You are invited to attend a remembrance service in memory and deep respect to Banaz Mahmod Babakir Agha a victim of the so called Honour killing
“Banaz never had a funeral, her grave is without a name or a memorial, let us pay her the respect she deserves”
Organised by the Combating “Honour” Based Violence Forum on Tuesday 26th June 2007 from 1-4 pm
At 1pm
* The remembrance service will start with a meeting to share our memories, thoughts and experiences about Banaz and other victims of the so called Honour Killing.
* Venue: Morden Assembly Hall, Turdo Drive, Morden, Surrey SM4 4PJ

I can’t make it due to work, but have the full details if you can. Reading police pledges (again!) to do better to protect women, I shivered at this paragraph:

In one instance where she had escaped from her father, she was not taken seriously, and described as melodramatic and manipulative by an officer who interviewed her.

Two pieces of good news on abortion in the UK:

*The BMA medical ethics committee has recommended that the two-doctor rule be removed, nurses and midwives be able to provide abortions, and restrictions on where an abortion can be carried out be loosened. This is in recognition of medical advances, and that the current system is making women wait much longer for abortions than is necessary, which of course means later, more medically risky, abortions. (Although of course abortion is still safer than pregnancy.)

* And on the political side there is a parliamentary push for a change in the 1967 law.

Whatever your personal stance on the issue, such a change in the law would not mean more abortions – just safer, less stressful ones, i.e. we would stop penalising, punishing women for getting pregnant.

Sometimes you just have to despair. There is a new airline starting up (well that’s enough cause for despair in itself), but this is an airline marketing itself entirely at women.

How’s it doing that? By painting the plane pink, offering manicures before take-off, and heading for Paris as a “shopping destination”.

Aaarrrghhh!!!!

(Only yesterday I was privately raging about all of the Freecycle postings offering or asking for “boy’s” or “girl’s” baby clothing, as if it makes any difference to babies!)

In what was considered a “safe” area of Kabul, Zakia Zaki was shot as she slept in her bed with her baby son beside her.

Zakia Zaki, 35, had run the US-funded station Peace Radio since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. She was also headmistress of a local school and ran for parliament in 2005.

She recently received warnings from powerful local commanders to tone down her reporting, according to the Afghan Independent Journalists Association. “This is a very bad day for female journalists. Our work is becoming increasingly dangerous,” said Farida Nekzad of Pajhwok, an Afghan news agency, after returning from Zaki’s funeral today.

Interesting review in the TLS of three books that together seem to provide a pretty solid summary of the state of knowledge about past and present childbirth, and reproductive technology.

A couple of samples:

…infant mortality jumped 50 per cent between 1915 and 1929 in the United States in lockstep with the widespread across-class shift from home to hospital.
[Today] Women are 70 per cent more likely to die in childbirth in the US than in Europe.

And it seems not all of the latter figure can be put down to poverty – bad medicine has quite a bit to do with it as well.