ProWomanProLife

It’s hard to think that women and children would be military targets, but for militias and rebel groups operating in the DRC, that’s exactly what they are.

The killings of the civilians took place on Monday and Tuesday in remote villages in the territory of Shabunda, in South Kivu Province, an area still troubled by armed groups more than eight years after the end of a war there. An army spokesman said the 45 victims were mainly women and children, including one pregnant woman, and a leader of a village was decapitated.

There’s a petition to President Obama you can sign here to send an envoy to the region. If you know of something similar in Canada, please let us know.

In 2009 the NY Times reported,

Christine Schuler-DeSchryver, a well-known anti-rape activist, vented about all the empty promises from the stream of high-ranking visitors who have recently come to eastern Congo, “one more important than the next.”

“In the end, all we got was a pile of business cards,” she said.

The Congolese women have been waiting too long for action.

Poor women are delivered a message in this country, that rather than deliver their baby, their baby would be “better off” having never been born at all. A message we can see at work here.

Among poor women, the abortion rate increased 17.5 percent, rising from 44.4 to 52.2 per 1,000 women [...]

… when confronted with an unintended pregnancy, poor women who might have felt equipped to support a child, or another child, when not in the midst of a recession may have decided that they were unable to do so during a time of economic turmoil.

The message that if you don’t have a house with a white picket fence, then you might not be able to support your baby the way we, the nation, deem fit, is sinister enough. But now in South Africa, poor immigrant women, rather than getting the help they need, are actually facing a battle for custody because they had their children and aren’t able to meet the states criteria for “good parenting”.

Simon Zwane, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Development, confirms that women must have jobs and housing before they can recover their babies, to prove they are capable of caring for them.

“We have taken babies into places of safety until parents can prove they can look after their babies, they have fixed places of abode and they have partners or they have found employment and they will not be on the streets with babies,” he says.

Konjiwa, 26, spends her days remembering. Her 2-year-old son, Joe, is growing up fast without her in an institution far from the squalid building where she lives. She too carried her child across the Limpopo River.

“I can’t survive without my baby,” she croaks miserably. “I miss him more than anything.”

Zwane says some women use their babies to beg. But Konjiwa and Chibura say they cannot feed their children without begging, let along afford child care while they seek money.

As many as 2 million Zimbabweans have flooded into South Africa in recent years looking for work after fleeing their country’s economic collapse and political violence. They find they are not especially welcome, particularly in townships where xenophobic violence in 2008 saw machete-wielding mobs storm through, beating up Zimbabweans and other migrants, burning some to death.

When I learned about a local charity and support group for young mothers, SHYM, I was astonished that no one had thought of this before. While SHYM does wonderful work here in Nova Scotia, there is another group in the US. What’s astonishing about this article is that in the whole of a country nicknamed by Michael Moore as “The Big One” they’re the only one.

Americans enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Swaddled within those precious rights is the freedom to be born. Debate rages about a woman’s right to choose, yet many would choose to have their babies if only they had a place to live. For 27 years, Friends of the Unborn in Quincy has given pregnant, homeless women the freedom to keep their children.

Marilyn Birnie, FOTU founder and executive director of the pregnancy crisis center and shelter, has helped more than 2,000 women with this choice. Up to 16 pregnant women, ages 18 and older, can stay for about two years, rent-free, to develop self-supporting skills at the multiroomed Victorian in Quincy. Getting a GED is mandatory. Also offered are additional educational classes and resource assistance. [...]

For close to three decades, FOTU has stayed open through private donations that average $25. Each month is a miracle since the annual expenses exceed $350,000.

“We are never ahead. It’s always month-to-month,” said Penny Romano, a 20-year employee at Friends of the Unborn, the only such private organization in the United States.

[...]

The women are here because of an ultimatum from their families, “Get an abortion or get out.”

Boyfriends abandoned them. A logical option loomed – get an abortion – but they didn’t want to. They found FOTU through hospital or agency referrals, or word of mouth.

[...] Some women endure a long, fierce journey. “Esther,” a married woman with three children, was brutally gang raped by soldiers in the Congo. She and her husband were taken to two separate prisons and her children were lost. She escaped alone and after arriving in the US, she eventually found her way to Birnie’s door.

“Esther came to us with nothing more than the wrinkled yellow dress she was wearing. She didn’t know if the baby was her husband’s or the three men who raped her, but she didn’t want to abort her husband’s child. We took care of her. Later a Congolese priest was able to locate her mother in the Congo who was caring for her three children. Esther was able to talk to them, but we were never able to find her husband.”

Now Esther has a daughter and has moved to Lynn.

Will an abortion make them magically wealthy? Will an abortion end her employment in the sex trade? Will an abortion find them child care arrangements for their other children? The majority of unplanned pregnancies are red flags that a woman’s life, not just her pregnancy, isn’t going the way she planned.

It seems that abortion proponents are happy to overlook this blazing neon sign, and instead believe that lower income women just aren’t educated or don’t have enough access to birth control to prevent a pregnancy from happening. But does sex ed and birth control at an early age really break the cycle?

Teenage pregnancy is linked to several risk factors. Being poor, living in a single-parent household, child abuse, and risky behaviors such as drug abuse and early or unprotected sex are all predictors of whether a teenager will become pregnant (Kirby 1997*; Dillard*).

It seems that being poor doesn’t just lead to more unintended pregnancies but also to an earlier age of sexual activity. And if this isn’t desirable for us as a society, then birth control is not the answer. Something fundamental must change, especially as poor women are at a higher risk of sexual violence.

Poor women and girls may be more at risk of rape in the course of their daily tasks than those who are better off, for example when they walk home on their own from work late at night, or work in the fields or collect firewood alone. Children of poor women may have less parental supervision when not in school, since their mothers may be at work and unable to afford child care. The children themselves may, in fact, be working and thus vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Poverty forces many women and girls into occupations that carry a relatively high risk of sexual violence,^[22] particularly sex work.^[23] It also creates enormous pressures for them to find or maintain jobs, to pursue trading activities and, if studying, to obtain good grades all of which render them vulnerable to sexual coercion from those who can promise these things.^[24] Poorer women are also more at risk of intimate partner violence, of which sexual violence is often a manifestation.^[25][26]

The answer is not to sterilize these women and children so that their exploitation doesn’t lead to an unintended pregnancy, the answer is to stop and condemn the exploitation and violence.

And those are real women’s rights she’s fighting for, as opposed to the fake reproductive kind:

A Saudi mother said Sunday she defied a ban on women drivers in the ultra-conservative kingdom by getting behind the wheel for four days without being stopped. Najla al-Hariri, a housewife in her mid-30s, said she drove non-stop for four days in the streets of the Red Sea city of Jeddah “to defend her belief that Saudi women should be allowed to drive.”

“I don’t fear being arrested because I am setting an example that my daughter and her friends are proud of,” Hariri told AFP, adding she was offering driving lessons for women.

Murhabazi Namegabe has been awarded the World’s Children’s Prize for his work in the DR Congo.

“You’re going to die tonight. Eat your last meal!”
Murhabazi read the short message that beeped on his mobile phone. He was in an important meeting with the UN, discussing children who were being forced to become soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He looked around cautiously. Had someone in the room sent him the death threat?

Murhabazi has made many enemies during his struggle for the thousands of children being exploited and tortured in war-torn DR Congo.
“The fight for children’s rights here is a matter of life and death. And I’m prepared to die in that fight, every day,” says Murhabazi Namegabe.

Murhabazi Namegabe has been nominated for the World’s Children’s Prize 2011 for his 20-year long perilous struggle for children in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since 1989, Murhabazi and his organisation BVES has freed 4,000 child soldiers and more than 4,500 girls who have been sexually assaulted by armed groups, and taken care of 4,600 unaccompanied refugee children.

His 35 homes and schools offer some of the world’s most vulnerable children food, clothes, a home, healthcare, therapy, the opportunity to go to school, security and love. Most of the children are reunited with their families. Thanks to Murhabazi, some 60,000 children have passed through the doors of BVES’ various centres and been given a better life.
Murhabazi and BVES represent children in DR Congo by constantly urging the government, all armed groups, organisations and everyone else in society to look after the country’s children.

Not everyone supports Murhabazi’s struggle. He has been imprisoned and assaulted and is constantly receiving death threats. Seven of his colleagues have been killed.

Here’s a pro-woman solution if ever there was one,

For years, diplomats, aid workers, academics and government officials here have been vexed almost to the point of paralysis about how to attack this country’s staggering problem of sexual violence, in which hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, many quite sadistically, by the various armed groups who haunt the hills of eastern Congo.

Sending in more troops has compounded the problem. United Nations peacekeepers have failed to stop it. Would reforming the Congolese military work? Building up the Congolese state? Pushing harder to regulate so-called conflict minerals to starve the rebels of an income?

For Ms. Ensler, the feminist playwright who wrote “The Vagina Monologues” and who has worked closely with Congolese women, the answer was simple.

“You build an army of women,” she said. “And when you have enough women in power, they take over the government and they make different decisions. You’ll see. They’ll say ‘Uh-uh, we’re not taking this any longer,’ and they’ll put an end to this rape problem fast.”

Over the weekend, Ms. Ensler took the first step toward building this army: the opening of a base here in Bukavu called City of Joy.

Yes, more of this please.

PICTURES OF KATLYN GUNN’S little girl line the walls, cover the fridge and top the tables. Her baby’s name — Kylie — loops across her inner wrist, a tattooed reminder when the child isn’t in her arms.

“She’s my everything,” the 18-year-old Dartmouth mother says. “If I didn’t have her, I don’t know where I’d be.”

Perhaps the same could be said of where she actually is — a unique apartment complex, once a 1950s parochial school, tucked away behind a Dartmouth church.

These days, it’s a sanctuary of sorts for young single mothers like Katlyn. And the staff of volunteers guides the girls to far greater life lessons. Like how to bond with their babies, how to balance their chequebooks, how to rise above the people or places or behaviours that have been keeping them down.

The non-profit Supportive Housing for Young Mothers (SHYM) opened this 14-unit dwelling in October 2007, after extensive renovations funded by the federal government.

The organization bought the building — owned by Halifax Regional Municipality and used as a storage facility — for $1.

Single mothers aged 16 to 24, mostly teenagers, live in most of the units, although two units are set aside for staff, one of whom is a permanent resident. The girls stay for up to two years, occasionally longer. Most have no place else to go.

Katlyn used to live in group homes.

Former resident Amanda Young used to be homeless, going from friend’s house to friend’s house — and spending a month at a Halifax shelter with her now 3½-year-old son Jordan — until she came here.

“For one reason or another, they’re not able to live with their families,” says SHYM executive director Wendy Fraser. “Those reasons can be anything from financial, to capacity of the family, to mental health or drug and alcohol issues.

“There’s not really any one scenario that would fit for any of them. The common denominator is that they were young and didn’t have family that was able to provide the support they needed.”

Good grief:

LUCKNOW, India — A northern Indian village has banned unmarried women from using cell phones for fear they will arrange forbidden marriages that are often punished by death, a local official said Wednesday.

The Lank village council decided unmarried boys could use mobile phones, but only under parental supervision, council member Satish Tyagi said. Local women’s rights group criticized the measure as backward and unfair.

Marriages between members of the same clan are forbidden under Hindu custom in some parts of north India, where unions are traditionally arranged by families. In conservative rural areas, families sometimes mete out extreme punishments, including so-called honor killings, for those who violate marriage taboos. In some cases, village councils themselves have ordered the punishments, though police often intervene to stop them.

The Lank village council feared young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange forbidden elopements.

Part of me laughs, but mostly I’m horrified, of course. Marriage is tough enough without all those ridiculously backward rules one finds in ridiculously backward societies. Shame on these people.

…for Dr. Mildred Jefferson.

Associated Press

Dr. Mildred Jefferson, a prominent, outspoken opponent of abortion and the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, died Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by Anne Fox, the president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, one of many anti-abortion groups in which Dr. Jefferson played leadership roles.

Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, “gave my profession an almost unlimited license to kill,” Dr. Jefferson testified before Congress in 1981.

[...]

“She probably was the greatest orator of our movement,” Darla St. Martin, co-executive director of the National Right to Life Committee, said Monday. “In fact, take away the probably.”

In a 2003 profile in The American Feminist, an anti-abortion magazine, Dr. Jefferson said, “I am at once a physician, a citizen and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged and the planned have the right to live.”

_____________________

Andrea adds: Wow. Memorize that last sentence. “I am at once a physician, a citizen and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged and the planned have the right to live.” Sounds like a ProWomanProLife motto to me.