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Big fan of Ms.Fine. :)
“My risk of an unwanted pregnancy and being denied an abortion is not a random fact about me. It’s a fundamental part of what it means to be born female, shoved into the class “woman” and hence devalued as an autonomous human being. It will remain so even when I can no longer conceive. I won’t shed my perceived lack of bodily autonomy; it will have different manifestations but it will persist because I was born into this body. To claim “not everyone who is born female can bear children therefore bearing children has nothing to do with being female” is rather like me arguing that because I was born with three nipples, any biology textbook which claims having two nipples is a feature of being human is making a random assertion rather than an obvious generalisation. And generalisations matter. To argue otherwise is not only to dismiss the history of discrimination but to perpetuate it.”
-Cordelia Fine, Manbrains and ladybrains: Squaring the circle
When the government really isn’t on your side… Excerpts taken from here.
“Between 1971 and 1991 in Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic and Slovakia, the “reduction of the Roma population” through surgical sterilization, performed without the knowledge of the women themselves, was a widespread governmental practice. The sterilization would be performed on Romani women without their knowledge during Caesarean sections or abortions. Some of the victims claim that they were made to sign documents without understanding their content. By signing these documents, they involuntarily authorized the hospital to sterilize them. In exchange, they sometimes were offered financial compensation or material benefits like furniture from Social Services – though it was not explicitly stated what this compensation was for. The justification for sterilization practices according to the stakeholders was “high, unhealthy” reproduction.
[…]
While human rights can be violated by individuals or by institutions, they can only be defended by institutions. The European Court of Human Rights does not deal with single individuals who have committed crimes. Rather, it focuses on why the government in question could not take action against what happened. But where are the doctors, politicians and all the people who personally contributed to or carried out such surgeries, and when they are going to take responsibility for their actions? In order to take action against this human rights violation, blaming the Communist regime is not enough. The practice continues today and forcibly sterilized Romani women are still a long way from receiving true justice.”
-Written by: Galya Stoyanova, Romani intern at Romedia Foundation
Read about a heroine’s unflinching dedication to the reproductive rights of women.
Amy Hagstrom Miller has defended her group of Texas clinics, Whole Woman’s Health, all the way to the Supreme Court despite tremendous personal cost. Here’s why.
Amy Hagstrom Miller will face the Supreme Court tomorrow in defense of her group of abortion clinics, Whole Woman’s Health. Hagstrom Miller is a mission-driven small business owner, inspired, she says, by her commitment to human rights and justice, a desire to be deeply present with women facing hard decisions and shaping their own futures with intention.
But in recent years, Hagstrom Miller’s goal of maintaining a safe, supportive oasis for the “whole woman” has become almost impossible. For almost a decade, she and her staff have jumped through hoops as the Texas legislature imposed more and more TRAP laws (Targeted Restriction of Abortion Providers), bogus “safety” laws aimed at driving clinics out of business and eliminating abortion access. But after each costly accommodation…
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My chorus of MRA hacks is always on about how great things are for women and often how the wimmenz have it better than dudes.
Right.
So here again, is an example of what existing while female is like.
“A group of computer scientists, when studying the acceptance of contributions on the software repository GitHub, found open source code written by women is actually more often approved than code written by men. The catch—there’s always a catch—is that this only happens when the woman’s gender is hidden.
GitHub, which is used by more than 12 million people, allows developers to write code for the projects of other software developers, who then choose whether to approve the submissions. Among the three million submissions (or “pull requests”) the researchers examined, female-written code saw a 78.6% approval rate. With male-written code, it was 74.6%.
If female coders specified their gender on their profiles, though, their acceptance rate fell to 62.5%.”
Yep, equality is certainly firing on all cylinders here…
“Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless,” the six computer science researchers from California Polytechnic State University and North Carolina State University wrote in the study published Feb. 9. The higher blind acceptance rate for code written by women is all the more impressive when you consider that men in the open source community overwhelmingly outnumber their female counterparts—who by various estimates make up only 1% to 11% of the population.”
Of course, this is just my usual cherry picking routine, certainly not meant to draw attention to larger issues/patterns in society.
[Source: Quartz]
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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