1ac plan womens health nc fdi util nebel same fdi same
TFA State
1
Opponent: Canadian LG | Judge: Phoenix Pittman
1ac dem cc misinfo 1nc skep fw dem skep same
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Tournament: Contact Info | Round: Finals | Opponent: You | Judge: Judge Hello, I'm Faith -- If you need to contact me pre-round, please email me -- dropsofgold479@gmail.com In round, use grapevinelddocs@gmail.com for speech docs. If you don't contact me before round I get an auto I-meet on all disclosure interps. Pronouns: she/her See you in round!
3/7/22
MA AC
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 1 | Opponent: Canadian LG | Judge: Phoenix Pittman
Framing
Resisting oppression is a prerequisite to any conception of justice due to moral exclusion
Winter and Leighton 99 ~Deborah DuNann Winter, Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Dana C. Leighton, PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice~ "Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century." Pg 4-5 Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about AND local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace.
Disregarding foreseeable harm reifies structures of domination
McCluskey 12 – JSD @ Columbia, Professor of Law @ SUNY-Buffalo (Martha, "How the "Unintended Consequences" Story Promotes Unjust Intent and Impact," Berkeley La Raza, doi: dx.doi.org/doi:10.15779/Z381664) By similarly making structures of inequality appear beyond the reach of law reform, the AND losses to so many of us seem natural, inevitable, and beneficial.
Thus, the standard is minimizing structural violence.
Contention One — Democracy
Status quo journalism incentivizes and creates echo chambers that lead to rampant misinformation
Klein 20 Ian Klein, J.D. Candidate at the Texas AandM University School of Law, 2020, "Enemy of the People: The Ghost of the F.C.C. Fairness Doctrine in the Age of Alternative Facts." Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1809andcontext=hastings_comm_ent_law_journal The "Filter Bubble" and Confirmation Bias Problems The problem is that despite there AND doubtful that the Social Media market will regulate away fake news. Watchdog Agencies
Media filter bubbles disrupt democratic discourse and lead to rushed policies that don't reflect the will of the people – this destroys democracy
Democratic backsliding causes cycles of oppression and paves the way for alt-right populist groups to take power
Abramowitz 18 Abramowitz, Michael J. "Democracy in Crisis." Freedom House, 2018, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/democracy-crisis. FC The challenges within democratic states have fueled the rise of populist leaders who appeal to AND entire regions become unstable, and violent extremists have greater room to operate.
Contention Two – Climate Change
Conservative media has abandoned objectivity to promote climate change denialism, which causes a massive partisan gap on climate change
Partisan gap on climate change causes gridlock which halts all action towards mitigating it
Gross 21 Gross, Samantha. "Republicans in Congress Are out of Step with the American Public on Climate." Brookings, Brookings, 10 May 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2021/05/10/republicans-in-congress-are-out-of-step-with-the-american-public-on-climate/. FC Many Republicans legislators still reject the science of climate change, a position not held by other mainstream parties in democratic countries, but rising among far-right parties in Europe. Their positions have not kept up with their constituents, or even some business groups with which they are typically aligned. After the API made its announcement, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, issued a statement saying, "Proposals that impose a cost on carbon will hurt American families." In April, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania announced at a hearing of a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he planned to introduce a bill to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Framework Commission on Climate Change. He introduced his bill, which has no chance of passing, on Earth Day. How did we get here? A total unwillingness to cooperate with Democrats is part of the problem. The polarized atmosphere in Washington is such that it is difficult for a Republican to support anything proposed by the Biden administration, lest they be demonized by right-wing media and the party's activist base. A lack of honesty exacerbates this problem. Just in the last few days there was a flareup on the political right that President Joe Biden's climate plan intended to severely limit Americans' meat consumption. His plan said no such thing, but as the saying goes, a lie can travel around the world while the truth is lacing up its boots. The climate policies that Biden has proposed so far are a mix of executive action and proposals for Congress to fund climate-friendly investments. His American Jobs Plan includes encouragement for electric vehicle purchases and charging station construction, a clean electricity standard and tax credits for clean electricity development, and support for low-carbon industrial processes. He's more focused on carrots than sticks, in part because carrots are easier to get through a skeptical Congress. Yet those policies are condemned by Republicans as "socialism." "Our best future won't come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams," said Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina in response to President Biden's first address to a joint session of Congress, on April 28. The situation of one political party out of step with a majority of the American people seems like an unsteady state, a disequilibrium that cannot hold. As an American concerned about climate and looking toward a low-carbon future, I wish that were so. But the Republican Party is sticking together in opposition. Although 57 of Republican voters support the American Jobs Plan, Republicans in Congress are saying no. The anti-majoritarian structure of the Senate gives the minority power to block legislation and require 60 votes for passage. Democrats can take advantage of their narrow control of the Senate to pass support for green investments through the budget reconciliation process, and perhaps afterward point out the popularity of the legislation among average Republicans. But in today's tribal political environment, will it matter? Ultimately, hope for change among Congressional Republicans lies with voters, who say they care about climate, but haven't made it a central issue determining their vote. Unless and until that changes, I fear that U.S. climate gridlock will continue.
Climate change reifies structural issues and continues the systemic oppression of marginalized communities
Kaplan 20 Kaplan, Sarah. "Climate Change Is Also a Racial Justice Problem." The Washington Post, WP Company, 29 June 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/06/29/climate-change-racism/. FC Racism is "inexorably" linked to climate change, said Penn State meteorologist Gregory Jenkins, because it dictates who benefits from activities that produce planet-warming gases and who suffers most from the consequences. One study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found that black and Hispanic communities in the U.S. are exposed to far more air pollution than they produce through actions like driving and using electricity. By contrast, white Americans experience better air quality than the national average, even though their activities are the source of most pollutants. Another paper in the journal Science found that climate change will cause the most economic harm in the nation's poorest counties; many of those places, like Zavala County, Tex., and Wilkinson County, Miss., are home to mostly people of color. In a course he teaches called "Climate Change, Climate Justice and Front Line Communities," Jenkins traces this connection from slavery, which created the economic foundation for the industrial revolution, to modern-day policies that influence where people live and environmental risks to which they are exposed. Studies show that coastal communities in the South, where African Americans are a significant fraction of the population, are at the greatest risk from sea level rise. Other research has found that neighborhoods once shaped by discriminatory housing policies known as "redlining" have more pavement, fewer trees and higher average temperatures — a combination that can lead to deadly heat illness. Racial inequality also means that the people most at risk from climate change have the fewest resources to cope. According to a study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, more than 30 percent of black New Orleans residents didn't own cars when Hurricane Katrina hit — making it almost impossible for them to evacuate. After the storm, the city's black population fell because many residents couldn't afford to return. "Unless inequity is addressed now," Jenkins said, "future impacts from climate change will disable many communities of color."
Contention Three – Misinformation
The repeal of objective media measures led to the rise of alt-right movements and increased their ability to recruit and spread misinformation
Cagliuso 21 Dominique Cagliuso, writer with working on a Master in International Affairs with a concentration in Human Rights and a Specialization in UN Studies at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, 2021, "Age of the Alt-Right: New-Age Media and White Nationalism in Trump's America," International Social Science Review, https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1529andcontext=issr The New-Age of Media Since the turn of the millennium, both social and technological advancements have allowed the white supremacy movement to flourish. Through the use of the internet, they have been able to spread their ideology to millions. While the ideas and beliefs behind the Alt-Right movement are nothing new, the dissemination of their ideas through the internet is. A Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mark Potok, stated that the data they were collecting led them to conclude that "the advent of social media and other more dispersed means of sharing information had created a shift in how extremists shared their ideologies and how they recruited, too."11 The SPLC maintains that most white supremacists today are no longer members of official groups but rather operate over the internet. The origins of the far-right's internet use can be traced back to the creation of the platform Stormfront. This white supremacist platform was created in 1990 as a virtual bulletin board for the Senate campaign of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Eventually, the website went public in 1995 and became the stormfront.com that is still active today.12 Due to the creation of stormfront.com, around several hundred white supremacists were turning to the internet by 2000.13 In 2004, Robert Futrell and Pete Simi attributed the white power movement's success to the newly developed "free spaces" on the internet. These "free spaces" were defined as "network intersections that link otherwise isolated activist networks through physical and virtual spaces."14 Futrell and Simi concluded that the use of cyberspace would massively affect the white power movement by creating a new and easier platform to find existing members and to seek out potential recruits. With the creation of new platforms and websites gaining traction, the traditional magazine American Renaissance converted their publishings to the internet. After a decade of shipping out the original magazine, in 2000, they added a virtual magazine for their readers. By 2012, they ceased all shipments of the magazine and transitioned entirely to an online presence. The editor of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor, wrote to their subscribers about the decision to go virtual: Dear Subscriber; We will be shifting our efforts from the monthly publication into what we expect to be the very best race-realist website on the internet… We have seen the costs of printing and mailing continue to rise while, at the same time, more and more people look to the internet for information. When we began publishing in November 1990, it was tough to get unorthodox information about race. The only way to find out about them was through luck, word of mouth, or diligent library research… There was only a meager network of racially conscious whites who rarely met each other. The internet has given rise to scores of racially conscious websites, and it has become easy to find like-minded people. 15 In the twentieth century, news organizations tried to present information in an unbiased and objective way. Bias was meant to be avoided at all costs, and facts were supposed to be highly proven with evidence. In 1949, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enacted the Fairness Doctrine with the purpose of enforcing strict rules on broadcast media. The doctrine required any entity functioning under a broadcasting license needed to present unbiased news and cover all sides of an issue. Under these rules, the media was rewarded by presenting truthful, unbiased, and fair reports. Everything changed, though, when the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987.16 The new media era began with the founding of FOX News in October1996.17 The network purpose was to showcase solely Republican and Conservative ideas and news. This creation of biased news networks quickly led to the "narrowcasting" seen today: where producers of news seek to gain readers for profit rather than share credible and unbiased news. They seek to reinforce the readers' already existing viewpoints rather than inform them of all sides. The new media also rewards the speed of news rather than accuracy. It is seen as more important to be the first to report on a topic whether or not the content is yet proven as true or false. 18 The rise of the internet created a new medium for political discourse and gave birth to the Alt-Right movement. As it became more challenging for those with a racial bias to openly voice their opinions without persecution, the internet opened an entirely new platform for supremacists to express their ideology without social reproach. The Alt-Right success can be attributed to the internet's lack of "opportunity costs—the energy, money, and psychological energy it takes to meet people, establish connections, and mobilize actions among groups of people."19 By anonymously joining a movement for free by merely owning an internet-accessible device, the Alt-Right became the new haven for white nationalists. An expansive network of right-wing platforms has been created during this new digital era. A few of the most successful far-right websites that the Alt-Right frequent are Breitbart, Infowars, 4chan, American Renaissance, and Occidental Dissent. Social media sites such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have also played vital roles in the movement's growth—although there have been increased monitoring of hate groups on these sites in the past few years. Andrew Anglin created The Daily Stormer in 2013, one of the most well-known Alt-Right sites. It focuses on the sense of victimhood and marginalization that the Alt-Right strongly believes they are the subject of.20 Another significant Alt-Right player, Alex Jones's Infowars, is known as the conspiracymongering site at the center of many Alt-Right ideologies and conspiracy theories.21 Infowars is used to "fuel right-wing paranoia and propaganda."22 Infowars truly emphasizes the concept of the "false flag," used as a claim that anything potentially damaging to conservative values must simply be false. It is the concept that anything that has gone wrong, whether it be a scandal, a mass shooting, or an economic crisis, must be the fault of liberal policies or a plot by liberal players to undermine the conservatives.23 Without a doubt, the most prominent way that the AltRight represents themselves in our society today is through the internet. The Ideology of the Alt-Right
Journalists use media biases to spread right-wing misinformation which instigates violence and the continuation of oppressive ideals
Hemsley 21 Hemsley, Jeff ~Professor at University of Syracuse~ "When Fake News Turns Into Conspiracy Theories: The viral factor in today's media, landscape, and what we can do to stop it" , Syracuse EDU, February 8, 2021 https://ischool.syr.edu/when-fake-news-turns-into-conspiracy-theories-the-viral-factor-in-todays-media-landscape-and-what-we-can-do-to-stop-it/ FC On January 6, as public officials met to certify Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 Presidential Election, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the capitol by mob, resulting in a riot that left five people dead. In the days leading up to the riot, supporters of President Trump used a myriad of mainstream and fringe social media sites to organize and discuss the possibility of violence. Websites like Parler and TheDonald.win were "rife with posts about storming the Capitol," according to an article in The Hill. According to reporting by the New York Times, as Donald Trump ended his afternoon rally by calling on protestors to march on Congress, right-wing groups immediately took to these sites to promote the attack. At least 12 people openly posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol building, with others recommending tools that could help pry open doors. Some were dressed in Viking costumes, some looked like soldiers in camouflage military uniforms, and others carried with them symbols of hate. But they all united — as they had been for months — around a common falsehood: The election had been unlawfully stolen from Trump, who deserved the victory. Fake news, from what it is to how it spreads, has been a hot topic throughout the past few years, especially amidst the recent election. In the weeks following Election Day, President Trump has been making claims of widespread fraud that wrongfully resulted in Joe Biden's win. Jeff Hemsley, Professor of Information Studies at the iSchool, says that there are always minor amounts of fraud in every election. Out of nearly 160 million votes, he suspects that only a tiny fraction of ballots may have been fraudulent. Probably less than 1. "~President Trump~ is essentially creating and instigating a fake news story," he said. Hemsley argues that these instances of fake news are really just propaganda — something that has been around since there have been governments and churches at all. At its core, propaganda is simply distorted information that's published for someone's political gain. And whether it's a wartime newspaper ad or a seemingly innocent social media post, propaganda is only successful to the extent that people believe it and it spreads. So what is it that makes something go viral? Hemsley says the key thing to remember is that stories don't go viral unless a lot of people share it ("a lot" being relative to the audience and platform). A CNN video with a million views, for example, isn't necessarily viral. CNN simply has a lot of viewers. But if that video is frequently shared and spreads as a result, then we might call it viral. According to Hemsley, one reason fake news spreads is because it's often inflammatory in some way. That makes it exciting and worth talking about it. "The things that tend to spread are things that are remarkable," he said, "Remarkable just means people are talking about it, or remarking on it. And that's virality." For example, the Black Lives Matter movement is largely the result of many viral events linked together, Hemsley argues. The general public became aware of the severity of police brutality and racial injustice ultimately because videos from bystanders went viral again and again. Another well-known example is "Pizzagate," a fake news story started on the conspiracy-oriented online message board 4chan. In 2016, a 4chan user fabricated a story about the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in Washington, DC, falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic elites used the pizza shop's basement as a site for child sexual abuse. In response, a North Carolina man attempting to investigate the conspiracy himself drove to the restaurant and fired a semi-automatic rifle inside in order to break the lock to a storage room. As it turns out, Comet Ping Pong doesn't even have a basement at all — nor does it engage in any of the alleged illicit activities. Pizzagate is often considered to be a predecessor to other conspiracy theories such as "QAnon," whose central premise is that Satanic cannibals run a global child sex trafficking ring that plots to overthrow Donald Trump. While admittedly far-fetched on its own, in August 2019, the FBI published a report calling QAnon a possible source of domestic terror. These stories and countless others show just how severe the consequences of fake news can be, though the logistics of preventing it can be difficult to sort out at scale.
Advocacy
Thus, the advocacy: In a democracy, a free press ought to prioritize objectivity over advocacy.
I'll clarify more in CX – it checks – otherwise I'd spend 6 minutes speccing tiny parts of the plan and never get to substance – guts clash
We define objectivity as such:
McLaughlin 16 ~Greg McLaughlin, senior lecturer in media and journalism at the University of Ulster, 2016, "Journalism, Objectivity and War," The War Correspondent, https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19qgf0x.7~~ objectivity under fire Objectivity in journalism has come under serious critique from academics (Glasgow University Media Group, 1976; Lichtenberg, 1996; Streckfuss, 1990; Parenti, 1993). They suggest in various ways that the news media do not simply report and reflect our social world but that they more or less play an active part in shaping, even constructing it; that they represent sectional interests rather than society as a whole.2 When these criticisms are leveled at journalists, their traditional defence is their practice of objectivity but what does it mean to be objective in journalism in the first place? According to Michael Schudson (1978), objectivity is based on the assumption that a series of 'facts' or truth claims about the world can be validated by the rules and procedures of a professional community. The distortions and biases, the subjective value judgements of the individual or of particular interest groups, are filtered out so that among journalists at any rate, 'The belief in objectivity is a faith in "facts", a distrust of "values", and a commitment to their segregation' (p. 6). Gaye Tuchman refers to this method as 'a strategic ritual', a method of newsgathering and reporting that protects the journalist from charges of bias or libel (1972, p. 661ff). Radical critiques measure journalistic claims to objectivity against analyses of how the news media produce and represent their version of reality according to sectional interests. Bias is not in the eye of the beholder but is structured within the entire news process; the news filters and constructs reality according to a dominant or institutional ideology (Glasgow University Media Group, 1976). 'What passes for objectivity', for American scholar Michael Parenti, 'is the acceptance of a social reality shaped by the dominant forces of society – without any critical examination of that reality's hidden agendas, its class interests, and its ideological biases' (1993, p. 52). It is the difference respectively between the journalist as the professional, instutionalised reporter and the journalist as the partial eyewitness and writer. John Pilger points to the transparency of this ideology of professionalism, especially in a public service broadcaster like the BBC whose coverage of domestic and foreign crises has demonstrated its true agenda and its true allegiances: These people waffle on about objectivity as if by joining that institution or any institution they suddenly rise to this Nirvana where they can consider all points of view and produce something in five minutes. It's nonsense and it's made into nonsense because the moment there's any kind of pressure on the establishment you find reporters coming clean, as they did after the Falklands. They were very truculent: 'These were our people, our side. And now we'll get back to being objective'. It's the same with the term 'balance'. I mean censorship for me always works by omission. That's the most virulent censorship and what we have is an enormous imbalance one way, ...the accredited point of view, the sort of consensus point of view which has nothing to do with objectivity, nothing to do with impartiality and very little to do with the truth.3 The pressure to pursue objectivity in reporting has had serious consequences for journalism as a form of factual writing. James Cameron thought that 'objectivity in some circumstances is both meaningless and impossible.' He could not see 'how a reporter attempting to define a situation involving some sort of ethical conflict can do it with sufficient demonstrable neutrality to fulfil some arbitrary concept of "objectivity".' This was not the acid test for Cameron who 'always tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than the truth, and that the reporter whose technique was informed by no opinion lacked a very serious dimension' (1967, p. 72). There are, however, alternative forms of journalism that subvert the very notion of objectivity: the 'New Journalism' of the 1960s and what has been called 'honest journalism', described as a compromise between the blind assumption of impartiality and ideological commitment.
Moreover, this form of objectivity means reporters recognize that the world is independent from their desires for it
Haely 03 Haely, Karen Cordrick. "OBJECTIVITY IN THE FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE." Ohio State University, 2003, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1064415629anddisposition=inline. FC Keller claims that objectivity, like autonomy, need not be rooted in one's separation from or dominance over the world. To be objective, on Keller's view, means that one recognizes that the world is independent of one's desires about the world, and she explicitly defines objectivity as "the pursuit of a maximally authentic84, and hence maximally reliable, understanding of the world around oneself".85 How one operates in science distinguishes between "static objectivity" and "dynamic objectivity".86
Objectivity does not refer to the journalist's personal beliefs but their method
Dean 17 Dean, Walter. "The Lost Meaning of 'Objectivity'." American Press Institute, 18 July 2017, https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials/bias-objectivity/lost-meaning-objectivity/. FC One of the great confusions about journalism, write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism, is the concept of objectivity. When the concept originally evolved, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias. Quite the contrary. The term began to appear as part of journalism after the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work. In the latter part of the 19th century, journalists talked about something called "realism" rather than objectivity. This was the idea that if reporters simply dug out the facts and ordered them together, truth would reveal itself rather naturally. Realism emerged at a time when journalism was separating from political party affiliations and becoming more accurate. It coincided with the invention of what journalists call the inverted pyramid, in which a journalist lines the facts up from the most important to the least important, thinking it helps audiences understand things naturally. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, some journalists began to worry about the naïveté of realism. In part, reporters and editors were becoming more aware of the rise of propaganda and the role of press agents. At a time when Freud was developing his theories of the unconscious and painters like Picasso were experimenting with Cubism, journalists were also developing a greater recognition of human subjectivity. In 1919, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, an associate editor for the New York World, wrote an influential and scathing account of how cultural blinders had distorted the New York Times coverage of the Russian Revolution. "In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see," they wrote. Lippmann and others began to look for ways for the individual journalist "to remain clear and free of his irrational, his unexamined, his unacknowledged prejudgments in observing, understanding and presenting the news." Journalism, Lippmann declared, was being practiced by "untrained accidental witnesses." Good intentions, or what some might call "honest efforts" by journalists, were not enough. Faith in the rugged individualism of the tough reporter, what Lippmann called the "cynicism of the trade," was also not enough. Nor were some of the new innovations of the times, like bylines, or columnists. The solution, Lippmann argued, was for journalists to acquire more of "the scientific spirit … There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than aim; the unity of disciplined experiment." Lippmann meant by this that journalism should aspire to "a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact." To begin, Lippmann thought, the fledgling field of journalist education should be transformed from "trade schools designed to fit men for higher salaries in the existing structure." Instead, the field should make its cornerstone the study of evidence and verification. Although this was an era of faith in science, Lippmann had few illusions. "It does not matter that the news is not susceptible to mathematical statement. In fact, just because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the exercise of the highest scientific virtues." In the original concept, in other words, the method is objective, not the journalist. The key was in the discipline of the craft, not the aim. This point has some important implications. One is that the impartial voice employed by many news organizations – that familiar, supposedly neutral style of newswriting – is not a fundamental principle of journalism. Rather, it is an often helpful device news organizations use to highlight that they are trying to produce something obtained by objective methods.
Objectivity is not neutrality – it does not always mean balanced
Gutman 12 Gutman, David. "Opinion: Objectivity Does Not Mean Neutrality: The Danger of False Equivalency in the Media." Common Dreams, 25 Oct. 2012, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/10/25/objectivity-does-not-mean-neutrality-danger-false-equivalency-media. FC Journalists should always exhibit a bias towards objectivity. Being objective — dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings — is always the goal. The trouble comes when objectivity is confused with neutrality. It is fine to be partial, indeed it is imperative if, after a careful examination of the facts, one concludes that the truth lies on one side of the argument. This is being objective. Examining the facts on their merits and presenting the truth is a journalist's job. Granted, on many issues there is legitimate debate and disagreement, but this is not always the case, and the media should not treat every issue as if both sides have equally valid points. The truth does not always lie in the center. In fact, it rarely does. A journalist's job is to report the truth, not to neutrally report what both sides say and stake out a safe position in the middle.
Objectivity does not give credence to erroneous viewpoints
Serrano 20 Serrano, Kathryn. "Journalism vs. Activism: How the Social Impact of Journalism Has Evolved ." Scholarworks UArkansas, May 2020, https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5117andcontext=etd. FC Bill Keller, the editor of The Marshall Project and a previous editor at The New York Times, says he maintains the same standards at this new digital publication focused on criminal justice problems as he did at the Times. Journalists should not express personal views in news coverage. Their nonprofit aims to provide the public with information about the criminal justice system rather than advocating for particular ways to fix it (Blanding 2018). Keller has stated that he has "read lots of advocacy journalism" but does not relate that term to The Marshall Project. "I still believe in the discipline of impartiality, reporting that 7 applies skeptical inquiry to all sides of an issue. I don't advocate equal time for points of view that can't withstand scrutiny, but I find journalism ~is~ more credible if it starts with an open mind and follows the evidence," he said in a Columbia Journalism Review interview (Vernon 2017). Despite the blurred lines between advocacy and journalism, journalism is not going to disappear or professional journalists are not going to be indistinguishable from bloggers, social media activists, or human rights advocates (Simon 2014). It also does not mean that the quality and accuracy of the information is irrelevant. On the contrary, Simon argues, because the line is growing blurrier by the day, those who define themselves as professional journalists need more than ever to maintain standards and report with seriousness and objectivity (Simon 2014).
3/10/22
ND AC
Tournament: Hebron | Round: 2 | Opponent: Kinkaid AI | Judge: Nicholas Scheufler Framing Only a feminist lens can solve structural disparities – other pedagogies push women’s oppression to the backburner, which means it never gets solved Matsuda 86 Matsuda, Mari. Assistant Professor of Law, University of Hawaii “Liberal Jurisprudence and the Abstracted Visions of Human Nature: A Feminist Critique of Rawls’s Theory of Justice.” New Mexico Law Review, Vol. 16, Fall 1986. The body of emerging scholarship known as feminist theory, as rich and diverse as it is, is characterized by some basic tenets. First is the charge of androcentrism in mainstream scholarship--the charge that traditional scholarly discourse largely ignores the lives and voices of women. Second is the charge of dualism. Dualism is the oppositional understanding of intuition, experience, and emotion as the inferior antitheses of logic, reason, and science, coupled with a tendency to equate women with the former grouping and men with the latter.3 A related dualism places men in the public domain-politics, law, paid work-and women in the private-home, absence of law, unpaid work.32 From these critiques of mainstream scholarship, feminists have derived two insights. The first is that the personal is political.33 By this it is meant that what happens in the daily lives of real people has political content in the same way as does what we normally think of as politics – the structure of economic systems and governments. That is, who makes breakfast, who gets a paycheck, who gets whistled at in the street – all the experiences of daily life are a part of the distribution of wealth and power in society. The second insight is that consciousness raising – collective focus on the particularities of real-life experience – is essential to truth-seeking. Focusing on “big picture” issues like security and economic development dismiss gendered advocacies and never address them —this retrenches injustices. Enloe 14 Cynthia Enloe, 05-16-2014 (Research Professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment, affiliations with Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science, all at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, “Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics,” University of California Press, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umichigan/reader.action?docID=1687669andquery=andppg=2) Why do most of us not hear the names of these organizations regularly on the nightly news or on the main Internet news sites? Editors, mainstream experts, and some academic scholars employ several strategies to dismiss the analytical (that is, explanatory) value of these groups’ insights and impacts. One common rationale for ignoring the work of these transnational feminist networks is to dismiss them as representing only a “special interest.” By contrast, the international expert is, so he (occasionally she) claims, interested in “the Big Picture.” That is, the common assumption is that one-half of the world’s population is equivalent to, say, logging companies or soccer clubs; thus, the thinking goes, their actions do not shed light on the world but simply are intended to advance their own limited self-interests. A second rationale for not taking seriously the ideas and actions of these contemporary globalized women’s advocacy groups — ideas and actions that should be thoughtfully weighed, not automatically accepted—is that the arenas of politics that these feminist activists do expose are presumably merely domestic or private, as opposed to, for instance, the allegedly “significant” public arenas of military security or government debt. In other words, the conventional failure to take seriously the thinking behind transnational women’s advocacy is itself rooted in unrealistically narrow understandings of “security,” “stability,” “crisis,” and “development.” All four concepts are of utmost concern to those worried about the international Big Picture. Each of these four concerns—security, stability, crisis, and development—is routinely imagined to be divorced from (unaffected by) women’s unpaid and underpaid labor, women’s rights within marriage, the denial of girls’ education, women’s reproductive health, and sexualized and other forms of male violence against women, as well as the masculinization of militaries, police forces, and political parties. The conventional Big Picture, it would appear, is being painted on a shrunken canvas. Third, these feminist transnational groups’ analyses and actions can be ignored—their reports never cited, their staff members never invited to speak as experts, their leaders or activists never turned to for interviews— on the questionable grounds that their campaigns are lost causes. Behind this justification is the notion that challenging entrenched masculinized privileges and practices in today’s international affairs is hopeless, therefore naive, therefore not worthy of serious attention. Further underpinning this final argument are the stunningly ahistorical assertions that (a) any advancements that women have gained have come not as a result of women’s political theorizing and organizing but because women have been given these advancements by enlightened men in power, and (b) we collectively have “always” understood such useful political concepts as “reproductive rights,” “sexual harassment,” “systematic wartime rape,” and “the glass ceiling.” This latter assertion overlooks the fact that each of these revelatory concepts was hammered out and offered to the rest of us by particular activists at particular moments in recent political history. All three of these spoken or unspoken rationales, and the assumptions they rely upon, are themselves integral to how international politics operates today. All three assertions that deny the significance and analytical value of transnational feminist organizing are the very stuff of international politics. The very rarity of professional international political commentators taking seriously either women’s experiences of international politics or women’s gender analyses of international politics is, therefore, itself a political phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously. What so many feminist-informed international commentators ignore has been explored by the burgeoning academic field of gender and international relations. That is, paying close attention to—and explaining the causes and consequences of—what is so frequently ignored can be fruitful indeed.9 We have an ethical responsibility to reject patriarchy—it leads to unjust domination. Thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best performatively and methodologically breaks down structural instances of the patriarchy. Jhyette Nhanenge, 2007 (developmental Africa worker), 2007, Retrieved May 30, 2015 from http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?sequence=1 The two characteristics, which benefit in a racist and/or patriarchal society are white and male. Since both are received by birth, the benefits are not based on merit, ability, need, or effort. The benefits are institutionally created, maintained and sanctioned. Such systems perpetuate unjustified domination. Thus, the problem lays in institutional structures of power and privilege but also in the actual social context. Different groups have different degrees of power and privilege in different cultural contexts. Those should be recognized, but so should commonalities where they exist. However, although Ups cannot help but to receiving the institutional power and privileges it is important to add that they are accountable for perpetuating unjustified domination through their behaviours, language and thought worlds. That is why ecofeminism is about both theory and practice. It does not only try to understand and analyze, it also finds it important to take action against domination. (Warren 2000: 64-65).¶ Patriarchy is an unhealthy social system. Unhealthy social systems tend to be rigid and closed. Roles and rules are non-negotiable and determined by those at the top of the hierarchy. High value is placed on control and exaggerated concepts of rationality, even though, paradoxically, the system can only survive on irrational ideologies.
Contention One The idea of women as subservient homemakers is STILL a pervasive belief. Employed women’s work is devalued and unemployed women are increasingly doing MORE domestic labor Rao 19 Rao, Aliya Hamid. “Even Breadwinning Wives Don't Get Equality at Home.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 12 May 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/breadwinning-wives-gender-inequality/589237/. FC That women should take on the bulk of domestic responsibilities is still a widespread belief. Married American mothers spend almost twice as much time on housework and child care than do married fathers. Although American mothers—including those with young children—are far more likely to be working now than in past decades, they spend more time on child care today than did moms in the 1960s. One way to understand how women’s success at work is treated at home is to look at heterosexual breadwinning wives—women who outearn their husbands. About 29 percent of married women in the United States fall into this category, and it’s a group that has been steadily growing. But when wives are professionally successful, couples are often reluctant to acknowledge the woman’s status as the breadwinner. In one study of families in which wives earned at least 80 percent of the total household income, researchers found that in just 38 percent of the couples did both the husband and the wife say that “breadwinner” was an appropriate label for the woman. It wasn’t just the husbands who were skeptical of the term—wives were actually less likely to think of themselves as breadwinners than were their husbands. Why are Americans so reluctant to acknowledge wives who are breadwinners? One reason is that couples in the U.S. continue to idealize and privilege a family structure with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. Recognizing women as breadwinners threatens the idea that a family fits into that mold. When wives earn more than husbands, couples often reframe the value of each spouse’s work to elevate the husband’s work as being more prestigious and downplaying the importance of the woman’s job. Breadwinning wives also don’t get parity in how household chores are divvied up. As wives’ economic dependence on their husbands increases, women tend to take on more housework. But the more economically dependent men are on their wives, the less housework they do. Even women with unemployed husbands spend considerably more time on household chores than their spouses. In other words, women’s success in the workplace is penalized at home. Homemakers are workers – the state has made marriage a widespread economic survival tool – it’s a job Moraes 16 Moraes, Alana. Writer for the International Journal on Human Rights Brant, Maria A.C. Writer for the International Journal on Human Rights “SILVIA FEDERICI: OUR STRUGGLE WILL NOT SUCCEED UNLESS WE REBUILD SOCIETY” International Journal on Human Rights, December 2016 FC It was the feminist movement that began the analysis of sexuality that has given the power to prostitutes to say, “I am a sex worker” and to come out of the shadows and to struggle and say, “my struggle is also a feminist struggle.” It was the women’s movement that started analysing sexuality as part of housework, as part of the services that women are expected to give to men, as part of the marriage contract that women are obliged to give. Until the 1970s or 1980s, the crime of rape in the family did not exist in the United States, because it was understood that when you get married, the man acquires the right over your body and has the right to get sexual services from you at any time. It was understood – and the feminist movement has analysed it – that men always sell themselves, or try to sell themselves, in the wage labour market. We also sell ourselves in the marriage market. For many women, getting married is an economic solution, because the division of labour has been organised in such a way that it is much more difficult for women to get access to wage jobs. So, many women marry not because they want to, but as an economic solution for their lives. And you have sex because that is part of your job. We performed this deconstruction of sexuality, of the family, of the relationship between men and women, and we said that marriage is prostitution. In many cases, you can have a good relationship with your husband, but it doesn’t matter. The reality is that the way the state has constructed marriage has forced women to rely on marriage for survival and therefore, to offer sex in exchange for subsistence. The state has put us into the situation of prostitution. Through domestic labor, women are continually placed into exploitative relations that allow for the perpetuation of a patriarchal hierarchy Kynaston 96 Kynaston, C. (1996). The everyday exploitation of women. Women’s Studies International Forum, 19(3), 221–237. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(96)00011-8 FC Walby (1986, pp. 53-54) argues, then, that the domestic labourer is essentially engaged in the production of labour power, on both a daily and a generational basis. In particular, she expends her labour power on replenishing the labour power of her exhausted husband. However, the labour power she produces is owned and controlled not by her, but by her husband. In this sense, then, the woman, as producer, has neither ownership nor control over part of the means of production. When the husband, or partner, subsequently sells the labour power that the woman has produced he does not fully remunerate her for the labour she has expended, because the part of the wage that he allocates for his own personal use is typically larger than that allocated for his wife's personal use. Walby also notes that the housewife usually works longer hours than her male partner. In working longer hours and yet receiving less, Walby maintains that the housewife is clearly exploited. In effect, the husband is appropriating the wife's surplus labour. Walby is not, of course, the first writer to suggest that women's domestic labour should be conceptualised in the context of a patriarchal or domestic mode of production. Delphy's (1984) analysis of patriarchy, in which she argues that the domestic mode of production is the economic base of women's subordination, is particularly well known. In her refreshingly frank and open style Delphy maintains that a Marxist analysis of capitalism represents only one possible application of the general historical materialist methodology of Marxism. She draws on Marxism to develop her own materialist feminist analysis of women's oppression. Delphy argues that all tasks performed in the maintenance of our material existence are quite clearly productive, but that only certain tasks will be acknowledged as being productive. Tasks will be labelled productive or unproductive, and will be paid or unpaid, depending upon whether they are performed in the capitalist workplace or in the home. Since the home is not generally regarded as being a workplace -- indeed is often regarded as being a haven from the workplace -- tasks performed there are not regarded as being "real" work. Work is commonly perceived to take place only in the capitalist workplace. Delphy (1984) is at pains to stress, however, that in contemporary industrial society there are, in fact, two modes of production: the capitalist mode and the domestic mode. Whilst in the capitalist mode of production workers receive monetary remuneration for their labour, in the domestic mode of production women are granted only their maintenance and receive no monetary payment. Since many of the tasks performed within the two modes of production are essentially the same, it is clearly not the tasks, themselves, that determine their paid status but, rather, the relations of production that characterise the performance of the tasks. Women, of course, are the workers within the domestic mode of production and Delphy maintains that it is their conscription to this mode of production that enables their labour to be systematically appropriated by men. Just as capitalists are the beneficiaries of the capitalist mode of production, so too are men the beneficiaries of the domestic or patriarchal mode of production. Together, the work of Delphy (1984) and Walby (1986, 1989, 1990) has considerably advanced our understanding of the nature of women's subordination. Delphy's insightful use of the methodology of historical materialism to explore the dynamics of women's subordination, and her conceptualisation of the domestic mode of production, paved the way for Walby's more rigorous specification of the interlocking elements of patriarchy and, in particular, of what she elected to call the patriarchal mode of production. Both of these theofists have correctly stressed that the relations between men and women are, at base, exploitative relations, in exactly the same way that the relations between capitalists and proletarians are exploitative. The basis of exploitation is identified, in both cases, as the appropriation of surplus labour. Whilst in the capitalist mode of production, surplus (unpaid) labour is appropriated from wage workers, in the patriarchal mode of production surplus (unpaid) labour is appropriated from women. In this latter mode, surplus labour is appropriated from women through the operation of a sexual division of labour that ensures that women continually perform the bulk of the household's domestic labour or housework. The lack of adequate recompense for labour expended (i.e., the appropriation of surplus labour) constitutes exploitation. It must be stressed, however, that this fundamental exploitation provides the basis for the development of a whole range of further inequities which, in the case of the patriarchal mode of production, systematically blight the lives of women whilst at the same time enhancing those of men. The nature of these inequities, in areas such as leisure, health, and access to financial resources, will be further pursued in the second part of this paper. The current system doesn’t recognize homemakers as workers, which fuels the oppression of and silences women Federici 1 Federici, Sylvia. “Wages Against Housework.” Warwick, 1974, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/femlit/04-federici.pdf. FC It is important to recognize that when we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job as other jobs, but we are speaking of one of the most pervasive manipulations, most subtle and mystified forms of violence that capitalism has perpetrated against any section of the working class. True, under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle around and against the terms and the quantity of that wage, the terms and the quantity of that work. To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live. But exploited as you might be, you are not that work. Today you are a postman, tomorrow a cabdriver. All that matters is how much of that work you have to do and how much of that money you can get. But in the case of housework the situation is qualitatively different. The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into an natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work. In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen – bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle. This affects all women – the oppressive attitude spills over Federici 2 Federici, Sylvia. “Wages Against Housework.” Warwick, 1974, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/femlit/04-federici.pdf. FC This fraud that goes under the name of love and marriage affects all of us, even if we are not married, because once housework was totally naturalized and sexualized, once it became a feminine attribute, all of us as females are characterized by it. If it is natural to do certain things, then all women are expected to do them and even like doing them – even those women who, due to their social position, could escape some of that work or most of it (their husbands can afford maids and shrinks and other forms of relaxation and amusement). We might not serve one man, but we are all in a servant relation with respect to the whole male world. This is why to be called a female is such a putdown, such a degrading thing. (“Smile, honey, what’s the matter with you?” is something every man feels entitled to ask you, whether he is your husband, or the man who takes your ticket on a train, or your boss at work.) The view of the woman as subservient and economically dependent upon men perpetuates gendered violence Giovetti 19 Giovetti, Olivia. “3 Causes of Gender Based Violence.” Concern Worldwide, 5 Mar. 2019, https://www.concernusa.org/story/causes-of-gender-based-violence/. FC At Concern, we believe unequivocally that protecting and empowering women and girls is key to making lasting change. Gender-based violence has many causes but we’ve identified three key factors — and outlined ways we’re working to address them.
HARMFUL GENDER NORMS Gender stereotypes and are often used to justify violence against women. Cultural norms often dictate that men are aggressive, controlling, and dominant, while women are docile, subservient, and rely on men as providers. These norms can foster a culture of abuse outright, such as early and forced marriage or female genital mutilation, the latter spurred by outdated and harmful notions of female sexuality and virginity. Solvency Thus, the advocacy: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’ll clarify any more in CX – it checks – otherwise I’d spend 6 minutes speccing tiny parts of the plan and never get to substance – guts clash Recognizing the right to strike magnifies women’s voices and is key to solve structural sexism Howard 21 Howard, Sally. “How Can Women Get Equality? Strike!” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Mar. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/14/how-can-women-get-equality-strike. FC Yet domestic labour has always been a tricky injustice to protest against. It takes place in the privacy of the home, making it difficult for women to see each other doing this work and to collectively acknowledge that men do not share equally in its burden (and they don’t: the average British woman still contributes 60 more washing, wiping and childcare a week than the average British man, even as the pandemic has increased this work to around nine hours per day). And there can also be dire consequences if we withdraw this labour: children uncared for and vulnerable relatives unfed. “A women’s strike is impossible; that is why it is necessary,” claims Women’s Strike Assembly (WSA), an activist alliance that, to mark last week’s International Women’s Day, called for a series of banner memorials to be erected around the UK to declare why #westrike as women (or, just as importantly, why we can’t). In a manifesto published in November, WSA wrote: “We strike because we are tired of our labour being taken for granted. We strike because we now have to do a triple shift: our paid work, our unpaid domestic labour and educating our children during the pandemic.” In Liverpool, Bristol and Edinburgh women gathered, last Monday, in socially distanced clusters toting their banner memorials. “#westrike because we are tired. Very, very tired,” a banner in Liverpool read and a memorial painted by Bristol Sisterhood stated, simply: “Fuck macho bullshit, women on fire.” Many of the social media protests, however, indicated why last Monday saw no wholesale abandonment of women’s posts. “I am a freelancer and I would not get paid (or lose my client!). But I’m striking with my compañeras in mind and spirit,” one IWD banner read, and another: “I cannot strike but I lit a candle in solidarity.” Recent years have seen a flowering of strikes against gendered labour in Spain and South America. In 2018, six million women joined Spain’s 2018 “Dia Sin Mujeres’ (day without women), including Madrid’s Manuela Carmena and actress Penelope Cruz, as “feminist men in solidarity” staffed a network of collective nurseries. Old-fashioned mother’s aprons, the symbol of the strikes, were stitched in solidarity workshops and strung from balconies. But, in Britain, women’s general labour strikes have been conspicuously absent. Selma James, the cofounder of 70s marxist activist project Wages for Housework, has a theory to account for this lack. She points out that as the power of unions dwindles, the climate in Anglo-Saxon countries is less hospitable to gestures of withdrawn labour, even as feminist identity marches gain broader support. Without union protection, British and north American women who strike from paid work risk losing their jobs; to the single mum on the breadline in a pandemic, strikes, in this context, seem the preserve of privileged white feminists. For all this, calling political attention to the pandemic’s third shift is an urgent project. Only 36 of British women have been able to continue working full time alongside their caring responsibilities during the pandemic, compared to 66 of men, and mothers are more likely to have quit or lost their job. As the pandemic recedes over a nation of shattered women, there will be opportunities for direct action. Women’s March, Pregnant Then Screwed and Women’s Strike Assembly, among others, are calling for protests and marches to highlight the structural sexism that’s left women bearing the brunt of reproductive labour during this year of crisis. James, in the meantime, advocates a daily constellation of “small resistances”: banging pots and pans at your window; stringing up a banner and apron; radically lowering domestic standards. Forty-five years after the Women’s Day Off, Iceland has ranked top in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report – an index that examines educational opportunities, life expectancy, pay equity and the average time spent on housework – in 13 of the past 16 years. Yes, it’s impossible for many women to strike; but can we afford not to? Sex strikes are an empirically successful way for women homemakers to mobilize and create systemic change Shaw 17 Shaw, Maureen. “History Shows That Sex Strikes Are a Surprisingly Effective Strategy for Political Change.” Quartz, Quartz, 14 Apr. 2017, https://qz.com/958346/history-shows-that-sex-strikes-are-a-surprisingly-effective-strategy-for-political-change/. FC Most people associate the idea of sex strikes with the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, in which women team up to bring about the end of the Peloponnesian War. But sex strikes have spanned hundreds of years and multiple countries. In 1600, for example, Iroquois women refused to engage in sex as a way to stop unregulated warfare. The tactic worked: They gained veto power concerning all future wars and paved the way for future feminist rebellions. In more recent years, sex strikes have surged in popularity as a means to achieve political ends. In 2003, Leymah Gbowee organized a well-publicized sex strike to end Liberia’s brutal civil war. Not only did warlords agree to end the violence, Gbowee was later awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. Three years later, female partners of gang members in the Colombian city of Pereira withheld sex to demand civilian disarmament and a reduction in violence. According to the Global Nonviolent Action Database, the strike’s results were clear: Pereira’s murder rate fell by 26.5 by 2010, a huge accomplishment for a city that had a homicide rate twice the national average when the sex strike began. Kenyan women followed suit in 2009, enforcing a sex ban until political infighting ceased. Within one week, there was a stable government. And in the Philippines, a sex strike led to peace in a violence-plagued Mindanao Island village. Domestic strikes spill over to deconstruct broader gender and wage inequality Jaffe 18 Jaffe, Sarah. “The Women of Wages for Housework.” The Nation, 14 Mar. 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wages-for-houseworks-radical-vision/. FC To the women of the Wages for Housework movement, the Icelandic strike was a salutary example of their politics in action. Internationalist, anti-capitalist, and feminist, the movement argued that by focusing on women’s unpaid labor inside the home—child care, cleaning, emotional support, even sex—activists could highlight more fundamental inequalities based on gender. And the best way to do so was to refuse to do that kind of work. As the International Feminist Collective (IFC), which launched the Wages for Housework campaign, wrote in a press release: “We don’t want just to demonstrate our strength but to use it and increase it to get what we want…. We are tired of our work and of not having any time of our own.” That press release is just one of the trove of documents collected in the new book Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972–1977: History, Theory, Documents. Published by Autonomedia and edited by Silvia Federici, one of the core members of that committee, and artist and scholar Arlen Austin, Wages for Housework is one of those rare books that takes the reader inside the theory and practice of a radical movement, reproducing posters and flyers, photographs, internal strategy papers, and media clips along with previously published articles. Wages for Housework helps to recover a movement that had modest origins but spread around the world within several years. From the gathering in Padua, Italy, that launched the international campaign in 1972 to the spin-off groups like the New York Committee, the women of Wages for Housework made arguments and demands that were well ahead of their time, helping to fill in the gaps overlooked by the mostly male left and the mostly liberal mainstream feminist movement, both of which have long excluded the home and the processes of social reproduction from their activism and thinking. As the IFC’s launch statement (which served as a founding document for the New York Committee) put it: We identify ourselves as Marxist feminists, and take this to mean a new definition of class, the old definition of which has limited the scope and effectiveness of the activity of both the traditional left and the new left. This new definition is based on the subordination of the wageless worker to the waged worker behind which is hidden the productivity, i.e., the exploitation, of the labor of women in the home and the cause of their more intense exploitation out of it. Such an analysis of class presupposes a new area of struggle, the subversion not only of the factory and office but of the community. To demand wages was to acknowledge that housework—i.e., the unwaged labor done by women in the home—was work. But it was also a demand, as Federici and others repeatedly stressed, to end the essentialized notions of gender that underlay why women did housework in the first place, and thus amounted to nothing less than a way to subvert capitalism itself. By refusing this work, the Wages for Housework activists argued, women could help see to “the destruction of every class relation, with the end of bosses, with the end of the workers, of the home and of the factory and thus the end of male workers too.” In a moment when women’s protests and talk of class struggle are both resurgent, the intersectional analysis that Wages for Housework put forth (years before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term) is more relevant than ever. It noted that to ignore women’s wageless work is also to ignore that of so many others, from the slaves who built the United States to those who still labor basically unwaged in prisons: “In capitalism,” as the Wages for Housework committee members wrote in 1974, “white supremacy and patriarchy are the supremacy and patriarchy of the wage.” But Wages for Housework also sought to improve women’s lives in more immediate ways, through struggles around health care and reproductive rights, Social Security, and the criminalization of sex workers, and it showed the possibilities of radical action even in the most conservative of eras.
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Tournament: Lindale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Westwood DL | Judge: John Sims Framing Resisting oppression is a prerequisite to any conception of justice due to moral exclusion Winter and Leighton 99 Deborah DuNann Winter, Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Dana C. Leighton, PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged e lite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice, injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to the oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, and alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. Focusing on “big picture” issues like security and economic development push gendered advocacies to the backburner—this retrenches injustices. Cynthia Enloe, 05-16-2014 (Research Professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment, affiliations with Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science, all at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, “Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics,” University of California Press, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umichigan/reader.action?docID=1687669andquery=andppg=2) Why do most of us not hear the names of these organizations regularly on the nightly news or on the main Internet news sites? Editors, mainstream experts, and some academic scholars employ several strategies to dismiss the analytical (that is, explanatory) value of these groups’ insights and impacts. One common rationale for ignoring the work of these transnational feminist networks is to dismiss them as representing only a “special interest.” By contrast, the international expert is, so he (occasionally she) claims, interested in “the Big Picture.” That is, the common assumption is that one-half of the world’s population is equivalent to, say, logging companies or soccer clubs; thus, the thinking goes, their actions do not shed light on the world but simply are intended to advance their own limited self-interests. A second rationale for not taking seriously the ideas and actions of these contemporary globalized women’s advocacy groups — ideas and actions that should be thoughtfully weighed, not automatically accepted—is that the arenas of politics that these feminist activists do expose are presumably merely domestic or private, as opposed to, for instance, the allegedly “significant” public arenas of military security or government debt. In other words, the conventional failure to take seriously the thinking behind transnational women’s advocacy is itself rooted in unrealistically narrow understandings of “security,” “stability,” “crisis,” and “development.” All four concepts are of utmost concern to those worried about the international Big Picture. Each of these four concerns—security, stability, crisis, and development—is routinely imagined to be divorced from (unaffected by) women’s unpaid and underpaid labor, women’s rights within marriage, the denial of girls’ education, women’s reproductive health, and sexualized and other forms of male violence against women, as well as the masculinization of militaries, police forces, and political parties. The conventional Big Picture, it would appear, is being painted on a shrunken canvas. Third, these feminist transnational groups’ analyses and actions can be ignored—their reports never cited, their staff members never invited to speak as experts, their leaders or activists never turned to for interviews— on the questionable grounds that their campaigns are lost causes. Behind this justification is the notion that challenging entrenched masculinized privileges and practices in today’s international affairs is hopeless, therefore naive, therefore not worthy of serious attention. Further underpinning this final argument are the stunningly ahistorical assertions that (a) any advancements that women have gained have come not as a result of women’s political theorizing and organizing but because women have been given these advancements by enlightened men in power, and (b) we collectively have “always” understood such useful political concepts as “reproductive rights,” “sexual harassment,” “systematic wartime rape,” and “the glass ceiling.” This latter assertion overlooks the fact that each of these revelatory concepts was hammered out and offered to the rest of us by particular activists at particular moments in recent political history. All three of these spoken or unspoken rationales, and the assumptions they rely upon, are themselves integral to how international politics operates today. All three assertions that deny the significance and analytical value of transnational feminist organizing are the very stuff of international politics. The very rarity of professional international political commentators taking seriously either women’s experiences of international politics or women’s gender analyses of international politics is, therefore, itself a political phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously. What so many feminist-informed international commentators ignore has been explored by the burgeoning academic field of gender and international relations. That is, paying close attention to—and explaining the causes and consequences of—what is so frequently ignored can be fruitful indeed.9 We have an ethical responsibility to reject patriarchy—it leads to unjust domination. Thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best performatively and methodologically breaks down the patriarchy Jhyette Nhanenge, 2007 (developmental Africa worker), 2007, Retrieved May 30, 2015 from http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?sequence=1 The two characteristics, which benefit in a racist and/or patriarchal society are white and male. Since both are received by birth, the benefits are not based on merit, ability, need, or effort. The benefits are institutionally created, maintained and sanctioned. Such systems perpetuate unjustified domination. Thus, the problem lays in institutional structures of power and privilege but also in the actual social context. Different groups have different degrees of power and privilege in different cultural contexts. Those should be recognized, but so should commonalities where they exist. However, although Ups cannot help but to receiving the institutional power and privileges it is important to add that they are accountable for perpetuating unjustified domination through their behaviours, language and thought worlds. That is why ecofeminism is about both theory and practice. It does not only try to understand and analyze, it also finds it important to take action against domination. (Warren 2000: 64-65).¶ Patriarchy is an unhealthy social system. Unhealthy social systems tend to be rigid and closed. Roles and rules are non-negotiable and determined by those at the top of the hierarchy. High value is placed on control and exaggerated concepts of rationality, even though, paradoxically, the system can only survive on irrational ideologies. Contention One The patent industry is male-dominated – women’s health is completely overlooked Koning 21 Koning, Rem. “Too Few Women Get to Invent – That's a Problem for Women's Health.” The Conversation, 29 July 2021, theconversation.com/too-few-women-get-to-invent-thats-a-problem-for-womens-health-162576. FC Griffith’s research and inventions have the potential to improve women’s health dramatically. The problem for women is that she stands out for another reason: She’s female. In 2020, only 12.8 of U.S. inventors receiving patents were women, and historically male researchers have ignored conditions like endometriosis. Male researchers have tended to downplay or even outright overlook the medical needs of women. The result is that innovation has focused mainly on what men choose to research. My colleagues John-Paul Ferguson, Sampsa Samila and I show in a newly published study that patented biomedical inventions in the U.S. created by women are 35 more likely to benefit women’s health than biomedical inventions created by men. To determine which inventions are female-focused, male-focused or neutral, we analyzed the title, abstract and start of the summary text from 441,504 medical patents using the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Text Indexer. The indexer uses machine learning to categorize the subject of a text document, including whether it has a female or male focus. Our data reveal that inventions by research teams that are primarily or completely composed of men are significantly more likely to focus on the medical needs of men. In 34 of the 35 years from 1976 to 2010, male-majority teams produced hundreds more inventions focused on the needs of men than those focused on the needs of women. These male inventors were more likely to generate patents that addressed topics like “erectile” or “prostate” than “menopause” or “cervix.” Male inventors also tended to target diseases and conditions like Parkinson’s and sleep apnea that disproportionately affect men. Conversely, inventions patented by research teams that are primarily or completely composed of women were more likely to be focused on the needs of women in all 35 years of our data. These patents are more likely to address conditions like breast cancer and postpartum preeclampsia and diseases that disproportionately affect women like fibromyalgia and lupus. However, in 1976 only 6.3 of patents were invented by teams with as many women as men. By 2010 that figure had risen to only 16.2. As a result, while inventions by women were more likely to be female-focused, such patents were uncommon because so few inventors were women. We found that across inventor teams of all gender mixes, biomedical invention from 1976 to 2010 focused more on the needs of men than women. Our calculations suggest that had male and female inventors been equally represented over this period, there would have been an additional 6,500 more female-focused inventions. In percentage terms, equal representation would have led to 12 more female-focused inventions. There are also more subtle benefits when more women invent. Female inventors are more likely to identify how existing treatments for non-sex-specific diseases like heart attacks, diabetes and stroke can be improved and adapted for the needs of women. Indeed, women are more likely to test whether their ideas and inventions affect men and women differently: for example, if a drug has more adverse side effects in women than in men. IPP and the TRIPS agreement has led to millions of unsafe abortions and preventable deaths of women Mike 20 Mike, Jennifer H. M. “Access to Essential Medicines to Guarantee Women's Rights to Health: The Pharmaceutical Patents Connection.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, 29 June 2020, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jwip.12161. FC Particularly, contraceptives are essential medicines as they are necessary to curtail early and unwanted childbearing, and prevent unplanned pregnancies. This is especially where the pregnancy is damaging to the health, welfare and human development of the woman (WHO, 2017). Significantly, access to appropriate drugs and contraceptives, including emergency contraception, could prevent and control unsafe sex and even reduce vertical HIV transmission (Nanda et al., 2017; Perehudoff, Pizzarossa, and Stekelenburg, 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14).13 Accessing contraceptives can also prevent the termination of unwanted pregnancies and the option of unsafe abortion (MSF, 2019). Data reveals that unsafe abortion kills about 68,000 women every year, representing 13 of all pregnancy-related deaths (Grimes et al., 2006; WHO, 2002; WHO, 2004, p. 14). It is further estimated that 25 million unsafe abortions take place worldwide each year, majorly in developing countries (WHO, 2019). Following unsafe abortions, women may be vulnerable to a range of harms that affect their quality of life and well-being; they may suffer reproductive and genital tract infection and experience other health complications (WHO, 2004, p. 14). Some of these infections are fatal and serious, leading to infertility, disability and worse, death (Perehudoff et al., 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14). This is in addition to the social and financial costs to women, their families, the community at large and health care systems. There is therefore a need to improve access to contraceptives. A survey, however, estimated that many women who are at risk of unplanned or unintended pregnancy and would choose birth control using effective modern contraceptives are unable to do so (ICPD, 1995; Logez et al., 2011; WHO, 2004, 2017). Furthermore, reproductive and sexual health problems such as maternal, perinatal mortality and gynaecological health-related complications are said to be a significant disease burden for women of reproductive age (WHO, 2017, p. 11). Sexual and reproductive ill-health can lead to sexual dysfunction and other gynaecological conditions such as severe menstrual problems, urinary and faecal incontinence due to obstetric fistulae, uterine prolapse and pregnancy loss (Filippi et al., 2016, p. 6; Timilsina, 2018, pp. 18–19). This, in turn, leads to maternal and perinatal mortality. Women will, therefore, need access to medical interventions to prevent these avoidable health situations or treat theirrr conditions. For example, maternal health complications such as postpartum haemorrhage (PPH), pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, can be prevented or treated by the appropriate use of essential medicines such as oxytocin and ergometrine injections; magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) injection for the prevention and treatment of severe pre-eclampsia and eclampsia; ampicillin, gentamicin and metronidazole injections for the treatment of maternal sepsis; procaine benzylpenicillin, and ceftriaxone for neonatal sepsis (Tran and Bero, 2015). Access to the high quality, therapeutic medications in developing countries may not be adequate, resulting in a high number of preventable maternal deaths (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). Lack of access to Oxytocin in some sub-Saharan African countries and Tanzania has also been traced to institutional, socioeconomic, financial, cultural and political barriers (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). In 2019, a heat-stable carbetocin for the prevention of PPH was added to the WHO Essential Medicines List (EML; WHO, 2019a). This new formulation has similar effects to oxytocin, the current standard therapy, but offers a significant advantage for tropical countries as it does not require refrigeration for storage. Raltegravir is another medicine on the WHO's EML that is particularly important for pregnant women, as well as other contraceptives such as; levonorgestrel, an oral hormonal contraceptive, medroxyprogesterone acetate, an injectable hormonal contraceptive, progesterone vaginal ring, an intravaginal contraceptive and many others (WHO, 2019b). Injectable contraceptives are often preferred by women as they can be used discretely and conveniently to circumvent the factors aforementioned in Section 1.1.1. Studies, however, indicate that poor reproductive health and sexual health problems, including complications arising from early childbearing, HIV infection and STIs are significant disease burdens in developing countries and also, essential medicines and contraceptives for reproductive health are often not available to the majority of women who need them (Hall, 2005; The World Bank, 2001). In this respect, Hall (2005, pp. 32–34), made the observation that Mifepristone, a useful medicine for safe abortion, which can be self-administered to induce a discrete and noninvasive medical abortion up to 2 weeks of gestation is still prohibitive to most women wanting to access the drug. Some of these essential contraceptives, their compositions or methods may be impacted by patent-right restrictions as data indicates that contraceptives such as raltegravir, levonorgestrel, medroxyprogesterone acetate, process of extracting ergometrine, progesterone and the composition of carbetocin are more widely patented (Drug Patent Watch; European Patent Office; Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). This may be due in part to changes in national patent laws in many countries following the entry into force of the TRIPS Agreement, or the patenting practices of applicants (Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). Invariably, the inability to access better and high quality therapeutic treatments may mean that majority of women, particularly in developing countries, may be restricted to a limited choice of contraceptives. Those opposed to reproductive rights use IPP to prohibit women’s access to them Allen 12 Allen, Scott A. “Patents Fettering Reproductive Rights.” Indiana Law Journal, 2012, cgi?article=3004andcontext=ilj#:~:text=The20Supreme20Court20has20established,right20to20terminate20a20pregnancy.andtext=Conceivably2C20private20actors20could20use,reproductive20technology20from20the20public. FC Because these patentable reproductive inventions have enabled reproductive choice and are often catalysts for reproductive rights, opposition to reproductive autonomy has translated into opposition to specific technologies. In turn, opposition has slowly begun to find its way into the patent laws that provide limited monopolies on reproductive inventions. Unlike inventions of antiquity, the advanced technology that now constitutes patent-eligible subject matter has the potential to tread on deeply moral, religious, and political ideologies. One commentator has noted that “as human existence becomes increasingly embedded in technology, the impact of traditionally patentable subject matter upon the exercise of individual liberties grows.”9 There is no area more fundamental to human existence than that of reproduction—an area that has recently experienced extraordinary technological advances. For example, in the last several decades, patents have been issued on technologies ranging from abortive methods,10 pharmaceuticals,11 and instruments,12 to in vitro fertilization (IVF),13 cloning (e.g., Dolly),14 and in vitro pre-implantation genetic diagnostic (PGD) procedures.15 Reproductive knowledge and capabilities have expanded in exponential ways, promising that the future holds even more technological advancements. Much of that practical knowledge is owned, or has the potential to be owned, as intellectual property. These “twenty-first century” technological developments, and the new perceived reproductive liberties that may accompany their growth,16 pose new challenges to a constitutionally empowered system of “promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts”17 with eighteenth-century origins. Whether or not the Framers contemplated the vast universe of procreative and reproductive developments as within the scope of traditionally patentable subject matter,18 the fact remains that as section 101 of the Patent Act19 currently stands, inventions related to human reproduction will routinely fall within its broad scope. It is likely, however, that the Framers did contemplate a patent system that would continue to provide broad and robust incentives to invent—a set of incentives that has helped establish the United States as a technological superpower and that many feel may be best left untouched. As currently configured, the patent system is susceptible to use by those opposed to reproductive rights—those who desire to prohibit access to reproductive and procreative technologies that directly bear on reproductive rights. Taken to its extreme, those who want to limit individuals’ ability to exercise their currently constitutionally protected rights or future constitutional rights, or desire to deny access to technologies on other moral bases, could obtain patent rights (by application, assignment, or license) on reproductive technologies and then enforce those governmentally granted property rights against any infringer. In other words, the same government that affords the rights to reproductive choices as found in the Constitution could be forced to grant limitations on the access to a private patentee’s reproductive technologies or inventions—regardless of societal value. Because a private patentee is a private actor, as opposed to a state actor, the application of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment has traditionally been thought to be inapplicable in this context.2 Unintended births perpetuate a patriarchal hierarchy that draws from socioeconomic status – access to contraceptives is key to reduce this gap Venator and Reeves 15 Venator, Joanna, and Richard V. Reeves. “The Implications of Inequalities in Contraception and Abortion.” Brookings, Brookings, 29 July 2015, www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/02/26/the-implications-of-inequalities-in-contraception-and-abortion/. FC A poor woman is about five times as likely as an affluent woman to have an unintended birth, which further deepens the divides in income, family stability, and child outcomes. But what is behind the gap? That is the question we address in our new paper, Sex, contraception, or abortion? Explaining class gaps in unintended childbearing, and accompanying data interactive. Among single women who are not trying to get pregnant, we find no income gaps in the chances of being sexually active in the previous year (our data is from the latest National Survey of Family Growth). This suggests that use of contraception and/or abortion may explain variations in unintended birth rates. This is, in fact, what we find: We also simulate two ‘what-if’ scenarios, exploring how equalizing contraceptive use and abortion rates across income groups would affect birth rates. By our estimates, if all single women adopted the same rates of contraception use as high-income single women, the ratio of unintended births between affluent and poor women would be cut in half. If all single women had the same abortion rates as high-income single women, the ratio would be reduced by one-third. Our paper concludes: “Control of fertility varies widely between income groups. Most unmarried women are sexually active, regardless of income. But women with higher incomes are much more successful at ensuring that sex does not lead to an accidental baby. This almost certainly reflects their brighter economic and labor market prospects: simply put, they have more to lose from an unintended birth. Improving the economic and educational prospects of poorer women is therefore an important part of any strategy to reduce unintended birth rates. But there are more immediate solutions, too. Affluent women use contraception more frequently and more effectively, and there is a clear case for policies to help close this income gap, including increasing access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). But access to affordable abortion also matters, and this is currently limited for many low-income women. There are of course strongly-held views on abortion, but it should be hard for anyone to accept such inequalities by income, especially when they are likely to reverberate across two or more generations. Abortion is a difficult choice, but it is not one that should influenced by financial status.” Patents magnify gender biases and prevent women from access to life-saving medicines – reducing IPP is key Mike 20 (2) Mike, Jennifer H. M. “Access to Essential Medicines to Guarantee Women's Rights to Health: The Pharmaceutical Patents Connection.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, 29 June 2020, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jwip.12161. FC Deeply ingrained gender bias and stereotypes also lead to behaviours that favour men over women, especially in accessing healthcare. Gender-related limitations through cultural and traditional practices are also factors that can affect women's health and influence their access to healthcare services, facilities and medicines (Ezeah and Achonwa, 2015, p. 47; NPC and ORC Macro, 2004, pp. 39–40, 127–128). These gender-related problems are prevalent in societies that subjugate the social status of women and subject them to harsh traditional medical practices. Examples of adverse cultural practices are Female Genital Mutilation (FGM),4 preferential treatment of male children (Lewu, 2015, p. 227). and differential access to and utilisation of healthcare facilities by men and women in many communities in of some developing countries (Mandara, 2000, pp. 97–98.) In Nigeria, for example, the practice of FGM is largely prevalent in communities that believe the act is necessary to control a female's libido and prevent promiscuity (WHOb). Apart from the psychological torture, this painful circumcision practice exposes women to infections such as human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), hepatitis B, as well as the danger of haemorrhage, shock and death (Ayanleye, 2013, p. 131). These gender inequalities can have far reaching consequences on women's health and well-being, consequently, they will need access to medicines. Similarly, religious and cultural practices, such as the purdah system of wife seclusion are also barriers to accessing healthcare by women (Adedini et al., 2014, pp. 341–359; Wall, 1998, pp. 341–359). These practices can prevent women from seeking medical attention when necessary. A gender-based assessment of poverty and a review of the literature on social inequalities and health further suggest that most women, especially in the rural parts of developing countries, experience limited access to health services and resources (Bennett, Dolin, and Blaser, 2014, pp. 1477–1479; O'Donnell, 2007, p. 2827; Sicchia and Maclean, 2006, p. 70). Several factors such as economic hardship, illiteracy and poverty, and so forth, create barriers to access to health treatments (Holmes et al., 2012, p. 11). The lack of economic resources to support the provision of essential health services could significantly contribute to the limited availability and access to quality healthcare and medicines by women (Ojanuga and Gilbert, 1992, p. 614). Although the poor access to healthcare services, facilities and medicines for women is not limited to resources and low income, inaccessibility due to finances and cost of drugs makes it even less likely for women to have access to adequate patented medicines healthcare. As a result of the many factors that obstruct their access to health care, women will require specific attention in the efforts to scale up access to the necessary healthcare treatments and medicines (CESCR, 2000, para 21).5 Gender-based violence such as intimate partner violence, rape and sexual violence, physical battery and psychological harm also affect women's health and impinge their fundamental human rights. These violent practices, in turn, have far reaching consequences on women's physical, sexual and psychological health and wellbeing (Onigboji, Odeyemi, and Onigboji, 2015, p. 92.) The violence and abuse of women is linked with negative health outcomes including physical injuries, reproductive health disorders, HIV and sexual infections, unwanted pregnancy, emotional problems, depression and sleeping disorders (Alo, Kereem, and Olayinka, 2014, pp. 748–749; Campbell, 2002, pp. 1331–1332; Ellsberg et al., 2008, pp. 1165–1166). Consequently, the inability to access healthcare resources to alleviate their health situation mean that they are severely restricted from regaining good health to pursue other productive activities. Here, a human rights perspective would argue that women should be able to access healthcare, and specifically essential medicines because it constitutes the basic minimum to respect her human dignity, which every human being is entitled to. Research studies has revealed that HIV/AIDS incidence is higher for women than it is for men in the sub-Saharan African region (Physicians for Human Rights, 2006, p. 16). Thus the specific healthcare needs of women, especially those infected with HIV/AIDS offer an additional ethical base to argue for a consideration of women's access to medicines. For various reasons relating to biological and cultural factors, lack of control over sexual interactions and economic hardship, women are more vulnerable to HIV infections (Maharaj and Roberts, 2006, p. 215; Müller, 2005, p. 27; Physicians for Human Rights, 2006, p. 16). Several factors, including physiological disposition; sexual behaviour, social attitudes to the infection, cultural norms where women are less likely to negotiate condom use, domestic violence and rape, and so on, work to women's disadvantage with regard to the infection.6 In many parts of the developing world, the increasing spread of the virus among younger and pregnant women is attributable to social and cultural practices that encourage older men to have sex with younger women, or more women and restrict women's freedom in negotiating sexual practices (Sampath, 2004, pp. 251–291).7 Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV from an infected mother to child either during pregnancy, or delivery, or through breastfeeding is another challenging issue of concern to women and their children (Agboghoroma, Sagay, and Ikechebelu, 2013, pp. 1–7). Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNIADS) indicate that many children living with HIV had been directly infected by their mothers, primarily in utero, during labour or while breastfeeding (Skinner-Thompson, 2015, pp. 1–34; UNAIDS, 2010, p. 63). Crucially, access to antiretroviral medicines can significantly reduce the risk of MTCT (McIntyre, 2015; Sampath, 2004, p. 265; UNAIDS, 2010, pp. 9–10; UNAIDS, 2013, pp. 38–39; WHOc.)8 However, UNAIDS reports that many pregnant women living with HIV have insufficient access to essential antiretroviral treatments (UNAIDS, 2013, p. 40; UNAIDS, 2014, pp. 232–233).9 Without adequate medications, their babies' chances of surviving to adulthood are reduced, thus access to and use of antiretroviral drugs to prevent transmission and safeguard children is paramount (Siegfried et al., 2011). For this reason and others, the UN general Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS made a case for a response to issues of HIV prevention and treatment in a multisectoral and gender-sensitive manner (Article 14, Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS: United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS, 2001). More recently, the spread of the Zika virus, which is passed from mother and child during pregnancy, has drawn global attention and heightened the need to find a more sustainable and effective treatments for reproductive health, vector-borne and neglected infectious diseases that predominantly affect women (Nour, 2010, pp. 31–32; WHO, 2016). Asides the difficulty posed by HIV/AIDS, studies have also demonstrated that women are more prone to the risk of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as chlamydia and gonorrhoea because of their anatomy (Berman and Kamb, 2007, p. 75). Poorer women may also be more susceptible to other diseases that affect their immune systems such as malaria or TB due to problems caused by anaemia and malnutrition (Katona and Katona-Apte, 2008, pp. 1584–1585). In the face of these challenges and many others, it is argued that women should have access to essential medicines. Through a human rights approach, special attention is drawn to women, particularly the marginalised and disadvantaged, who require access to medicines, in addition to other necessary responses to their health situations and circumstances. Although patent right is not an underlying cause, it is a factor that can further exacerbate the issue of accessibility to medicines. The point being made here is that for women already confronted with these limiting factors, any additional constraint on access to essential medicines will typically impose a greater challenge to their health outcomes.10 This argument does not lose sight of the fact that the most logical thing to do is address the sociocultural and economic root cause of these problems and health concerns. Nonetheless, the problems associated with accessing drugs within the context of a patent right and the effect on their rights to health cannot be underestimated, hence the focus in this article.11 Solvency Thus, I affirm: Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines concerning women’s health. I’ll clarify any more in CX – it checks – otherwise I’d spend 6 minutes speccing tiny parts of the plan and never get to substance – guts clash Eliminating patent barriers is key to women’s increased access to contraceptives and life-saving medicines – the current system is broken Chaskalson 21 Chaskalson, Julia. “Opinion: WTO Waiver Is Important, but so Is Fixing Sa's Outdated Patent Laws.” Spotlight, 10 Mar. 2021, www.spotlightnsp.co.za/2021/03/10/opinion-wto-waver-is-important-but-so-is-fixing-sas-outdated-patent-laws/. FC The history of the battle for antiretrovirals to treat HIV has shown that patent regimes can either be crucial in realising the right to access healthcare and health products, or act as barriers to equitable, affordable access to medicines. As it stands, our patent system does not examine patent applications to determine whether they meet strong patentability criteria, and simply grant patents on application. This has resulted in many patents being unwarranted: some drugs under patent here are not patented anywhere else in the world. Our patent system allows ‘patent evergreening’ – where the period of patent protection is extended and keeps the prices of medicines artificially high for extended periods of time, which has limited access to life-saving medicines. Activists are adamant that government must reform our patent system. The coalition has urged the Presidency and DTIC to publish new legislation adhering to the recommendations of the Intellectual Property Policy Phase I which was adopted by Cabinet in 2018. This policy aligns with global public health policies and best practice, but the DTIC seems to drag its feet when with publishing new legislation. It is critical that Bills be published for public comment and expedited into law not only to strengthen South Africa’s efforts to make sure that COVID-19 vaccines and treatments can reach all the people but importantly also to increase access to medicines generally at home. The South African government has acknowledged, through its joint-proposal at the WTO, that special measures are needed to facilitate access to medicines, prevent deaths and relieve pressure on the health system. But COVID-19 is not the only health crisis to which these measures should apply. While the patent waiver at the WTO is a bold move from the South African government for our country and others in the Global South, the waiver would only exist for the duration of the pandemic, and only in relation to COVID-19 medicines. Real patent law reform domestically would save lives in South Africa now and for years to come. Patent law reform could help to give cancer patients affordable and equitable access to medicines, people living with HIV greater access to second or third line antiretrovirals, increase the supply of contraceptives and push down the prices of drugs for drug-resistant tuberculosis. Not only is this possible, but it is a constitutional imperative. Over and above promoting the rights to equality, dignity and access to healthcare and medicines, new legislation would save lives, relieve pressure on healthcare workers and ease the strain on our public health system. And it cannot wait any longer. Examining foreign policy through an intersectional feminist lens is key to solving structural disparities in policy – it’s a pre-req to all other impacts Amhed et. al 21 Ahmed, Zara, et al. “Here's Why Sexual and Reproductive Rights Must Be the Linchpin of Feminist Foreign Policy.” Guttmacher Institute, 2 June 2021, www.guttmacher.org/article/2021/06/heres-why-sexual-and-reproductive-rights-must-be-linchpin-feminist-foreign-policy#. FC As global leaders are taking decisive steps to begin rebuilding many of the systems devastated in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have an opportunity and a responsibility to optimize this moment of reconstruction and address structural, gender-based disparities. The combination of long-standing inequities and pandemic-exacerbated conditions has clarified that sexual and reproductive health and rights are foundational and necessary for gender equality, as well as to a full recovery from the damage caused by COVID-19. What Is Feminist Foreign Policy? Traditionally, foreign policy has treated issues like gender equality as separate from and peripheral to core aims, such as promoting national security and trade. But a new and growing body of evidence illustrates how improving gender equality is in fact central to those aims, resulting in healthier and more prosperous societies. For example, equalizing women’s participation in the workforce with men could boost the global gross domestic product by $28 trillion annually and would benefit countries at all income levels. There is also evidence that gender equality is associated with peace and stability; the larger the differences between men and women’s experiences and opportunities in a given country, the more likely that country is to be involved in violent conflict. The first official recognition of gender equality as a global priority was in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, but it is only in the past decade that countries have begun to develop and adopt feminist foreign policies. This approach has evolved from tackling gender equality as just one of the many disparate aims of foreign policy, and instead applies a gender lens to every foreign policy decision, from aid allocations to political representation. It also acknowledges how gender inequality overlaps with other forms of oppression, such as racism and classism, and takes an intersectional approach to feminism.