“A Mother in Jail for Helping Her Daughter Have an Abortion”

Colleagues,

If we can’t do something to help women like this, we need to reorganize.

Not only does this continue the immoral intrusion by the church and the state into the reproductive destinies of women, but it also imposes unwarranted suffering on this poor, in all senses of the term, family.

Who is served by this prosecutor’s attack? Doesn’t she have real crime to prosecute?

Who is served by this judge’s decision? He is depriving a family of its mother, when all she did was to protect her daughter’s health. What will happen to this woman in prison? What will happen to her family while she is not there to take care of them?

Where is the outrage?

And, where can we contribute to her defense? We all know that if she were wealthy, she would never have been in this position.

Enough is enough.

Mary

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“Emma Watson Threatened With Nude Photo Leak for Speaking Out About Women’s Equality”

You can find the appalling details at Slate.

I also link again to this argument from Emily Bazelon. Simply put, naked images made public without consent do not deserve first amendment protection. As this particular case makes abundantly clear, they are posted to hurt and humiliate. I’m no lawyer, but I would call this hate speech. As Bazelon (who is a lawyer) argues, web administrators ought to be required by national legislation (a revision of or judicial reinterpretation of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act) to remove such content upon receiving complaint–in exactly the same way they are with respect to copyrighted materials. (A handful of individual states do already have some kind of laws in place.)

Even if you are disinclined to sympathize with celebrities, who make so much of their living displaying their handsome, gorgeous bodies, know that “revenge porn” is a huge and growing online phenomenon. Legislators need to get their act together. Find one campaign to put a stop to this here.

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“Health Researchers Will Get $10.1 Million to Counter Gender Bias in Studies”

The NIH has launched a program to counter gender bias in medical research. Fortunately policy makers seem to be listening to feminist bioethicists — rather than Fields and his ilk — in at least this instance!

Find the story at the New York Times.

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Research into Sex Differences – Carrots and Sticks

In this piece from Scientific American, R. Douglas Fields argues that the new US National Institutes of Health policy, which is intended to drive research in sex differences, is a major step in the wrong direction. The new policy requires NIH-funded projects to use equal numbers of male and female animals and cells in their studies.  Fields is correct that additional targeted funding would strengthen the initiative, but even without targeted funding the policy still has value.

The importance of sex differences varies according to the condition in question.  But we often don’t know how and to what degree sex matters because differences are not routinely investigated.  Many clinical guidelines and Cochrane reviews note that evidence regarding sex difference is missing.  Meta-analysis can often not be conducting because journals continue to publish studies that don’t provide sex-specific reporting of results.  For example, clinical guidelines on the use of antiarrhythmics continue to be based on research that significantly under-represents women relative to the proportion of women prescribed these drugs. It is too late at the point of guideline development to demand further information about sex difference because the research simply isn’t there.  Investigation, analysis and reporting of sex differences needs to be systematically built into research further up-stream. Certainty this requires more money and time, and diverts resources from other avenues of research. But whether this requires “a duplication of time and effort that is rarely practical or scientifically warranted”, as Fields argues, depends on the value one places on having evidence based medicine that equally serves male and female patients.  When data is systematically collected and reported, patterns can be detected, often years after the original research. However it can be prohibitively expensive to replicated studies because sex differences are subsequently thought relevant.

Fields’ criticism that the policy compels all researchers to study sex regardless of the focus or hypothesis of their study, but provides no additional funding to do so, is fair. Money is a significant driver of behavior, including research.  If you want to refocus the research agenda – either towards research that addresses the health needs of the world’s poor, research into behavioral and environmental solutions to chronic disease or research into sex difference – the most effective means is to target funding.  Pogge’s Health Impact Fund proposal, which aims to provide financial incentives to address conditions accounting for significant global morbidity and mortality,  is an attempt to do this.  Indeed one of the reasons that the NIH requirement to include minorities and women in NIH funded research has been more effective than similar recommendations in other jurisdictions is that compliance is tied to NIH funding.  Targeted funding would strengthen the policy but this does not mean it is a major step in the wrong direction.

PJW Note: Much more can be found on this issue in IJFAB‘s special issue, “Research Ethics: Women, Sex, and Gender in Biomedical Research,” guest edited by Angela Ballantyne, Belinda Bennett, Isabel Karpin, and Wendy Rogers. (Content is behind a paywall if you or your institution does not subscribe.)

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AIC goes to Hollywood: Why We Should Watch MTV’s Faking It

MTV’s half-hour romantic comedy series, Faking It, will feature a character with an intersex condition (or DSD) this season (see the Hollywood Reporter story here).

20140330232930!Faking_It_2014_MTV

This is not the first time a character with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) has appeared on the small screen. Individuals with AIS have typical male chromosomes, but the bodies of those with “complete” AIS (CAIS) cannot respond to androgens, and so are phenotypically female. Some in the US may recall the quirky and smart and short-lived series, Freaks and Geeks from the late 1990s. The series closed with a girl’s revelation of her CAIS to her sweet and startled boyfriend. While a gutsy storyline to introduce, its impact was minimal. Aside from the low ratings that had guaranteed the series’ premature end, there was little in the way of public awareness that would allow any uptake of AIS in particular, or atypical sex anatomies in general.

Six years later, there was a notorious second-season episode of House, featuring a supermodel who, as Dr. House crassly informs her and her abusive father, has testicular cancer. Repeatedly referring to the patient as “a man,” Dr. House tells the distressed teenager that she’ll be fine “after I cut your balls off.”  Continue reading

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AIC goes to Hollywood:
Why We Should Watch MTV’s Faking It

MTV’s half-hour romantic comedy series, Faking It, will feature a character with an intersex condition (or DSD) this season (see the Hollywood Reporter story here).

20140330232930!Faking_It_2014_MTV

This is not the first time a character with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) has appeared on the small screen. Individuals with AIS have typical male chromosomes, but the bodies of those with “complete” AIS (CAIS) cannot respond to androgens, and so are phenotypically female. Some in the US may recall the quirky and smart and short-lived series, Freaks and Geeks from the late 1990s. The series closed with a girl’s revelation of her CAIS to her sweet and startled boyfriend. While a gutsy storyline to introduce, its impact was minimal. Aside from the low ratings that had guaranteed the series’ premature end, there was little in the way of public awareness that would allow any uptake of AIS in particular, or atypical sex anatomies in general.

Six years later, there was a notorious second-season episode of House, featuring a supermodel who, as Dr. House crassly informs her and her abusive father, has testicular cancer. Repeatedly referring to the patient as “a man,” Dr. House tells the distressed teenager that she’ll be fine “after I cut your balls off.”  Continue reading

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“Remember #BringBackOurGirls? This Is What Has Happened In The 5 Months Since”

It’s depressing.

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“‘Why Didn’t You Just Leave?’: Six Domestic Violence Survivors Explain Why It’s Never That Simple”

To follow-up thematically to the New Yorker article linked below, these stories from HuffPost.

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“Time to End Sex-Testing of Female Athletes”

Because of an International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and International Olympic Committee (IOC) policy, Dutee Chand, an 18-year-old Indian sprinter, was blocked from competing at the 2014 Commonwealth Games because her body makes too much testosterone. She has been prohibited from competing at all national and international sporting events on the grounds that she has an unfair advantage over her competitors. These actions left Chand feeling “completely shattered.”

Her situation might sound familiar, because it is.

Find the full article by Georgiann Davis at Ms. Magazine Blog.

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“A Raised Hand: Can a new approach curb domestic homicide?”

Dorothy Giunta-Cotter knew that someday her husband, William, would kill her. They met in 1982, when he was twenty and she was fifteen: a girl with brown eyes and cascading dark hair. Over the course of twenty years, he had kidnapped her, beaten her, and strangled her with a telephone cord. When she was pregnant with their second child, he pushed her down the stairs. After visits to the emergency room, he withheld her pain medicine and, at one point, forbade her to wear a neck brace.

Find the full story at the New Yorker.

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Visual Critique: Illustrating the Issue of Street Harassment

Over the last couple of months, various artists have spoken out against the phenomenon of cat-calling. Last year, Buzzfeed released a list of “18 Kickass Illustrated Responses to Street Harassment,” but I only recently noticed many more such responses on social media. The blog Robot Hugs, for example, put together a very clear comic strip that explores the verbal objectification of women in public spaces.

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More recently, Playboy released a “flow chart” illustrated by Shea Strauss entitled, “Should You Catcall Her?” The flowchart inevitably concludes that unless the woman in question has confirmed that she enjoys being called at in this way by you (the man), catcalling is not appropriate—no matter the situation.

Continue reading

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“Get Stolen Naked Photos Off the Web: Congress needs to change the law to force Reddit and 4Chan to do the right thing.”

It’s time to extend the protections copyright offers to victims of involuntary porn. These images are clear invasions of privacy, and it’s not hard to judge whether there is value in making them public (as it might be for a celebrity’s stolen emails, for example). Once a site like 4Chan is on notice that it is hosting nude or sexual images that a star like Jennifer Lawrence—or a person who is not famous at all—says she didn’t consent to distribute, the law should give that site every reason to take the photos or video down. This will not put free speech or the free Internet at risk. It will just give solace to people who clearly deserve that.

Read the full article from Emily Bazelon at Slate.

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