April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

Debra

Condolences to the Broadbent family

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Lucille Broadbent, wife of one-time NDP leader Ed Broadbent, has died of cancer.

Lucille said her husband’s idealism was what attracted her to him.

Before meeting him, she’d worked as a teacher and a nurse, becoming widowed at age 29 with a young son. Broadbent’s first marriage was failing about the same time.

She campaigned for him during his successful first run for Parliament in 1968 in the riding of Oshawa, heartland of Ontario’s unionized auto sector. They started dating married in 1971.

In 1975, Broadbent would become the NDP’s leader, taking the party to 43 seats in the 1988 federal election — still its best showing ever.

“Obviously we share a certain political philosophy. We share certain beliefs about life. We have a concern for our fellow man that we share,” he said.

“I’m concerned about women’s rights and I’d like to see our young people be able to get adequate jobs,” she once said. Lucille also campaigned in the early 1980s for Soviet Jewish dissidents who wanted to emigrate to Israel.

Lucille joked that she really enjoyed election campaigns because she got to see more of Ed.

And unlike Ed, Lucille was fluently bilingual.

Update on Nicaragua’s abortion ban

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The let women die law abortion ban has not even officially passed and yet it is already taking lives.

After 19-year-old Jazmina Bojorge bled to death in early November at a public hospital in the Nicaraguan capital due to complications from pregnancy, her family appeared on local television and tearfully accused doctors of delaying her treatment for fear of being prosecuted under the nation’s abortion ban.
Bojorge, five months pregnant, arrived at the hospital with painful, premature contractions. After staying the night, she was sent to a different medical center for an ultrasound because hospital equipment was inadequate. Doctors tried to stop the contractions, but they were unsuccessful and the fetus died. Efforts to induce labor to expel the fetus failed and Bojorge went into shock. Her placenta had separated from the uterine wall and her uterus filled with blood. She died two days after arriving at the hospital.

It was Bojorge’s second pregnancy. She left a young son behind.

Poor women in particular will suffer from this law as the better off will be able to travel or to attend private clinics.

n a nation where 8 of 10 people struggle to live on less than $2 a day, poor women with limited access to maternal health care will be most vulnerable, say activists and health workers.

“Women who can only go to public health services will die,” said Blandon, of Ipas.

Surely it is preferable to save a woman’s life than to leave her young child/ren motherless.

“The new penal code doesn’t just go against basic human rights: It goes against fundamental principles of humanity,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Washington-based director of the Americas for Human Rights Watch, headquartered in New York.

Those involved in the religious effort to deny women their rights are still saddened by the loss of life.

“It is a prosperous business,” said Max Padilla, a Catholic activist who helped organize a lobbying effort and massive public demonstration in favor of the ban. “Now the people involved in that business are defending their livelihoods, presenting false cases.”

For women who still have the choice of birth control and the luck that their method doesn’t fail, not getting pregnant seems to be the answer to this law.

In May, Chevez had an emergency therapeutic abortion two months into her pregnancy when doctors discovered the fetus was forming outside the uterus and had ruptured a fallopian tube, causing severe internal bleeding.

“I would like to try again, but I’m afraid to get pregnant. That operation saved my life,” Chevez, 28, a swimming teacher, said in an interview at her home in Leon, where she lives with her two children, 9 and 11, from a previous marriage, and her second husband. Her husband wants a child, she said. “But he is afraid of losing me.”

Women will still demand control of their bodies. It may be through illegal abortion, it may be through suicide, it may be through methods of birth control, but all women deserve, want and have a right to control their reproduction.

You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law. ~Lyn Beth Neylon

Dec. 6th Action

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Recent events and news stories bring very sharply to mind that women still have not achieved equality and that there are factions who wish us to be divested of those rights and freedoms we have achieved thus far.

Bearing that in mind, and the toll it took on 14 young women as well as women around the world, I would like to propose an action.

Starting on Nov. 23 and culminating on Dec. 6th.

14 days to represent the 14 women whose lives were taken that day.

If you have a blog or a website write one thing each day in recognition of women.

It could be about abuse stats, it could be about the work your local women’s group is doing, it could be about the wonderful woman in your life. Friend, mother, girlfriend,teacher…

It could be the goat you bought for a woman half way round the world.

It could be about other actions people can take to change the world.

One thing a day to recognize women’s lives.

On Dec.6th every participant will create an entry called Dec. 6th Memorial with only a picture of a candle as the post.

For anyone who would like to participate but who doesn’t have a blog, you can sign up at Rose’s Place and I will set you up to be an author and you can post there or you can sign up at Bread and Roses and take part in the thread there.

If you take part please send me the name and url of your blog and I will put your link on my blog under Dec.6th Action.

(debrascot@gmail.com)

If we’re from Venus can we go back?

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While debate continues as to whether reducing women to their sexuality is acceptable, women and female children around the world are suffering from the permissions those attitudes are granting.

Permission to take control

A man has admitted murdering his baby daughter after thinking about killing her every day since her birth as part of fantasy about controlling women.

Andrew Randall, 33, of Havelock Street in Kettering, committed “a catalogue of horrendous violence” on seven-week-old Jessica, Northampton Crown Court.

Jessica, born five weeks early, was abused almost since she left hospital until her death in November last year.

Randall also pleaded guilty to causing her grievous bodily harm.

After her death, Jessica was found to have at least nine injuries to her ribs as well as brain injuries and cuts to her face, the court heard.

Permission to destroy

A Canadian couple convicted of brutally assaulting two girls, one of whom said she was kept as a sex slave, were sentenced on Tuesday, but the victims’ relatives denounced the punishment as too lenient.

Prosecutors had described the couple — Terry Ladouceur, 39, and Lynnette Traverse, 25 — as “evil incarnate,” and the case evoked memories of the trial of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, who were convicted in the torture killings of two Ontario girls in a notorious sex case in the 1990s.

A Manitoba judge sentenced Ladouceur to 10 years in prison and Traverse, his common-law wife, to four years on charges that included sexual assault, kidnapping and forcible confinement involving the two girls, who were 12 and 13 when the assaults started.

Because of the time the couple spent in jail awaiting trial, Ladouceur will spend only an additional seven years behind bars, and Traverse will be eligible for release almost immediately.

The victims’ relatives cursed and cried in the courtroom over sentences that they said were too lenient. They complained to reporters that the couple have never shown remorse for what they had done.

Prosecutors had wanted Ladouceur to spend up to 18 years in prison and Traverse eight years. They called the sentences handed down by the court an irony since at least one of the girls would likely never recover psychologically.

Interesting in these cases how more blame seems to go to the female accomplice.

Permission to assign blame to the victim

Until now rape cases were dealt with in Sharia courts. Victims had to have four male witnesses to the crime – if not they faced prosecution for adultery.

Now civil courts will be able to try rape cases, assuming the upper house and the president ratify the move.

The reform has been seen as a test of President Musharraf’s stated commitment to a moderate form of Islam.

“It is a historic bill because it will give rights to women and help end excesses against them,” Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told parliament after the vote.

Religious parties boycotted the vote, saying the bill encouraged “free sex”.

Free sex? seems right now the men have a right to all the free sex they want.
Oh! I get it! Women shouldn’t be able to have sex freely. Ya know like with free will.

Do something!

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it

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A sad and frightening tale at AlterNet today,

Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception — adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes — and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.

“Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, “My body is not my own.” This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

Pride argues that feminism is a religion in its own right, one that is inherently incompatible with Christianity. “Christians have accepted feminists’ ‘moderate’ demands for family planning and careers while rejecting the ‘radical’ side of feminism — meaning lesbianism and abortion,” writes Pride. “What most do not see is that one demand leads to the other. Feminism is a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God’s role for women. Those who adopt any part of its lifestyle can’t help picking up its philosophy.” “Family planning,” Pride argues, “is the mother of abortion. A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular.”

In a nutshell the group thinks women should have as many children as they possibly can in an effort to create soldiers for god and overthrow the feminist, heathen, liberal society they so fear.

It is their belief that god will provide. That if women are submissive all good will come to them and their husbands will care for and never leave them.

Oh and no need to take care of this earthly sphere for god has a new home prepared for the faithful.

I wish it were possible to force feed history. It is not that long ago women were submissive regardless if through choice or by law.

Cases of spousal abuse were not less, rape was not less, single mothers were really not less just better hidden.

Women worked!!

Yes there is the great romantic novel of how women merely lazed the days away, happily content in her role as mother and wife.

The reality being that any woman of a certain class was trained in certain skills to be a good companion and social climber.

All other women made do as they could working as domestics, laundresses, wet nurses, prostitutes, bar maids, anything that might keep body and soul together.

Children were raised by older children, were taken to orphanages, were abandoned were raised in workhouses and were lost to poverty and disease.

There was nothing romantic about their lives. God sent no armies of angles to comfort the children as their bellies swelled with hunger, no angles comforted mothers trying to provide for their children as their bodies ached from their daily labours. No angles kept the fibers and dust out of the lungs of women working in the mills. God provided no comfort for those women beaten and raped by husbands and who had no recourse for the damage done. God’s priests provided no comfort sending these women home and telling them to be better more submissive wives in order to prevent further abuse.

“My body is not my own.”

A scary thought. A feeling one has when undergoing severe abuse or rape. The only way to deal with is to disassociate

It is interesting to me that these women fear feminism, fear autonomy, fear the right to make their own decisions and fear being left.

It is as if they do not realize that women living under full control of a patriarchy have much more to fear.

The children have much to fear also, being seen as future brood mares of cannon fodder.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal

No Bravery

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There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
Tears drying on their face.
He has been here.

Brothers lie in shallow graves.
Fathers lost without a trace.
A nation blind to their disgrace,
Since he’s been here.

And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.

Houses burnt beyond repair.
The smell of death is in the air.
A woman weeping in despair says,
He has been here.

Tracer lighting up the sky.
It’s another families’ turn to die.
A child afraid to even cry out says,
He has been here.

And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.

There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
But no one asks the question why,
He has been here.

Old men kneel and accept their fate.
Wives and daughters cut and raped.
A generation drenched in hate.
Yes, he has been here.

And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.