Category Archives: Feminism

CENSORED NEWS: My grandmother loved words

My grandmother loved words. She was a dirt farmer in the old south. Each day she would work the word puzzles in the newspaper, challenged and awakened by those words. At the turn of the Nineteenth Century, she received a college degree in English. But she returned to the land. She never cut her hair or said unkind words about others.

I aked her once if she could have been anything, what would it be. She said, ‘A cotton farmer, but the boll weevils ended that.’

It was words that took me out of the old south. It was words that took me out into the world.

It is words that can make peace or war. It is words that transform us into what we are becoming. Words awaken our spirits, they carry us forward.

Tonight when Peter Phillips of the Media Freedom Foundation threatened to sue me, claiming he owned the words ‘Censored News,’ I thought of my grandmother.

She lived in a different time and place, but she knew the power of words. She knew their beauty, she knew their resilience, and she knew that like the land and river water, no one can own the words.

via CENSORED NEWS: My grandmother loved words.

Frances Oldham Kelsey, F.D.A. Doctor Who Exposed Danger of Thalidomide, Dies at 101 – The New York Times

The sedative was Kevadon, and the application to market it in America reached the new medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration in September 1960. The drug had already been sold to pregnant women in Europe for morning sickness, and the application seemed routine, ready for the rubber stamp.

But some data on the drug’s safety troubled Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a former family doctor and teacher in South Dakota who had just taken the F.D.A. job in Washington, reviewing requests to license new drugs. She asked the manufacturer, the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati, for more information.

Continue reading the main story

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Thus began a fateful test of wills. Merrell responded. Dr. Kelsey wanted more. Merrell complained to Dr. Kelsey’s bosses, calling her a petty bureaucrat. She persisted. On it went. But by late 1961, the terrible evidence was pouring in. The drug — better known by its generic name, thalidomide — was causing thousands of babies in Europe, Britain, Canada and the Middle East to be born with flipperlike arms and legs and other defects

via Frances Oldham Kelsey, F.D.A. Doctor Who Exposed Danger of Thalidomide, Dies at 101 – The New York Times.

New Hampshire’s Planned Parenthood Defunded Because White Men Know Best

This post was originally published on the Community site.

Continuing the trend of white men having a lot to say about women’s health care, three Republicans on the New Hampshire Executive Council removed state funding from New Hampshire’s Planned Parenthood on Wednesday over the objections of the state’s pro-choice governor, Maggie Hassan. This leaves thousands of their constituents at risk of losing vital services, and it makes New Hampshire one of the three states to remove funds from the organization this week.

All white dude council

(Voted to defund: Kenney, Sununu, Wheeler)

So how did this fairly obscure entity manage to override a sitting governor? The answer is rooted in New Hampshire’s longstanding distrust of centralized authority. The Executive Board, which arose out of the state constitution as a check on gubernatorial power, approves members of boards and commissions, judicial appointments, and state contracts. And, since all of the members of the Council are male, this effectively means that the only female Democratic governor has to share power with a bunch of dudes.

Three of these men are very concerned about the manufactured scandal that is Planned Parenthood legally donating fetal tissue. So following Governor Hassan’s refusal to honor demands for an investigation of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England’s fetal tissue donations (the entity doesn’t even participate in a voluntary tissue donation program), the Republican Councilors rejected a $640,000 contract that constitutes a third of the budget for the state’s five Planned Parenthood clinics.

While this move was ostensibly meant to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s ability to provide abortion services, the dollars from the general fund that were at issue were not being used for abortions. Instead, the actual effect of this decision will be the decimation of other services that Planned Parenthood provides such as birth control, health education, cancer screening, and STD testing and treatment.

Christopher Sununu, one of the councilors who voted to defund Planned Parenthood, summarized the stakes best on Wednesday:

“In my district — I represent about a quarter-million people —

via New Hampshire’s Planned Parenthood Defunded Because White Men Know Best.

Mexico: “We Are the Problem Because We Disturb the Government and the Narcos” · Global Voices

“The human traffickers grab you as a woman, the hired killers if you’re a student. Here we are all the problem, disturbing the Government as well as the narcos; we’re faced with repression on two fronts, the legal and the illegal. Because the narcos are the government in this state. The narcos are the ones in power; the Zetas are literally the ones who manipulate this whole state, rule it; here they charge you use rights, there they charge you to operate a bar, they charge you just to have a job,” said the young University of Veracruz graduate who, up to the time of her death was cultural affairs promoter.

Vera’s body was found last Friday, July 31, together with those of other three women and photojournalist Rubén Espinosa, 31, in an apartment in Mexico City’s Narvarte section. Vera’s body showed signs of “a gunshot wound to the head and multiple abrasions.” Both Espinosa and Vera were well known in Veracruz for publicly denouncing the violence and out-of-control impunity in the city, especially after 2010, when Javier Duarte de Ochoa took the reins of the state government.

via Mexico: “We Are the Problem Because We Disturb the Government and the Narcos” · Global Voices.

Planned Parenthood Leader Defends Group as Senate Blocks Bill to End Its Funding

Democrats resisted backlash against the organization, set off by videos about fees for tissue from fetuses. Cecile Richards, the group’s president, said the videos proved that employees did nothing wrong.

via Planned Parenthood Leader Defends Group as Senate Blocks Bill to End Its Funding.

“I’m studying overseas at a small college in Minnesota. I’m just…

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“I’m studying overseas at a small college in Minnesota. I’m just home for the summer. There’s definitely more outward freedom in the states to wear what I want and do what I want. But I never feel completely at ease because there are only three Pakistanis at my school, and I feel that everything I do reflects on my family, my religion, and my country. I feel pressured to always be exceedingly polite and well behaved, even when I don’t feel like it. But in Pakistan I can relax more, even though the electricity sometimes goes out and I’ve already been mugged twice since I’ve been back. Because here I feel like my actions only reflect on me.”

(Hunza Valley, Pakistan)

via “I’m studying overseas at a small college in Minnesota. I’m just….

Bra-clad activists march through Hong Kong streets to protest ‘breast assault’ ruling

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Hundreds of protestors dressed in bras took to the streets of Hong Kong yesterday to protest the conviction of a woman who was jailed for assaulting a senior police officer with her breast.

via Bra-clad activists march through Hong Kong streets to protest ‘breast assault’ ruling.