No introductory essay tonight, just straight to the newses after the usual boilerplate. But the footing down there remains treacherous, so please watch your step and
This Week In The War On Women meets Saturday evenings, also posting & reblogging across the week. We welcome all who are interested to comment in the discussion, bring relevant links and stories, join in order to reblog diaries on women’s issues, and consider writing for the Saturday schedule. For reblogging your own or found diaries here, Click the Follow Group button at our home-page if you’d like our posts & reblogs automatically delivered to yr activity stream, and send a message to us there with diary link If you’d like to request reblog of your own or found diaries on women’s news and issues. (A mssg to individual active admins may get fastest results.)
Our news-digest diaries are a team effort.
Particular thanks this week to
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker SandraLLAP
elenacarlena ramara Angmar
& all who are bringing links, tweets etc to the comment thread.
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As tragic as it was predictable: New Taliban Chancellor Bars Women From Kabul University
From wik: <big>Hegemonic masculinity</big>
In gender studies, hegemonic masculinity is part of [Rayewyn] Connell's gender order theory, which recognizes multiple masculinities that vary across time, culture and the individual...[an androcentrism] that legitimizes [male dominance] in society and justifies subordination of ...women and other marginalized ways of being a man.[1] [The concept] proposes to explain how and why men maintain [dominance] ... in a given society.
As a sociological concept, [its nature] derives from [a Marxist] theory of cultural hegemony [analyzing] the power relations among the social classes of a society….
R Kelly found guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking. He faces a possible life sentence.
<big>🇬🇧</big> From the Insider: A London police officer handcuffed a women in a fake arrest before raping and killing her, prosecutors say. Defendant has pled guilty. Sentencing (as of Wednesday) scheduled for later this week.
Say her name: Sarah Everard.
(From this DKos diary:
'No one is looking for us': Why we don't know about Arianna Fitts but we know Gabby Petito)
From Reuters Police in the Canadian province of Quebec are searching for a man accused of punching a female nurse in the face for giving his wife a COVID-19 vaccine without his consent,
From medscape Traumatic experiences, especially sexual assault, may put women at greater risk for Stroke, Dementia
from Al-monitor.com (no paywall but registration is required)
Egypt announces human rights strategy - critics say it's primarily meant to quiet international critics.
The National Strategy for Human Rights [2021-2026] is divided into four areas: civil and political rights; economic, social and cultural rights; rights of women, children, persons with disabilities, youth and the elderly; and education and capacity building in the field of human rights….[with] dozens of goals, including “reviewing crimes that are punishable with the death penalty” and “combating torture.” Egypt's human rights record has faced scrutiny and criticism by international human rights organizations, the United Nations, the United States, European countries and international nongovernmental organizations.
Egyptian and international human rights organizations have repeatedly made these demands as well as reducing Egypt's 25.8% illiteracy rate and providing equal opportunities for women and men in the judiciary.…
Gamal Bayoumi, a former assistant foreign minister, told Al-Monitor that the Foreign Ministry handled development of the strategy because international criticism bothers Egypt more than the domestic criticism.... “Egypt is not against making progress in the human rights file, but it is important to take into account the cultural and civilizational differences between peoples. The abolition of the death penalty contradicts the concept of revenge in Upper Egypt, for example, and it is impossible for Egyptian society to accept same-sex marriage and embrace other sexual freedoms...”
from Al-Monitor — Egyptian activist Nour Emam tackles sex education online despite taboos and sociolegal hazards.
Although talking about sexual health remains taboo in many [MENA] countries, including Egypt … Emam is working to educate women and men [there] through an online platform titled “This Is Mother Being.” ...On its Facebook page, [she] publishes topics related to fertility, pregnancy, childbirth ... postpartum support ... teaches parents-to-be how to prepare, trust, support and listen to the reproductive journey.... The platform also offers a range of women-only educational sessions that address menstruation, childbirth and sexual awareness focused on pleasure.
Emam works at a hospital as a doula to help women before and during childbirth. She [studied in] a five-month online doula training program from Canada, then another training program in postpartum depression management from a British university. She told Al-Monitor that she decided to launch the initiative to help herself and other women after her postpartum depression almost led her to commit suicide....
from medscape “The Parent Penalty...”: US statistics
...show disastrously short maternity leave (1 in 4 women return to work in 2 weeks), overlooked paternity leave, and dismal rates of mothers returning to work. [Yet the US remains] matter-of-fact about what should be an indefensible situation...
from Medscape 175,000-strong National Nurses United statement on Congressional healthcare legislation performance.
..."Nurses across the country are deeply disappointed that three Democratic members of Congress [chose pharmaceutical industry profits over the lives of our patients and] blocked Medicare drug price negotiation in the Energy and Commerce Committee… This legislation would lower drug prices not only for Medicare recipients, but for patients of all ages….”
NNU also commended "the House for including the expansion of dental, vision, and hearing benefits in Medicare, but strongly urges both the House and the Senate to improve these benefits by eliminating cost sharing and shortening the implementation timeline … It is critical that all Medicare recipients are able to use these benefits without financial barriers to care as soon as possible,"
"In the middle of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Congress and the Biden administration should be making health care more available to as many people as possible. Nurses continue to advocate for the strongest possible expansion of Medicare, including lowering the eligibility age to 60 and instituting an out-of-pocket cap, in the pending budget reconciliation bill…."
Good news items:
- Updated on ABC Evening News 9/30/2021: America Strong: Resilience in NYC: Mary O'Halloran, when her pub Mary O's was shut down due to the pandemic, delivered 30 meals per night to frontline workers whilst worrying how she would make ends meet. Her soda bread scones with homemade blackberry jam went viral on Instagram. She has now made over $1 million on orders, and has put them on pause whilst she works to catch up. If you've ordered her blackberry scones and not received them yet, please be patient. If you haven't ordered yet, you'll have to be even more patient and wait until she opens back up to orders!
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from The Conversation: members of Congress as ideologically opposed as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have joined the “Free Britney” cause and are pushing for conservatorship reforms and more[/better] data[collection] on the legal arrangements.
<big>ABORTION </big>
from The Conversation (no paywall) <big>Study shows an abortion ban may lead to a 21% increase in pregnancy-related deaths</big>
...carrying a pregnancy to term can be deadlier than having an abortion.... people having abortions are on average less advantaged than people having births and at a higher risk of pregnancy-related death....[Research shows that] the federal government, other states and nongovernmental organizations could make state abortion bans less deadly.... For example [by] addressing the maternal health crisis [to] make pregnancy safer and ...[helping] people access safe medication abortion and travel across state lines to an abortion clinic ....
... in the U.S. [abortion is very safe], with 0.44 deaths per 100,000 procedures from 2013 to 2017. In contrast, 20.1 deaths per 100,000 live births occurred in 2019 [here] for many reasons, including cardiovascular conditions, infections and hemorrhage caused or worsened by [pregnancy or delivery]. [By conservative estimate, anywhere here that a ban is put in place without abortion alternatives] the annual number of pregnancy-related deaths would increase by 21% overall, or 140 additional deaths, by the second year after a ban.
Among non-Hispanic Black woman, this percentage would increase 33%, causing 78 additional deaths and exacerbating the ongoing U.S. Black maternal health crisis. [Their] pregnancy-related death rate ... is about three times higher than for non-Hispanic white women and Hispanic or Latino women, likely because of structural racism, biases in health care provision and disparities in health care access, among other reasons...
Back in Te
xas Court: Nation’s most restrictive abortion law:
"A federal judge on Friday will consider whether Texas can leave in place the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., which since September has banned most abortions and sent women racing to get care beyond the borders of the nation’s second-most populous state.
A lawsuit filed by the Biden administration seeks to land the first legal blow against the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which thus far has withstood an early wave of challenges — including the U.S. Supreme Court allowing it to remain in force."
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https://www.reuters.com/…
at Notre Dam, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Samuel Alito defended the "shadow docket" that brought us the Texas abortion law rollout.
[Image at right: Top half of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Hesburgh Library WORD OF LIFE mural, popularly known as TOUCHDOWN JESUS. A notable alumna: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Amy Coney Barrett.]
<big><big><big>Honoring the courage of Cori Bush, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal for testifying their personal abortion stories</big>, in the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing Thursday on abortion rights, held in response to the spate of anti-abortion laws being instituted across the country. </big>https://www.msnbc.com/…</big>
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from The Conversation <big><big>Jim Crow tactics reborn in Texas abortion law, deputizing citizens to enforce legally suspect provisions</big></big>
...This approach to enforcement is a legal end-run that privatizes a state’s enforcement of the law...[shielding state officials] from being sued for violating the Constitution … and the law is made, at least for a time, more durable.
The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the state on the grounds the law violated a woman’s constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability. [The suit] specifically cites one of the cases that was brought over a Texas Jim Crow law that excluded Blacks from participating in primaries, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1944....
from The Conversation <big><big>How The Satanic Temple is using ‘abortion rituals’ to claim religious liberty against the Texas’ ‘heartbeat bill’</big></big>
Texas’s controversial anti-abortion law known as the “Heartbeat Bill” went into effect at midnight on Sept. 1, 2021. Less than 24 hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it would not block the law.
In response, <big>The Satanic Temple</big>, a nontheistic [human rights-oriented] group that has been recognized by the IRS as a religion, announced that it would fight back by invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, to demand exemption from abortion restrictions on religious grounds. RFRA laws, which came into effect in 1993, restrict the government’s ability to burden religious practices.
Like the Heartbeat Bill itself, The Satanic Temple’s efforts to circumvent abortion restrictions on religious grounds involve a creative and complicated legal strategy.…
from medscape: 25 professional medical associations signed the American College of Obstetricians& Gynecologists’ <big>amicus brief in the SCOTUS case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization,</big>
...The case, filed by Thomas E. Dobbs, MD, state health officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, and others, challenges the attempt by the state of Mississippi to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The case is being brought specifically against the Jackson (Miss.) Women's Health Organization.
ACOG's amicus brief … "represents an unprecedented level of support from a diverse group of physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals, which demonstrates the concrete medical consensus of opposition to abortion restriction legislation...”
The brief explains how the ban goes against not only the ability of health professionals to provide safe and essential care, but also goes against scientific evidence and medical ethics….
In Washington D.C. today there’s been (and perhaps still being) a<big><big> "Rally for Abortion Justice" plus virtual participation around the country, all organized by Women's March.</big></big>
Tweets etc in the comment thread welcome!