(WOMENSENEWS)--

Cheers

Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., was allowed to bring her partner, Lauren Azar, on a military flight after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., intervened on her behalf, the Politico reported April 1. Baldwin is the only woman who is openly gay in Congress.

House guidelines permit members of Congress to take spouses on military flights when there is room or when necessary for protocol, but the Defense Department officials balked and did not consider Azar a spouse. Pelosi pressured Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who then granted special permission to Azar to join Baldwin on a fact-finding trip to Europe during the Easter recess. Five other members of Congress went on the trip.

"It's a matter of fairness that spouses should be allowed to go, and she is Ms. Baldwin's spouse," Pelosi spokesperson Brendan Daly told the Washington Post.

The Gates-Pelosi intervention renewed a debate on the definition of "spouse" and on the Pentagon's protocols on same-sex marriage. The Defense Department still prohibits openly gay individuals from serving in the military and generally follows a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Late last month, Baldwin sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice requesting basic protections for lesbian and gay employees in the State Department, including equal travel rights for domestic partners accompanying service officers to postings overseas.

More News to Cheer This Week:

• Zimbabwe elected 28 women into its lower house of assembly in the March 29 presidential elections. President Robert Mugabe's party narrowly lost its majority in the government, according to unofficial counts, however election results still need to be confirmed. More than 900 women ran for office in Zimbabwe, according to the YWCA, which monitored the voting. Sixty-one women ran for the 60 senate seats, 118 for the 710 parliament seats and 740 for the 1,958 councilor seats. Women's organizations spearheaded a national "Women Can Do It" campaign to get out the vote and 100 women participated as election monitors.
• A Saudi Arabian judge for the first time has allowed a 28-year-old woman to marry the husband of her choice despite her father's opposition, signaling a possible shift away from forced marriages, the Saudi Daily Okaz reported March 31. The nation will also introduce legal assistance centers run by women for women to convey requests to judges, Arab News reported March 31. "We have come up with a mechanism in which women can reach judges without having to mingle with men," said Minister of Justice Abdullah Al-Asheikh in his announcement.
• Citigroup has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit involving 2,500 female brokers at Smith Barney for $33 million, Reuters reported April 4. The brokers had accused the firm of preventing them from competing fairly with male brokers for new accounts, denying promotions and fair pay, and depriving women of equal training and sales support.

Jeers

"Abortion" as a search term had been blocked in POPLINE, the largest reproductive health database, according to an April 2 post by Women's Health News blogger Rachel Walden. The research database is funded by the federal government as a project of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The result is that a person who types abortion in to the database for a keyword search will retrieve no articles on the topic.

Database officials advised a librarian who queried about the omission that the term "unwanted pregnancy" should be substituted instead. A more difficult search through the database's index can still be used to retrieve abortion-related articles, but most average library users will not know the workaround, Walden, who is a librarian, points out in her post.

The database is funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is prohibited from distributing foreign aid to international groups that provide abortions, make abortion referrals or lobby for change in their nation's abortion laws, under the so-called global gag rule policy of the Bush administration.

On April 4, apparently in response to bloggers, Michael J. Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School, reversed the decision to remove "abortion" as a search term and said he would launch an inquiry into the change. In a statement published on the school's Web site, Klag said that USAID had found two items in the database that did not meet POPLINE's criteria for "evidence-based information" and administrators decided to remove the search term.

More News to Jeer This Week:

• Despite backing from the archbishop of Wales a bill to allow female priests to become Anglican bishops was rejected by the Church in Wales' governing body, the BBC reported April 2.
• A South Dakota anti-choice group has gathered double the necessary signatures to put a proposed abortion ban on the November ballot, the Argus Leader reported March 31. The proposal allows exceptions for rape and incest, unlike a ban that was rejected by voters in 2006 that allowed an exception only to save the life of a woman.
• Irish women are being discouraged by the Irish Medical Board from purchasing RU486, the medical abortion pill, over the Internet, the Independent reported April 3. Abortion is illegal in Ireland, so women have been purchasing the pill from Britain and aborting at home without medical supervision.
• A 2008 study released by the Intercultural Cancer Council Caucus details the strong ethnic disparities among women diagnosed with cancer, the Kansas City Infozine reported April 4. Women who live in isolated and poor regions of the United States do not get the tests they need to detect cancer early or the treatments they need to fight it.
• Female executives who serve on nonprofit boards of directors are disproportionately absent from for-profit boards, according to a March 31 Simmons School of Management report that surveyed over 500 female managers and executives around the nation. Sixty-one percent of those women participate on boards, with the majority involved in nonprofit organizations; only 11 percent of respondents served on for-profit boards.
• Dawn Martin, a former law professor at Howard University, lost a suit against the school seeking protection from sexual harassment in the workplace after a federal appeals court ruled against her on March 31, according to her law office. Martin was stalked on campus by a non-employee and asked the school to protect her and other women from the stalker. After that, her teaching contract was not renewed.

Noted:

Cambodia introduced a ban on foreign marriages to combat sex trafficking and cut exploitative, arranged marriages involving uneducated and low-income women on April 3, India Express reported. In 2007, South Korea issued 1,759 marriage visas for Cambodian brides. Seven returned to Cambodia because they could not endure their marriages but there was no evidence of systematic exploitation in a recent report from the International Migration Organization.

Shanelle Matthews is Women's eNews editorial intern and a recent graduate of the Manship School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University. Dominique Soguel is Women's eNews Arabic editor.

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.

For more information:

Irish Abortion 'Journeys' Avoided in Election:
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3180/

Studies Plumb Depths of Black Maternal Health Woes:
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3330/

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