Posts from — July 2010

From “The Feministing Five: Elaine Villasper” at Feministing blog.

“When I first got involved with GABRIELA, I was in college. I was really shocked by the issue of sex trafficking and how Filipinos are affected by sex trafficking. When I first started college, I didn’t know that Filipino women were affected by so many issues. I had grown up in the US undocumented, so I didn’t have a lot of access to information or even just basic history of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, until I got to college. It was the first time I was learning a lot of these things, that there was a sex trade, and that people were making money off of it, off of the bodies of women. And it really struck me because at the time I was thinking, “that could be me.” These women, they’re me. They’re my age, they could be my cousins, my family. Any of us could easily have fallen into the sex trade or been victimized in the same way, because I lived in the same conditions that these women are living in right now. So when those realizations came to me, that was when I decided that I had to do something.

Elaine Villasper is the Vice Chair of Education for GABRIELA USA, the North American chapter of the Filipino women’s rights organization. …Villasper helps to teach basic organizing skills, trains young leaders and helps to educate the local community about issues that affect Filipino and Filipino-American women. GABRIELA USA runs a number of cultural and artistic programs here in the US, as well as the Back to the Motherland program, which enables Filipino-Americans to travel to the Philippines to gain a better grasp of the pressing political, socioeconomic and human rights issues on the ground there. Here in the US, the organization works on issues like domestic violence, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights and political representation for the Filipino-American population.

Read the interview with Villasper here

I thought this was a wonderful exercise in dreaming out loud for civil rights and equality….this court would actually look  like our students!   See the full article here, with details about “the court” and those who nominated them.

Dale Minami, civil rights attorney;  Lani Guinier, Harvard law prof/activist; Goodwin Liu, Berkeley law prof; Patricia Williams, Columbia law prof; Harold Koh, lawyer/scholar; Marsha Berzon, 9th Circuit federal appeals judge; Jackie Berrien, EEOC chair; Gerald Lopez, UCLA law prof; and Jed Rakoff, federal district judge.

And be sure to check out the newly re-launched ColorLines webmagazine, now a fully digital publication.

From Ms. Magazine’s blog, June 25

The Akanksha Infertility Clinic is a small pastel building inside a walled compound. Located in Anand, India, the clinic is one of hundreds in the country offering the local women as commercial surrogates. For a fraction of what it can cost in the United States, infertile couples or single parents can hire a woman to stay in the hostel for nine months and bear their child.

Potential surrogates recruited by the Akanksha Clinic are healthy married Indian women who have children of their own.  Once a party to the agreement, they can no longer live at home, have sexual contact with their husband and must leave older children behind to live at the hostel. They sleep nine to a room, are administered daily iron shots and follow a closely monitored diet.

The increasing popularity of outsourcing pregnancy to countries like India, Thailand and Cambodia poses urgent questions about the connections between global inequality and the commodification of the female body. Currently, commercial surrogacy is legal in India because no law exists to prohibit the practice. This means that there are also few safeguards protecting the rights of surrogate mothers.

In its next legislative session, the Indian Parliament is set to debate a bill entitled “The Assisted Reproductive Technology Act,” which will regulate the growing industry. One problematic part of the bill says that a surrogate must waive all her rights during the pregnancy. Even the option of “fetal reduction,” abortion, is a decision that can only be made by her doctor or the genetic parents.

Story continues here

From Ms. Magazine blog, July 2, 2010:

On Thursday, the New York State Senate passed a landmark bill granting overtime pay, paid vacation days, a day off each week, and protections against sexual harassment to domestic workers. David Paterson has promised he will sign it into law, giving thanks to the many workers who lobbied for its passage:

They provide all of us with an example of how individuals can, through struggle and dedication, bring about positive change in the face of skepticism and doubt. This achievement belongs to them, and I will be pleased to sign it into law on their behalf.

The bill’s passage concludes a six-year battle in the state legislature, and is a significant step toward protecting domestic workers. But some of its benefits were qualified: Advocates agreed to compromise on the proposed requirement for six paid holidays and six days of paid vacation, and instead mandate three paid vacation days annually–but only after a worker has been with an employer for a year.

In the New York metro area, 93 percent of domestic workers are women. The passage of the bill was due in large part to Domestic Workers United, a thriving New York City union of Caribbean, Latina and African nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers.

More at “Newsflash: New York Passes Nation’s First Domestic Workers Bill of Rights”  Ms Magazine Blog.