Preliminary results of a study lead by Harvard researcher Elizabeth Ginsburg reported in December's Journal of the American Medical Association on women using Estrace, an estrogen supplement prescribed to less than 20% of women taking supplements, indicate that some women who take estrogen supplement to reduce the symptoms of menopause may inadvertently triple their blood levels of the female hormone - and perhaps raise the risk of breast cancer - just by consuming moderate amounts of alcohol.

      "I wouldn't recommend that women change their estrogen replacement dosing on the basis of this alone," said Dr. Ginsburg, "but if future findings confirm our conclusion, then I'd suggest lower doses of estrogen in women who drink alcohol."

      Stay turned for future developments.

      Two of every 5 victims of violent crimes reported in 1994 were females. That's up from 20 years ago when women accounted for 2 of every 7 victims. Most crimes against women are committed by people closest to them.

      There's one rape for every 270 women, one robbery for every 240 women, and one assault for every 29 women in this country.

      Black, white, and Hispanic women were attacked by intimates at about the same rate.

      As a youth, Simon had two strikes against him under the white supremacy system of apartheid and the stern Calvinist morality underpinned it: he was both black and homosexual.

      He endured 5 years in various jails and prisons for his political activism before being acquitted of treason in 1988.

      Gays and lesbians in South African saw their long campaign for sexual equality enshrined in law Tuesday when Mandela signed the country's new constitution, one of the world's most liberal charters. The document approved Dec. 4 by that nation's highest court, prohibits discrimination on any basis, including race, age, gender, sexual orientation, physical disability, language, or religion. No other nation's constitution specifically protects homosexuals from discrimination by both the government and individuals.

      Did you know that Adolph Hitler was staunchly anti-abortion? Seems he needed more soldiers for the Fatherland.There is a difference between being anti-abortion and being pro-life.

      Attacks on same-sex marriage have become the leading anti-lesbian and gay strategy of the radical right. Despite a recent study showing 71% of lesbians are in committed relationships, same-sex marriage is not legal in any state. Nevertheless, radical extremists are using this issue to divide the country and target lesbians and gay men for discrimination. Organized opposition to this gratuitous lesbian and gay bashing is essential to stop religious and political extremists from advancing their hate-filled agenda.

      The only major feminist organization in the Nation Freedom to Marry Coalition, NOW, is lauding the Hawaii court decision and announcing plans to rally public support as the case moves through the appeals process.

      On the day of the announcement, NOW President Patricia Ireland said, "Lesbian rights are women's rights is what we've argued for more that 20 years. . . ..Today's historic decision finally throws some legal weight behind that idea."

      A Hawaii trial court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutional sex discrimination under Hawaii's Equal Rights Amendment.

      "It's a somewhat ironic, sweet victory for us, given the scare tactics the religious, political extremists attempted to use against the ERA during our long, intense battles," Ireland said. "Any new federal constitutional equality strategy must champion the rights of all women, and specifically include lesbian rights."

      Anticipating a length appeals process, NOW is planning a National Valentine's Day of Action in support of same-sex marriages the weekend of Feb 14. Organizers expect local chapters will stage protests or mock wedding ceremonies, and deliver Valentine's with messages to legislators. NOW recently sent a 12-page mailing on the Day of Action to all 600 of its local chapters.

      "What better day than Valentine's Day, the day we celebrate romantic love and long-term commitments, for activists of all sexual orientations to speak up for the rights of lesbian and gay couples in Hawaii and every state?" said Ireland.

      Lesbian rights are one of NOW's five priority issues, and the organization has a firm co

mmitment to securing same-sex marriage rights. In addition to working on legal, legislative and grassroots strategies to secure equal marriage rights through the National Freedom to Marry Coalition, NOW's national board declared support for same-sex marriage in 1995 and NOW activists have battled attacks on same-sex marriages in at least 39 states.

What is the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and what are the implications of the law?

      With the recent passage of DOMA, the federal government made a radical venture into marriage law for the first time in US history. DOMA, which resoundingly passed the Senate and House and was promptly signed into law by President Clinton, attempts to give states the unconstitutional power to deny recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states. It also defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman, thereby denying federal benefits to same-sex couples who may be granted the right to marry in certain states/ Despite DOMA's passage, the same-sex marriage battle will continue to be fought in the state legislatures, in addition to court cases challenging DOMA's constitutionality.

Isn't DOMA unconstitutional under the Full Faith and Credit Clause?

      Yes. States are bound, by the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution, to honor states' contracts and judicial proceedings, including marriage. currently, same-sex marriage is illegal in all states, but if Hawaii eventually allows same-sex marriage, people legally married in Hawaii would not be considered married by the federal government of the 16 states that have enacted anti-marriage laws. The Constitution was designed to prevent this type of complex and unworkable situation.

            from National NOW information packet

      On a visit to Central and South America, Hillary Rodham Clinton urged nations to do more to combat maternal mortality and lamented that the Republican Congress cut US aid for such efforts.

      "Without access to family planning, women often turn in desperation to illegal, unsafe abortion procedures that account for half of all maternal deaths in this country," the First Lady said during a two-day visit to Bolivia. "Deaths from abortion complications are responsible for 30 to 70 % of maternal mortality in the hemisphere, depending on the country."

      During her visit, Clinton also remarked, 'East, West, North, and South, there is a growing appreciation of women's contributions in and outside the home - and a greater understanding that everyone in society benefits when women are allowed to claim the political, economic, social, and civic power they are due."

      Teen-age girls committed a quarter of all juvenile crime in 1995, and more than 700,000 girls were arrested, pushing the rate of female youth crime up faster than that of boys.

      'Tis a shame- most of us did not fight for equality for women so that women could imitate what is worst in men but rather so that women could give the world what is best in us.

      Pro-choice Democratic women were elected to nine additional House seats, beating five radical right Republicans, one additional Senate seat, and a governorship. No pro-choice Democratic Congresswomen running for reelection were defeated. Indeed, all won by large enough margins that potential challengers will think hard, very, very hard, before running against them in the next election.

      On the Presidential level, women voted for Clinton over Dole by 53% to 37%. During the campaign, Clinton solidified his support among his core Democratic voters, single, minority, and union women, and expanded his supporters to include "soccer moms ' (suburban women with children, Clinton 49%; Dole 42% ) and low-wage working mothers (Clinton 55%; Dole 28%).

      Only four of the fifteen groups in the survey supported Dole over Clinton: devout evangelical women, homemakers, married mothers, and southern white women, and their support was luke-warm at best.

      On the Congressional level, women supported Democrats over Republicans by 53% to 47% while men supported Republicans over Democrats by 57% to 43%. Unfortunately, women tended to split their ticket more than men, allowing the Republicans to retain control of the congress.

      Of the women who stayed home in 1994, allowing the Republicans to have a big win, and who returned to the polls in 1996, 60% chose Clinton over Dole and 61% voted for Democratic congressional candidates while 39% voted Republican.

      All in all, perhaps women have finally come of age in the political arena, as candidates, contributors, volunteers, and voters. Remember to always vote!

      If anyone has news on how pro-choice Republican candidates fared, send the info to the newsletter editor at the NOW PO box and I'll put it in the next newsletter.

            from EMILY's List newsletter, Dec 1996

      Violence against women manifests itself in many ways. Some of the many ways that violence against women's intellect is manifested include denying women an education; excluding women from the process of defining what is moral and right; devaluing women and women's contribution to culture; refusing to reason with or listen to a woman; interrupting her; "refuting" her ideas with absurd arguments; expressing verbal put-downs disguised as "joking", teasing," and "forbidding" women from reading something, discussing a topic, or learning.

      World AIDS Day was marked with renewed vigor around the world after a UN agency reported that nearly 1/4 of the 6.4 million AIDS deaths to date occurred in the past year.

      This year, 3.1 million people were infected with HIV bringing the total number of people with HIV or AIDS to 22.6 million, UNAIDS said.

      AIDS activists the world over used various techniques to bring attention to this emerging plague and to remember the victims of this on-going tragedy.

      Rep. Robert "B-2 Bob" Dornan, the most rabid radical right member of the House from the (arguably) most Republican district in the country (Orange County, Ca.), was defeated in his run for a nineteenth year in the House by a liberal, Democratic, Hispanic woman, Loretta Sanchez. Andrea Seastrand, a first term Gingrich clone from California, also went down in flames. How sweet it is. Now if only Jesse Helms and Phil Graham and . . . .

            from The GOP In-fighting Update Series, a net resource

      As soon as Madeline Albright, Secretary of State designate, is confirmed by the Senate, she will become fourth in line for the Presidency- after the President, Vice-President, and Speaker of the House. (Perish the thought President Gingrich.)

      To combat hate, the Anti-Defamation League sponsored its second annual benefit Concert Against Hate at the Kennedy Center. "We wanted to use the power of both words and music to increase people's understanding of hate as a problem that still exists in our society," noted David C. Friedman, the ADL's regional director.

      The concert focused on six hate crimes committed across the nation from 1963 to the present, interspersing the stories with musical selections. The representative hate crime victims included civil rights pioneer activist, a south-east Asian male teenager, a Jewish teenager, the minister of a black church which was torched by KKK members, and an anti-Nazi editorial writer.

      We salute the ADL's dedication to keeping America safe and free from hate for all Americans. Thanks.

      The oldest extant writings on contraceptive practices come from Egypt and date to the nineteenth to the eleventh century BCE.

      John Riddle in Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1992) studied ancient medical texts, identified the plants in their contraceptive and abortifacient potions, and determined that the ancient contraceptives and abortifacients were probably effective and as safe as giving carrying a pregnancy to term. These herbals were commonly used by all strata of society. Although some plants were added to and other plants were dropped from the herbal lists over the millennia, many plants, plants which modern science has determined contain natural chemicals that could cause a woman to miscarry or become infertile, remained on the lists for thousands of years.

      Many traditional societies without access to Western medicine still use herbal potions as contraceptives and abortifacients. If modern women use safe and effective herbal contraceptives and abortifacients, why couldn't ancient women have used them?

      The Assyrians, Sumerians, and Babylonians had laws which forbade abortion. The Greeks and Romans considered abortion and contraception a crime only if the father objected because the crime was in depriving the father of an heir, not in murdering a human being.

      The earliest Catholic theological objection to abortion and contraception was that abortion and contraception were not sins in and of themselves. Neither of them were considered to be murder since the fetus had no soul. (According to Augustine, the fetus acquired a soul at 40 days for boys and at 90 days for girls. The pig.) These practices were objected to because they hid the true sins: fornication (sex with someone you are not married to) and adultery. Not until 1869 did the Catholic church declare that the soul entered the fetus at conception, making contraception and abortion murder.

      The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice is an ecumenical movement composed of Christian, Jewish, and other non-Christian clergy and laity who believe that the pro-choice side needs a religious voice. The Coalition has out reach programs at national religious meetings, testifies to state and federal legislative committees, and lobbies state and federal legislatures on behalf of keeping women's right to abortion. To contract RCRC write to 1025 Vermont Ave. NW., Suite 1130, Washington DC 20055, phone: 202-628-7700, fax: 202-628-7716 or visit their website at http://www.rcrc.org

      At 28, university trained artist Mary Ware married architect Hartley Dennett. The deliriously happy couple went into business together with Hartley providing building designs and Mary contributing her decorating skills. The Dennett's had three children.

      Then tragedy struck. During her third pregnancy, Mary's uterus tore. Because of her chronic bleeding, Mary remained weak for almost a year. Finally she visited a specialist. He operated on her to repair the tear but informed her that another pregnancy would kill her. In an age when access to contraception was prohibited, to avoid pregnancy meant to not have sex. Her much beloved Hartley had remained chaste during her year long trial but when he was informed that he would have to remain permanently celibate, he began an affair with a family friend. Eventually their marriage ended.

      Realizing that she would have to support herself as well as her children and wanting to distance herself from the arts which had such strong emotional ties to her beloved Hartley, Ware entered the field of social activism.

      Dennett, a life long social activist, had been active in the Twilight Sleep Association, an organization which promoted the use of pain-killing drugs during child birth. But to pay the bills, Dennett accepted a position with the National American Woman's Suffrage Association as public relations officer. Her arrival marked the turning point of the NAWSA which had been in the doldrums. She flooded the country with suffrage propaganda. When Washington state granted suffrage to women in 1910, her publicity and fund-raising efforts began to bear fruit.

      Tired of internal politics and ready to tackle a new social problem, in 1914. Dennett left the suffrage campaign. By now Dennett's sons were teenagers and she wanted to give them an accurate sex education. Unable to find accurate written sources which her sons would be able to understand, Dennett wrote her own pamphlet giving accurate names to the sex organs and accurate drawings of male and female anatomy. Wanting to ensure the accuracy, she asked her physician to review her pamphlet. He thought it was the best he had ever seen and passed a copy of it along to the local medical society. Her sons enjoyed her pamphlet and she circulated it to friends. Eventually, Dennett published and distributed thousands of copies of her pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life.

      So began Dennett's influential, life-long involvement with the nascent, still-disreputable birth control movement. Only a few other people, notably Emma Goldman and Dr. William J. Robinson, were active in the field - even Margaret Sanger had only joined a few months before Dennett took up the cause.

      In her final years, the war years, Dennett took up the cause of peace.

      Until the second half of the nineteenth century, American law, following in the tradition of English common law and like the laws in most of Western Europe, permitted abortion until quickening - the instant in time when the mother first feels the baby move. After all, for most of history, unless a woman was visibly pregnant, she was not pregnant unless she declared herself to be pregnant.

      In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the advent of the germ theory of illness, the establishment of medical schools, and the beginning of systematic medical research, the medical profession began differentiating itself from folkhealers and midwives. To establish themselves as a true profession (and to drive the folkhealers and midwives out of business), laws restricting the practice of medicine to university trained doctors began to appear. Anti-abortion laws were passed ostensibly to protect women from quacks and incompetents.

      The Comstock Law of 1873 forbade the distribution of obscene material through the mail. According to the Comstock law, obscenity encompassed "every lewd, lascivious, or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character," "every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice of any kind," and "any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing." The Comstock law specifically mentioned contraception and abortion by declaring that it was a crime to advertise or mail any information "for preventing conception or producing abortion."

      Virtually anything could be considered obscene. For example, it was illegal to place an add in a newspaper for contraceptive products or services, for a mother to write her daughter a letter telling her how to avoid pregnancy, for a flyer to advertise a seminar on contraception, for a medical journal to discuss certain complications of pregnancy, for two medical researchers to use the mail to trade information on the relative efficacy of various forms of contraception, for a pharmaceutical company to advertise contraceptive products in medical journals, indeed, for a physician to discuss contraception with a married patient in the privacy of his own office. Even mentioning that it was possible for a woman to control her fertility without describing how to do so was obscene.

      For a first-time offender, the penalty for obscenity was a fine of up to $5000 fine or five years in jail or both, and for repeat offenders, a fine of up to $10,000 fine or ten years in prison.

      Little by little the Comstock law was whittled away. Much progress in making birth control information and contraceptive products available to all women was made during the Great Depression of the 1930s when it was in men's best interest to limit the size of their families without restricting their access to their wives' sexual services. Using legal arguments based on the 9th Amendment right to privacy, women's control over her reproductive processes gradually broadened. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court struck down the last remaining laws forbidding distribution of contraceptives to married couples. In Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), the Supreme Court extended access to contraceptives to single women. In Planned Parenthood v. Danforth (1976), the Supreme Court voided a law that required the consent of a woman's husband for an abortion. In Bellotti v. Baird (1979), a minor's right to privacy was established when Massachusetts' parental consent requirements were struck down.

      All news was not good new, however. With the election of the republican Regean administration and the appointment of conservative judges, the Supreme Court turned hostile to women's reproductive freedom. In Harris v. McRae (1980) the Court upheld a Congressional ban on the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortion. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the Supreme Court explicitly stated that states could regulate abortion as all public health issues are regulated.       For the last few years, Court rulings have been a mixture of good news and bad news for abortion rights advocates. Hopefully, with at least another 4 years of a Democratic Presidency, more moderate appointments to the judiciary will result in a strengthening of women's reproductive rights. Hoping for a Republican Presidential victory in 1996, the last Congress was slow to fill vacant seats in federal courts. We must make sure that open judicial seats are filled promptly. Roe v Wade (1973) which was argued on 9th and 14th amendments right to privacy overturned by a vote of 7-2 the state laws of 46 states - only Alaska, Hawaii, NY and Washington had statutes that met the Court's standards. Roe gave women unlimited access to abortion in the first trimester, allowed states to regulate abortion in the second trimester to protect maternal health, and permitted states to prohibit abortion in the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, unless the life or health of the mother was at stake.

      In addition to sources already noted, the following sources were used to write this month's newsletter

      Chen, Constance M., The Sex Side of Life: Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education, The New Press, NY, 1996

      Mohr, James, Abortion in America, Oxford University Press, 1979

      Ranke-Heinemann, Uta, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church, Doubleday 1990

      Weatherford, Doris, American Women's History, Prentise Hall, 1994

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