Jezebel 
Enter your username and password.
New York, 6:16 AM
Mon Nov 9
19 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors:
tips@jezebel.com
Editor-in-Chief:
Anna Holmes
Email | Twitter
Deputy Editor:
Dodai Stewart
Email | Twitter
Senior Contributing Editor:
Tracie Egan
Email | Twitter
Contributing Editors:
Anna North
Email | Twitter
Sadie Stein
Email | Twitter
Editorial Assistant:
Margaret Hartmann
Email | Twitter
Contributors:
Jenna Sauers
Email
Rich Juzwiak
Email | Twitter
Lizzie Skurnick
Email
Interns:
Katy Kelleher
Twitter
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/02/09
10/01/09
AND THEN maybe she'll get a reward for killing a big shot bad guy! Not just saving her father, but also one-upping the government who'd been trying to catch this guy. Holy shit. I can't get over how bad ass this is.
Seriously, that's like living out a fantasy. Like, when I hear that banks are robbed or people are killed or women are raped? I have these mini fantasies in which I am a superhero and do some shit like this. Except I could totally not do something like this in real life, because shit like this never happens in real life. It's from a movie.
But it's not! She's a super hero! A real, live, superhero!
10/01/09
Women and young women in the country and also men have to be pushed and quizz to get their real positions. The country if polled would say that they are against abortion but if you ask about their daughters being raped, their wives life's being threaten or incest, they would reconsider. I know that because I have asked. Some wont give shit but most understand if you tell them that what the woman feels and thinks about a pregnancy, a forced one, is important.
Some people in other sites have look at President Fernandez, the man who proposed the change in the legistation, and blamed him and curse him, people in the international community because they understand that we as a society are high past the time when a woman had to die helpleslly because of a pregnancy.
I point fingers at him and blame him too. He's action was irresponsible and unnecessary. But I voted for him in the past and if I had to vote tomorrow I would vote for him again. Here's why:
It may seem like an extreme position that he asked congress to pass but the problem with abortion legislation or the problem with the country's position on abortion is not him. It's a whole system. The Catholic Church's influence is so great that no matter the party in power, it sways the law and it control's the debate. I hate what he did but I take him as my president over any other any time because he is, as hard to believe as it may sound, the most progressive candidate. It is either him and his party, that have made huge changes in infranstructure, education, investment in the youth and yes, women or ultraconservaties parties that have no vision for the country and only make themselves richer.
I wish I could have an openly pro-choice candidate but that is a utopy in a country where we have no separation of church and state and have a Concordat that makes the Church the practical forth party and nobody is even considering change that. This legislation is a big fuck you to women and it sucks that I have to choose between evils but sometimes in countries like mine, thats all you have. I am tired of stupid politicians running my country, like, literally stupid and this party is the only one with progressive ideas as crazy as this may sound, and I know that if progress will come to my country it will be from the party that has the 32 senators and diputades that challenged this piece of shit and not the two other party that pulled the christian card and are willing to just lay there for the Church to provide thought.
There is such a thing of going backwards in an already sexist, anti-choice, ultraconservative country.
Last week they said what was already known, that abortion is illegal but they also enacted legislation that said that men and women by law have to be paid equally and that you cannot be discriminated against for gender, age and such.
I have no idea if you get my point but put simply, I just know from being a dominican feminist that this is not something to justify but it could be way worse if those other right wing parties take over. This is baby steps we are talking about here.
This will be appeal if not during the second revision of the law reform proyect then in a couple months or years. I hope with all my might that the debate that was finally opened in our society will continue and eventually, I have no hope for at least 10 years, we will joint the world in women's right to choose.
10/01/09
First of all, I think it is an outrage that this piece of legislation was passed on first lecture, I believe in a woman's right to choose particularly because I live in a country where 100,000 women risk their lives every year to get the procedure done, I know all the methods, from teas to jeans water to instruments to places where to go. Some of my friends have had illegal abortions but there are deeper issues at hand when you talk about illegal.
I have some money, or better said, my family has some money so if I, my sister's or my friends need to have an illegal abortion we know of places that are relatively safe and clean. We also can take pills or provoque the abortion ourselves and then go to a gyno that is accepted by our health insurance and problem solve. Or we can just fly ourselves to Miami or Cuba where is perfectly legal.
The women that are affected are not the rich ones or the well off. The scary thing is that these pregnancies are forced, sometimes literally, on women who are poor and whose child would make them even more so. Sometimes women as young as 12 and 11 years old, repeatelly raped by their relatives or young women in college or rural parts of the country.
Abortion has always been illegal in the country. Always, but now they have taken this one step further and add the 'since the moment of conception' part. Some legislators in the same party of Pres. Fernandez had proposed the use of the words 'in general' so that women who are raped, victims of incest and whose health is at risk could end the pregnancy but the Cardinal, a real piece of work who calls pro-choicers and feminist 'butchers and carnivors and murderers', a man whose job is to mind everything political and every decision made in the country, lost all of his shit and started demonazing the people who supported this special cases abortions. So two of of the tree mayority parties started making speeches in congress that usually began with: 'As a catholic...', 'I am a christian...' or the always useful 'God said very specifically...'
10/01/09
10/01/09
What if we know the fetus is a girl? Can't we abort it then, or are you going to wait for her to be born before not caring about her?
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
Leonel es un cochino de mierda y espero que le den diarreas incontenibles y explosivas por el resto de sus dias!
10/01/09
What were these kid's parents talking about around the dinner table, I wonder.
10/01/09
10/01/09
I would find a way to charge the little fucker with something.
10/02/09
Of course, he shares that lack of understanding with a great many adults in this country. Including, most likely, his parents.
If it were up to me I'd take the kid out of his family for a while. We need some sort of redneck version of the Fresh Air Fund. Make sheltered white children of racist parents go live in an urban area with lots of diversity for a few months every year.
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
Legal crossing is a snap, but crossing illegally from DR to PR is very, very dangerous and even more so if you are a woman.
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
10/01/09
I'm not sure why her testimony is relevant because it seems like she wouldn't really know whether her kidnapper is mentally competent. I doubt she has the training in psychology to make these sorts of determinations, and she hopefully isn't in a place to make evaluations of Mitchell's current mental state anyway. Her basis for why he must be competent now is that she knows his religious convictions were wrong because it isn't what her religion tells her. I have no idea what that has to do with competency. And her point that he turns on the crazy when it helps him is somewhat relevant, but she is basing this on her interactions with him when she was kidnapped years ago.
Then again, if this helps her get over the trauma that she went through, that's a good thing. But if I were the judge, I would find it really hard to objectively evaluate competency when hearing the horrible things Mitchell did to her, and I am sure that's what the US Attorneys are hoping for. It's probably irrelevant- whether Mitchell is kept in a mental hospital, or found competent and convicted, he's hardly getting away with anything. He's certainly not in self-imposed "exile" in France.