Unsafe Country For Women Quotes

Contraceptives save the lives of mothers and newborns. Contraceptives also reduce abortion. As a result of contraceptive use, there were 26 million fewer unsafe abortions in the world’s poorest countries in just one year, according to the most recent data.

When ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) claims that home birth and midwives are unsafe, they imply that the women who choose it and the midwives that provide it are acting irresponsibly and selfishly. They stigmatize normal birth just as the political right has stigmatized abortion. And they stigmatize women. "Our country has created a mythology of women who are irresponsible and don't care," says Paltrow. "We talk about welfare queens, crack moms, and murderous women who have abortions." A culture that allows such language to permeate our national subconscious inevitably dehumanizes all women, including mothers. Lyon argues that this thinking perpetuates a phrase often invoked in exam rooms and delivery rooms: The goal is to have a healthy baby. "This phrase is used over and over and over to shut down women's requests," she says. "The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful." What's best for women is best for babies. ... The goal is to have a healthy family.

The weightless rhetoric of digital technology masks a refusal to acknowledge the people and resources on which these systems depend: lithium and coltan mines, energy-guzzling data centers and server farms, suicidal workers at Apple’s Foxconn factories, and women and children in developing countries and incarcerated Americans up to their necks in toxic electronic waste.2 The swelling demand for precious metals, used in everything from video-game consoles to USB cables to batteries, has increased political instability in some regions, led to unsafe, unhealthy, and inhumane working conditions, opened up new markets for child and forced labor, and encouraged environmentally destructive extraction techniques.3 It is estimated that mining the gold necessary to produce a single cell phone—only one mineral of many required for the finished product—produces upward of 220 pounds of waste.4

One in three African women experiences physical or sexual violence. Because many African countries prohibit abortion on any grounds, even if the mother’s life is at risk, almost one third of all the unsafe abortions that occur in the world each year occur in Africa. Most of the 130 million women alive today who have undergone female genital mutilation live in Africa, and 125 million of the current population of African women were married before the age of eighteen.