Author: Feminist Majority Foundation Blog

Vice-President Al Gore called on Congress to pass laws that would end discrimination against women in the health care industry. Gore said that the President’s health care quality commission had recently reported “very strong evidence of the unequal treatment of women in our health care system.” For example, Gore said, women are less likely to be referred to a specialist and three times more likely as men to be told that the problem is “all in their heads.”

Gore said that the administration had asked Congress to pass a law that would allow a woman to see the same OB/GYN throughout her pregnancy, regardless of insurance rules.

Vice President’s Remarks on International Women’s Day

San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown will perform a marriage ceremony for 50 same-sex couples at City Hall. The ceremony is open to the first 50 couples to pay the city’s $35 registration free to be recognized as domestic partners and $30 for the ceremony.

Brown said, “On March 25th, we will put a human face on same-sex relationships, challenging America to look at these couples who pay the same taxes, share the same hopes and dreams, contribute equally to society, and yet are denied equality under the law.”

More than three thousand couples have registered with the city as domestic partners since the passing of the 1992 ordinance. City laws also allow retirement and benefits to be extended to same-sex spouses.

Twenty-seven states have prohibited recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states since Mayor Brown performed the first same-sex ceremony in 1996.

Feminist News Stories on Same-Sex Marriage

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said that President Clinton has vowed to veto any IMF funding legislation that includes abortion restrictions. Daschle said, “We’re just not going to be blackmailed into accepting language that is totally unacceptable.” White House spokesman Michael McCurry said that President Clinton is “certainly moving” towards a veto.

House Republican conservatives continue to fight for language that would deny U.S. family planning assistance to groups that lobby for reproductive rights. Congress has agreed to allow $1.8 billion in funding for military operations in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf and $387 million for national disaster relief. Conservatives are still arguing for abortion restrictions to be placed in legislation that would provide $18 billion for the International Monetary Fund and approximately $1 billion in past due U.S. payments to the United Nations.

Army, Navy and Air Force officials are rejecting a suggestion by an advisory panel of academics and retired military officers to separate men and women in basic training. A senior military official said, “We want to train as we fight … We are not going to gender segregate.”

The panel, led by former Kansas Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, based their recommendation on what they saw as a need for safety for the women, and a lack of military values.

Military officials from the three services agree that safety is a concern and will be putting more barriers between the floors in barracks where men and women are housed.

Women are still prohibited from serving in the infantry, tank units or special operations forces that would involve close combat with the enemy, but they are flying in combat aircraft and helicopters.

Women and men are still trained separately in the Marine Corps.

Democrat Lois Capps was elected to the House of Representatives in a bid for her late husband’s seat against Republican Tom Bordonaro. At 3 a.m., Capps had 66,424 votes and Bordonaro had 54,635, with 257 out of 356 precincts reporting.

Capps won despite a vicious campaign initiated by extreme anti-abortion groups. The Campaign for Working Families, led by conservative Gary Bauer, spent $200,000 on TV ads supporting Bordonaro and calling attention to Capps’ pro-choice views. The Christian Coalition and the Catholic Alliance handed out flyers and “voter guides” in churches the Sunday before the election.

Bordonaro, a California State Assemblyman, has vowed to compete against Capps in the November elections. “I will be going up against Congresswoman Capps, not the widow Capps,” said Bordonaro.

Vatican officials declared that they would not consider allowing women to apply for deaconships. The head of the congregation for Catholic education, Italian Cardinal Pio Laghi, and the head of the congregation for the clergy, Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, said that the church has no reason to change its tradition. When reporters pointed out that female deacons were allowed in early church history, the two replied that the women had been widows who had no real power.

Laghi said, “[the Vatican] believes that the cultural changes which have occurred over the centuries and especially in our time don’t justify rejecting Christian tradition concerning the role of the woman in church.” He added that the male-only decision is because “Christ was a man.”

Deacons are laymen who are ordained to aid in the work of the church when there is a shortage of clergy. Deacons are often called upon to work with the poor and help the priest administer the sacraments to ill church members.

The family and friends of Robert Sanderson and Emily Lyons planted a tree outside the Alabama abortion clinic that was bombed in January. Sanderson was killed and Lyons was seriously injured in the blast.

The tree was planted in the crater left by the explosion. Emergency Coalition for Choice member Stephanie Everett said, “In the past 10 years, over 200 life-threatening assaults on abortion providers, escorts and clinics have occurred …. It’s time to stop the agenda of hate.”

FBI officials reported that the brother of the man wanted for the bombing amputated his own hand with a circular chain saw and videotaped the event earlier this week. Officials do not know why he did this, and the family has not issued a comment.

Call 1-888-ATF-BOMB with information regarding the bombing.

Pictures of Eric Robert Rudolph

Feminist News Stories on Clinic Violence

In the first conviction for sexual harassment in Greece, a Greek court convicted Dimitris Assimakopoulos of sexual harassment and punished him with a 10 month suspended prison sentence.

Assimakopoulos, the head of the Veropoulos supermarket chain in Patras, was convicted of harassing a 23-year-old employee. When the woman complained about the harassment, he fired her and three other employees who had witnessed the repeated harassment.

A 1992 Greek survey found that 60 percent of women employees had suffered harassment in the workplace.

French woman Peggy Bouchet launched her 25-foot boat from the Canary Islands in an attempt to become the first woman to row across the Atlantic alone. Bouchet, a 24-year-old engineer, plans to row 3,000 miles to the Caribbean Islands in three months.

Bouchet is in contact via radio with the Ocean Rowing Society of Britain.

The Correctional Services of Canada issued a report recommending that apologies and settlement packages be offered to female prison inmates who were involved in LSD studies in the 1960’s. In 1964, psychologist Mark Eveson wrote in theCanadian Journal of Corrections that he had tested LSD on at least 30 women without their consent. Eveson wrote, “It is the fundamental responsibility for every professionally trained worker in this field to carry out such research — to try to answer in an objective manner the questions posted by our inability to effectively and consistently deal with the offender.”

Although LSD was legal in Canada at the time, many of the subjects suffered disturbing hallucinations and the effects of the study caused permanent damage to at least two of the women.

Dr. Somerville of McGill University condemned the experiments. Somerville said, “You don’t lose your right not to be used as an experimental animal …. It is sometimes said that you can best test the ethical tone of a society by how it treats its most vulnerable, weakest and its most in-need members … It’s not how you treat the people you like that tests your ethics; it’s how you treat the people you really despise.”

Islamic women’s groups are voicing their outrage at a growing system of gender apartheid in the Muslim world. During the weeks preceding International Women’s Day, Muslim women throughout North Africa spoke out on television and in their communities.

Wassyla Tamzali, an Algerian lawyer and expert in Muslim women’s rights at UNESCO, commented, “Islamic countries have modernized many laws — in the economy, education, commerce, politics, you name it …. But there is practically no movement in the status of women. When it comes to women’s rights, religion and theology are invoked.”

As families flock from rural areas in the Mediterranean countries to the cities, more and more women are attending universities to earn jobs as doctors, lawyers and businesswomen. But laws denying equal rights to women make surviving in the workplace, or as a single mother, increasingly difficult.

Fundamental Islamic policies in Iran and Turkey dictate what women can wear. In Afghanistan, women face punishment by death if they do not follow a dress code. Laws have been issued that prohibit the women from working outside the home or going out in public without a father, brother or son.

In Morocco, a woman cannot marry, name her children or go to work without the permission of a male relative. Moroccan women inherit half of the property and money that male siblings inherit, can be forced to marry or participate in polygamy and are routinely beaten.

Nouzha Skali, a pharmacist from Casablanca, said, “Legally we are still as helpless as the illiterate girls on the farms…. We are legal minors, and we depend on permission of our fathers, brothers or husbands.”

Many Muslim women’s groups are working to institute fair divorce and child-custody laws into civil law, rather than in the Mudawana, Muslim family law. Although a million signatures were collected in 1993 supporting reform, the changes actually enacted by male policymakers have made little difference.

Tamzali commented, “Muslim feminists have long argued that it is not the religion but the male interpretation of the Koran that keeps women oppressed, along with the texts that were added on in the Middle Ages …. So the way to reform had seemed to be to re-examine and reinterpret the religious texts. But efforts to reform Islam from within keep failing.”

Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan

A study released in the European Heart Journal reports that women face a greater genetic risk of heart disease than do men. Dr. Sinikka Pohjola-Sintonen of the Peijas Hospital in Vantaa, Finland said, “While a history of coronary heart disease in first-degree relatives is a risk factor for the disease, the risk is greater in women than in men.”

Researchers examined the medical histories of 121 female and 586 male middle-aged survivors of heart attack and their siblings, and then compared those histories to the medical outcomes of the siblings of 130 healthy women.

Study results showed that 76% of female heart patients had a sibling who developed heart disease before age 65, while 62% of male heart patients had siblings who developed heart disease. Researchers found that the differences were more pronounced in siblings under age 55.

The research team concluded that “there is a strong heritable component in coronary heart disease of young and middle-aged women,” and that there is “a greater excess risk of (heart) disease in the families of female patients, especially in their sisters.”

According to a report issued by USA Today, 20 percent of welfare recipients forced to take low-paying jobs are back on welfare within three to six months. The report also found that in Iowa, 49 percent of former welfare recipients who were employed had less income after losing their welfare checks. In Indiana and South Carolina, people forced off welfare rolls are finding it difficult to find work because of a lack of child care resources, and in South Carolina and Tennessee a loss of welfare caused an increase in housing, hunger and health-care problems. Three Maryland children whose families lost welfare are now in foster care.

The study reported that five states have cut welfare rolls by more than 50 percent and that states have cut welfare by an average of 30 percent overall.

The national pro-choice group Refuse & Resist has declared today National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers. Pro-choice groups across the nation are commemorating the day in remembrance of Dr. David Gunn, the first abortion provider murdered on March 10, 1993.

Dr. Gunn was shot by anti-abortion terrorist Michail Griffin outside a Pensacola, FL. clinic. “We must take a strong stand of support for all clinics and abortion providers, for without them there would be no “choice” for women,” stated a Refuse & Resist press release.

Feminist News Stories on Clinic Violence

Virginia State Del. Ward L. Armstrong (D) apologized during a House session for remarks made on the House floor and at a party about Del. Jeannemarie Devolites. Armstrong compared Devolites to Monica Lewinsky, and joked about her “coming over to his place.”

Devolites commented, “It whittles away at what all women have achieved down here,” but accepted the apology as “very sincere.” Devolites said, “He’s a good guy …. He did it inadvertently.”

Currently, 22 women serve in the Virginia House of 140 total members. Only 56 women have served in the House since 1924, 23 of whom have been elected in the past decade.

Virginia state Sen. Janet D. Howell (D) said that it is difficult for many women to run because of a common misconception that women cannot raise the money necessary for their campaigns. Howell stated that a woman running in 1991 “was viewed as a disadvantage because [she] couldn’t raise money,” but that “both parties are beginning to realize women make good candidates.”

British Minister for Women Joan Ruddock urged 600 young women to consider careers in science and technology. Rudock spoke at a conference organized by Gresham College in the City and the Girls School Association.

Ruddock said, “We want girls, not just to have jobs but to have real careers in science, engineering and technology. We want to see that women are equal and that means in public life and on public bodies.”

Currently, only 21% of girls in Britain are taking high-level physics classes and only 16% are enrolled for computing courses. Ruddock said, “These skill shortages can probably only be filled if you girls get in there and get the education required. The statistics are very troubling indeed because we are a technological society and we need to compete in the world.”

Women around the globe marked International Women’s Day by calling attention to human rights abuses against women in Afghanistan and Algeria.

European Union Humanitarian Affairs Commissioner Emma Bonino led a campaign which urged all countries to deny recognition of the Taliban militia because of its horrendous treatment of women.

British Secretary of State for international development Clare Short joined Bonino by urging the international communities to “take a stand” against Afghanistan. “Discrimination against women is human rights abuse on a global scale and a major hindrance to the elimination of poverty,” said Short.

Women’s human rights are being systematically denied and abused by the Taliban militia group in Afghanistan, which has seized control of two-thirds of Afghanistan since 1994. Their goal is to construct a “100-percent Islamic government.”

The Taliban has prohibited women from working outside the home or attending school, from walking outside their homes without a husband, brother or father and requires that all women wear a burqa, a debilitating garment that covers the body from head-to-toe.

Intelligence sources in Pakistan have admitted to sending agents of the nations’ main spy agency into border areas of Pakistan and prompting Afghan refugees to create the Taliban, a militia group which would then join in Afghan’s civil war. The Pakistan spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, then assigned military advisers to the Taliban’s militia with United States officials’ knowledge.

“State Department officials distanced the United States from the Taliban after its fighters seized Kabul, hanged Afghanistan’s former communist ruler, Najibullah, and imposed restrictions on women,” reported the Washington Post.

Iran’s highest female official, Masoumeh Ebtekar, vice president for environmental affairs, spoke at a women’s assembly in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, a town outside Taliban rule. Ebtekar said, “your unbearable present status is eyed with deep concern by the Moslems all over the world …. Your sisters in the Islamic republic are taking measures to establish Islamic human rights of women in the world which will contribute to the improvement of the status of women and provide progress in all the areas for the Moslem communities around the world.”

Iran has said that it will not recognize the Taliban militia group as a legitimate government and has condemned the group as “medieval” in its practice of fundamental Islam.

Approximately 500 women attended a rally in the capital of Algeria, demanding that the Algerian government amend a new law that gives men power over women by awarding the home to the husband if the couple divorces and requiring that the wife obey the husbands’ parents.

Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan

Feminist News Stories on Afghanistan

Officials investigating the bombing of the New Women All Women Health Care Clinic in Birmingham, Alabama reported that a potted plant, tipped-over on its side, was used to attract clinic workers to the bomb. When the plant was moved upright the bomb was set to explode. The explosion killed off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson and seriously injured clinic nurse Emily Lyons.

The FBI has issued a $100,000 reward for the arrest of Eric Robert Rudolph, a Murphy, N.C. man who has been linked to previous bombings in Atlanta. call 1-888-ATF-BOMB with information regarding the bombing.

Pictures of Eric Robert Rudolph

Feminist News Stories on Clinic Violence

The U.S. Senate voted 58 to 37 against a proposal that would have eliminated the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program from a bill authorizing transportation projects for the next six years. The DBE requires that at least 10 percent of highway construction contracts be awarded to companies owned by women and minorities. Since the inception of the program in the 1970’s contracts awarded to women and minorities have increased from 2 to 15 percent, according to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).

The proposal to drop the program was sponsored by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who stated that the program was “unfair, unconstitutional, and just plain un-American.”

Supporters of the program claim that it is constitutional and essential to eliminating discrimination in the construction industry. Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said McConnell’s proposal was a “clear demonstration” of why the Republican party has difficulty attracting women and minorities.

Feminist News Stories on Affirmative Action

Berklee College of Music trumpet professor Susan Fleet filed a sex discrimination suit against the school with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Fleet is charging the school with repeatedly passing her up for promotion to associate professor because of her sex.

Fleet began teaching at Berklee in 1988 as an assistant professor. In 1994 she began requesting promotion to associate professor. A male graduate of Berklee was hired to the position instead. In 1996, another male Berklee graduate was hired to a position higher in rank and salary than Fleet.

Berklee lawyer Paul Lyons stated that Fleet was passed over because she was trained and played in a classical style whereas the school is known for its contemporary repertory.

Twenty-two percent of the students at Berklee are female, compared with a near 50 percent ratio at other prestigious music schools. The faculty is 19 percent female, 7 percent of whom are full-time, and only 17 percent of the senior faculty are women.