Year: 2015
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The history and role of the criminal law in anti-FGM campaigns: Is the criminal law what is needed, at least in countries like Great Britain?
This article was published online in Reproductive Health Matters 2015;23(46):145-57. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rhm.2015.10.001. Here is the abstract in English, French and Spanish: Abstract The history of campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM) began in the 1920s. From the beginning, it was recognised that FGM was considered an important rite of passage between childhood and adulthood for…
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What kind of research is needed for abortion advocacy?
At the 5th Research Meeting on Unwanted Pregnancy and Unsafe Abortion, Mexico City, 28-30 September 2015, Silvina Ramos presented an excellent new CLACAI publication (in Spanish) on a renewed agenda for abortion research in the LAC region: “Investigacion sobre aborto en America Latina y el Caribe: una agenda renovada para informar politicas publicas e incidencias”. I was asked to…
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Women’s right to safe abortion: interview for London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Online Course
Improving the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents: from Evidence to Action is a free online course of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. I was interviewed on the subject of abortion for one of the sessions; this is what I said below. The course first ran in autumn 2015 and is due to be…
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Abortion today: what women need and want
Berer Presentation to Gynuity Medical Abortion Meeting NY 9 June 2015 This is a presentation I gave to a meeting about medical abortion, organised by Gynuity Health Projects in New York, 9 June 2015. Click on the link to read it.
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Another FGM case in Britain that found no harm
Another FGM case, which did not involve the criminal law but family law, and that took place in November 2014 in Leeds, two months before the first criminal trial in London,[1] involved an attempt to take two small children into care: a girl G aged ±3 and a boy B aged ±4, whose parents were…
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Is the NHS collection of patient identifiable data of women with FGM unethical and a breach of confidentiality?
Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been illegal in the UK since 1985, and taking a child abroad to undergo FGM, as legislated in the 2003 Female Genital Mutilation Act and 2015 Serious Crime Act is also illegal and is recognised as a form of child abuse. Until 2014, however, no one had been prosecuted for…
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Support for universal vaccination of all boys aged 12-13 against human papillomavirus
I wrote this blog as RHM Editor with Lisa Hallgarten, RHM Online Editor. It was published on the RHM Blog on 18 December 2014. This paper, sent to the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), is in support of universal vaccination of all boys aged 12-13 against human papillomavirus (HPV) as a cause of genital…
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Ghosting, a memoir by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books: a response from a ghost of another kind
This blog was written as a letter to the editor of the LRB on 29 March 2014, but not published. I read Andrew O’Hagan’s memoir “Ghosting” in the London Review of Books, 6 March 2014, about his experience of ghostwriting the unauthorised autobiography of Julian Assange, with great discomfort. His reasons for writing it appeared…
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Accepting the global reality of “self-help” abortions
Taking medical abortion pills at home to have an abortion, mostly before ten weeks of pregnancy, though not always, is happening in most countries across the world, and each year more than ever. It is happening both in countries where terminating most pregnancies is still a criminal offence and registered abortion services are not available,…
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Berer Blog statistics
Readers of this blog might be interested to know that it has been viewed by people from 86 countries, ranging from 1 per country to 435 from the UK. The numbers of posts and views since it started have been as follows: 2011 15 posts 1,432 views 2012 26 posts 4,346 views 2013 …