Pacific Views

Second Sex Dispatch

Feministing: Your weekly feminist reader. If you're a white woman, you might have trouble getting your tubes tied, if you're a brown woman, you might wind up forcibly sterilized. Nothing's more fashionable than crazy or dead women, obviously. Native American women are routinely sexually assaulted, largely by non-Indian males, and the House has agreed to fund programs to combat and study this endemic abuse. Overpopulation is SO not our fault. How much jail time will women get for having an abortion when the nutcases make it illegal?

Lawyers, Guns and Money: But hey, why wait for abortion to be banned completely to lock women up? Right now, this very minute, there are women in jail for having stillborn infants.

Focus on the Family: A new Arkansas law will fine abortion clinics $1,000 a day if they don't put up signs informing their patients that coerced abortion is illegal. FotF describes this as offering "a way out" for "abortion-minded" women, because as we all know, women only ever have abortions because someone forced them to.

International Herald Tribune: Anti-choice misogynists no longer have the Republican party by the short hairs, which is a small, small consolation in the wake of this year's disastrous Supreme Court decision.

The Hartford Courant: Why is a bill designed by Democrats to tackle the root causes of unwanted pregnancy allowed to be defined in this news story by Republicans, 'moderate' Democrats, and one of those traitorous hacks at NARAL whining about divisiveness? You know what's divisive? Telling me I become a virtual ward of the state the minute I become pregnant.

Pandagon: When women are less aggressive during salary negotiations, it turns out that they're making a completely rational choice based on how people are likely to react to them.

Washington Post: The woman who pushed Texas legislators to enact universal HPV vaccination for girls has died of cervical cancer.

Women's eNews: A pregnant court reporter talks about her judicial process ultrasound, recounting her impressions of the Supreme Court proceeding this year where the conservative court majority decided to ban a procedure commonly recognized as the safest for medically-necessary second and third term abortions. Canada grants asylum to a woman and her young daughter on the basis of the threat that her daughter might be subject to FGM, which is known to increase mother and infant mortality in later pregnancy.

New York Times: The rules of the modern workplace were set up to penalize workers for having family obligations, but a new class of lawsuit is finally starting to turn that tide. While this used to be seen as solely a woman's issue (and we know *those* aren't important), more men are getting caught up in regressive family leave policies as the structure of families has changed over the years. The US, naturally, is the stingiest industrial democracy in the world when it comes to family leave.

Never forget, Men Hate You, a permanent PSA from our favorite spinster aunt down in Texas.

Posted by natasha at July 31, 2007 04:17 PM | Women | TrackBack(2) | Technorati links |