poor acoustic window…plus, I’m not a rapist.” (I was going to propose repeatedly entering a single identical image in affected patient’s charts nationwide, as a recognizable visual protest…but I don’t have an ultrasound image that I own to the point that I could offer it for that purpose.)
5) Do anything else you can think of to protect your patients and the integrity of the medical profession. IN THAT ORDER. We already know how vulnerable patients can be; we invisibly protect them on a daily basis from all kinds of dangers inside and outside of the hospital. Their safety is our responsibility, and we practically kill ourselves to ensure it at all costs. But it’s also our responsibility to guard the practice of medicine from people who would hijack our tools of healing for their own political or monetary gain.
In recent years, we have been abject failures in this responsibility, and untold numbers of people have gleefully taken advantage of that. Silently allowing a politician to manipulate our medical decision-making for the purposes of an ideological goal erodes any tiny scrap of trust we might have left.
It comes down to this: When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.
Because we are their last line of defense.
MARCH 20, 2012
Where Is The Physician Outrage?
Right. Here.
I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics.
I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.
I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.
In all of the discussion and all of the outrage and all of the Doonesbury comics, I find it interesting that we physicians are relatively silent.
After all, it’s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.
Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.
It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.
It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.
Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.
1) Just don’t comply. No matter how much our autonomy as physicians has been eroded, we still have control of what our hands do and do not do with a transvaginal ultrasound wand. If this legislation is completely ignored by the people who are supposed to implement it, it will soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.
2) Reinforce patient autonomy. It does not matter what a politician says. A woman is in charge of determining what does and what does not go into her body. If she WANTS a transvaginal ultrasound, fine. If it’s medically indicated, fine… have that discussion with her. We have informed consent for a reason. If she has to be forced to get a transvaginal ultrasound through coercion or overly impassioned argument or implied threats of withdrawal of care, that is NOT FINE.
Our position is to recommend medically-indicated tests and treatments that have a favorable benefit-to-harm ratio… and it is up to the patient to decide what she will and will not allow. Period. Politicians do not have any role in this process. NO ONE has a role in this process but the patient and her physician. If anyone tries to get in the way of that, it is our duty to run interference.
3) If you are forced to document a non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound because of this legislation, document that the patient refused the procedure or that it was not medically indicated. (Because both of those are true.) Hell, document that you attempted but the patient kicked you in the nose, if you have to.
4) If you are forced to enter an image of the ultrasound itself into the patient chart, ultrasound the bedsheets and enter that picture with a comment of “poor acoustic window”. If you’re really gutsy, enter a comment of “poor acoustic window…plus, I’m not a rapist.” (I was going to propose repeatedly entering a single identical image in affected patient’s charts nationwide, as a recognizable visual protest…but I don’t have an ultrasound image that I own to the point that I could offer it for that purpose.)
5) Do anything else you can think of to protect your patients and the integrity of the medical profession. IN THAT ORDER. We already know how vulnerable patients can be; we invisibly protect them on a daily basis from all kinds of dangers inside and outside of the hospital. Their safety is our responsibility, and we practically kill ourselves to ensure it at all costs. But it’s also our responsibility to guard the practice of medicine from people who would hijack our tools of healing for their own political or monetary gain.
In recent years, we have been abject failures in this responsibility, and untold numbers of people have gleefully taken advantage of that. Silently allowing a politician to manipulate our medical decision-making for the purposes of an ideological goal erodes any tiny scrap of trust we might have left.
It comes down to this: When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.
Because we are their last line of defense.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Medical Student Won't Perform Pelvic Exams on Anesthetized Patients
Posted by Jill—Unnecesarean
August 30, 2010
TRIGGER WARNING
Medical student Hilary Gerber of Mom’s Tinfoil Hat was offered the chance to perform a pelvic exam on an unconscious female patient by an operating room nurse at the local hospital not affiliated with her school. Wrote Gerber:
I participated in a dilation and curettage on a woman who was experiencing an incomplete abortion. I was in the room before the procedure and the OR nurse offered to let me do a pelvic exam on her, since the patient was already anesthetized.
Gerber declined the offer.
Although I was fascinated by the opportunity, and initially was tempted by the learning experience, I didn’t want to do it without her permission, and made myself consider her as a patient and a person, not as a pathology or anatomy in front of me. Yes, I knew she was going to have a pelvic procedure that she already consented to, and I even had the opportunity to introduce myself to her before she was anesthetized, but I knew it wasn’t diagnostic for me to do a pelvic on her in this situation, wouldn’t change the course of her treatment, and questioned the ethics of it.
She is not alone in her unwillingness to perform a pelvic exam on an anesthetized patient without her consent. Dr. Michael Greger, author of Heart Failure: Diary of a Third Year Medical Student, refused to perform nonconsensual pelvic exams on anesthetized patients as a student. This 2003 interview with Michael Greger is archived on the now inactive ShamExam.org website:
Are all women who are put under general anesthesia in a hospital practiced on by students while unconscious?
All women in the OB/GYN department at most teaching hospitals and hospitals affiliated with a medical school are. If you’re anesthetized and you’re in the OB/GYN department, you probably have had students practice pelvic exams on you regardless of what you’re in the hospital for - even if the procedure you need doesn’t require a pelvic exam!
Additionally, while doctors don’t go to other departments — such as general surgery patients, neurosurgery patients or cardiac surgery patients — if your surgeon is an OB/GYN, odds are there’s going to be a team of hungry medical students waiting for you to fall asleep.
When you say a team, how many people do you mean?
That depends. There’s the attending, a few residents, an intern and then as many medical students as they can round up.
However, I’m less concerned about interns and residents. They are doctors that have a role in that patient’s care, so doing a pelvic exam might be useful for them. But for medical students, no one even pretends it’s about the patient. Patients are strictly tools for our education. There’s no thought that there’s any benefit to the individual patient when medical students are just lining up in there.
When you were a medical student, did all your classmates perform non-consensual pelvic exams on women?
Yes, particularly the male students practiced pelvic exams on anesthetized women. As of last year, which was the last time I checked, they still do.
Why are male students more likely to perform non-consensual pelvic exams?
The medical community assumes that women will be less likely to allow male students practice on them if asked. So the male students are quicker to jump at the opportunity to practice on women who are unconscious.
Are there ways for student to learn how to perform pelvic exams other than on non-consenting women?
Yes, there’s a surrogate program that pays volunteers. If you contact a chairperson at an OB/GYN department or medical school they will tell you all about the surrogate program if they have one. What they won’t tell you is that in addition to the surrogate program they still carry out this practice. At [omitted], second year students practiced on a surrogate. That’s how I learned how to do it. But then in my third year on my OB/GYN rotation I performed pelvic exams on unconscious patients. Women would come in for appendicitis or something. Then, once they’re asleep, the crowd gathers, line forms to the left.
If teaching hospitals and medical schools have surrogates offering to consent to pelvic exams, why perform non-consensual ones?
Money. It’s expensive. And takes time while waiting for someone to volunteer. At least that’s what medical schools will say.
Can you explain what happens during these non-consensual pelvic exams?
They are usually “bi-digital” exams. This means students insert two fingers as deeply as they can into the vagina with one hand and use the other hand to feel around the outside of the abdomen for the ovaries. What they’re trying to do is trap the ovaries between their two fingers and their hand and feel for the internal organs from the inside. Sometimes, speculums are also used in the exams.
And what does this teach the student?
Very little in terms of how to do a proper pelvic exam. The art of doing a pelvic exam is how to do it while making the woman feel comfortable. When a patient is unconscious, obviously she can’t tell you what’s uncomfortable, what you’re doing right or wrong, what hurts. And, it feels completely different because the musculature is completely relaxed because of the anesthesia. So it doesn’t feel the same when you do a pelvic exam on a woman who is awake.
So why do the pelvic exams on unconscious women?
Because the student thinks, “Well, the more exams I do, the more spinal taps I do, the better I’ll be at it.” And then he thinks, “Hey, if I have to ask permission, I may not be able to do as many, so I may not be as good at it.” But that’s not really the case.
I often tell this story to illustrate my point:
In my physical diagnosis class at [omitted], students learned how to do rectal exams from a proctologist. I was waiting for my turn to perform a rectal exam.
When I was finally called in, I was shocked to find a poor guy bent over a table with his pants around his ankles. I’d never met the patient or the doctor before and I wondered how the doctor was going to explain to the patient why he was going to get a second exam.
Then the doctor told the patient, “I want to get a second opinion by a specialist.” All of a sudden though I was just a 2nd year medical student, I was not only a doctor but a specialist! I went in there sticking my finger out with no idea what I was doing. Obviously, the proctologist couldn’t tell me anything, either, because I was now the specialist. So, the educational experience for me was absolutely useless.
When you go in as a medical student to do your first procedures like a blood draw, or putting in your first IV, if you’re introduced by the resident as “doctor” — which almost everyone is — and they pretend they know what they’re doing, all the resident can do is stand behind the patient and surreptitiously tug at their ear and make sign language that what you’re doing is wrong.
However, if you respect the patient as a human being and go in there and say. “My name is Michael Greger, I’m a medical student. I’ve never done this procedure before but there’s someone right here that’s going to take me step-by-step through the procedure. Would you mind if I did this?” and actually sit down with them and establish a relationship and rapport, medical students will be surprised at how many people are willing to let us do all sorts of things to themselves and their families. Then the doctor can take you step-by-step because you’re not pretending you’re someone you’re not.
Of course, doctors know they won’t have this problem when the patient is anesthetized, because then you can go step-by-step and you don’t have to respect anything.
What stops students from simply asking the patient for permission?
When I was a student and approached the chairperson of my department and said I was uncomfortable with this, and he said, “I don’t see anything wrong with it.” My response was, “If there’s nothing wrong it, then you won’t mind if I ask permission.” He said I couldn’t do that. He knew that women would be absolutely outraged at the thought, and so, no one would tell them anything.
As a woman, if I just had surgery at a teaching hospital and asked my doctor if students had been practicing pelvic exams on me without my consent while I was unconscious, what would he say?
Particularly in this perceived climate of liability, doctors wouldn’t say anything. Medical ethics literature reveals surveys that say 50% of doctors blatantly falsify patient records and 70% mistreat patients. I had a case in my internship where doctors literally lied about killing a patient. They have so little respect for the autonomy of the patient, or that patients have any say in what they do or how they carry out their practice. Doctors know the right thing to do, but they’ve been socialized to fit in with the team and protect their own.
So, how can a woman prevent non-consensual pelvic exams happening to her?
All you can do is ask and hope that your doctor will honor your request. Once you’re asleep, however, you have no power. And what a powerless thing for women to know this goes on and think, “Well, I’m just going to have to trust my doctor.”
What if you don’t trust your doctor?
Women can write on their bikini line, “I do not give consent for medical students to practice pelvic exams on me” in marker. Then as soon as the clothes come off or the robe is lifted and all the medical students are getting on their latex gloves they can see that message. And that will stop them.
I was inspired to think up this tip because of patient advocates like Bernie Siegel, M.D., who recommend that patients use a magic marker to write “Wrong leg” or “Wrong arm” on their healthy body parts to prevent them their doctor from performing surgery on the wrong limb - a common mistake.
Has any medical governing body, like the American Medical Association, ever commented on non-consensual pelvic exams?
Over and over medical authorities say this practice is egregious. In numerous medical ethics articles this practice is described as an outrageous assault on the dignity and autonomy of the patient.
One quote from these articles reads: “This practice shows a lack of respect to the patient as a person, renewing a moral insensitivity and misuse of power. It is just one of the ways in which physicians abuse their power and have shown themselves unwilling to police themselves in matters of ethics, especially in regards to female patients.”
Since medical authorities are against non-consensual pelvic exams, have they ever tried to ban them?
They talk the talk, but when it comes to changing the culture of medicine, nothing happens. But then there’s that paradox that can be exploited. You can say, “Your own medical ethicists say this is wrong. So how can you continue to do it?”
Do you believe there should be federal legislation banning non-consensual pelvic exams?
Yes, you shouldn’t have to just trust that your doctor isn’t lying to you when he says students didn’t practice pelvic exams on you while under anesthesia. This practice should be outlawed. There should be professional guidelines. There should be federal guidelines.
This practice is already illegal in Massachusetts — although, it still happens there all the time. But it’s all about public knowledge. I believe that’s the primary role of proposing legislation, because articles in the media about the legislation would help spark a national debate and inform the public. And, the most effective thing is public knowledge.
If more people know about this and are outraged, then medical students will be more likely to go to the head of their department and say, “I don’t comfortable doing this.” And if the response to their protest is, “There’s nothing wrong with this,” the students can throw a stack of articles on the desk and say, “What do you mean? People are outraged all over the world!”
Is this practice worldwide?
Yes, and wherever this has come out, public outrage has followed. For instance, in New Zealand, there was outrage across the whole country when this practice was discovered. And that led it to stop.
And just this year [2003], the British Medical Journal had an article about the Royal Society of Medicine taking a stance on this.
How do medical students feel about performing non-consensual pelvic exams?
When I talk about non-consensual pelvic exams during my lectures, the majority of first and second year medical students - both male and female - are just horrified to hear that this goes on. They say, “This will never happen in our school!” But then there’s usually a third or fourth year student who attends the lecture and raises his hand and says, “I did this just last week. Yes, this goes on here.”
How do the attending physicians who require the students to perform non-consensual exams feel about the practice?
The attending physicians are almost without exception supportive of the practice, haven’t even thought about it, or don’t consider anything wrong with it. I’ve seen female just as likely as male attendings support the practice.
In fact, the only people who are fine with not asking permission are doctors. They’re so out of touch with the world and society. This is where they’re weakest.
Why do attending physicians feel this way?
I’ve been told that they don’t see anything wrong with it. They don’t see anything unethical about it at all. They think, “Huh, we just never thought anyone would mind.” In fact, a quote in a recent article in the response written in response to the American Journal of OB/GYN article this month [March 2003] quoted the residency director of Johns Hopkins as saying “I don’t think any of us even think about it. It’s just so standard as to how you train medical students.”
If the majority of first and second year med students are horrified by the practice, then how do they transform into third and fourth-year students who perform the non-consensual pelvic exams? And then into future attending doctors who require other students to perform them?
Good question. Well, one interesting statistic that you don’t hear discussed is that people talk about the ¼ of med students who say it’s “unimportant” to ask consent. And that’s outrageous, obviously. But if you analyze this data, those were students who had completed or who were in the middle of their OB/GYN rotation.
If you ask students before they get to that point, before they do their rotation, before they’re forced into a position where they have to do this kind of thing, the number is significantly lower - 17%.
So what happens to medical students when they’re placed in this situation that they undergo this shift, this eroding of their ethical principal?
In my book, I talk about some of the studies that show, if anything, moral reasoning may be inhibited by medical education, that ethical sensitivity increases during the first and second years of medical school but then decreases throughout the rest of medical school. So 4th year medical students who graduate and get their M.D. are less medically sensitive than when they entered into med school!
Why do you think there’s such a dramatic shift from 1st and 2nd year med students who don’t want to perform non-consensual to 3rd and 4th year students who feel it’s okay?
Medical school has a cult-like atmosphere. You’re all immersed in this one lifestyle, you’re sleep deprived, you’re not eating enough, you’re all dressed the same. So, when you’re presented with something of questionable morality, you have no time to introspect or self-reflect or think about it. You don’t have time to question whether things are right or wrong. Without any kind of outside contact, you just get caught up in it. You go along with the team and go with the culture of medicine.
How can students who oppose this practice convince their schools to ban it?
They need to organize. To get together as a group and approach the chair of their department and say, “We as a group feel uncomfortable with this.” I don’t want anyone to be put in the position I was, this lone person who sticks their neck out and then gets dismissed or worse. But if they stand together as a group, they can come together and say, “We as a class…” or “We five people on this rotation feel uncomfortable with this.” My hope is that medical schools then just can’t ignore it.
Gerber blogged that she hopes to maintain the “ethical sensitivity” mentioned by Greger into her future career in OB-GYN.
I hope that if I do get my career in ob/gyn, I do continue to consider my patients as patients. I know there is a crisis in ob/gyn in which obstetrics is turning more into a game of avoiding liability and “moving meat”, and I hope my switch won’t get flipped to the point where my nameless, faceless patient is just a medicolegal liability or a long labor to be avoided by an unnecessary surgery.
August 30, 2010
TRIGGER WARNING
Medical student Hilary Gerber of Mom’s Tinfoil Hat was offered the chance to perform a pelvic exam on an unconscious female patient by an operating room nurse at the local hospital not affiliated with her school. Wrote Gerber:
I participated in a dilation and curettage on a woman who was experiencing an incomplete abortion. I was in the room before the procedure and the OR nurse offered to let me do a pelvic exam on her, since the patient was already anesthetized.
Gerber declined the offer.
Although I was fascinated by the opportunity, and initially was tempted by the learning experience, I didn’t want to do it without her permission, and made myself consider her as a patient and a person, not as a pathology or anatomy in front of me. Yes, I knew she was going to have a pelvic procedure that she already consented to, and I even had the opportunity to introduce myself to her before she was anesthetized, but I knew it wasn’t diagnostic for me to do a pelvic on her in this situation, wouldn’t change the course of her treatment, and questioned the ethics of it.
She is not alone in her unwillingness to perform a pelvic exam on an anesthetized patient without her consent. Dr. Michael Greger, author of Heart Failure: Diary of a Third Year Medical Student, refused to perform nonconsensual pelvic exams on anesthetized patients as a student. This 2003 interview with Michael Greger is archived on the now inactive ShamExam.org website:
Are all women who are put under general anesthesia in a hospital practiced on by students while unconscious?
All women in the OB/GYN department at most teaching hospitals and hospitals affiliated with a medical school are. If you’re anesthetized and you’re in the OB/GYN department, you probably have had students practice pelvic exams on you regardless of what you’re in the hospital for - even if the procedure you need doesn’t require a pelvic exam!
Additionally, while doctors don’t go to other departments — such as general surgery patients, neurosurgery patients or cardiac surgery patients — if your surgeon is an OB/GYN, odds are there’s going to be a team of hungry medical students waiting for you to fall asleep.
When you say a team, how many people do you mean?
That depends. There’s the attending, a few residents, an intern and then as many medical students as they can round up.
However, I’m less concerned about interns and residents. They are doctors that have a role in that patient’s care, so doing a pelvic exam might be useful for them. But for medical students, no one even pretends it’s about the patient. Patients are strictly tools for our education. There’s no thought that there’s any benefit to the individual patient when medical students are just lining up in there.
When you were a medical student, did all your classmates perform non-consensual pelvic exams on women?
Yes, particularly the male students practiced pelvic exams on anesthetized women. As of last year, which was the last time I checked, they still do.
Why are male students more likely to perform non-consensual pelvic exams?
The medical community assumes that women will be less likely to allow male students practice on them if asked. So the male students are quicker to jump at the opportunity to practice on women who are unconscious.
Are there ways for student to learn how to perform pelvic exams other than on non-consenting women?
Yes, there’s a surrogate program that pays volunteers. If you contact a chairperson at an OB/GYN department or medical school they will tell you all about the surrogate program if they have one. What they won’t tell you is that in addition to the surrogate program they still carry out this practice. At [omitted], second year students practiced on a surrogate. That’s how I learned how to do it. But then in my third year on my OB/GYN rotation I performed pelvic exams on unconscious patients. Women would come in for appendicitis or something. Then, once they’re asleep, the crowd gathers, line forms to the left.
If teaching hospitals and medical schools have surrogates offering to consent to pelvic exams, why perform non-consensual ones?
Money. It’s expensive. And takes time while waiting for someone to volunteer. At least that’s what medical schools will say.
Can you explain what happens during these non-consensual pelvic exams?
They are usually “bi-digital” exams. This means students insert two fingers as deeply as they can into the vagina with one hand and use the other hand to feel around the outside of the abdomen for the ovaries. What they’re trying to do is trap the ovaries between their two fingers and their hand and feel for the internal organs from the inside. Sometimes, speculums are also used in the exams.
And what does this teach the student?
Very little in terms of how to do a proper pelvic exam. The art of doing a pelvic exam is how to do it while making the woman feel comfortable. When a patient is unconscious, obviously she can’t tell you what’s uncomfortable, what you’re doing right or wrong, what hurts. And, it feels completely different because the musculature is completely relaxed because of the anesthesia. So it doesn’t feel the same when you do a pelvic exam on a woman who is awake.
So why do the pelvic exams on unconscious women?
Because the student thinks, “Well, the more exams I do, the more spinal taps I do, the better I’ll be at it.” And then he thinks, “Hey, if I have to ask permission, I may not be able to do as many, so I may not be as good at it.” But that’s not really the case.
I often tell this story to illustrate my point:
In my physical diagnosis class at [omitted], students learned how to do rectal exams from a proctologist. I was waiting for my turn to perform a rectal exam.
When I was finally called in, I was shocked to find a poor guy bent over a table with his pants around his ankles. I’d never met the patient or the doctor before and I wondered how the doctor was going to explain to the patient why he was going to get a second exam.
Then the doctor told the patient, “I want to get a second opinion by a specialist.” All of a sudden though I was just a 2nd year medical student, I was not only a doctor but a specialist! I went in there sticking my finger out with no idea what I was doing. Obviously, the proctologist couldn’t tell me anything, either, because I was now the specialist. So, the educational experience for me was absolutely useless.
When you go in as a medical student to do your first procedures like a blood draw, or putting in your first IV, if you’re introduced by the resident as “doctor” — which almost everyone is — and they pretend they know what they’re doing, all the resident can do is stand behind the patient and surreptitiously tug at their ear and make sign language that what you’re doing is wrong.
However, if you respect the patient as a human being and go in there and say. “My name is Michael Greger, I’m a medical student. I’ve never done this procedure before but there’s someone right here that’s going to take me step-by-step through the procedure. Would you mind if I did this?” and actually sit down with them and establish a relationship and rapport, medical students will be surprised at how many people are willing to let us do all sorts of things to themselves and their families. Then the doctor can take you step-by-step because you’re not pretending you’re someone you’re not.
Of course, doctors know they won’t have this problem when the patient is anesthetized, because then you can go step-by-step and you don’t have to respect anything.
What stops students from simply asking the patient for permission?
When I was a student and approached the chairperson of my department and said I was uncomfortable with this, and he said, “I don’t see anything wrong with it.” My response was, “If there’s nothing wrong it, then you won’t mind if I ask permission.” He said I couldn’t do that. He knew that women would be absolutely outraged at the thought, and so, no one would tell them anything.
As a woman, if I just had surgery at a teaching hospital and asked my doctor if students had been practicing pelvic exams on me without my consent while I was unconscious, what would he say?
Particularly in this perceived climate of liability, doctors wouldn’t say anything. Medical ethics literature reveals surveys that say 50% of doctors blatantly falsify patient records and 70% mistreat patients. I had a case in my internship where doctors literally lied about killing a patient. They have so little respect for the autonomy of the patient, or that patients have any say in what they do or how they carry out their practice. Doctors know the right thing to do, but they’ve been socialized to fit in with the team and protect their own.
So, how can a woman prevent non-consensual pelvic exams happening to her?
All you can do is ask and hope that your doctor will honor your request. Once you’re asleep, however, you have no power. And what a powerless thing for women to know this goes on and think, “Well, I’m just going to have to trust my doctor.”
What if you don’t trust your doctor?
Women can write on their bikini line, “I do not give consent for medical students to practice pelvic exams on me” in marker. Then as soon as the clothes come off or the robe is lifted and all the medical students are getting on their latex gloves they can see that message. And that will stop them.
I was inspired to think up this tip because of patient advocates like Bernie Siegel, M.D., who recommend that patients use a magic marker to write “Wrong leg” or “Wrong arm” on their healthy body parts to prevent them their doctor from performing surgery on the wrong limb - a common mistake.
Has any medical governing body, like the American Medical Association, ever commented on non-consensual pelvic exams?
Over and over medical authorities say this practice is egregious. In numerous medical ethics articles this practice is described as an outrageous assault on the dignity and autonomy of the patient.
One quote from these articles reads: “This practice shows a lack of respect to the patient as a person, renewing a moral insensitivity and misuse of power. It is just one of the ways in which physicians abuse their power and have shown themselves unwilling to police themselves in matters of ethics, especially in regards to female patients.”
Since medical authorities are against non-consensual pelvic exams, have they ever tried to ban them?
They talk the talk, but when it comes to changing the culture of medicine, nothing happens. But then there’s that paradox that can be exploited. You can say, “Your own medical ethicists say this is wrong. So how can you continue to do it?”
Do you believe there should be federal legislation banning non-consensual pelvic exams?
Yes, you shouldn’t have to just trust that your doctor isn’t lying to you when he says students didn’t practice pelvic exams on you while under anesthesia. This practice should be outlawed. There should be professional guidelines. There should be federal guidelines.
This practice is already illegal in Massachusetts — although, it still happens there all the time. But it’s all about public knowledge. I believe that’s the primary role of proposing legislation, because articles in the media about the legislation would help spark a national debate and inform the public. And, the most effective thing is public knowledge.
If more people know about this and are outraged, then medical students will be more likely to go to the head of their department and say, “I don’t comfortable doing this.” And if the response to their protest is, “There’s nothing wrong with this,” the students can throw a stack of articles on the desk and say, “What do you mean? People are outraged all over the world!”
Is this practice worldwide?
Yes, and wherever this has come out, public outrage has followed. For instance, in New Zealand, there was outrage across the whole country when this practice was discovered. And that led it to stop.
And just this year [2003], the British Medical Journal had an article about the Royal Society of Medicine taking a stance on this.
How do medical students feel about performing non-consensual pelvic exams?
When I talk about non-consensual pelvic exams during my lectures, the majority of first and second year medical students - both male and female - are just horrified to hear that this goes on. They say, “This will never happen in our school!” But then there’s usually a third or fourth year student who attends the lecture and raises his hand and says, “I did this just last week. Yes, this goes on here.”
How do the attending physicians who require the students to perform non-consensual exams feel about the practice?
The attending physicians are almost without exception supportive of the practice, haven’t even thought about it, or don’t consider anything wrong with it. I’ve seen female just as likely as male attendings support the practice.
In fact, the only people who are fine with not asking permission are doctors. They’re so out of touch with the world and society. This is where they’re weakest.
Why do attending physicians feel this way?
I’ve been told that they don’t see anything wrong with it. They don’t see anything unethical about it at all. They think, “Huh, we just never thought anyone would mind.” In fact, a quote in a recent article in the response written in response to the American Journal of OB/GYN article this month [March 2003] quoted the residency director of Johns Hopkins as saying “I don’t think any of us even think about it. It’s just so standard as to how you train medical students.”
If the majority of first and second year med students are horrified by the practice, then how do they transform into third and fourth-year students who perform the non-consensual pelvic exams? And then into future attending doctors who require other students to perform them?
Good question. Well, one interesting statistic that you don’t hear discussed is that people talk about the ¼ of med students who say it’s “unimportant” to ask consent. And that’s outrageous, obviously. But if you analyze this data, those were students who had completed or who were in the middle of their OB/GYN rotation.
If you ask students before they get to that point, before they do their rotation, before they’re forced into a position where they have to do this kind of thing, the number is significantly lower - 17%.
So what happens to medical students when they’re placed in this situation that they undergo this shift, this eroding of their ethical principal?
In my book, I talk about some of the studies that show, if anything, moral reasoning may be inhibited by medical education, that ethical sensitivity increases during the first and second years of medical school but then decreases throughout the rest of medical school. So 4th year medical students who graduate and get their M.D. are less medically sensitive than when they entered into med school!
Why do you think there’s such a dramatic shift from 1st and 2nd year med students who don’t want to perform non-consensual to 3rd and 4th year students who feel it’s okay?
Medical school has a cult-like atmosphere. You’re all immersed in this one lifestyle, you’re sleep deprived, you’re not eating enough, you’re all dressed the same. So, when you’re presented with something of questionable morality, you have no time to introspect or self-reflect or think about it. You don’t have time to question whether things are right or wrong. Without any kind of outside contact, you just get caught up in it. You go along with the team and go with the culture of medicine.
How can students who oppose this practice convince their schools to ban it?
They need to organize. To get together as a group and approach the chair of their department and say, “We as a group feel uncomfortable with this.” I don’t want anyone to be put in the position I was, this lone person who sticks their neck out and then gets dismissed or worse. But if they stand together as a group, they can come together and say, “We as a class…” or “We five people on this rotation feel uncomfortable with this.” My hope is that medical schools then just can’t ignore it.
Gerber blogged that she hopes to maintain the “ethical sensitivity” mentioned by Greger into her future career in OB-GYN.
I hope that if I do get my career in ob/gyn, I do continue to consider my patients as patients. I know there is a crisis in ob/gyn in which obstetrics is turning more into a game of avoiding liability and “moving meat”, and I hope my switch won’t get flipped to the point where my nameless, faceless patient is just a medicolegal liability or a long labor to be avoided by an unnecessary surgery.
Adopted or abducted?
By Dan Rather | Yahoo! News – Tue, Mar 27, 2012
Most women describe giving birth to a child as a life changing experience – in a word – “challenging”, “joyous”, “miraculous.” But generations of young, unwed women describe their experience of giving birth to a child as a nightmare – and decades later their suffering has yet to end.
From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America, and as recent as 1987, young mothers say they were “coerced”, “manipulated”, and “duped” into handing over their babies for adoption. These women say sometimes their parents forged consent documents, but more often they say these forced adoptions were coordinated by the people their families trusted most...priests, nuns, social workers, nurses or doctors.
Last month, a Dan Rather Reports producer and crew were in Canberra, Australia as Parliament released the findings of an 18-month-long investigation revealing illegal and unethical tactics used to convince young, unmarried mothers to surrender their babies to adoptive homes from the late 1940s to the 1980s. And we interviewed some of the victims -- adoptees and mothers separated at birth.
“One of the happiest days of my life, most proudest achievements, is giving birth and holding my newborn child,” says Senator Rachel Siewert, who oversaw the Australian Senate Committee Report. “These women didn't have that experience. And I can't imagine it.”
Siewert added, “There was a lot of testimony from people that were associated with Catholic institutions. And Catholic Health Services here issued an apology and I understand they're gonna be putting in place some grievance procedures.”
In some cases, mothers in Australia were drugged and forced to sign papers relinquishing custody. In others, women were told their children had died. Single mothers also did not have access to the financial support given to widows or abandoned wives, and many were told by doctors, nurses, and social workers that they were unfit to raise a child. Siewert says, “We heard practices that were either illegal or unethical and downright cruel.”
“It wouldn't surprise me to hear the same thing happened elsewhere,” continues Siewert, “...the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Ireland. So you could, I think, expect that those countries also had these sorts of practices.”
Two weeks ago, a prominent Canadian law firm announced that it would file a class-action lawsuit against Quebec's Catholic Church accusing the Church of kidnapping, fraud and coercion to force unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption.
Attorney Tony Merchant represents several hundred women who claim that when they were in maternity homes in the 1950s and 1960s, social workers, nurses, doctors, and even men and women in the employ of the Catholic Church cooperated with government officials to force or, even coerce, young women to sign away their rights to keep their child never knowing they even had a choice.
Merchant was quoted in the Montreal Gazette as saying, "The beliefs the Catholic Church (in Quebec) had about premarital sex and the judgmental approach the church had, made it particularly aggressive in pressuring women into putting their children up for adoption."
In Spain, an 80-year-old nun, Sister Maria Gómez, became the first person accused of baby snatching in a scandal over the trafficking of 1,500 newborns in Spanish hospitals over four decades until the 1980s. The babies were either stolen, sold or given away by adoption.
Since October, Dan Rather Reports has contacted nearly 100 alleged victims, social workers, researchers, lawyers and authors from around the world to shine a bright light on the issue of forced adoptions. The two most respected books on the subject of “forced adoptions,” Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away and Rickie Solinger's Beggars and Choosers indicate that the tactics used to procure adoptable babies in Australia, Ireland, Canada and Spain were also implemented in the United States.
We have interviewed numerous women in the U.S. who told us that they were sent to maternity homes, denied contact with their families and friends, forced to endure labor with purposely painful procedures and return home without their babies. Single, American mothers were also denied financial support and told that their children would be better off without them.
In some cases, they too were told that their babies had died. Many signed away their rights while drugged and exhausted after childbirth. Others were threatened with substantial medical bills if they didn't surrender or were manipulated through humiliation. According to Fessler, these seemingly unethical practices were used against as many as 1.5 million mothers in the United States.
When we asked these women who say they were victims of “forced adoption” to use one word to describe their experience giving birth…here’s what they told us…
“Sad” states Angie from Colorado, who says at age 19 her pregnancy was kept an absolute secret and that she disappeared before her infant daughter was put up for adoption against her will in 1972. “Sad” also states Chris from Massachusetts, who gave up her firstborn through Catholic Charities in 1969.
“Trauma” states Valerie from Toronto who says in 1970 a Salvation Army matron at the Bethany Home for unwed mothers dropped her off at Grace Hospital in Toronto to labor alone. While crying out in pain during labor, she says a nurse called her a “slut.”
“Barbaric” states Christine, a PhD. candidate at the University of Western Sydney in Australia, who heads the Apology Alliance, made up of individuals and groups from all around Australia who seek an apology for the practices and policies that led to forced adoptions in her country.
“Devastating” states Shawn who was a sophomore in college in 1974 when at age 19 she gave birth to a son she has yet to see in person or touch. During the delivery, she says her doctor forcibly grabbed her foot and said, “I hope this has taught you not to get in trouble again.”
“Horrifying” states Lily who was 17 in 1967 when she says she was “held in slavery for nearly 10 months” in a home for unwed mothers before she says she was forced to give her son up for adoption.
“Traumatic” states Fran from Pennsylvania, who says in 1959 at age 20 she did not give informed consent before her son was placed for adoption. “It was not a choice…it was social policy.”
“Tragic” states Susan, who at age 21 in 1967 says she had to fight just to see her daughter a day after giving birth to her at Miserecordia Hospital in Milwaukee. A supervisor tried to talk her out of it, but she persisted. A few days later, she regrettably agreed to give her daughter up for adoption.
"Torture" states Hanne from British Columbia, Canada, who says at age 16, her baby girl was “stolen...abducted on the delivery table.” “Torture” also states Carlynne from Florida, who says at age 20, she was not able to see, touch or was told the sex of her baby before being forced to put it up for adoption.
“Shattering” states Karen who was living in Virginia in 1966, when at age 18, she says she was “told by Catholic Charities to sign the paper” and give her daughter up for adoption. “I was never told I could visit her in foster care. I didn’t even know she was in foster care. I wasn’t told that I had six months to get her!! To change my mind.. as if I had even made up my own mind. I didn’t...they did.”
“Horrific” states Laura from Virginia, who says at age 16 she was “forced” to give her son up for adoption in 1972. “I was totally coerced from day one.”
“Decimated” states Elizabeth from Melbourne, Australia, who says in 1963 at age 18 she was rendered unconscious before her daughter was taken from her at birth, even though she was married to the father of her baby 11 months before the adoption was finalized. “Decimated” also states Leslie, who at age 17 was going into labor at a maternity home in Alabama when “Sister Martha, the director of the maternity home drove me to the hospital, pulled into the driveway and let me out. I went in and admitted myself. I labored that night (alone) in one of the hallways” because she says she was told the maternity ward was only for married women. Ironically, the son she says was taken from her was born on Mother’s Day 1966.
Carol, was a college freshman in 1966, when she says a social worker in Pittsburgh betrayed her with promises to help her keep newborn son. After the birth, drugged and disoriented, Carol says she unknowingly signed relinquishment papers presented by that social worker as hospital release forms. She needed two words to answer our question, “soul rape.”
Most women describe giving birth to a child as a life changing experience – in a word – “challenging”, “joyous”, “miraculous.” But generations of young, unwed women describe their experience of giving birth to a child as a nightmare – and decades later their suffering has yet to end.
From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America, and as recent as 1987, young mothers say they were “coerced”, “manipulated”, and “duped” into handing over their babies for adoption. These women say sometimes their parents forged consent documents, but more often they say these forced adoptions were coordinated by the people their families trusted most...priests, nuns, social workers, nurses or doctors.
Last month, a Dan Rather Reports producer and crew were in Canberra, Australia as Parliament released the findings of an 18-month-long investigation revealing illegal and unethical tactics used to convince young, unmarried mothers to surrender their babies to adoptive homes from the late 1940s to the 1980s. And we interviewed some of the victims -- adoptees and mothers separated at birth.
“One of the happiest days of my life, most proudest achievements, is giving birth and holding my newborn child,” says Senator Rachel Siewert, who oversaw the Australian Senate Committee Report. “These women didn't have that experience. And I can't imagine it.”
Siewert added, “There was a lot of testimony from people that were associated with Catholic institutions. And Catholic Health Services here issued an apology and I understand they're gonna be putting in place some grievance procedures.”
In some cases, mothers in Australia were drugged and forced to sign papers relinquishing custody. In others, women were told their children had died. Single mothers also did not have access to the financial support given to widows or abandoned wives, and many were told by doctors, nurses, and social workers that they were unfit to raise a child. Siewert says, “We heard practices that were either illegal or unethical and downright cruel.”
“It wouldn't surprise me to hear the same thing happened elsewhere,” continues Siewert, “...the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Ireland. So you could, I think, expect that those countries also had these sorts of practices.”
Two weeks ago, a prominent Canadian law firm announced that it would file a class-action lawsuit against Quebec's Catholic Church accusing the Church of kidnapping, fraud and coercion to force unwed mothers to give up their children for adoption.
Attorney Tony Merchant represents several hundred women who claim that when they were in maternity homes in the 1950s and 1960s, social workers, nurses, doctors, and even men and women in the employ of the Catholic Church cooperated with government officials to force or, even coerce, young women to sign away their rights to keep their child never knowing they even had a choice.
Merchant was quoted in the Montreal Gazette as saying, "The beliefs the Catholic Church (in Quebec) had about premarital sex and the judgmental approach the church had, made it particularly aggressive in pressuring women into putting their children up for adoption."
In Spain, an 80-year-old nun, Sister Maria Gómez, became the first person accused of baby snatching in a scandal over the trafficking of 1,500 newborns in Spanish hospitals over four decades until the 1980s. The babies were either stolen, sold or given away by adoption.
Since October, Dan Rather Reports has contacted nearly 100 alleged victims, social workers, researchers, lawyers and authors from around the world to shine a bright light on the issue of forced adoptions. The two most respected books on the subject of “forced adoptions,” Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away and Rickie Solinger's Beggars and Choosers indicate that the tactics used to procure adoptable babies in Australia, Ireland, Canada and Spain were also implemented in the United States.
We have interviewed numerous women in the U.S. who told us that they were sent to maternity homes, denied contact with their families and friends, forced to endure labor with purposely painful procedures and return home without their babies. Single, American mothers were also denied financial support and told that their children would be better off without them.
In some cases, they too were told that their babies had died. Many signed away their rights while drugged and exhausted after childbirth. Others were threatened with substantial medical bills if they didn't surrender or were manipulated through humiliation. According to Fessler, these seemingly unethical practices were used against as many as 1.5 million mothers in the United States.
When we asked these women who say they were victims of “forced adoption” to use one word to describe their experience giving birth…here’s what they told us…
“Sad” states Angie from Colorado, who says at age 19 her pregnancy was kept an absolute secret and that she disappeared before her infant daughter was put up for adoption against her will in 1972. “Sad” also states Chris from Massachusetts, who gave up her firstborn through Catholic Charities in 1969.
“Trauma” states Valerie from Toronto who says in 1970 a Salvation Army matron at the Bethany Home for unwed mothers dropped her off at Grace Hospital in Toronto to labor alone. While crying out in pain during labor, she says a nurse called her a “slut.”
“Barbaric” states Christine, a PhD. candidate at the University of Western Sydney in Australia, who heads the Apology Alliance, made up of individuals and groups from all around Australia who seek an apology for the practices and policies that led to forced adoptions in her country.
“Devastating” states Shawn who was a sophomore in college in 1974 when at age 19 she gave birth to a son she has yet to see in person or touch. During the delivery, she says her doctor forcibly grabbed her foot and said, “I hope this has taught you not to get in trouble again.”
“Horrifying” states Lily who was 17 in 1967 when she says she was “held in slavery for nearly 10 months” in a home for unwed mothers before she says she was forced to give her son up for adoption.
“Traumatic” states Fran from Pennsylvania, who says in 1959 at age 20 she did not give informed consent before her son was placed for adoption. “It was not a choice…it was social policy.”
“Tragic” states Susan, who at age 21 in 1967 says she had to fight just to see her daughter a day after giving birth to her at Miserecordia Hospital in Milwaukee. A supervisor tried to talk her out of it, but she persisted. A few days later, she regrettably agreed to give her daughter up for adoption.
"Torture" states Hanne from British Columbia, Canada, who says at age 16, her baby girl was “stolen...abducted on the delivery table.” “Torture” also states Carlynne from Florida, who says at age 20, she was not able to see, touch or was told the sex of her baby before being forced to put it up for adoption.
“Shattering” states Karen who was living in Virginia in 1966, when at age 18, she says she was “told by Catholic Charities to sign the paper” and give her daughter up for adoption. “I was never told I could visit her in foster care. I didn’t even know she was in foster care. I wasn’t told that I had six months to get her!! To change my mind.. as if I had even made up my own mind. I didn’t...they did.”
“Horrific” states Laura from Virginia, who says at age 16 she was “forced” to give her son up for adoption in 1972. “I was totally coerced from day one.”
“Decimated” states Elizabeth from Melbourne, Australia, who says in 1963 at age 18 she was rendered unconscious before her daughter was taken from her at birth, even though she was married to the father of her baby 11 months before the adoption was finalized. “Decimated” also states Leslie, who at age 17 was going into labor at a maternity home in Alabama when “Sister Martha, the director of the maternity home drove me to the hospital, pulled into the driveway and let me out. I went in and admitted myself. I labored that night (alone) in one of the hallways” because she says she was told the maternity ward was only for married women. Ironically, the son she says was taken from her was born on Mother’s Day 1966.
Carol, was a college freshman in 1966, when she says a social worker in Pittsburgh betrayed her with promises to help her keep newborn son. After the birth, drugged and disoriented, Carol says she unknowingly signed relinquishment papers presented by that social worker as hospital release forms. She needed two words to answer our question, “soul rape.”
The War on Women
EDITORIAL
Published: February 25, 2011
Republicans in the House of Representatives are mounting an assault on women’s health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception and life-saving cancer screenings and cut nutritional support for millions of newborn babies in struggling families. And this is just the beginning.
The budget bill pushed through the House last Saturday included the defunding of Planned Parenthood and myriad other cuts detrimental to women. It’s not likely to pass unchanged, but the urge to compromise may take a toll on these programs. And once the current skirmishing is over, House Republicans are likely to use any legislative vehicle at hand to continue the attack.
The egregious cuts in the House resolution include the elimination of support for Title X, the federal family planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In the absence of Title X’s preventive care, some women would die. The Guttmacher Institute, a leading authority on reproductive health, says a rise in unintended pregnancies would result in some 400,000 more abortions a year.
An amendment offered by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, would bar any financing of Planned Parenthood. A recent sting operation by an anti-abortion group uncovered an errant employee, who was promptly fired. That hardly warrants taking aim at an irreplaceable network of clinics, which uses no federal dollars in providing needed abortion care. It serves one in five American women at some point in her lifetime.
The House resolution would slash support for international family planning and reproductive health care. And it would reimpose the odious global “gag” rule, which forbids giving federal money to any group that even talks about abortions. That rule badly hampered family planning groups working abroad to prevent infant and maternal deaths before President Obama lifted it.
(Mr. Obama has tried to act responsibly. He has rescinded President George W. Bush’s wildly overreaching decision to grant new protections to health providers who not only will not perform abortions, but also will not offer emergency contraception to rape victims or fill routine prescriptions for contraceptives.)
In negotiations over the health care bill last year, Democrats agreed to a scheme intended to stop insurance companies from offering plans that cover abortions. Two bills in the Republican House would go even further in denying coverage to the 30 percent or so of women who have an abortion during child-bearing years.
One of the bills, offered by Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, has a provision that would allow hospitals receiving federal funds to refuse to terminate a pregnancy even when necessary to save a woman’s life.
Beyond the familiar terrain of abortion or even contraception, House Republicans would inflict harm on low-income women trying to have children or who are already mothers.
Their continuing resolution would cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality.
The G.O.P. bill also slices $50 million from the block grant supporting programs providing prenatal health care to 2.5 million low-income women and health care to 31 million children annually. President Obama’s budget plan for next year calls for a much more modest cut.
These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on February 26, 2011, on page A18 of the New York edition.
Published: February 25, 2011
Republicans in the House of Representatives are mounting an assault on women’s health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception and life-saving cancer screenings and cut nutritional support for millions of newborn babies in struggling families. And this is just the beginning.
The budget bill pushed through the House last Saturday included the defunding of Planned Parenthood and myriad other cuts detrimental to women. It’s not likely to pass unchanged, but the urge to compromise may take a toll on these programs. And once the current skirmishing is over, House Republicans are likely to use any legislative vehicle at hand to continue the attack.
The egregious cuts in the House resolution include the elimination of support for Title X, the federal family planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In the absence of Title X’s preventive care, some women would die. The Guttmacher Institute, a leading authority on reproductive health, says a rise in unintended pregnancies would result in some 400,000 more abortions a year.
An amendment offered by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, would bar any financing of Planned Parenthood. A recent sting operation by an anti-abortion group uncovered an errant employee, who was promptly fired. That hardly warrants taking aim at an irreplaceable network of clinics, which uses no federal dollars in providing needed abortion care. It serves one in five American women at some point in her lifetime.
The House resolution would slash support for international family planning and reproductive health care. And it would reimpose the odious global “gag” rule, which forbids giving federal money to any group that even talks about abortions. That rule badly hampered family planning groups working abroad to prevent infant and maternal deaths before President Obama lifted it.
(Mr. Obama has tried to act responsibly. He has rescinded President George W. Bush’s wildly overreaching decision to grant new protections to health providers who not only will not perform abortions, but also will not offer emergency contraception to rape victims or fill routine prescriptions for contraceptives.)
In negotiations over the health care bill last year, Democrats agreed to a scheme intended to stop insurance companies from offering plans that cover abortions. Two bills in the Republican House would go even further in denying coverage to the 30 percent or so of women who have an abortion during child-bearing years.
One of the bills, offered by Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, has a provision that would allow hospitals receiving federal funds to refuse to terminate a pregnancy even when necessary to save a woman’s life.
Beyond the familiar terrain of abortion or even contraception, House Republicans would inflict harm on low-income women trying to have children or who are already mothers.
Their continuing resolution would cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality.
The G.O.P. bill also slices $50 million from the block grant supporting programs providing prenatal health care to 2.5 million low-income women and health care to 31 million children annually. President Obama’s budget plan for next year calls for a much more modest cut.
These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on February 26, 2011, on page A18 of the New York edition.
National Republicans Declare War on Women Over, But State-Level Battles Still Exist
By Susan Kraykowski
Recently, Republican politicians of national stature called for a cease-fire in the GOP War on Women – if not an outright withdrawal. Senator John McCain (R – Ariz.) has acknowledged that this strategy is a loser for the GOP, and Representative Richard Hanna (R – NY) has told his female constituents their rights are under assault and to “contribute your money to people who speak out on your behalf, because the other side — my side — has a lot of it.” You can’t get much more specific than that.
How then is it possible for the very same Republicans to be both on the right and wrong sides of this issue at the very same instant? Put on your waders; these are muddy waters and ‘gators lurk in this swamp.
Exhibit A: Helen Brosnan’s fine article on PolicyMic, which appeared a few weeks ago when the brou-ha-ha over inappropriate language to women came to its inevitable head. Few men, whether R’s or D’s realized that this wasn’t a free speech issue at all. To their credit, the Republican women on PolicyMic knew it immediately.
Exhibit B: Rachel Maddow’s interview with former Surgeon General (to George W. Bush) Richard Carmona. Maddow sets up the interview with about 3 minutes of metaphorical amplification of her thesis that Republicans are muddying the waters around a number of issues, but the point Carmona makes is quite significant. He recognizes an assault on women’s rights and women’s health when he sees one and has switched political parties to run for the Senate in Arizona on the Democratic ticket.
Arizona is one of the states which has passed or is currently working on more restrictive legislation on abortion and other women’s health issues. Very often these bills are similar sounding and mandate unnecessary procedures and/or the reading to women of scripts that contain misinformation regarding the association of breast cancer with abortions. (IRONY ALERT: why are Republicans mandating procedures and protesting the ACA mandate to buy health insurance at the same time? I told you there were ‘gators in the swamp) Other states busily restricting women’s rights and trying to return us to the status of chattel are: Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio and Utah.
North Carolina’s state assembly passed the euphemistically titled “Women’s Right to Know” Bill in 2011; mandating that a woman see an ultrasound and hear the fetus’ heartbeat – along with a doctor’s/technician’s scripted description of visible characteristics. The bill was vetoed by Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue, but overridden in a special legislative session. Implementation of the law is suspended pending legal challenge.
Kentucky’s state legislature voted down their version of the ALEC-drafted pre-abortion ultrasound bill.
Answer to the question posed, above: national Republicans can wash their hands of the War on Women because they know that their state and local counterparts are still hard at work; trying to cut women off at the pass.
My solution to this problem is an appeal to all American women across the political spectrum to unite to rid ourselves of these state representatives and state senators who insist upon pursuing legislation inimical to our interests and to our very health and well being (by the way – sympathetic men are invited to join this effort).
This will take thought, research and, definitely, ticket splitting - as is illustrated by the vote on Idaho’s SB1387 ultrasound bill. On March 19, the bill passed on a 23-12 vote but 5 Republicans crossed party lines to vote NAY with the Democrats: James Hammond (R-Couer d’Alene), Shawn Keogh (R-Sandpoint), John Goedde (R-Couer d-Alene), Joyce Broadsword (R-Slagle) and Tim Corder (R-Mountain Home). Thus, for example, if you’re a Democrat in Hammond’s district; you may want to vote for him this time as a reward for his support in trying to defeat the Ultrasound bill. Or, if you’re a Republican and he gets an even more rightwing primary challenger; support Hammond.
Special note to Virginia Democrats: 2 Democrats voted with the Republicans to pass Virginia’s ultrasound bill. We want to get Charles J. Colgen (D-Prince William) and Phillip P. Puckett (D-Russell) out of office, too, if good alternatives present themselves.
Ladies and gentlemen; regardless of your choice for president, please use the 2012 and 2014 election cycles to examine your downballot choices and to replace the paternalistic, authoritarian ilk who are working so hard to return us to the 19th century.
In closing, please read these simple words:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
That is the entirety of the effective language of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution – first introduced in Congress in 1923. Perhaps, if we can weed out our state legislatures, we can finally ratify it.
Recently, Republican politicians of national stature called for a cease-fire in the GOP War on Women – if not an outright withdrawal. Senator John McCain (R – Ariz.) has acknowledged that this strategy is a loser for the GOP, and Representative Richard Hanna (R – NY) has told his female constituents their rights are under assault and to “contribute your money to people who speak out on your behalf, because the other side — my side — has a lot of it.” You can’t get much more specific than that.
How then is it possible for the very same Republicans to be both on the right and wrong sides of this issue at the very same instant? Put on your waders; these are muddy waters and ‘gators lurk in this swamp.
Exhibit A: Helen Brosnan’s fine article on PolicyMic, which appeared a few weeks ago when the brou-ha-ha over inappropriate language to women came to its inevitable head. Few men, whether R’s or D’s realized that this wasn’t a free speech issue at all. To their credit, the Republican women on PolicyMic knew it immediately.
Exhibit B: Rachel Maddow’s interview with former Surgeon General (to George W. Bush) Richard Carmona. Maddow sets up the interview with about 3 minutes of metaphorical amplification of her thesis that Republicans are muddying the waters around a number of issues, but the point Carmona makes is quite significant. He recognizes an assault on women’s rights and women’s health when he sees one and has switched political parties to run for the Senate in Arizona on the Democratic ticket.
Arizona is one of the states which has passed or is currently working on more restrictive legislation on abortion and other women’s health issues. Very often these bills are similar sounding and mandate unnecessary procedures and/or the reading to women of scripts that contain misinformation regarding the association of breast cancer with abortions. (IRONY ALERT: why are Republicans mandating procedures and protesting the ACA mandate to buy health insurance at the same time? I told you there were ‘gators in the swamp) Other states busily restricting women’s rights and trying to return us to the status of chattel are: Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio and Utah.
North Carolina’s state assembly passed the euphemistically titled “Women’s Right to Know” Bill in 2011; mandating that a woman see an ultrasound and hear the fetus’ heartbeat – along with a doctor’s/technician’s scripted description of visible characteristics. The bill was vetoed by Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue, but overridden in a special legislative session. Implementation of the law is suspended pending legal challenge.
Kentucky’s state legislature voted down their version of the ALEC-drafted pre-abortion ultrasound bill.
Answer to the question posed, above: national Republicans can wash their hands of the War on Women because they know that their state and local counterparts are still hard at work; trying to cut women off at the pass.
My solution to this problem is an appeal to all American women across the political spectrum to unite to rid ourselves of these state representatives and state senators who insist upon pursuing legislation inimical to our interests and to our very health and well being (by the way – sympathetic men are invited to join this effort).
This will take thought, research and, definitely, ticket splitting - as is illustrated by the vote on Idaho’s SB1387 ultrasound bill. On March 19, the bill passed on a 23-12 vote but 5 Republicans crossed party lines to vote NAY with the Democrats: James Hammond (R-Couer d’Alene), Shawn Keogh (R-Sandpoint), John Goedde (R-Couer d-Alene), Joyce Broadsword (R-Slagle) and Tim Corder (R-Mountain Home). Thus, for example, if you’re a Democrat in Hammond’s district; you may want to vote for him this time as a reward for his support in trying to defeat the Ultrasound bill. Or, if you’re a Republican and he gets an even more rightwing primary challenger; support Hammond.
Special note to Virginia Democrats: 2 Democrats voted with the Republicans to pass Virginia’s ultrasound bill. We want to get Charles J. Colgen (D-Prince William) and Phillip P. Puckett (D-Russell) out of office, too, if good alternatives present themselves.
Ladies and gentlemen; regardless of your choice for president, please use the 2012 and 2014 election cycles to examine your downballot choices and to replace the paternalistic, authoritarian ilk who are working so hard to return us to the 19th century.
In closing, please read these simple words:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
That is the entirety of the effective language of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution – first introduced in Congress in 1923. Perhaps, if we can weed out our state legislatures, we can finally ratify it.
A triumph for the Texas Taliban
Ophelia Benson
March 15, 2012
So there’s this couple in Texas looking forward to their second baby, a brother for their 2-year-old daughter.
Yet now my doctor was looking grim and, with chair pulled close, was speaking of alarming things. “I’m worried about your baby’s head shape,” she said. “I want you to see a specialist—now.”
My husband looked angry, and maybe I did too, but it was astonishment more than anger. Ours was a profound disbelief that something so bad might happen to people who think themselves charmed. We already had one healthy child and had expected good fortune to give us two.
Instead, before I’d even known I was pregnant, a molecular flaw had determined that our son’s brain, spine and legs wouldn’t develop correctly. If he were to make it to term—something our doctor couldn’t guarantee—he’d need a lifetime of medical care. From the moment he was born, my doctor told us, our son would suffer greatly.
And now you’re guessing the rest. You’re no fools; you didn’t miss the deadly “Texas” at the beginning.
Their doctor couldn’t do the abortion, because the hospital she’s affiliated with is Catholic (as so many hospitals, and more all the time, are). They had to go to a clinic. They went straight there.
My counselor said that the law required me to have another ultrasound that day, and that I was legally obligated to hear a doctor describe my baby. I’d then have to wait 24 hours before coming back for the procedure. She said that I could either see the sonogram or listen to the baby’s heartbeat, adding weakly that this choice was mine.
“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.
But it couldn’t be helped.
“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.
“Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart…”
I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident.
When the description was finally over, the doctor held up a script and said he was legally obliged to read me information provided by the state. It was about the health dangers of having an abortion, the risks of infection or hemorrhage, the potential for infertility and my increased chance of getting breast cancer.
March 15, 2012
So there’s this couple in Texas looking forward to their second baby, a brother for their 2-year-old daughter.
Yet now my doctor was looking grim and, with chair pulled close, was speaking of alarming things. “I’m worried about your baby’s head shape,” she said. “I want you to see a specialist—now.”
My husband looked angry, and maybe I did too, but it was astonishment more than anger. Ours was a profound disbelief that something so bad might happen to people who think themselves charmed. We already had one healthy child and had expected good fortune to give us two.
Instead, before I’d even known I was pregnant, a molecular flaw had determined that our son’s brain, spine and legs wouldn’t develop correctly. If he were to make it to term—something our doctor couldn’t guarantee—he’d need a lifetime of medical care. From the moment he was born, my doctor told us, our son would suffer greatly.
And now you’re guessing the rest. You’re no fools; you didn’t miss the deadly “Texas” at the beginning.
Their doctor couldn’t do the abortion, because the hospital she’s affiliated with is Catholic (as so many hospitals, and more all the time, are). They had to go to a clinic. They went straight there.
My counselor said that the law required me to have another ultrasound that day, and that I was legally obligated to hear a doctor describe my baby. I’d then have to wait 24 hours before coming back for the procedure. She said that I could either see the sonogram or listen to the baby’s heartbeat, adding weakly that this choice was mine.
“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.
But it couldn’t be helped.
“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.
“Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart…”
I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident.
When the description was finally over, the doctor held up a script and said he was legally obliged to read me information provided by the state. It was about the health dangers of having an abortion, the risks of infection or hemorrhage, the potential for infertility and my increased chance of getting breast cancer.
If Men had Periods...
by Gloria Steinem
Since history was recorded, male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy is "natural" to women - though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men more vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb-envy at least logical. In short, logic has nothing to do with it. What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? The answer is clear - menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
- Men would brag about how long and how much.
- Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag parties.
- The US Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea to help stamp out monthly discomforts.
- Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. (Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of commercial brands such as John Wayne Tampons, Muhammed Ali's Rope-a-dope Pads, Joe Namath Jock Shields - "For Those Light Bachelor Days," and Robert "Baretta" Blake Maxi-Pads.)
- Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ("MENstruation") as proof that only men could serve in the army ("You have to give blood to take blood"), occupy political office ("Can women be aggresive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet Mars?"), be priests and ministers ("how could a woman give her blood for our sins"), or rabbis ("Without the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean")
- Male radicals, left-wing politicians, and mystics, however, would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could enter their ranks if only she were willing to self-inflict a major wound every month ("You must give blood for the revolution"), recognize the preeminence of menstrual issues, or subordinate her selfness to all men in their Cycle of Enlightenment.
- Street guys would brag ("I'm a three-pad man") or answer praise from a buddy (" Man, you are lookin' good") by giving fives and saying, "Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!"
- TV shows would treat the subject at length. ("Happy Days": Richie and Potsie try to convince Fonzie that he is still "The Fonz," though he has missed two periods in a row.)
- So would newspapers. (JUDGE CITES MONTHLY STRESS IN PARDONING RAPIST.)
- And movies. (Newman and Redford in "Blood Brothers"!)
- Men would convince women that intercourse was more pleasurable at "that time of the month." Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself - though probably only because they needed a good menstruating man.
- Of course, male intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguements. How could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics, or measurement, for instance, without that in-built gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets - and thus for measuring anything at all? In the rarefied fields of philosophy and religion, could women compensate for missing the rhythm of the universe? Or for their lack of symbolic death-and-resurrection every month?
Since history was recorded, male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy is "natural" to women - though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men more vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb-envy at least logical. In short, logic has nothing to do with it. What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? The answer is clear - menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
- Men would brag about how long and how much.
- Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag parties.
- The US Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea to help stamp out monthly discomforts.
- Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. (Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of commercial brands such as John Wayne Tampons, Muhammed Ali's Rope-a-dope Pads, Joe Namath Jock Shields - "For Those Light Bachelor Days," and Robert "Baretta" Blake Maxi-Pads.)
- Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ("MENstruation") as proof that only men could serve in the army ("You have to give blood to take blood"), occupy political office ("Can women be aggresive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet Mars?"), be priests and ministers ("how could a woman give her blood for our sins"), or rabbis ("Without the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean")
- Male radicals, left-wing politicians, and mystics, however, would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could enter their ranks if only she were willing to self-inflict a major wound every month ("You must give blood for the revolution"), recognize the preeminence of menstrual issues, or subordinate her selfness to all men in their Cycle of Enlightenment.
- Street guys would brag ("I'm a three-pad man") or answer praise from a buddy (" Man, you are lookin' good") by giving fives and saying, "Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!"
- TV shows would treat the subject at length. ("Happy Days": Richie and Potsie try to convince Fonzie that he is still "The Fonz," though he has missed two periods in a row.)
- So would newspapers. (JUDGE CITES MONTHLY STRESS IN PARDONING RAPIST.)
- And movies. (Newman and Redford in "Blood Brothers"!)
- Men would convince women that intercourse was more pleasurable at "that time of the month." Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself - though probably only because they needed a good menstruating man.
- Of course, male intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguements. How could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics, or measurement, for instance, without that in-built gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets - and thus for measuring anything at all? In the rarefied fields of philosophy and religion, could women compensate for missing the rhythm of the universe? Or for their lack of symbolic death-and-resurrection every month?
Gaslighting
[Definition:] A form of intimidation or psychological abuse, sometimes called Ambient Abuse where false information is presented to the victim, making them doubt their own memory, perception and quite often, their sanity.
The classic example of gaslighting is to switch something around on someone that you know they're sure to notice, but then deny knowing anything about it, and to explain that they "must be imagining things" when they challenge these changes.
It works in part because it feeds off hundreds, probably thousands of years of minimizing women’s real concerns by accusing them of being hysterical, or of making mountains out of molehills. Women have been told that we’re hysterical if we say that rape is traumatizing even when the rapist is an acquaintance. Even today, women are told that they’re blowing it out of proportion even when suffering violence at the hands of a spouse. Women are told we’re just imagining the wage gap or the pressure to support men’s ambitions over our own, and told that actually these inequities are a result of our own “choices.” Every step of the way, we’re told that our reactions to injustice are more about our inferiority as women, that women have an inability to perceive reality, and that things aren’t what they seem.
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