POLAND: March on 3 October ; police raids in 4 cities on 4 October – Safe Abortion

Women’s rights groups in Poland have had their documents and computers seized in police raids which took place a day after thousands of activists marched against the country’s restrictive abortion law.

In October 2016, legislation was proposed to completely outlaw abortion overall. The plans prompted around 30,000 people to assemble despite awful weather in Warsaw’s Castle Square, chanting “We want doctors, not missionaries!”.

The far-reaching protests were successful and triggered lawmakers to vote against the restrictive new law just three days afterwards. The eastern European country is one of the few countries in the world to outlaw abortion following decades of total legalisation.

http://www.safeabortionwomensright.org/poland-march-on-3-october-police-raids-in-4-cities-on-4-october/?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/poland-abortion-police-raids-a7987181.html

Canada to Pay Millions in Indigenous Lawsuit Over Forced Adoptions

The perils of adoption . . .

OTTAWA — For decades, Canadian social workers forcibly separated indigenous children from their families, putting them up for adoption by nonnative families in Canada and around the world.

On Friday, the Canadian government took a step to make amends for that adoption program, which began in the 1960s and lasted till the 1980s, by agreeing to pay 750 million Canadian dollars in legal settlements.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/world/canada/indigenous-forced-adoption-sixties-scoop.html

A GAY dad brutally murdered his adopted toddler daughter after calling her “Satan dressed up in a baby grow”, a jury has heard.

Matthew Scully-Hicks, 31, was allegedly heard yelling “shut up you little f***ing brat” in the months before 18-month-old Elsie died of a brain haemorrhage.

http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/gay-dad-matthew-scullyhicks-alleged-to-have-murdered-his-adopted-18monthold-daughter/news-story/7045bbc3e4e80d79c6489d08732e8f5f

Stereotype that women are kinder and less selfish is true, claim neuroscientists

The results revealed that when taking the placebo, 51% of the time women chose to share the money, while for men the figure was lower, at 40%. But after taking the amisulpride, women were less keen to share, while men became more prosocial, opting to split the cash 45% and 44% of the time respectively.

In the second study, the team looked at data from 40 men and women who had undergone brain imaging while undertaking decisions on whether to share money, focussing on the activity of a value-processing region of the brain that relies on dopamine signalling.

The team found that when making prosocial choices, activity in this brain region was stronger for women than men, suggesting a greater dopamine response.

The researchers say that, taken together, the studies support the idea that the dopamine-based reward system is geared towards sharing behaviour in women and more selfish behaviour in men.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/09/stereotype-that-women-are-kinder-and-less-selfish-is-true-claim-neuroscientists?

Family violence perpetrators ‘not being held accountable’

Researcher and senior lawyer to the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council, Paul McGorrery, said there is growing concern that family violence perpetrators are not being held accountable for the mental trauma inflicted on their victims.

To try and combat this, Mr McGorrery said he is investigating ways to improve understanding about prosecuting the offence, noting that while causing someone psychological harm is already a crime in every Australian state, not a single person has ever been prosecuted for it.

Commenting on what sparked his decision to investigate this matter, Mr McGorrery said his career has shown him that the issue of psychological harm in the criminal law needs to be highlighted more prominently.

“I started in workers’ compensation law, where 33 per cent of all money paid to injured employees was for psychological injuries caused by their workplace, but then I found myself in criminal law, where psychological injuries caused by someone else were almost an afterthought,” he said.

https://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/wig-chamber/22031-family-violence-perpetrators-not-being-held-accountable?

Trump Administration Set to Roll Back Birth Control Mandate – NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is poised to roll back the federal requirement for employers to include birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, vastly expanding exemptions for those that cite moral or religious objections.

The new rules, which could be issued as soon as Friday, fulfill a campaign promise by President Trump and are sure to touch off a round of lawsuits on the issue.

More than 55 million women have access to birth control without co-payments because of the contraceptive coverage mandate, according to a study commissioned by the Obama administration. Under the new regulations, hundreds of thousands of women could lose birth control benefits they now receive at no cost under the Affordable Care Act.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/politics/trump-birth-control.html?_r=0&referer=https://t.co/IuYhebr4us?

Why don’t women win Nobel science prizes?

[Y]ou have to go back a full 54 years to find the last female Nobel laureate in physics.

This scarcity of women (and black and minority ethnic men, for that matter) is often put down to the time lag between work being carried out and being rewarded with the highest accolade in science. The awards, it is argued, reflect the make-up of academic institutions way-back-when.

This over-cautious approach, where scientists are rewarded for discoveries often decades-old, means younger scientists who are still active, a greater proportion of whom are women, miss out. It also meant that the committee missed out on the chance to celebrate the late American astrophysicist Vera Rubin, whose observations in the 1970s provided the first compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter. Rubin died last year, before an experiment such as CERN had been able to solve the mystery of what dark matter actually is. If it continues on this trajectory, the Nobel prize risks looking not just traditional, but like a relic, gathering dust.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/06/women-win-nobel-science-prizes?

Swedish model gets rape threats after ad shows her unshaved legs

A Swedish model says she has received rape threats for posing in an advertisement with unshaved legs.

Arvida Byström, who is also a photographer and digital artist, appears in a video and photograph promoting Adidas Originals’ Superstar range. Byström, who has described the norm for women to shave as “fucked”, has hairy legs in the images and says she has faced a vicious backlash as a result.

She wrote on Instagram: “Me being such an abled, white, cis body with its only nonconforming feature being a lil leg hair. Literally I’ve been getting rape threats in my DM inbox. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to not possess all these privileges and try to exist in the world.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/06/swedish-model-gets-threats-after-ad-shows-her-unshaved-legs?

Samoa to protest transgender weightlifters

Samoa says it’s unfair for transgender weightlifters to compete in women’s divisions and plan to take their protest to the International Weightlifting Federation.

New Zealand lifter Laurel Hubbard won the over 90kg division at the Australian International event in Melbourne earlier this month.

The President of the Samoa Weightlifting Federation, Jerry Wallwork, said the move will discourage women from participating in the sport.

“I really don’t think it’s fair. I’ve seen it up in front, in person, and especially when you’ve got someone who was a champions male lifter and now competing with the women, against the women,” he said.

You meet the testosterone levels and you get it down to a certain level but you’ve still got the muscles and the bones of a man and of course you’ve still got the strength there – it doesn’t matter how low you go.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/sport/327731/samoa-to-protest-transgender-weightlifters

Three women killed in domestic violence in NSW in one week is a crisis

A stabbing, two hammer attacks and a strangling have made it a horror week of domestic violence in NSW.

Three women in their 30s had their lives brutally taken by their partners or former partners in a single state in a single week and the shocking thing is it didn’t make front page news or lead news bulletins.

These three women, whose lives were cut far too short in the most abysmal of circumstances, take the domestic violence death toll to 38 women this year according to the Counting Dead Women Australia researchers of Destroy The Joint. Thirty eight.

How many more women were attacked last week in NSW but not fatally? The answer is roughly 1250 according to data from the year 2014-15. Australian police deal with 5,000 domestic violence matters on average every week which is one every two minutes.

Among women aged between 18 to 44 years family violence poses a bigger health risk than smoking, drinking and obesity.

https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/three-women-killed-in-nsw-in-a-single-week-is-a-crisis/
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/three-dead-in-four-days-of-domestic-violence/news-story/e423c70335f40c472b37eb3917233e63

Melbourne pensioner reveals why he paid jailed WA mum’s fines

In order to pay the fines, initially Mr Clark had to investigate in which prison she was in and tried calling, but was denied because he did not know her name.

“I said [to the attendant] there’s an article in The Guardian today if you pull it up on your computer you’ll see it,” Mr Clark explained.

“How many Noongar women with five children of her own, and six children that she looks after, who’ve been arrested in the last two days do you get?

“And she said, ‘oh we get seven or eight a day’. I said, ‘are they all being locked up because of unpaid fines?’ And she said, ‘yes, and they’re mostly women’,” he recalls in disbelief.

“At that point, I just shook my head.”

But after much determination, he finally got through to someone who could help him, and paid the remainder of the woman’s fines, which after her two days in prison at a rate of $250 per day, meant there was $3376 remaining.

Now he is calling for change to the Western Australian system.

“It’s a national disgrace,” Mr Clark said.

http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/10/02/exclusive-melbourne-pensioner-reveals-why-he-paid-jailed-wa-mums-fines?