April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

Politics

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

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.

Poppies and Peace

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poppies

From the Peace Pledge Union website

An alternative view of the British Legion inspired Remembrance
ceremonies is deeply rooted in the history of the Peace Pledge
Union. The PPU’s original pledge – I renounce war and will
never support or sanction another – was taken from an
Armistice Day sermon given in 1933 in New York by Canon
Fosdick, called The Unknown Soldier. Canon Fosdick was an
army chaplain and his sermon was an apology to the men who
had been sent to their deaths in World War One: ‘If I blame
anybody…it is men like myself who ought to have known better.
We went out to the army and explained to these valiant
men what a resplendent future they were preparing for their
children by their heroic sacrifices.’ He went on to ‘renounce
war because of what it does to our own men’ and ‘what it
compels us to do to our enemies’. ‘I renounce war for its consequences,
for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying
hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place
of democracy, for the starvation that strikes after it.’

snip

The white poppy was conceived by the Women’s Co-operative
Guild in 1933. Members of the Guild were themselves the
wives, mothers, sisters and lovers of men who had died and
been injured in World War One. They were only too well aware
of the likelihood of another war, and chose this symbol for
peace ‘as a pledge to Peace that war must not happen again’.
The PPU joined with the Guild and later took over the distribution
as Europe once again drifted to war.
The declaration of war in 1939 put a stop to Armistice Day
ceremonies. The failure of the First World War to achieve anything
of significance was too obvious. Remembering the ‘Glorious
Dead’, who gave their all to save future generations from
war, would have sounded false even to regular Armistice Day
attenders.

War affects everyone. It does not only affect those “sent to war” it affects those from whom they were sent. It affects those they were sent to kill and it effects the lives of all in the country besieged.

As Tolkien wrote in Lord of the Rings “those without swords can still die upon them”.

It has been said that the white poppy is an insult to the veterans of war, that it takes away from their sacrifice, yet it was originally a symbol of the sacrifice and grief of the families they left behind. Is their grief, and the grief of those who recently lost sons and daughters to war, disrespectful?

As we take a less romanticized view of war we recognize that while we are grateful to those that fought in the “great wars” we cannot forget that there were also great crimes. Many women were sacrificed upon the alter of victory. Women whose lives deserve to be honoured.

And while we remember the sons and daughters lost so recently in Afghanistan, let us also remember the losses of families living there.

Peace is not a four letter word. Most of those returning from the world wars spoke highly of the need for peace. Lest we forget, was the message.

Recognition of the veterans both combative and non combative, of those still being sent to war, of the families who have lost loved ones, of the women whose lives were and are so brutally and forever changed, of children from whom childhood was and is stolen, of the bloody, heart wrenching, gut wrenching, soulless enterprise that war is can and must surely exist together.

For it not to do so would be a greater insult to those who are sacrificed to war.

Rush Limbaugh is THE WATERBOY

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Limbaugh on the Democrat win;

LIMBAUGH: Now, I mentioned to you at the conclusion of the previous hour that people have been asking me how I feel all night long. And I got, “Boy, Rush, I wouldn’t want to be you tomorrow. Boy, I wouldn’t want to have to do your show. Boy, I’m so glad I’m not you.” Well, folks, I love being me. I can’t be anybody else, so I’m stuck with it. But the way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I’m just going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, “Well, why have you been doing it?” Because the stakes are high. Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat [sic] Party does and liberalism.

waterboy