Climate of fear descends on state for clinic workers, patients and others after the supreme court’s conservative majority decision on Wednesday
Anti-abortion bounty hunters began calling Amy Hagstrom Miller’s chain of four independent abortion clinics in Texas just hours after the supreme court issued a two-paragraph order that effectively ended access to 85% of abortion services in the state.
Related: After the Texas abortion ban, clinics in nearby states brace for demand
Continue reading...After seeing a woman die in childbirth, Liyatu Ayuba stepped in and has now delivered 118 babies in a community cut off from public health services
Having watched a woman and her baby die needlessly after being refused admission to a hospital over a lack of money, Liyatu Ayuba wanted to never let it happen again.
The 62-year-old is one of Nigeria’s nearly 3 million internally displaced people (IDPs) – driven out of their homes by the violence of the Boko Haram Islamist militants. Ayuba fled Gwoza in the north-eastern state of Borno in 2011 with her family. After her husband was killed by Boko Haram and her teenage son badly wounded, she went to the makeshift Durumi 1 IDP camp, in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, where about 500 families live.
Continue reading...Biden administration’s options are limited and filibuster poses roadblock to federal legislation
Joe Biden and top Democrats are scrambling for a strategy to counter Republican restrictions on women’s reproductive rights amid the fallout from a Texas statute that has banned abortions in the state from as early as six weeks into pregnancy – but the options available to the administration are thin.
The conservative-dominated supreme court in a night-time ruling refused an emergency request to block the Texas law from taking effect, in a decision that amounted to a crushing defeat for reproductive rights and threatened major ramifications in other states nationwide.
Continue reading...Women forced out of jobs despite Taliban promises to allow them to keep working, survey finds
Female journalists in Afghanistan are being forced out of jobs and told to stay at home despite Taliban promises to allow them to keep working and to respect press freedom, according to a report.
Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) says it believes fewer than 100 of Kabul’s 700 female journalists are still working and only a handful are continuing to work from home in two other Afghan provinces. Others have been attacked and harassed.
Continue reading...San Francisco’s de Young Museum honors the creator of The Dinner Party and a vast body of urgent work
Criticized at the time for an over-emphasis on white women and its stylized representations of vaginas, Judy Chicago’s room-sized installation The Dinner Party has only recently come to be seen as a canonical example of late-20th-century art.
Created over a five-year period (1974-79) and consisting of 39 elaborate place settings, it imagines a meal shared by notable women throughout history, such as Elizabeth I, Sojourner Truth, and the goddess Ishtar.
Continue reading...At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom
Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.
“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”
Continue reading...With a hit Netflix series and The Fran Lebowitz Reader now published in the UK, the American wit talks about failing to write, her dislike of Andy Warhol and her best friend Toni Morrison
Fran Lebowitz is a famous writer who famously doesn’t write. “I’m really lazy and writing is really hard and I don’t like to do hard things,” she says, and it’s the rare writer who would not have some sympathy with that. Yet, as all writers also know, writer’s block, which the 70-year-old has suffered from for four decades now, is never really about laziness. Lebowitz’s editor Erroll McDonald (“the man with the easiest job in New York”) has said she suffers from “excessive reverence for the written word”.
Given that Lebowitz has, at last count, more than 11,000 of them in her apartment, there is no question that she loves books. “I would never throw away a book – there are human beings I would rather throw out of the window,” she says. So is this talk of “excessive reverence” a euphemistic way of saying that she has low self-esteem and doesn’t think she can write anything good enough to commit to print?
Continue reading...More than 60 NGOs call for spending rule change, saying people on frontline of climate crisis want greater access to reproductive healthcare
The UK government has been urged to open up its £11bn pot of climate funding to contraception, as research from low-income countries shows a link between poor access to reproductive health services and environmental damage.
In a letter to Alok Sharma, president of the UN Cop26 climate conference, an alliance of more than 60 NGOs has called for the funding eligibility rules to be changed to allow projects concerned with removing barriers to reproductive healthcare and girls’ education to access climate funds.
Continue reading...Stigma can stop women seeking help but Hawa Bah, who was cut at eight, reaches those suffering in silence to get them the care they need
One night 14 years ago, Hawa Bah crept out of her house in Guinea and slipped into the darkness. She says she had lost count but it may have been her 14th or 15th escape attempt from an abusive marriage she was forced into with a man 37 years her senior.
Bah made her way through a maze of streets to the meeting point where a car was waiting with two strangers inside. When they took her to the airport, Bah felt her heart beating through her chest. She had not realised until then that she would be leaving her country. Aged 17, she had no belongings and no idea where she was going.
Continue reading...Educators say they fear reversal of hard-won progress as aid workers call for Taliban’s desire for international legitimacy to be used as leverage
Afghanistan’s only boarding school for girls has temporarily relocated to Rwanda, its co-founder has said, just days after a video of her burning class records to avoid Taliban recriminations was widely shared on social media.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh, who escaped Kabul with 250 students and staff, urged the world to “not avert your eyes” from the millions of girls left behind.
Continue reading...Nilofar Bayat begins rebuilding her life in Spain after days of fear for her life under Taliban rule
When the Taliban entered Kabul, Nilofar Bayat, the captain of Afghanistan’s female national wheelchair basketball team, knew she had to get out.
“There were so many videos of me playing basketball. I had been active in calling for women’s rights and the rights of women with disabilities,” she said. “If the Taliban found out all of this about me, I knew they would kill me.”
Continue reading...The actor, 53, talks about her charming dad, never reading her reviews in the papers, staying strong and eating nothing but shepherd’s pie
We grew up without money: two rooms and an outside loo. I remember shyly cowering behind the coal shed as Mum tried to photograph me, but by the age of four I was playing Mia Farrow’s daughter in The Great Gatsby. I loved the fantasy of acting, the contrast of the worlds in which I lived. It’s not that one was better, but going from life with not very much to this extravagant, surreal set opened my eyes to possibilities.
Dad was charming and a genius with numbers – he was also deep in the organised crime world. In the 60s, he worked with both the Kray twins (Reggie was my brother’s Godfather) and their arch enemies, the Richardsons. He went to prison quite a few times and Mum would never take us to visit him. Still, he was my dad who I loved deeply.
Continue reading...Death has caused outrage in country where one in three girls are likely to be married by 18, despite ban
Zimbabwean police have charged a man after a 15-year-old girl died while giving birth at a church shrine last month.
Hatirarami Momberume, 26, has been charged with raping Anna Machaya, whose death provoked outrage in the country and was condemned by the UN.
Continue reading...A few days ago the capital was full of women going about their business. Now, the few that remain walk fast and full of fear
Four days after the quick and unexpected invasion of Kabul by the Taliban, the streets of the Afghan capital are almost entirely devoid of women.
The few women who are on the streets are wearing the traditional blue burqa, Islamic garb that, while customary in Afghanistan, was not used as widely in Kabul until now. Many women are dressed in the long black clothes commonly worn in the Middle East and Arab nations.
Continue reading...Biden’s hasty withdrawal removed leverage in talks with Taliban, says first female vice-president of Afghan parliament Fawzia Koofi
Joe Biden delaying the exit of American forces from Afghanistan by just a month could have made a significant difference to the outcome of continuing peace talks with the Taliban leadership, according to one of the negotiators.
Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan politician and women’s rights activist, said the chaotic withdrawal undermined all leverage that the US and the Afghan government had had with the Taliban at the talks in Qatar.
Continue reading...The Taliban said they wanted peaceful relations with other countries and would respect the rights of women 'within the limits of Islam', as they held their first press conference since seizing Kabul. During their rule between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban implemented their own strict interpretation of sharia law, preventing women from working and girls from going to school.
Almost a million women have left their jobs because of menopausal symptoms. Countless others are discriminated against, denied support and openly mocked. Do they need new legal protections?
In 2019, Mara’s weekly performance review meetings grew intolerable; she would sit in a cramped conference room with her supervisors only to be told that she wasn’t performing well enough. “I felt like a child,” says Mara, who is 48, lives in Hampshire and works and works as a public servant. “They would tell me off. They’d say: ‘You won’t meet this deadline, will you? You didn’t put a paragraph in this document.’”
A year earlier, Mara had had a hysterectomy, to alleviate her endometriosis. Afterwards, in surgically induced menopause, she began to experience debilitating brain fog, anxiety and depression. “I was drowning,” she says. “I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t see or think.” Doctors prescribed antidepressants and oestrogen gel, but nothing helped. Mara could barely function at work. “I couldn’t retain anything,” she says. “I had no memory. I couldn’t see or think clearly enough to do my work. I had no confidence at all. I thought I was useless.”
Continue reading...Turning her camera on her customers, the sex worker and photojournalist exposed the male gaze to itself – and opened up a world of shame and desire
“As a rebellious preteen, I sat down and made a list of my life goals,” writes Cammie Toloui in her photobook 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes. “It was pretty simple: 1. Sex. 2. Drugs. 3. Rock’n’roll.”
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Summer of Love, Toloui was in the right place to hit these targets, and by 1990 was a member of a feminist punk band, Yeastie Girlz, and working at the Lusty Lady strip club. Stripping was part-rebellion and part-necessity because Toloui was studying photojournalism at San Francisco State University and the Lusty Lady paid well, but when she was given an assignment to shoot her own life, it also became a project. Deciding not to photograph herself or her colleagues, because female nudes have been seen so many times before, she trained her camera on the customers.
Continue reading...As city after city falls to the Taliban, women fear that the freedoms won since 2001 will be crushed
In a market in Kabul, Aref is doing a booming trade. At first glance, the walls of his shop seem to be curtained in folds of blue fabric. On closer inspection, dozens and dozens of blue burqas hang like spectres from hooks on the wall.
As the Taliban close in on Kabul, women inside the city are getting ready for what may be coming. “Before, most of our customers were from the provinces,” says Aref. “Now it is city women who are buying them.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: abusive practice should also be outlawed in health bill to protect women, say gynaecologists
The government’s pledge to outlaw virginity testing will be undermined unless fake surgery touted as “virginity repair” is also banned, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has warned.
Last month ministers committed to criminalising the invasive and unscientific “tests” offered by some private clinics to determine whether someone is a virgin through an examination to see if the hymen is intact.
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