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Ravishly •

Banning Abortion Isn’t Pro-Life: Anti-Choice Legislation Killed My Great-Grandmother

Two big things happened in 1929: the stock market crashed, and my grandmother was born.

My maternal grandmother, Ann, was the second child in the Hubbard-Miller family from Clinton, Missouri. Over the next four years, my maternal great grandmother, Joyce June Hubbard, would bear two more children. In 1936, at just thirty-six years old, she found out she was pregnant again. The family had lost nearly everything in the ’29 crash and could barely feed their family of six.
Ravishly •

Powerful Men Do Terrible Things: Why Lawyers Like Kavanaugh Perpetrate Sexual Assault

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh now has two accusers. Listening to debates about the allegations of sexual violence committed by the current SCOTUS nominee, I have been particularly surprised at those who cling to his profession as an attorney and judge as an indicator that he would be morally incapable of doing something as reprehensible as rape or sexual assault. That was, in fact, the opposite of my experience as a law school student.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the first female US president

Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the 2016 presidential race caused liberals across the United States to question whether the country was indeed ready for a woman president. Since then, there has been much speculation about various female politicians and celebrities running for office, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Kamala Harris, Oprah, Michelle Obama, and others. There have even been rumours that Hillary Clinton might run again.

I, however, don’t see any of these women making it
The Independent •

AOC is right about Kamala Harris. But Americans can’t solve this problem | Carli Pierson

American exceptionalism was on full display in Guatemala yesterday. As Vice President Kamala Harris marched to the podium at a press conference after meeting with the Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei, you could almost hear Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance playing in the background. Her straightforward, ominous message for those considering making the dangerous voyage north felt like a watered-down version of Trumpism when she proclaimed: “Don't come!"
The Independent •

Opinion: For the good of America, Justice Breyer must step down from the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States sent chills down the spines of progressives this week by agreeing to review Mississippi’s abortion law, which bans most procedures after 15 weeks. The review will take place next term, and it will be decisive. If the Mississippi law is upheld, the ruling could give free reign to other states looking to roll back women’s right to self-determination and health, significantly curtailing Roe v Wade.

With that announcement, Democrats are renewing calls for Just
The Independent •

Kamala Harris is about to meet Trump-friendly Mexican president AMLO. I have some words of advice | Carli Pierson

Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to meet virtually with the Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday regarding immigration and the climate crisis. But it’s unlikely she will get far with the bullheaded and contrarian populist ideologue. Let me tell you why.

For starters, Lopez Obrador — better known in Mexico by the acronym AMLO — doesn’t have a lot of experience in politics.
The Independent •

Catholic bishops plan to pressure Biden over abortion rights. It’s time to make a choice | Carli Pierson

When Joselyn turned 15 she was already two months pregnant. Her mother, a housemaid who worked in another city, came back to her tiny village in a rural area of Puebla, Mexico, for her daughter’s quinceañera and her abortion. They had the party celebrating her 15-year birthday and so-called “entry into womanhood” first, and the next day they induced the abortion. It was bloody and painful. She retched on the floor for hours.
The Independent •

Red flag laws don’t work. The only way to heal our nation is to ban guns | Carli Pierson

How many shootings in the past month? In 2021? Well, as any “woke lawyer” (as my trolls on Twitter like to call me) would tell you, it depends. It depends on how you count them, for instance. According to the Gun Violence Archive there have been (so far) 36 mass shootings in April with a total of 44 people killed and many more injured. If you want to count “simple” shootings, then in just the past 72 hours there were over 253, but that number will likely go up between the time I finish writing...
The Independent •

Opinion: Is 2021 the year of the Equal Rights Amendment? I hope so

If you believe that women’s rights to equality under the law are enshrined in the US constitution, and that the Equal Rights Amendment consecrating women’s rights passed decades ago, then you’re wrong.

The ERA was famously drafted by Alice Paul of the National Women’s Party in the early 1920s and was introduced in every Congressional session since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The bill gained significant momentum in the women’s movement of the 1970s and was approved by 35 states before...
The Independent •

The first three things Biden should do in office

An economic recession that left millions of Americans unable to pay rent or put food on the table amid a raging pandemic is just the beginning of the new president-elect’s problems.

Our healthcare system is stretched beyond repair, we have an unpredictable white supremacist autocrat clinging to power, and too many gun toting Republican politicians in Congress and local governments that support him and his vitriol.
The Independent •

Trump could face international human rights law consequences for his coronavirus pandemic response

“Donald Trump has blood on his hands.” Those were the words of New York City’s comptroller Scott Stringer, whose mother died last week of Covid-19. He wasn’t the first person to say it, but this time Stringer’s words hung glaring, suspended in air thickened with the struggling breaths of tens of thousands of sick New Yorkers and exhausted medical workers struggling in emergency rooms and ICUs overflowing with dying patients. This time those words meant something to everyone in America...
The Independent •

Opinion: Mexico's AMLO seems incapable of tackling record rates of femicide

A sea of purple and black swayed in unison with the Jacaranda trees lining Mexico City’s streets yesterday as over 80,000 women descended upon the capital to protest the country’s femicide epidemic. And across the nation, women of all ages and backgrounds joined local marches to protest an increasing outrage at the gender-based violence epidemic and the lack of an adequate response on behalf of the government.

Yesterday, women (and some men) came out in the hundreds of thousands to call out the
The Independent •

Opinion: Let's talk about why Iran is really angry with America

More major news came out of Iran and Iraq over the weekend. Overnight thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets of Tehran to mourn General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in Iraq last week while part of an official envoy sent to help elect a new Iraqi prime minister. On Sunday, the Iraqi parliament approved a humiliating resolution to expel American troops from Iraq after the US assassination.
The Independent •

Opinion: Say goodbye to diplomacy as Trump nominates Kelly Knight Craft to the UN

When Trump officially nominates Kentucky socialite Kelly Knight Craft as ambassador to the United Nations next week, the US will have officially killed off any semblance of making efforts toward international diplomacy.

Knight Craft has been the US Ambassador to Canada since 2017, but the veneer of preparation for the UN post is quite thin. She is a monied socialite and billionaire donor to the Republican party with ties to Kentucky's high society.
The Independent •

Opinion: Trump is a spoiled toddler and Mexican president AMLO won't give in to the tantrum

Mexico is on the brink of a major humanitarian crisis and the president is gunning for it. The so-called “mother of caravans” with over 20,000 migrants, mostly from Honduras, is supposedly preparing to head for Mexico in the coming days, but the country doesn’t have the institutional resources to support so many people as they wait to apply for asylum in the US.

The northern border city of Tijuana declared a crisis in November 2018, after 5,000 migrants looking to apply for asylum in the US wer
The Independent •

'Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma’ is an expose on Mexico’s caste system'

I am not a film critic. I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of how the prodigious director Alfonso Cuarón made such a visually outstanding film in his latest work, Roma, nor do I intend to comment on the incredible performance by Yalitza Aparicio or Marina de Tavira. But after seeing the film in Mexico on Wednesday evening, I felt a visceral need to share my thoughts on the heroine of the story and my own experience with domestic workers in Mexico and Latin America – the hidden heroines of many homes here.
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