Father of "seven or eight," Jesse Lee Herald of Edinburg, Virginia, has pled guilty to "child endangerment, hit and run driving and driving on a suspended license" stemming from a vehicle crash in December. Herald had rolled his car after hitting an embankment, and proceeded to flee the scene, taking his 3-year-old…
Ahhh, nature vs. nurture. The ye oldieste questionne! Are we born this way (nice, mean, fat, gay, smart, aggressive, passive, selfish, Republican, otherkin, whatevs) or are we made this way by the homosensual Kenyan media elite? Or whatever? Well, personally, I make it a point not to give any shits. ON PRINCIPLE.…
A plan to compensate some of the estimated 7,600 victims of the state of North Carolina's forced sterilization program has been stalled in the state's Senate by Republicans who are terribly, terribly sorry that it happened, but who just don't understand how money will help solve anything. There there, now. Please…
The North Carolina General Assembly recently passed the first bill that will grant reparations of $50,000 to victims who underwent forced sterilization within the state between 1929 and 1974. This is the first step in recognizing a very dark mark on American history, however victims, such as 58-year-old Elaine…
A BBC investigation has uncovered a massive government-mandated program that forced doctors to sterilize women in Uzbekistan without their knowledge or consent. Tens of thousands of women have been affected, with no end in sight. But doctors aren't just sneaking into women's houses at night and stealthily making off…
A task force convened by North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue has spent months debating what the state should do for the 1,500-2,000 living victims of its forced sterilization program, which targeted poor, black, and disabled residents all the way up into the seventies. Now, the task force has recommended that each…
From the 1920's to the late 1970's, the state of North Carolina forcibly sterilized 7,600 people. Most of them were poor women, and a disproportionate number of them were black. At the time, the government justified the surgeries as in the best interest of the state, as those sterilized were classified as "feeble…
In 1968, Elaine Riddick was sterilized against her will after a c-section to deliver her first and only child. She was just fourteen years old. Now she's fighting to receive compensation as a victim of North Carolina's Eugenics Board, which sterilized thousands of women, disproportionately black, on such grounds as…
Rick Santorum recently said he found it "almost remarkable for a black man" to be pro-choice. The anti-choice linking of abortion, slavery, and genocide has always involved a cocktail of distortion and condescension. So what to do about it?
That's during marital intimacy. Oh, and the fun doesn't stop there! We haven't even started on the "social class differences" you should be aware of When You Marry. [Contexts]
Via Feminist Law Professors, Academics at NYU have been working on an archive of the work of Margaret Sanger, the early 20th century birth control advocate, and responding to New Jersey Republican Congressman Christopher Smith's misrepresentations of her work.
As part of her Times interview, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made some brief remarks about the Hyde Amendment and whether criticisms of the reproductive rights movement's flirtation with economic eugenics would prove true. Those have, naturally, been misinterpreted.
With Trig Palin being perhaps the best known special-needs child in American history, there have been several articles about increased genetic testing for prenatal abnormalities in recent days. As the story goes, Sarah Palin knew before he was born that Trig had a genetic condition, but because of her strongly held…
Louisiana Representative John Labruzzo is a unique problem solver. Recognizing that generational poverty is a problem for many people in his state, he's dispensed with the usual solutions of education, training, access to reduced- or low-cost family planning or any normal poverty-reduction programs in favor of paying…
Hey, remember how double helix discoverer and nasty old Nobel laureate James Watson thinks black people are stupid and all homos and ugly women deserve to be aborted? Well, now he says he doesn't actually believe all of that. "To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is…
