From the monthly archives:

May 2007

The Effects of the War on Iraqi Women

by Cara May 31, 2007

The NY Times ran an article the other day about how female Iraqi refugees are increasingly turning to sex work in Syria. As if women affected by war don’t already have enough to worry about (their husbands being killed and leaving them with no means of support, the threat of rape, the threat to their [...]

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On White Privilege

by Cara May 31, 2007

I imagine that this may be difficult for some people to read. There are two posts over at Feministing in the last 24 hours that have really affected me. The first was by Samhita about white cultural appropriation. The post is in no way perfect. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it. But I [...]

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Our Supreme Court is Bullshit

by Cara May 30, 2007

That’s right, I said it. Our Supreme Court is officially, without a doubt, bullshit. It wasn’t enough for them to tell women (despite having no medical training) that abortion is bad for them, but now they’ve decided that if you don’t file your discrimination suit fast enough, it’s tough cookies, honey. The decision came in [...]

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The Beauty Myth

by Cara May 30, 2007

I finished Naomi Wolf’s landmark book The Beauty Myth several days ago and have been thinking about what to write ever since. I’ve decided to do a personal reflection about what I’ve learned instead of an official review. It’s a great book. — A dense book, but a great book. There is a lot of [...]

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The Importance of Abortion Doctors

by Cara May 30, 2007

I received this profile of aspiring abortion doctors a week ago, and haven’t had time to write about it until now. It’s a really great piece, filled with a lot of sad facts about how few doctors are going into the profession, how few medical schools train students to perform abortions and how difficult it [...]

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How Abortion Politics Isolate Abortion Patients

by Cara May 29, 2007

There is a piece up at AlterNet by Carole Joffe and Kate Cosby, who are in the middle of conducting an interview study trying to determine the impact of state-sponsored abortion regulations on abortion patients. What they are uncovering, though they have only interviewed a handful of women so far, is astonishing and tragic. They [...]

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Military Veterans and Rape

by Cara May 29, 2007

In my twisted mind, this seemed appropriate for Memorial Day: AlterNet has a great piece up about new recent finding that 29% of incarcerated veterans are in on rape or sexual assault charges, which means that they are twice as likely to be incarcerated for that reason than non veterans. Why? Here’s one insightful answer: [...]

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Blog For . . .

by Cara May 28, 2007

So I found out about two different blogswarms, today, that I plan on participating in. Blogging for LGBT families day is on June 1st. Last year, which was also their first year, they had about 130 posts. Let’s see if we can get them more this year! They are also apparently encouraging bloggers who do [...]

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What We’re Ignoring in the Lybrel Debate

by Cara May 28, 2007

So here’s another article on the debate over the period-suppression pill Lybrel (written by a man, fyi). They seem to be everywhere, lately– every blog, every newspaper. [I'm not adding links both because they're ubiquitous and because few of them say anything original.] Let’s take a look: For women with severe physical symptoms—cramps, migraines, nausea—banishing [...]

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On Stopping Rape

by Cara May 27, 2007

These recent rape cases I’ve been blogging about have been weighing down on my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot (slightly obsessively) about what they mean and where we go from here. Here are some of my jumbled thoughts: If these cases have made anything clear to me it’s that rape does not seem to [...]

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