Why Do Bad Maternity Systems happen to Good People?

dralisonbarrett

The truth is that just because there is a better way doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s done.  I had an “aha” moment about why crappy care prevails in health care—-in particular, why women are still being abused and traumatized when they come to hospital to give birth— when I listened to this podcast  on the “religious” CBC radio programme Tapestry.  In the podcast, Mary Hynes interviews Gretta Vosper, an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. Gretta tells the story of a particularly bitter conflict which had emerged within her church community and the pain that conflict had caused her.  She questioned why it is that in so many church settings, the meanest voices seem to own the podium.  What is peculiar to our humanity that this happens so often?

The reason, Gretta said,  why the bullies often win is that they exploit a loophole in our…

View original post 727 more words

Herabai Tata: The Power Behind Indian Women’s Voting Rights

THE 50 MILLION MISSING CAMPAIGN BLOG ON INDIA'S FEMALE GENDERCIDE

by Rita Banerji

The name Herabai Tata will not ring a bell for most Indians! Unfortunately, not even for most Indian women, even though she is one of the main reasons that women have the right to vote in India!

Born in 1879 in Bombay, Herabai Tata was the Secretary of the Bombay branch of the Women’s Indian Association (WIA). In the early 1900s, she was a central figure in the fight for Indian women’s franchise – the right to vote. In fact she is referred to by Geraldine Forbes who documented the changing lives of Indian women in the early 1900s, as the “real soldier” of the movement.

So why don’t Indian women know of her? The fault perhaps lies with the sexist and patronizing view of the history of women’s rights in school textbooks. Students are taught that it is men who fought for and ‘gave’ women their…

View original post 1,609 more words

The Ghost of Khan

Great blog on temperament, Russia…

Threat to racial discrimination law is a threat to sex discrimination law too

fcollective

By Fran Hayes

Recent weeks have seen a fierce community debate over the extent to which certain types of racist behaviour should be prohibited under Australian anti-discrimination laws.

Specifically, the Abbott Government is proposing to amend Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 to remove prohibition of certain negative behaviours targeting people because of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act – Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin – currently provides that:

(1) It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and

(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all…

View original post 770 more words

I hope Charles Murray’s gay friends also have some better friends

Excellent blog from Family Inequality.

Family Inequality

Charles Murray still thinks legalizing homogamy is a “dangerous thing in a philosophical sense,” although he acknowledges that the political train has “left the station” and urges Republicans to stop fighting it for practical reasons.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he described his “number of gay and lesbian friends” and how they surprised the social scientist in him by being not just responsible parents, but “excruciatingly responsible parents” (See, “some of my best friends are…” and “aren’t gays hilariously fastidious?”)

But Murray’s gay friends should beware, because when he is acting as an (alleged) social scientist, he’s not so kind. In a section of his bookComing Apart that has received disappointingly little attention, he wrote:

I am predicting that over the next few decades advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, leading…

View original post 192 more words

Getting beyond how the ‘Factual Feminist’ is wrong about the prevalence of rape

Family Inequality

Christina Sommers

Christina Sommers, who works out of the American Enterprise Institute (along with Brad Wilcox and Charles Murray), thinks the Centers for Disease Control, President Obama, and the feminist establishment are exaggerating how much rape there is. I’m not an expert on measuring rape – and neither is she – but I’ve looked into it enough to say her debunking is basically bunk.

Then: What happens when we go beyond her argument?

Lifetime experience of rape

In a video put out for the American Enterprise Institute, under the misnom de guerre “Factual Feminist,” Sommers quotes Obama as saying, “one in five women will be a victim of rape in their lifetime.” I’m mostly going to focus on this empirical claim.

Obama gets that statistic from the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, conducted by the CDC (he says it like it’s a projection, but it’s…

View original post 1,464 more words