Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

  • Some happy news to share right off the bat — Epic TV Goddess Shonda Rhimes has joined the board of Planned Parenthood! (ABC News)

  • Dr. Willie Parker, a prominent physician and abortion provider, visited The Daily Show to talk about the barriers faced by women seeking abortion and the religious beliefs that inform his pro-choice values. What an astonishingly brave and compassionate man. (Comedy Central)
  • The Democrats’ filibuster was successful, so Republicans went ahead with the “nuclear” option for Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the Supreme Court. We know how they roll, so it’s not a surprise. “Better to change the rules altogether than play the game fairly!” –Republicans (MSNBC)
  • Can you imagine being CONVICTED of molestation for changing a baby’s diaper? Arizona was very close to enacting this, but luckily the law was struck down. (Slate)
  • This is scary: Anti-abortion groups in various states have been  tracking women’s visits to Planned Parenthood and other health clinics via cellphone data (a practice known as “geofencing”), and then sending “pro-life” digital ads to their smartphones! Massachusetts is not having it, but what about the rest of us? (Boston Globe)
  • Ivanka Trump, who purports to be all about the “economic empowerment” of women, held a meeting with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in the weeks following the inauguration and has since done NOT A DAMN THING to advance THE most crucial aspect of women’s livelihoods — reproductive rights. (Politico)
  • The global gag rule, recently put back into effect by President Trump (wonder where Ivanka was???), will only “increase the likelihood of perilous, sometimes fatal [abortion] procedures.” Thanks in advance for contributing to the deaths of scores of women around the world, 45. (Lenny Letter)
  • Republicans have a remarkable knack for taking something that sucks and literally making it suck even worse. Kudos and cheers to Trumpcare 2.0 failing just as badly as the first version. (Think Progress)
  • The spike in oral cancer cases is spurring more and more doctors to order parents to vaccinate their young children against HPV. This goes for girls AND boys! (Chicago Tribune)
  • Speaking of HPV, a quarter of American men have cancer-causing strains of the virus! (Jezebel)
  • One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing non-scientific hysteria surrounding birth control. “Oh, I tried the Pill but it made me CRAZY!” Or, “I gained x number of pounds taking birth control!” Or, “I took the Pill but it made me super-depressed!” Well, science has spoken: Birth control has not been proven to cause depression. Also, please keep in mind, there are dozens upon dozens of different types of birth control pills. They don’t all have the same side effects! (NY Times)
  • Here’s How John McCain and Jeff Flake’s Votes Could End Up Screwing Over 30,000 Arizona Women (Phoenix New Times)
  • “The Donald” has halted all U.S. grants to the United Nations Population Fund, an international humanitarian aid organization that provides reproductive health care and works to end child marriage and female genital cutting in more than 150 countries. (HuffPo)

The State of Girls in the World: International Day of the Girl Child

Content note: This article discusses sexual assault and violence against women and girls.

afghan girlOctober 11, 2014 will be the third International Day of the Girl Child. UNICEF began this day in 2012, a day that focused on the issue of child marriage. Last year, the subject was education for girls. This year the theme is Empowering Adolescent Girls: Ending the Cycle of Violence.

I am excited that violence is this year’s focus. When I worked in another state as a child therapist in an inner-city neighborhood, I once had a 14-year-old girl bring in two friends for her session. She and another girl around her age wanted me to talk to their 11-year-old friend, who was thinking about having sex with her older boyfriend. The boyfriend was insisting on it. The older girls agreed with the general idea that “spreading your legs” (in their words) is part of having a boyfriend, but were worried that their friend was too young. Though they could not see any coercion in their own lives, even they could tell that in their 11-year-old friend’s case, something was wrong. At one point I asked them, “Do you enjoy it?” All three looked at me as if I were talking a foreign language. The idea that sex could be pleasurable had never occurred to them.


We need to work to prevent violence against girls where it begins — with the perpetrators and their enablers.


These girls were not alone, and although they reflected a particular cultural setting, partner violence is not unusual anywhere. According to the United Nations, one in three women worldwide experiences partner violence, many of them as children and teens. The statistics in this article include countries where teenage girls are often married, and in several countries the proportion exceeds 50 percent.

Violence against girls is often considered acceptable where the social structure gives men dominance over women. Practices like female genital mutilation, which is often strongly supported and facilitated by the women of a culture group, reinforce violence as a social norm. Female genital mutilation is restricted to a group of northern African countries as well as Iraq and Yemen, but the practice has been carried by immigrants into Western countries, including our own. While the practice was made illegal in the United States in 1996, the law was not amended until 2012 to include transporting girls abroad to have the procedure done; this was done as a provision of the Defense Authorization Act that year. Continue reading