Archive for 1 月, 2014
荷墮胎船 開進禁忌葡萄牙
【2004.08.25 聯合報 編譯朱邦賢／綜合荷蘭登黑德二十三日電】
荷蘭墮胎諮詢船「隆準號」在訪問愛爾蘭和波蘭引發爭議後，正準備開往葡萄牙。葡萄牙是虔誠的天主教國家，法律對墮胎的限制十分嚴格，這艘海上墮胎診所前往訪問，使葡萄牙各界側目。
蕾貝嘉．龔柏茲醫生說：「在葡萄牙，墮胎是很大的禁忌話題。但願我們往訪會重新引發激辯。」龔柏茲一九九九年成立「乘風破浪婦女基金會」，管理「隆準號」。
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女立委提案墮胎要先看精神科 江綺雯︰這是宗教共識
【2002.12.22 ETtoday 中央社台北22日電】
中國國民黨籍立法委員江綺雯22日上午表示，婦女身體自主權重要，但嬰兒生存權也要重視，每年生出來的嬰兒數目和墮胎嬰兒數目接近，墮胎氾濫問題必須要正視，這是社會上各個宗教、社會團體的強烈共識。
立法院衛生環境及社會福利委員會明天排定審查江綺雯（高雄市）提出的優生保健法部分條文修正草案，草案中嚴格限制人工流產前要接受合格心理師或精神專科醫師輔導二小時以上，經六天等待期，才能施行人工流產。台灣團結聯盟籍立委陳建銘（台北市）和婦女團體代表上午在立法院舉行記者會，表示反對這項草案審查。
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先看精神科醫師才能墮胎？ 婦團︰應先要求男人戴套
【2002.12.22 ETtoday 中央社台北22日電】
台灣團結聯盟籍立法委員陳建銘和台灣女人連線理事長黃淑英等人22日上午批評中國國民黨籍立法委員江綺雯等人提出的優生保健法修正草案嚴格限制人工流產的條款，要婦女看精神科醫師才能人工流產，是歧視婦女的作法，他們認為減少墮胎要從性教育、避孕著手。
立法院衛生環境及社會福利委員會明天審查江綺雯（高雄市）提出的優生保健法部分條文修正草案，草案中嚴格限制人工流產前要接受合格心理師或精神專科醫師輔導二小時以上，經六天等待期，才能施行人工流產。陳建銘（台北市）上午在立法院舉行記者會，邀請相關人士一起表示反對這項草案審查。
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先輔導再等待 墮胎設限惹爭議
【2002.12.23 聯合報 記者潘彥妃／台北報導】
立法院今天將審理「優生保健法」修法，由於立委江綺雯等提案修法，要求未來要施行人工流產的女性，必須先經過精神科專科醫師或合格心理師輔導兩小時，再等待六天，取得證明後才能合法人工流產。婦女團體和台灣婦產科醫學會昨天緊急舉行記者會，抨擊此「宗教版」法案歧視女人做決定權利；且只會讓這些女性因顧慮多一層曝光的機會，轉而尋求密醫或自行買藥墮胎。
對於立委所提修法，衛生署國民健康局副局長林秀娟表示，理想很好、但實務上有困難，首先便是精神科醫師和心理師的人力不足以因應，衛生署認為可修改成由醫師、心理師、社工師、或衛生所人員等事前輔導，比較可行。
墮胎等待期六天 婦團反彈
【2002.12.23 自由時報 記者黃維助╱台北報導】
國民黨立委江綺雯昨天就「優生保健法部分條文修正草案」引發的爭議澄清指出，這次修正限制墮胎的相關條件，並非歧視婦女的身體自主權，而是希望外界也能夠正視嬰兒的生存權，尤其台灣已邁入老化社會，現在每年出生的嬰兒數和墮胎數接近，如何抑制墮胎情況惡化下去，需要大家共同來關心。
對於這項草案，江綺雯進一步表示，朝野立委共有九十九人連署提案，「這件案子並非我一人提出」，而且墮胎代表殺生，修正草案規定人工流產之前接受合格的心理師或者是精神專科醫師輔導，是希望要施行人工流產的婦女，先行確認其對生命的認知，這也是多位宗教領袖一致認同的看法。
墮胎等待期六天 婦團反彈
【2002.12.23 自由時報 記者項程鎮╱台北報導】
台聯立委陳建銘昨天召開記者會指出，立院衛生環境及社會福利委員會今天將審查國民黨立委江綺雯所提出的「優生保健法部分條文修正草案」，草案對人工流產進行嚴格限制，有藉機推展宗教教義、影響婦女權益嫌疑，他要求停審或延期處理。
共同與會的「台灣婦產科醫學會」秘書長謝卿宏表示，根據相關統計，台灣每年只有八萬四千多位婦女墮胎，可是江版草案的立院議案關係文書卻宣稱每年墮胎人數高達五十萬人，讓人覺得草案的數據相當草率。
First legal U.S. gigolo starts work in Nevada
【2010.01.22 】
BEATTY, Nev. (AP) — A brothel in a Nevada desert town has hired the state’s first male prostitute, a muscular college dropout who abandoned a brief stint as a porn actor in Los Angeles to become the only legal gigolo in the United States.
The Shady Lady Ranch successfully won state and county approval to clear the way for the “prostidude,” as Nevada’s newest sex worker is already being called. After a slow first week on the job, his first appointments are scheduled for this weekend.
The male prostitute — known as “Markus” — has quickly become the center of attention in Nevada’s brothel industry.
He has been criticized by female counterparts for not being willing to have sex with men. And he created a dustup after telling Details magazine that his pioneering role in the sex business was “just the same” as civil rights icon Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus during racial segregation in the U.S. South. Since those remarks, he has been forbidden from doing interviews.
Prostitution is illegal in nearly all of the United States but is legal in parts of the western state of Nevada, though not in its most famous city, Las Vegas.
Competing brothel owners fret that hiring gigolos in Nevada will bring unwanted scrutiny from state officials, potentially tempting them to make prostitution illegal. The competitors have also expressed concerns about sexually transmitted diseases, and worry that female customers can’t be inspected as carefully as men are before sex.
Markus, 25, described himself as a well-read college dropout and former U.S. Marine from Alabama. He said he drove to Los Angeles to become a porn actor and left after filming two scenes, the first about a month ago. He said he ended up in a homeless shelter near Santa Monica, Calif., after being unable to find another job.
Shady Lady madam Bobbi Davis picked him from about 10 potential hires culled from hundreds of applications, many featuring crude inquiries, according to her husband and co-owner, Jim. Part of Markus’ appeal was that he was not afraid to deal with heavy publicity.
“Whichever woman may walk through that door, she’s appreciated,” Markus said in his Details interview. “A surrogate lover will love that woman for a whole hour, or however much we charge here, and she’ll leave feeling much more empowered and much more confident in herself.”
Jim Davis told the Associated Press that after reading the article, he and his wife decided that Markus doing interviews was bad for business. Bobbi Davis declined an interview with the AP. The Davises declined to give Markus’ real name, which is a customary practice for sex workers in Nevada.
Davis said the Shady Lady had received dozens of e-mails expressing interest in the gigolo. He said it took years to establish steady business from truckers, salesmen and other travelers after the brothel opened 17 years ago, and getting paying female customers could take at least a month.
“This is a business — if (Bobbi Davis) didn’t think she could make more money, she wouldn’t have done it,” Davis said. “Why else would she start something like this?
“And if she knew what she was getting into, she probably wouldn’t have,” he said.
The yellow-painted Shady Lady compound is more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Beatty — an unincorporated township of fewer than 1,200 people between Las Vegas and Reno.
The small, fenced-in brothel includes a French-themed foyer that displays a pricing menu — $200 for 40 minutes, $300 per hour. It sits on 40 acres of mostly empty land the Davises originally bought for $11,000, Davis said.
Three connected bedrooms are distinctly decorated. One has a heart-shaped hot tub in its bathroom, another has an Asian theme. The brothel’s newest space is a disconnected cottage that looks like a roomy studio, with a kitchenette, a wooden bathtub in the bedroom and armrests on the toilet. The cottage cost $50,000 to build, Davis said.
Markus plans to use the cottage.
“It won’t be successful,” said Arie Mack Moore, owner of the Angel’s Ladies Brothel, just north of Beatty. “You can’t have both (male and female prostitutes) in the same building or adjacent to each other, in my opinion.”
Moore claims his business has picked up since Markus was hired, with customers saying they wanted to avoid the Shady Lady because of Markus.
A 22-year-old prostitute at Angel’s Ladies named “Cuddles” said Markus’ unwillingness to see gay males makes the Shady Lady seem sexist and discriminatory. Her brothel services women.
“How can you just turn down services because of what someone’s preference is? It comes with the territory. It comes with the business,” she said.
Davis said that he and his wife aren’t interested in establishing a gay male clientele, but it will be up to Markus to decide whether to accept men as customers. Davis said Markus told him that he wouldn’t perform for male customers.
“All this gay homophobia in this country is horrible,” Davis said. “Everybody’s so damn scared two men might have sex — it’s happening every day in Las Vegas. Not going to happen here, but that’s all the big fear, is gay people.”
George Flint, a longtime lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Owners Association, said allowing a male prostitute creates legitimate health concerns. Male customers are thoroughly cleaned and inspected for signs of disease before sex at Nevada’s brothels, and he doesn’t believe the same “fanaticism” is possible when checking female customers.
He also worries about the ramifications for the six other brothels in Nye County and the 24 total in Nevada.
“We got an industry in this state right now that’s got an investment of somewhere between $50 million and $75 million,” Flint said. “And yet Bobbi’s in the catbird seat right now where her antics and her procedures and her demands and her goals could potentially bruise an entire multimillion-dollar-a-year industry.”
Flint said he believed the Shady Lady Ranch, which is not a part of his association, could see a temporary wave of curious female customers, but the experiment will ultimately fail.
“I think she truly believes that it’s a viable effort, and I’m wondering after four or five days and there haven’t been any takers, if she’s beginning to wonder if maybe she was wrong,” Flint said. “You and I and the rest of the world can sit and debate this damn thing until hell freezes over, but if nobody shows up at her front door, what’s it proved?”
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
減少墮胎 應叫男人多一「套」
【編按】青少年性知識不足，不是口上說說就算了，不傳授性知識的責任還是在成人啊，老怪小孩兒沒學好，去不反省沒處可學才是問題所在。至於RU486的濫用，也是整個用藥知識、資訊不足的問題，能怪得了那些藥物需求者嗎？
另外針對這個叫【男人多一套】的說法，同樣是社會文化論述的問題，而不是要把矛頭指向社會中的某些人，否則這個問題沒解決，先引來對立與矛盾，又有何益。
墮胎與否 從身心健康考量
墮胎與否，永遠沒有標準答案。目前全球有近八十個國家嚴禁墮胎，其中多數是宗教因素，但封殺墮胎的國家，其人民一直積極爭取開放；法律開放的國家，則反而開始省思管制之道。
天主教國家愛爾蘭嚴禁墮胎，只在繼續懷孕會危及母親安全下，允准婦女墮胎；對死亡觀念開放的荷蘭，雖然是第一個通過安樂死法案的國家，但墮胎手術卻須經政府和醫療機構許可。這些國家的婦女，不得不冒著不可知的風險、花錢巨資，漂洋過海到其他國家墮胎。
Not all sex workers are victims
【2010.04.14 By Thierry Schaffauserp】
New laws on prostitution are sexist – being paid for sex does not objectify me any more than working in a low wage job did
On the 1 April 2010, the Policing and Crime Act became effective. We are facing not a feminist measure, but an ideology that sees women as unable to be sexually independent and free of their own actions. Anti-sex-worker laws are sexist. They are essentialist, paternalist and reinforce the division of women.
It is an essentialist conception to consider sex work as always a violence whatever the period, the place, or the conditions. Sex workers are often seen only as women when many men and transsexual people are also working, and women are always seen as victims by essence. All acts of violence against a sex worker are thus analysed as intrinsically the result of sex work itself and not the conditions in which sex work is exercised.
It stops the real violence that exists in the sex industry being visible. We are told that we must stop sex work to avoid this violence. If we refuse, we become accomplices of the patriarchal system. We are accused of being responsible for maintaining an industry that harms women.
Yet bell hooks warned feminists of the dangers of a “shared victimisation” sisterhood. A victim’s status for women reduce them to beings who must be protected. It participates in the denial of their capacities. It denies sex workers the free disposal of our bodies, our self-determination, our capacity to express our sexual consent like children under 16. It reinforces the idea that sex workers are too stupid, lazy, without any skills, and without consciousness of their alienation.
Many anti-sex-workers’ rights activists think that rape is the conditioning to becoming a sex worker. These claims about rape in our childhood or Stockholm syndrome are used to de-legitimate political attempts to be recognised as experts on our lives and to confiscate our voice. How could we say that a victim of rape has lost her capacity to express her consent because she is traumatised for life? We never say that for other people.
Another paternalistic way to deny our voice is to claim that we are manipulated by pimps. It is a common accusation since the beginning of our movement in 1975. This strategy has been used against many groups. For instance women were accused of being manipulated by the church to be deprived their right to vote.
Instead of fighting the “whore stigma”, middle-class feminists prefer to distance themselves from it, and by doing so reinforce it and exclude those who incarnate this identity. This participates in the segregation between women. This may be a form of internalised sexism by other women who think female sex workers give them a bad name. According to some anti-sex-workers’ rights activists, sex workers maintain the idea that men can own women’s bodies. Sex workers are told that they create a sexual pressure on the whole women class.
On the contrary, I think that it is by using expressions such as “selling your body” that we reinforce the idea of sex workers being owned and women as objects, while sex workers try to impose the term the “sale of sexual services” between two adult subjects. How can we talk about the ownership of our bodies when we are on the contrary those who impose their conditions? Isn’t it an excuse not to question their own sexuality?
Being penetrated doesn’t mean that I give my body. Being paid for sex doesn’t make me more of an object than when I was working for the minimum wage. What makes me an object is political discourses that silence me, criminalise my sexual partners against my will, refuse me equal rights as a worker and citizen, and refuse to acknowledge my self-determination and the words I use to describe myself.