Check out this fascinating map of what I’d like to call The United States of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. (News Mic)- The birth control pill advanced women’s economic freedom immensely … and we are SO grateful!! (Businessweek)
- More and more women are speaking out about their abortions and telling stories, not of trauma or tragedy, but of triumph, relief, and gratitude. (Al Jazeera America)
- The Supreme Court is set to make a monumental decision about pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, and for once, pro-choice and anti-abortion activists agree. Don’t get too used to this. (Think Progress)
- The state of sex education in our country is positively shameful. (Salon)
- Don’t shoot the messenger, but the CDC says the benefits of circumcision far outweigh its risks. (Seattle PI)
- The U.S. Department of Education is taking a stand on behalf of transgender students! Schools will not be able to discriminate against transgender students or treat them as anything but the gender they self-identify as. (RH Reality Check)
- This pregnant woman verbally eviscerated a group of anti-abortion zealots harassing women outside an abortion clinic in London. Anyone else surprised that this “sidewalk counseling” madness happens across the pond, too? (HuffPo)
- Indonesia has pioneered the first male birth control pill! If you’re wondering whose palms we have to grease to get our hands on it in the United States, the answer is complicated. (USA Today)
- Why aren’t more women using the superbly effective birth control implant? (Vox)
Circumcision does not stop HIV and can increase infection rates:
http://www.publichealthinafrica.org/index.php/jphia/article/view/jphia.2011.e4/html_9
Which is totally beside the point, since circumcising children is sexual assault. Planned Parenthood is partly about people’s ownership of their own bodies. To even frame circumcision as a medical procedure causes sexual assaults against children and undermines the idea that anyone’s body should be respected.
Germaine Greer (excerpt from p. 102 of “The Whole Woman” New York: A.A. Knopf, 1999)
“Silence on the question of male circumcision is evidence of the political power both of the communities where a circumcised penis is considered an essential identifying mark and of the practitioners who continue to do it for no good reason. Silence about male mutilation in our own countries combines nicely with noisiness on female mutilation in other countries to reinforce our notions of cultural superiority.”
Soraya Mire (Somali filmmaker, Fire Eyes) in her endorsement of the video Whose Body, Whose Rights?
“The painful cries of little boys being circumcised remind me of my own painful experience of female genital mutilation. It is the norm in my culture to mutilate girls, as it is in the U.S. for boys. It really terrifies me to know this. Hopefully this film will educate Americans about the harmful effects of male genital mutilation.”
I understand the philosophical objections to circumcision, but one article in an open-access journal that isn’t even indexed in PubMed isn’t going to outweigh the scientific consensus regarding its benefits … Not for me, anyway.
Well said Anna. Science has spoken. Loudly. With very meaningful research & evidence.