I met Rosemary W. Codding, the Director of Patient Services at the Falls Church Health Center in Virginia, a couple of months ago. Since the first moment I spoke to her, I felt that she was the kind of person that could be my mentor. Rosemary has committed her time to providing safe and personalized care to women and their families. Her great staff of board certified doctors, counselors and health educators provide wellness opportunities for maternity, infertility, birth control, adoption and abortioncare  every single day to Virginia women.

Since 2010, the fight against women’s reproductive rights has increased dramatically for Rose’s clinic and the other abortion clinics in Virginia. These clinics need our support; without it, they will all close down one, one by one.

According to NARAL Pro-Choice America’s annual report, in 2011 legislators around the country were passing bills limiting access to abortion services. At the national level, the House passed eight different bills related to reproductive rights, up from one vote in 2010, three votes in 2009 and zero in 2008. However, the most damage has happened at the state level.  In 2011, 26 states enacted 69 new limits on abortion rights. That’s the second-highest number since NARAL started counting in 1995. The highest? In 1999, 70 such measures were passed around the country. Over 700 anti-abortion rights measures have been passed around the US since 1995.

The state of Virginia has been the most affected by these laws. In December of 2011, Bob McDonnell approved new guidelines that will actually enforce many abortion providers to close their clinics. The clinics are required to meet the same physical requirements as hospitals; otherwise, they will be considered illegal for providing abortions or any other service for women. According to the Government’s office, the new rules are “common sense” regulations that will help ensure the safety and well-being of patients.

The truth behind this law is that it will create huge costs and problems for abortion clinics. This is especially suspicious when one considers that, through legislation, state governments are increasingly dictating the minute details of private healthcare in ways that many healthcare providers find questionable.

In 2008, there were 50 abortion providers in Virginia. Today, there are only 22. This has to do with the new regulations.  We need to support the Virginia abortion providers.

The deadline for the abortion clinics to meet the hospital standards is coming up. Providers have not able to meet the standards for the new law. Most of the centers and their buildings are at least two decades old, if not older. Clinics in Virginia are now being forced to spend thousands of dollars that they don’t have on architectural analyses, just to document what construction is needed just to stay open.

They need our help to raise $14,000 to pay an architect for this critical information by the end of April. If you want to support and help them, you can make a tax-deductible donation to the Abortion Care Network.    

Event a small donation can make a difference. We need to stand against the laws that are harming women’s reproductive rights, and protect providers like Rosemary who are working for the health and safe care of women.

Photo Credit Flickr  World Can’t Wait via Creative Commons 2.0.

Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus by Deborah Juang Stein is a must read memoir by a woman who was born in prison and spent the first year of her life behind bars.

“Can you please alter Deborah’s birth certificate,” my mother asks in the letter to the family attorney, “from the Federal Women’s Prison in Alderson, West Virginia, to Seattle? Nothing good will come from her knowing she lived in the prison before foster care or that her birth mother was a heroin addict. After all she was born in Seattle, and if she finds all this out she’ll ask questions about the prison and her foster homes before we adopted her.”

This is what Deborah read one day when she found a letter in her parents’ room. She already knew that she was adopted, but not that she was born in prison? This completely changed her life, her relationship with her family, and mostly it changed the relationship she had with her adopted mother, a relationship that took over twenty years to return to a state of normalcy.

Deborah was born to a heroin addicted incarcerated mother in the Alderson Federal Prison in West Virginia. In the 1960s, she was adopted at the age of three by a rare mixed-race Jewish couple from Seattle, one of the few mixed-race families of that generation. Since she was just a young child, she was wondering why she had brown skin when her whole family and all of her friends at school were white. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t fit into some social groups. She knew that there was something different, something that she couldn’t explain.

Deborah grew up with many identity and personality issues. She wanted to know where she belonged in terms of education, culture, class, peer group, and more. By the time she was a young adult, she became addicted to drugs, she lost her path in life, and she put her life in danger.

This memoir is full of strong and emotional moments. It’s the epic tale of a woman who tries to find her roots and where she belongs. At the end, Deborah finds peace with herself and her family. Before the end of the book, she writes,

“I thank my mother for this wisdom and freedom, a woman who allowed the tension of opposites to live in me. I thank my prison mom for the spirit of this tug of opposites and how it stirs in me. Each mother, in a different way, taught me to embrace life.”

There is no stronger relationship than the one between a mother and daughter. Even if it’s not a link from birth, the mother’s love, patience, and support is always present.

The author’s incredible work doesn’t stop with that book. She created the non-profit organization, The unPrison Project. She also travels all over the country where she speaks to women in prison and tries to inspire them. She wants to help them and their children. She wants to inspire them and show them that life can change; life can be better.

 “Of all creatures who live and have intelligence, we women are most miserable. …People say that women lead a life without danger inside our homes, while men fight in war; but they are wrong. I would rather serve three times in battle than give birth once.”

Medea’s complaint, Athens, Greece, 431 BC (Euripedes, Medea 230-51.G)

As Medea’s words show, the glorious democratic freedom of classical ancient Greece was not applied to women. On the contrary, women in everyday life in ancient Greece were completely subject to the authority of men (father or husband). However and as always, there were women who didn’t follow the “rules.” There is the famous story of Kallipateira. She was the mother of a famous boxer. She wanted to see her son’s fight in the Olympics. As women were not allowed to attend the games, she dressed up as a male trainer and she stood in the crowd. When her son won the fight, Kallipateira was so excited that she jumped over a barrier to congratulate him. Unfortunately, the robe caught on the barrier and revealed her identity.

Despite some movements and positive changes for women with respect to political and social rights during the Hellenistic and Roman eras that followed the classic Greek, women continued to be required to take care of their families and remained under the thumb of her husband or whomever was the head of the house.

The Greek Women’s Rights Movement has its origins in the late nineteenth century. At
that time, the priority for women was to fight for the right to an education. For the first time, we had women entering universities and saw the emergence of female publishers like Artemis (1866), Thaleia (1867) and Eurydice (1870-73).  In 1887, the Newspaper of the Ladies (I Ephemerida ton Kirion), lead by Calliope Parren, represented the movement.

In 1920, Anna Theodoropoulou and Maria Negrepontim, with Maria Svolou, Roza Imvrioti and Elleni Korrylou, founded the League of Women’s Rights. The beginning of the organized women’s movement was real. Women were demanding the same political, economic and civil rights as men.

Unfortunately, the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas followed by World War II introduced serious problems to the feminist movement, not only in Greece but all over the Western World.

After World Word II ended, urbanization and industrialization brought a lot of changes to Greek society. Finally, women started to vote in the early 1950′s and actively participate in politics. In 1953, Eleni Skoura (1896-1991) was the first woman to be elected for the Greek Parliament as a candidate for the area of Thessaloniki. Interestingly, her opponent was another woman, Virginia Zanna. Skoura garnered 46,650 votes while
Zanna received 23,808 votes. She came from Volos. In 1956, the first woman minister Lina Tsaldari was elected as Minister of Social Welfare. Also, the first woman Mayor was elected in the island of Corfu.

Women started to earn significantly bigger wages than they earned before the War. Still, the military one more time tried to stop the women’s movement in Greece in the late ’60s through the early ’70s, under the regime of Georgios Papadopoulos. Greek women (especially students) were pressured to follow strict dress codes and stay away from mixed-sex social groups.

Finally, after the end of Papadopoulos’ dictatorship, women’s liberation and equality advanced rapidly. One of the most important steps happened in 1983, under Andreas Papanderou’s first PASOK administration. The Family Law was enacted in 1983, which promoted the equal partnership of women and men in all social and economic aspects of development.

Women have made impressive progress in Greek society. The majority of university graduates are female. More women participate in the Greek parliament and work outside of the house. Though they are on the right track, they are still behind. They win less money than men in high positions and the unemployment rate for women is higher than for men. Men still take up to two thirds of high-skilled jobs and the promotion of women to decision–making positions is still poor. Especially today, with the economic crisis in Greece, unemployment is higher for women than for men and their salaries are lower. According to statistics released in January of 2010, 14.9 of women were unemployed, compared to 8.7 percent of men, and in the private sector, women make only 82.9 percent of men’s salaries annually (IKA, Social Insurance Institute 2009).

Greek women have taken a lot of important steps, but we need to be feistier and more active. It will take more time for Greek society to accept the idea of women in powerful jobs, but people in general have more opportunities today, and it’s easier to get new ideas as they communicate more easily with others all over the world. Come on, Greek women, we can do it!

First image on the right is Calliope Parren. Second image on the left is Lina Tsaldari.

Violet Tsagkas is currently working on her Master’s degree at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. She grew up in Ioannina, Greece, and finished her Bachelor’s degree there. She loves communications and is interested in politics and women’s issues.

Photo credit: artolog via the Creative Commons License.