The Greatest Story Never Told
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Join Leslie Carol Botha when she interviews feminist activist Merle Hoffman, author of Intimate Wars – the Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room on Monday night, April 30 from 6 to 7 pm MST on KRFC FM, community radio in Fort Collins, CO.
The recently declared “war on women” or “war on religious freedom” – depending on which side of the political aisle you find yourself – is the most recent issue du jour, but the challenge with focusing on the politics of women’s health is that it tends to mask what’s really going on in America
Bioethicists argue that parents should be accountable for the health of their baby. Agreed…. but to be obligated or to be told it is their ‘duty’ to use IVF to increase the child’s well-being, expand his or her self-determination, and reduce inequalities – has too much of a Eugenics overtone.
President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has released a new video featuring Gloria Steinem, in which the feminist icon argues that this election is a “turning point” and that women should grant Obama a second term if they want to see their rights protected.
“We will lose what we have gained if a Republican candidate were to win,” says Steinem. “So the question is will we be active, will we get out there, will we be self-respecting and forget about party labels and vote for ourselves. Vote for our fundamental human rights?”
An Irish woman who had a symphysiotomy performed after childbirth in 1969 has been awarded €450,000 ($600,000) for medical negligence.
Symphysiotomy was a procedure to break the pelvis during a difficult birth and was carried out on about 1,500 women in Ireland between 1944 and 1992.
A controversial solution for caring for severely intellectually and physically disabled children is quietly spreading, according to the Guardian (UK). In 2007 the doctors who prescribed the “Ashley treatment” were banned from repeating it in the state of Washington. But this has not stopped other doctors and ethics committees from giving it a green light.
Nearly two months after Susan G. Komen for the Cure reversed its decision to end its funding for Planned Parenthood, fallout from the decision continues to haunt the breast cancer charity, the Washington Post reports.
Since the controversy erupted, the heads of Komen affiliates in greater New York and Oregon announced their plans to step down, and three top officials at the charity’s Dallas headquarters resigned.
Arizona has taken up yet another draconian law for women’s health – this time replicating but broadening the federal push to let employers deny women access to birth control. The bill stipulates that, unless a woman brings in a note proving she is not using it to avoid getting pregnant, an employer can deny birth control to any woman in the workplace.
In a widely reported address, Pope Benedict XVI has again declared that the only acceptable way for children to be conceived is through intercourse between a man and a woman. “Indeed, the union of a man and a woman, in that community of love and life which is marriage, represents the only worthy ‘place’ for a new human being to be called into existence,” he said. He told a gathering at the Pontifical Academy for Life that the field of human procreation seems to be ruled by scientism and the logic of profit,” which often “restrict many other areas of research.” He said that the Church is “attentive to the suffering of infertile couples…and her concern for them is what leads her to encourage medical research.”
Both the fetus and the new-born infant are only potential persons without any interests. Therefore the interests of the persons involved with them are paramount until some indefinite time after birth. To emphasise the continuity between the two acts, they term it “after-birth abortion” rather than infanticide.
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