Kemi Badenoch vs. maternity pay (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to start your week

Hello dear readers and welcome new subscribers. It’s been quite the week of news. Wouldn’t a reprieve be nice?

P.s. For anyone celebrating Jewish New Year this week, shana tova!

And now to the reads….

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1) In Sudan, rape as a weapon of war

Earlier this month, a UN fact-finding mission to Sudan, where civil war has been raging since April 2023, found evidence of rape, sexual violence and sexual slavery among the “harrowing human rights violations” committed by the warring parties. That this is the year’s consistently overlooked conflict has been said many times. Last month, The Economist ran a front page arguing that there are reasons the world should care about this war. In an ideal world, basic humanity would be enough. The BBC has an on-the-ground report with women talking about the sexual violence they or people they know have suffered. Here is an excerpt:

And the women, I asked, were they safer than the men? What about rape? The chorus of voices died down. Then one erupted.

"Where is the world? Why don’t you help us?" she said, her words coming out in torrents as tears ran down her cheeks.

“There are so many women here who’ve been violated, but they don’t talk about it. What difference would it make anyway?”

“Some girls, the RSF make them lie in the streets at night,” she went on. “If they come back late from this market, the RSF keeps them for five or six days.”

2) Pregnancy-linked prosecutions spike in the US

A US legal advocacy group, Pregnancy Justice, has published a report showing that in the year after the US Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade, “at least 210 pregnant people faced criminal charges for conduct associated with pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth. The report finds that in the one-year period from June 24, 2022 to June 23, 2023, there was the highest number of pregnancy-related prosecutions documented in a single year.” Between 1973 and 2023, Pregnancy Justice found, more than 2,000 people “faced prosecution and punishment for circumstances surrounding their pregnancies and pregnancy outcomes.”

These weren’t only related to procuring abortions. For Mother Jones, Nina Martin has some more context:

More than 200 of the prosecutions involved allegations of substance use during pregnancy. In almost every case, authorities—driven by the idea that the fetus can be the victim of a crime perpetrated by its pregnant mother—charged women using statutes that criminalize child endangerment, neglect, or abuse. By contrast, despite widespread fears that women and medical providers might be criminally charged for obtaining or performing abortions in states with draconian abortion bans, Pregnancy Justice found only a handful of cases that specifically mentioned alleged abortions, attempted abortions, or “researching or exploring the possibility of an abortion.” Only one of those defendants was charged under a law making abortion a crime.

3) Women’s insecurity hurts India’s economy

The rape and murder last month of a trainee doctor in the hospital in Kolkota where she was working (she had been trying to get some sleep during a 36-hour shift) has sparked mass protests in India. Women’s lack of safety at work, on public transport, and in public spaces in general is a block to the country’s economic growth (and presumably to gender equality, too), according to a longread in the Financial Times. One economist cited in the piece says gender is now “macro-critical” in India. John Reed and Jyotsna Singh write:

“Nowhere is safe for women,” says Shyamadra Sarkar, 24, a medical student in Kolkata. Families feel it would be safer for daughters to be cooped up at home rather than risk going out to work, she says. “Parents think, ‘If you’re not safe outside, stay at home’.”

As well as highlighting the threat of violence, the case has also provoked much wider questions about the status of working women in the world’s most populous nation and its biggest developing economy.

4) Kemi Badenoch vs. maternity pay

It’s Conservative Party Conference in the UK this week, which means the various leadership hopefuls are doing that bit extra to vie for the party faithful’s attention. Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch, minister for women and equalities in Rishi Sunak’s government, appeared to say in a radio interview that maternity leave pay is “excessive” and has “gone too far”. As per the BBC, she also said that: “the exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there… We need to have more personal responsibility - there was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies."

The would-be Tory leader said her words had been “misinterpreted” and a row over her allegedly misunderstood words had everyone talking as the party’s conference began. Cue various articles by British parents explaining why maternity pay in this country is far from excessive. Whatever Badenoch meant, or didn’t mean, it’s worth noting here that maternity pay is notoriously low in Britain, though the low pay does last longer than higher pay does in some other countries. Also, regarding Badenoch’s comments about a time before maternity leave when people had more children, as

Josie Glausiusz

pointed out to me on Bluesky: “In 1800 (when people were having more babies) approximately one in every three children born that year did not make it to their fifth birthday.” And maternity leave was a still a long way off!

P.s. While we are on the UK, a new review into Britain’s maternity services has found that harm is at risk of being “normalised”. For those familiar with British maternity care, surely that’s happened already?

5) Mexico’s new conservatism

In August, the American Conservative Political Action Conference also took place in Mexico City for the second year running. Madeleine Wattenbarger reports for The Baffler on the Mexican edition, highlighting a new further-right Viva México Movement, as well as anti-feminist discussions that took place. She writes:

Amid familiar stabs at Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, this brand of Latin American anticommunism came with an added dose of anti-trans, anti-feminist sentiment. Calling in over video, French politician Thibaud Monnier bemoaned the recent Paris Olympics opening ceremony’s “LGBT parody of the Last Supper.” Farkas lamented “cancel culture” coming after anyone “defending women’s sports,” while Chilean analyst Axel Kaiser referred to Imane Khelif as the “male boxer” who “beat up lots of women,” before warning the crowd of a “new era of darkness brought on by the most perverted ideas the human mind can create.”

And also:

Brazilian Sara Huff, née Winter, was the star of a segment dedicated to women denouncing the false promises of feminism. The thirty-two-year-old, who sported the only visible tattoos on the conference stage, narrated her life story to a rapt audience: after finding herself homeless and pushed into sex work as a teenager, she founded the Brazil chapter of the Ukrainian feminist organization Femen, even traveling to Ukraine for a feminist boot camp. After a misoprostol abortion caused her to hemorrhage, her neighbors, a “white Catholic man” and his wife “who prays the rosary,” drove her to the hospital. The pro-life movement, she said, went on to pay her rent for a year and support her studies. She left behind her feminist activism to advocate for women to “follow their natural destiny” of motherhood and servitude rather than pursuing careers.

Later, I asked Huff what she proposes for Latin American women who face, as she once did, economic conditions that preclude a tradwife vocation. After insisting that feminism is an export from the North that “confuses” Latin American women, she offered, in the way of social policy, a piece of advice: “Stop having sex with idiots, and find a good man,” she answered. “Be more intelligent.”

Bonus: Putin vs. the child-free | Gender apartheid latest

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time.