Right of wrong, the “ritual nick” provides plenty of fodder for the hard right.
Reader’s Challenge: ‘Ritual Nick’ — Preventive Measure or Cultural Relativism?
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Women
Arizona Rising
Summer is always hot in Arizona, but the summer of 2010 may be hotter than any in recent memory.
Gender: B
The Obama administration has gotten at least one thing right on U.S. foreign policy: its emphasis on empowering women and their rights around the world.
Postcard From…Copenhagen
Last weekend, women farmers from Africa and Latin America gave President Obama a message that he can’t afford to ignore. In a letter delivered to the president and U.S. negotiators in Copenhagen, the women argued that the poorest, most disenfranchised people in the world hold the key to resolving the biggest global challenge of our time.
Coup’s Impact on Honduran Women
Ms. Magazine’s inaugural cover featured President Obama in Superman pose, ripping open his suit coat and dress shirt to reveal a T-shirt that proclaims: "This is what a feminist looks like." Photoshop tricks aside, Honduran women need this to be true. They need the Obama administration to fully grasp the plight of Honduran women and their families and act decisively on their behalf.
Demystifying Iran
Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy
Economic hardship, discrimination, and violence have driven millions of women to work in the sex sector around the world, and their numbers will increase as a result of the current global economic crisis. Unless the underlying factors pushing women to opt for selling sex to support themselves and their families are remedied, many women will continue to have few other options.
Fashioning Resistance to Militarism
In the silver lining to the devastating economic crisis, critiques of excessive military spending are now beginning to echo around Capitol Hill and throughout mainstream media. Federal budget priorities — and the billions of dollars tied up in the military budget — are coming under much wider scrutiny. For years, the National Priorities Project, WAND (Women’s Action for New Directions), and War Resisters League have calculated the tradeoffs for military spending with readable pie charts, diagrams, and interactive websites to educate and empower ordinary people to take part in this policy debate.
Afghanistan: Build Infrastructure, Not Bases
In 1995, Sakena Yacoobi cofounded the Afghan Institute for Learning (AIL) — today one of the largest nonprofit organizations in Afghanistan — and is now its president and executive director. AIL provides education and health services to over 350,000 women and children annually in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with offices in the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Sakena has received numerous prestigious awards for peace-building, including the Peacemakers in Action Award from the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the Gruber Prize, the Bill Graham Award from the Rex Foundation, and most recently, the Kravis Prize for Leadership.
Un-Gagging Women’s Human Rights
Of the many crises President Barack Obama faces, few are more urgent than preventing the needless deaths of half a million people this year. This is the number of women who die annually from a lack of basic reproductive health services. Unlike the global recession, climate change, and other disasters compounded by George W. Bush, the crisis of maternal mortality is easily resolved. Last week, Obama took an important first step by rescinding the "global gag rule."
Formally known as the Mexico City Policy for the place where it was first announced, the gag rule cut U.S. funding to foreign healthcare organizations that provide abortions or abortion counseling, or advocate legalizing abortion in their own countries (though in true Bush-era fashion, anti-abortion advocacy was permitted).
The policy was nicknamed the “global gag rule” because it stifles free speech and public debate, violating healthcare workers’ right to press to change the laws that lead to nearly 70,000 abortion-related deaths each year. The gag rule was thus an attack on women’s health, democratic process, and free speech. Rescinding it is a fitting farewell to the Bush era, but it’s only the first step in a needed overhaul of U.S. reproductive health policy.