By Jennifer Kilty and Tara Lyons

The proposed Bill C-484, known as the “Unborn Victims of Crime Act,” is currently receiving a great deal of media attention.

Supporters of the bill suggest that it is “simply” a strategic attempt to protect vulnerable pregnant women from violence – both at the hands of strangers, and more often than not by their intimate partners.

This argument presumes two things: (1) that we can implement new laws and policies in a simplistic and direct fashion and without the possibility of generating unintended consequences; and (2) that harsher penal sanctions effectively reduce harms and violent crime.

Both of these presumptions are inherently false. In practice, Bill C-484 is a law that opens the door for future legal challenges against women’s right to choose whether to have an abortion. In effect, this new bill could create legal rights for foetuses, marking them as human and thus as protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms while still in the womb. Given the fact that the foetus and the woman share one body, offering human rights to the foetus intrinsically means we are encroaching upon the woman’s rights.

Sunera Thobani is an assistant professor at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on race and gender relations, and migration, citizenship, and nation-building. She was the first woman of colour to serve as President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) between 1993 and 1996. During that time NAC, along with the Canadian Labour Congress, organized the National Women’s March Against Poverty. She made national news in October of 2001 as one of the first critics of US foreign policy and the “war on terror” when she stated, “From Chile to El Salvador, to Nicaragua to Iraq, the path of US foreign policy is soaked in blood.” Thobani is one of the founders of the cross-Canada Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity (RACE) and is currently writing about media representation of the “war on terror” and its impact on gender, race, and empire-building. Sharmeen Khan interviewed Thobani in July 2007.

How did you get involved with the feminist movement and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women?

Real change needed at women's shelters in Canada
by Mai Nguyen, from Rabble.CA

Canada's shelters for abused women have an appalling framework, argued a group of panelists gathered on International Women's Day (IWD) in Toronto, as they described the dysfunction behind the shelter walls. The event was called Transforming Shelters Beyond Protection and was moderated by Judy Rebick, CAW Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University.

With over 500 shelters across Canada, 152 in Ontario alone, meant to protect women suffering from mental health issues, drug problems and especially those suffering from domestic violence, the current framework that these shelters operate within does a great disservice to these women.

By World March of Women, February, 27 2008

We welcome this opportunity to address the issue of the World Social Forum as a strategy to build this other world we are aiming for. We want to contribute to this debate with a feminist analysis of the present geopolitics as well as an analysis of the present moment the movements and organizations are in and how the WSF has contributed and could continue to contribute to effect change.

Situation – elements to build a common analysis

For millions of women around the world, daily life means struggling to survive economically, to eat, not to be raped or beaten, not to bear children we don’t want, to have the ones we want and ensure that they have all that they need, to study, to be healthy, to stay alive, to resist and strategize to keep our lives, our bodies and our communities from crumbling even further.

By Sylvie Tissot, Le Monde diplomatique, February, 07 2008

Last month Le Nouvel Observateur published a series of articles about a passionate but unhappy woman, authoritarian yet submissive, intelligent yet sensual, stylish yet with a weird hair-do, a man-eater who was enthralled by one man (1). Was it Britney Spears or Carla Bruni? No, it was a philosopher, militant and committed intellectual, an incarnation of feminism for many in France and around the world: Simone de Beauvoir. For the centenary of her birth, the newspaper gave her the celebrity exposé treatment, complete with nude picture on the front page. The series said much about the conditions that govern a Frenchwoman's right to get into the enclosure of memorials to great men in the Panthéon in Paris (Marie Curie was the first woman so honoured, although not until 1995). It helps to go in on the arm of a man -- the feature keeps calling de Beauvoir Jean-Paul Sartre's girlfriend.

By Michael Bronski, Z Magazine

By Hilary Klein, Source: TowardFreedom.com, Z Net, February, 05 2008

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is best known for its brief uprising in January 1994. In addition to being a guerrilla army, the EZLN is a broad social movement; its principal demands include land and indigenous rights and culture. For the past decade or so, the EZLN has been constructing indigenous autonomy in its territory including its own government, health and education infrastructure, and economic institutions. Zapatista territory covers much of the eastern part of the Mexican state of Chiapas. Hundreds, if not thousands, of villages in the Lacandon jungle, the canyon region, the highlands and the northern zone of Chiapas make up the Zapatista support base.

By Kim Sengupta, Z Net, February, 04 2008

A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country's rulers. This is Afghanistan - not in Taliban times but six years after "liberation" and under the democratic rule of the West's ally Hamid Karzai.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Written by Cory Fisher-Hoffman, Tessa Landreau-Grasmuck, Kaya Weidman, and Mandy Skinner collectively, Thursday, 24 January 2008, Upside Down World.

Just after midnight on January 1st, was the 14th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, and the caracol of La Garrucha was alive with celebration. From the top of a refurbished school bus we watched a mass of bodies dance to norteños below a vast sky littered with stars, and the occasional covering of fog that characterizes the mountains of the Mexican southeast.

This night marked the end of the third Encuentro [Gathering] of the Zapatistas with the People of the World, and the first Encuentro of Zapatista Women and the Women of the world. Why a women’s encounter? “Because it was time,” repeated the voices of the masked women speaking before a seated audience of women from Zapatista support bases across Chiapas, as well as from social movements in Mexico and the world.

Twenty years of freedom of choice

by Judy Rebick, January 25, 2008, rabble.ca

I'll never forget the day the Supreme Court struck down the abortion law, January 28, 1988. It was freezing cold. A group of pro-choice activists were standing in front of the clinic along with a mob of media waiting to hear the news from our comrades in Ottawa. They were supposed to call the clinic as soon as the decision came down and the clinic staff would let us know. We didn't have cell phones in those days.