Demovictory9
Demovictory9's JournalWomen Are Voting - With Their Wombs - Around the world, fertility rates are in free fall
Around the world, fertility rates are in free fall. Governments have been scratching their heads over how to make babies a more feasible proposition. It’s not that parents don’t want kids - most families yearn for at least two. China used to limit its citizens to a single child, now it’s pushing its people to multiply. Over 50 countries are trying to reverse a decades-long fall in global fertility rates, says a special Financial Times (FT) report this week. The FT argues that “there is little evidence that policy helps.” But I’d argue that it’s precisely policy that is at fault. It isn’t - anywhere - near ambitious enough. If countries want babies, they’ll need to get far more serious about building more gender-balanced economies, democracies - and couples.The Challenge: No Babies
The ‘baby bust’ deepened through Covid. Lockdowns, war, climate crises and fear of disease are not a comfortable context for making babies. Birth rates plummet in times of catastrophe, from the Spanish Flu in 1918 through depressions and World Wars. The Covid pandemic’s fall is already being recovered, and birthrates are back to pre-pandemic levels in several countries. But these are still at an all-time historical low - and well below the 2.1 replacement ratio needed to stabilise populations.
The world’s population is predicted to peak at 9.7 billion by 2064, dropping to 8.7 billion around the end of the century says a report in The Lancet. “About 23 nations can expect their populations to halve by 2100,” says the Finanical Times. “Japan’s population will fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53; Italy’s from 61 million to 28.” Christopher Murray, one of the Lancet report’s authors, said it was “hard to overstate the economic and social impact the decline in fertility would have. ‘We will have to reorganise society.’
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2022/04/23/women-are-voting--with-their-wombs/?sh=452121bd100a
MONEY: Women have gained a degree of financial independence and they prize it above all else – including reproduction. Create a holistic post-pandemic program that protects and equalises pay, prospects and pensions between genders across the entire lifespan. Mutualise the financial hit to everyone whose careers are interrupted by caring responsibilities. Provide good quality daycare. The nest needs to be comfortably feathered and secure for it to be baby-ready and mother-friendly.
Abortion training under threat for med students, residents
Browse any medical dictionary, and before hitting appendectomy and anesthesia, you’ll find abortion.
The first two procedures are part of standard physician education. But for many U.S. medical school students and residents who want to learn about abortions, options are scarce.
And new restrictions are piling up: Within the past year, bills or laws seeking to limit abortion education have been proposed or enacted in at least eight states. The changes are coming from abortion opponents emboldened by new limits on the procedure itself, as well as a pending Supreme Court decision that could upend the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
“It’s quite terrifying what’s going on,” said Ian Peake, a third-year medical student in Oklahoma, where the governor on April 12 signed a measure outlawing most abortions.
Abortion training is not offered at Oklahoma’s two medical schools and education on the topic is limited. Aspiring doctors who want to learn about it typically seek out doctors providing abortions outside the traditional medical education system.
Peake, 32, said if he wanted to learn to do colonoscopies, for example, he could work with school staff to shadow a doctor doing research or working in a clinic.
“That would be easy,” he said. “To do the same for abortion, that’s almost impossible.” He said it took him six months to find a provider willing to teach him.
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“Abortion is one of the most common medical procedures,” they wrote. “Yet abortion-related topics are glaringly absent from medical school curricula.”
https://www.emissourian.com/news/abortion-training-under-threat-for-med-students-residents/article_a877a538-c27e-11ec-87af-9312ee1cbe02.html
Texas women are heading to Mexico for medical abortions
A week after Texas’ abortion-restricting law was enacted, Mexico’s Supreme Court dissolved a Coahuila state law that made abortion a crime.
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“What we’ve heard patients say is that they just go to the pharmacy in Mexico, which is literally just walk-in, and the pharmacist will just give you the medication,” she said. Misoprostol, initially approved as an ulcer medication, is available there without a prescription. Mifepristone is not. So sometimes people make do with just misoprostol, which can still be effective in ending a pregnancy, though less so when taken alone.
For example, a medication abortion is completed 92% of the time when misoprostol and mifepristone are taken together. That rate drops to around 60% with only misoprostol.
Some people, Hernandez said, come back to the McAllen clinic unsure of whether they were given the right medications and whether they worked. Others come in because they experience excessive bleeding and cramping.
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“They say they would rather just go to Mexico,” said Hernandez, who then pleads with patients to stick with Whole Woman’s Health and let them help arrange an abortion at another clinic in the U.S. More of the clinic’s resources are now being used to coordinate travel and accommodations, she said.
But her patients tend to be wary of traveling to other states, said Hernandez, who has worked at Whole Woman’s Health of McAllen for 12 years. Many who come into the clinic tell her they have never been anywhere but the Valley and Mexico. And even for those who have, Mexico is still more familiar, she said.
https://khn.org/news/article/abortion-clinic-texas-mexico-border-legal-and-cultural-challenges/
Some Republicans fear party overreach on LGBT measures
Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential bid who has since left the GOP, said of the recent measures, “I think in the short term, it’s a political winner, and that’s why you see so many other states doing copycat bills on Florida.”
But “I think that there are some big risks for Republicans, though in the medium term,” he added. “There’s a reason that the politics on gay marriage shifted so quickly. … The broad middle of this country does not want to see gay people or trans people be targeted.”
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“Youngkin invented this, and DeSantis has perfected it,” said Dan Eberhart, a GOP donor who is close with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). Eberhart said laws like the one in Florida signal to the base of the party a willingness to take on fights.
But Eberhart said that he thinks DeSantis “may have gone too far” in pushing subsequent legislation that stripped special tax breaks from the Walt Disney Co. after it opposed the parental rights bill. Now, he said, Democrats can paint DeSantis as hurting the economy in central Florida, where Disney employs thousands of workers.
The resurgence of anti-gay rhetoric is reminiscent of a past era, some observers said. In 2004, for example, Republicans pushed state referendums banning same-sex marriage. But by the time of the Donald Trump administration, GOP antipathy to gay and lesbian rights had in many respects faded.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/some-republicans-fear-party-overreach-on-lgbt-measures/ar-AAWwhhu
DC shooting suspect found dead. Gun cache found
Christopher Rufo Foments a School-Rape Panic The right's boy wonder finds a new cause.
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo is the boy wonder of the right, having burst onto the scene as a fervent critic of left-wing pedagogy’s encroachment on the workplace and schools. The strange logic of partisanship has transmuted his role into something far more bizarre: He is now fomenting a panic about sexual abuse in public schools.
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The most remarkable passage in Rufo’s piece is where it turns to remedies. Rufo complains that “only 15 states had adopted policies to regulate ‘grooming behaviors’ by school employees and only 18 states require ‘awareness and prevention training on sexual abuse or misconduct by school personnel against students.’” If there is a crisis, there must be bureaucratic solutions. He proposes that “public schools should have mandatory screening, training, and reporting requirements for all staff.”
Yes — Chris Rufo, the man who is famous for denouncing anti-racism training, seems to be demanding sexual-assault awareness-training mandates for every local school. And this may well become the conservative position as a convoluted result of him digging in to vindicate a campaign of Twitter trolling.
The upside is that, if schools do accede to his demands, the sexual-assault training will provide Rufo with plenty of grist for his next outrage campaign. He can expose the feminist conspiracy to indoctrinate teachers in “rape culture” theory via its insidious training. He may even seize some obscure strand of feminist theory he can associate with these trainings and turn it into a Fox News bogeyman.
The most unfathomable aspect of this story may be the simple fact that Rufo works for a think tank.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/christopher-rufo-foments-a-school-rape-panic.html
NYT finds most of the FL books were rejected over social emotional learning, new rightwing target
Using online sample materials provided by publishers to Florida school districts, The New York Times was able to review 21 of the rejected books and see what may have led the state to reject them.
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In most of the books, there was little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory.
But many of the textbooks included social-emotional learning content, a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mind-sets that can support academic success.
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Until recently, the idea of building social-emotional skills was a fairly uncontroversial one in American education. Research suggests that students with these skills earn higher test scores.
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But right-wing activists like Chris Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, have sought to tie social-emotional learning to the broader debate over the teaching of race, gender and sexuality in classrooms.
In a March interview conducted over email, Mr. Rufo stated that while social-emotional learning sounds “positive and uncontroversial” in theory, “in practice, SEL serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism.”
“The intention of SEL,” he continued, “is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of ‘repression,’ ‘whiteness,’ or ‘internalized racism,’ and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/us/florida-rejected-textbooks.html
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