[News] We Stand With the Women of the World & A Time For Militant Sisterhood!
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Mar 8 14:38:07 EST 2007
International Women's Day, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/marshall03082007.html
We Stand With the Women of the World
By LUCINDA MARSHALL
For the past 5000 years, give or take a century
or two, there has been a persistent tendency to
leave unexamined the impact that social,
economic, environmental, and military policies
have on the lives of women throughout the world.
As a result, women make up the majority of those
living in poverty, millions of women have died
needlessly due to lack of healthcare and safe
living conditions and there is a worldwide pandemic of violence against women.
For those reasons, International Women's Day
(IWD), which is observed on March 8 is a time not
only to celebrate women's lives and achievements,
but also a chance to join hands in solidarity
with women around the globe and to focus much
needed attention on the many problems women face today.
It has been said that the health of a society is
measured by how it treats its women. With one in
three women throughout the world likely to
experience sexual assault during her lifetime, it
is not a stretch to say that this society is in
crisis. In recognition of the systemic and
pervasive violence that impacts the lives of
women every day, the United Nations' theme for
its 2007 observance of IWD is "Ending Impunity
for Violence against Women." As Eve Ensler,
author of The Vagina Monologues has pointed out,
"When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury,
and terrorize women, you destroy the essential
life energy on the planet. You force what is
meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative,
and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken."
Here in the U.S. for the sixth year in a row,
President Bush's annual budget request for
funding the Violence Against Women Act once again
falls short of the amount of its Congressional
authorization. And while the President will no
doubt serve up the usual annual platitudes about
honoring women on March 8th, his administration
has, as it has every year since 2001, also
requested cuts in funding for maternal and child
health as well as family planning.
Meanwhile, more than half a million women
worldwide will die this year from the
complications of pregnancy and childbirth,
including 68,000 from illegal and unsafe
abortions. According to The Lancet, "an estimated
90% of deaths from unsafe abortions and 20% of
obstetric mortality could be avoided with
improved access to contraception. Yet the latest
figures show that donor funding for family planning has decreased by 36%."
It is particularly ironic that the supposedly
liberated women of Afghanistan suffer the second
highest maternal mortality rate in the world with
1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births. In the U.S.
more than 20 million women live in poverty and
out of 173 countries, the U.S. is one of only
five countries that has no guaranteed maternity
leave. The U.S. is also one of only seven
countries that has not ratified the Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
The ongoing militarism that plagues our planet is
also extremely detrimental to women. Violence
during war and conflict is not incidental, it is
systemic. Rape, a cheap alternative to bullets,
has always been a de facto weapon of war. Women
who are raped during conflict are particularly
vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. Conflict frequently
leaves women without homes, food and medical care
and many become refugees. Obtaining work may
become difficult, forcing many women into
prostitution in order to survive. Hundreds of
thousands of women are sexually trafficked every
year and violence makes it impossible for
hundreds of thousands of girls to attend school.
Pollution is also an important problem for women.
Recent studies have found numerous toxins in
breast milk and one out of six women in the U.S.
has enough mercury in their wombs to cause mental
retardation, autism and other diseases. Women who
breathe polluted air are four times more likely
to have children who develop cancer. Other
pollutants such as PCBs, dioxin and DDT are known
to impact reproductive health and have been
linked to breast cancer. Chemical and nuclear
weapons impact women's reproductive health,
causing low birth weights and gross birth abnormalities.
It is for all of these reasons that on March 8th,
we once again affirm the human rights of women
throughout the world as well as celebrate their lives and accomplishments.
*This essay is adapted from commentary by the
author that was originally published by the
<http://www.leoweekly.com/>Louisville Eccentric
Observer. "We Stand with the Women of the World"
is the theme for the 2007 Louisville, Kentucky/US observance of IWD.
Lucinda Marshall is a feminist artist, writer and
activist. She is the Founder of the Feminist
Peace Network,
<http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/>www.feministpeacenetwork.org.
**************************************************************************************
For International Working Womens Day
and Womens History Month, March, 2007
A TIME FOR MILITANT SISTERHOOD!
With over 3000 US troops killed and close to
50,000 wounded; with nearly a million Iraqis
slaughtered and half-a-dozen wars percolating in
hitherto peaceful places, this years
commemoration of International Working Womens
Day and Womens History Month can only be a call
to forge even stronger bonds of militant
sisterhood against imperialism and for womens and peoples liberation.
Over and over again, we have been assured that
this or that method would bring the war in Iraq
to a successful conclusion. But the maimed and
the dead continue to increase, while much-needed
resources in the billions of dollars are wasted
in reconstruction projects which are never
completed; in war materiel destroyed, and in
natural wealth polluted and damaged. After the
unleashing of a sea of blood in Afghanistan, Iraq
and half-a-dozen other places, the Minotaur of
war remains insatiate. This is The Plan: an
endless state of war, a war that spans more and
more countries; a war without resolution. And
in the chaos, death and destruction,
imperialisms multinational corporations, from
Halliburton to Black Water, continue to extract
profits, enriching the few in the deaths and injury of the many.
Even as imperialism renders uninhabitable various
places in the world through wars, pillage and
pollution, it strokes xenophobia within the
United States, the better to exploit the
vulnerability of undocumented workers. Majority
of the 12 million undocumented workers in this
country are women and children; 20% of them are
employed in private households, as housekeepers,
nannies, cooks. They are allies of American
women in the defense of the American family which
is embattled by imperialisms desire to isolate,
atomize and separate the individual from the
group, the group from the collective, the collective from society.
Let it be our task for this 8th of March to
show the world how strongly we reject
imperialisms culture of violence, its culture of
exploitation, its culture of destroying the
social nature of humankind itself. Let us
prepare to descend upon Washington DC on the 17th
of this month, to protest the war in Iraq, the
war in Haiti, the war in the Philippines, the war
in Palestine
Let us march mantled by grief for
our sisters and brothers in those countries; let
us march waving the banner of our outrage at the
continuing deceit and lies; let us march in
condemnation of all the wars of imperialism; let
us march in condemnation of US-led imperialism itself.
JOIN THE MARCH 17TH MOBILIZATION AGAINST THE WAR!
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