Prison rape no joke

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.

“Prison officials don’t need a gun; they already have full control over you,” said a former Michigan prisoner who was raped by a correctional officer. She shared her experience with Just Detention International (JDI), an organization working to end the sexual abuse of detainees in prisons and jails around the globe.

The horror of prison rape has been well-documented by Human Rights Watch (hat tip, Te-Ping Chen at change.org). But in American popular culture, the issue of prison rape (when it’s not being ignored), is somehow considered funny, the subject of late-night, drop-the-soap humor. Humor can bring relief to conversations of uncomfortable facts, but it can also dehumanize and trivialize.

Just Detention International (note the name’s double entendre) seeks to change that dynamic with a moving new campaign. JDI prepared three sets of images.

The first set challenges the view that prison rape is somehow not really rape:

The second highlights the health of rape victims:

The third targets the alleged humor of people being raped:

Prison rape has reached epidemic proportions in US jails and prisons. Some 60,500 (4.5%) of the 1.3 million people in federal and state prisons were sexually abused in 2006, according to a 2007 Department of Justice study. By one account, one in five male prisoners is sexually abused at some point during his incarceration. Meanwhile, HIV is four times more prevalent, and Hepatitis C is eight to 20 times more prevalent, in US prisons than in society overall.

Among juveniles in U.S. youth prisons, according to a just-released Department of Justice study, one in eight reported being sexually victimized in the past 12 months (or if they were incarcerated for fewer than 12 months, since they were admitted). Eighty percent of these victims were abused by prison staff.

Kudos to Just Detention International for humanizing people in prison by depicting them in something other than prison garb. Rape is awful whether it happens to women or men, free or imprisoned. “No matter what crime someone has committed,” says JDI, “sexual violence must never be part of the penalty.”

Criminalizing prenatal harm

In May, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock sentenced an HIV-positive pregnant woman to just enough days in prison to coincide with the end of her pregnancy. Both the prosecutor and defense attorney had recommended 114 days, which would have allowed Quinta Layin Tuleh, 28, of Cameroon, to leave prison with time served. But the judge sentenced her to 238 days.

She had been convicted of possessing fake immigration documents. Following her prison term, whatever its length, Tuleh will be deported. The judge said he would have sentenced her to time served if she had simply been pregnant. But because she could potentially transmit HIV to the fetus, he extended the sentence. Only in prison, he reasoned, would Tuleh have access to the antiretroviral therapy that would reduce the risk of HIV transmission from 25% to 1-2%.

Judge Woodcock explained from the bench:

“My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant, and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she’s carrying. I don’t think that the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault. If I had — if I were to know conclusively that upon release from imprisonment a defendant was going to assault another person, I would act in a fashion to prevent that, and similar to an assault, causing grievous injury to a wholly innocent person. And so I think I have the obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm.”

The unusual sentence outraged some feminist and civil liberty advocates. Zachary Heiden of the Maine Civil Liberties Union said, “[J]ailing someone is punishment -- it is depriving them of liberty. That deprivation has to be justified, and illness or pregnancy is not justification for imprisonment.” Jessica Valenti of Feministing wrote, “I fail to see how Tuleh's inability (if that really is the case) to procure affordable, decent healthcare is an ‘assault’ against her fetus, rather than the system's assault of Tuleh.” These views, I think, while important, ignore the harm done by transmitting HIV to the child (avoidable as it is), as well as the mother's own interest in procuring prenatal care.

But how far should we go to prevent prenatal harm? Should the government intervene?

I’m discussing responsibilities to the 'unborn,' but I’m not talking about abortion. I'm interested in fetuses only to the extent that they'll become future people. If you're into rights-based language, Carson Strong, a University of Tennessee bioethicist, frames it well. He explains that a child's “birthright” is not “a right to be born” but “a right possessed by all people who are born,” namely the “right to be born free of serious impediments to their well-being” (p. 507). We have obligations to fetuses that will most likely become life - obligations we don't have to fetuses in general.

So I think the Judge Woodcock was thinking correctly about including the future child as a member of our community, even if legally speaking, the fetus is a non-item, and he over-reached judicial bounds by essentially sentencing Tuleh for assault and not an immigration violation. But couldn't the judge have found Tuleh prenatal care without depriving her of liberty? That would be ideal, but I don't think it's possible. Inmates have a right to health care due to their incarceration. The government does not have the authority to provide health care to others under its supervision (parole or probation) beyond Medicare and Medicaid, for which Tuleh would not qualify. So it appears that for Quinta Layin Tuleh and her future child, the choice was prison or HIV.

What then? It appears that the future child's best interest in being HIV-negative contradicts the future mother's interest (she did appeal the sentence) in not being incarcerated. But it’s not an either/or dichotomy of interests. Surely the mother would not want her child to suffer from HIV.

I was unsure of the judge’s decision, but I was disappointed by the reasoning of my usual allies: feminists and civil libertarians. Margo Kaplan of the Center for HIV Law and Policy, for example, accused the judge of “glibly equat[ing] being HIV-positive and pregnant with committing a crime.” Zachary Heiden of the Maine Civil Liberties Union also simplified the case: “Judges cannot lock a woman up simply because she is sick and pregnant.” Kaplan especially does not grapple honestly with the facts. The alleged offense was not being “sick and pregnant”; it was transmitting HIV.

Heiden, admirably, did offer a more nuanced view: “We are enormously sympathetic to the desire to ensure that Ms. Tuleh receives adequate health care, including prenatal care. Federal immigration law has developed in truly arbitrary and punitive ways. Here, even a federal judge could not get assurances that Ms. Tuleh would not be deported before the end of her pregnancy. He could not get assurances she would not have her medical care arbitrarily cut off. That is wrong.”

Jessica Valenti, like Kaplan, distorted the judge's reasoning and condemned the “paternalism, discrimination and misogyny that are so rife in this case.” But where is concern for the woman’s health care needs? Where is the concern for the HIV status and suffering of the future child? Wouldn't Tuleh also want her child to be HIV-negative? We have two awful options in this case: (1) the risk (moderate but not trivial) of transmitting HIV, or (2) the woman’s extra 124 days in prison (beyond the 114 days she had already served). Incarceration, even for four months, can be a degrading deprivation of liberty, but compared to HIV, it's not necessarily the worse option.

Margo Kaplan also exaggerates the case's ramifications. She wrote: “His reasoning essentially criminalizes being HIV-positive and allows the state to prison anyone with HIV simply because they have HIV and are capable of transmitting it to another. It classifies anyone with HIV as a threat to society who can be incarcerated at the whim of the state to protect public health.”

Not correct. The judge explicitly said he does not propose incarcerating any HIV-positive person who could transmit the virus. This case concerns an individual who by virtue of her immigration status would soon be deported and deprived of health care, and who could thereby transmit a life-ending illness to her future child. The judge’s use of incarceration does not apply to other HIV-positive people, or HIV-positive women, or even HIV-positive pregnant women. Poor citizens (update: and non-citizens) have access to immediate prenatal care through Medicaid. Tuleh did not.

True, Tuleh was treated as a fetal container, incarcerated for the sake of the fetus. Broadly speaking, that's worrisome and I share that feminist outrage. But freeing Tuleh would not have met obligations to the future life. It's just not possible, in Tuleh's case, to first do no harm.

The most outrageous piece, I think, was that Tuleh could not be guaranteed access to prenatal care except in prison. It’s cruel and undeserved – but not unusual – that incarceration fills this gap. We routinely address social and medical issues like substance abuse, mental illness, and poverty by incarcerating people. If the crime was "assault" or risking transmitting HIV to the child, the real perpetrator was not the woman - who had few options (if any) to access regular prenatal care - but a society that would deny medical care to the needy. The judge should throw all of us in prison.

If abortion were murder

Dr. George Tiller was murdered this week by an anti-abortion coward with a gun.

But maybe he wasn't a coward, but a bold principled warrior for the anti-abortion movement.

Suppose you believe unequivocally that "abortion is murder," just as the bumper stickers proclaim. You see would-be mothers as accomplices to murder and abortion providers as mass-murderers, with sometimes thousands more victims than the cruelest serial killers. Dr. Tiller was "the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day," as the killer, Scott Roeder, wrote in 2007.

You also recognize that stopping this mass-murder through peaceful legal means has largely failed. Abortion remains legal 35 years after Roe v. Wade, despite the occasional successes of anti-abortion advocates (e.g., the recently repealed global gag rule, the ban on 'partial birth' abortion, the Henry Hyde amendment that screws poor women by restricting federal Medicaid dollars, etc.). Of course you'd prefer peaceful legal advocacy, but in 35 years, the anti-abortion movement has failed to reverse the law. So you begin to examine other options to combat the status quo. After all, nearly everyone believes in the occasional necessity of war and violence.

You could slow the mass-murder of the unborn by murdering just one person - and not just any person but a murderer who promises to murder again (excuse "murder" but I'm working within their paradigm). Why not pick up a gun? Most people would also murder one person to save many (that is, the person who'd be responsible for the death of many - not any random passerby) - or at least respect someone who did (or tried). In Tiller's case, it really was that straightforward. Fewer abortions will happen now that he's gone, if only because fewer doctors, fearing violence, will provide the procedure. So Tiller's murderer seems more savvy and principled than deranged. In fact, unless you believe all killing is wrong (very unlikely), the killer's actions made sense.

Abolitionist John Brown, who understood in 1859 that slavery could not be ended peacefully and organized the still-controversial raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, might sympathize.

My question: Why did so many anti-abortion activists rush out on the Sunday afternoon of the murder to denounce the action? The National Right to Life Committee announced it opposes "any form of violence to fight the violence of abortion." Americans United for Life stated that "the foundational right to life that our work is dedicated to extends to everyone," and disowned the killer completely: "Roeder is most definitely not part of the pro-life movement." Sarah Palin wrote that "the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life."

Were they worried about their own criminal liability, perhaps for inciting violence? No, I think not. Bill O'Reilly stood by his anti-Tiller crusade (video): "Nazi stuff," "operating a death mill," "executing babies for 5,000 dollars," "if I could get my hands on him," etc. And it's certainly not that the pro-life movement actually believes in life. The same people support the death penalty (and war). Nor were they merely concerned for their image (though they were). Perhaps they condemned the murder out of respect for the rule of law. That's possible, though I imagine that abortion opponents see themselves as answering to a higher power.

No, they condemned the murder because deep down, I think, the vast majority do not actually equate the abortion of a fetus with the death of a human being. Abortion isn't murder after all. Or it's murder with an asterisk.

Still, there are always a few principled literalists who take the "abortion is murder" slogan seriously. It's terrifying to think that another abortion provider could be gunned down by yet another religious zealot. These stalwarts of the anti-abortion movement will not be swayed by appeals to women's rights. Dr. Tiller's murder has forced us to return to the basics - the dreaded "when does life begin" question and the "personhood" debate (ugh) that I'd rather see disappear - and to explain (somehow) that fetuses are not entitled or actual lives, and that while our obligations extend to future people (both in particular cases and as a society), they do not extend to potential people. And until the woman decides to carry to term, a fetus is nothing more than a potential person.

But America isn't suddenly going to come around. The mainstream "pro-life" movement has not only harnessed the power of conservative hate speech but is also politically savvy enough to have disowned its hitman, Scott Roeder. Perhaps abortion foes will one day have the courage to admit that abortion, however undesirable, is something other than murder. Until then, let's hope they continue to disregard the meaning of their slogan and the dangerous imperative it may present.

Worth a thousand words

On the fake "controversy" sparked by Michelle Obama's sleeveless style...

The iconic Rosie the Riveter and the official White House portrait:

SEX in America

If you want to talk politics in America, you've got to talk about sex: adultery, abortion, homosexuality, teen sexuality, abstinence education, sex education, family values... Do other countries operate this way or do we still suffer from Puritan tendencies? Perhaps our national discomfort stems from our inability to resolve the conflicting messages that people continue to receive about sex - that it's dirty and that we should therefore save it for the one we love. Huh?

Sex grabbed headlines today after Bristol Palin was interviewed about her sudden motherhood (transcript, video). She reportedly declared that abstinence is "not realistic." But here's her entire sentence, in all its glory: "I think abstinence is, like -- like, the -- I don't know how to put it -- like, the main -- everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it's not realistic at all." To me, what stood out in that sentence and throughout the interview, was just how juvenile, how adolescent, she was. "I love being a mom," she said, "it's awesome." And: "I wished it would have happened in, like, 10 years so I could have a job and an education and be, like, prepared and have my own house and stuff." That sends a powerful message: that kids are still kids and shouldn't be having kids. But Bristol sends a mixed message: while she'd "love to be an advocate to prevent teen pregnancy," her son "brings so much joy, I don't regret it at all."

Gov. Sarah Palin enters at the end of the interview and says of her daughter's pregnancy: It's "an absolute shock that it happened." Uh, nope, not when you're having sex without birth control.

But my real point: I wish people would stop arguing about whether abstinence is "realistic," as in realistic to expect from teens, without noting the evidence: Abstinence education doesn't work.

Meanwhile, 60% of Americans in a 2009 poll have no objection to premarital sex, while fewer than a third (32%) disagree (51% among people 65 and older). Thirty years ago, the numbers were 56% to 37%. If that's not reason enough to teach real sex ed and make condoms available, Dan Savage adds a compelling point about the pernicious and paradoxical impact of abstinence education, particularly when combined with homophobia: Straight kids, feeling pressure to preserve their virginity, have (unsafe) anal intercourse (which somehow doesn't count) instead of vaginal, while gay kids, feeling pressure to prove their straightnees, have vaginal intercourse. WTF.

Home sweet home

CNN's Campbell Brown's great "free Sarah Palin" segment (YouTube, text), highlighting the McCain campaign's sexist treatment of its very own candidate, has finally inspired me resume this blog. But I'm going to resist wading into presidential politics in favor of a brief update.



I now live in Cincinnati, Ohio, working for an inspiring prison reform NGO as a "mental health advocate" (exact job description in process), on an effort to improve "discharge planning" for soon-to-be-released mentally ill prisoners. It'll help them prepare for the return home. I've spent the last few weeks trying to understand the mental health and criminal justice "systems."

I returned in late August from travels in South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. I began in Cape Town to visit my brother at the Treatment Action Campaign, an impressive HIV/AIDS activist organization. I backpacked overland to Zambia via public buses, minibuses, rikkis, taxis, and hitchhikes. I started days not knowing what city I'd land in, much less where I'd sleep. I spent some nights under the stars. I lived out of a backpack with only a few pairs of clothing and stayed constantly on the move, sleeping in 29 different places over 56 days.

I am thinking about revamping this blog, including its name. Suggestions welcome.

The personal is political

Love it.


Via the June 30 issue of The New Yorker.

Pac power

Ms. Pac-Man wishes you a happy Women's History Month:

PETA strikes again

An animal is not just a piece of meat. A woman on the other hand... So suggests (though not directly) PETA's new ad featuring Alicia Silverstone (below). It sends a very different message than their previous, more humorous "State of Union" ad available here (warning: nudity!).



Sex sells, of course. Everything is sold through sex. So maybe it's ludicrous to expect more from PETA. In the various vegetarian circles I've traveled in (including in my pre-vegetarian days), friends often debated the impact of PETA's ads on the public's perception of the vegetarian movement. Some think PETA is more of an asset than a liability, others vice-versa. But nearly no one thinks it doesn't constitute, on some level, a liability. I find PETA's tactics disappointing because they pit feminists against vegetarians when the two should complement each other. Some who study the "sexual politics of meat" even suggest they should cooperate. I also dislike PETA for making me and my vegetarian-ness radical. But everyone has beef with PETA, and their message doesn't derail mine. Most veggies have come to consider the group a fact of life. So we move on, pick up, and find better reasons to go veg. PETA's latest ad presents a fairly simplistic reason, more-or-less amounting to: "Since I went veg, I feel great." We can do better.

Republican for gay marriage

I'm simply regurgitating the news here, but it's worth it. Get a tissue. In this emotional statement, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders announces his support for a gay marriage resolution:



The statement was an about-face for Sanders, who had previously threatened to veto the city council's resolution. In the statement, he says: "I've decided to lead with my heart. . . to take a stand on behalf of equality and social justice. ... I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of our community they were less important, less worthy or less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage than anyone else, simply because of their sexual orientation."

Less courageous was the sub-headline of the LA Times article:

"Jerry Sanders, a Republican and former police chief, has a daughter who is gay."

"Oh," I'm supposed to think, "that explains it." Not.

Cool kids wear pink

News flash to warm up your day:

Central Kings students wear pink to send bullies a message
The Chronicle Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 9-13-2007

[A] Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who ... called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up. The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday. (emphasis mine)

Maybe they could have involved female students? Then pink would be a color that everyone wears, just like all the other colors unrestricted by gender. But regardless, kudos for their courage!

How society exploits men (too)

A few weeks ago, the blog Feministing, in its usual exemplary spirit, asked readers to share what double-standards drive them crazy. It was an incredible list. Readers uncovered the subtle yet pervasive ways that we (as a society) expect more (or less) from women.

Some examples:

"Slut/Stud."

"[E]ngagement rings? Two people decide to get married, but only one of them is marked as 'taken'?"

"[The] father 'giving the bride away' at her wedding. No one gives the husband away."

"If women want to get married, they're clingy. If men want to get married, they're respectable and responsible. If women DON'T want to get married, they're weird. If men DON'T want to get married, they're normal."

"Men get wiser, more 'distinguished' looking. Women get old."

"If a man were raped, nobody would ask what he was wearing, or whether or not he'd had sex before, or how many sexual partners he'd had, or if he was walking in a bad part of town, or if he was drunk, or..."

"Boy Scouts vs. Girl Scouts. Camping vs. crafts."

"Women belong in the kitchen, unless it's attached to a restaurant."

"Lots of different methods of birth control for women, but not men."

True. To ask another question, which in no way detracts from the first: How are men victims of double-standards? In what ways does society expect more (or less) from them?

A list:

Male-on-female rape is horrible. Male-on-male rape, especially in prison, is funny.

Being proud of one's maleness is seen (in some circles) as being proud of patriarchy.

If a woman cries, she's normal. If a man cries, he's a 'pussy.'

"If a woman is selective about who she sleeps with, she's responsible; if a man is selective about who he sleeps with, he's a loser." (Offered by a Feministing reader.)

Some double-standards speak negatively of both women and men. For example: Men don't get custody because they're violent. Women do get custody - because they're natural mothers.

Finally, men as a group take the blame. War? Blame it on men. Sexism? Blame it on men. Not on some men. But all men. An example wasn't hard to find. Kira Cochrane in the Guardian considers why high-powered celebrities like Nicole Kidman continue to sell their bodies to magazines. "[N]o matter how successful they are," she concludes, "the need to be pleasing to men, to say, 'However powerful and clever I might seem, I'm just a playful, bra-baring bunny underneath,' trumps everything." Indeed, blame it on men. As a group, we are homogenized and vilified. Charlotte Perkins Gilman played with the idea in her insidious book, Herland. The result: Rather than cultivate a positive sense of maleness, young men flee from everything associated with it. Their own own bodies disgust them. If that's what it means to be a man - so the thinking goes - then I want nothing to do with it. The result: Alienation from oneself. Embarrassment of who you are. But double-standards are noxious, even when they afflict the relatively privileged.

Enough of these myths of masculinity. Men should be proud to be men.

Mrs. and Mr. Laura Bush

Big news for people who treat politicians like celebrities: Jenna Bush is engaged.

Here's the White House Press Release:

President and Mrs. George W. Bush are happy to announce the engagement of their daughter, Jenna Bush, to Mr. Henry Hager, son of the Honorable and Mrs. John H. Hager of Richmond, Virginia.

Wait a sec... Do the women have names?

Burqa, bikini, and habit

Will the real feminist please stand up?

That was my first thought upon seeing the cover of last week's New Yorker (July 30):


The painting, by Anita Kunz, is called “Girls Will Be Girls.” A discussion at The BAG blog offered a few insights, though just a few. Some thought the woman in the middle was Jewish (though none had the chutzpa to call her a JAP). Others thought the painting had a Harry Potter message (those maniacs will find Harry Potter in anything!). I took the image as a commentary on feminism, with the artist suggesting that none of the women had any more (or any less) of a claim to being a feminist than any other. Sitting side-by-side at exactly the same height, they're equals.

One person had this take, suggesting that none of the women are feminists:

If we assuem the two 'girls' on the flanks are covering up to please 'Men' you can just as safely assume that the one in the middle is revealing her flanks to please 'Men' as well. ... There's no question in my mind that Patriarchal culture has shaped both of these fashion extremes.

Another suggested that the image may not make a feminist point at all:

This cover would also work with men as the subject: One man dressed as a terrorist, on the other side a man dressed in a suit and televangelist hair-do as a fundamentalist christian preacher and a man in the middle in sunglasses, flip flops and swim trunks.

I spent a long time staring at this picture, trying to figure out what bothered me about it. Suddenly it was obvious: the burqa, the bikini, and the habit seem to emphasize that these three New Yorkers are terribly different, but they actually suggest the opposite. All three women are hiding behind something, including the middle one who seems to bare all, yet who sits with crossed legs and crossed arms and big sun-glasses. She hiding, too - a point that's emphasized, I think, by the color of her bikini top. There's both similarity and symmetry in what these women are wearing.

Shortly before I saw the New Yorker, I read about a study “Hidden in Plain Sight: Sexual Harassment and Assault in the New York City Subway System” (25-page PDF), that found that nearly 2/3 of the 1800 respondents reported have been harassed on the Subway. The value of this survey is diminished somewhat because the sampling was not randomized. Instead, the respondents had to elect to take the online survey, which probably explains why 2/3 of them were women. Still, it'd be naive to deny that sexual harassment exists below the streets of New York City. The phenomenon's been reported before. So I saw Kunz's painting through this lens, too: Three women, with their obvious differences, seeking solidarity on a Subway bench.

Are girls better losers?

By “better,” of course, I mean “more gracious.”

Last week, my ultimate frisbee team lost in overtime, 16 to 17, having given up a four-point lead. It was pathetic: a series of preventable turnovers at the goal-line. Hell, the other team didn’t win it; we lost it. But the winners rushed the field anyway, boisterous and exuberant, while the losers stared shocked at their cleats and kicked the grass, saying: “I can’t believe that just happened.”

I shook hands with the opposing team and staggered off the field. I was angry as hell – an emotion I don't think I had ever felt before on an ultimate field. I played a mediocre game, with stupid decisions and shoddy defense. Sure, it was my third hour in eighty degree humidity, but I can’t imagine that members of the opposing team faired much better. My teammates certainly didn't. We had dropped three throws in the last three points. Not only that, but those who dropped the throws proceeded to coach everyone else. We had a glut of talkers and a dearth of listeners - a plethora of advice that even the self-appointed advisers could not heed. Even the winning team, I remember thinking, should have adorned sack-cloth and sulked with the rest of us, in testament to how a group of seasoned players - with decades of collective experience - had played so poorly.

I spoke to my father that night. "Look," I said to him - because I needed to say it out-loud, to somebody - "maybe I should have taken the dump throw at count four, but damnit, I don't want to hear it from the kid who couldn't land a viable cut even when he was poached."

My dad had just returned from taking my little sister to a college recruitment exhibition for field hockey. Between her field hockey and my wrestling, he's watched his share of sports. "Ya know," he replied, "the girls handled losing much better than the boys. They're less scared of it."

A week later, I wonder if it's worth lamenting the competitive nature of men's sports. Its presence is everywhere. Walking off the field last week, reeling from the fresh wound of our defeat, I wanted nothing more than to drop to all-fours and beat my fist into the ground, futile as it would be.

I looked over to a teammate, to try to cope with the loss. "It hurts," I managed.

"It should," he said.

The social justice sisterhood

I'm part of an advisory group for a new 'global health office' at the medical school. The office will help med students make contacts abroad and will sponsor a lecture series on issues such as refugees, sex trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and migrant labor. The group - which includes both students and professors - met a week ago. Of the 12 people around the conference table, 2 of us were men.

This imbalance isn't exceptional. My public health courses in college were brimming with women; they outnumbered the men 10 to 1. I didn't complain much. I'd joke that I studied public health for romantic reasons. Plus, it was quite exciting to bring diversity to a group - which as a white male I don't often get to do - though it meant I was often looked upon as a curious XY specimen. But the imbalance always bothered me. Really, where were all the men? I don't have any studies about it, just anecdotal evidence. In Providence, I spent a week with a Brown program exploring issues of homelessness and affordable housing - with 25 women and 5 men. In Syracuse, I've been tutoring through the city's literacy corps, a group that teaches adults how to read and write. In my training class of 17 people, 3 were men. I tell ya, it sure is hard to be a man in this world...

So when did social justice work become an old girls network? Here's a hypothesis:

In both developed and developing countries, women disproportionately suffer from economic and social inequalities. In the United States, women earn 77 cents to a man's dollar, occupy fewer CEO positions, can't take time from work to breastfeed, and may even get kicked off a plane for it. Sexual violence, meanwhile, is as frequent as it is perverse. A 2007 study published in last month's Journal of American College Health found that only 2 percent of victims of sexual or physical abuse (that's 1 in 50!) contacted the police. Many women don't report such abuse because they feel ashamed or embarrassed or somehow at fault or because they see the abuse as an isolated incident and not as part of a larger epidemic. We evidently have a fairly vacuous sense of sexual violence.

Inequalities in developing countries also disproportionately affect women. Complications from pregnancy kill half a million women a year. It's safer to donate a liver lobe in New York than to give birth in Afghanistan. In some African countries, women can't insist on condoms or refuse sex and may contract HIV from their husbands. In Muslim countries, no man is killed for raping a women, but women are sometimes killed for 'losing their honor' - or otherwise beaten. On the economic front, we know that the whole family benefits when women achieve financial independence. In fact, UNICEF's 2007 State of the World's Children Report went as far as to say that expanding women's opportunities in South Asia would save 13.4 million children from malnutrition.

I would bet that the pervasiveness of women's victimization - and women's awareness of it - is a key reason why women disproportionately gravitate toward work in public health and social justice. Perhaps women seek to rectify injustice because they tend to bear the brunt of it. Another idea is that women - because they have been marginalized - have great sympathy for fellow sufferers. Both help explain why women greatly outnumber men in public health - a field with a very wide social justice purview - but don't outnumber men in medicine. I also bet (though I have no stats) that female medical students are more likely to see their medical training as part of an overall effort to promote social and economic opportunity and reform 'the system.' The radical conclusion, of course, is that if medical schools want to foster social justice, they should admit more women.

That, anyway, is my preferred explanation. An alternate explanation maintains that women are simply more caring than men - an explanation that's always smacked of reductionism to me and begs the very question it purports to answer: why are women (supposedly) more caring?

Abortion & Conscientious Objection

From the UK Independent: Abortion Crisis as Doctors Refuse to Perform Surgery (April 16, 2007)

"Britain is facing an abortion crisis because an unprecedented number of doctors are refusing to be involved in carrying out the procedure. The exodus of doctors prepared to perform the task is a nationwide phenomenon that threatens to plunge the abortion service into chaos, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has warned."

Distressing news. I'm not entirely sure what to do when health care "providers" refuse to provide. For now, I'll make an ethics-related point: I think this case reveals the inadequacy of rights-based moral thinking with respect to abortion. Many people recognize a human "right" to health that includes a women's "right" to an abortion. The Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade turns on a "right" to privacy. In bioethics, personal "rights" continue to dominate the moral framework; in global health and development, "human rights" has been established as the prevailing moral discourse. Yet rights-based theories fail to resolve conflicts of rights - when a women's right to choose counters a doctor's right to say: "Here I stand. I can do no other."

Because rights say little about the ethical demands of community and relationships, bolstering a women's right to choose can only take us so far. Meanwhile, as history shows, assertions grounded in rights-discourse produce intractable and bitter debates about which rights trump others. We need to understand that the work of caring involves more than respecting rights. Rather than focusing solely on individual rights, we in the pro-choice camp should aim to create institutional policies that enable both patients and health care providers to interact comfortably without compromising deeply held beliefs. To start, the British National Health Service could return to its former training structure. Doctors could then acquire wider competence across fields, and more docs would be able to perform abortions without being, as few want to be, full-time abortionists.

Some good news to wrap up the post: Portugal legalized abortion last week.

News Round-Up: Health & Feminism

Email is a distraction from work, blogging from email, newspapers from blogging. I read dozens of newspaper articles a day. I've decided to combine these various distractions by sharing some of these news stories in the form of a “news round-up.” Over the last month or so, I’ve collected enough links to sort these stories by theme. Welcome to the health & feminism edition.

Almost two million children in the U.S. don’t have health insurance.

The U.S. will make it easier for children of illegal immigrants to get Medicaid.

South Carolina officially banned gay marriage with a constitutional amendment. Sigh.

There’s more to sex-ed than putting a condom on a banana. There’s communication and consent and dynamics of power, too. High school and college students ought to learn about it.

Circumcision limits transmission of HIV. But a few words of caution are in order.

People who sell fake drugs to developing countries should be prosecuted for murder.

Strange as it sounds, approximately 46% of rural women of India haven't even heard of HIV/AIDS. Nationwide, only 57% of women and 80% of men have heard of the disease. Illiteracy is a big cause of this ignorance, seeing how only 54% of women and 76% of men in India can read. So far, HIV/AIDS prevention efforts have focused on commercial sex workers, injection drug users, and other high-risk groups; but the government says the general population is next on the list.

Facing a looming gender imbalance crisis, the government of India has proposed that couples put their unwanted female children in government-funded orphanages, rather than aborting them in utero. In some areas, the imbalance is now as skewed as 800 girls per 1000 boys. I’m glad the government is concerned about the demographic problem, but this proposal just "solves" one problem by creating another. Now India will have lots of girls without parents.

A Colorado court ruled against “Ladies’ Night,” a practice where clubs charge women lower entrance fees and drink prices. The court’s rationale – that Ladies’ Night discriminates against men – generated lots of sarcastic commentary on feminist blogs, which tended to fault the practice of “Ladies’ Night” for encouraging women to drink and increasing the incidence of rape.

I was floored by the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich, who pursued Clinton over the immorality of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while Gingrich himself was cheating on his wife. Yuck.

It seems that many presidential contenders have slept around... Among the three Republican front-runners — thrice-married former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, twice-married Sen. John McCain, and Gingrich — there are eight current and past wives. The point was underlined by the wife of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who said, “The biggest difference between Mitt Romney and the other candidates,” is that the Mormon candidate has “only had one wife.”

Blog against sexism day

To mark International Women's Day, the powers of the blogosphere have named today Blog Against Sexism Day. Here's my humble contribution: a look at the status of women's freedom across the globe.


From the United Nations (verbatim):

* Violence against women is the most common but least punished crime in the world.

* It is estimated that between 113 million and 200 million women are demographically "missing." They have been the victims of infanticide (boys are preferred to girls) or have not received the same amount of food and medical attention as their brothers and fathers.

* The number of women forced or sold into prostitution is estimated worldwide at anywhere between 700,000 and 4,000,000 per year. Profits from sex slavery are estimated at seven to twelve billion US dollars per year.

* Globally, women between the age of fifteen and forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die as a result of male violence than through cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war combined.

* At least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Usually, the abuser is a member of her own family or someone known to her. Domestic violence is the largest form of abuse of women worldwide, irrespective of region, culture, ethnicity, education, class and religion.

* It is estimated that more than two million girls are genitally mutilated per year, a rate of one girl every fifteen seconds.

* Systematic rape is used as a weapon of terror in many of the world's conflicts. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women in Rwanda were raped during the 1994 genocide.

* Studies show the increasing links between violence against women and HIV and demonstrate that HIV-infected women are more likely to have experienced violence, and that victims of violence are at higher risk of HIV infection.

Sources: Secretary-General's in-depth study on violence against women (2006). Vlachovà, Marie and Biason, Lea, Eds. (2004) Women in an Insecure World: Violence Against Women - Facts, Figures and Analysis. Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces. [The UN also provides this helpful background paper titled, "Ending Impunity for Violence against Women and Girls."]

What if I had never been born?

I sometimes think: Would it have been a bad thing if I had never been born?

I corresponded with a friend this morning who, for the first-time, met his biological family two weeks ago. This friend was raised by his adopted family, but when his parents (by which I mean, his adopted parents) died, he decided to contact his biological siblings. As I think about it, I'm very happy his biological mother carried the pregnancy to term. If she had aborted the fetus who would later become the person I call my friend, then I would never have met him. At the same, though, I am a strong proponent of the legal and moral permissibility of abortion.

I don't think it's a contradiction to say, on the one hand, that the world is a better place because I was born, and on the other hand, to say that it would not have been a bad thing if the fetus-who-became-me had been aborted. Imagine lamenting that the woman who would have become my wife was aborted before birth. It's no way to live a life, and more than that, I think it represents a superficial view of how we develop our emotional intelligence, life goals, romantic interests, and personalities. I don't see why a fetus constitutes a living being (or at the very least, a living being with personhood). It is no tragedy whatsoever to abort something without personhood (or at least not more of a tragedy than to refrain from reproducing in the first place).

A friend pointed me to the following commercial (seen on the Christian Life Network; not sure why she was watching that...). It puts forward exactly the argument I reject. It's manipulative and false. Aborting a fetus is TOTALLY different from killing a person once s/he's been born. Anyway, here it is:



Part of the confusion stems from the paucity of our language. I don't really know how to refer to the fetus who would later develop into "me" except to say, "the fetus who would later develop into me." It's clumsy as all hell, but it's the best we have. I simply can't say that it was "me" in my mother's womb. There was no "me" then. People who do not exist have no a right to be brought into existence. Or put even more simply, there is no right to be born because there is no person at that point to claim that right. Now, I should note that some people, including 1.1 billion Catholics, disagree. In their view, human “souls” preexist human bodies. I wish I had a more thorough argument for why personhood does not begin with conception (I'm workin' on it). It seems self-evident to me, but I know the opposite view seems self-evident to others, so I'll have to be clearer in another post. In the meantime, take it as an assumption. There's only so much one can say at a time.

The very question here supposes that future people are lining up for their turn to be born, “as if they were waiting in the wings to be called out onstage,” as feminist philosopher Laura Purdy writes (1996: 70). But that's far-fetched. If "I" did not exist before my birth, then it makes no sense to ask whether it would have been a bad thing if "I" had never been born. Even anti-abortion folks should agree with that.

Here's another way of phrasing the argument:

Think of all the people today who are NOT being born! (Hint: It's impossible.)

Is it a tragedy that they don't exist?