Posts Tagged ‘Women’
Call for stories regarding the new HPV vaccination mandate
12:11 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Health|Immigration · Comments Off
7 Nov 2008Please pass the word around, this is incredibly important!
Do you know a young woman or family member that has been affected?
In July 2008, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) added five new vaccinations to the list of required immunizations for immigrants seeking legal permanent residency in the U.S. or people applying for immigrant visas. The list included a vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV), a viral infection that is transmitted by direct skin-to-skin contact and is the leading cause of cervical cancer. Following a recommendation by the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices to administer Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine currently approved for the U.S. market to females ages 11 to 26 in the U.S., the recommendation became an automatic requirement for prospective immigrants and applicants seeking to adjust their status when the government updated its list of vaccines in July.
The policy went into effect on August 1, and advocates in the immigrant rights and public health movements are calling for a reversal with respect to the HPV vaccine. The mandate creates additional cost barriers for young immigrant women and immigrant families seeking adjustment of status or entry to the U.S., and unfairly forces immigrant women to subject their bodies to a vaccine that is new to the market and has unknown long-term efficacy rates.
Please consider sharing your story if you know someone who has been directly impacted by the new mandate for the HPV vaccine or any of the other vaccines involved. Contact Priscilla at phuang@napawf.org with your story.
What Do Latina Women Want From Our Next President?
1:40 pm By Maegan La Mala · Events|New York City|US Presidential Race 2008 · 1 Comment
16 Oct 2008Two nights ago, a group of woman gathered in LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NYC to address the presidential wannabes and voters themselves to say what they wanted. Part of the nationwide This is What Women Want speak out, Latina voices were loud and clear and presente.
Luz Rodriguez, of SisterSong, Women of Color Health Care Collective, speaks of human rights.
See more Latina women, including Kety Esquivel and VL Editor Maegan la Mala, speak what they want after the jump.
Another Rich White Man Wants Poor Women to Stop Having Babies. Color La Macha Shocked.
10:27 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Justice|Women · 7 Comments
25 Sep 2008
A friend sent me the news that a Louisiana state Representative (John LaBruzzo) wants to “pay poor women $1000 to have their tubes tide” while at the same time give “tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children.”
Of course, Mr. LaBruzzo has emphasized that his little idea has nothing to do with race, and it is actually the moral alternative to paying women to have abortions:
LaBruzzo said he opposes abortion and paying people to have abortions. He described a sterilization program as providing poor people with better opportunities to avoid welfare, because they would have fewer children to feed and clothe.
Because, you know, god forbid any politician demand that the minimum wage be increased or fund scholarship programs so that women can go to college and enter into the upper-income strata. I mean, why couldn’t he have said, I will pay any woman who enters into a college degree driven program a thousand dollars? Why is that not considered a viable ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of poor people having kids?
I think that if he did something like that, he (along with the rest of the ‘capitalism rawks’ cronies) would have to admit that it’s not the individual that has a problem and it’s not the reproductive capabilities of poor/women of color that is the problem–it’s the system. It’d be admitting that sometimes, the system sucks so desperatly that whole swaths of people need more than just a bootstrap, but actual *help* to succeed in it.
La Macha has spoken.
Black and Latina Women are having more Abortions than White Women
7:43 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Health|Women · 1 Comment
24 Sep 2008
More Latinas and black women are having abortions than white women, says the latest survey conducted by the Guttmacher Institute. According to the survey:
Statistically one in three U.S. women will have an abortion in her lifetime, the study found, but that risk does not apply to all women equally. Women who choose abortion are more likely to be in their 20s or 30s than in their teens or 40s; they’re more likely to have children already; and they’re also more likely to be black or Hispanic than white. The abortion rates in 2004 were 50 abortions per 1,000 black women and 28 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women, compared with 11 out of every 1,000 white women.
I noticed two interesting things about this passage. First, since when was getting an abortion considered something that women were “at risk of”? And similarly, if having an abortion is ‘risky’ then why isn’t what causes so many abortions (poverty, abuse at home, lack of resources, etc) considered ‘risky’? Why isn’t it considered a national health crisis that so many women in the U.S. are suffering through conditions that make ‘risky’ behaviors like abortion a necessity?
Second, the ‘experts’ quoted in the article just couldn’t seem to figure out why it is that there is such a racial disparity between black/Latina women and white women. Maybe, say the experts, it’s lack of education on family planning?
I personally wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that black/Latina women make less money that white women do (on average) and are always hit first during economic crisis (like the one we’re in now) and may actually desperately want the the pregnancies that they experience, but can’t afford to carry it through?
Could having a baby, in these cases, be privilege that black and Latina and all women of color, simply aren’t entitled to because of draconian back to work laws and the racism that puts them on the lowest rung of the economic ladder?
Mexico City Subway Ridden with Perverts
4:08 pm By Maegan La Mala · mexico|society|Women · 1 Comment
15 Aug 2008
The head of the Mexico City transportation system announced today some alarming statistics about the metropolis’s subway system. There is an average of at least one incident of sexual harassment reported to authorities every day.
“…In 5 million trips made from Monday through Friday, there is one complaint per day. We believe that this number is low. There are perhaps 2 or 3 complaints per day that go unregistered because the complaint never gets made, either because [the victim] doesn’t have time or because they are reluctant. That’s why we are encouraging people to report [the incidents],” said Bojórquez.
The head of the system says that measures that are currently being used to curb this trend — like separate cars for women and children — seem to be helping, but there is obviously still a problem.
Gropers beware: The Fridabus takes Mexico City
10:03 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Culture|Marketing|mexico|society|Women · Comments Off
11 Jul 2007Earlier this week we talked about the latest attempts to raise the profile of Frida Kahlo in the world, in honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth. While some might say that this is all too much, Mexico City thinks not. They’ve converted some of their city buses into “Fridabúses” — moving shrines honoring the painter. According to Mexico City blog DFinitivo, the buses also serve an altruistic purpose:
The Fridabúses are the first step in exalting important women in history involved in education, science and the struggle for women’s rights — women whose actions strengthened equal gender rights.
Latin American women almost on par with men for salary
2:01 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Labor|Latin America|Women · Comments Off
14 May 2007
A new study shows some encouraging data about the state of workplace equality — at least as it relates to remuneration — for women in Latin America. According to the Organización Internacional del Trabajo’s (OIT, International Work Organization) report “Equality in the Workplace”, in the period of 1994-2004 salaries for women in Latin America have gone up considerably, reaching almost the same level of pay for their male counterparts in some cases, and falling just below in others:
In Paraguay, for example, women went from earning 36% less than men in 1994 to 5% less in 2004.The same thing happened in Brazil in the same decade (from 39% to 13%), and Chile (from 30% to 17%), in Mexico (from 32% to 22%) and in Ecuador (from 24% to 13%).
The best examples of positive change for salary equality in Latin America were Venezuela and Colombia, where women workers earn only 1% less than their male counterparts. The worst? Argentina, where women earn an average of 38% less than men, a statistic that didn’t change from 1994-2004.
Via / El Universal
AIDS becoming a female issue in Mexico
7:04 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Health|mexico|Women · 1 Comment
10 May 2007
The number of women infected with HIV or suffering from AIDS has skyrocketed, making the epidemic in Mexico a “women’s issue”, according to the United Nations Population Fund which announced, via press conference, a worldwide HIV conference to be held in Mexico next year:
The UN representative stressed that the increase in the number of cases of women [with HIV] is “worrysome”, as the statistic of 35 percent of women making up the number of infected people around the world in 1995 has gone up to 48 percent.Mauricio Hernández, under secretary of Health, revealed that in Mexico there are 40,000 women infected with the virus, and that the organization is looking to negotiate to procurement of female condoms for less than two dollars each, to be able to distribute 800,000 this year.
According to the UN Joint Programme on AIDS, two thirds of the estimated 1.7 million people living with HIV in Latin America reside in the four largest countries: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina.
Via / La Jornada and UNAIDS
Chile: Women wear diapers to work non-stop
10:26 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Chile|Controversia|Labor · 8 Comments
4 May 2007
A supermarket chain in Chile is accused of forcing its cashiers to wear diapers to avoid interrupting their work by going to the bathroom:
Going to the bathroom is prohibited during work hours. This is one of the unjust obligations that cashiers at the Chilean supermarket chain Santa Isabel have to fulfill, according to the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) union.A union spokesperson said on Thursday that the women working at these establishments “are made to work 9 hours at their cash registers without being allowed to move,” which requires that they wear diapers since they cannot go to the bathroom.
The chain is denying that they’ve done anything wrong. President Bachelet, where are you?
Via / Diario ADN
Mexico City government official: 1,619 rapes is nothing
7:42 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Controversia|mexico|Women · Comments Off
7 Feb 2007
1,619 rapes per year in Mexico City is apparently not such a big deal for the head of the Woman’s Institute (Instituto de las Mujeres del Distrito Federal), the city government entity that promotes programs for women and supposedly defends their rights. Nothing in comparison, she says (yes, she) to the number of busines robberies there are per year in the Mexican capital. These words were pronounced before an assembly of representatives from the Equality and Gender Commission (Comisión de Equidad y Género).
According to Mexican daily La Jornada, when pressed by a politician from the PRD who emphasized the grave problem of women being raped on the city’s public transportation systems, the head of the Institute, Martha Lucía Micher Camarena, rectified her statement by saying “…even if there were only one (rape) it would warrant our work.” Media then got wind of the statement:
Hola!
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