The Assault on Womens Sexual and Reproductive Rights

[Kobi]

KANSAS CITY, Kansas (Reuters) - Kansas is set to enact one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation which defines life as beginning "at fertilization" and imposes a host of new regulations.

The Kansas House of Representatives passed the bill 90-30 on Friday night, a few hours after the Senate backed it on a 28-10 vote. Strongly anti-abortion Republican Governor Sam Brownback is expected to sign it into law. Republicans hold strong majorities in both houses.

In addition to the provision specifying when life begins, the bill prevents employees of abortion clinics from providing sex education in schools, bans tax credits for abortion services and requires clinics to give details to women about fetal development and abortion health risks. It also bans abortions based solely on the gender of the fetus.

The Kansas bill comes on the heels of anti-abortion measures passing in states across the country, including one in Arkansas banning abortions in the 12th week of pregnancy and a law in North Dakota that sets the limit at six weeks.

The Kansas language stating that life begins "at fertilization" is modeled on a 1989 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, said Kathy Ostrowski, legislative director of Kansans for Life, anti-abortion group.

Ostrowski said the language protects the rights of the unborn in probate and other legal matters.

If the bill is signed into law, Kansas will become the eighth state declaring that life begins at fertilization, said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager of the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, which researches abortion-related laws nationwide.

While it would not supplant Kansas law banning most abortions after the 22nd week of pregnancy, it does set the state up to more swiftly outlaw all abortions should the U.S. Supreme Court revisit its 1973 ruling making abortion legal, Nash said.

"It's a statement of intent and it's a pretty strong statement," Nash said. "Should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade or should the court come to some different conclusion, the state legislature would be ready, willing and able to ban abortions."

States that already have such language are Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, North Dakota and Ohio, Nash said.

The Kansas bill prohibits use of public funds, tax preferences or tax credits for abortion services. It prevents state-provided public health-care services from being used in any manner to carry out abortions, according to a summary.

Taking away tax benefits would amount to 12 tax increases for abortion providers, women and their families, said Elise Higgins, Kansas coordinator for the National Organization for Women. Even abortions to save a mother's life would not be a deductible cost, she said.

Higgins also criticized the bill's requirement that women be told of possible connection between abortion and later risk of breast cancer. "It's an obvious intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship by making them get this inaccurate information," Higgins said.

Ostrowski said the bill merely requires that patients be referred to online and other material about abortion and breast cancer. It does not steer them to misinformation, she said.

The bill bars school districts from letting abortion providers offer, sponsor or furnish course materials or instruction on human sexuality or on sexually transmitted diseases. Higgins said that creates an unfair stigma for employees of abortion providers.

Another portion of the new law would prevent women from deciding on an abortion solely because of the gender of the fetus. It is unclear how many women terminate pregnancies for that reason.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/kansas-sena...014146445.html

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....bangs head on desk....

[femmeInterrupted]

This is infuriating. Victim blaming bullshit.

http://samuel-warde.com/2012/11/amer...tim-is-blamed/


"We have heard a lot this year about the so-called “War On Women”. Conservatives on the one hand want to say there is no war, liberals strongly state the opposite.

Personally, I find it incredible that anyone c0uld deny such a war exists with all the recent legislation regarding women’s reproductive healthcare services, comments by bloviating ignoramuses such as Rush Limbaugh, Richard Mourdock and Todd Akins. Hell there is even a website now showing how many days it has been since a Republican mentioned “rape” while campaigning.

The official Republican National Committee Platform presents the harshest take on women’s issues in decades and their candidate for president, Mitt Romney, refuses to say where he stands on women’s pay – even after repeated questions regarding the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

In the midst of this misogynistic frenzy, one recent news items stands out from all the rest when last week in California, the Moraga School District, alleged that a 12 year old girl, who suffered prolonged sexual abuse spanning years at the hands of two middle school teachers was “careless,” “negligent” and “was herself responsible for the acts and damages of which she claims”.

Let’s think about this one for a minute. A school district, a branch of civic government is saying that a young girl – 12 to 13 years old – is herself responsible for prolonged acts of sexual abuse by 2 of its teachers?

And their response? What about their response?

They did for whatever idiotic reason feel compelled to issue a response, as if anything they could ever write or say could justify their intent.

In their statement they wrote: “We certainly empathize with Ms. Cunnane and did not intend to cause her further distress in filing our formal Answer to her Complaint. However, this is a significant case that could have serious consequences for our school district. She is demanding several million dollars in damages. As a result, at this point in the proceedings we have an obligation not to waive any potential legal lines of defense. … Ms. Cunnane and the media have seized on only one of the nine potential areas and over-exaggerated its importance.”

Now how in the hell does one “empathize” with what essentially amounts to the unprovoked rape of a child? [And for those of you fond of splitting hairs - I write unprovoked because there is no way anyone can reasonably state that a 12 year old child can provoke a sexual act.]

And what about the talk of serious consequences to the school district and millions of dollars in potential damages? What about the serious consequences to a 12 year old child, who as it turns out foolishly thought she was safe at school in the care of teachers? What about the damages to her spirit and body?

And with all due respect, what the hell is this talk about their claim the victim “seized on only one of the nine potential areas and over-exaggerated its importance”? WTF?!?

Are these people serious?

And what about the victim, Ms. Cunnane?

“It’s hard to see that I’m ‘seizing on’ something,” she told KTUV, “because this is my life.” She told the KTUV reporter that she felt the school district response tells rape victims everywhere that they are the ones to blame.

“It felt like I got punched in the stomach, and I stood up and thought about how young I was when I was 12 to 13 years old at the school,” said Cunnane. “For them to use words like ‘negligent’ and ‘responsible’ just broke my heart.”

As reported by the Oakland Tribune, the school district’s attorney stated that the language used in their response was “appropriate” and “necessary” for a civil case with significant ramifications and went on to note that “every potential defense” must be raised in such legal filings, “since failure to do so results in a waiver of the defense.”"It is imperative that all possible defenses be raised at this point in time. As more facts become known, the district will then reassess its defenses”.Ms. Cunnane’s attorney and noted youth law expert, Paul Llewellyn noted: “That (the) defendants would go so far as to blame a child victim of sexual abuse rather than admit or even examine their own wrongdoing is offensive and appalling”.

Again, as reported by the Oakland Tribune “Cunnane was sexually abused by two Moraga middle school teachers in the 1990s, one of them over a four-year period. She sued the district, retired Joaquin Moraga Intermediate School principal Bill Walters, retired assistant principal Paul Simonin and retired superintendent John Cooley in Contra Costa Superior Court, saying they repeatedly ignored allegations of abuse, allowing her and other students to be victimized. The lawsuit alleges negligence, fraudulent concealment, conspiracy to commit fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and cites an investigation by this newspaper as revealing for the first time the district’s knowledge of the alleged abuse.

Former Joaquin Moraga P.E. teacher Julie Correa pleaded guilty to rape and sexual battery against Cunnane over a four-year period beginning in 1996, when Cunnane was an eighth-grader. Cunnane said Correa groomed her after she confided in her that Joaquin Moraga science teacher Daniel Witters had molested her. Witters committed suicide shortly after a group of girls came forward with allegations in 1996, and police stopped investigating him criminally after that.”

[femmeInterrupted]

I've been going through a massive feminist crisis lately. My own politics and a belief in non-violence is being tested, as I ponder the gendered nature of forgiveness. Instead, I am thinking about UNforgiveness and IRreconciliation.
I am starting to think about forms of resistance and what those may mean to our women's communities. I see tiny pockets of women globally, literally picking up sticks and resisting. And when I see how many of our girls and women are chewed up and crunched alive in the jaws of gender oppression, I feel less and less like 'nurturing' and 'teaching' and 'talking' and more and more like creating change through some serious ass kicking. Seriously.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/wo...r.html?hp&_r=0




NEW DELHI — Hundreds of demonstrators besieged New Delhi’s police headquarters on Saturday to protest the kidnapping, rape and torture of a 5-year-old girl last week.


The injured girl was moved Friday evening to New Delhi’s finest public hospital on a gurney covered with stuffed toys, and by Saturday she was alert and in stable condition, according to doctors there. She was being given fluids and intravenous antibiotics to fight a blood infection, the doctors said, and further operations will have to wait until the infection has abated.

Meanwhile, the police arrested a 22-year-old garment worker early Saturday morning in Bihar, said Rajan Bhagat, a Delhi police spokesman. The police identified the suspect as Manoj, who, like many Indians, uses only one name. He had recently married and was tracked down with the help of cellphone records in the town where his in-laws live, according to Indian news reports.

The suspect had an apartment in New Delhi in the same building as the girl, whom he is accused of abducting, raping and torturing last Sunday night. The Times of India reported that he told the police he fled his apartment shortly thereafter because he believed that the girl had died. The girl’s parents discovered her on Wednesday in the man’s apartment.

“This is the first time I have seen such barbarism,” R. K. Bansal, medical superintendent of Swami Dayanand Hospital, said Friday in a televised interview. “There were injuries on her lips, cheeks, arms and anus area. Her neck had bruise marks suggesting that attempts were made to strangle her.”

He said a bottle almost eight inches long and pieces of candle had been inserted “into her private parts.”

In December, a woman was gang-raped and tortured and her companion beaten in a case that shocked the nation and led to weeks of spontaneous protests by Indians demanding better security for women. That case led to changes in the country’s rape laws, but horrific sexual assaults continue to be reported around India with regularity. Whether women are less safe in India than in other emerging countries is uncertain, but rape and police competence have become burning political issues.

On Saturday, demonstrators sought to reawaken the outrage that convulsed India in December, but the day’s protests were far smaller and seemed less spontaneous.

Anger at the authorities began to build after the parents of the 5-year-old said that the police had failed to take their complaint seriously, failed to carry out an adequate search and then offered them 2,000 rupees — about $37 — if they would keep quiet about the case. Then on Friday, television news channels showed a large mustachioed police officer slapping a small female protester in the face.

The government’s concerns about the case ratcheted up so quickly on Friday night that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed regrets about the episode. And on Saturday, the president of the Indian National Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi — whose house was also the site of protests on Saturday — released a statement condemning the rape and saying that “action and not words are required to ensure that such incidents never happen again.”

Two police officers, including the lead investigator on the case and the one seen slapping the protester, were suspended. The lead investigator is being investigated after being accused of trying to bribe the child’s family to remain silent, said Mr. Bhagat, the police spokesman.

The quick arrest of the suspect may do little to calm the anger surrounding the case since fairly quick police work also led to the arrests of five suspects in the December rape case. Such rapid resolutions are not the norm in India, where highly politicized police forces and a backlogged and inefficient judiciary often mean that cases remain unresolved for years.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

[femmeInterrupted]

[femmeInterrupted]

http://www.womenundersiegeproject.or...0ZlRcg.twitter



By Michele Lent Hirsch/Associate Editor — March 29, 2013

It’s a euphemism we still haven’t shaken. “Comfort women” refers to the women and girls—usually foreign, from countries like Korea, the Philippines, and China—forced by the Japanese military to do sex work mainly during World War II.
Armed groups from various countries have done this too, although perhaps without the euphemism, choosing a group of individuals to use for repeated sexualized violence. Then combatants and high-up generals rape them. Again and again.

Euphemisms, and terminology in general, are tricky in the context of war. As I wrote in November 2012, “ethnic cleansing” is a phrase that may, at this point, successfully connote Hitlerian violence, but it’s been up for debate.
“Comfort women,” however, sounds cozy where it should be horrifying. It sounds like the archetypal mother who holds her infant on a cold night, quilt tucked in neatly and the radiator on.
It sounds like the opposite of the brutal enslavement and sexualized torture of a young woman.

That brutality is what photographer Ahn Sehong’s new exhibit, featured on The New York Times’ “Lens” blog, aims to capture. Sehong’s show, currently on display at the Korea Press Center Gallery in New Jersey, zooms in on the faces and daily lives of a handful of the estimated 200,000 women held as sex slaves during the war.
Sehong shows the faces of 80- and 90-year-olds, their faded maps of home, and the poor conditions they live in 70 years later. Only three of the women he photographed are still alive.

At one point, these elderly women were young and living in Korea, then held captive by the Japanese army in China. After the war, the Times explains, they were stranded there.
When Sehong first visited them, hoping to document their memories, “most lived in hovels, often in the same dusty rural towns where they had endured the war,” he said.

Each of Sehong’s subjects has a grueling story. One, Bae Sam-yeop was just 13 when a “high-ranking” Japanese officer raped her, she says.
Yet for a long time now, politicians have had trouble acknowledging the violence.
Just before the end of 2012, the Times reported that Japan’s new government might be “revising” an official apology given nearly two decades earlier to the victims of sexual slavery.
And in May last year, Japanese diplomats visited a small monument honoring these women in New Jersey and asked to have it removed.

The photographer is pairing his project with activism, hoping to raise aid for the aging survivors.
But even his images have been controversial: Sehong had to battle in court last year in order to display them at a Nikon gallery in Tokyo.
The company tried to cancel his show after receiving complaints.

For the survivors still holding on to a poor daily existence in China, Sehong’s efforts may matter more than politics.
Of the women he’s documented, Sehong said, “We couldn’t take care of them after the war. But now we have money and power to help them.”

As far back as their suffering during World War II may be, these women are still struggling to scratch out a living now, Sehong said in a local news story. And regardless off what term we use to describe the violence perpetrated long ago against them, they continue to be burdened by their memories.

“Their broken hearts are not in the past,” Sehong said.

[Kobi]

President Barack Obama on Friday defended Planned Parenthood—the largest source of reproductive health care for women, as well as an abortion provider—against its opponents, and warned critics that the organization remains steadfast.

"Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere," Obama told the 1,000 people at the group's annual national conference in Washington. "It’s not going anywhere today. It’s not going anywhere tomorrow." He is the first president to address Planned Parenthood.

The organization has long been a target of abortion opponents, who in recent years have fought to cut off its federal funding—despite the fact that that money, by law, is not applicable toward abortions. (Abortions make up an estimated 3 percent of the organization's budget.)

The president on Friday lauded Planned Parenthood's work “providing quality health care to women all across America."

Obama added, "We are truly grateful to you.”

He noted that 1 in 5 women in America have sought services from Planned Parenthood, which is the primary source for health care for many women. When politicians attempt to turn it into "a punching bag," Obama said, they are shutting out women who need health care and communities that may need health care services the most.

"When it comes to a women's health, no politician should get to decide what's best for you," Obama said. "The only person who should get to make decisions about your health is you."

Obama used his appearance to champion his health care law, which he said promotes many of the same principles as Planned Parenthood. Obama said his law supports health care for women by allowing young women, for example, to be covered by their parents' health care insurance plans, and by preventing women with pre-existing conditions from being denied coverage.

The president did not say the word "abortion" during his remarks, but did reference a woman's "right to choose."

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus recently targeted the organization with a scathing op-ed for conservative news site Red State accusing Planned Parenthood and Democrats of supporting infanticide. Priebus wrote that testimony from a Planned Parenthood lobbyist in Florida indicated the organization supports the killing of infants.

Planned Parenthood later released a statement on the lobbyist's testimony, saying, "As a trusted health care provider, Planned Parenthood strongly condemns any physician who does not follow the law or endangers a woman's or child's health. And while HB 1129 addresses a situation that is extremely unlikely and highly unusual, if the scenario presented by the legislation should happen, of course a Planned Parenthood doctor would provide appropriate care to both the woman and the infant."

The president's appearance at the conference comes at a time when infanticide has been in the national news due to the murder trial of former abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell, of Philadelphia, is charged with murder in the death of a woman in 2009 during an abortion procedure and in the deaths of four babies.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/o...145150867.html

[Soon]

Welcome to a pro-life world

By Jill on April 30, 2013

In El Salvador, a young mother pseudonymously called Beatriz is pregnant and dying. She has lupus and is facing renal failure; the fetus she’s pregnant with is anencephalic, meaning it has no brain and will not survive once born. If she dies, she will leave behind a husband and their toddler. With each passing day, she gets sicker and sicker, and the chances of death increase. She needed a termination weeks ago; more delays could pose significant hardships, as the probability increases that she will have to be on dialysis for the rest of her life — not a reasonable possibility for a poor woman living in rural El Salvador. But because El Salvador outlaws abortion under any circumstance, Beatriz cannot terminate the pregnancy that’s killing her.

This is what a “pro-life” world looks like. And indeed, even in this extreme case, religious and pro-life groups in El Salvador oppose allowing Beatriz to terminate:

The Archbishop of San Salvador José Luis Escobar, said, “it is my understanding that the mother of the child is not in an intensive care situation… For me, it is the baby in utero that is in more danger because there is a movement to terminate its life. Only God knows how long this baby that they want to kill will live.”

Anti-choice groups in the U.S. who are currently raising hell about late-term abortions supposedly killing babies are notably silent on this case, where pro-life laws are slowly killing a woman.

You can sign the petition at RH Reality Check to encourage the government to move quickly and save Beatriz’s life.