Some of you might remember this post, about the med student who was suing to get the Medical Examiners Board to allow her time to pump breast milk during her exams.

Well, guess what. The first judge ruled against her, it's now been overturned, and the MEB is planning to appeal. At this rate, the baby will of course be in med school herself by the time it's all over, but with luck the latest judge's ruling will stand.

As he put it,

That's it exactly. The judge goes on to explain, for those who don't get how intuitively obvious that statement is, that

In other words, it's not about the baby, it's not about being a mommy, it's not about whining, it's not about wanting special privileges.

It's about a bodily function. Which, by the grace of god, Cthulhu, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or the impersonal forces of evolution and sexual reproduction, is one that women have and men don't, and that may women never experience.

But those that do are still human beings, with the same right to equal treatment as everyone else. Failing to accommodate them is akin to failing to accommodate people's needs to pee, or eat, or fulfull ay other necessary bodily function.

The only difference is that this bodily function belongs to women. If it didn't, every public building and office in the developed world would have nursing rooms.

Don't even get Bitch_PhD started about the lack of changing tables in a lot of public buildings and in men's rooms. Though this has started getting better since significant numbers of men started taking care of babies, too. Go figure.

Facebook has made a bad mistake. Apparently they've been deleting pictures of breastfeeding mamas and babies, and in some cases even deleting the accounts of said mamas. This, apparently, because they (1) consider breasts obscene, and (2) can't differentiate between a titty shot and a picture of someone feeding a baby.

As anyone who's ever had a baby knows, you Do Not Fuck With Breastfeeding Mamas, who are one of the most easily organized groups on the internet. After all, websurfing is one of the few things you can do easily while nursing a baby. And mamas who breastfeed are pretty damn militant (rightly so), since it takes a certain amount of chutzpah just to overcome the "omg, titties!" thing and decide to nurse in the first place.

I predict that Facebook's going to change their mind about this policy within a week. So if you're on Facebook and agree that they should learn the difference between porn and breastfeeding, you'd better hurry up and join the Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! group; since the original article linked at the top of this story appeared three days ago, the group's gotten almost 10,000 members, who've posted over 600 breastfeeding photos.

Bitch_PhD breastfed her kid for two and a half years.

On the left, Asma Jahangir. Here's her C.V., and here's an interview with her that appeared in the UN Chronicle.

On the right, a photo of a group of women from the ("Red Mosque", a campus of sorts that includes the mosque as well as religious schools for both men and women, and that has become a center for pro-Islamist political action in Pakistan.

Jahangir wants Pakistan to recognize and support a secular version of human rights, particularly human rights for minorities and women. As she says in the linked interview, "cultural diversity does not mean inhuman treatment of other human beings."

Lal Masjid, including the women of Jamia Hafsa (a kind of women's seminary), want Pakistan to embrace Sharia, a specifically Islamic form of law, the particular tenets of which vary depending on who you ask; roughly, the idea is that the laws of a political state should be based in religious texts and religiously-based precedent.

Presumably to most of us it's obvious that Jahangir is in the right, and the women of Jamia Hafsa are in the wrong. It's pretty easy when you're standing outside of whatever the cultural/religious norms are to recognize that not everything that people with tits do is automatically feminist. It's a lot harder when the norms being criticized are norms you yourself hold.

Feminism isn't "all about choices." It's all about power and equality. Arguing for women's "right" to do things that perpetuate their lack of power or equality isn't feminist; it's using pseudo-feminist language to argue for women's continued status as second-class citizens.

Similarly, arguing for men's "right" to continue to be treated as individuals without regard to the social status or power of "men" as a class is usually anti-feminist: e.g., arguments about men getting "passed over" for jobs or promotions in favor of women, etc. If the situation is one where the job in question is "traditionally" a woman's job, then sure: argue away. But if we're talking about politicians or CEOs or college professors or scientists or construction workers, then nope--sorry.

Context matters. If you refuse to consider it, then you might as well go back to 'separate but equal." As Warren wrote in Brown v. Board of Education,

because

The court's finding at the time depended on a great deal of research and the integrity to realize that the way difference is interpreted matters.

Theories are all well and good, but at some point you have to look at what's actually happening. If it "just so happens" that women can't get contraception because it's prescription-only, or because some pharmacists and doctors "just happen" to have religious prejudices against it--but it doesn't "just happen" that men are subject to the same problems--then it just happens to be the fact that that's discriminatory. If it "just so happens" that women "choose" to wear heels and makeup because doing so increases their status, while men "happen" not to rely on signalling sexual availability/attractiveness in order to increase theirs, then that, too, is discriminatory.

If women's "choices" happen to perpetuate the idea that women are second-class citizens, then those choices aren't feminist.

Which ain't the fault of those women; we all make the decisions we have to make to live in the world. And for the record, there are defensible arguments that (say) nude pictures of oneself can be quite feminist in nature.

It's a question of context. As Diana York Blaine said in the interview linked immediately above,

Focusing on the nudity is part of the problem, people. Just like arguing for women to be "protected" from rape by covering themselves and staying out of public view--or by "not getting drunk with strangers" or whatever your preferred "how to not get raped" argument is--as if women "get" raped by some invisible force of nature.

You're not doing feminism any favors when you think it's all about what women do or don't do. Women aren't raised under rocks, and we're not brains on sticks. The world we live in, and the people we live in it with, have an effect on us. The real question ought to be, are you trying to change shit? Or are you just making a bunch of bullshit excuses to perpetuate your own comfortable status quo?

Bitch_PhD promises this will be her last post on this subject for the forseeable future.

I love this story. Maria Luisa Sánchez-Fuentes graduated Friday with her Masters in Public Administration from my alma mater, the University of Washington. To get it, the 50-year-old commuted from Mexico City, where she's the Executive Director of the Information Group on Reproductive Choice (GIRE), which led the way to decriminalizing abortion in Mexico City two months ago. (Sánchez herself wrote that last link, by the way). She dedicated her degree to her 16-year-old son, who flew to Seattle with her to watch Mama graduate.

Speaking as a feminist, women like Sánchez rock my world. And everyone else's. When you see something that needs doing and you start working on it, good shit happens; Sánchez started out as a staff member at GIRE when it started in 1992, and if you know anything about how these things work, you just know that there was probably like the founder and Sánchez and maybe one or two other people working their butts off for pennies to get the ball rolling.

It's easy to think that big change requires more than one person can do, but t'aint so. A few smart women organized to research and publish information can change a city, a nation, a continent.

Speaking as an educator, students like Sánchez make teaching a real pleasure. It's easy to get pissed off when yet another 19-year-old frat boy comes to your office to whine about how he "needs" an A even though he's skipped half your classes, and to start thinking that students suck. "Nontraditionals," as the jargon goes, keep you coming back. Selfishly, those are the students who will come to you and say they have a conflict without expecting you to solve it for them--they're simply keeping you informed, and they don't think you're their mommy. Pedagogically, (and just in case anyone reading this thinks the whole argument for diversity in the classroom is silly p.c. nonsense), they make a HUGE difference in the education of those 19-year old frat boys, too.

The kinds of things older women, kids off the reservation, first-year working-class college students, community college transfers, students who know what it's like to be homeless, and people who've worked in the real world bring to a classroom--which remember, is often led by someone who was always an A student and may never have worked outside academia--are amazingly invaluable in a classroom. If all you care about is academics, you can go to a library: if you want to learn how academic topics work in the world, you need to get out of the classroom or talk to people who have. Students like Sánchez bring in info that the professor doesn't necessarily have, and they make the entire point of teaching in a classroom, with real actual people sitting there, suddenly clear.

So congrats to Sánchez, congrats to the UW, and congrats to Mexico and Seattle, her self-declared "new second home."

Bitch_PhD misses Seattle, looks forward to teaching again soon, is a bit of an Hispanophile, obviously is thrilled that abortion's been decriminalized in Mexico, and really really needs to get back to speaking more Spanish.

It's about time. On Wednesday, Republican representative from Connecticut, Christopher Shays and Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg from New Jersey introduced the Access to Birth Control Act, legislation to require pharmacists to stock Plan B if they supply any form of contraception.

You can get a .pdf of the proposed legislation at the bottom of this page. For facts about pharmacy refusals and state laws, see Planned Parenthood's site. For arguments against Plan B, see here. Here's where you can contact your senator or representative and tell them to support the bill.

Bitch_PhD happens to know where you can get Plan B t-shirts, if you're so inclined.

Cross-posted at Bitch PhD.

Ah, the joy of international travel, in search of places where annoying feminist ideas haven't yet destroyed civilization.

Because, you know, thin women are fitter than women who aren't thin:

And chicks can always lose weight -- which makes them healthier, don'tcha know -- because, after all, the Ark story is true:

Moreover, telling women to stay small in no way violates their humanity; big women aren't, after all, humans:

Do I really need to articulate why this finding is fucked up?

Probably, so let's have at it; in any case, the reasons are so obvious it'll take all of five minutes to spell them out.

First, thin women are often weaker than their bigger sisters, especially if their thinness is the result of excessive dieting.

Second, muscle weighs more than fat -- so correlating fitness with weight is doubly stupid.

Third, even if you use BMI, which at least takes into account height, there are still a ton of variables, including ethnicity and body fat itself that it doesn't predict well.

Fourth, it's possible that dieting is worse for your health than maintaining a steady, if high, weight.

Fifth, the Ark is a myth.

Sixth, it seems to be untrue that people can simply choose to lose weight.

Seventh, asking a living creature -- what with "living" including "growth" -- to control its growth is, in fact, an attack on its status as living. What with women, surprisingly, being living creatures, telling them to stay small is, therefore, an attack on their humanity -- of which "womanhood" is, and I know this is a leap -- a part.

Eighth -- and I love this -- there's the fact that Air India also demands that its flight attendants have perfect teeth and no acne. Doubtless this is because crooked teeth and zits are widely known to prevent people from being able to compromise flight safety.

If you're inclined to actually learn something about the science and politics of the weight issue -- as opposed to simply having the same uninformed opinions everyone else has -- you can read this book or this blog, both of which provide much more and better evidence than I have here.

Bitch_PhD thanks mat8drb for the link. If she were in a plane emergency, she wouldn't give a shit what the flight attendants looked like; all the better if they have the constitutions and training of Marines.

On Mother's Day, this ad appeared in the Great Falls Tribune.

The ad reads:

You'll be unsurprised to find out that a week and a half later, when a woman went in to Snyder Drugs, which is owned by the Anderson family (one of the signatories to the ad), she was handed this note instead of her prescription:

The note says

Interestingly, the story doesn't appear to have been covered in the Great Falls Tribune, the paper that carried the ad; the only place I've found mention of it is on the Montana Netroots blog. Being as the author of the Montana Netroots post is a guy,* he gets distracted by the issue of property rights--

--but hey, credit for noticing.

The real issue here is that Stuart E. Anderson, R.Ph, is a registered pharmacist and Snyder Drugs is a pharmacy. Which is to say, Mr. Anderson and his business are licensed by the state to dispense prescribed medications.

Which they are refusing to do.

Now, why are they refusing to dispense medications that are prescribed only to women? It isn't because oral contraceptives cause abortion--they don't. It isn't because they can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, either, because while that may be theoretically possible, there's no evidence that oral contraceptives actually work that way--as a registered pharmacist surely knows.

I can only assume, then, that it's because Stuart E. Anderson and the co-owners of Snyder Drugs, Kurt and Kori Depner, are sexist jackasses who think that their license to dispense drugs is less important than their god-given right to pass judgment on women.

I hope that the State of Montana respects their choice by taking away Mr. Anderson's pharmacist's license and his and the Depner's right to own a pharmacy.

*This is what is known as "hyperbole." Also "black humor."

Bitch_PhD doesn't think that the reasons the woman with the prescription needed the scrip were relevant, so she's not mentioning them.

Cross-posted at Bitch PhD

AARRRGGGHHH.

That's it, ladies. Officially being a good little girl and giving your employer the benefit of the doubt is going to fuck you over. What you want to be doing now is demanding knowledge of your coworkers salaries from day one, and every time there's a raise or a promotion, and don't forget you want details of their benefits, work experience, transfers, titles, and perks. From here on out, anything that raises even the slightest doubt in your mind, you file suit -- no more with the looking for "patterns" of discrimination. If you wait, then it doesn't matter if discrimination existed -- you basically asked for it, so it's your fault, you complacent little slut. I bet you secretly want to be raped, too.

Seriously. Equal pay for equal work? We're still fighting over this? Not the details of what it means, but the simple idea that it's the fucking law? What? The? Fuck?

When the Supreme Court of the United States starts offering the same anti-feminist bullshit arguments that you regularly hear from 18-year old frat boys -- "can you point to the specific moment when that was sexist? No? Well that just proves that you feminists only want to complain" -- then you really want to start just bashing heads.

Bitch_PhD wants to know what all the other newswire bloggers are getting paid, wink wink.

Should girls and women, in places where abortion's illegal, lose their right to travel while pregnant?

That's the question in Ireland, where the Irish health service has forbidden a 17-year-old girl from leaving the country. She's having to go to court to appeal for her right to freedom of movement (although the Irish police, bless them, seem to have said that they don't intend to enforce the HSE's order). Her mom and her boyfriend are behind her desire to go to Britain for an abortion, not that she should need her boyfriend's permission to travel. An HSE appointed psychiatrist found that she's "distraught," but not actually suicidal -- which she'd need to be in order to get an abortion in Ireland.

Again, not that it should matter, but the fetus she's carrying is anencephalatic. It's missing part of its skull and brain, and will die within a few days after it stops using her body for a life support system.

But dammit, Catholic Ireland insists that she'd better act as a living incubator for as long as she can. Because a brainless fetus has more rights than a pregnant woman.

Bitch_PhD thanks Trahern for the link to the story.

We all know Quentin Tarantino is a bit of an asshole. But really: a Rapist "action figure"?!?

The doll's based on Tarantino's character in the latest exploitation shlock "Grindhouse," and--I guess because Tarantino doesn't even know the meaning of the word "shame," it looks like him. The manufacturer says, gleefully,

Oh. Goody. It's not available to kids.

Just to grownup men, or fucked up women, who think it would be cool to own a rape doll.

Somehow I'm not the least bit reassured.

Newsflash, Mr. Tarantino: rape isn't a game, it isn't funny, and it isn't cool.

Bitch_PhD liked Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill as much as the next gal, but there are limits.

File this one under "we're not there yet, but thanks for the idea": in India, a new requirement for women civil servants orders them to report a "detailed menstrual history" including the date of their last periods and maternity leaves.

The linked article doesn't say why -- presumably this is on a health questionnaire? -- but predictably, women are none too happy about it. And while a thorough medical history includes menstrual information along with number of pregnancies and births, the potential for this kind of information to be used by an employer (in this case, the state) to discriminate against women is pretty damn obvious: "Oh, your last period was three months ago? You might be pregnant. Forget about that upcoming promotion."

Not to mention that this kind of thing might well be flat-out embarrassing to a lot of women. I, for one, don't think it should be, but wishing doesn't make it so.

Bitch_PhD finished her last period about three days ago, has a longer-than-average cycle, only had the one pregnancy, and may or may not be pre-menopausal but is kind of hoping to knock one more kid out before her fertility tanks.

Good lord. Listen to this jaw-dropping speech by everyone's favorite nutso politican, Zell Miller:

Translation: killing embryos is bad because we need them to grow up into soldiers we can kill. Also, we want white workers, not those dirty Messicans.

He's right about one thing. Those are some pretty damn offensive things to say.

Bitch_PhD isn't too interested in breeding for the greater glory of the homeland, thanks anyway.

Today is International Women's Day. Four links:





Rwanda is coming out of the genocide era with some hopeful news:

Which matters to the country's future because

The Pan-American General Health Foundation launches a fund to combat domestic violence in the Americas.





Iran released 23 women but is still holding three journalists arrested last week while protesting the government's criminal charges against five other women for organizing a women's rights demonstration.

The three women still being held have begun a hunger strike. More information about women's rights in Iran here.





Lest this kind of thing get used (as women's rights in Afghanistan were) to drum up support for war against Iran, however, take note: we haven't exactly improved women's rights in Iraq.

You can hear Democracy Now!'s radio show on the UN report here.

Bitch_PhD spent most of International Women's Day being a mama.

Who gives a rat's ass about women's or children's health? Not the US.

Apparently the FDA thinks it's reasonable to commandeer 30% of dedicated women's health funding for general use.

Oh well, that's okay — after all, the money will get spent on other things that benefit women, right? Not so fast. The Office of Women's Health

Like, oh, say prenatal care and reproductive health issues. But we don't really care about that shit, either: the feds are planning on restricting funding and eligibility for the Children's Health Insurance Initiative (which by the way, has in the past

We gotta spend more money on the war, you see. As for women and kids, well,

But hey. It's not like, a deliberate conspiracy or anything.

Just a failure to give a shit.

So, a little more research and, apparently, for most of us, news about meth use during pregnancy.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,

That last is what I want to concentrate on. The first question — the substance abuse pattern — is one I hope to address in a later post, but for now I'll simply point out that one of the major problems with *any* understanding of how most illegal drugs affect pregnancy is that, because they're illegal, it's very hard to distinguish between the effects of the drug itself and the effects of any other substances or additives that may have been used in producing or cutting the drug — e.g., antifreeze used in making meth, or quinine used to cut heroin. Moreover, since many (if not most) addicts use more than one drug (including smoking) or get their drugs from different sources, the problem of tracing specific effects to specific drugs only gets more difficult. And finally, the observed effects of drug use during pregnancy — it's important that they're observed, rather than known, since you can't always know the cause of what you see — are surely, in many cases, affected by other factors like the mother's health or nutrition or her local environment: stress, environmental pollutants, and lots of unknown factors mean that non-drug users also have babies with some of these problems.

That said, the apparent risks of meth use while pregnancy — which depend on how often and how much is used, as well as at what stage of pregnancy, mind, so keep in mind that making generalizations about whether or not a given woman's meth use will "cause" these would be a massive overgeneralization — include:

I didn't emphasize the "mays" in that quotation, but I hope you noticed them.

My point here isn't that using meth (or any other drug, including alcohol, tobacco, or prescription medication) is a-ok during pregnancy. Using meth or drinking heavily or smoking isn't a-ok even when you're not pregnant — duh. My point is that simple judgments about drugs' effects on pregnancy aren't supported by the science; even when we know that in general X drug tends to cause Y outcome, that isn't the same thing as saying that this specific user is going to have that specific result. The most one can say is that it puts a user at an elevated risk for that result.

And there are things that we can do to mitigate those risks. Again according to SAMHSA, the critical factor in a child's outcome is not the simple fact of use itself, but the home environment. The consequences of use — or even of a poor home environment — can be mediated if we actually care about the child's well-being more than we do about casting blame on the mother.

One of the most effective solutions to the problem of mothers using meth is formally prioritizing families with children in treatment programs. Meth users, in fact, have:

* the highest "satisfactory" outcome after treatment programs, at 65.6%;
* the highest result for ongoing reunification services between mother and child when a baby that's been removed from the mother (usually after being tested for the presence of a drug at birth--which by the way, isn't done routinely--so there may be babies with meth problems that we don't know about, *and* there may be babies born with meth in their systems who are doing fine) and the mother is offered treatment — rather than incarceration;
* the second shortest amount of separation between mother and baby in these cases. The shortest separation time is for babies who tested positive for marijuana.

In short, as the Supreme Court of Hawaii found in the first case there where a woman was arrested for meth use during pregnancy, arresting pregnant drug users

For what it's worth, I've met the woman who was prosecuted in that Hawaii case. Her baby was born premature, and died after being released from the hospital (raising the question of why, if his health was compromised at birth, the hospital released him). Prosecutors assumed his death was the result of her having smoked meth a few days before delivery. After getting clean and getting through her prosecution, Tayshea Aiwohi has gone on to establish a foundation to help women recover from drug addiction and be reuinted with their children. It's named after her dead son. Seems to me she's doing a lot more good than the prosecutors who wanted to lock her up and throw away the key.

Bitch_PhD, being a liberal, is objectively pro-drug use.

Why do I care about the rights of pregnant meth users? Let's start small.

For most "respectable" women, the main thing you'll be told when you get pregnant is "don't drink alcohol." In fact, let's grab a beer out of the fridge and look at what the warning label says:

Everyone who drinks has seen these warnings, right? So we all know — and when you're pregnant, your doctor will remind you — that pregnant women shouldn't drink.

Notice, in fact, that while pregnant women "should not" drink, non-pregnant women — and men — aren't told what they should, or shouldn't do. They're given the facts — drinking "impairs your ability to drive" and "may cause health problems" — and expected to make their own, informed, decisions. Pregnant women, on the other hand, are told directly what they should do.
There are two implications here: first, that pregnant women are less able than men or non-pregnant women to think for themselves; and second, that alcohol is more dangerous for pregnant women (or their fetuses) than it is for "normal" people.

The first implication — that pregnant women can't think for themselves — is obviously stupid and insulting. If you're like me, when someone tells you what to do, you're inclined to tell them to fuck off. But before we tell the "don't drink while pregnant" crowd to fuck off, let's see what the problems with drinking while pregnant actually are — after all, it's a Big Deal, this pregnancy thing, and we wouldn't want to let knee-jerk attitudes about being grownups (after all, we're pregnant! How much more grownup can you get?) affect our judgment.

So let's move on to the second implication. Is alcohol, in fact, more dangerous for pregnant women than it is for everyone else? To find out, I'm consulting Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder. I stole the title of this post from the book, by the way. According to the author, Elizabeth Armstrong,

Five percent of children born to alcoholics. That ain't much. I think it is fair to say, without dismissing the importance of FAS, that most "normal" women — the kind of women who read alcohol warning labels, who see doctors during pregnancy, who are inclined to think about what they eat and drink — do not have much to worry about. Alcoholics, by and large, don't read warning labels and are far less likely than most of us to get decent prenatal care (which may, in and of itself, be a big part of the problem). If you care about FAS, your primary concern should be helping pregnant alcoholics get prenatal care, which includes treatment for their alcoholism.

Finally, let's don't forget that most women don't realize they're pregnant for a month or two. By which point, if you've been drinking, you've probably already done the majority of whatever damage you're going to do. IME, that ain't much; I went out drinking with my friends every weekend for two months before I realized I was knocked up, and as far as I and my kid's teachers can tell, he's smarter than most of the other kids on the playground. God knows, at 10 lbs 1 oz, he didn't have low birthweight (supposedly one of the markers of FAS). He's reading at grade level, his math is well above grade level, and he can tell you how DNA works, what a metaphor is, and how to build a working rocket.

So yeah. I'm inclined to say that drinking during pregnancy — by which I mean, "drinking during pregnancy by women who aren't alcoholics" — is okay. I'm inclined to think that people who claim that there are "tons" of kids with FAS in public schools are talking out their asses. I'm inclined to think that people who give you the fisheye when you order a cocktail in your seventh month are judgmental assholes. And I'm inclined to think that a lot of the hype around women's "responsibility" not to drink while pregnant is a big, guilt-tripping load of bullshit.

Bitch_PhD likes a good fight, and thinks people who pass judgment on pregnant women need to be smacked.