Largest women’s health class action decision upheld – Lawyers Weekly

A landmark decision from November 2019 has been upheld, delivering findings in favour of thousands of women whose “lives were destroyed”.

In November 2019, Justice Anna Katzmann of the Federal Court of Australia found in favour of women impacted by pelvic mesh implants sold by Johnson & Johnson and Ethicon which were “not fit for purpose”. The class action – “the largest women’s health class action in Australia’s history”, according to Shine – commenced in October 2012 and culminated in a trial that ran over seven months starting in July 2017.

It was a win, the firm said, for “the brave women who spoke out about their suffering”, after pelvic mesh implants left them in “chronic and debilitating pain”.

In March 2020, Justice Katzmann ruled that the three lead applicants – Kathryn Gill, Diane Dawson and Ann Sanders, who represented the class – were to be awarded damages of $1,276,113.00, $555,555.000 and $757,372.00, respectively.

In April of last year, Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson confirmed it would appeal the Federal Court decision, with proceedings taking place in February 2021.

Justices Jayne Jagot, Bernard Murphy and Michael Lee – who heard the appeal in NSW – expedited their judgment and, on Friday, 5 March, delivered findings in favour of 10,000 women “whose lives were destroyed by defective prolapse mesh and incontinence tape implants”, Shine said.

The remaining members of the class, Shine noted, can now bring individual claims for compensation which will be assessed by the Federal Court.

Source: Largest women’s health class action decision upheld – Lawyers Weekly

Follow the Money: How the Pritzker Family Makes a Killing From the Transgender Industry (Flow Chart)

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in transgender medical infrastructure across the United States and world to “treat” transgender people. In addition to gender clinics proliferating across the United States, hospital wings are being built for specialized surgeries, and many medical institutions are clamoring to get on board with the new developments. Doctors are being trained in cadaver symposiums across the world in all manner of surgeries related to transgender individuals, including phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, facial feminization surgery, urethral procedures, and more. More and more American corporations are covering transgender surgeries, drugs, and other expenses. Endocrinologists seeking the fountain of youth in hormones for more than a generation, and the subsequent earnings for marketing those hormones, are still on a quest for gold.

Puberty blockers are another growing market. The plastic surgery arm of medicine is staged for an infusion of cash as well as organ transplants, especially womb transplants for men identifying as women who may want future pregnancies. These surgeries are already being practiced on animals and the first successful womb implant from a deceased female donor to another female has already been a success. Biogenetics is poised to be the investment of the future, says Rothblatt, who has headed a massive pharmaceutical corporation and is now heavily invested in biogenetics and transplants.

Transgenderism has certainly made its way into the American marketplace, so it seems important to consider the implications of this as we pass laws regarding transgender individuals’ and our civil liberties. Transgenderism sits square in the middle of the medical industrial complex, which is by some estimates even bigger than the military industrial complex.

Much more important than funds going directly to the LGBT lobby and organizations, only a fraction of which trickles down to assist people who identify as transgender, is the money invested by the men mentioned above, governments, and technology and pharmaceutical corporations to institutionalize and normalize transgenderism as a lifestyle choice. They are shaping the narrative about transgenderism and normalizing it within the culture using their funding methods.

Source: Follow the Money: How the Pritzker Family Makes a Killing From the Transgender Industry (Flow Chart)

Scientists call for convicted baby killer Kathleen Folbigg to be pardoned, released

Ninety medical and scientific experts are pushing for convicted serial killer Kathleen Folbigg to receive a full pardon, arguing she is not responsible for the deaths of her four infant children.
Folbigg is currently behind bars after she was convicted of the murder of three of her children and the manslaughter of another.

Genomic sequencing has found that two of Folbigg’s daughters, Sarah and Laura, had a genetic mutation, said Australian National University’s Carola Vinuesa.
“The team found a novel variant never before reported in a gene known as CALM2, which encodes for calmodulin,” Professor Vinuesa said.
“Calmodulin mutations typically are associated with cardiac arrhythmia that can cause sudden unexpected death in children and adults both while awake and asleep.”

The scientists also found Folbigg’s two boys also had a genetic mutation which has been shown to cause epilepsy in mice.
There was no physical evidence indicating she murdered the babies, but prosecutors pointed to a series of ominous diary entries.

Source: Scientists call for convicted baby killer Kathleen Folbigg to be pardoned, released

Women are (rightly) angry. Now they need a plan

If the lessons of second wave feminism are any guide, Australian women now need to not only get angry, they need to get organised.

In the 1980s, government policy was routinely audited for its impact on women. But in the 1990s, feminist policy “machinery” was steadily dismantled.

Today’s Office for Women has a tiny staff and a low profile. It was not consulted on any of the major COVID-related policy shifts, like JobKeeper or changes to superannuation.

If our parliament is full of men who ignore, belittle and disrespect women, and women who enable these men, it is because we, the voters, have put them there. But we can also vote them out.

A women’s candidate survey, ready to roll out at the next federal election, is just one strategy from the women’s movement of the 1970s that might be worth reviving today. Women need to maintain their rage, but they need to turn it into political action, too.

Source: Women are (rightly) angry. Now they need a plan

The People Haven’t Risen Up For The Same Reason Abuse Victims Don’t Leave Their Abusers – Caitlin Johnstone

This is what so few people understand about abusive relationships. People see friends and family members stuck in relationships that are obviously horrible and say “She should leave him! Why doesn’t she just leave??” If the abuse happened in secret the first question your loved ones ask when you escape is “Why did you let it go on so long? Why didn’t you leave sooner?”

Abusive relationships aren’t just one partner doing cruel things to another. If they were, there would be no relationship: there’d just be a woman getting assaulted one time by her boyfriend and then immediately leaving. Abusive relationships necessarily include the construction of psychological barriers to leaving, or else they would not exist. Victims of abuse are kept constantly confused, off-balance, insecure and unsure of themselves, because their abuse always necessarily includes the element of psychological manipulation.

This is why people stay in abusive relationships, whether it’s abusive relationships with significant others or abusive relationships with empires.

Vast fortunes are poured into keeping us from realizing that we are being exploited by powerful wealth hoarders while our nation’s resources are sent to fight wars of planetary domination. That our ecosystem is being destroyed for profit with no real plan for what to do when it’s gone. That we are being increasingly oppressed and impoverished to keep us from having enough awareness and wealth to dethrone our rulers. And that it doesn’t have to be this way at all.

Source: The People Haven’t Risen Up For The Same Reason Abuse Victims Don’t Leave Their Abusers – Caitlin Johnstone

Book Launch: Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law: Performances in Plastic Tickets, Wed 3 Mar 2021 at 06:00 – 07:00 AEDT

You are invited you to join the Buckingham Law School – Book Launch: Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law: Performances in Plastic by Dr Scutt

Source: Book Launch: Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law: Performances in Plastic Tickets, Wed 3 Mar 2021 at 19:00 | Eventbrite

Parental alienation should have no place in our law or legal system

Parental alienation is already being misused in our family courts to the extent that victims of domestic abuse are afraid to disclose abuse for fear of being accused of alienation.

In America, more than fifty thousand children each year are forced by courts into unsupervised contact with an abusive parent. More than 70% of domestic abuse perpetrators gain custody of children. More than 770 children have been murdered by a divorcing or separating parent since 2008. For children in America, bravely speaking out about abuse is no guarantee of escaping it. The courts often overlook and dismiss allegations of domestic and sexual abuse. In many cases they do so because of the aggressive misuse of a concept called parental alienation (PA).

Despite there being no scientific evidence for it, parental alienation has become a dominant force in American courts as the standard defence against domestic abuse allegations.

If we take protecting children in the UK seriously, then we must look to the experience of the US with parental alienation. It shows us quite how dangerous this concept is, and why it has no place in UK law or our legal system.

Source: Parental alienation should have no place in our law or legal system

A Morrison government minister has been accused of rape in a letter sent to the Prime Minister | The New Daily

A rape allegation against one of Scott Morrison’s own Cabinet Ministers has been referred to federal police after a letter was sent to the Prime Minister detailing the allegations.

The alleged sexual assault dates to 1988, before the unnamed senior minister entered politics.

The victim, who was 16 at the time of the alleged crime, took her own life last year.

The letter came with a detailed statement prepared by the complainant for her lawyer and was shared with the ABC’s Four Corners program by a friend of the alleged victim.

Ms Hanson-Young said the information she had received regarded a “disturbing and a very serious allegation of a criminal nature against a senior member of the government”.

Senator Wong said it was her understanding the complainant, who was 16 at the time of the alleged attack in Sydney, reported the assault to NSW Police and South Australia Police.

Source: A Morrison government minister has been accused of rape in a letter sent to the Prime Minister | The New Daily

25th of February, 2021 – The War On Women

Just three days after we heard that RISE have lost their contract following an “equalities impact assessment” on its service provision, another women’s charity, Monklands Women’s Aid, has announced it, too, has been defunded.

The charity has been supporting women and children for 30 years, and its activities include providing refuge, housing support services, and crisis support, for those who have experienced, or are at risk of experiencing, domestic abuse. Like RISE, Monklands has had its funding removed as part of a decision to make services more “inclusive”; specifically to provide services for men. And perpetrators.

The activists who want to convince everyone that biological sex has no impact on a person’s life, although a minority, are successfully infiltrating organisations and influencing decision-makers.

This is not a drill. This is a war on women. Let’s start fighting back.

Source: 25th of February, 2021 – The War On Women

Madonna King: Our schoolkids aren’t immune to sexual assault – they need our help most | The New Daily

For years, schools have been silently dealing with a tricky and vile problem: Counselling sessions, often on Monday, with girls aged as young as 13, who are traumatised from sexual assault.

But in our own “me too’’ moment, and lifted by the courage of Brittany Higgins, school girls across Australia this week are speaking up to tell their own awful stories of being raped by peers while drunk at parties.

Former Sydney school student Chanel Contos is gathering the stories, and claims to now have hundreds and hundreds of sexual assault allegations.

Most of those are levelled at students of all-boy schools in Australia, but include some boys admitting their wrongdoing.

Dr Briony Scott, from Sydney’s Wenona School, highlighted that this week, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald that “the extent of peer-on-peer assault in this country and the number of sexual assaults against adolescents, within any community, is breathtaking’’.

No school principal is shocked by the rising number of allegations; they deal weekly with the trauma and heartache and shame some girls struggle with, after an encounter they can barely bring themselves to talk about.

Source: Madonna King: Our schoolkids aren’t immune to sexual assault – they need our help most | The New Daily