Day: October 3, 2001

Mexico Overturns Law That Allowed Men to Claim Rape Vicitims ‘Provoked’ Them

Women’s groups in the Mexican state of Chihuahua recently won an important victory when they pressured the state legislature into repealing a noxious law which had provided for lighter sentences for rape if the defendant could prove that the victim had “provoked” him.

The minimum sentence for rape had been four years, but the revision to the penal code set the minimum at only one year if the convicted rapist could prove that the victim had provoked the rape. This compared to the 6 year minimum sentence in Chihuahua for anyone convicted of cattle rustling.

The penal code had also been revised to reduce the minimum sentence from four years to six months for victims who were penetrated only with an object (which was an even more bizarre revision, in my opinion, than the provocation nonsense). That change was also overturned.

Jorge Ramirez Marin, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party which has an overwhelming majority in the Chihuahua legislature, claimed that the law had been misunderstood. Apparently the law was intended to curtail a perceived problem that women were charging their boyfriends with rape rather than admit to their parents that they were having premarital sex. Even if that’s accurate, however, it’s hard to see how a reduced sentence for rapes that were “provoked” would be a viable solution to such a problem.

Mexico’s national Congress had threatened to intervene if the Chihuahua legislature did not act.

Source:

Mexican lawmakers revoke law reducing penalties for rapists ‘provoked’ by women. Associated PRess, SEptember 19, 2001.

Is Providing Fertility Information A “Scare Campaign”?

Marjie Lundstrom wrote an op-ed a couple months ago about an odd effort by some feminists to restrict information about female reproductive health. They objected to an ad campaign sponsored by the American Infertility Association and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to inform women about the difficulty in getting pregnant in their late 30s and 40s.

With text like, “Advancing age decreases your decreases your ability to have children,” the ad campaign was motivated by the high profile media cases of women who successfully conceive and bear children at relatively late ages. Although such stories seem rather common these days, the reality, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is that the odds of becoming pregnant in any given month drop to 20 percent for women over 30 and a mere 5 percent for women over 40.

As Pamela Madsen of the American Infertility Association told Lundstrom, “I have to speak to women every day in their late 30s and early 40s whose biological clock has pretty much tickered out, and they’re asking, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?'”

Thanks to technological advances, having children is possible now even for women 45 and up to have children, but usually only for people who can afford expensive fertility treatments and/or donated eggs.

The National Organization for Women was not pleased by the campaign. In a Newsweek article, NOW president Kim Gandy bizarrely ridiculed the idea that women could choose when to have children. According to Gandy,

The idea that you can choose what age you’ll be to have your children is a ludicrous proposition for most women, as though you can simply snap your fingers and say, “OK, I’m the right age,” and then have all the accouterments magically appear — the stable relationship, financial stability, life stability.

That is a very weird view of parenthood. Few people I know who are parents (including my wife and I) were foolish enough to wait until their lives were ideal before having children.

Source:

Should You Have Your Baby Now?. Claudia Kalb, Newsweek, August 13, 2001.

Fertility education is offending feminists. Marjie Lundstrom, Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, August 17, 2001.