An Australian-first, all-female mental health facility dedicated to treating women with PTSD caused by sexual and domestic violence is being hailed a “game-changer” by experts.
Photos from the Nights at the Museum event held on April 14 show a man in ladies’ underwear sitting with a group of children building Lego blocks.
The woman who took the images said, “You let a male in fetish gear play in the kids lego pit during the school holidays. When I spoke to security they said they could do nothing and pointed me to the organiser. He’s sitting there with his full package out. Disgusting!!”
After a complaint was made the Museum investigated and said in a statement: “The individuals in fancy dress were keeping to themselves and had not done anything wrong.”
A “domestic supply of infants” is exactly what the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to abolish.
Second only to the creeping chatter of state birth control bans, the speedy pivot to celebrating forced birth and adoption is chilling. It’s chilling not just because it discounts the extortionate emotional and financial costs of childbirth and the increased medical risks of forced childbirth. It’s chilling because it lifts us out of a discussion about privacy and bodily autonomy and into a regime in which babies are a commodity and pregnant people are vessels in which to incubate them. If this sounds like a familiar, albeit noxious, economic concept, it’s because it is.
The economics of chattel slavery itself reflects a long, sordid history of using women’s bodies to incubate babies for the benefit of others, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of “substantive due process”—much derided by Republicans and Alito—was an effort to put an end to that practice. References to “safe havens” and the depleted domestic supply of adoptable babies are terrifying because this is exactly what the 14th Amendment sought to curtail.
The argument that forced birth is justified because other people can have enjoyment of the resulting children sends us tumbling deeper down the rabbit hole into commodifying babies and conscripting their mothers. This is hardly a practice that ended with slavery. Recall that removing babies from their parents was the animating theory behind the Canadian residential school atrocities and that, as Rebecca Nagle notes of Alito’s claims about the domestic baby supply, “for decades, the adoption industry has filled this gap disproportionately with children from communities of color—first through international adoption and now foster care.”
If you believe in fetal personhood, or that “abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman’s life,” while directing shrinking resources toward parental leave, child hunger, health care, and poverty, and while threatening to cut off contraception access, you must justify forcing women to carry pregnancies to term regardless of the dangers to their own health and lives, regardless of cost, and regardless of the misery they or their children may suffer. One way around that thorny ethical dilemma is to simply assert that such children will be efficiently transferred to alternate parents who will value them.
A notorious killer now wants to be treated as a baby and wear nappies while in prison, according to reports.
Sophie Eastwood, formerly known as Daniel, transitioned from male to female after being jailed for life in 2004.
The 36-year-old was dubbed ‘Hannibal Lecter Junior’ after she used shoelaces as a garotte to strangle her cellmate – a month before she was due to be freed from a young offenders’ institution for dangerous driving.
Since then, she has told staff at Polmont prison in Brightons, Scotland, that she wants to be treated as an infant, and has requested to wear diapers and have her food pureed.
Eastwood has also demanded guards hold her hand when she is escorted to and from her cell.
According to a source quoted by the Daily Record, prison bosses are treating her requests seriously and have already given her a dummy.
While it is unknown if Eastwood’s condition has been clinically examined, people who identify as babies usually suffer from paraphilic infantilism, otherwise known as ‘adult baby syndrome’.
Like any fetish, there is a booming industry behind it, with adult nurseries featuring giant cots and adult-sized nappies all available in England.
A MOTHER who could not afford the petrol to drive her children to a court-ordered contact visit with their father should never have been jailed, the Full Bench of the Family Court has ruled.
In an extraordinary judgment, the court said not only did Federal Court magistrate Michael Jarrett get it wrong, his considerations fell “far short” of what was required by the Family Law Act.
With no money to put petrol in her car and without a lawyer, she had represented herself before Mr Jarrett, who earns $239,430.
She was jailed for four months in March but released on appeal on the order of the Full Bench after eight weeks and reunited with her daughter, 6, and son, 8.
The end of Roe v Wade would dramatically impact reproductive rights in the US. It would also likely have symbolic consequences globally, shaping the strategies and tactics of the trans-national anti-abortion movement, writes Prudence Flowers.
Although Australia is sometimes described as the 51st US state, when it comes to abortion our politics and laws are extremely different.
The Australian public is strongly pro-choice and has been for decades.
Abortion in Australia is regulated by state and territory legislation and the overall trend in the 21st century has been to enshrine abortion as a legal right. In 2021, South Australia became the last jurisdiction to decriminalise the procedure.
Broadly, there is a significant shortage of trained surgical abortion providers. Although early medication abortion can be prescribed by GPs, very few are certified to do so. Until COVID, many private regional abortion clinics relied on doctors working on a fly-in-fly-out model.
The tiny Australian right-to-life movement has direct links with the US movement.
In recent state decriminalisation debates, we witnessed the wholesale incorporation of American rhetoric and tactics into the Australian context.
Anti-abortion activists had an out-sized place in these state debates because of their vocal political and religious allies.
Minor parties such as One Nation now have a “pro-life platform”, while several federal Coalition politicians, including Barnaby Joyce, Alex Antic and Matt Canavan have spoken out against abortion.
Amanda Stoker, the assistant minister for women, recently addressed the annual Queensland anti-choice rally.
The end of Roe v Wade will likely embolden our own anti-abortion activists and politicians, who can question public provision of abortion, push for additional legal and medical regulations, and seek to revise laws by emphasising US talking points such as “late-term” and “sex-selective” abortions.
US — Somerset County, New Jersey. A 32-year-old male described in some mainstream news sources as a “transgender mom” who “fathered” a seven-year-old will serve a 25-year sentence in state prison for raping and allowing accomplices to rape the girl on film. Marina Volz, who now identifies as a woman and was previously named Matthew, won custody of his daughter in December 2018. He moved the child from his mother’s home in Oregon to his home in Franklin Township, New Jersey with the aide of two accomplices and the plan of sexually abusing his daughter and filming it, he revealed in his confession before Somerset County Superior Court.
He raped the child alone, and with accomplice Ashley Romero, an aged 28 male who identifies as female and was previously named Adam Romero. Mr Romero also jointly raped the child with Sean Allen, an aged 54 United States Navy veteran.
