Soraya Chemaly

Safer to Give Birth in Bosnia and Kuwait than US

Every 90 seconds, somewhere in the world, a woman diesfrom a pregnancy-related complication. This isn’t just a “third world” problem. The United States currently ranks 50th in the world for maternal health. It is safer to give birth in Bosnia or Kuwait than in California. But what we do here ultimately affects women everywhere. This is a matter of inequality and political will.

When I was eight months pregnant with my first child, my cousin died in a San Francisco delivery room giving birth to her third. And while both of my pregnancies were high-risk and dangerous, I did not almost die like my sister during childbirth. She lost her baby after, with only the benefit of quickly administered topical anesthesia, she underwent an emergency Caesarian section to save her life. My best friend had to be raced, during labor, to a second hospital in critical care during her life-threatening delivery. Another close friend hemorrhaged so badly she required twelve liters of blood after delivering. I could easily continue this list with stories of people I know intimately.

Pregnancy can be difficult and complicated and giving birth often dangerous and sometimes life threatening. (Something legislators who fancy themselves doctors seem to be in complete ignorance of.) We don’t like to talk about these difficulties and dangers in a culture that idealizes and glorifies motherhood and holds women to manic and ridiculous standards for what is “good.” The examples I gave above took place in major hospitals where women had the best care available to them. Imagine what it is like for the literally billions of women with none of those resources. The risk of a woman in a developing country dying in these ways is 36 times what it is in a developed country. Me, my sister, my friends, you or a woman you know easily would have died giving birth in these countries. Many do here. Of the estimated 210 million women who become pregnant each year, 20 million will experience life-threatening complications.

For these women and their families, there is no Mother’s Day. That’s why this year, the maternal health advocacy organization Every Mother Counts is asking you, women and men, to act in solidarity on Mother’s Day to raise awareness and help change the lives of millions of women who will otherwise die becoming mothers.

The cornerstone of their newly launched campaign, “No Mother’s Day,” is the following Public Service Announcement, directed by her husband, actor and filmmaker Edward Burns:

According the the World Health Organization’s Trends in Maternal Mortality Report:

• Every 90 seconds a woman dies from a pregnancy related death, that’s 1,000 women a day
• 90 percent of these deaths are preventable
• 99 percent of maternal deaths that took place in 2008 (most recent data from 2010 study) occurred in sub-Saharan Africa (57 percent) and South Asia (30 percent)
• 50 percent of all maternal deaths take place during the first 48 hours after delivery.
• Seven million women a year suffer critical complications. For every woman that dies, another 20 experience debilitating and life threatening harm.

“Equal Enough” is Unacceptable

American women need to be recognized as full citizens. Yes, women in this country. It’s me again, sitting in my office, by myself, saying that “equal enough” is NOT. But, I am not alone.  Tomorrow, Saturday, April 28th, thousands of women and men will participate in 53 marches and rallies for women’s rights in 45 states and the District of Columbia. These events are part of UNITEWOMEN.ORG movement against the War on Women. 

Why should you march?

Because women’s and girls’ fundamental rights, to privacy, to life, to bodily integrity, to chose when to plan their reproduction are being violated.

Because women can’t afford to nor should be forced to live their lives according to rules that assume they are dependent on men.

Because women and girls should not be punished, denigrated and publicly humiliated for speaking civilly and intelligently in their own interest or making their own choices.

Because boys and girls should be taught what equality, not entitlement, means.

Without fail, when I talk to people about gender inequality in the United States, someone inevitably says some variation of this: “Compared to other women, women here are equal enough.” First of all, women arenot in competition with other women for safety from violence and freedom. Second, this type of comparison, with its echo of threat, is an unacceptable and irrelevant framework for considering citizenship and protection under the law. Women are citizens and should have the full rights and privileges of citizens.

We should. But we don’t.

If you are uncertain about what I am saying and think I am exaggerating the harm, consider the effect of one distillation of events: the degree to which the conservative “political” agenda requires that all women, regardless of color, faith, economic status or sexual preference, seek men’s review and approval before acting. (Those factors, race, economic status, sexual preference magnify the effect.) “Informed consent, ” “permission slips,” wage policies determined because “money may be more important to men,” “man-up finances,” women’s health care being determined by all-male religious leaders and congressional panels,refusal to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act because of homophobia (and racism). On and on and one: every time the baseline requirement for women to exercise their rights and live freely is the intervention and approval of men. This is not just unfair to girls and women, but imposes unreasonable responsibilities and pressures on boys and men.

Even the phrasing of hot button issues — “Mommy Wars” and “Slutgate” — are coded conversations that define women, their health, their choices and their incomes primarily in terms of their relationships to men. Those frameworks are unacceptable. These attempts to legislate the subordination of women are not just distasteful and embarrassing but designed ultimately to humiliate women and keep them in their place.

 Time and again, women and their rights are made marginal and secondary to almost everything else and debated away as a matter of expedience.

You should march because this is unacceptable.

You should march because women have yet to be recognized as full citizens, with agency in both the private and public spheres.

Virgins, Bondage and A Shameful Media Fail

Based, as Newsweek’s article was, on “publisher’s data, gleaned from Facebook, Google searches and fan sites” I have drawn the shocking conclusion that given the wholesale and massively profitably adoption of dominatrix aesthetics at all levels of fashion, it is apparent that there is a trend of women coping with increased equality, freedom and economic power by adopting fashions that speak to their comfort with equality and free will and men’s and women’s happy acceptance of powerful females.

Thanks to its recent cover story, The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Sadomasochism is a Feminist Dream, millions of people can thank Newsweek for unfulfilling sex and a cynical undermining of feminism’s attempts to change that. Instead of substantively considering the gendered nature of shame in our culture and how e-readers are being used by women to deal with its effects, the magazine perpetuated some pretty dubious and unsubstantiated theories about power, sexuality, gender and yes, feminism. The only trends that surface when considering the work cited in the article are women’s use of technology, their openness to overtly sexual content and mainstream media’s persistent misrepresentation of both women and the feminist movement.

The article inquestion relied largely on the success of the soft-core porn condage/dominance/sadomasochism (BDSM) series, 50 Shades of Grey, to explain why working women (mis-conflated with feminists) might be uncomfortable with free will. What drivel. Not only is women’s consumption of BSDM (in the book or two other referenced media) not a trend, but there is also no connection between the theme of submission/dominance and women’s “possible” discomfort with economic successes and power. The series’ sales are unexceptional and their content ultimately traditional for the simple reason that the books are about romance in the context of VIRGINITY, SUBMISSION and the transformative power of what filmmaker and writer Therese Shechter calls “the magical penis” which awakens and transforms a woman in these narratives. The deep thread, not to be pulled by Newsweek’spredictable trojan horse writer, connecting all of these things is gendered shame. 

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