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A harsh reminder that a woman's right to choose includes not only abortion,
but the right to have a child, was seen this year in the impoverished
mountain region of Huaiji in China. The provincial authorities in Guangdong
ordered that county of less than one million people to perform 20,000
abortions and sterilizations during the last six months to enforce their
one-child-only policy. County officials cut workers' already paltry wages
in half to get money to buy portable ultrasound equipment to carry to
remote villages to forcibly test all women for pregnancy and conduct
abortions on the spot! Doctors were also ordered to sterilize women as soon
as they gave birth after "officially approved" pregnancies.
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An Islamic fundamentalist court in the state of Sokoto in Nigeria sentenced
a 30-year-old pregnant woman to death by stoning in late October for
engaging in premarital sex. It was the first time a woman was ordered
murdered since right-wing fundamentalists took over a dozen northern
Nigerian states within the last two years.
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In the seemingly never-ending game of blaming women for every plague on
your house, in September Swaziland's King Mswati III "responded" to
that
country's AIDS epidemic by ordering all unmarried teenage girls (but not
boys) to abstain from sex for five years and publicly identify themselves
with green-and-yellow tassels. Married teen girls are exempt, but must wear
red-and-black tassels.
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