Category: bererblog
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Lessons from the case in Spain
Yesterday, I shared a feature article I wrote for the newsletter of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion on this blog. I think there are a lot of lessons to draw from this case, but for me, at this moment, the two I would emphasise are the crucial importance of solidarity on all our…
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The Case of Dr Carlos Morín, Barcelona, Spain – “Hasta el final”
The history of the persecution of Dr Carlos Morín, former director of the Ginemedex clinic in Barcelona, Spain, the staff of his clinic and the thousands of women who had abortions there began in Britain in 2004 and reached its climax, at least for the moment, on 17 June 2016, in the Regional Court of…
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Prof Homa Hoodfar imprisoned in Iran: call for her release (Note: Homa was finally released)
Homa Hoodfar, a respected Canadian-Iranian professor of anthropology of the Middle East in Canada, has been arrested in Tehran, Iran, and is being held in Evin prison without access to her lawyer, family members or to needed medical care. Full information about her and the campaign in support of her release can be found at: www.homahoodfar.org.…
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Interview for Amnesty, 22 August 2015
The following are my answers (with some additions) to questions in an interview with Saphia Crowther of Amnesty International via email, for publication by them last year: What drives you to campaign for sexual and reproductive rights? Was there one person, incident or news story that inspired you to become an activist? I became active in my mid-20s…
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IN MEMORIAM Rosa Tunberg
It is with great sadness that I wish to inform everyone who knew her that Rosa Tunberg, who worked for Reproductive Health Matters from October 1999 to August 2007, died from cancer on 10 January 2015 in California. Rosa was born on 5 February 1939, in Santiago, Chile, the middle of three sisters. Her father…
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Quinacrine: the non-surgical sterilisation method that refuses to die
A response to all the articles on so-called “permanent contraception” in Contraception 2015;92(2):89-176) It is with a deep sigh, after more than 10 years, that I sit down to respond to your articles on “permanent contraception”, particularly the one by Jack Lippes pushing quinacrine sterilisation, that dead letter, to the fore once again, in your…
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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…