that-catholic-shinobi:

takineko:

npr:

When at 19, Mehnaz became pregnant for the fifth time, she panicked. She already had four daughters, and her husband was threatening to throw her out if she had another. So she did what millions of Pakistani women do every year: She had an abortion.

Like many of those women, her abortion was partly self-administered. “I kept taking tablets — whatever I laid my hands on,” she says. “I lifted heavy things” — like the furniture in her tiny living room. She drank brews of boiled dates — many Pakistanis believe the beverage triggers labor.

Mehnaz says she felt “a terrible pain in my stomach.” Her husband took her to a midwife, who told him the baby was dead. “She gave me injections and it came out,” Mehnaz says.

That was eight years ago. Since then she has had two more abortions, each time because she feared the baby would be a daughter.

Mehnaz, whose last name is being shielded to protect her identity, is one of millions of Pakistani women who have abortions each year. The deeply conservative Muslim country is estimated to have one of the highest rates of abortion in the world, based on a 2012 study by the New York-based Population Council, a nonprofit that advocates family planning. The rate that year was 50 abortions for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 — roughly four times higher than in the U.S.

Why The Abortion Rate In Pakistan Is One Of The World’s Highest

Image: Diaa Hadid/NPR
Caption: Mehnaz sits inside her home in Abbottabad, northern Pakistan. She has one son and six daughters. She has also had three abortions, fearing she would have more girls.

Horrible

This is horrible. abortion enables shitty societies.

The Human Toll of Instant Delivery

beachdeath:

i’m fifteen minutes into this interview with a black woman who works in a verizon warehouse in tennessee and she’s already told a story about how another black woman died on the warehouse floor and the foremen set up cones around her dead body and left her there for two hours while forcing all the other employees to continue working. and the woman being interviewed said that herself and four other employees suffered miscarriages while working because the foremen refused to honour their doctor’s notes saying that they shouldn’t lift heavy objects on the job. when she began to miscarry on the warehouse floor, she asked a foreman if she could go home because she wasn’t feeling well and she was worried about jeopardizing the health of her baby, the foreman said, “why are you pregnant? you don’t need any more kids. go have a fucking abortion.” 

The Human Toll of Instant Delivery

blackness-by-your-side:

When Sherry Johnson was eleven, she found one day that she’s gonna marry a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her. She became pregnant and in order to avoid investigation and criminal case, her family and church officials decided to make the girl a legal wife of this monster.

“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Johnson remembers today, many years later. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’” 

However, her case is one of thousand cases of child marriage. According to statistics, children 16 and under are still being married in Florida at a rate of one every few days.


Johnson and her family also attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. One girl said when she was 10 she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and later gave birth to a daughter. There were all documents confirming her and her child’s age, but still, the judge approved the marriage to end the rape investigation, telling her,

“What we want is for you to get married.”

And nevertheless, America prefers to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, like in Syria, calling it “defending freedom” rather than to change states’ laws and to protect American children from rape, coercion and molestation. 

Today, Johnson is campaigning for a state law to stop underage marriage that has already become a norm in some states.

Please, help me to raise awareness to this issue. No one can remain indifferent to the problem of child molestation. 

#StopChildMarriage 

#StopChildAbuse

liberscaryrynn:

Today the vice principal told me that she had spoken to one of my most difficult student’s mother about his behavior and the woman straight up admitted that she’s been calling him stupid and worthless since he was 2 YEARS OLD. Well no fucking wonder he acts out bitch what the hell? Now I just want to love on the poor kid.

oneshortdamnfuse:

emotionalempowerer:

Regardless of the numbers on your paycheck or in your bank account, nobody is less than you.

Also most people in NYC are working more than 1 job. I know people living out shelters working 2 jobs.

So the fact that people are working 2 jobs and living in shelters shows that having a job or jobs doesn’t prevent homelessness. So there should still be no superiority complex in these employees.

This didn’t happen in New York City