<^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> ........Catt's Claws # 148 ... March 11, 1997......... ........ A Feminist Newsletter by Irene Stuber......... istuber@direclynx.net is solely responsible for its content Archives are found at http://www.imageworld.com/istuber.html <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> From Melissa Etheridge's marvelous album*, _Yes I Am_: You are digging for the answers Until your fingers bleed To satisfy the hunger To satiate the need They feed you on the guilt To keep you humble to keep you low Some man and myth they made up A thousand years ago... Mothers tell your children Be quick you must be strong Life is full of wonder Love is never wrong. Remember how they taught you How much of it was fear Refuse to hand it down The legacy stops here. * Copyright 1989 Melissa Etheridge Melissa will appear along with k.d.lang, Laura Dern, and Oprah in the one-hour TV special April 30 when Ellen comes out of the closet. Be prepared for campaigns to try to bar the episode from airing in your locale. Our local TV station that carries Ellen is much controlled by the local Catholic diocese ... (Barb, I may need a tape.) After the show's taping last week, Ellen Degeneres was said to have walked over to an "unnamed woman," hugged her, and said, "I'm free." . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . More than a million women die each year in childbirth. Read that again. More than a million women die EACH YEAR in childbirth. Dr. Daniel Weinstein, president of the World Society of Labor and Delivery said it was "the biggest tragedy of our time." Well, far be it for me to criticize Dr. Weinstein for finally recognizing something that has been going on since before Moses started raping his slave women. Death in childbirth has always been an accepted part of conjugal relationships of the good religious hypocrites. Martin Luther, the "reforming" Christian, said dying from childbirth "was there for women to do." Too bad, ladies, but there it is. Rather than have men use self-control or birth control, women HAD to (and HAVE TO CONTINUE) to die. Who made the rules? Not women. The men who made and enforce the rules don't talk about GAWD, the mother. They talk about the evils of stopping men's sperm from impregnating women. The religists say women are destined to die in childbirth and are not allowed to do anything to prevent pregnancy. (Christian mercy???) If this were about any other form of death, the self-righteous would rise up and howl from the mountaintops ... if it were as serious as men going bald, they would howl from the moon ... Weinstein went on to say, "More people are dying in labor and delivery than all the dead in all the wars." BEG YOUR PARDON, Herr Doktor, but that should read: More WOMEN are dying ... unless there are some things going on out there we don't know about ... (Dolly, you fooling around on the side???) The killing of women by penis is worse than gassing, guns, or even gang warfare. And no one is saying much about it except the religists who say its ok. Weinstein complained that he couldn't raise enough money for a worldwide conference on the problem since national governments are NOT backing examination of the problem. Who runs national governments? Norway is one of the few countries who have donated ... and Norway has had woman leadership. The good doctor also blamed a goodly percentage of the deaths to botched abortions... That's bull crap, doctor, and you know it. Stop pandering. The high rate of death in childbirth is because of the lack of medical care, too many pregnancies too fast, improper nutrition because the larger males take most of the food and women are left with leftovers, and, of course, women as the primary workers in all areas of the world doing 98% of the work are overworked. Children in India, Somalia, Ethiopia, China, Japan and the United States as young as nine are being impregnated by older men. Those children having children have bodies that are much too immature to bear for one child. Then they are continuously raped (under the age of consent is RAPE marriage or not) until they die in or of childbirth. Just another sad statistic according to male governments. Tch. Tch. So sad ... but unavoidable according to those old men who wear skirts and claim to be the spokesMEN for god. Yes, our laws must be changed. And so too our religions. "... when conditions are evil, your duty...is to see that those conditions are changed. If your laws forbid you, you must change your laws. If your church forbids you, you must change your church. And if your God forbids you, you must change your God. -- Clemence Dane (1861-1965). A man who impregnates a girl or woman who then dies because of that pregnancy should be prosecuted for murder or attempted murder. And don't give me this stuff about it being HER choice. Even if it was, the man does have some free will - even though he started off blaming everything on Eve - and SHE, by dying, has paid for her mistake. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . New concerns about how new, complex medications are reacting to our food intake are being expressed, but I ask you, honestly, have your pharmacist or your doctor warned you about it? Taking pills with grapefruit can increase the blood level of some drugs. According to a news reports, the drugs most likely to be affected include oral contraceptives, oral hormone-replacement therapy, calcium channel blockers used to treat high blood pressure, the controversial allergy drug Seldane, the sleeping pill triazolem (Halcion) and the many antibiotics. Do NOT take them with grapefruit juice or anything containing caffeine such as coffee, tea or colas. The pills can also dramatically increase the effects of the CAFFEINE! Making you a mess with jitters. And don't ingest caffeine for several hours after taking "the pill." (Might be the answer to some of that PMS...) Take medications on an empty stomach or with water. DEMAND your doctor and your pharmacist explain the problems in detail. DEMAND he tell you what you SHOULD know. And don't let him put you off as "oh, those things are exaggerated ..." It's YOUR life, not his. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . It's hard to believe, but many school systems are attempting to order their women employees and teachers to wear skirts or dresses. Can you believe it??? Today??? One Pomona, California elementary school teacher just won her lawsuit with her school district that required the ridiculous code of skirts. And those religists are also trying to force girls to wear skirts or dresses. If they are so righteous about Old Testament family values, let the men go back to wearing their floor length robes too. Damn these zipper heads! How stupid do they think women are to fall for this crap. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . We've got a couple of web sites we'd like to recommend. First is the one operated by webitor Laurie Mann who was one of the pioneer women in women's rights pages: http://www.city-net.com/~lmann/women The other is for those of you who are supporters of Susan McDougal and are interested in the terrible wrongs being perpetrated against the U.S. Constitution by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. The Arkansas Times, a weekly newspaper that became the refuge for liberal and educated newspaper people when the Arkansas Gazette went out of business (yes, Arkansas has more than one educated person) has a web site at www.aristotle.net/ARKtimes There you'll find a number of articles about Starr's shameless actions on behalf of the big money men who hate the Clintons and everyone around them. The pages also include excerpts from the new book Ralph Nader co- authored about Starr, entitled _Hypocrite_. Remember how much President and Mrs. Clinton oppose cigarettes? Starr has been on retainer from the Philip Morris. Read the Arkansas Times articles and find out why the REAL people of Arkieland have developed a deep, deep contempt for Starr and his cohorts. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . Larissa from Dallas writes that the latest news report was that the woman who accused the two Dallas Cowboy's players of rape has been charged with filing a false police report. We checked with a close friend in Dallas who said that's been it. She was charged and there is now the deep silence that we noted. Larissa says the locations of the accused during the time frame in question were verified, so the woman might have a difficult time changing her story. We question that. Last we heard is that it was a negative verification. Susan Chizeck writes "Here in Dallas there's been much more publicity. Seems the woman, an Iranian girl who worked as a stripper, is being prosecuted for false accusation. She is penniless. My feeling is that she was intimidated from giving evidence as she had bruises that could have come from sexual assault, though not necessarily from the people accused. She was well known to the football players, and hung out with them, frequently at their houses... (although no one is sure what actually happened) she's being treated as a lying whore." So take your choice - does a penniless woman tell the truth or do the owners of dozens of millions of dolllars who both should have criminal records. Perhaps BOTH sides are wrong but who is going to pay and pay and pay. Not the snorters, that's for sure. Be that as it may, as it might be - according to a LOT of talk - there is a certain TV news personality who broke the story by twisting some facts around and PERHAPS conned the woman into making the charges and or setting her up to make the charges ... then hounded the police into some really bad decisions. Obviously with so much botched police work and so much money covering for the bad men wearing America's team uniforms, we shall probably NEVER know what the true facts were. The TV personality and the stupidos on the Dallas police force are squeaking out by heaping shit on the woman's head. Bad, bad situation from whatever angle you look at it from. But we wonder why men who break laws are allowed to continue to play "sports" and earn those fantabulous salaries that put them above the law - not serving any prison time - while everyone wants the woman prosecuted to the full extent of the law. When a football player was shown on the cover of a magazine with his face coated with cocaine, why wasn't he put in jail???? . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . The writer who sent me the following put the words, "HOLY SHIT!" on the subject line. So be warned. Two girl children, sisters, 3 and 4 years old were shown in full intercourse with adult males in photographs confiscated in a Canadian raid. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, acting on a tip, arrested 28- year-old Andrew in Bridal Falls, near Chilliwack, and confiscated hundreds of videos, magazines, and computer equipment along with 61 rolls of undeveloped film which included shots of two sisters Police believe there may be four or five other small girls in the Chilliwack area who may have also been sexually assaulted. Gibbons was convicted in 1992 for "sexual interference" with a two-year- old girl and went to jail for three months. THREE MONTHS! One wonders if he's going to get SIX months this time. What the hell is the matter with our male-driven legal system? He'd get a longer sentence for abusing a dog, not ripping little girls apart. Doesn't this sort of thing bother you? Why isn't anything being done about these monsters who rape and ruin the lives of children? . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . Jean writes, that the URL we gave for the partnership that has set up a web site to keep women informed on health matters should read: http://www.pg.com/womenshealth/index.html (Note the s on womens...) Sorry, we use cut and paste for URL addresses ... Thanks for the correction. Speaking of corrections, it is Representative KaSich of Ohio, not KaLich, as we incorrectly typed. Either way, he's a jerk who wants to become a millionaire on the backs of poor women. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . Oh, yawn. National NOW put out an alert about the House of Representative committee hearing Tuesday, March 11 on the D & X abortion method. Besides being tardy, in its usual fashion, the NOW bulletin went on and on and on without EVER giving one single authoritative quote or any facts or figures. For the sake of all that is decent, when are you girls of National NOW going to come down to earth and start doing your jobs? You are supposed to be giving your membership SERVICE, not sermons- How about some facts????? Will National NOW testify at the hearings ???? Will NOW have authorities testifying on behalf of the women it takes dues from??? Yeah, sure ... You'll get sermons and orders on what YOU are supposed to do but, please don't expect National NOW officers to put ourselves out. WHO if anyone on the National Board is checking on how many days the officers spend doing their jobs? . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . Rebecca Antolak, 17, a Broward County art student at Dillard High school won $45,000 for having her right to free speech violated. Her sculpture of a nude man wearing eye makeup and lipstick was yanked from the school lobby because it was too risque although nude drawings, paintings and sculptures of women have been and are being displayed. So the principal was stupid, but the school board agreed. So Antolak sued and then the school board saw the error of its ways and settled. Antolak's sculpture was shown once at Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art but has been in mothballs since. Poor babies can't stand to have their genitals exhibited so that they can be compared to other men. Can't bear to be shown how so many men can be proud of so little. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . "Bank robbers wouldn't rob if not confronted with all that money, so the solution, obviously, is to close the banks. "Similarly, knowing that all parents have a breaking point, we can rid the world of child abuse if we just outlaw kids. "And the secret to ending racial hate crimes? Why, restore segregation, of course. "All of these stellar ideas are but pale imitations of the logic expressed by many of our political leaders in hearings held last week before a Senate Armed Services Committee. The hearings were called to investigate a burgeoning number of sexual harassment and rape charges made by women in the military. "No less a Socrates than Army Chief of Staff Gen. Dennis J. Reimer, supposedly an advocate of coeducational military training, now thinks that the services should `re-examine' whether the benefits of that training outweigh the `drawbacks.' "These `drawbacks'include assault, rape, extortion, sodomy and death threats inflicted on female recruits by their male instructors during coed training for the noncombat jobs that the Army has recently opened to both sexes. "Several razor-sharp senators, all of whom you will notice bear male names, hinted at the underlying cause of these distasteful drawbacks. It is not, evidently, some way-out-of-bounds aberrant behavior by a bunch of sicko sergeants that is to blame. Instead, it seems, the problem is caused by the presence of -- yep -- the women themselves. "Eliminate the cause and you'll eliminate the problem: close the banks, keep kids away from parents, segregate the races, segregate the genders, and -- zippo, presto -- no more icky problems. Above all, no need to deal with the deviants who are, after all, just responding to `human nature.' "Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., expounding on this `biology is destiny' theory, said, `I have some fundamental concerns about throwing very young women in a position with a drill sergeant ... That's, you know, like sitting there with a match near some gunpowder and expecting a spark not to fly every now and then and cause a problem.' "... The notion that men somehow cannot help but harass women, in the military or in the workplace, does an inordinate disservice to the millions of men who manage to act decently in those environments every day. The notion that women should somehow be willing to give up their rights and job opportunities in order to escape the illegal, immoral and deviant behavior of a scuzzball minority of men should be infuriating to women and men alike. "Women are no more `temptations' to decent, law-abiding military officers than banks full of cash are to those of us who pass them every day. The cash is not ours for the taking. Neither are women." -- J.B. Dixson writing in the Accent section of the Detroit News. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . Catt's Claws monthly reminder: Medical authorities are saying the use of two already approved drugs will induce abortions when used in combination and they have produced a surge in abortions. However, no one will realize it for several years until they see that the birth rate and abortion rate have stayed down. The two- drug abortions method is being prescribed quietly and in privately in doctor's offices today. Dr. Richard U. Hausknecht of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York published a study of the use of the combination of methotrexate and misoprostol to induce abortion (the Aug. 31, 1995 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine). In years past, several doctors, including a woman doctor released the same information but after the flurry of the first news story, the information was quietly ignored/suppressed. Catt's Claws vows this time the information will stay available. Methotrexate is FDA-approved for use against cancer; Misoprostol is FDA approved to treat ulcers. Because both are FDA-approved, they can be prescribed by physicians today. Together they produce abortions at a better rate than the RU-486 pill. Available today at your friendly M.D. Also available for many years and never brought to women's attention, the drugs that produced abortions in women with ectopic pregnancies: your friendly birth control pills. . . . . . . . ^c^c^ . . . . . . . Women's rights are young and tender and we must protect them from the plagues of holy hypocrisy and newts. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- >>> Send your ideas, comments, and news to istuber@direclynx.net for inclusion in the Catt's Claws feminist newsletter which will be emailed up to three times a week. This is NOT an interactive discussion net but an exchange of information. Catt's Claws is NOT sponsored by any organization. We are accepting *limited* donations (only what can be spared) to help offset the online costs of posting Catt's Claws and archiving them. Copyright 1997, Irene Stuber. PO Box 6185, Hot Springs, AR 71902, email istuber@direclynx.net<<<< To receive Catt's Claws by email, write and in the body of the note We thank Jennifer Gagliardi for handling the madding subscription list through her listserv. And a BIG thanks to Sam McMillan for doing our Web site: http://www.imageworld.com/istuber.html