This past month, the world has been watching a 22-year-old pregnant woman in El Salvador die, little by little. I want to say it is like watching an accident happen in slow motion, but this situation is no accident. El Salvador's government is deliberately denying lifesaving treatment to...

Recently, an appeals court in Scotland ruled that a wide range of service providers have a right to object to helping with the provision of abortions, even if the care they provide is not directly related to the termination of a pregnancy. In the original ruling, last year,...

This week, Duke University published a new study, which found that women wake up grumpier than men. The study's authors attribute the additional grumpiness to women needing more sleep than men. Me? I think there is just a lot to be grumpy about lately.

First, the

Each year around March 8 (International Women's Day), representatives of world governments come together to draw up a statement that is supposed to communicate the notion that women and men are equal. This has been a key tenet of international relations since the signing of the United Nations Charter in...

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives finally passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which reauthorizes funding for the fight against domestic violence in the United States. The bill passed after a prolonged partisan fight over specific protections for Native-American women and lesbian, bisexual, and trans women....

I don't watch Modern Family, the primetime sitcom depicting "non-traditional" (e.g., same-sex, interracial and inter-generational) couples. Still, I'm struck by how fast family realities change and how slowly laws and societal perceptions about what's "right" reflect those changes.

The couples depicted in Modern Family were surely seen by society at...

If you ask children what the purpose of a punishment is, most will say "to learn your lesson." This is why life imprisonment and the death penalty don't make much sense to them. Yet in the United States alone, 140,000 people are currently serving life sentences, and 41,000...

Earlier this month the punditsphere erupted in vicious back-and-forths over the (lack of) space for trans women in mainstream feminism and how to talk about transgender people to begin with.

The comment that led to the storm has since been described by its author, Suzanne Moore, as a

Last week Jodie Foster received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes and accepted it by thanking her loved ones and sharing her dislike of intrusions of privacy. Since then she has been subject to much criticism, ranging from swipes at her continued friendship with...

Wednesday morning last week, news broke that Saudi Arabia's authorities had gone ahead with the public beheading of Rizana Nafeek, a young woman accused of killing a baby in her care in 2005 when she was 17 years old. Nafeek insisted the baby had died in...

As 2012 came to a close, Sao Paolo joined the jurisdictions that allow same-sex marriage. The joy this news elicited is absolutely warranted. However, it may cover up the fact that equal marriage rights do not mean the end to hostility against those who aren't straight.

Arguably nowhere...

This week, as we are waiting for the Ugandan parliament to debate whether or not homosexuality should be punishable by death (or at the very least life in jail), it might be helpful to review what could make anyone reach such a murderous conclusion. The short answer is...

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court judges were expected to announce which, if any, cases related to gay rights they would review. At stake are not only the right to marry and federal recognition of marriage-related financial benefits for same-sex couples who are already married. The cases before the...

It's that time of year again: Turkeys get pardoned or, more frequently, eaten. Malls get raided. Football gets ignored. Meanwhile, life goes on. And while it is easy to be cynical and disheartened by global news in light of so much hostility and inhumanity, for those of us living in...

Savita Halappanavar's death is personal to me.

No one knows for sure yet what happened to Savita Halappanavar. We know that she wanted to be pregnant, that she miscarried, and that the care she received did not save her life. It is important to push for medical accountability...

November 6th was a good day for human rights, at least in Maryland. Not only did the state's voters support same-sex marriage, they also voted in favor of expanding access to higher education for all of Maryland's students, regardless of their immigration status.

While the Maryland...

I recently held a seminar on rape in war with military lawyers from across the world. We talked through a number of obstacles to prevention and elimination of sexual violence, but at the end of the seminar everyone agreed that the biggest of them all is silence. "We don't ever...

Rape is about power. The attacker seeks to control and subdue the victim's physical and psychological integrity. When we address rape, it is therefore essential to overturn this power-imbalance and restore dignity and control to the victim. Most often, we fail miserably at this.

Consider the case of recently deceased...

On October 15, the New York Times reported that adolescents who are vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) aren't more promiscuous than those who don't get vaccinated. HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that raises the risk of some cancers. It's not surprising that a vaccine has no effect...

This week, a two-year-old program allowing New York City schools to distribute emergency contraception (EC) in high schools finally made news, and not in a good way. Though schools allow parents to "opt out" of the program, some parents say they should have been asked to "opt in."