Pro-choice supporters danced outside Colombia's constitutional court in downtown Bogotá, the capital, after it decriminalised abortion during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Judges ruled five against four to decriminalise the procedure in the South American country after rulings in Mexico and Argentina also lowered barriers to abortion.
Anti-abortion protesters demonstrated against the ruling
Continue reading...Move to outlaw procedures to reconstruct the hymen welcomed by campaigners and survivors of ‘honour’-based abuse
“Virginity repair” surgery known as hymenoplasty has no place in the medical world, British healthcare professionals were warned today, as legislation to criminalise the practice was introduced by the government.
An amendment added to the health and care bill on Monday will make it illegal to perform any procedure that aims to reconstruct the hymen, with or without consent.
Continue reading...Monika was too busy with her young family to join the early protests against Poland’s strict abortion laws. But when she became pregnant with her fourth child, she realised she had to act
It is Saturday afternoon, and the centre of Chełm, a Polish city on the Ukrainian border, is empty except for one woman and her toddler. A monument to “the fallen sons” of the 1920 Polish-Soviet war marks the middle of the market square, surrounded by two churches, a few closed restaurants, and a boarded-up wooden booth with a sign reading, “cheap footwear”. The Catholic Basilica – a former Eastern Orthodox church – dominates the landscape and, locals say, the social life of the town.
Chełm is in one of the poorest areas in Poland, a stronghold of the ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, where the birthrate is -6.1 and people in their 60s comprise the largest age group. The city – once among Poland’s most religiously and ethnically diverse, with a pre-2nd?second world war population split evenly between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews – was the site of one of the first postwar anti-Jewish Pogroms and, more recently, among the first local councils to declare itself an “LGBT-free zone.”
Continue reading...Handful of local administrations are among the first in west to offer arrangement to their employees
A handful of local administrations in Spain have become among the first in western Europe to offer menstrual leave to their employees, in an attempt to strike a better balance between workplace demands and period pains.
This year the Catalan city of Girona became the first in the country to consider flexible working arrangements for any employee experiencing discomfort due to periods. In June it announced a deal with its more than 1,300 municipal employees to allow women, trans men and non-binary individuals to take up to eight hours menstrual leave a month, with the caveat that any time used must be recovered within a span of three months.
Continue reading...Proposed register would come into effect in January, a year after near-total ban on abortion
Poland is planning to introduce a centralised register of pregnancies that would oblige doctors to report all pregnancies and miscarriages to the government.
The proposed register would come into effect in January 2022, a year after Poland introduced a near-total ban on abortion.
Continue reading...Women who turn down advice from health service staff say they are being coerced with threats of referrals to agencies and police
Pregnant women and new mothers are being referred to social services by midwives for refusing to follow their advice, patient advocacy groups have warned.
Expectant parents who have declined care, including opting out of scans, refusing inductions or failing to attend antenatal appointments, are among those who have faced threats from healthcare professionals amounting to coercion, according to the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (Aims).
Continue reading...Hundreds of mostly Roma women were threatened, tricked or bribed into being sterilised until 2012
Women sterilised without their consent are to be offered compensation in the Czech Republic after President Miloš Zeman signed a bill into law this week.
The women, most of whom were Roma, will be awarded 300,000 Czech crowns (£10,000) from the government as compensation.
Continue reading...Kidnapped by Lord’s Resistance Army rebels as a girl, Victoria Nyanjura has pushed through major reforms for victims of abduction and rape
When Victoria Nyanjura was abducted from her Catholic boarding school in northern Uganda by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, she prayed to God asking to die.
She was 14 when she was taken, along with 29 others, in the middle of the night. During the next eight years in captivity she was subjected to beatings, starvation, rape and other horrors that she cannot talk about even 18 years later. Five of the girls who were taken prisoner with her died, and Nyanjura gave birth to two children.
Continue reading...The inflammatory condition causes swelling of the limbs and affects more people in the UK than Parkinson’s or MS. For years it has been overlooked, but now awareness is finally growing
Five weeks after being diagnosed with cervical cancer, Corinne Singleton was declared to be in remission. She skipped out of the oncology ward that day, ready to make the most of her retirement. Little did she know that her health challenges were far from over. “To be honest,” says Singleton, five years later, “the cancer was a breeze compared with the lymphoedema.”
About a month into her recovery, Singleton, 60, noticed some unusual swelling of her upper thigh. “I just thought I must have banged it,” she says. When it persisted after two weeks, she realised, with a sinking feeling, what was the likely cause. She had learned about lymphoedema early on in her treatment for cancer, as a possible side effect of radiotherapy. “I remembered thinking: ‘I hope I don’t get that one’,” she says.
Continue reading...Exclusive: De Niese reveals she was in hospital hours before acclaimed performance in La Bohème at Royal Opera House
The soprano Danielle de Niese’s opening performance in Puccini’s La Bohème at the Royal Opera House last Saturday was acclaimed as “standout”, “show-stealing” and “big-hearted” as she “startle[d] with her energy and physicality, fusing acting and song in a way no one else approaches”.
What neither the critics, the audience nor most of her colleagues knew was that 18 hours earlier she was doubled up in hospital in searing pain from a miscarriage, and the cramps continued for days afterwards.
Continue reading...Misinformation and access issues combined with patriarchal social norms fuelling disparity in distribution across most states
Deep-rooted structural inequalities and patriarchal values are to blame for India’s worrying Covid vaccine gender gap, campaigners and academics have warned.
As of 25 June, of the 309m Covid vaccine doses delivered since January 2021, 143m were administered to women compared with nearly 167m to men, according to CoWin, India’s national statistics site – a ratio of 856 doses given to women for every 1,000 given to men. The difference is not accounted for by India’s gender imbalance of 924 women to 1,000 men.
Continue reading...In the first of a series looking at chronic pain and long Covid, Linda Geddes explores the growing realisation that pain can be a disease in and of itself – and the pandemic could be making it worse
It started with headaches and neck pain, but no sooner had Tricia Kalinowski’s physiotherapist come up with a strategy to tackle these problems, then another area of her body would start to hurt: her lower back, her hip or her jaw.
“The physio was chasing the pain up and down my body,” says Kalinowski, 60, from Minneapolis, US. Eventually, she was referred to an oral surgeon, who believed the root cause of these issues was a problem with one of the joints in her jaw, so she underwent surgery to replace a thumbnail-sized disc.
Continue reading...When she was pregnant, Anna Malaika Tubbs was thrilled – then terrified, knowing the shockingly high death rate of Black women in childbirth. Could she find a way to stay safe?
In the bathroom of a friend’s house in Washington DC, I waited anxiously for a few minutes before turning to look at the pregnancy test. It was positive. My eyes filled with tears; I was overjoyed, grateful and excited, but also very scared.
I think many parents can relate to this feeling, which seems to start as soon as we see that test result, and continues until our children are adults; we are overwhelmed with happiness for their mere existence while simultaneously terrified of the possibility of losing them. But as a Black feminist scholar, I was well aware that I had even more reason to worry.
Continue reading...While men over 50 tend to suffer the most acute symptoms of coronavirus, women who get long Covid outnumber men by as much as four to one
In June 2020, as the first reports of long Covid began to filter through the medical community, doctors attempting to grapple with this mysterious malaise began to notice an unusual trend. While acute cases of Covid-19 – particularly those hospitalised with the disease – tended to be mostly male and over 50, long Covid sufferers were, by contrast, both relatively young and overwhelmingly female.
Early reports of long Covid at a Paris hospital between May and July 2020 suggested that the average age was around 40, and women afflicted by the longer-term effects of Covid-19 outnumbered men by four to one.
Continue reading...There are books, podcasts, apps and devices devoted to it. But what’s behind this new obsession with a strong pelvic floor?
If you want to know about the wonders of a healthy pelvic floor, you could do worse than look to Coco Berlin, who styles herself “Germany’s most famous belly dancer”. Berlin started belly dancing in 2002, but it wasn’t until a few years later, when she went to Egypt to study dancers there, that she wondered why they were so much better. She concluded they were seriously in touch with their pelvic floor, the internal muscular structure that supports the internal organs and prevents incontinence, among other important functions.
“When I connected to my pelvic floor, for the first time in my life, I had this feeling of embodiment,” Berlin says. It improved her dancing – before, she says, it had felt “like mimicry” – but also affected the rest of her life. She felt more confident, “I had the feeling that I own my body”. Her enjoyment of sex was greatly improved, and she felt stronger and less stressed. She thinks it is a prime reason why people assume she is much younger than she is (she’s 42 and, speaking over Zoom from her home in Germany, she looks like a woman in her 20s).
Continue reading...With university online and no job to go to thanks to Covid, it has become easier to spend hours in front of the mirror berating my appearance
Name: Melis Layik
Age: 21
I increased my dosage of antidepressants today. With the loosening of Victoria’s Covid restrictions and the surge of New Year’s weight loss marketing, my eating disorder has once again overwhelmed me with feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.
Continue reading...Crowdfunder allows Kanwal Ahmed to keep sharing advice on sex, violence… and cooking
A social media star has been dubbed Pakistan’s Kickstarter Oprah after her groundbreaking digital talk show in which women talk about taboo issues such as marital rape, cyberbullying and femicide was saved by fans.
Filming started this week on the new series of Conversations With Kanwal, in which presenter Kanwal Ahmed, 31, sheds light on issues that are rarely talked about within families, let alone in the public arena, after fans raised more than five million rupees (around £23,000) in less than a week using the online crowdfunding platform.
Continue reading...As Covid infections rose, hospital felt like an increasingly dangerous place to have a baby. But is labouring without midwives or doctors the answer?
On the morning of 3 May, Victoria Johnson prepared to give birth at her home in the Highlands. One by one, her three children came downstairs to where she was labouring in a birthing pool surrounded by fairy lights, the curtains tightly shut against the outside world.
Suddenly, she felt an urge to get out of the pool. “I stood up and it felt as if the weight of the universe crashed from my head to my toes.” Her waters broke – “all over the carpet, which wasn’t ideal” – and the baby started to crown. “Everyone was there, including both grandmothers on video call,” she says. “Once the baby was out, my eight-year-old son came over and said, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ And that was everything.”
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