Muslim scholars from around the world have called for female circumcision (also called ‘female genital mutilation' or FGM) to be banned. They have unequivocally claimed that Islam offers no justification for the procedure and that those who carry it out should face punishment. At the recent conference on the subject, the religious scholars went so far as to assert that governments should make and enforce legal consequences for those who continue the practice.
A little background: Female circumcision is the removal of all or part of the external female genitalia. With some of the most severe practices, a woman or a girl has all of her genitalia removed and then stitched together leaving openings for intercourse and menstruation. According to Amnesty International, an estimated 135 million girls have undergone the procedure.
Last week, the gathering of Muslim scholars claimed that the practice amounts to violence against women and Islam forbids people from inflicting harm on others. They held that those who circumcise their daughters were doing exactly that.
In honor of Wednesday's House vote, I'd like to highlight a few fantastic resources from the Abortion Conversation Project. Each one dares to sidestep the politics of the abortion debate in favor of promoting genuine dialogue and reflection about what the issue means for us as individuals and as a society:
Pregnancy: Lose the Adjective! A thought-provoking essay by Margaret R. Johnston that makes a compelling case for dropping modifiers like "unwanted," "unplanned," and "unintended" from our discussions of pregnancy, since such terms often wind up obscuring the complexity of what it means to be pregnant.
Despite the new wave of "feminist" anti-abortion crusaders like Feminists for Life that spin legal abortion in this country as unsafe or harmful to women, the facts tell a very different story. As Tyler LePard and Katie Porter blogged last month, The British Journal, The Lancet, released a series of articles on sexual and reproductive health, coordinated by the World Health Organization. The study on unsafe abortion in developing nations called it a "silent pandemic" that is an "urgent public health and human rights imperative." Those are some pretty strong words - as well they should be.
Almost 70,000 women die every year (97% of them in developing nations) from unsafe and illegal abortion but millions more suffer complications such as hemorrhaging and infection. Many of those complications result in permanent damage for the women.
When are we, as a global community, going to treat this as a burning human rights issue and not just a political one?
It's official: on February 11, 2007, Portuguese citizens will vote on whether or not to make abortion legal without restriction within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Portugal is one of the few countries in Europe where abortion is illegal under most circumstances; currently, the procedure is legally available only in cases where a pregnant woman's life is at risk, or during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy in cases of rape or fetal malformation. Despite the restrictive laws, tens of thousands of Portuguese women seek illegal, unsafe abortions every year, and pro-choice organizations estimate that some 10,000 of them wind up in the hospital with complications. Worse, women who seek unsafe abortions face harsh prison sentences, and are subjected to the additional trauma of having their sentence read out loud during public and often televised trials. Inter Press Service has an excellent analysis of the current situation here.
This past Friday, World AIDS Day 2006, I took a moment to reflect on the impact AIDS has had on my own life. I was born a year after the "discovery" of HIV. I have never known a world without it. I have seen it go through all of the myths from something only gay people get, to something you could get through casual contact, to what we know today: that you get it through certain body fluids, like blood and semen. Although I learned about HIV/AIDS in school (before the times of abstinence-only), I didn't know what the disease meant for me.
The first time I realized the seriousness of HIV/AIDS was through Pedro Zamora by watching the 1994 season of the Real World on MTV. It was the first time I "knew" someone with HIV. Watching someone on a day to day basis live with HIV helped to squash my misconceptions about the disease.
Today the House of Representatives will vote on the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, sponsored by reproductive health advocates' good buddy - Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ). This is the act that would require women seeking abortions be offered anesthesia for fetuses of 20 weeks or more and told that there is substantial evidence of fetal pain at that stage. Rev. Haffner discusses this latest attempt to mandate bad information and Marcy Bloom examines the science and politics behind this issue. And that's exactly what's going on - politics.
This is just another example of abortion counseling requirements that are medically inaccurate. Fetal pain legislation is a common tactic used by abortion opponents to try to force women to continue their pregnancies. In fact, five states already include counseling materials on fetal pain, despite credible scientific evidence that fetal pain is unlikely before the third trimester. (And third trimester abortions are illegal - in fact, so called "late-term" abortions occur in the second trimester and "partial-birth" is not even a real medical term... but now we're getting off-topic.)
This bill puts politics in the doctor's office, without regard to sound science - so why isn't this bigger news?
Marcy Bloom does U.S. advocacy and capacity building for a Mexico-City based organization GIRE - El Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Elegida/The Information Group on Reproductive Choice.
Today, the lame duck House of Representatives will vote on a scientifically biased and deceptive bill that is yet one more attempt to drive women away from making the choice of abortion in an atmosphere of compassion and respect. Instead of real information and support, the inaccurately named "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act" forces doctors and health care providers to give women seeking an abortion at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy inflammatory and manipulative misinformation written by anti-choice legislators. The express intent of this last-ditch restrictive attempt by the current Congress is clearly to extend the concept of rights to the fetus, to frighten women, and to distort information that might truly be helpful in allowing women to make the best decisions possible when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.
The House of Representatives this week is scheduled to vote on a bill titled the "Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act of 2006." Republicans are hurrying to have this bill considered before the new Congress takes over.
The bill requires that every woman in America who is having an abortion after 20 weeks receive a pamphlet that says that abortion causes pain to the fetus and that they have been offered fetal anesthesia.
The problem? Well according to a review article by the American Medical Association, "Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester," and there is "little or no evidence" of the effectiveness of fetal anesthesia and "limited or no data" on the safety of administering it.
This year, three large international bodies that have great influence on global reproductive health searched for new leaders. The selection processes for new heads of the United Nations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and the World Health Organization have evolved in unique ways - often involving back-room politicking and intrigue - requiring our scrutiny on many levels.
The Christian Coalition has proven to me once again that their freaky fixation on women's bodies and what we do with them goes beyond simple morality-mania. It extends to a genuine fear of women's bodies and the power we have to do nothing less than destroy the world with them. Why else would they continue to fight against any attempts to re-adjust their focus away from reproductive rights and towards the truly scary issues of poverty, global warming and HIV/AIDS? Clearly, women's bodies are dangerous to these people.
So, is it any surprise that on Tuesday, November 28th The Christian Coalition voted to accept President-elect Reverend Joel C. Hunter's resignationbefore he started because he wanted to expand their core issues beyond the confines of an anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality agenda?
