Purvi Patel is out of prison.

A superior court judge in Indiana on Wednesday ordered the immediate release of Purvi Patel, the Indiana woman who was convicted of “feticide” and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2015 for losing her pregnancy, after resentencing Patel to less time than she has already served.

After Patel appealed the original sentence, her feticide conviction was vacated by an appeals court in July. She was still found guilty of a class D felony charge of child neglect.

In her ruling Wednesday, St. Joseph superior court judge Elizabeth Hurley “said a sentence of 18 months for Purvi Patel was appropriate for a felony charge of neglect of a dependent and that Patel does not have to be placed on parole,” the Guardian reported.

“Child neglect”? There was no child.

While many reproductive rights advocates celebrated the overturning of the feticide conviction, they are also disturbed that Patel remains charged with child neglect.

As the National Network of Abortion Funds wrote last month: “While vacating the feticide charge has been the hopeful focus of the outcome for many, the felony class D, with a sentence of 180 days to six years, sends a mixed message that doesn’t yet restore the relationship between doctors and patients.”

“If pregnant people women fear criminal consequences, they don’t go to the doctor,” said Shelly Dodson, director of All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Bloomington, Indiana. “Indiana is setting a dangerous precedent not to trust the medical community. Choosing to criminalize people women around pregnancy decisions and pregnancy outcomes is a grave injustice, which is just as true for anti-abortion laws like HB 1337 as it is for Purvi Patel.”

Women, you damn fool. If it were people the laws wouldn’t be like this. It’s only women who get pushed around this way, and they get pushed around this way because they’re women. Women get pregnant, and that makes all women public property subject to stringent property laws.

At any rate it’s good that Purvi Patel is out of the slammer.

Yes please.

The paradox of the US – so rich, yet so third world by so many measures – like maternal mortality for instance. With all our piles of cash, we suck at keeping poor women alive throughout pregnancy and delivery. How shameful that is. We’d rather spend the piles of cash on making sure that rich people can buy all the houses they want than on good healthcare for all.

The good news is that maternal mortality rates are declining worldwide. The bad news? The situation for women in the United States is a glaring exception. And in Texas, where clinics serving women have shuttered and their health interests have been battled all the way up to the US Supreme Court, the rate of pregnancy-related deaths more than doubled over the course of two years.

These are some of the findings in a new study (PDF) in the September issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology. The authors set out to analyze maternal mortality trends in part because the United States government has not published official data on this subject since 2007, they said, calling that fact an “international embarrassment.”

Why yes, that is an embarrassment. Shame on us.

The United States performs worse than any other developed nation when it comes to maternal death, according to State of the World’s Mothers 2015, the most recent comprehensive report compiled by Save the Children, a 90-year old global organization advocating for kids’ needs.

That’s what I mean. Worse than any other developed nation. That’s shameful.

And Texas is the standout.

From 2006 through 2010, numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics show that the rate of maternal deaths in Texas wavered little. There were as few as 69 deaths in 2009 and as many as 82 in 2008. But from 2010 to 2012, those numbers shot up from 72 deaths to 148. In 2013, deaths fell slightly to 140, and there were 135 in 2014, the last year analyzed by the study’s researchers.

Advocates for reproductive rights — including the right to legal and safe abortions — were quick to seize upon the news with their analysis about the trend in Texas.

The uptick is no coincidence, they say. In this same window of time, Texas politicians voted to defund Planned Parenthood and slashed family planning dollars, reducing access to more than abortions. Other services provided by Planned Parenthood, which often caters to underserved communities, include breast and cervical cancer screenings, contraceptive counseling, STD testing and treatment, and multiple forms of preventive women’s care.

“For many of our patients, Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics are their gateway to the health care system,” said Sarah Wheat, chief external affairs officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, in a written statement. “Women have been left out in the cold, without being able to obtain regular healthcare screenings, or birth control to space their pregnancies, and delays in their initial pregnancy test and prenatal referral — all of which are harmful to women’s health.”

But Texas is only the worst.

Of 183 countries and territories studied from 1990 to 2013, only 17 saw maternal mortality rate percentage increases, the World Health Organization report “Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2013” showed. In the United States, the maternal mortality rate grew by 136% over those 23 years, more than any other country studied.

More than any other country studied.

Leo Igwe tells us:

A victim of witchcraft accusation and witchcraft related violence in KENYA NEEDS YOUR HELP!

A 24-year-old woman is fighting for her life at Maua Methodist Hospital in Meru after her hand was chopped off and her private parts bruised after she was accused of witchcraft.

Mercy Nyoroka was assaulted for allegedly bewitching her neighbour and child at Kathelwa area, Igembe Central Sub County.—–

They later brought her back to her kitchen with deep wounds on her head and private parts. Her hand was also chopped off.

Richard Ntoiti, the victim’s husband, says he had gone to buy milk when his wife was abducted by the attackers.

Ntoiti, who is a casual labourer, is now appealing for help to cater for his wife’s treatment.

Purple Sage has a post on a new “Safer Sex” guide for trans people. Read it all; I want to share a couple of her points here.

The guide begins by defining some terms:

“We, as trans people, use a variety of words to describe our gender and our body parts, and these words can be very unique and personal. There’s no one right way to refer to our bodies, but to keep things consistent in this guide, we’ve decided to use the following words in the following ways.

…

PARTS: We use this word when we’re talking about genitals or sexual anatomy of any kind.

DICK: We use this word to describe external genitals. Dicks come in all shapes and sizes and can belong to people of all genders.

FRONT HOLE: We use this word to talk about internal genitals, sometimes referred to as a vagina. A front hole may self-lubricate, depending on age and hormones.

STRAPLESS: We use this word to describe the genitals of trans women who have not had genital reconstruction (or “bottom surgery”), sometimes referred to as a penis.

VAGINA: We use this word to talk about the genitals of trans women who have had bottom surgery.

See what they did there? Women have “front holes” but trans women have vaginas.

Is that, finally, obvious enough misogyny that people will get it?

Then there’s some very creepy shit about “transactional sex” which is what they call prostitution.

This guide talks about consent, which is good, but look how they throw in a sentence about “transactional sex.”

“Consent is the enthusiastic, mutual and voluntary agreement to do whatever activity you’re discussing. Giving consent is an ongoing process: You always have the right to say “yes” or “no” to any sexual activity regardless of whether you’ve done it before, whether you know your partner really likes it or whether you’re in the middle of doing it. We also recognize that transactional sex complicates consent. If at any point you change your mind about doing something, you should say so and your partner needs to stop.”

And johns always stop when the sex worker changes her mind, as is well known. There is no violence in the “transactional sex” industry, however much transactional sex complicates consent. And I’m Marie of Rumania.

In their section on communication, they talk about “transactional sex” again:

“We recognize that communication can be complicated with transactional sex partners. In some cases, the recognition of the sex transaction can actually help frame sexual negotiation, but power and control dynamics can also make this more challenging. Hopefully, ongoing communication can help us have sexual experiences where we all feel safe and respected.”

Hopefully! Yeah! Let’s hope so! Let’s just keep hoping so forever, while the johns beat up the sex workers and nobody gives a damn. Hopefully all that will stop one of these days.

And then there’s the BDSM part, but I’ll let Purple Sage tell you about the knives and blades and what she thinks the correct advice is. (Spoiler: don’t use them.)

Yes! The FDA has banned anti-bacterial soaps.

Antibacterial soaps were banned from the US market on Friday in a final ruling by the Food and Drug Administration, which said that manufacturers had failed to prove the cleansers were safe or more effective than normal products.

Dr Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s center for evaluation and research, said that certain antimicrobial soaps may not actually serve any health benefits at all.

“Consumers may think antibacterial washes are more effective at preventing the spread of germs, but we have no scientific evidence that they are any better than plain soap and water,” she said in a statement. “In fact, some data suggests that antibacterial ingredients may do more harm than good over the long term.”

Let me guess – they may do more harm over the long term for the same reason overuse of antibiotics does: the bacteria evolve to withstand the soaps, so then they’re that much harder to get rid of.

The FDA first proposed a rule about the chemicals in 2013, following research that they might affect human hormones or change natural resistance to bacteria. The agency requested research from the producers to back up their health claims, but in the three years since has found that data lacking or their requests ignored.

Triclosan has been proven effective at killing bacteria if used at sustained length – far longer than the few seconds most people spend washing their hands – and was once only found in healthcare settings.

Recent studies have linked triclosan to a series of disruptions in human and animal health. A University of Chicago study released in July found that triclosan changed the microbiome inside human guts, and its researchers suggested that exposure could damage developing fetuses. A study from earlier this year found that overuse could also be contributing to antibiotic resistance, and a 2015 studyfound that antibacterial formulas were not more effective than soap and water.

So if they’re not more effective, it’s a really bad idea to use then when they could be contributing to antibiotic resistance, eh?

Professor Patrick McNamara, who has published research on antimicrobial soaps, called the ruling “logical” because research shows “there is no added benefit to having these antimicrobial chemicals in soaps”.

He added that triclosan could play a part in driving antibiotic resistance, saying, “after these chemicals are used in our homes they go down the drain to wastewater treatment plants and eventually to the environment where they can select for antibiotic resistance genes”.

“In short, triclosan and triclocarbon present a risk towards propagation of antibiotic resistance,” he said. “Since they do not offer added benefits when washing hands, their use is not worth their environmental risk.”

Thank you FDA.

A new horror in the murder of Samia Shahid: she was raped before being murdered.

A British woman who died in Pakistan in a so-called honour killing was raped before her death, the officer in charge of the investigation has said.

Samia Shahid, 28, from Bradford, died in July in northern Punjab.

The Pakistani chief investigator also told the BBC Ms Shahid’s father and former husband carried out her murder.

He added he was seeking to have her mother and sister returned to Pakistan to be questioned about their role in the murder.

She never wanted to marry him in the first place. She was forced to marry him. She left him, and divorced, and married someone she did want to marry. For that he first raped her and then killed her.

The depth of hatred just never ceases to amaze me.

A friend went to the Science Museum – you know, the prototype one, the original one, the one in South Kensington. The friend took pictures of an exhibit. I got permission to share them. They’re from a Wellcome Trust exhibition, Who Am I?

“Who am I?” is a somewhat odd question for a science museum. Science can tell us what we are but not really who. Who questions are conceptual rather than scientific.

“Gender identity” isn’t a scientific term. It’s political. It’s maybe literary, maybe philosophical; it’s conceptual…but it’s not scientific.

“Identity” too is not scientific. “Feeling” male or female is not scientific.

Not science.

A press release from Maryam and One Law for All:

Dear Mona Siddqui

RE: Independent Review into Sharia Law

Thank you for your invitation to give evidence to  the Sharia review.

We will not be able to accept your invitation. We are boycotting the review because of its limited terms of reference; the panel makeup (including yourself – a theologian – as chair and a former Judge who is a member of the Christian Lawyers Fellowship); imams as ‘advisors’; and your labelling the legitimate concerns of women’s rights campaigners and organisations as ‘arrogant’. The above confirm our fears that the review will be nothing but a whitewash aimed at further legitimising parallel legal systems at the expense of women’s rights.

Our concerns have been clearly laid out in an open letter to the then Home Secretary signed by nearly 200 prominent women’s rights campaigners and organisations to which we have yet to receive a response.

As mentioned in the open letter, minority women deserve an independent, impartial, judge-led inquiry centred on human rights and not theology. Theologians and those invested in augmenting religion’s role in the law cannot impartially investigate a system from which they benefit. As testimonies gathered from women reveals, religion in the law is discriminatory particularly against women. Any review that does not look into the full extent of rights violations of Sharia bodies from a human rights perspective cannot be considered a legitimate review nor taken seriously.

Sincerely

Maryam Namazie, Spokesperson, One Law for All

Gina Khan, Spokesperson, One Law for All

BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK

tel: +44 (0) 7719166731

email: onelawforall@gmail.com

web: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/

It’s horrifying that this is going ahead.

Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Approaching a woman in a confident, easy going way.

As Samantha says, listen to women.

Do you go up to men reading and demand that they talk to you, that they flirt with you even? Do you go up to men out jogging and demand that they converse with you on the basis of no known common interest? Do you get all het up and defensive when you try to start a conversation and the man walks away? Probably not but the way you are addressing this issue suggests that you might just be daft enough.

When women are interested in making new friends and acquaintances they put themselves into social situations where casual conversation is easy – a bar, a hobby club, something like that – but no-one is under any obligation to begin or to continue any particular conversation, to stay while the other person bores them to death or to agree to see them privately.

You, though, seem to be trying to put some random woman into a position where she is obliged to put your sexual curiosity ahead of all other considerations. It’s not on!

As for “faint heart never won fair lady” do you even know where that notion comes from? Think France in the fourteen century and the cultural aberration which produced the troubadours. Sure, that produced some middling poetry and some slightly better songs but it was a game played by the elite and was almost entirely played in people’s heads. It involved men getting or pretending to get a crush on a woman of high social status and drooling poetically all over her, knowing that she had the clout to get him beaten up, locked up or disappeared if he went too far. It was a game of “how far dare I go” and does not translate to the New York subway or wherever in the twenty-first century.

There is another way of going about this if you’d be interested. Imagine that women are people. They are on the way to, say, an interview or having a last read of their brief before they appear in court. Or they might just be trying to pick up the bread and milk on the way home to feed the kids. It doesn’t matter. No matter how superficially you may be attracted to someone at first glance she owes you nothing. Stop trying to remake the world so that she does. Stop trying to convince us? yourself? that women like it. We don’t. And look out for all those signals which say, before you open your mouth, I do not wish to speak to you.

If you can understand a clenched fist coming towards you then you can understand earbuds or hunched shoulders, a refusal to make eye contact. If you try.

A bad thing didn’t happen:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law.

That includes Clarence Thomas, of course – voting to weaken the Voting Rights Act.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

So that states could claw back a little racism in their voting laws.

Civil rights groups joined with the Obama administration in filing suit against the law, arguing that, several parts of the law violated the Constitution and what remained of the Voting Rights Act. A trial judge rejected those claims in April, but in July a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., disagreed.

The appeals court ruling struck down five parts of the law: its voter ID requirements, a rollback of early voting to 10 days from 17, an elimination of same-day registration and of preregistration of some teenagers, and its ban on counting votes cast in the wrong precinct.

The court found that all five restrictions “disproportionately affected African Americans.” The law’s voter identification provision, for instance, “retained only those types of photo ID disproportionately held by whites and excluded those disproportionately held by African Americans.”

This was so, the court said, even though the state had “failed to identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud in North Carolina.” But it did find that there is evidence of fraud in absentee voting by mail, a method used disproportionately by white voters. But the Legislature exempted absentee voting from the photo ID requirement.

But we were assured it was all about preventing voter fraud. Assured.

More good advice for men who want to intrude on women:

THE cold vastness of space is a surprisingly good place to pull because female astronauts get very lonely and horny.

Here’s how to approach a lady spaceman as she is orbiting the Earth:

– When you meet a female astronaut out in the Earth’s orbit, the first thing you should do is casually knock on the helmet and introduce yourself.

– Their first response may be to tell you “Fuck off” but that’s just them being coy and maybe a little shy. We all know what women are like.

– Persistence is key. So, just casually knock on the helmet again and gesture for them to remove the helmet so you can ask their name.

Read the whole thing; it’s funny. Martin Bishop wrote it.