niyad
niyad's JournalFuture psych eval tests. It occurred to me that future psych eval tests,
scales, diagnostic tools, etc., (assuming we survive to HAVE a future), are going to be completely redone. Every diagnostic criterion is going to be based on how one reacts to reading or watching or listening to the more insane of the orange creature's oral and written effluvia. The more, and the more quickly one believes, the more serious one's condition.
I am trying to come up with some appropriate names.
Invisible victims How Colombia plans to support children orphaned by femicide
Invisible victims
How Colombia plans to support children orphaned by femicide
Siblings Fabian Ramirez, Luna Castro and Jennyfer Ramirez lost their mother to femicide in 2022 [Christina Noriega/Al Jazeera]
By Christina Noriega
Published On 11 Jun 202511 Jun 2025
Bogota, Colombia – The news made her breath catch in her throat. There, on her Facebook feed, was a post with an image of her mother's ex-boyfriend. The caption announced a femicide: the intentional murder of a woman because of her gender. Jennyfer Ramirez was only 17 years old at the time, a high-school student and the eldest of three siblings. She had been waiting at her uncle's house, where her mother, 33-year-old Leidy Navarrete, was expected to arrive. It was December 23, 2022. Only two days remained before the Christmas holiday. But as Ramirez read the Facebook post, she realised her mother would never come. Navarrete was the victim referenced in the caption. Her ex, Andres Castro, had forced his way into her apartment in southern Bogota that morning and strangled her to death before she could leave for work.
Ramirez felt like she could no longer breathe. Overwhelmed with the shock, she fainted.“It was always the four of us together, my mother and the three of us," said Ramirez, now 19. "From one moment to another, everything changed."
Ramirez, her brother and her baby sister are what domestic violence advocates consider the “invisible victims” of femicide: children who are left without a mother or loved one upon whom they rely.Such murders can often leave kids orphaned without any parents at all, particularly when the perpetrator is a father or guardian.But new legislation passed in Colombia's Congress seeks to offer state support to the child survivors of femicide, like Ramirez and her siblings.The bill is part of a growing trend of legislation in Latin America that provides compensation and funds for mental health services to children struggling with the aftermath of gender-based violence.“It recognizes that, in the process of femicide, the mother isn’t the only victim," said Representative Carolina Giraldo, who helped draft the bill. "There are indirect victims as well."
. . . .
According to the United Nations, eight Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Ecuador, have passed similar laws to support the dependents of femicide victims. The need, advocates say, is great. In 2023, the United Nations estimated that 11 women each day were murdered because of their gender in Latin America and the Caribbean region.In Colombia alone, at least 1,746 children were left parentless as a result of a femicide between 2019 and 2024, according to the Colombian Observatory of Femicides, an independently run research group that tracks violence against women.
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Luna Castro holds up a photo of her mother, the late Leidy Navarrete [Christina Noriega/Al Jazeera]
. . . .
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Luna Castro does homework at her grandmother's home in southern Bogota [Christina Noriega/Al Jazeera]
. . . .
The legislation will provide support to minors who lose a parent to femicide until the age of 18. Children who pursue higher education or who are disabled will remain eligible for benefits until the age of 25. It also offers funding for funerals and free access to mental health programmes. The bill now heads to the desk of President Gustavo Petro, where it is expected to be signed into law. When the law comes into effect, Ramirez said that she plans to enroll in a university to continue her education in tourism studies. She said she owes her strength to her mother. “My mother practically made me in her image,” said Ramirez. “I learned a lot of things from my mother that now I can offer to others.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/6/11/invisible-victims-how-colombia-plans-to-support-kids-orphaned-by-femicide
African manhood is broken - and it's costing women their lives( Urgent Trigger warning!!)
African manhood is broken – and it’s costing women their lives( Urgent Trigger warning!!)
Femicide is surging across the continent. Without cultural reform led by men themselves, more lives will be lost.
Tafi Mhaka
Al Jazeera columnist
Published On 20 Jun 202520 Jun 2025
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Activists chant slogans during the women's protest against gender-based violence and femicide in Pretoria, South Africa, April 11, 2025 [Themba Hadebe/AP Photo]
On May 25, Olorato Mongale, a 30-year-old woman from South Africa, went on a date with a man she had recently met. Less than two hours later, she was dead. Her half-naked body was found by the roadside in Lombardy West, a suburb north of Johannesburg. It showed signs of severe trauma and bruising. Investigators concluded that she had been murdered elsewhere and dumped at the scene. Her brutal and senseless killing led to a wave of grief and outrage on social media. Days later, a family spokesperson revealed that Mongale – a master’s student at the University of the Witwatersrand – had once worked as a journalist. She left the profession seven years ago due to the emotional toll of reporting on gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF).
. . . .
In November 2023, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa released the country’s first national study on GBVF. It found that the persistence of gender-based violence is rooted in “deeply ingrained societal norms and structures that perpetuate male dominance and reinforce gender hierarchies … leading to female subordination, systemic inequalities, and violence against women”. The destructive effect of entrenched patriarchy is undeniable. In South Africa, a woman is murdered every three hours. That is approximately 8 women a day. One study estimates that around 7.8 million women in the country have experienced physical or sexual violence. While women of all races and backgrounds are affected, Black women face higher rates of GBVF – an enduring legacy of apartheid and its structural inequalities. This crisis is not unique to South Africa. The terror faced by women and girls is a continent-wide phenomenon.
In November 2024, the United Nations published its report Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Intimate Partner/Family Member Femicides, revealing that Africa had the world’s highest rate of partner-related femicide that year.
Kenya stands out for its staggering figures. Between September 2023 and December 2024, the country recorded more than 7,100 cases of sexual and gender-based violence. These included the murders of at least 100 women by male acquaintances, relatives, or intimate partners in just four months. Among the victims was Rebecca Cheptegei, a Ugandan Olympian and mother of two, who competed in the marathon at the 2024 Paris Games. On September 5, 2024, she died in Eldoret, Kenya, from severe burns after her former partner doused her in petrol and set her alight during a domestic dispute. He himself later died in a hospital from his injuries.
The Kenyan government later recognised GBVF as the most pressing security challenge facing the country — a belated but crucial move. On May 26, Kenya’s National Gender and Equality Commission noted that the surge in GBVF crimes was driven by “a complex interplay of cultural, social, economic, and legal factors”. Patriarchal traditions continue to fuel inequality and legitimise violence, while harmful practices such as forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), and dowry-related violence further endanger women’s lives. Economic hardship and women’s financial dependence only deepen their vulnerability. Across the continent, we are witnessing a dangerous resurgence of archaic patriarchal norms.
. . . . .
There can be no just African future unless African manhood is transformed.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/6/20/african-manhood-is-broken-and-its-costing-women-their-lives
Missouri AG Andrew Bailey Will Sue To Make Sure All Chatbots Say Donald Trump Loves Jews The Most
(Sadly, this is NOT The Onion, or Borowitz)
Missouri AG Andrew Bailey Will Sue To Make Sure All Chatbots Say Donald Trump Loves Jews The Most
Yes, it's that stupid.
Gary Legum
Jul 11, 2025
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Screencap of Bailey from Donald Trump Jr’s Triggered
What is it about Missouri’s state attorney general office that it produces some of the most pathetic, try-hard right-wingers in Donald Trump’s America? Just in recent years the office has produced Josh Hawley, quite possibly the smuggest dork in America not named Elon Musk. Hawley lasted two years in the AG’s seat before quitting to become a US senator. It also produced Eric Schmitt, who spent his tenure suing the Biden administration 25 times for various offenses, lost about half the cases, then touted his aggressive legal attacks in his own Senate race, which he won. That leads us to current Missouri AG Andrew Bailey, who clearly also has his eyes set on something bigger. Probably not senator, since Hawley and Schmitt aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe Bailey is thinking governor? Cabinet secretary? Champion in competitive mayonnaise eating? Whatever his ambitions, Bailey has spent his two-plus years in office pursuing ham-handed legal actions that seem almost to have been focus-grouped to grab MAGA’s, and specifically Trump’s, attention. He has fought to keep people in prison even after their convictions were overturned. He unilaterally banned gender-affirming care for transgender adults and hounded a children’s hospital in Kansas City for private medical information about transgender patients until the hospital sued him. He sued the state of New York to make it delay sentencing Trump on his 34 felony convictions until after the 2024 election.
Then this past week, Bailey sent threatening letters to multiple tech companies for the crime of building AI chatbots that don’t think Donald Trump is the bestest president at fighting antisemitism of all our recent presidents, and probably all the presidents in our 250 years of being the bestest nation, and what the hell, the bestest leader of every organized government since the Sumerians first wrote the Code of Ur-Nammu. Yes, Donald Trump. You know, the guy who casually drops antisemitic slurs during his rallies, hosts notorious antisemites like Kanye West for dinner at his bargain-basement Xanadu in Florida, accuses Jews who disagree with Israel of not actually being Jewish, and has staffed his administration with people like this dipshit. And this dipshit. And all these dipshits. How did this question even come up? Apparently, it was an experiment by mrcFreeSpeech, an offshoot of the notorious right-wing Media Research Center dedicated to policing alleged bias against conservatives by Big Tech. Some weirdo at mrcFreeSpeech decided it would be a worthwhile use of her finite time on Earth to ask various chatbots, “Rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically in regards to antisemitism.” Then she analyzed the results of a question asking for political analysis for political bias.
. . .
But, if we must report these results without making a jerking-off motion, three of the chatbots tested listed Trump as the most antisemitic of our last five presidents. Two chatbots listed him as the least antisemitic (Grok was one of the two, natch), and one, Microsoft’s Copilot, refused to answer the question. Andrew Bailey then sent his letter to the three companies whose bots named Trump the most antisemitic, along with Microsoft, presumably for the crime of remaining neutral. In the letter, he trashed the companies for “seeming inability to arrive at the truth” and threatened to sue them for fraud.
. . . . .
Maybe Bailey can take a page from that time he sued Starbucks for discriminating against white men and go after Meta for this despicable and entirely hilarious oversight.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/missouri-ag-andrew-bailey-will-sue
Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The La Perla! (Calling Aristus!!!)
Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The La Perla!
A sweet tropical Negroni for the heat of summer.
Matthew Hooper
Jul 11, 2025
Prouhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vq3X!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09162524-06dc-4663-9d03-c244f75bc114_4032x3024.jpegd of that garnish. The drink’s a bit more orange in person.
Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. The 4th of July was stupid busy at the bar, and it hasn’t slowed down much since then. I decided to play around a little on my day off and make some infusions inspired by an Instagram cocktail from Holy City Handcraft. The end result is bittersweet, complex, and a ton of fun. Let’s make a La Perla. Here’s the recipe.
Time for a drink!
La Perla
1 ½ oz House Coconut Rum
1 ½ oz Banana Aperol
1 ½ oz Taylor’s Dry Sherry
5 dashes black walnut bitters
Stir all ingredients together in a cocktail vessel with ice until the outside of the container is cold. Strain into a rocks glass over a large ice cube. Garnish with an orange twist and a bruleed banana slice.
House Coconut Rum
1 750ml bottle Planteray 3 Star Unaged Rum
¼ cup coconut oil
Microwave the coconut oil until it is completely liquid and clear, 30-40 seconds. Pour off ¼ cup of the rum from the bottle and reserve for later use. Add the coconut oil to the rum bottle and shake vigorously. Store in the freezer overnight. The next day, strain the solids from the bottle and pour into a sealable bottle. Keeps indefinitely in the fridge.
Banana Aperol
2 cups Aperol
1 ripe organic banana
Peel the banana and place it in a blender with the Aperol. Puree until most of the solids are liquefied. Pour the mixture into a container and store it in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, strain out the solids and pour into a sealable bottle. Keeps indefinitely in the fridge.
A standard Negroni is equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth. This recipe is inspired by the Negroni, but uses none of the original ingredients. The original Negroni is named after Count Negroni, an inspired Italian drinker who swapped gin for soda water in a cocktail at his favorite watering hole. In the same vein, I went looking for a Caribbean noble I could name this drink after. I stumbled upon Miguel Enriquez, Captain of Sea and War, a wildly successful Spanish privateer of African descent who commanded a fleet larger than Blackbeard’s. His flagship was the La Perla, which strikes me as a lovely name for a cocktail.
Do not use a commercially made coconut rum for this drink. Commercial coconut rum is thick with sugar. Malibu “rum” has so much sugar in it that it doesn’t even qualify as rum anymore; the alcohol content is too low. Aperol is already quite sweet on its own. Adding a sugar-laden coconut bomb to the glass will create undrinkable syrup. If you buy a tasty unaged rum like Planteray 3-Star and wash it with coconut oil, you won’t regret it. As I am writing this, I’m sipping on a glass of homemade coconut rum on the rocks with a lime wedge. It’s probably not the lime in the coconut that Harry Nilsson had in mind, but it’s curing what ails me after a very long work week. Seriously, even if you don’t make the rest of this recipe, make this rum. You won’t regret it.
I decided to use Aperol instead of Campari in this recipe based solely on the season. Campari is herbal, bittersweet, and addictive. But Aperol has orange notes that scream of summer. Pairing orange, coconut, and banana together in a stirred cocktail was too appealing not to pursue. Aperol spritzes are still popular at the country club bar. Enhancing the Aperol with fresh banana proved to be an utter treat, enhancing the sweetness and flavor while maintaining a crisp bitter undertone.
Let’s talk ingredients:
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I thought I’d photograph the infusions before they had time to sit instead of photographing the final product. That Aperol looks scary, but the results are worth it.
House Coconut Rum: This is the same fat-washing technique that I’ve used to make olive Tito’s for dirty martinis in the past. The only tricky bit is that coconut oil tends to stay solid at room temperature. A quick trip through the microwave solves the problem nicely. Use a rum that you’d want to drink without coconut for best results. Good ingredients make better cocktails.
Banana Infused Aperol: The banana does add a lot of sweetness to the cocktail; I might cut the Aperol down by ½ oz and add more coconut rum, but that’s to suit my own palate. Taste, experiment, make it your own.
Taylor’s Dry Sherry: I know there are better sherrys out there, but they’re hard to find out in suburban Midwest Ohio. By all means, use something nicer if you have it. I think a dry sherry instead of a cream sherry is in order; there’s already enough sweetness in this drink.
Black Walnut Bitters: Nut and banana meld wonderfully. A quick hit of bitter walnut to balance the cocktail is a great idea. Be generous with the bitters; too much is always better than too little.
We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck that coward Bezos with a rusty bar spoon. Go read The Negroni: Drinking to La Dolce Vita, with Recipes & Lore instead. This cocktail isn’t a Negroni, but many cocktails, including this one, have been inspired by the classic three-part recipe. You would do well to read this and get inspired for your own variations on the classic.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/welcome-to-wonkette-happy-hour-with-151
'We Need to Shift Who Has Power in This Country': Cynthia Richie Terrell Knows How We Can Cultivate Gender Balance in P
(lengthy, informative, important read)
‘We Need to Shift Who Has Power in This Country’: Cynthia Richie Terrell Knows How We Can Cultivate Gender Balance in Politics
PUBLISHED 7/10/2025 by Carmen Rios
The RepresentWomen founder laid out how reforms like ranked-choice voting could double women’s representation in politics in the first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward.
“There’s an appetite to take on the dysfunction in our electoral system,” Richie Terrell told Ms.
Cynthia Richie Terrell has worked as a political campaign manager and field director for candidates and initiatives at every level of government—but what she wants to win most is the fight to restructure our political system. After co-founding the nonpartisan organization FairVote with her husband, she launched RepresentWomen, an organization devoted to researching and championing evidence-based solutions to the challenges women face at every stage of the political process. (She also writes a weekly column on women’s representation right here at Ms.)
In the first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward — a Ms. podcast exploring the history of the magazine and the feminist movement — Richie Terrell talked to Ms. consulting editor Carmen Rios about the vision of democracy she’s inspired by, practical strategies for advancing gender balance in politics, and what she considers the “gold standard” for equitable voting.
Richie Terrell is joined in the first installment of the new series by SheThePeople founder Aimee Allison, New Mexico state Sen. Charley Angel, pollster and leading political strategist Celinda Lake, and professors and experts in gender, politics, and the law Julie C. Suk and Jennifer M. Piscopo. Together, we explore the promise of a truly representative democracy—and the lessons feminist history offers for how we can advance a feminist future.
. . . . .
https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/cynthia-richie-terrell-gender-balance-women-politics-ranked-choice-voting/
An Open Letter to Rep. Kat Cammack From a Medical Doctor: It's Abortion Bans That Make Doctors Afraid to Act, Not 'the
(and the WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
An Open Letter to Rep. Kat Cammack From a Medical Doctor: It’s Abortion Bans That Make Doctors Afraid to Act, Not ‘the Radical Left’
PUBLISHED 7/10/2025 by Chloe Nazra Lee
A group of doctors join abortion-rights supporters outside the Supreme Court on April 24, 2024, during oral arguments in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
I remember the day I heard about Dobbs. It was a summer morning during my final year of medical school. I’d awakened in the damp basement apartment I’d rented for a clinical rotation in Pittsburgh. As I scrolled through my news feed, my heart plummeted. There was a resigned and tacitly understood melancholy among the women in the hospital that day. A sisterhood predicated on shared despair was quietly forming during the upheaval of perceived judicial betrayal. Even those of us who barely knew each other might wearily exchange passing glances in the hallway, signaling, “Well, shit. Girl, I know. And it’ll only get worse.”
No woman may escape the cruelty of the nebulous and varying restrictions on reproductive healthcare in the post-Roe world—as Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) discovered in May 2024 when faced with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy shortly after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect. Concerned by the lack of clarity in the wording of the law on the limits of intervention in pregnant patients, doctors reportedly delayed administering intramuscular methotrexate to terminate the pregnancy, out of fear of prosecution. The state of Florida offered clarification to healthcare providers in September 2024. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Cammack stated her belief that liberal “fear-mongering” was predominantly responsible for doctors’ fear and the resultant delay in care that could have cost her her life.
Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) leaves a GOP caucus meeting at the Capitol Hill Club on Feb. 28, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
While I’m sorry for the terror you experienced during an hour of desperate need, Rep. Cammack, I must fervently disagree that this vague spectre of The Left is what’s scaring doctors. What truly terrifies us are real laws, real prosecutions and real threats that punish us for providing basic, necessary medical care.You may meet me—a pro-choice psychiatrist-in-training from un-apologetically blue New York—with skepticism, but I hope you, and other self-identified pro-life politicians, can appreciate the plea in this message. We have more in common than you might initially believe. We’re both professional women who want motherhood and who believe in protecting human lives and the betterment of our communities, though we may differ on the exact means of doing so. I hope this may help you understand the post-Roe fear through my eyes—a view shared by many young female doctors.
. . . .
Dr. Caitlin Bernard in Indianapolis on Sept. 28, 2022. (Kaiti Sullivan / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
. . . .
Did you think you would be an exception, Rep. Cammack? That if you “did everything right” as a woman, this wouldn’t happen to you? I don’t mean that condescendingly; I thought that way once. Raised very conservative, a Sunday school teacher, who invested heavily in my education and can keep a home quite well, if I do say so myself, I molded myself into the ideal woman, naively certain that life-altering terror couldn’t find me if I lived a Christ-like life. I was wrong. None of us is exempt from cruel circumstance. This vicious culture, hiding under a vapid veneer of “pro-life” hurts you as much as it hurts every other woman. I’ve seen the “FAFO” memes online about you and read about the threats you’ve encountered since publicly airing your story. I’m sorry for the vitriol, and would encourage activists in the pro-choice camp to offer more kindness. But I would also encourage you not to fan the flames of political polarization and to appreciate the true roots of doctors’ fears in the post-Roe world with intellectual honesty. My voice counts for relatively little. But Rep. Cammack, your voice and your story have power. I hope you use them to reintroduce nuance and common sense to the discussion on women’s lives. There are many of us who will extend a hand across the aisle and work together with you to right some of the senseless wrongs.
https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/rep-kat-cammack-medical-doctor-abortion-bans-that-doctors-afraid-act/
Inside Liberty University's Secret Maternity Home
(and the WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
Inside Liberty University’s Secret Maternity Home
PUBLISHED 7/10/2025 by Ava Slocum
Former residents say Liberty’s Godparent Home used shame and faith to force adoptions.
Liberty’s Godparent Home began under the direction of Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher and televangelist. (The Liberty Godparent Ministry / Instagram)
Imagine you’re a pregnant teenager in 1972. Abortion isn’t an option, and you’re not ready to get married … so you might turn to a maternity home for unwed mothers. You’ll live there until the baby is born, then give it up for adoption to redeem yourself from the so-called sin of premarital sex. While they’re not well-known today in modern America, some people remember maternity homes from the 1950s through 1970s as places where mostly white, middle-class teenage girls gave birth in secret, then were forced to surrender their babies for adoption.
What even fewer people know is that these homes are not just a part of America’s Christian conservative past: They’re alive and well today. Many shut down in the 1970s after access to abortion became more widely available with Roe v. Wade. However, in the three years since the fall of Roe, the number of maternity homes in the U.S. has grown by 40 percent and now surpasses 450, according to reporting from The New York Times.
On June 23, podcast studio Wondery released the new series Liberty Lost, which investigates the well-kept secret of Liberty University’s Godparent Home, which opened in the 1980s and is still operating today. In the podcast, reproductive rights journalist T. J. Raphael explores the history of the maternity home on the campus of Liberty University, a private evangelical college in Lynchburg, Va. There, staff members coerce young girls into surrendering their babies for adoption by affluent Christian parents in exchange for a full-ride scholarship at Liberty.
Raphael told Ms. about her experience speaking with birth mothers Abbi Johnson, Toni Popham and Zoe Shaw, who lived at Liberty’s Godparent Home in the early ’90s and as recently as 2008, in Johnson’s case. “They report a culture of shame, fear, religious manipulation and coercion that drove them to try and separate them permanently from their children despite their repeated expression that they wanted to keep and parent their babies,” Raphael explained. “And I think that a lot of people believe that maternity homes were a thing of the past, but in some communities, they never went away.”
. . . . .
President Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell leave after Trump delivered the keynote address during the commencement at Liberty University on May 13, 2017, in Lynchburg, Va. Trump is the first sitting president to speak at Liberty’s commencement since George H.W. Bush in 1990. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
. . . . .
Raphael also pointed to a connection between maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers or fake clinics, which currently outnumber real abortion clinics in the U.S. by about three to one. “A lot of women who are uninterested in abortion might find themselves going to a crisis pregnancy center for information, for help, and then they’re pushed towards maternity homes if they’re rejected by their family,” she said.
Maternity homes, many run by churches or Christian organizations, have historically operated under a culture of shame that tells young unmarried women they’re not fit to become parents. The first Florence Crittenton home opened in New York in 1883 as a place to reform unmarried “fallen women.” (The Florence Crittenton maternity home network still operates today.) Most modern faith-based maternity homes “explicitly have to share a Christ-centered message, and that often looks like espousing traditional values, conservative family values, that say that single women should not be parenting,” Raphael said. “The only right way to have a child is to have it grow up in a two-parent household, often heterosexual.” Many former maternity home residents share that staff told them—either implicitly or directly—that the best thing for them and their child would be permanent separation.
. . . .
A mobile billboard parked outside Caring Hearts, a crisis pregnancy clinic in Little Rock. (Courtesy of Mayday Health)
Former residents of these homes describe intense rules and restrictions, including needing to ask for permission before leaving the property, attending mandatory morning prayers and handing over food stamps to pay for communal groceries. Other policies, such as requiring residents to surrender their phones before bedtime and download tracking apps, are in keeping with the censorship and scrutiny that former Godparent Home residents describe. By shining a light on American maternity homes—an industry that frequently flies under the radar—Raphael’s podcast Liberty Lost highlights the grim reality of adoption coercion, an important and often overlooked topic in the national conversation surrounding reproductive rights. According to Raphael, the podcast explores “the ways that adoption in the United States is also about choice, but oftentimes the lack of it. I don’t think that in this country, we really think critically about why a woman would permanently separate from the child she gave birth to. It’s often a result of desperation, a lack of resources and support.”
https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/liberty-university-maternity-home-unwed-mothers-teenagers/
The U.N. Should Condemn the U.S.' Human Rights Record on Abortion
(What a woman-hating society this country is. the WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
The U.N. Should Condemn the U.S.’ Human Rights Record on Abortion
PUBLISHED 7/9/2025 by Jaime M. Gher and Elise Keppler
The U.S. MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE on the world stage for its escalating attacks on reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy.
Protesters rally on the three-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2025, in Los Angeles. (David McNew / Getty Images)
The periodic U.N. review of the United States’ human rights record is coming up in November. With the Trump administration’s far-reaching, intensifying attacks, the timing could not be more opportune. Never have U.S. institutions, funding and initiatives that promote the rule of law, faced such an abject threat. This is a moment to shine a light on U.S. abuses on the global stage. U.S. policymakers and the public rarely consider the experiences of U.S. residents through a human rights lens — but doing so is eye-opening. Abortion is a key case in point.
Health, human rights and reproductive justice organizations — including local organizations in Texas and Louisiana — recently joined to highlight the significant deterioration of individuals’ reproductive and bodily autonomy in the United States. As part of the review, during every four years of a country’s record, this U.N. submission was one among many submitted.
Forty-one states have banned abortion in some form since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Of these, 12 ban abortion altogether and another four ban abortion at six weeks — when many people do not yet realize they are pregnant. Another seven ban abortion at or before 18 weeks. Many state laws involve criminal and civil penalties.
Thousands of people rallied in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18, 2025, for the People’s March, just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration. (Livia Follet)
. . . . .
The Trump administration’s attacks on reproductive autonomy throw oil on the fire he started in 2020. Less than three months since taking office, the Trump administration dismissed challenges to states that fail to ensure federally mandated emergency health-stabilizing care, which in some cases involves abortions. It also re-instituted the global gag rule, which bans foreign assistance to organizations if they provide, counsel, refer or advocate for abortion, even if the activities are legal in their country and supported by non-U.S. funds. His administration further de-funded the World Health Organization and drastically reduced USAID funding, which provided critical reproductive health resources globally for decades.
The U.S. is now a global regressive outlier (https://reproductiverights.org/maps/worlds-abortion-laws/) on reproductive and bodily autonomy. Yet experience shows that positive change is possible. Strategic intervention and perseverance have helped fuel major advances for reproductive autonomy in countries around the world, including in Ireland and across Latin America. The upcoming U.N. review is not a panacea, and the Trump administration will surely try to undercut it. But it is an important opportunity to document abuses — including and beyond reproductive autonomy — and keep the pressure on.
https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/09/united-nations-usa-abortion-human-rights-record-health-death/
A really ugly thought keeps running through my head, based on stories
from other regimes and pogroms and witch hunts (the REAL ones), and thinking about the seeming randomness of sone of their "captures". How many of them are based on anonymous "tips" from hateful or disguntled neighbors, acquaintances, rivals, etc.We all know how it worked during those terrible times. Is it happening again, here and now, in what used to be at least a semi-functioning not-dictatorship?
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