War on women Archives - Hormones Matter

The Uterus:The Next Great Threat to Humankind

Published on August 27, 2012

2529 views

One would have to be living in the outback not to have noticed the flurry of policy and politics surrounding all things women’s health. The Guttmacher Institute reports that there have been over 1100 provisions introduced and 135 laws passed at the state level, this year alone. This is compared to 32 in 2005 and fewer than 20 in 1985.

Not to be outdone by the locals, the US House of Representatives has spent a whopping 38 of the 46 weeks (from January 2011 through July 2012) in session gesticulating about women’s health, at a cost of approximately $249.6 million dollars. So much for reducing government or governmental waste.

The Great Uterine Threat

And it is not the health of the woman per se that is of such great concern to these fine, older men. No, these paramounts of paramour don’t care much about a woman’s heart, lungs, kidneys, liver or even really that other female touchstone, the breasts, no sir. All they care about is her uterus. I would venture a guess that no other human organ faces as much regulatory devotion as the uterus.

This irrepressible and dangerous internal human organ of approximately the size of a fist has 100s of laws associated with it. Indeed the female uterus might be more regulated than guns, toxic waste, food safety and probably even taxes combined. At least with taxes and toxic waste there are loopholes to avoid regulation, not so for the formidable uterine threat.

The Secret Juices of the Omnipotent Uterus

Why has the female uterus spurned such consternation from our nation’s mostly-male leaders? Aside from the obvious as a repository of male fantasy, the demon uterus has the power to induce fear and loathing, especially now that we understand that it can think itself pregnant or not pregnant by emitting its super-secret, all powerful, anti-pregnancy juices. That power must be contained at all costs. Indeed, for such an overt and dangerous threat $249 million is just the beginning. We must spend more money and more time battling the omnipotent uterus.

Let’s Regulate Thoughts Too

But I must say Senator Akin, you have it all wrong. You must regulate a woman’s thoughts too and not just her uterus. Because if you do not and more women learn about the true power that they wield, there would be no more unwanted pregnancies, no need for birth control or abortion, no need for fertility treatment –entire industries would collapse and your PAC money would disappear. If more women knew about those secret juices that we control – entire nations built upon male hegemony- would crumble. I bet once we master the ability to think ourselves pregnant or not, it’s only a matter of time that we learn how to master having only female children or progressive males. Just think how we might trim the gene pool once we learn to control our untamed uterine powers. And then Senator Akin, what will you and the other beacons of reproductive wisdom have left to regulate?

Citizen Activists in the Internet Age and the War on Women

by Chandler Marrs, PhD

Published on April 25, 2012

2099 views

With all of the negativity and the downright stupidity of the American political scene, I thought some positive trends deserved attention, and hence this post. There is a resurgence of citizen activism that is successfully and positively changing the legislative process. This inspired me. I hope it inspires you.

Passage of the JOBS Act

For those of you not on the investment bandwagon, the JOBS Act which stands for the Jumpstart Our Business Startups will legalize crowdfunded investment for small companies like ours and democratize the investment process. It will allow average, everyday citizens, not just the super wealthy, to invest small amounts in new companies- it will allow crowd-funded investment. You can read more about the legislation here.

What is truly remarkable about this legislation is the story of this bill came to be. Three entrepreneurs wanted to fund their start up. Eighty-year-old SEC rules prohibited the crowdfunding of investment to private companies (Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms are not technically investment. They more akin to sponsorship). These three guys decided to change the laws and regulations. They began a grassroots, Internet driven campaign and with much effort and persistence, succeeded. No ALEC or other nefarious Super PAC, just three guys and an idea. How cool is that?! Citizen activists have power in the Internet age.

SOPA

SOPA –the Stop Online Piracy Act was stopped dead in its tracks by the Twitterverse. At first glance, the legislation looked benign enough; who wouldn’t want to stop online piracy? On closer inspection, however, this legislation would have seriously limited the ability of Internet users to do business, especially small blogs, content related and social media type ventures. SOPA was stopped by intense Internet activism beginning with millions of average users and then followed by wide-scale Internet blackouts by Wikipedia, Digg, even Google protested. Citizen activists have power in the Internet age.

RWA

A few months later came a less well known bill, the Research Works Act (RWA), that would have prevented public access to taxpayer funded research by giving all rights to the publishing houses. RWA was pushed by Elsevier, one of the most powerful and profitable academic publishing houses worldwide. Scientist, academics, and average citizens rose up and said NO, promising to boycott Elsevier (the Cost of Knowledge protest) had it passed. The outcry killed the bill and I think might ultimately change the business of academic publishing for the better. Indeed, more and more universities are opting for open source publishing venues to counteract the high cost and the access barriers publishing houses have instituted in recent decades.

The success of citizen activists in social media age is just beginning. Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that deemed corporations people and opened the flood gates for Super Pac sponsored elections, may have been the far end of the pendulum, which now must swing back. Americans have woken up from a decades long slumber and are realizing that they can make a difference. This may bode well for women’s rights, if we wake up and begin the arduous, but completely doable, task of creating and passing the legislation that matters to us (and voting out the scoundrels seeking to limit our rights).

The War on Women

The War on Women, though disputed by many, is evidenced by a very real and dangerous rollback in women’s health rights; rights many of us took for granted. At last tally, over 900 bills had been proposed restricting a woman’s access to health care and limiting her rights to make he own health care decisions, this year alone. Indeed, it wasn’t until the all-male birth control hearings and the subsequent diatribes by Rush Limbaugh, that many of us began to pay attention. Only then was the public outrage palpable, but outrage without focus or discernible goals to change something is, in my mind, a waste. We cannot just get mad. We need to fix this mess. We need new leaders, new laws and a new game plan for protecting the rights of our daughters.

This weekend, women will be uniting across the nation to protest the War on Women. When the outrage settles, we must begin to act. As the citizens responsible for initiating the JOBS act or stopping SOPA and RWA demonstrated, average citizens can change policy. Super PACs and the super wealthy are powerful, but not as powerful as millions of angry, Internet-connected, women. Hell hath no fury…

Let’s focus that fury on ensuring women are granted the basic human rights afforded the male citizenry. If three guys with an idea can change 80 year old, heavily entrenched, heavily bank supported, investment laws, if tweets can lead to the blockage of the media industry’s takeover of the Internet, and if scientists can all but take down a major publishing house, then certainly, women can get laws passed and politicians in office that support women’s rights.

For information about the War on Women protests planned for this Weekend, 4-28-12, click here.

What are you going to do to improve women’s rights?

The Slippery Slope of Regulating Perceptions: Stand your Ground

by Chandler Marrs, PhD

Published on March 27, 2012

2099 views

As I write this post, there are two, seemingly mutually exclusive, events rocking the nation and a third about to re-ignite; the Trayvon Martin tragedy, the battle over women’s health rights and the Supreme Court hearing on healthcare. I can’t help but thinking somewhere in the depths of these events there is an important point missing from the conversation.

On the one hand, a child was shot and killed as he walked home from the store. His killer remains free and protected by a poorly written law giving the shooter justification by self-defense. The killer believed the child was a threat to him and that is all that was needed under the NRA supported Stand Your Ground Law, recently enacted in Florida and other states.

“The Stand Your Ground Law acts as an immunity to both criminal and civil liability once it is successfully raised at or before trial by somebody who has been accused of using deadly force. See Peterson v. State, 983 So.2d 27, 29 (App. Ct. 2008) (holding that “[t]he [Florida] Legislature finds that it is proper for law-abiding people to protect themselves, their families, and others from intruders and attackers without fear of prosecution or civil action for acting in defense of themselves and others.”). Once a person raises this self-defense, “the trial court must determine whether the defendant has shown by a preponderance of the evidence¹ that the immunity attaches.” Id. Once the immunity attaches, it is then the prosecution’s burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt² that the self-defense should not apply and that the person is guilty of the crime. Montijo v. State, 61 So.3d 424, 427 (App. Ct. 2011).” (The Urban Politico)

On the other hand, we have a series of laws, proposed and enacted, that give a physician the right to withhold medically relevant information to a woman, if that information can be perceived as leading to an abortion. Furthermore, should the withheld information cause injury or death to the mother or child, which is inevitable, additional laws have been enacted protecting the physician from medical malpractice in these ‘wrongful birth’ cases.

In both cases, the fundamental questions of guilt or innocence, and the personal responsibility for the life or death of another human being need not be based upon the actual facts of the case. Rather, these laws allow defendants protection based upon what they believe or feel about the circumstances. The aggressor has legal justification to act if he/she believes a threat exists or a possible future action might occur. Feelings and beliefs are trumping facts and reality. This is a slippery slope.

Perhaps, even more insipid is the underlying assumption that it is OK, even justified, to harm another individual, a woman, a child, if doing so accords with one’s religious, political, economic or racial beliefs; that those organizational ideologies somehow supersede the basic human ethic and make the harming or even killing of another individual, whether by force or by bad policy, OK so long as I/my group believe it to be OK.

Enter this week’s Supreme Court hearings on the individual mandate aspect of the Affordable Healthcare Act. Although unconnected on the surface, this too has the air of succession of belief over reality. Only in this case, the courts will decide the value of human life versus the value of economic gains or loss, under the auspices of state’s rights and individual liberties versus federal power. Admittedly, legal scholars frame this decision differently and the pundits on both sides of the aisle have their opinions, but at its core, this decision will determine whether basic access to health care is a right determined by the presupposition that human life has value above economic or political gains worth protecting at the federal level or whether it is simply a commodity in a very screwed up political economy.

The facts of this case are that the American healthcare system is inefficient, has poor outcomes compared to other industrialized nations and is way too expensive. To boot, 30 million Americans do not have the insurance that provides them access. Every one of these 30 million Americans will become ill at some point and many will die without access to care. Do we as a nation think this is acceptable? Apparently, many do. And the fact that many people are suffering or dying doesn’t appear to have bearing when compared against the perceived economic gains or losses of certain industries or the political power many seek to retain. What some feel they will lose, should the healthcare act survive, has primacy over reality and facts. Indeed, if facts and reality mattered, there would have been a host of other solutions to presented, that address the actual costs to a nation that doesn’t provide its citizens healthcare. As we all know, this was not the case.

Yes, there will be economic consequences if healthcare is provided to all (perhaps some positive). And maybe the individual mandate is not the solution, but the arguments before the courts are not about whether the mandate is the right solution. These hearings are about whether facts trump feelings and whether the value of human health trumps state power and the economic gain of a few. Let’s hope the collective wisdom and ethics of the Supreme Court is greater than what has been observed in local legislatures and courts across the nation.