One of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Velmanette Montgomery, called the practice of restraining women in labor "barbaric and unconscionable" (which sounds about right to me), but the new law will make New York one of just  four states in the country that restrict the use of restraints on incarcerated women during pregnancy or childbirth. California and Illinois were the first to put any legal limits on the practice -- in both cases, after a series of lawsuits forced the states to overhaul their disastrously inadequate prison healthcare systems. Before the restriction, in Illinois, it was standard practice to chain female inmates to their hospital beds before, during and after the births of their babies. As one advocate told the New York Times, “What was common was one wrist and one ankle.” (A policy that, frighteningly enough, looks positively benevolent compared to Kansas’s, North Carolina’s and Washington’s, which allow women to be locked in belly chains and leg irons while they’re in labor, according to a 2006 investigation by Amnesty International.)

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When they're healthy, the two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, work to keep breast cells growing normally. But when they contain certain mutations, they can indicate that a woman has a 40-85 percent chance of developing cancer in her breasts or ovaries. Women with extensive family histories of cancer often choose to be screened for the mutations, since positive tests can indicate the need for precautionary measures such as more frequent mammograms or MRIs, prophylactic drugs or, in some cases, preventive mastectomies.

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The news story was triggered by the case of a woman whose rapist had been convicted, in part because she participated in forensic evidence collection at a local hospital immediately after her assault. Officers assured her she wouldn't have to pay for the procedure (you know, kind of like the way a burglary victim doesn't pay police to fingerprint the scene of the crime) yet she received a bill -- marked delinquent -- for nearly $2000.

Texas has a Crime Victims' Compensation Fund that automatically covers up to $700 of the cost of a sexual assault investigation, but state law requires victims to exhaust all other potential sources before the fund will kick down any more. ("We're so sorry that you've been through hell, ma'am. Please submit an invoice in triplicate to your insurance company.")

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Ayman Udas was a local celebrity in the city of Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The area is at the center of the struggle between the country's secular government, tribal factions and the increasingly powerful Pakistani Taliban. And as is so often the case on the frontiers of culture wars, women's freedoms have been among the first casualties. The NWFP is where a group of men were caught on video last month, whipping a screaming teenaged girl. Talibani groups have bombed and burned hundreds of girls' schools in the region, and religious militants terrorized thousands of women away from participating in last year's national elections.

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Duffy first got attention in 1999 with the collection "The World's Wife," which views literature and history through the eyes of women behind myth-making men (poems include "Mrs. Faust" and "Pilate's Wife"). According to a story in the Guardian, she was widely regarded as runner-up in 1999, when then-Prime Minister Tony Blair chose outgoing laureate Andrew Motion. Rumor had it Blair believed England wasn't ready for Duffy: She's not just a woman, but she's also a lesbian. 

Duffy told BBC Radio 4 she had some hesitation about the position. 

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The event was led by Domestic Workers United, which points out that household employees need protection as much as, if not more than, any other workers -- especially because their work takes place behind closed doors, where they're particularly vulnerable to abuse. When the organization surveyed domestic workers in 2006, they found that 21 percent had been verbally abused by their employers. More than half worked overtime, often 50-60 hours per week, yet 67 percent didn't get overtime pay. Less than half of workers received basic workplace benefits like regular raises and paid sick days.

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"They called him gay and a snitch," his stepfather said. "All the time they’d call him this."

Kate Harding wrote about the impact of homophobic bullying last week, on what would have been the 12th birthday of Carl Walker-Hoover, who committed suicide in April after months of being tormented with anti-gay slurs. It was also the 13th National Day of Silence, organized by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network "to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment and effective responses."

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Acting as a celebrity judge for the competition, which aired on NBC last night, Hilton asked Miss California Carrie Prejean (previously rumored to be a favorite, in case you weren't keeping track) her opinion on same-sex marriage. Prejean had the decency to look a little stressed as she came up with this somewhat garbled, ultimately obnoxious response, for which she got both cheers and boos:

"I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."

So, three cheers for "opposite marriage," then?

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The release notes that, on April 4, the New York Times ran two adjacent front-page articles: one on the Iowa Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage, and one on the gunman who murdered 13 people in Binghamton, N.Y. So you get it, right? The stories were on the same page! It's irrefutable proof of the link between homosexuality and murder!

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Indeed, Idaho was but one stop on the "right of refusal" crazy train. On Monday, an Illinois judge ruled that the state couldn't force two anti-choice pharmacists to dispense Plan B morning-after pills, despite a 2005 state rule that says they have to. Since the two druggists own five pharmacies between them, all located in rural northern Illinois, the decision could make for a serious impingement on local women's access to emergency contraception.

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The Rockefeller Drug Laws were enacted back in 1973, when the state was caught in a crime wave widely associated with the national heroin epidemic. The laws were sold as a way to catch big-time dealers and make sure they served lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key prison sentences. But because they imposed long mandatory minimum jail times for the possession of small amounts of drugs, and removed judges' power to consider mitigating circumstances, they ended up impacting hundreds of thousands of small-time offenders and just-plain drug addicts. One of the state's most famous drug-law offenders was Elaine Bartlett, who won clemency from former governor George Pataki after spending 16 years in prison for a minor role in a single cocaine sale.

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Tracy Clark-Flory first wrote about the LAPD rape kits backlog in October, but since then the numbers have gotten even worse: Human Rights Watch reported Tuesday that more than 12,000 rape kits are sitting around untested in L.A. County police departments and crime labs. The kits (taken by an often excruciating, 4-6-hour process) are intended to help prosecute sexual assaults -- as HRW investigator Sarah Tofte writes on Women's eNews, the kits contain DNA and other evidence collected from victims' bodies and clothes immediately after the crime, and they have the potential to identify rapists, corroborate victims' accounts of assaults and exonerate innocent defendants. Of course, in order to serve those functions, the kits have to actually be used. Nearly 500 of L.A.'s untested kits are attached to cases that have passed the 10-year statute of limitations for rape in California, making it impossible to prosecute rapists even if they were to be identified. Thousands more kits have been destroyed untested.

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The Associated Press and dozens of local papers ran the story, describing the teenagers (quite rightly) as victims of a savage commercial sex industry. And because the kids were picked up under federal law, that’s how they’ll be treated. According to the FBI, most of the teenagers have been placed with local child protection agencies, which will presumably try to get them into foster homes or residential treatment facilities.

All of this might seem pretty intuitive -- it doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to see a 13-year-old having sex with adults on the street as a victim. In the words of one FBI deputy: “The vast majority of these kids are what they term 'throwaway kids,' with no family support, no friends.” Most have run away from abusive homes. Once they end up on the street, they face heinous rates of violence and sexual assault, and they often end up under the control of pimps who use them as for-profit sex slaves.

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Over the course of the nation's three-and-a-half decade (and counting) incarceration boom, the number of women in jails and prisons across the country has multiplied by more than ten. Combine the explosive increase with mandatory-minimum sentencing and three-strikes laws that keep people in prison for longer stints than anywhere else in the Western world, and it turns out that you get, well, a whole lot of little old ladies behind bars.

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Hagen worked as a department liaison until 2006, when she ran afoul of Republican hit-lady Monica Goodling -- most famous for the partisan hiring and firing scandal that led to the eventual resignation of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Despite excellent performance reviews, Hagen was fired the first time her job came up for renewal. DOJ staffers leaked the story to NPR, saying that the order had come from Goodling, who'd gotten word that Hagen was gay. Back at the beginning of 2008, NPR quoted an anonymous Republican source as saying, "To some people, that's even worse than being a Democrat." The story was confirmed a few months later by a Justice Department investigation.

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"We're mad that having children has turned our lives upside down much more than theirs. We're mad that these guys, who can manage businesses or keep track of thousands of pieces of sports trivia, can be clueless when it comes to what our kids are eating and what supplies they need for school. And more than anything else, we're mad that they get more time to themselves than we do."

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