Like so many of the businesses – and ideologies – that thrive on social media, FBS cultivates a sanitized image of the product it promotes. Saldaya never hosts podcast guests who regret their decision to freebirth. And she routinely deletes negative comments on Instagram, such as the one posted earlier this year by a mother who lost her daughter: “My baby died 41 weeks stillborn after I followed your teachings and I will regret it for the rest of my life.” (The mother was also blocked.)

The first woman known to have lost her baby after following Saldaya’s advice was Lorren Holliday. When she got pregnant in 2018, she interviewed midwives, but couldn’t afford the $5,000 downpayment for their services. Reluctantly, she resigned herself to the hospital, until, scrolling through Instagram one day, she found FBS: “What they offered was exactly what I was looking for.” A friendly animal lover with short pink hair, Holliday lives in a trailer on an acre of land in the Arizona desert with her husband, Chris, their three barefoot children and 35 dogs, cats, ducks, goats, chickens and turkeys. “I wanted health. I wanted natural.”

She began bingeing the podcast and joined Saldaya’s FBS Facebook group. A freebirth, Holliday believed, would give her baby the most gentle start to life.

Holliday was in her Airstream caravan when her contractions began on 1 October 2018. She was 41 weeks pregnant. By day three she realised they “weren’t spread out any more. It was like one long contraction.” Holliday began messaging Saldaya for advice. “The pain is unbearable … I just want to know if I’m not progressing,” she wrote on 4 October. She said she’d been vomiting, and explained a pattern of contractions that would have rung alarm bells for a medical professional. Saldaya said the pain was not unbearable – thinking of it that way “is a dead end – or a path to hospital birth”. She added, “You’ll have to die 1000 deaths and let go of everything that you think you can’t do.”

On the evening of 6 October 2018, after six days of active labor – unheard of in a medically managed birth – Holliday sent Saldaya a photograph of luminous green meconium. The following day, Saldaya asked for an update. Holliday said the baby wasn’t moving much and she hadn’t been able to urinate for 24 hours. Saldaya said she would go to hospital at this point, but suggested she may want to lie to doctors about when her water broke. She sent her a script to deceive medics.

At the hospital, Holliday learned her daughter was dead. Journey Moon had dark hair like her father. Holliday doesn’t know what color her eyes would have been, but she likes to imagine they were blue.

After Journey Moon died, the Daily Beast reported on the case. At Saldaya’s request, Holliday lied to the journalist, saying Saldaya didn’t advise her during her birth, and Saldaya said she’d provided no advice. “We tweaked,” Holliday says bitterly, “that little interview.”

Both Saldaya and Holliday received hate mail after the article was published. “I wanted the best for Journey Moon,” Holliday says of her decision to freebirth. “That’s why I stuck it out so long, to give her the best birth possible. When people started calling me selfish and greedy, that killed me, because I did it for her.”

Eileen Callear says she has been given extra security and has concerns for her safety.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/50253898

The transportation department has unveiled a first crash test dummy in the US modeled specifically on female anatomy, a move officials say is meant to close decades of safety gaps in vehicle testing.

Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, unveiled the THOR-05F, an advanced female design for a crash-test dummy with upgraded technical specifications. According to the transportation department, the dummy will be incorporated into federal vehicle crash testing once a final rule is published.

Although men make up the majority of annual car-crash victims, women are more likely to die in collisions of comparable severity. Women are also 73% more likely than men to sustain serious injuries in a crash, according to studies. In addition, they face a higher risk of specific trauma, including pelvis and liver injuries.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/50231347

Germany plans to treat the use of date rape drugs like the use of weapons in prosecutions as part of measures to ensure justice for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.

“We classify date rape drugs, which are increasingly used as a widespread tool in crimes, as weapons. This creates the basis for significantly stricter prosecutions,” Alexander Dobrindt, the interior minister, said on Friday. “We are committed to clear consequences and consistent enforcement. Women should feel safe and be able to move freely everywhere.”

Nearly 54,000 women and girls were the victims of sexual offences in Germany in 2024 – an increase of 2.1% on the previous year – of which nearly 36% were victims of rape and sexual assault.

Fifteen women are killed every day in a country with one of the highest rates of gender violence in the world.

A growing number of women in South Africa are learning to use guns to protect themselves against gender-based violence.

Beware of triggers. I'm in awe of these survivors

Polling, like anything else that involves human beings, is not strictly analytical. There is an emotional aspect to the results, a natural side effect of asking people how they feel about candidates or issues. That tendency is exaggerated in the current political moment (as the great Ariel Edwards-Levy has written), when partisanship runs high and polling offers Americans a non-Election-Day opportunity to express their enthusiasm or distaste for what’s unfolding in our country.

It is through that lens that we should consider new polling from Gallup indicating that 2 in 5 young women would like to permanently move out of the country. But we should not consider those numbers solely through that lens.

The Gallup finding is striking, if not sudden. The pollster has been asking a version of this question since 2008, finding that young people were consistently-but-only-slightly more likely to express interest in moving out of the U.S. than were older Americans and Americans overall. Since 2016, though — that is, since the year that Donald Trump first won election to the White House — the percentage of young women who’ve expressed that desire has surged.

It’s useful to remember that we’re not talking about one group of people who are changing their minds. A woman aged 18 to 44 in 2025 was not necessarily a woman in that age group in 2016, and vice versa. This shift likely reflects both an expressed decline in enthusiasm for the U.S. among women and an increase in the number of women who never would have expressed enthusiasm in the first place.

The feminist movement in the second largest country of South America has distinguished itself as being loud and proud. Massive demonstrations that filled the streets of Argentina’s biggest cities helped clinch huge victories, such as the 2020 legalization of abortion for cases up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.

But the landscape has changed under libertarian President Javier Milei, who has put the chainsaw he campaigned with into action, cutting roughly 30% of government spending in his first year in office. Along the way, he has deployed increasingly hostile rhetoric against the feminist movement, characterizing legal abortion as “aggravated murder” in public speeches, and denigrating so-called “woke” policies in an echo of his counterpart President Donald Trump in the United States. Milei’s government has used the power of funding to put that rhetoric into action, cutting financing for contraceptives and ceasing to provide abortion pills. Prior to his administration, the national government bought and delivered misoprostol and mifepristone to provinces that administered it free of cost through the public healthcare system. Now, that responsibility has shifted to provincial governments. The result, according to Amnesty International, has been shortages of medication in various provinces, hindering women’s ability to access a service that remains legal.

Away from the capital city, feminism in Argentina has always been a more complex undertaking, one that often exists in a conservative or religious environment where traditional gender norms hold firm. In more rural areas, women have found empowerment and support through small collective organizations that have planted seeds of activism in people like Ojeda.

Organizations like La Chicharra—the Cicada—a tiny community run radio station that is at the center of feminist organizing in Goya, the second largest city in Corrientes. The grassroots feminist project helped Ojeda find her voice, in part through workshops built to educate women on their rights, how to assert their worth in the home, and strengthening their financial autonomy.

Across the world, millions of people suffer from premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD, a condition linked with their menstrual cycle and characterized by depression and irritability severe enough to impair their daily lives. It’s unclear precisely how many women are affected by PMDD. Under the narrowest assessment, at least 1.6 percent have the disorder according to a 2024 systematic review by a group of international researchers, although the figure shifts depending on which criteria apply. (Although trans men and nonbinary people may also experience the condition, relevant data are scarce.) Other analyses suggest the figure is between 3 percent and 8 percent.

“In my experience it is probably higher due to under reporting and misdiagnosis,” wrote Nick Panay, a gynecologist and chairman of the National Association of Premenstrual Syndromes in the United Kingdom, in an email to Undark.

In cases like Stenos’, PMDD symptoms may be so intense as to lead to thoughts of self-harm. A 2024 U.K.-based study of more than 3,600 women with PMDD found that 82 percent had suicidal thoughts before their periods, and a quarter had tried to end their lives during what the researchers described as a “PMDD crisis.” A global survey of almost 600 women had similar findings, with 72 percent reporting active suicidal ideation at some point during their lives.

Medical bodies and doctors may vary in whether they treat PMDD as primarily a psychiatric or gynecological condition — it is, in the words of one group of clinicians, “at a crossroads between mental and gynecological health.” Treatments range from birth control, antidepressant drugs, and therapy to drug-induced menopause or surgery to remove reproductive organs.

Some feminist scholars worry that PMDD is a “culture-bound” phenomenon, which pathologizes healthy bodies and ignores women’s valid reactions to problems in their environment. Jessica Peters, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, disputes this characterization: “I think the only person who would suggest this is somehow over-pathologizing something is somebody who doesn’t have PMDD.”

But not all doctors are familiar with the disorder. By one estimate, 90 percent of women with PMDD are mistakenly thought to have another condition. Stenos saw multiple clinicians before receiving her diagnosis, which she eventually received from a medical herbalist in the U.K. before finding a gynecologist who took her on board. “I had been to 20 gynecologists, I had been to five or six endocrinologists, I had been entered into the pain management program in Liverpool where I was living in the U.K.,” she said. “I mean, I had gone to as many doctors as would see me, and no one had brought it up as a diagnosis. So I was diagnosed by a non-medical doctor.”

A video of the incident on Tuesday shows a visibly drunk man trying to kiss the president on the neck and embrace her from behind, as she removes his hands and turns to face him, before a government official steps in and places himself between them.

“This is something I experienced as a woman, but it is something that all women in our country experience,” said Sheinbaum in her daily press conference. “If I do not file a complaint, where does that leave all Mexican women? If they do this to the president, what happens to all the other women in the country?”

Just thought I would share for some good news. I've been following along as the My Voice, My Choice group has been campaigning to get safe and accessible guaranteed in law for all EU members. And as of about 40 minutes ago, they just won the first round of votes needed for this to happen.

I believe they still have at least one more boss battle to face in parliament now some time in the future but this is a good sign that not everything is as dark as it seems in the world right now.

@feminism Manga review: Chi no wadachi (a trail of blood).
A great title for a heavy subject, only if you can stomach its content.

https://mangaispolitical.noblogs.org/post/2025/10/15/review-chi-no-wadachi/

Saskia Lightburn-Ritchie says her domestic abuse charity MyCWA helped nearly 5,000 people last year.

[...]

In some cases, setbacks in one country are prompting progress in others. After witnessing the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, the French government adopted a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a national right to abortion. And after Sweden reversed its feminist foreign policy, the Spanish parliament voted to enshrine Spain’s version in its development cooperation law.

[...]

I find that the women’s rights movement is doing a bad job of telling the story of (and learning from) our victories. Because our wins are often less far-reaching or sensational than some of the high-profile setbacks, they are less likely to receive media coverage. This is a tragedy, because it means our narrative of social change is incomplete: We believe defeat to be final, when in fact the resistance is alive and well and effective. It’s our duty to tell those stories and to learn from them, too.

[...]

That’s why the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative is launching a global repository of the world’s progressive victories for women’s rights. We’ve gathered groundbreaking policies on everything from abortion to feminist foreign policy, including archived texts that conservative governments have tried to disappear. We’ve crowdsourced policy briefs and advocacy resources and analyses of progressive victories in dozens of countries and amassed more than 600 resources in 16 languages. And now, our repository is open for policymakers, advocates, academics, and individuals from all over the world to continue to upload their resources and help us tell the successful story of the global feminist movement.

[...]

https://archive.is/9KWjp

Imagine the scene of a pregnant mother giving birth. Chances are, you are visualizing a woman lying back, legs spread, and pushing hard to bring the newborn into the world. But that’s neither the only way for a woman to deliver a baby, nor necessarily the most comfortable.

Media is partly to blame for perpetuating this on-the-back-only myth. In a study, titled “How to Give Birth – According to Hollywood,” lying on the back is the dominant birthing position in films recommended for pregnant women across multiple search lists. Among the top five mainstream films on the list, only one of eight birth scenes showed a mother delivering not lying back. And in that lone scene where a woman gives birth in a bear-crawl position, the film’s characters find her to be “crazy” and “disgusting.”

It is physiologically possible for women to deliver standing, sitting, squatting, kneeling, or on all-fours. More importantly, many women aren’t aware that they have options — and should be given the power to choose.

Endless respect to all working parents

Women’s campaigners say book excerpts reveal ‘network of privilege’ that protected Jeffrey Epstein amid wider misogynistic culture

archive link

Milwaukee native Yaz Rodriguez grew up watching her brothers playing baseball while her father tossed her a ball in friendly games of catch. “When I was able to play in middle school,” she said, “I did softball until my freshman year of college.”

Baseball had always been her passion, but playing it simply wasn’t in the cards for many young girls.

Last month, Rodriguez joined dozens of other players who were trying out for the Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL), set to begin its first season in May as only the second women’s professional baseball league in the United States. It follows in the footsteps of the historic All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1940s and ’50s. Its founder, Philip K. Wrigley, previously the owner of the Chicago Cubs, intended to keep baseball fields active while many American men were fighting in World War II, so he put women to play. His solution gained a strong following, which held on until the league’s final year in 1954.

The Women’s Professional Baseball League is reimagining the legacy of Wrigley’s all-American girls with a more inclusive mission.

Though the United States has not had an active women’s baseball league in decades, USA Baseball does oversee the Women’s National Team, which was established in 2004. Players like Kylee Lahners, who has played third base for the team since 2018, showed up at the WPBL tryouts, hoping to expand her talents.

There was also Mo’ne Davis, a former Little League Baseball pitcher and Hampton University softball star from Philadelphia. Davis made history in 2014 as the first girl to throw a shutout — a game where the opposing team scores no runs — during her time as a Little League Baseball pitcher.

After coaching Major League Baseball’s Trailblazer Series, securing a graduate degree at Columbia University and excelling in Hampton University’s softball program, Davis believes now is the time for her to return to baseball.

“I just feel like I can never get away from” baseball, she said in an interview with Major League Baseball. “No matter how hard I try, somehow it’s always going to pull me back in different directions.”

Another woman dead to male violence. Love to her and all you loved her