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Ellison's Must Read of the Day

My must read of the day is "How Countries Across the Globe Are Tampering with Women's Wombs," in Vice:

Last week's revelation that Indian women are being sterilized for as little as $13 to meet targets set by state officials and at risk to their lives has rightly seen a collective, international outcry.

It's been reported that women targeted for sterilization are typically from the very poorest parts of the country are under pressure to comply and offered no other form of contraception. But coerced or forced sterilization happens in other nations for a wide range of reasons, not just brutal and misguided efforts at population control. […]

In Uzbekistan, there has been a sustained program of forced sterilization since 1999 in a bid to control population growth. A 2013 report by journalist Natalie Antelava for human rights group Open Society Foundations found doctors under pressure to meet government targets and unable to provide proper medical examinations or sterile environments.

Women say they are often unaware of the nature of the procedure. One woman, "Shahida," a mother of two, was told it was reversible and only discovered the truth when those children died in a car crash and she was unsuccessful in conceiving more. Her husband left her.

Other women aren't asked at all. Uzbekistan women's rights organization Ozod Ayol (Free Woman) has recorded cases of involuntary hysterectomies.

Toward the end of the piece, this article brings the topic around to reproductive rights in the United States. It claims that, today, women in the United States are "routinely denied access to contraceptive choices." I don’t think that’s accurate. Most contraception is quite accessible to American women, and it’s also not comparable to the issue of forced sterilization—which is what I think is important in this piece.

Accounts of forced sterilization are appalling, and it’s the kind of women’s issue that I wish feminists in the United States spent more time focusing on.

Do they care about this stuff? Yes, I know they do—but it’s not what they’re most vocal about. It’s not what they focus on, and it’s not their primary concern.

It should be.

Instead of focusing on the basic rights of women, which are routinely violated in countries such as Nepal or Afghanistan, where 85 percent of women say they have experienced "physical, sexual, or psychological violence or forced marriage," feminism in America has become part and parcel to a political game. The inveterate attention to abortion is trivial, and it’s much more about gaining votes for the Democratic Party than actually defending women. Feminists don’t need to abandon abortion rights as an issue, but it should be secondary to something like speaking out against forced sterilization or socially sanctioned domestic abuse—and it’s not.

I love feminism, which I’ve said in the past. I don’t agree with every aspect or every major feminist figure of the first, second, or third wave, but I’m well aware that many of the opportunities I have today are available to me because of their work. We can, and should, thank feminism for so many of the benefits American women don’t think twice about today—such as greater access to education and the ability to participate in college sports, decriminalization of birth control, property rights for married and single women, and of course that whole voting thing—but we should also expect more from it.

The feminism that props up Beyoncé, Lena Dunham, and Wendy Davis as ideal champions of women’s rights is doing a disservice to women as well as the history of the movement. They should be spending their time standing up for women (mostly outside of the United States) who continue to have their most fundamental rights violated, ignored, and pushed aside by their government and neighbors.

I love Beyoncé too, but feminists need to prop up the work of women like Sunitha Krishnan and Naheed Farid instead.