Month: May 2013

A 22-year-old woman five months pregnant appeared before El Salvador’s Supreme Court Wednesday to beg for her life. Known by the pseudonym Beatriz, she suffers from lupus and kidney problems. Her doctors say there is “strong probability of maternal death” if she doesn’t terminate her pregnancy. When she was pregnant with her now 14-month-old son, Beatriz almost died: she suffered an exacerbation of her lupus, anaemia, pneumonia, and high blood pressure which led to severe pre-eclampsia. Her son was delivered via emergency cesarean section, and was in the hospital with digestive and respiratory problems for more than a month.

On top of that, her fetus has been diagnosed with anencephaly, a serious birth defect in which parts of the brain and skull are missing. As the Center for Disease Control states, almost all babies born with anencephaly will die shortly after birth. Although Beatriz’s doctors would like to provide her with an abortion, they fear that they could face prison. In El Salvador, abortion is illegal, with no exceptions for incest, rape, or the health or life of the mother. In fact, since passing its strict abortion law in 1998, El Salvador has jailed 628 women for having abortions, some for 30 years.

Beatriz’s lawyers asked the legal authorities for a permission to perform a therapeutic abortion and a guarantee that they would not be prosecuted. The attorney general refused to grant any such guarantee. So, in mid-April, Beatriz’s lawyers took her case to the Supreme Court. As if Beatriz’s life weren’t at risk, as if that risk weren’t increasing with each passing moment, the Supreme Court waited until last week to ask the Institute of Legal Medicine (ILM) to make a recommendation. On May 7, to the shock and dismay of many, the ILM said Beatriz was not in immediate danger and recommended a “wait and see” approach.

Read more at Policymic

If you watch TV, read the news, or follow politics, you’ve seen or read or heard Katrina vanden Heuvel, a true icon for the progressive movement and media. Vanden Heuvel is the editor and publisher of The Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, founded in 1865.  Vanden Heuvel’s blog “Editor’s Cut,” appears at thenation.com and she writes a weekly online column for The Washington Post. She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC, MSNBC, CNN and PBS. Her articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Foreign Policymagazine and The Boston Globe. Vanden Heuvel is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the board of The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, The Institute for Policy Studies, The World Policy Institute, The Correctional Association of New York, The Women’s Media Center and The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. She received Planned Parenthood’s Maggie Award for her article, Right-to-Lifers Hit Russia, the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Callaway Prize for the Defense of the Right of Privacy, The American- Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s 2003 “Voices of Peace” award, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s 2006 “Justice in Action” award. Vanden Heuvel is the author of several books including Taking Back America – And Taking Down the Radical Right,  Dictionary of Republicanisms: The Indispensable Guide to What They Really Mean When They Say What They Think You Want to Hear (2005) and The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in the Age of Obama.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five with Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Katie Halper: What recent news story made you want to scream?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: It made me scream to see that even while austerity’s theoretical underpinnings have been exposed as flimflam, constructed out of spreadsheet error and goofy logic, austerity’s reign of misery continues– just the other day, unemployment in Greece soared to 60%, 20 million in our country remain unemployed or underemployed, our growth is imperiled, yet Wall Street, which blew up our economy, grows more concentrated and powerful. Could we break up the big banks, build coops and community banks and move from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism that prizes the  three “p”s….planet, people and profitability?

KH: What, in your opinion, is the greatest challenge facing feminism today?

KV: How do we ensure women control their own bodies — and thereby their own destiny. In the US and globally, if women control their own bodies, fates and future — whether it’s through access to birth control, education or economic independence, and by living in peaceful cultures, free of militarism and military occupation, all people are lifted up and it will be a healthier, more secure and just country and world. I think that we should pay a lot of attention to the rollback of reproductive rights, of women’s health. My good friend Ilyse Hogue, Nation blogger, now head of NARAL, has called it, “death by a thousand cuts” –of women’s rights to control their own bodies, which is so central to a democratic society.

[…]

Read more at Feministing

First, the chief of the Air Force sexual assault prevention unit was arrested for sexual assault. Then the Pentagon released a report showing that sexual assault had jumped from 19,000 cases in 2010 to 26,000 in 2012. Now, we have the Air Force’s top commander, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, saying that sexual assault happens all the time outside of the military and that it’s because of a “hookup mentality.” 20% of women report they had been sexually assaulted,

“before they came into the military…. So they come in from a society where this occurs…. Some of it is the hookup mentality of junior high even and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it.”

It’s nice to know that this general moonlights as a cultural anthropologist who studies his own children. Maybe his kids can  testify as expert witnesses and explain how sexual encounters between consenting adults is responsible for sexual assault and rape. I feel so much better knowing that military high ups have such a nuanced understanding of their institution’s rampant and systemic rape and sexual assault.

Read more at Feministing

n an interesting speech, Pope Francis urged 800 nuns representing  international women’s congregations  to be mothers and not spinsters.

1 : a woman whose occupation is to spin

2: a: archaic: an unmarried woman of gentle family b: an unmarried woman and especially one past the common age for marrying

3 : a woman who seems unlikely to marry

I don’t think The Pope is telling nuns not to spin. Nor is he telling nuns to get married of have children. He wants them to be chaste mothers. And if you think that’s impossible, just remember Maria, the virgin mother of Jesus Christ, provides us with the precedent. But in case they can’t achieve immaculate conception, The Pope is fine with a spiritual, if not physical motherhood, or as he describes it,

“a fertile chastity, a chastity which produces spiritual children within the Church…. The ordained woman is a mother, she must be a mother and not a spinster! You are mothers, like the figures of Mary and the Mother Church…. It is not possible to understand Mary without maternity, nor the Church without motherhood.”

Read more at Feministing