Will Kansas law shut down last 3 abortion-providing clinics?

Whenever I’m getting an outpatient procedure, I always ask, is the janitor’s closet big enough?  Because if it is not, how can you safely provide medical services for women?  Via Huffpo:

According to some of the new clinic requirements, an abortion facility in Kansas must be set to a temperature between 68 and 73 degrees, have a janitor’s closet of at least 50 square feet and an operating room of 150 square feet, feature separate dressing rooms for staff and patients and have 13 different types of drugs on hand. A patient is now required to stay in the recovery room, which must have a temperature between 70 and 75 degrees, for at least two hours after her procedure, even if the procedure requires no anesthesia.

The requirements are so numerous and specific that it’s almost impossible for Kansas’ three abortion clinics to get up to speed by July 1, the licensing deadline. The Republican lawmakers who pushed for the bill insist that they aren’t aiming to shut down all of Kansas’ abortion clinics — but that they are just looking out for women’s health and safety.

Do you do this? Enlisting a male voice to help.

I remember many years ago a woman philosopher friend phoned me to say she felt so ashamed.   She had had someone out to her house to discuss repairs and he was putting her under some perssure to sign up.  She couldn’t get rid of him, she said.  So  eventually she just said, “I’m sorry but I must discuss it with my husband before I can agree to anything.”   She wasn’t married.

Now, I don’t think that strategy had ever occurred to me before then, and I have to say that my spouse is not keen on coming on as the decider and/or in other contexts the heavy.  But recently I have been trying to negotiate my way through a very complex hierarchical buracracy, when the behavior can unhelpful to the point of being bizarre.  And incomprehensible.  E.g., I finally got this very major giant of an organization to phone.  And in fact they phoned three times.  Each time I picked up the phone and said “Hello”.  There was a three second pause (timed by my phones) and then a click as the call was ended.

Of course, having called, they felt they had discharged their obligation to contact me.  So enter the spouse, who does get short-tempered.  Cleverly, they said they could not discuss the situation with him, because I had not given them permission to do so.  However, he was undeterred.

The thing is, it works.  Problem solved.  This has happened twice in the last two weeks. 

Does one get corrupted by brining on one’s spouse, whether fake or real?  I’m afraid so.  But, on the other hand, I had spent 3 days and 10 phone calls trying to do it on my own, and gotten only these ghostly phone calls..

Would you ever do this?

Bodies in Crisis – call for papers

Bodies in Crisis

The Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health in collaboration with RIKK – Center for Women’s and Gender Research and EDDA – Center of Excellence at the University of Iceland
2-4 November, 2011
University of Iceland, Reykjavik

The Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health is based at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden and had its first network meeting in January 2008. With the aim of achieving productive interdisciplinary work on issues concerning gender, body, and health, the network gathers researchers and practitioners from a number of diverse fields such as medicine, comparative literature, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, sports- and health sciences, psychiatry, social psychology, and history of science.

We now invite submissions for the fifth meeting with the network Gender, Body, Health, an international conference under the theme “Bodies in Crisis”. The conference will take place on November 2-4, 2011 at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland in conjunction with the 20th Anniversary Conference of RIKK – The Center for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Iceland.

We welcome submissions for papers, panels, and mini-workshops approaching issues within the overarching theme from a broad range of disciplines and fields of research.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Representations and Discourses of Bodies in Crisis
• Vulnerability and Suffering
• Bodies in Economic Crisis and Poverty
• Trauma and PTSD
• Sexuality and Reproduction in Times of Crisis
• Global Bodies and Bodies in Transition
• Bodily Boundaries and Integrity
• Responsible Bodies and Crises of Responsibility
• Healing and Cathartic Forces of Crisis

One page abstracts are due August 1, 2011. Please submit your abstracts to body@gender.uu.se.

Reader Query Re Partners of Sex Workers

A reader writes:

The girlfriend of a female acquaintance of mine has recently decided to become a prostitute with male clients. Apparently her reason is that she is sex positive and really wants to do this. My acquaintance (who is not a sex worker herself) is having hard time coping with this decision. In order to come to grips with it, she would like to know of websites, discussion forums or blog that are aimed at and/ or written by partners of sex workers. Does anyone have suggestions?

I’ll be very grateful if you could put suggestions in comments. I’d like to ask you, though, to confine yourself to the question asked. There are lots of very legitimate debates that could be had over sex work, and also over words like ‘sex positive’. But let’s not have them here.