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TOPIC: pregnancy

Society

How Italy's "Conscientious Objector" Doctors — De Facto — Limit Abortion Rights

Italy decriminalized abortion in 1978, but the law allows for doctors to conscientiously object. And so many do that it makes it difficult for many women to access health care when they need it most, with some turning to unsafe abortions.

COSENZA — At the Annunziata Civil Hospital in this southern Italian city, every single gynecologist is a conscientious objector. So pregnancy termination is possible only twice a week here when the visiting doctor who performs the procedure is present.

“More than six months after the resignation of the only non-objector gynecologist at Annunziata, the service is still lacking and is proceeding in fits and starts," explain the activists of the FEM.IN collective, who met with the hospital's administrative director in December and made them promise to hire two more doctors and guarantee the service in the area.

The hospital is not an isolated case in Italy. According to a Ministry of Health report from 2022, 64.6% of Italian gynecologists were conscientious objectors in 2020, a rate slightly lower than 2019, while 44.6% of anesthesiologists and 36.2% of non-medical staff object to performing pregnancy terminations.

This means that 45 years after the passage of the law that decriminalized abortion in Italy through the third month of pregnancy, the "objection" rate among physicians and health care professionals is so high that it makes the termination of pregnancy effectively impractical in many areas of the country.

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"In Pain You Shall Bring Forth Children" — The Business Behind Suffering In Childbirth

Certain female doctors, extremist midwives, online consultants extol the benefits of painful labor, blame mothers who resort to C-sections and convince them to refuse anesthesia. From Italy, an expose on who they are and why they preach a return to the ancestral nature of motherhood.

ROME — “I was told that enduring the pain of childbirth would be the first test as a mother..."

Ginevra Massiletti, 32, went into labor with her first child last year in the southern Italian city of Cosenza, convinced that childbirth should be a fully natural experience.

"I was in too much pain, but I didn't want to give in to analgesia," she said. "In the end, however, I couldn't take it; I asked for an epidural to feel less pain, but in the meantime I was crying and apologizing to my baby, feeling that I had betrayed him because of my weakness and need for relief.”

Ginevra says she's now over the shock, but “for months, I believed I was not up to my motherhood.”

During her pregnancy, reading various blogs and social pages, she had internalized a belief: that childbirth accompanied by anesthesia to relieve the mother's pain was a second-class birth, and especially that in doing so she would selfishly put herself before the baby.

Ginevra’s is not an isolated case. Indeed, online, in some newspapers, and even in certain health circles, a narrative of motherhood that ostracizes any medical-pharmacological support for childbirth, not to mention the use of C-section, is raging in the name of an ancestral vision according to which the mother's body must do everything on its own. Any “little help” offered by science will have negative effects on the unborn child.

Behind this, there is often also a real business, with courses and consultations, strictly on a for-profit basis.

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DRC, Where Armed Groups Are Targeting Pregnant Women

In just three months, armed groups in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo killed nearly 500 civilians. The statistics fail to capture the full scale of the suffering, as limited health care access also claims the lives of pregnant women and infants.

ITURI — On a typical day, this village would wind down by 7 p.m.: the animals back in their stables, the men at a local pub huddled over a battery-powered radio, the women at home preparing dinner. But those predictable rhythms came to a halt one night in May 2021, as armed men descended on the village, setting fire to mud houses and murdering the people who lived in them.

Esther Wabiwa fled the region of Fataki, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that night, along with her husband and two young children. They stumbled through the bush for three days, spending their nights sleeping fitfully on wet leaves. Wabiwa, pregnant with her third child at the time, was gripped by contractions. The farther they walked, the stronger they grew.

“This isn’t the time,” her husband said, anxious and overwhelmed. “Can’t he wait a bit longer?”

He couldn’t. “His head was already between my thighs,” says Wabiwa, 29. The baby was born in the middle of the night, delivered on bare, wet ground. “I cut the umbilical cord with my own teeth,” she says. “I didn’t have anything else on me.” Then, fearing that rest would cost them their lives, the family walked for another three days.

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So He Wanted To Get Pregnant — The Story Of A Trans Dad Ready To Give Birth

The idea of a man carrying a child only receives attention when it is sensationalist or entertaining. But for trans men like me who want to get pregnant, we face discrimination and danger at all levels — from society, the healthcare system, and even from our own communities.

-Essay-

This is my story.

I found myself lying on my bed on my back, naked, looking at the origami paper boats that hung from my ceiling. To my right, a clock, which showed me that my mother would be home in about two hours. Above me, a groaning cis man — cis meaning someone whose gender identity matches that assigned at birth — collapsed in exhaustion.

"I couldn't hold it," he told me after ejaculating inside of me. Honestly, I never practiced safe sex with him — I didn't really even know what that meant at that age. With him lying on my body, I asked myself for the first time with full awareness, do I want to bear a child?

✉️ You can receive our LGBTQ+ International roundup every week directly in your inbox. Subscribe here.

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Society
*Saumya Kalia

India’s Women Are Fighting Air Pollution — And The Patriarchy

India is one of the world's worst countries for air pollution, with women more likely to be affected by the problem than men. Now, experts and activists are fighting to reframe pollution as a gendered health crisis.

MUMBAI In New Delhi, a city that has topped urban air-pollution charts in recent years, Shakuntala describes a discomfort that has become too familiar. Surrounded by bricks and austere buildings, she tells an interviewer: "The eyes burn and it becomes difficult to breathe". She is referring to the noxious fumes she routinely breathes as a construction worker.

Like Shakuntala, women’s experiences of polluted air fill every corner of their lives – inside homes, in parks and markets, on the way to work. Ambient air in most districts in India has never been worse than it is today. As many as 1.67 million people in the country die prematurely due to polluted air. It is India’s second largest health risk after malnutrition.

This risk of exposure to air pollution is compounded for women. Their experiences of toxic air are more frequent and often more hazardous. Yet “policies around air quality have not yet adequately taken into account gender or other factors that might influence people’s health,” Pallavi Pant, a senior scientist at the Health Effects Institute, a nonprofit in the U.S., told The Wire Science.

“It’s unacceptable that the biggest burden [rests on] those who can least bear it,” Sherebanu Frosh, an activist, added. People like her are building a unique resistance within India.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Paweł Smoleński

Searching For Marianna, A Pregnant Doctor From Mariupol Held Captive By The Russians

We’ve heard about the plight of the soldiers-turned-prisoners from Mariupol. Here are some traces of the disturbing fate of a young female doctor who’s been taken away.

"Wait for me, because I will return…"

Marianna Mamonova wrote these words to her family, among the text messages and short phone calls that are the only remaining fragments used to piece together her recent past. We also have a photo of her, posted on Russian websites, where she looks into the lens, gaunt and exhausted, signed with a number like a concentration camp prisoner.

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Until the Russian-Ukrainian war, Mamonova’s biography was available to anyone who wanted to know. She was born in 1991, studied at the Ternopil Medical University, and later at the Kyiv Military Academy. After completing her studies, she was sent to work in the coastal city of Berdiansk. Her mother says that this is where her daughter's dream came true: She’d always wanted to be a military doctor, and worked in Berdiansk for three years, receiving the rank of officer in the Ukrainian army.

Beginning in 2014, she’d worked stints as a front-line doctor in the Donbas region, and when Russia invaded Ukraine in February she went to war again. This time in Mariupol.

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Society
Vijayatharsiny Thinesh

The First Victims Of Sri Lanka's Economic Crisis: Pregnant Women

The country's worst economic crisis in decades has toppled the government and led to soaring prices. Pregnant women struggle to access essential supplies.

INUVIL, SRI LANKA — At sunset, as her young son plays nearby and her husband has yet to return from work, Kirushna Sutharshan forages for edible plants near her home.

She bends carefully over her expanding belly — her second child is due in August — but ignores the discomfort. The prices of milk, eggs, spinach and other foods recommended for healthy pregnancies have tripled since January; the once-free iron supplements are no longer available at prenatal checkups at public hospitals; and she cannot afford vitamins at private pharmacies. Even Thriposha, a corn-based nutritional supplement usually distributed to pregnant women for free, is no longer available.

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Dottoré!
Mariateresa Fichele

Miscarriage And Motherhood, When Pregnancy Is A Battlefield

"There’s still a pulse," they told me, surprisingly.

They call it 'recurrent abortion.' Your test shows up positive but then you end up losing the pregnancy in the first few weeks. I've lost count of how many times this happened to me.

I do remember the last time, though. I was eight weeks pregnant. I got up one morning and found myself in the usual pool of blood. I was so used to it that I didn't say anything to anyone. I called a cab and asked the driver to take me to the ER.

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Ideas
Irene Caselli

How Italy’s New Draconian Bill On Surrogacy Twists The Meaning Of "Women's Dignity"

Italy’s right-wing politicians are trying to ban surrogacy, as the pope pushes parents to have children and feminists are divided on the issue. On such a complicated issue, hard thinking and nuance have been in short supply.

-Essay-

After almost two decades away from Italy, I ended up moving back just after I found out I was pregnant in 2018.

We lived in a stone house among olive trees in the Umbrian countryside, just off a beautiful medieval borgo called Montecastello di Vibio.

Even if I had tried, I could not have picked a better place for my pregnancy to be celebrated — and monitored publicly. With its aging dwellers slowly fading and younger families moving to the big cities, Montecastello was a perfect illustration of Italy’s falling fertility rates.

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Society
Serena Dyer

How Rihanna Ripped Apart The Bland Victorian Rules Of Maternity Clothing

Barbadian singer and businesswoman Rihanna has proudly celebrated her pregnant belly in fun and revealing clothes. By doing so, she is breaking away from the unspoken rule that pregnant women should hide their baby bumps.

There is a stage in pregnancy where many women have to start thinking about switching out their clothes for maternity wear. Let’s be honest, the choices out there aren’t all too inspiring and women are often expected to give up on their sense of style in favour of comfort. Not singer Rihanna, though, whose refreshing approach to maternity fashion has rocked the world.

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Society
Shilu Manandhar

"Let It Be A Son": How Nepal Culture Pushes Women To Abort Girls

In a culture that can see girls as a burden, many women opt to abort their female fetuses — even though it's illegal.

SARLAHI, NEPAL — In the fourth month of her pregnancy, Indu found out she was carrying a girl. That night, she couldn’t sleep and kept crying. She chose to have an abortion, even though it’s illegal in Nepal to terminate a pregnancy after 12 weeks. If she were to have a seventh child, it needed to be a boy.

The desire to have a son is so strong in some parts of Nepal that it leads women like Indu to secretly terminate their pregnancies after finding out the sex of the fetus – either in a close-by town, or across the border in neighboring India. The decision is often one of economic necessity. Sons, especially in more rural regions, are considered financial assets who can contribute to a struggling family. But the illicit abortions, sometimes done in dangerous circumstances, often jeopardize the life of the woman. They’re also skewing the ratio of newborns, threatening to affect future population growth.

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Society
Patricia Simón

Ukraine Hopes These Surrogate Babies Will Stir The Conscience Of The West

BioTexCom is responsible for more than half of the 2,500 surrogate babies born annually in Ukraine. This is how, in the middle of the war, the surrogacy company continues to function.

KYIV — With his right hand, he moves the forceps, emulating how embryos are inserted into a woman's uterus. On the left, he holds the walkie-talkie used to communicate with the soldiers monitoring the surroundings of the clinic.

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Dr. Ihor Pechenoga, with three medical specialties, has been working since 2018 as a spokesperson for the surrogacy company BioTexCom, which is responsible for more than half of the 2,500 babies born annually in Ukraine through this procedure. When the Russian invasion began on February 24, he was appointed with the responsibility of protecting the clinic, located very close to the Kyiv front line.

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