Standing Up to Sterilization, Eugenics, and the Abuse of Women

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

“Keep your hands off my uterus!” That’s an often-repeated placard and plea at women’s marches I’ve attended over the past forty years. In the U.S. and abroad, it’s a common, continuing refrain because government sanctioning of abuse of women’s bodies has been occurring since well before the Second Wave women’s movement exposed it in the 1970s.

I worked in the women’s health movement then alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and other national organizations. One of the myriad issues we dealt with was the sterilization of poor, black and brown women.  We helped raise awareness of the medical abuse of Puerto Rican women that resulted in a third of women of reproductive age being sterilized for decades at clinics often funded by the U.S. government. In the 1960s women in Puerto Rico were also the subjects of birth control pill trials, without their consent. Those who became pregnant on placebos were offered no help, financial or otherwise, and were forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term.  

Another frequent abuse women of color faced was the lack of real informed consent. It can hardly be considered consent when you are asked to sign a paper in English and your only language is Spanish, or you are asked by the nice doctor if you’d like to stop having babies after you’ve just endured a long, arduous labor.

There is a long, ugly history of abusing and using women’s bodies by way of coercion and for experimentation. Dr. J. Marion Sims, know as the father of gynecology, practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849. During that time, he conducted hideous experiments, without any anesthesia, on enslaved women he had purchased in the 1840s. At an annual convention of the American Public Health Association in the late 1970s his portrait was still on display – until enraged women demanded that it be taken down and never shown again.

Affluent white women were often subjected to having their ovaries removed in the second half of the 19th century if they were deemed to be overly sexual. This practice coincided with the belief that if women used their minds too eagerly, their uteruses would atrophy, denying them the God-given role of child bearers.

Medical abuse was further embraced in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular, with the growth of programs that coerced women to be sterilized if they did not willingly consent. As Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation, points out, sterilization was viewed as part of a “necessary public health intervention aimed at protecting society from deleterious genes…” This mindset prevailed late into the century. My friend’s daughter, who was mentally impaired, was subjected to sterilization in the 1970s as part of her care plan.

Some states, like California, passed laws that resulted in thousands of residents being sterilized for decades (including some men). Even as late as 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had sterilized 150 women in four years. Richard Nixon, a Californian, significantly increased Medicaid funding for sterilization of poor Americans with an emphasis on people of color.

Let us remember, medical historians remind us, that eugenics policies in the U.S. aimed at those considered too mentally defective to reproduce, are credited with becoming models for Nazi Germany.

One of the saddest stories of a black woman being sterilized during her childbearing years is that of civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. She had a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 while undergoing minor surgery for removal of a benign tumor. She spoke about her experience as a Black woman who had been subjected to what was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” when women were taken to local clinics and sterilized.

Now comes Dawn Wooten, a courageous nurse, who revealed that women in an ICE detention center in Georgia, run by a private prison company, had an outside doctor perform hysterectomies on them when they complained about non-threatening reproductive health issues. Many of the women who experienced major surgery awoke to find that they had had their reproductive organs all or partially removed without their prior knowledge or consent. Most were still of childbearing age and most had no idea why they had undergone the procedure.

Pauline Binam, 30, was one of them. She was being quickly deported by ICE to Cameroon, which she left at age two. Binam, now 30, was on the tarmac when members of Congress including Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee intervened to keep her in the U.S.  Binam's lawyer has said her client thought she was getting a routine procedure last year, but "when she woke up from surgery, the doctor informed her that he had to remove one of her fallopian tubes."

Imagine how hard it will be to find records of the 17 surgeries that have now been reported.  Think about how many abused women will be rushed onto airplanes and deported so they can’t bear witness. Then try to understand what it feels like to have undergone surgery that renders you unable to have a child because you are young, poor, and unwanted.

It boggles the mind, and makes you want to weep.

                                                                        # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women’s health from Saxtons River, Vt. 

Will Burkhas Make a Comeback in Afghanistan or Can Women Prevail?

Last May, when militants in Afghanistan killed new mothers and their babies in a Kabul maternity hospital, the world’s women shuddered. Afghan women mourned, wept, and worried.  Women in Afghanistan have borne the brunt of that country’s brutality in ways few people can imagine. Now worries about what comes next in the face of an incomplete, drawn out peace agreement loom large for the females who live there.

 The U.S. and the notorious Taliban signed a preliminary peace agreement in February that aimed at ending two decades of war, but things have not gone smoothly. Insurgent activity added to problems related to power-sharing between the Afghan government and the Taliban, with the Taliban demanding release of thousands of prisoners as part of the deal.

 For women fears of what might happen emanate from memories of what life was like during the Taliban rule, when art, culture, education and women suffered from horrific repression. Now the Taliban is asserting again that girls’ education must end at sixth grade, with one leader stating, according to The New York Times, that “until an Islamic system is established our jihad will continue till doomsday.”

 It wasn’t always like this in Afghanistan. In the 1920s things looked hopeful for women there. The king and his wife worked hard to improve women’s lives, advocating against the veil and for greater freedom for females. Conservatives pushed back but things were relatively good. In 1964 the constitution gave women the right to vote and to enter politics.

 All that came to a halt when the Taliban gained power in 1996, enforcing the brutal oppression of women symbolized by blue burkhas and stoning deaths. While some rights for women were achieved after the Taliban defeat in 2001, Afghan women worry now that the peace talks will bargain away many of those rights, which included girls’ education and women’s right to work. Post-Taliban, a 2015 National Action Plan offered soothing rhetorical assurances that went nowhere given the commitment to “maintain cultural and religious codes.”

 As Guardian reporter Emma Graham-Harrison wrote last year, “A generation of women have grown up in Afghanistan since the Taliban were toppled.  But many of those who have guided the country through profound change . . . are haunted by memories of their brutal, misogynist rule.” Those groundbreaking women included educators, journalists and politicians, many of whom suffered hideous physical and emotional abuse.

 One of the most pressing issues for women leaders in Afghanistan now is that women will not have a legitimate seat at the tables of decision-making, and that only selective women will be half-heartedly consulted. At a conference attended by 700 women in Kabul last year representing 34 provinces, fears were expressed about the Taliban being brought back into government, renewing the oppression of women and girls. Afghan’s first lady Rula Ghani urged the women to express their views publicly, but her husband’s speech didn’t address the issue of women’s rights under a new government.

 According to a report in Pass Blue, a blog offering independent coverage of the United Nations, “the participation of Afghan women without methodical, sustained and substantive engagement in a peace settlement has the potential to harm them, not help them.” As one Afghan woman put it, “we’ve seen firsthand how well-intentioned efforts sometimes promote progress for Afghan women while quietly failing them.”

 For example, a multi-year U.S.-funded program to teach computer programming to women in Afghan villages ended without funds and no real opportunities having been provided, confirming for village men that educating women was useless.

 Intra-Afghan peace talks a year ago included women and received accolades from international media, but Afghan women were not impressed. “It was mere tokenism,” a woman who participated said. “Women on the delegation were called two days beforehand, leaving women to appear unorganized and unprepared.”

 As Afghan journalist Mariam Atahi told Pass Blue, “There have been lots of conferences across Afghanistan to see what women wanted in rural and urban areas . . . Women have worked to form the narrative on women’s right, including efforts to change the interpretation of Islamic law implemented by the Taliban in rural areas they control, but these activists were sidelined from the peace negotiations.”

 Najia Nasim, Executive Director of Women for Afghan Women, the largest women’s rights organization in Afghanistan, told me recently that “Afghan women insist on an inclusive intra-Afghan process where we can meaningfully participate to address institutional mechanisms of peace and amplify the diverse voices of women from around the country.” Women’s omission from the peace process, she said, “inhibits our ability to convey our unique experiences, grievances, priorities, and hopes for Afghanistan’s future, and to shape post-conflict institutions and broader society.” 

 Afghan women need to be assured a seat at the table where they can participate substantively in political discourse, monitor problems and progress, and insure accountability on behalf of the country’s women. Nothing less than that is acceptable in an environment where the Taliban may well be at the table with them.

The Pain of Feeling Other's Pain

More and more I avoid watching the news. I closed my Twitter account ages ago and I rarely visit Instagram, now more political than picturesque. I recoil at the thought of opening Facebook.

 Every day it’s one sad, upsetting, outrageous story after another. Innocent black youth murdered by police. Armed men with Nazi flags entering a state capital building. Newspaper headlines screaming “Syrian Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down,” while in an Afghan maternity hospital women and newborns are gunned down, and in America refugees seeking asylum are given a choice by ICE: Separate from your children or remain in detention indefinitely.

 All the cruelty makes me weep, and reflect that we can drown in the agonies and sorrows of our time - or we can choose to act.  I empathize with those who agonize, and I admire those who act.

 Recently a book inspired me to act. It is called The Book of Rosy: A Mother’s Story of Separation at the Border to be published this month. It’s a well-told tale by and about two remarkable women and how they connected with each other. It is also the story of an amazing grassroots organization and the Latin American women they have reunited with their children after being separated at the U.S. border. 

Co-author Rosayra Pablo Cruz crossed the border with her two sons because she had survived an attempt on her life and her older son was subsequently threatened.  Separated from her sons upon arriving in the U.S, she was sent to detention in Arizona while her sons were put in foster care in New York. With the help of a grassroots organization called Immigrant Families Together, Rosy, who now lives in New York, was finally reunited with her sons months later. In February she was granted asylum.

Julie Schwietert Collazo, a bi-lingual writer, editor and translator is the founder of the organization that helped Rosy. Dedicated to reuniting and supporting immigrant families separated at the US/Mexico border, the organization’s story is extraordinary.

It began with Yeni Gonzalez, an immigrant mother from Guatemala whose three children were transported by ICE agents to New York. When she was unable to pay a $7,500 bond, a group of American mothers led by Julie, who heard Yeni’s story on NPR, quickly mobilized to raise the bond money. Then they arranged to transport Yeni safely, state by state, to New York. There she was reunited with her children and Immigrant Families Together (IFT) was born. To date it has raised over a million dollars and paid over 100 bonds.

 Rosy’s story is stunningly moving as she describes the magnitude and the impact of the human tragedy taking place still. She shares the horrific journey north this way: “The trip is long enough for your stomach to struggle to accept food and water when you finally have access to them again. … The journey is long enough for you to make choices that, when you think about them later, fill you with disgust, like eating mangoes full of worms or drinking dirty water from a creek where cattle stand to cool off. You grip the mango with both hands… and you’re so ravenous, you don’t even avoid the worms.”

 Of the agony of detention, she writes, “In my short time here, I have seen women go crazy with hysteria. They curl up on their bunks and refuse to leave their cells. They cry without ceasing, as if their hoodies are bottomless wells of tears. I have seen them shut down, becoming shells of who they once were. I have seen them lose their will to fight, their will to go on. … I ache for my two boys, of course, but if I let my tears flow, I will become one of those women, hanging on the edge of her own being, and then, what will I be able to do to get my boys, who have been taken from me, back into my arms?”

 Her description of the icebox detention cells is as chilling as the cells themselves. “Months from now, Rosy writes, “when there are news stories about children dying in the icebox I won’t be surprised.”

 Concluding her story, Rosy says, “This is the immigrant experience I wish people could see, not because it’s my experience, but because it’s the story of so many of us, coming to the United States to escape violence and to build lives in which we will contribute to society. … We want to be part of your American dream. We want to help you realize it. We want to share it with you.”

 Rosy’s story is particularly compelling because Donald Trump, on advice of his revered advisor Stephen Miller, has closed the border with Mexico indefinitely, using Covid-19 as the excuse, when it’s really meant to end immigration altogether.

 I’ve been wanting to go to the border to help for a long time, so pre-Covid I contacted Julie. She led me to organizations that still need volunteers. I don’t know when, but I hope to go after the pandemic ends. The detention centers will still be full, despite Covid deaths and deportations.

 How could I not choose to act after reading Rosy’s story and knowing the vital work of Immigrant Families Together?  

Diminished, Dismissed, Misdiagnosed: When Doctors Don't Trust Women

Rana Mungin was 30-years old when she died of Covid-19 in March. A black teacher in Brooklyn with asthma and hypertension, she was twice diagnosed with having a panic attack in an ER, despite a fever and shortness of breath.

That reaction and lack of appropriate response by doctors was not a fluke. It happens frequently if you are female, especially if you’re a black woman, as several recent books about women’s health care reveal. That’s not news to women’s healthcare advocates, but perhaps now healthcare providers who may not have considered inherent problems involving diagnosing and treating women will be more enlightened.

Possibly the most important book on this issue is Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery. Adding to the impressive and important literature of women’s health, Dusenbery addresses two of the biggest impediments to women getting good care, the “knowledge gap” and the “trust gap.”

 The knowledge gap refers to the fact that many doctors don’t know enough about women’s bodies, their symptoms, or the diseases that affect them disproportionately. The trust gap speaks to the stereotyping of women as unreliable reporters at best, and hysterical at worst. These gaps are apt to occur more often with black women. Dusenbery’s central and necessarily repeated mantra is that women are either not trusted when they report symptoms or they are labeled crazy, malingering, or opioid- addicted.

“This book is not about a few sexist bad apples within the medical profession,” Dusenbery says in her introduction. “It is about how all health care providers, like all of us, have unconscious biases by virtue of living in a culture that holds certain stereotypes about women.”

These biases are revealed over and over again as women share their first-person horror stories of trivialization, misdiagnosis, not being believed and more, whether they suffer chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, reproductive problems, heart attacks or other life-threatening emergencies. 

Here’s one example. “I was asking for help. But my doctor said, ‘I don’t think you’re at the point where medication is an option, and it can be addictive. Keep exercising and doing yoga and maybe consider meditating. Try to get more sleep. If your symptoms persist, come back in a few months.”

Here’s another. A black woman I know was found to have multiple cysts in her body. She had gained weight and stopped menstruating. What did the doctor tell her? “You have a demanding job and a young child. I think it’s stress.” That opinion was rendered with no diagnostic workup, no referral to an endocrinologist, no curiosity or concern about what systemic problem might be causing the troubling symptoms.

Dusenbery backs up her conclusions with copious references to research studies, women’s personal stories, and other books in the women’s health canon, as she exposes “bad medicine and lazy science” in compelling and convincing ways.

“Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress” speaks to the frequency with which women are told their symptoms are due to stress, a theme played over and over again in the stories women share. “It’s hard work behaving as a credible patient,” as one woman said, underscoring how often pain is deemed to be “all in your head.” 

A chapter in Dusenbery’s book called “This is Not Normal” reveals how often women must insist on having diagnostic workups. “Young women aren’t the only group of patients who frequently find their symptoms dismissed as ‘normal’ by healthcare providers. The tendency to normalize symptoms associated with women’s reproductive functions finds echoes in the way elderly patients, trans patients, and overweight patients are often treated.”

 “The Career Women’s Disease” points to the modern version of age-old myths suggesting that motherhood and work are incompatible. One 20th century “expert” on endometriosis notoriously stated that the painful condition was on the rise because of “delayed and infrequent childbearing.” The 19th century version of this myth was that if a woman exercised her brain her uterus would atrophy.

Autoimmune diseases are especially challenging for physicians who receive about five hours of lectures on this difficult topic during their entire medical education. Research has shown that women with these diseases, like with many others, see about five physicians over a period of seven years before receiving a correct diagnosis.

The frustration of not being believed or properly diagnosed is intense.  As Dusenbery puts it, “The long, frustrating search for a diagnosis is such a common theme running through the stories of women patients that many feel immense relief to finally get a diagnosis, any diagnosis. Being sick without knowing why is very stressful; being sick and told ‘nothing’s wrong,’ is more stressful still.” 

Delayed, downplayed, poorly diagnosed illnesses are not simply a medical issue. In this time of “intersectionality,” it’s important to realize that race, class, age, gender and more come into play. As one analyst put it, “if you’re not wealthy, not white, and not heterosexual, you may be receiving less than optimal care.”

That’s why Rana Mungin’s story is so sad, and why Dusenbery’s message, echoing that of other healthcare advocates, is so important. “Listen to women. Trust us when we say we’re sick. Start there, and you’ll find we have a a lot of knowledge to share.”  Books like Doing Harm go a long way in arming women for the task.

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Elayne Clift has been a women’s healthcare educator and advocate for over three decades. She lives in Saxtons River, Vt.  

The Female Face of Leadership Past, Present, Future

March is Women’s History Month. What better time to honor the women who influence the worlds in which they live(d), whether they are contemporary or not, familiar or unknown.

Even in ancient times examples abound. Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, was a favorite of Julius Caesar’s. Another Cleopatra was a Syrian queen who claimed power when her husband died. Hatshepsut also ruled Egypt as did Nefertiti.

The Vietnamese Trung sisters led the first national uprising against Chinese conquerors in 40 AD. Then there were the famed Amazon women, and later, women like Grace O'Malley, chieftain of the O Maille clan, who challenged 16th century politics in England and Ireland. And we all revere Joan of Arc for her role during the Hundred Years' War.

Not all heroic women have literally been warriors, queens or saints.  Mary Wollstonecraft was a symbolic warrior when she published The Vindication of the Rights of Women in England in 1792, asking that women have “power over themselves.” The Grimke sisters were warriors when they stomped for women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery in the mid-1800s, along with multitudes of other women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

In 1872 America’s first female stockbroker, Victoria Woodhull, had the temerity to run for president.  Lawyer Belva Lockwood ran twice, in 1884 and 1888.  Ten years later social activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her pioneering book Women and Economics, a scathing treatise about women’s dependence on men and marriage for survival and sexual legitimacy.

In the early 20th century Emmeline Pankhurst called for militant action to secure women’s suffrage in England, leading the way for Alice Paul, founder of the National Women’s Party and nemesis of Woodrow Wilson, as her “Sentinels of Liberty” picketed the White House for women’s right to vote. Many brave women were jailed, brutalized, force fed, and threatened with psychiatric incarceration. But they carried on, forcing Wilson to support suffrage when their treatment was publicized.

These women, foremothers of today’s female activists, advocates and educators had spoken truth to power. Their work led to vibrant and courageous female leadership across all sectors of society in the U.S. and elsewhere that continues today.

One example is Jacinda Kate Ardern, the world’s youngest female head of state when she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017. Under her leadership New Zealand has focused on issues like child poverty, housing, and social inequality. Ardern was recognized globally in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attack in 2019 that led to strict gun legislation.

Finland’s Sanna Marin, leader of the Social Democratic Party is 34 years old, younger than Ardern’s 37 when she became prime minister, making Marin the youngest sitting PM in the world. Formerly a transport minister, she now oversees a governing coalition of five parties, all headed by women under age 35.

Iceland also has a female prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir, a strong supporter of the country’s Left-Green Movement. At 41 years old she is the second woman to hold the position. Her priorities are the environment, health and education. She hopes to make Iceland carbon neutral by 2040.

Closer to home, it now seems that no matter who wins the November election, having a woman president in the U.S. is not in question. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar are top tier candidates. If not this year, perhaps one of the “Squad”– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley or Rashida Tlaib - may find herself on a future ticket. And don’t rule out Stacy Abrams who nearly made Governor of Georgia and works tirelessly for voting rights. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Omar and Tlaib are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, and Pressley is the first black congresswoman to represent Massachusetts.

It isn’t only female political leaders we should remember and recognize.  There are women in the sciences, education, technology, communications and other sectors worthy of note as well. From Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in America to receive an M.D. in 1849 to Cecilia Payne, the first person to earn a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard and the one who answered the question “What are stars made of?” in 1925, to Katherine Johnson of Hidden Women fame, and astronaut Sally Ride, women have been pioneers.

Women have also excelled as business leaders, experts in various trades, academic visionaries, media specialists, and more.

And now we see them emerging as social justice and human rights activists across the globe, from education advocate Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, climate change activist Greta Thunberg, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and Emma Gonzales, whose leadership in stopping gun violence, along with other Parkland High School youth leaders, put a measurable dent in the NRA.

Behind each of these young women are multitudes more all over the world, raising awareness about critical issues, educating policymakers, organizing effectively and mobilizing mightily for social change in their communities and countries. We should honor them all, along with their pioneering role models, who through the ages have had the courage, skill and tenacity to keep the world moving forward, even in its darkest days.

                                                            # # #

Elayne Clift writes about women and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

A Growing Epidemic of Violence Threatens Black Transgender Women

Last month being LGBT History Month, it seems timely to think about what is happening to primarily Black transgender women across the country. It’s not simply timely, it’s urgent given the growing number of mostly Black trans women being murdered.

In 2018 at least 26 murders of transgender people occurred in the U.S. The majority were Black trans women. The year before that the number killed was 29. So far this year at least 26 transgender people, largely Black trans women, have been killed by acquaintances, partners and strangers. The numbers recorded for any year may be low due to under-reporting by victim families and law enforcement. These killings align with other significant factors that render trans people more prone to violent death, such as poverty, homelessness, healthcare barriers, depression, homophobia, racism and sexism.

These tragedies demand a human face. Baily Reeves, 17, was fatally shot in Baltimore, Maryland in September. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding her death.  Jordan Cofer, 22, who was out only to close friends and used male pronouns on social media, was among the nine victims killed in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio in August. A friend told the media he was “one of the sweetest people you’d ever meet, a true saint, but he was scared constantly.” Dana Martin, 31, “beloved by everybody,” was fatally shot in Montgomery, Alabama and found in a roadside ditch in her car. Claire Legato, 21, “full of life,” died of a gunshot wound to her head in Cleveland, Ohio. There are 22 more stories like this so far this year.

Two troubling cases remain unresolved. A 25-year old woman named Medina, denied treatment for a severe health problem in an ICE facility, died at a Texas hospital hours after being released by ICE. Another woman, Polanco, died in a cell at the notorious Riker’s Island prison in New York.

According to GLAAD.org, the American Medical Association has declared the killing of trans women and other trans people an “epidemic” exacerbated by a variety of social issues, including the fact that transgender people face high levels of discrimination and poverty. According to one national survey of transgender people, their level of unemployment is twice the rate of the general population. Transgender people are four times more likely to live in poverty, and 90 percent of them report experiencing harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination on the job. Access to healthcare is extremely limited for transgender people, in part because until recently private insurers have treated transition-related medical care as if it were cosmetic. Some procedures are still not covered, and it continues to be difficult to find a provider who is knowledgeable about transgender healthcare.  Sadly, 41 percent of transgender people reported attempting suicide in one large study.

“We are the most afraid we’ve ever been,” Mariah Moore of the Transgender Law Center, says. Kayla Gore, a transgender advocate in New Orleans, adds that the threat of violence is “always forefront in our minds, when we’re leaving home, going to work, going to school.”

It’s important to understand what “transgender” – and sexual orientation” – mean, among other terms, if violence born of fear and prejudice is to be adequately addressed. According to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a transgender person is someone whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they know themselves to be on the inside. It includes people who have medically transitioned and people who have not.  Sexual orientation refers to emotional, romantic, sexual and relational attraction to someone else, whether you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight or use another word to accurately describe identity. “Gender identity” is one’s internal concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither.  “Transition” is a process that some transgender people undergo when they decide to live as the gender with which they identify. They are not “becoming” a man or a woman; they are starting to live openly as their true gender. Transitioning is a difficult and private decision. People who make that decision deserve respect.

Th reality of living a transgender life makes LGBT History Month an important time for increasing awareness, acceptance, and safety for trans people. Started in 1994 by a Missouri high school teacher to educate schools, religious institutions, and communities about LGBTQ people, it led to LGBTQ Pride Month, celebrated in June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. It has grown from a day of Gay Pride to a month of events.

All the activity surrounding LBGTQ history and life is important. So is the need for lawmakers to strengthen hate crime legislation and for law enforcement and media to do a better job of addressing relevant issues.  As Sarah McBride of the Human Rights Campaign puts it, “the prejudices don’t add upon one another, they multiply upon one another.”  They lead to the murder of innocent human beings, largely women of color, who simply want to live their lives free of fear.

Surely that is not asking too much.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

The Global Problem of Child Marriage

Imagine being 23-years old and a promising science student studying on scholarship in England. Then imagine that having lived in the UK for half your life you are being forced by the government to return to your country of origin because your father demands that you marry your older cousin. Imagine that if you refuse, you will likely be killed.

That is the horrific story unfolding today about an aspiring astrophysicist whose identity is being protected by The Independent, which told her story last month. It’s a story that is repeated regularly for countless women in many countries who have no place to run. In this case, officials in England claim there is insufficient evidence that this young woman is at risk, despite the fact that she has reported frequent physical and mental abuse by her father and asserted that she and her siblings along with their mother fled to the UK. Her story should not be unbelievable; one in five murders in her native Pakistan are attributed to honor killings committed by fathers and brothers.

Now imagine that you have been betrothed at the age of eight, and then married off to your abusive first cousin, aged 34, at the age of 13. That’s what happened to Naila Amin in New York state and it was completely legal. Today Naila, who runs the foundation that bears her name, fights to ban child marriages in New York, which often occur because of loopholes and exceptions in the law.

According to a report earlier this year by the Associated Press, the U.S. has approved thousands of requests by men to bring child adolescent brides into the country. The approvals are legal because the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t set minimum age requirements. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and whether the marriage is legal in the state where the petitioner lives. Naila Amin, like the astrophysicist, was from Pakistan, and a victim of that system.

According to a UNICEF report, worldwide there are more than 700 million women alive today who were married before their 18th birthday. More than a third of them were married before the age of fifteen. USAID claims that in the developing world one in three girls are married before age eighteen. Some are as young as eight or nine years old.

The minimum age for marriage in most U.S. states is eighteen. But every state has exceptions, including “parental consent” and judicial approval. The founder of the nonprofit organization Unchained at Last, herself a child marriage victim, told the New York Times, “Shockingly, 91 percent of children married in New Jersey were [found to have been] married to older adults [in a study she conducted], often at ages or with age differences that could have triggered statutory rape charges, not a marriage license.”

The Tahirih Justice Center, a national organization that protects immigrant women and girls who find themselves in the United States in arranged and abusive marriages, provides legal services and advocacy in courts, communities and Congress. It points out that “there are very few laws and policies in the U.S. that are specifically designed to help forced marriage victims.”

The District of Columbia and some states have statutes that criminalize forcing someone into marriage in “certain circumstances” the center says, but “these laws seem designed for other purposes than to prevent parents from forcing marriage or to punish them for forcing their children into marriage. The majority of state criminal statutes arise in the context of laws against abduction, prostitution, and/or ‘defilement.’”

Unchained at Last estimates that “given the size of the various communities in the U.S. that are known to practice arranged or forced marriages, which include Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, Sikh, Asian, African, Hmong and other communities, hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the U.S. are in arranged/forced marriages.”

The story of a woman named Syeda puts a human face on the plight of immigrant women in forced marriages living in the United States. Forced into marriage in Pakistan at the age of sixteen, she first lived with her parents while continuing her studies.  When she was twenty-five her family moved to Boston. Her husband joined her there, moving in with her family. She was immediately subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse which she endured for months until her family threw her out of the house because she refused to return to Pakistan with her husband. Syeda fled to a women’s shelter and has since taken control of her life. She has earned a college degree, has a job and lives independently. With the help of Unchained she is getting a divorce.

Syeda was lucky. But for thousands more children, here and abroad, the nightmare of forced or arranged marriage continues. Clearly, states need to step up their efforts to save these children. All of us need to realize what is happening to them, and to advocate on their behalf.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

Women Pay the Price in More Ways Than One

It isn’t just the crisis surrounding Draconian measures aimed at controlling our reproductive health, privacy, autonomy, and indeed our lives, that threatens women everywhere. Globally, women continue paying the price of hideous policies and actions devised and implemented by dictatorial men, whose devaluation of women and the human rights for which they advocate, is stunning.

The injury to women activists in a great many countries is often invisible, especially outside their own nations, despite torture, imprisonment, and death. Women suffer atrocities simply because they have had the courage to confront injustices perpetrated by powerful men threatened by women’s voices and acts.  These women need to be recognized and honored for their bravery and sacrifice.

Among them is Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, recently sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. Sotoudeh has advocated on behalf of Iranian women prosecuted for removing their hijabs in public. In 2010, she was convicted of conspiring to harm state security and served half of a six-year sentence. Last June she was rearrested on an array of dubious charges and tried in secret. Charged with seven crimes and given the maximum sentence for all of them, with five additional years added from a 2016 conviction in absentia, the sentence was severe even by Iranian standards.

More recently, Mena Mangal, an Afghan journalist, was killed on her way to work in Kabul because of her work on behalf of women’s rights, and in May a promising Russian feminist journalist, Margarita Virova, 25, died after “falling” from an eighth-floor apartment window which Moscow Times reported as not suspicious.

After the Saudi Arabian government jailed several prominent female activists, many of whom had fought for women’s right to drive, media reports revealed that the incarcerated women had been subjected to torture, including electrocution and flogging, as well as sexual abuse in detention. One woman was made to hang from the ceiling. Another tried to commit suicide.

Joining Saudi Arabia, Sudan has threatened the death penalty against women who resist their own oppression. Last year, Sudanese prosecutors sought the death penalty for Noura Hussein, a teenager in a forced marriage who killed her abusive husband after multiple rapes. Saudi Arabia wants to execute Israa al-Ghomgham, an activist who sought equal rights for Shiite Muslims.

In Iran, Atena Daemi, a human rights activist, has been targeted by authorities for her anti-death penalty position. First arrested in 2014, she is currently serving a seven-year sentence for criticizing executions and human rights violations on social media.

There are many more stories of women who survive the discrimination and violence they live with daily because of their activism. But many women do not survive. Among them was Mariello Franco, a leading voice for poor people living in Rio de Janeiro before she died at the age of 38. Gay and black, she was serving a term on the city council when she and her driver were killed. No arrests were ever made.

Elisa Badayos, a human rights activist who worked on behalf of poor people in Cebu, Philippines trying to find disappeared family members, was murdered along with two colleagues in 2017. She is survived by four children. Again, no arrests were made.

Guadalupe Campanur Tapia, a Mexican activist who worked on environmental issues and the rights of indigenous people, was 32-years old when her body was found on the roadside. In a similar story, Juana Raymundo, a 25-year old Guatemalan nurse who also worked for indigenous rights was tortured before being murdered.

In Iraq, Su’ad al-Ali, president of a human rights organization focused on women and children, was leading a protest in Basra focusing on rising unemployment and corruption when she was shot in the head getting into her car. She was 46 and left behind four young children.

And who can forget the image of Razan al-Najjar, 21, the Palestinian volunteer medic in white shot dead last June when she ran toward a border fence in Gaza to help an injured person? Her last Facebook post read, “I am returning and not retreating.  Hit me with your bullets, I am not afraid.”

All these remembrances represent only a few of the tragic stories of women around the world who have been grievously harmed, or have given their lives, in the name of human rights and social justice. It is good and necessary to honor them and their sacrifices on behalf of multitudes of others.

But it is not enough. It is not enough to lay wreathes on their graves, or to say their names. It is not enough to allow such extraordinary women to remain invisible. It is not enough when the world continues to ignore the issues for which they fought. It is not enough, so long as men still have sufficient power to harm women and girls and to withhold from them their human rights. It is not enough when men can continue to harness female energy and action and silence female voices. It is not enough when men decide who among them shall live and who shall die. It will never be enough until every woman everywhere has the guaranteed right to decide her own course and to live her life freely and unafraid.

Why Harriet Tubman Belongs on the $20 Bill

The lengths this administration will go to in order to erase decisions made by the Obama administration or insult Blacks while signaling white supremacists are nothing short of stunning.

Those can be the only reasons that Treasury Secretary Steven Minuchin announced to a House Financial Services Committee meeting in May that the Obama administration’s 2016 decision to substitute Harriet Tubman for Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill would “not be an issue that comes up until most likely 2026.”

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S. who was elected in 1828, owned about 300 slaves. He is connected to the Trail of Tears, the forced relocations of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas usually west of the Mississippi River designated as Indian Territory. He was impeached for attempting to dismiss his Secretary of War, narrowly escaping conviction by the Senate.  Ironically, he opposed both the idea of a National Bank and paper money, yet his face still appears on America’s currency.

Compare Jackson to Harriet Tubman, the extraordinary woman who was born a slave and became the abolitionist and activist most well known for rescuing slaves, family and friends via at least a dozen trips on the network of safe houses known as the “Underground Railroad.”

Tubman, born into slavery in Maryland in 1820 or 1821, once said of her own journey to freedom, “I had crossed the line, I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.”  But she saw to it that others, whose tears she had seen and whose sighs and groans she had heard, as she put it, found welcome on their difficult and dangerous journeys, because she had vowed to “give every drop in my veins to free them.”

In 1850, having escaped slavery, she returned to Maryland after learning that her niece was about to be auctioned off.  Leading her to safety, she went on to rescue more than 70 other slaves at that time, continuing her mercy missions until the Civil War broke out. She is thought to have saved as many as 3,000 slaves and she never failed in a single rescue, earning the name “Moses.”

Tubman, who was illiterate, often used disguises, sometimes pretending to read a newspaper or dressing like a field hand with chickens in tow. She also used spirituals and other songs as code for her followers. She managed to avoid police, dogs, mobs, and slave catchers, and often slept in swamps, moving on only at night. Known as the “black ghost,” the bounty on her head was about $12,000 or $330,000 in today’s terms.

During the Civil War she served as an army nurse on the Union side, and scouted or spied behind enemy lines. On one famous mission in South Carolina, she helped free 700 slaves in one go. Having worked for the army for three years, she applied for veteran’s compensation when the war ended. It took 34 years for her to get it after President Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward intervened. She was 78 years old at the time.

Although impoverished after the War, Tubman became active in the women’s suffrage movement, traveling to New York and Washington to give speeches despite having occasional seizures resulting from a childhood injury.  In the 1890s she underwent brain surgery to alleviate lifelong headaches, refusing anesthesia for the operation as she had seen soldiers do.

Harriet Tubman’s life came to an end in 1913 in Auburn, NY in a home for the aged that she had founded. She was 91 years old and was buried with military honors not far from the grave of William Seward. She had lived an amazing life, especially for an African American woman at that time.

This is the woman the Trump administration refuses to honor on the $20 bill.

New Yorker Dano Wall, an artist who's been working with 3D printers since 2012, has created a stamp that allows users to superimpose Tubman's face over Jackson's on the $20 note. Previously available online as an act of civil disobedience, it has quickly sold out since the delay was announced by Minuchin. Wall reported in May, shortly after the announcement, that he’d received over 2,000 requests for more stamps.  Apparently, the notes with the Tubman stamp have been used successfully in vending machines, although shops and banks may not recognize them as legal tender – yet.

Still, if $20 Tubman bills keep turning up, it’s enough to send a signal to the Treasury Department and the Oval Office. Who knows? It might even make the racist Andrew Jackson turn over in his grave. Holy Moses!

Girls and Young Women Will Suffer Most from Anti-abortion Madness

Reading Facebook posts these days has become an exercise in masochism for many of us. Daily horrific posts reveal various forms of violence against the least powerful among us.

Among the victims of such violence are young women and “emerging adult” females. A recent post referenced an eleven-year old girl in Ohio pregnant by rape. Given Ohio’s newly proposed anti-abortion legislation, she could be forced to carry the fetus to term. That’s nothing short of state-sanctioned child abuse. State after state, the same kind of cruelty could be repeated.

We have heard little about the full impact of Draconian measures aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade on women’s mental and physical health, but of this you can be sure: The impact will be more drastic the younger the girl or woman subjected to such measures.

It should be noted that research reveals having a safe, legal abortion does not pose mental health problems for women. According to Lucy Leriche, Vice President of Public Policy, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, “over 95 percent of women who have had an abortion report feeling relief that outweighs any negative emotion they might have, even years later.”

In contrast, a statement last month by the Activism Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) makes clear the psychological damage that will be inflicted on girls (and women) from restrictions on their reproductive rights, none more so than the hideous laws Alabama and other states want to impose.

“Growing girls learn that in crucial, life-altering ways, the government has more control over their bodies than they do. This is important for many reasons, one of which is that a sense of control has been shown repeatedly in psychological research to be important to mental health and well-being,” write psychologists Paula J. Caplan and Joan Chrisler on behalf of the AWP. “Rape and incest are examples of extreme loss of control, and at least in some cases, making the decision to have an abortion after rape and incest are important parts of healing, which the Alabama law prohibits.”

Like domestic abuse and sexual assault, current proposed and passed laws are about power and control, and men’s fear of losing that power and control. The laws aim to remove any sense of agency from women, over their bodies and their lives. In their worst form, they are a manifestation of terrorism in which a women’s body is owned by the state, as it was in the chilling novel, The Handmaids Tale. Laws that attempt to incarcerate a woman for crossing state lines to have an abortion, laws that can send her or her physician to jail for life, laws that in the extreme could result in executing a woman for having an abortion reveal the pure evil underpinning these laws.

Let’s remember that the same men (and yes, some women) who want to torture girls and women in these ways are the same men (and women) who legislate against ensuring the health, safety, education, and well-being of the babies born of this unspeakable coercion, and who rabidly support capital punishment.

Even if these reactionary attempts to challenge women reproductive and human rights were to fail, “the blaming and shaming of girls and women who choose to use birth control measures or who choose to have abortions causes fear, self-doubt, low self-confidence, feelings of being unsafe, and beliefs that others consider [women and girls] unable to make major, or ethical decisions,” the AWP points out.

The truly heartbreaking thing is that once shamed, fearful, self-doubting, and depressed, it is almost impossible to regain a sense of personhood or control over one’s life. That kind of despair, in which it seems impossible to envision a way out, especially prevalent in the young, can easily lead to self-destructive behavior, including suicide.

Some years ago, when I worked in Romania on reproductive rights, I saw the damage done to girls, women, and children during the time of the dictator Ceausescu. His regime required all girls graduating from high school to undergo a pelvic exam to determine if she was pregnant. Every working woman was also subjected to monthly pelvic exams in their workplaces. These cruel practices were enforced to ensure that all pregnancies were carried to term. I saw the results of that grotesque policy in the Casa Copii – orphanages where unwanted babies were dumped. Many of the children were visibly impaired, physically and mentally. Others suffered in ways that can only be imagined. Very few of them, I’m certain, had any vision of a happy future. It was worse than Dickensian and it broke my heart.

What is happening in this country now is not far removed from the tragedies that have occurred because of pronatalist policies elsewhere. The lack of humanity, morality, and ethics inherent in such policies is stunning. It leaves one speechless. Incredulous. Furious. Grieving.

But it must not leave us silent.

We must march in unity, speak out vociferously, resist mightily, vote, and support the #SexStrike movement together. Most of all, we must refuse to sacrifice our young and our females on the alters of misogyny and in the chambers of violence. Our survival as sentient beings depends upon it.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health and social justice issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

America's Shameful Maternal Mortality Rate

This being the month to celebrate mothers, it seems timely and important to ask, why is maternal morality so high in this country?

According to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, American women have the highest risk of dying from pregnancy complications than in any other high-income country. Their report shows that we have 14 deaths per 100,000 births; the Centers for Disease Control puts it even higher at 18 per 100,000 births. Compare that to Sweden’s 4 per 100,000 or the UK rate of 9 per 100,000 and we are not so “developed” as we think.

Maternal mortality is “a death that occurs during pregnancy or within a year postpartum from a pregnancy complication, a chain of events initiated by pregnancy, or the aggravation of an unrelated condition by the physiological effects of pregnancy.” In the U.S. it has risen to the level of social crisis from a public health perspective. Our maternal mortality rates have more than doubled in the last twenty years, with African American women suffering at the alarming rate of 40 deaths per 100,000. Some experts say it’s getting deadly to give birth here.

Several factors are at play, but one big problem relates to our high C-section rate. A third of American mothers are now delivering by Cesarean section, an increase of more than 500 percent since the 1970s. That’s an astounding figure even if surgery can be necessary sometimes. But what doctors, and moms who elect to have a section, often forget is that we’re talking about major surgery, not something as simple as a tooth extraction.

As the World Health Organization notes, C-sections are effective in saving maternal and infant lives, “but only when they are required for medically indicated reasons.” C-section rates higher than 10 percent, the organization says, are not associated with reductions in maternal and newborn deaths.

“We’ve designed the birth environment to resemble an Intensive Care Unit. Ninety-nine percent of American women deliver in environments that resemble ICUs, surrounded by surgeons,” Dr. Neel Shah, a professor at Harvard Medical School, told a New York Times reporter.

Midwives, who’ve been delivering babies for millennia, have known for a long time that woman-centered childbirth is basically a natural process that, with appropriate support, ends well; it is not routinely a medical emergency. Women who elect to have midwife-assisted deliveries, a practice that has grown since the 1970s thanks to women’s health advocates, know this too.

The midwifery model espouses a holistic approach to childbirth that includes affirmation and comfort as a woman experiences one of the most significant lifetime events. Midwives are highly trained professionals who call in a physician if the situation warrants, and research shows they have better outcomes than physician-directed births. In addition to skills and techniques that can avert an intervention, midwives have an abundance of patience. They understand that birth cannot be rushed, and they know that less medicalization is appropriate in normal births rather than more.

In most countries, mothers deliver their babies with midwives, who provide a relaxed but watchful environment. In this country, as research by Dr. Shah noted, a surgical delivery has less to do with health issues or particular physicians than with the hospital in which a mom delivers. “Your biggest risk factor is which door you walk into,” he says. That’s particularly true in urban cities and teaching hospitals. It’s also why women are now alert to “buyer beware birthing environments.”

Birthing centers like the one at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, Massachusetts are breaking new ground in woman-centered childbirth. A team of experts there committed to reducing the C-section rate have developed a model to reduce Cesarean sections in collaboration with Dr. Shah and others at physician-writer Atul Gawande’s Boston Ariadne Labs. Recently they made national news when the team delivered twins naturally, one of whom (at least) would have been deemed a section in most other delivery suites.

In 2017 the House of Representatives introduced the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act which directs the Department of Health and Human Services to offer a range of ways to reduce the maternal mortality rate, including Maternal Mortality Review Committees, at the state level. It also provides for public disclosure of information in state reports. Passed by the Senate, Donald Trump signed the bill into law in December 2018.

In the U.S., the C-section rate continues to vary from seven to 70 percent, while the CDC estimates that 60 percent of maternal deaths in the U.S. are preventable. Those are shocking numbers, especially in a so-called developed country that reveres motherhood, at least rhetorically.

The lives of childbearing women in this country depend on the success – and implementation – of established and proposed legislation, especially to address structural inequities that put black, indigenous and rural families at disproportionate risk, making policy changes relating to Medicaid imperative. Several Democratic legislators have introduced such legislation.

For it to make its way through the labyrinth of public policy, people who care about moms, wives, and other American women, urgently need to advocate on their behalf.

What better time to start than on Mother’s Day?

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social justice issues from Saxtons River, Vt. (www.elayne-clift.com

Women Beware! Birth Control, Abortion, and Your Healthcare Are at Risk

You’re a middle-class mom with two kids, a mortgage, a fragile marriage, and an elderly parent to care for when you find yourself pregnant. You’re a sexually active college student and because of a condom failure you’re pregnant. You’re pregnant with a wanted child when you learn your fetus has a serious anomaly and probably can’t survive outside the womb. You are a rural woman with limited income who gets routine healthcare at a Planned Parenthood now threatened with closure.

Variations on stories like these abound. For all kinds of women, and their advocates, they are terrifying, as federal and state legislators continue gunning for Planned Parenthood and vehemently resisting female autonomy, privacy, and decision-making.    

As a recent New York Times piece by the editorial board stated, “In its continuing assault on reproductive rights, the Trump Administration has issued potentially devastating changes to the nation’s nearly 50-year-old family planning program, Title X, which allows millions of women each year to afford contraception, cancer screenings, and other critical health services.”

To be clear, health clinics like Planned Parenthood have been barred from using federal funds for abortions, but they have been able to to offer non-federally funded abortions and other family planning services under one roof. Now the Department of Health and Human Services wants to make clinics that provide abortions navigate ridiculous regulations if they want to receive Title X funds. I mean ridiculous regs, like having separate entrances for abortion patients, or establishing an electronic health records system separate from their regular system. Providers will also be prohibited from making abortion referrals, or providing information that adheres to standards for “informed consent.”

In addition to threats at the federal level, more and more states are attempting to pass ridiculous anti-abortion laws, like requiring wider hallways or revamping janitor’s closets.

More Draconian is the unethical “domestic gag rule” that allows so-called “pro-life” staffers in Title X facilities to say a particular procedure doesn’t exist or to lie to patients about false risks of abortion.

As Dr. Leana Wen, the new president of Planned Parenthood, told The New York Times, “There will be many providers that will face an impossible decision: to participate in Title X and be forced to compromise their medical ethics, or to stop participating in that program,” a step that would lead to overwhelming demand for reproductive health care but not much in the way of supply to respond.

Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, states have been constructing a maze of abortion laws that codify, regulate and limit whether, when and under want circumstances a woman can have an abortion, as the Guttmacher Institute points out. Major provisions to states laws, some on the books, other in litigation or defeated, include requiring that abortions be performed in a hospital or set gestational limits on abortion.

One example is the attempt to ban abortions when a faint heartbeat is detected, which can occur as early as six weeks, before a woman may know she is pregnant. Another is state restrictions on coverage of abortion in private insurance plans, and states allowing individual health care providers to refuse to participate in abortions. Some states mandate that a woman have counseling, including information on purported links between abortion and breast cancer, the ability of a fetus to feel pain, or long-term mental health consequences for the woman.

The Trump administration clearly wants to evict Planned Parenthood from the federal family planning program. It also hopes to ban abortion referrals. At the state level, early abortion bans called “heartbeat bills” are being proposed in several states. So far, five of them have advanced this legislation but every “heartbeat bill” passed to date has been overturned in state or federal court. With Judges Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, who know what will happen?

Five states have already passed preemptive “trigger laws” which would immediately ban abortion outright if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Several abortion cases are currently in federal appeals courts or pending litigation in various states. Lawsuits are challenging such issues as required waiting periods, required ultrasounds, 15-week bans, admitting privileges, abortions for minors, and Medicaid coverage.

The situation, not only for women seeking their constitutional right to abortion, but for women – and men - seeking appropriate, quality, accessible, affordable reproductive health care ranging from preventive screening and contraception to treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, grows ever more dire as the Trump administration, and state legislators attempt to control what should be women’s private, personal decisions.

The irony is that rules rooted in anti-abortion (and anti-sex education) feelings threaten access to contraception, which prevents unwanted or unintended pregnancy and consequently increases health care costs in a nation where the cost of care is already skyrocketing.  Can anyone explain why that makes sense? 

More importantly, perhaps, can anyone fathom what would happen without Planned Parenthood?

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

www.elayne-clift.com

Will Afghan Women Pay the Price of a Peace Plan?

Khadija was 23-years old when she set herself on fire in December 2017. She had a three-month old baby but still she set herself alight. Such was the horror of her life as a young wife and mother in Afghanistan. A victim of domestic abuse, physically and emotionally, she survived third degree burns. “I am not alive, but I am not dead.” Khadija says. “Women are all handcuffed in this country.”

Her story, reported in TIME Magazine last December, is not atypical. Here’s another provided by an advocate in Kabul who says that because of her work she “could be killed at any moment.” Just before her 16th birthday, a young woman who was to be married to her cousin, tried to jump off a sixth-floor balcony. She said that her uncle – father of the groom - had been raping her since she was 10 years old.

These stories, and many others, illustrate why women attempt or commit suicide in such high numbers in a country where an estimated 3,000 people kill themselves every year, 80 percent of whom are women.

Afghanistan is one of the most challenging places in the world for women to survive. Many of them die in pregnancy or childbirth, 85 percent have no formal education and are illiterate, and their life expectancy is 51.  Forced marriage is the norm, usually before age 18. In 2012, 240 honor killings were reported but the real number is likely higher.

Under Taliban rule (1996 to 2001), women were controlled to such a degree that they were rendered invisible. They could be stoned to death for minor infractions of Taliban law. They could not leave their homes without a male relative, attend school, shop, or show their ankles. Widows were forced to beg, and then beaten for it.

Now, Afghanistan’s 2015 National Action Plan says it will offer equal rights for women, a commitment that Democratic senators are urging the Trump administration to ensure as peace negotiations proceed. 

A Taliban spokesman has said that “if peace comes and the Taliban returns, [it will not be] in the same harsh way as it was in 1996.” He added that while the Taliban weren’t against women’s education or employment, they wanted to “maintain cultural and religious codes,” adding, “we will be against the alien culture clothes worn by women and brought to our country.” Does that signal the return of blue burqas?

A Gallup survey conducted last summer revealed notably low levels of optimism in the country. While findings were not disaggregated by gender, we know that Afghan women suffer disproportionately in a country ranked the worst place in the world to be female.

“It hurts me to say this but the situation is only getting worse,” says Jameela Naseri, a lawyer at the NGO Medica Afghanistan, an arm of the German-based Medica Mondiale, which helps women and girls in crisis zones. She calls what happens to women in Afghanistan “a war on women.”

An Afghan diplomat promised anonymity told a journalist recently that “the government wants to say they’re prioritizing women, but they’re really not. Supporting women in Afghanistan is something people all over the world pay lip service to, but money and aid never get to them. It’s eaten by corruption.”

Last February, Afghanistan passed a criminal code hailed by the UN Assistance Mission there as a milestone. But one chapter of the code was removed before the law was passed. It was the one penalizing violence against women.

In a recent piece on Radio Free Europe, reporter Frud Bezhan noted that, “With increased talk of peace in Afghanistan, the Taliban is projecting itself as a more moderate force….The Taliban said in a statement issued on February 4 that it was committed to guaranteeing women their rights – under Islam – and ‘in a way that neither their legitimate rights are violated nor their human dignity and Afghan values are threatened.’”

 But in the same statement, Bezhan said, “the Taliban also suggested it wants to curtail the fragile freedoms gained by women since the U.S.-led invasion…prompting concern among Afghan rights campaigners.”

That concern is legitimate. The Taliban has denounced “so-called women’s rights activists” and has said that “due to corruption, the expenses brought and spent under the title of women’s rights have gone to the pockets of those who raise slogans of women’s rights. Under the name of women’s rights, there has been work for immorality, indecency, and the promotion of non-Islamic cultures.”

No wonder Afghan women are worried. Says activist Samira Hamidi, “According to the Taliban, we are so-called activists who are responsible for poor health, lack of education, and violence against women.”

“We are not turning back,” promises Fawzia Koofi, a female member of the Afghan parliament. “Anyone who wants to do politics [here] needs to respect the human freedoms, including the rights of women.

Adds Jameela Naseri, “Afghan women need to take matters into our own hands. We can’t wait for the government and international charities to save or liberate us.”

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Let's Be Clear About Third Trimester Abortion

As a longtime women’s health educator and advocate, I was apoplectic when I read a recent commentary in my local newspaper by a “chaplain serving an elderly population” who is also “treasurer of the Republican Party” in my state and a “county party chair.”

The op.ed. proffered so many spurious and false assertions, often stated by others with far-right political views, that my hair was nearly on fire. Given where we are in this country regarding abortion, I felt compelled to address one of the egregiously uninformed views of the author, which I did in a Letter to the Editor.  It seems to me now important to share what I wrote for a wider audience, in the hope of reaching others inclined to make uninformed claims about a vital issue that affects so many lives and the culture in which we live. 

This is the claim that blew me away. It relates to a bill in my state proposing a law like ones in some other states protecting a woman’s right to abortion moving forward. “The bill goes far beyond Roe [v. Wade], guaranteeing unrestricted abortion through all nine months of pregnancy…” the author wrote. It’s a misleading claim that calls for revisiting the facts regarding the inaccurate use of the term “late term abortion.”

The first thing to note here is that abortion after fetal viability is a rare occurrence and usually involves a medical crisis. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abortions after 21 weeks make up less than 1.3% of all abortions in the United States. Abortions that occur beyond 24 weeks make up less than 1% of all procedures. Exceptionally rare cases that happen after 24 weeks are often because a fetus has a condition that cannot be treated and and that renders the fetus unable to survive, regardless of gestational age or trimester.

Secondly, the 14th amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees due process and equal protection under the law, was vital to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The 14th amendment also protects the right to privacy and the Court held that a woman's right to an abortion fell within that statute. By a 7–2 majority the Court ruled that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. Importantly, the Court also determined the point of fetal viability as the “capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb,” hence the 24- week marker. The Court’s decision gave women a right to abortion during the entirety of the pregnancy, however, while defining different levels of state interest for regulating abortion in the second and third trimesters.

It’s important to know that, as the Guttmacher Institute points out, if a physician determines that the child is “non-viable” and/or the abortion is necessary for the physical or mental health of the mother, a woman can have an abortion from the moment of conception until the child’s birth. State laws restricting third trimester abortions are unconstitutional under the precedent of Doe v. Bolton, a case in which the Supreme Court overturned a Georgia law. (Numerous states have laws that ban or restrict abortions in the third trimester. Because these statutes remain in place or haven’t been contested in federal court, they may imply that they are allowed by federal law. But because federal law trumps state law, no restrictions can be enacted that do not also allow the doctor to determine if abortion is necessary for the health of the mother.)

Here’s another fact: Overturning Roe and Doe won’t end all third-trimester abortions. When the Supreme Court throws the abortion issue back to individual states, third-trimester abortions will still be protected in states that reiterate prior standards for “viability” or “health.”

But here’s the most important thing for everyone to know. No woman decides to have an abortion after 24 weeks recklessly or without a great deal of anguish. Perhaps she does it because of a serious illness she has, like decompensating heart disease. Maybe her baby has a delayed diagnosis of anencephaly, which means the fetus forms without a complete brain or skull. There are a multitude of medical crises that can precipitate a third trimester abortion. But the decision is never taken lightly. In most cases, there is deep grieving and a profound sense of loss, brought about because of medical necessity and the wish that a much loved and wanted baby not suffer.

That’s why people like the man who wrote the troubling commentary – claiming that he “doesn’t oppose or seek to diminish women’s rights” and that he “supports [women’s] right to their own body and right to choose” -- people who misunderstand not just the right to abortion but the reasons women choose it, at any stage of pregnancy, must move beyond facile arguments, misstatements of fact, and feeble justifications. They must somehow begin to recognize that for many women, the choices they face are devastating and immensely complicated.  

Most urgently, they must find it in themselves to be compassionate and to resist judging those whose experiences and viewpoints differ from theirs. 

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

Why Are So Many Native American Women Abused, Missing and Murdered?

Savanna Greywind was a young woman in Fargo, North Dakota about to give birth in a few weeks when she was brutally murdered. Leona LeClair Kinsey was an older woman living in Oregon when she went missing eighteen years ago. She is still missing. RoyLynn Rides Horse, a Crow tribal member, died in 2016 after being beaten, burned, and left in a field to die.

These stories are all too common, but statistics about how pervasive the problem is are hard to find. Many cases go unreported, others aren’t well documented, and no centralized database exists in the U.S. government to track cases.

 According to the Indian Law Resource Center, violence against indigenous women in the U.S. has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence. Alaska Native women have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States. On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average.

“You really have to contact tribe by tribe, family by family, to really see the true impact,” one advocate says. “We are shoved under the rug by corruption even in our own homelands,” says another. “I’m here to say we will not be shoved under the rug anymore.”

At the heart of the problem is the longstanding indifference and hostility to Native Americans, especially Native American women, which can be traced back to the days when separating Native people from their families and homes and denying them their culture was a deliberate attempt to destroy Native beliefs, ways of life, even people.

Continuing racism and sexism contribute to the impression that indigenous women are assailable, says Barbara Perry, a profess at the University of Ontario. “It’s not unusual for women of color generally to be perceived as inferior to white people as a class and inferior white women as a subclass.”

The effects of these travesties remain present in unique ways for Native women. In addition to suffering sex trafficking, sexual violence, and the risk of being disappeared, they are often homeless, living in dire poverty, and totally disconnected from their families and communities.  

Now they face a new vulnerability from the flood of non-native workers into oil-rich regions or near reservations. Of particular concern is the workers who will lay the Keystone XL pipeline running from Canada through Montana, Illinois, and Texas, bringing many more workers into the “man camps” being built along the way. The problems that these camps bring is particularly acute in a region stretching across 200,000 square miles along the Montana-North Dakota state line. Attacks there on Native American women have increased dramatically as tens of thousands of transient oil workers have inhabited the temporary housing known as man camps.

Tribal law enforcement has no jurisdiction over non-native men who assault Native American women on reservations, according to Cheryl Bennet, an Arizona State University professor. “If a white person commits murder or rape against a Native American person, the federal government would have jurisdiction over those crimes instead of the tribe or state government.” But when tribal law enforcement sent sexual abuse cases to the FBI and U.S. Attorney Offices, federal prosecutors declined more than two-thirds of the cases, according to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report.

In recent months, the plight of Native women has begun receiving attention thanks to a growing activist movement that is being heard in state capitals and on Capitol Hill. Last year Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), defeated in the November mid-term election, introduced a bill to standardize law enforcement protocols relating to missing and murdered Native Americans. It attracted sixteen co-sponsors but didn’t make it out of committee.  

At the state level, Republican Rep. Gina McCabe introduced a House bill in Washington State that would bring the federal, state, and federally recognized sovereign tribal governments together to ensure that everyone in the state who goes missing is reported and listed in a central location. The bill, now making its way through the legislative process, mandates that the State Patrol creates a list of missing Native American women in Washington by June this year, working together with tribal and non-tribal police agencies.

May 5, 2017 marked the first National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls. Twelve years earlier, the movement for the safety of Native women, largely spearheaded by the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) and other groups, had led the struggle to include a separate title for Native women, called Safety for Indian Women, in the Violence Against Women Act. It was a start in raising awareness of this national issue but much more needs to be done.

More than half of Native American women have been sexually assaulted, including over a third who have been raped during their lifetime. That rate is nearly two-and-a-half times higher than for white women, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.

As the NIWRC said at the first National Day of Awareness, “Before this crisis is sufficiently addressed, it must first be acknowledged.”

That means by all of us.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.www.elayne-clift.com

Is It Really Silly Season So Soon?

January 1, 2019 and the horses were out of the gate, their hoofbeats assaulting our already over-taxed patience. The political horseplay began with a vengeance - before the new Congress set foot in Washington and before anyone had formally declared they were running for President next year. The new year promised the American public, and the world, a long and rocky race as all eyes, arguments, and predictions focused on the 2020 election.

Some pundits say the palaver is right on time. But most of us would probably concur that it’s way too early to begin the non-stop spewing and sputtering when we don’t even know who the serious contenders will be, or what they have to offer.

Still, the mainstream media dug in its heels and to the exclusion of reporting real and urgent news, they started having a field day. The New York Times, for example, ran a piece with this over-written, somewhat hysterical headline: "Rashida Tlaib’s Expletive-Laden Cry to Impeach Trump Upends Democrats’ Talking Points"!  "Expletive-Laden Cry"? She said one bad word at a private event and got caught on tape. The M-F- word, it seems, is enough to ruin a woman’s budding political career, but a guy who says publicly that he likes to “grab pussy” gets a pass and becomes president?

Dancing while Female?  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez danced, beautifully and joyfully, while in college, mimicking a famous movie dance scene. Someone taped it. A right-winger posted it, and hey presto, she's the bad "little girl."  

Elizabeth Warren went public first and she's immediately "unlikable." Sound familiar? Not only was Hillary Rodham Clinton tagged “unlikeable,” her headbands and hairstyles were scrutinized ad nauseam, as was Michelle Obama’s choice of sleeveless dresses, now the norm in women’s fashion.

Common denominator? Fear of powerful women, i.e., misogyny, and it needs to be called out every single time it rears its ugly head, whether in Congress, in conversation, or by TV pundits, social and print media, among the worst offenders for stoking this kind of sexist nonsense. Women like Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters know that game when they see it, and they aren't afraid to confront it, making them superb role models.

Moving on, how fair is it to be polling for favorite 2020 candidates and reporting on outcomes when most potential candidates have not yet declared? How in the world can anyone know who they are inclined to vote for until they hear what frontrunners have to say, never mind time to scrutinize their experience and policy perspectives?

It was nothing short of shocking to hear potential candidate Terry McAuliffe, former governor of Virginia, do a self-serving pre-stump speech critical of the progressive agenda of the Democratic party’s left in which he revealed how out of touch he is with what just happened in the mid-term election. Similarly, California Senator Dianne Feinstein didn’t get what the Blue/Pink Wave was all about. With all due respect to Joe Biden, Sen. Feinstein, and Mr. McAuliffe, the election was not about same old white guy-driven policies and agendas that don't speak to the new generation of Democratic constituencies. It was about inclusivity, relevance, and effectiveness in a 21st century political world.

That world is culturally, ethnically, and economically diverse, moving toward progressive ideas and goals, deeply committed to social justice, the earth’s survival, a democratic future, and other critical issues of our time. People like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke and others deserve their chance as McAuliffe, Feinstein and Biden have had theirs.

Messages about economic gains for the middle class (which means mostly white people) no longer resonate at a time when the U.S. government is caging and killing kids, when our water and food is no longer safe and children are dying because of rolled back regulations, when adults and seniors are dying prematurely because they can’t afford their medicines (like insulin) and can’t access health care, when Americans can’t earn a living wage, when people get killed just for being black and hate crimes are on the rise, when the planet we share is in real danger of dying, when ethical and moral behavior in Congressional offices and chambers no longer exists, and when we are on the brink of serious disasters, man-made and natural, with no one at the helm or in government agencies who understands or cares so long as their coffers are full.

This is not a time to be politically regressive. Our full attention, our intellectual faculties, our conscience and compassion have never been more important or more necessary. They must be exercised by each of us to the fullest degree if we are to survive as a nation and as citizens of a morally and physically safe world.

Everyone must commit to that effort, including those who have served as our political voice in the past, and those who want to find their way and use their voices to offer appropriate legislation and new, important ideas, knowing that they will be heard and that their ideas will be considered carefully, not judged on what they say privately, what they wear, or how they dance.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics, and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

www.elayne-clift.com

The Sham, Shame and Real Purpose of a Senate Committee

The Sham, the Shame, and the Real Purpose of a Senate Committee

In the end it wasn’t what “she said, he said.”  It was what she did, what he did.

She gave moving, credible testimony. He rambled and raged. She was composed and coherent. He was defiant and disrespectful. She was polite and dignified. He was rude and belligerent. She was calm. He dissembled, putting to rest the myth of female hysteria. She was quietly self-assured. He threw a self-pitying, tearful tantrum.  She told the truth. He lied.

The world watched as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford told her riveting and difficult story with grace and courage. Then it watched, cringing, as Judge Brett Kavanaugh stumbled his way to self-aggrandizement and entitlement, unleashing a dangerous temper unsuited to service on the Supreme Court.

They witnessed a Senate Judiciary Committee in shambles as Republican members, all white men, reprised behavior familiar from the vile verbiage visited upon Anita Hill in 1991, including by two senators who were on the committee when she testified.

The contrast between the morning hearings when Dr. Ford gave her difficult opening statement and the afternoon when Kavanaugh simpered his Trumpian opening remarks couldn’t have been starker. The morning was civil and respectful. The female prosecutor hired to ask Republicans’ questions, while interrogating Dr. Ford as if it were a trial, said nothing overtly offensive.

Later, the civility ended when Republican committee members reverted to form, Senator Lindsay Graham spewing invectives at his Democratic colleagues while exonerating Kavanaugh.  It was then that the prosecutor, who’d been assigned to ask Republicans’ questions, disappeared, fired midstream when she asked something Republicans found dangerous.

Could anything make clearer what Republican men on the committee think of women?  Could they have treated Dr. Ford, Senator Dianne Feinstein, or the prosecutor with more contempt?

What was happening as we watched the fiasco? What is the real issue?

It’s sexism. Misogyny. Male privilege and male sense of entitlement. It’s the patriarchal power struggle grounded in robbing women of agency, autonomy – even over their own bodies - and a place in the public square. And it’s gone on forever.

Aristophanes understood that in 411 BC when he wrote Lysistrata, a play about women using their sexual power to stop war. Susan B. Anthony and the women at the 1848 women’s convention faced it when they fought for women’s suffrage. Contemporary women recognized it when Anita Hill was trashed. We know it now as we continue to fight for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and the right to privacy and decision-making in our reproductive lives.

We live in a culture where male privilege and power are embedded, entrenched in every sector of society, from corporations and churches to academia, entertainment and news organizations, sports, science, and medicine. It’s a culture in which females are admonished to nurture and ensure the comfort of males while at the same time, we are reminded to protect ourselves from the uncontrollable sexual excesses of males because they can’t help themselves and can’t take responsibility for their behavior. We are taught to be good girls who dress properly, remain abstinent and restrained, who never go anywhere, not even the bathroom, alone. We are trained to be silent.

When women found the courage to tell Sigmund Freud about their sexual abuse he labeled their stories fantasies. Anita Hill was told that too. That’s why women don’t tell their stories. “No one will believe me,” they say.

Now that’s changing. In the last month calls to sexual abuse hotlines have spiked by 200 percent. Friends are telling friends. Wives are telling husbands and partners. Girls are telling parents. And women like Ana Marie Archilla and Maria Gallagher, the two brave women who demanded that Senator Jeff Flake look at them when they were talking to him, are putting politicians on notice: We are not going to be invisible or quiet or silent any longer. We matter!

As Rebecca Traister wrote in a New York Times editorial, and as poet Audre Lord, feminist writer Carolyn Heilbrun, and activists like Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too Movement, recognize, what has been denied to women until now is anger and expressions of anger. That stops now. We are speaking up, crying out, and refusing to be silenced any longer.  

So, as I write this commentary a cursory, controlled FBI investigation aimed at appeasement is occurring. The outcome of that investigation and what happens subsequently carries deep significance for our political future. But it doesn’t match the importance of what is happening in our culture as we make change and see it coming, however slowly.

It is coming because of courageous women like Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, Ana Maria Archilla, Maria Gallagher, and the multitudes of others who will not be silent  any more in the face of violence perpetrated against them. We will no longer defer to malicious men. We will no longer suffer political rape symbolized by the cry to “plow through” uttered by men in power. We will fight with everything we’ve got until men crawl kicking and screaming toward seeing, hearing, believing and respecting women.

It begins with three simple words: “I believe her.” And “thank you, Christine.”

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A Deeper Look at What the ME TOO Movement Can Teach Us

It’s been some time since the Harvey Weinstein revelations opened the floodgates of personal stories about sexual harassment and assault. Still, women’s stories keep coming, and so they should. We must bear witness if things are going to change, not only in the halls of Hollywood studios and Capitol Hill offices, but everywhere that people live, work and carry on their lives.

We’ve learned good lessons in the telling of those stories, and in the copious commentary that followed. We’ve recognized that Zero Tolerance policies must be implemented and enforced, that non-disclosure agreements, buyouts and retaliation must end, that the real issues behind acts of aggression against women and girls - culture, misogyny, male privilege and power, for example – are big, complex, and urgently need to be the center of exploration, discourse, and social change. We know that we have to educate our children, both male and female, about what is acceptable and what is not in human behavior. We need, as one columnist put it, “to move away from the narratives of victimization and sympathy.”

But there is a deeper analysis occurring now and it is beginning to help us understand the dynamics involved when one person hurts, attacks, terrifies and traumatizes another, based on gender.

In her important book Women and Power, English scholar Mary Beard reminds us that the silencing of women was ever thus. Aristotle thought women’s voices proved their wickedness and that virtue lay in masculine tones. Mythology shares stories of women who’ve had their tongues cut out to silence them while other tales have women turned into inanimate objects.

Such attempts at silencing females have long trailed women, from Odysseus’s wife Penelope to Hillary Clinton and other women in the world’s public spaces. Stories of silencing women, whether mythological or modern, are part of our personal stories too – “mansplaining,” not recognizing the value of our ideas until they think they were theirs first, ignoring our leadership skills. As Beard says, “When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.”  So have Eastern cultures. A recent NPR story exposed schools in China to which girls are sent to learn that their purpose in life is to serve their husbands silently, even those who rape and beat them.

Beard urges us to “interrogate our notions of power,” and to examine why they exclude women. Why are our ideas about authority, mastery, and knowledge perceived as gender-based, she asks. And how, when institutional structures are “coded as male,” can you ask women to fit into them? Clearly, the structures themselves must change.

Greg Weiner, writing in The New York Times, reminds us that character matters when it comes to moral behavior, which “calls for a deep capacity for judgment.” True morality, he argues, must be cultivated and must exceed private, coded actions.  

Adding to the #ME TOO tsunami, Paul Bloom’s recent discussion of new books in The New Yorker includes Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others, an exploration of humans’ capacity for cruelty, by philosopher David Livingston, who quotes Claude Levi-Strauss: “Humankind ceases at the border of the tribe,” the noted anthropologist said. Here, the tribe consists of men bound together by deep-seated misogynistic feelings that render them incapable of seeing, and treating, women as equally human.   That’s why it’s easy to “slut-shame” and to say you can grab women by their genitals; after all, they are not “like I am.”

In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne, assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University, makes this observation about sexual violence: “The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature.” She argues that we must recognize “the banality of misogyny,” much as Hannah Arendt argued that the world had to acknowledge “the banality of evil” after the Holocaust.  Manne raises “the disturbing possibility that people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness.” Like others, Manne argues that that there is a larger truth in this tendency. “Misogyny, she says, is “often not a sense of women’s inhumanity as lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem.”  Men, she explains, have come to expect things of women, including attention, admiration, and sex. “Misogyny,” adds Bloom, “is a mindset that polices and enforces these goals, it’s the ‘law enforcement branch’ of the patriarchy.”  Bad women must be punished.

This is heady, important, and sometimes difficult stuff.  But it offers the possibility of deeper examination that could lead to necessary exploration of factors that explain why so many men do what they do to women, especially in the workplace where females may be highly threatening.

Such analysis leads to other important considerations: How does this psychological and sociological reality within cultures influence media coverage of stories about women? Who gets to frame issues and how?  What language do we use in interpreting women’s experience? Who tells their stories? What impact can this deeper grasp of human psychology have on decision-making in the halls of governance?

That’s just for starters.  Still, we must begin somewhere. As Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) has said, “This is our moment.” Oprah Winfrey sounded a clarion call to action in her Golden Globe speech. Now, poised for the moment when we do move forward, women’s voices, experiences, and insights are leading the way. Surely, that is how it should be. Their time has come.

ME TOO: Who Among Us Doesn't Have a Story to Tell?

She was an exceptional legal secretary, a regal beauty, and an independent woman who repeatedly tried to ignore her boss’s advances.  One day, upon his return from a foreign business trip, he presented her with a string of French pearls and a litany of love. It was the 1930s so the secretary saw no way out but to quit her job. That woman was my mother.

She was a motivated professional who took her work seriously.  The first time it happened she worked for a medical board that certified physicians. At a formal dinner one evening, a doctor rubbed his hand up her leg under the tablecloth. She pushed it away. Later the doctor invited her on a trip to the Caribbean. She rebuffed him.

The next time, she was working in a different city when, standing next to her seated boss as he reviewed a document she’d handed him, he put his hand up her skirt. She slapped it away.

The time after that, she was on assignment in another country. Her work finished, she approached the local director to say goodbye. He grabbed her, kissing her on the lips.  Repulsed, she pulled away. But once again she told no one, because it was a time when women didn’t speak of sexual harassment or sexual assault, there being no words for it She was silent because she didn’t want to lose her job or be accused of “asking for it,” and she knew nothing would be done about it anyway.   That woman was me.

It isn’t necessary to cite other times it happened to me because by now everyone sort of gets the picture.  And I was one of the lucky ones: I was never raped.

Now, thanks to a growing number of brave, bold, truth-telling women, we are finally talking about the rampant sexual assault and harassment taking place in just about every workplace you can name. We are naming names. We are outing a pervasive culture of sexual abuse that exists in this, and most other cultures. We are refusing to be complicit via silence, choosing now to raise our collective voices in order to press charges so that we can put an end to the madness of male power and its concomitant sense of entitlement.

We thought Anita Hill’s dignity and truth-telling all those years ago might have been the beginning we see now, but it didn’t happen then.  Thankfully it’s happening now, because of a growing cadre of women who will no longer submit to second-class status, silence, or male prerogative.

Many of those women now hold public office. But they no longer hold their tongues. By telling their stories in the halls of power, they are starting to bring down men who insult them, trivialize them, accuse them of being liars and sluts, physically assault them, and once made them feel small and afraid.

There are men standing with us now too, taking up the fight against sexual harassment and abuse. Perhaps they heard playwright Eve Ensler when she said, “I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us?” To those men, we say, it’s about time, and if they really kick in, thank you.

Rob Okun is one of them. He is a writer and psychotherapist who edited a collection called Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement.  In a recent blog on www.counterpunch.org he wrote, “For decades, men who have never battered or raped would offer excuses for not standing up for women who faced harassment – and worse – offering this lame rationale: ‘I don’t engage in these behaviors, I’m a good guy, these are women’s issues, not mine.’ Those days are over. Sexual assault is not a women’s issue; it’s a community issue, and men, ready or not, we have to break our silence.”

In his piece, Okun credits women with “dragging domestic and sexual violence from society’s shadows” as they created rape crisis centers and shelter for domestic violence survivors. He credits the few men who stood with them initially as allies while coming to grips with their own passivity in the face of violence against women. He calls upon more men to act. He also calls out Donald Trump, who “has yet to pay a price for his sexual assaults.”

The work of Okun and other men working independently and alongside women is encouraging. But like gun violence, the problem of sexual harassment and assault will not simply disappear. It will take concerted group effort, and individual brazen acts. It will require telling our stories. It will take laws and enforced regulations in various workplaces. It will call for zero tolerance.

Can we get there in the age of Weinstein, Spacey and Trump?  As one good man said not long ago, “Yes, we can!” But only, it seems, if we raise our voices, tell our stories, press charges, and vehemently declare Enough!

Back to Barefoot and Pregnant Politics

In the late 1970s as I was beginning my career in women’s health, one of the first feminist icons I met of was a flamboyant, passionate, and deeply committed woman named Perdita Huston.  She had made her mark internationally working as a journalist and a Peace Corp professional, but what put her on the feminist map was her 1979 book Third World Women Speak Out. 

 

Huston’s book was remarkable because she was the first person to give women in the developing world a chance to tell their own stories. She gave them voice, and with that voice what they proclaimed most loudly was that they wanted fewer children, and they wanted those children to be educated.

It was a radical moment with far-reaching ramifications because it coincided with the early days of family planning becoming a goal of international funding agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). With the help of the Women in Development movement, spawned in large part by the Women’s Movement at large, donor organizations had begun to realize that family planning was key to a country’s economic and social development and that women’s reproductive health was an issue that mattered.

Subsequent years revealed that family planning was, indeed, a wise investment. Countries like Egypt and Bangladesh showed that once women controlled their fertility, families, communities, and countries benefited, whether by increasing educational opportunities for girls, widening agricultural opportunities for women, or bringing women into decision-making at some levels of society.

None of this happened quickly or easily; there are always naysayers and development “specialists” willing to argue against innovation (and empowering women), no matter how simple and effective an intervention may be. But gradually the world saw how important family planning was to the healthy development of nations, let alone women and their families.

Now fast forward to Trumpian times, in which the president has reinstated Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City Policy of 1984 – revoked by Bill Clinton, restored by George W. Bush, and revoked by Barack Obama - in which nongovernmental organizations are forbidden to receive U.S. federal funding if they perform or promote abortion in other countries. 

Trump goes even further. His administration, including the Departments of Health and Human Services, Treasury and Labor, wants to make it easier for employers to deny contraceptive coverage to their employees if the employer has “a religious or moral objection” to doing so. The administration also wants to make it harder for women denied birth control coverage to get no-cost contraception directly from insurance companies, as they have been doing.

In an attempt to rush this through, the administration made the absurd claim that taking time to seek public comment would be “contrary to the public interest,” and went so far as to say that coverage of contraception could lead to “risky sexual behavior,” a nod to those who believe women’s sexuality is evil.  Not only is that one huge misogynistic insult to women; what is riskier than setting women up for unwanted pregnancies while trying to eliminate safe abortion and shut down Planned Parenthood?

 These actions are a setback of huge proportion. They affect not just American women, but women around the world.  In Madagascar, for example, the change in policy is forcing dramatic cutbacks by the largest provider of long term contraception in the country, Marie Stopes International (MSI), which receives millions of dollars from USAID for its work there. Ironically, abortion is illegal in that country, but MSI cannot receive American aid because it will not renounce abortion as part of reproductive health services in other parts of the world.

Hundreds of women and girls flock to remote MSI clinics where they receive everything from malaria prevention to HIV treatment to contraceptives. It’s a scene repeated all over the developing world no matter who is providing services. What is to become of all those women?

The policy, already making its way to the courts, is clearly aimed at mollifying organizations like March for Life and Real Alternatives, anti-abortion groups that don’t qualify for religious exemptions but claim to hold strong moral convictions unrelated to a particular religion.

In his long string of lies, Trump and his administration have claimed, absent of any evidence, that its new rules won’t have an effect on “over 99.9 percent of the 165 million women in the United States,” while simultaneously arguing that low-income women will still be able to get subsidized or free contraception through community and government health programs. All this while the administration plans to substantially cut government spending on such programs.

The President’s attack on birth control, safe and accessible abortion, and the Affordable Care Act is low on intelligence and high on lies. It is spiteful, vindictive, woman-hating, and downright mean. It will hurt millions of women and their families. There are only two ways to describe it: utterly inhumane and grossly misogynistic. Everyone should be resisting mightily.