Anne is attending this very important conference in Philadelphia today on the changing Middle East and Arab world. It will be interesting to see if the status of women is even discussed.

A recent VOA article drew support on Anne’s Facebook page. Prominent Egyptian novelist, essayist and physician Nawall el-Saadawi says the the Egyptian women fear deeply that they must demand their rights.

Egypt’s leading feminist Nawal el-Saadawi speaks In words that should resonate with American women who are rapidly losing our reproductive rights to men who insist on controlling our bodies. They delight and believe it's politically just that women have only 17% representation in Congress after five decades of ‘liberation’, El-Saadawi says: “Women’s rights cannot be given … We have to take [them] by the political power of women,” she said. “And that’s why we are reestablishing our Egyptian Women Union.”

Her goal is to bring women from various organizations and belief systems together to fight for women’s rights in a collective group. Throughout the Middle East and Arab world, women fear losing rights just as we are in the United States.

In a staggering piece of news, Amnesty International has called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate serious allegations of torture, including forced ‘virginity test’ inflicted by the army on women protesters arrested in Tahir Square on March 9.

Amnesty International has been told by women protesters that they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges.

‘Virginity tests’ are a form of torture when they are forced or coerced.

“Forcing women to have ‘virginity tests’ is utterly unacceptable. Its purpose is to degrade women because they are women,” said Amnesty International. “All members of the medical profession must refuse to take part in such so-called ‘tests’.”

From the Associated Press about women’s bodies in America:

Dozens of bills are advancing through statehouses nationwide that would put an array of new obstacles - legal, financial and psychological - in the paths of women seeking abortions.
The tactics vary: mandatory sonograms and anti-abortion counseling, sweeping limits on insurance coverage, bans on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. To abortion-rights activists, they add up to the biggest political threat since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 that legalized abortion nationwide.
“It’s just this total onslaught,” said Elizabeth Nash, who tracks state legislation for the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research organization that supports abortion rights.

Conservative Republicans are moving against women’s rights from every angle. And while they are quick to call out liberals as being unAmerican and Communists, reality is that Hitler and Stalin used exactly the same tactics against women.

Stalin and Hitler Took Complete Control of Women’s Bodies

Until now we have resisted using inflammatory language to this degree, but a superb 2007 essay written by Ohio State University professor Steven Conn was an eye-opener yesterday.

We will no longer be silent about the parallels between Conservatives and fascists, when the focus is the world’s women. No more American pie talk from Sarah Palin about her representing ‘new feminism’. Let’s take off our sunglasses and stare reality in the face, once and for all.

During the 20th century, the control of women’s reproductive lives marked the most despicable regimes. Among the first things the Nazis did upon seizing power in 1933 was to outlaw abortion. Family planning centers were closed, access to contraception made increasingly difficult and abortion criminalized. By 1943 the Nazis made abortion a capital offense punishable by the death penalty. Stalin too outlawed abortion in 1936, and both dictators clearly saw control of women’s reproduction as a part of the larger apparatus of state control and repression.
States that are repressive enough to control women’s contraceptive options are just as likely to control other aspects of childbearing. The Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu made contraception illegal in 1966 for any woman who had fewer than five children. Not satisfied with that, 20 years later, in 1986, he created a monitoring system for all pregnant women, and miscarriages became subject to a criminal investigation. These acts forced women to have children whether they wanted to or not, and 200,000 of those children wound up in those infamous orphanages. Just as tyrannically, China, which limits family size by law, has long been accused of coercing women to have abortions and be sterilized.
So as Ohio and Louisiana rush to join South Dakota in attempting to criminalize abortion, we should ask: which side are we on? Are we among those societies that permit women the full measure of their freedom or with those that control women’s bodies in the service of a larger state agenda?
Remember that for many, especially on the religious right, abortion and contraception are no different. What they really want is to control the reproductive choices we all make in accordance with their particular ideas. Those of us who want the right to plan our own families are already being held hostage by these zealots. They have kept the early-abortion pill RU-486 off the market, pressured pharmacies not to sell birth control, and limited the availability of reproductive education in schools.
The lesson of the 20th century is clear, at least to the rest of the world. Free societies allow their citizens to make their own reproductive decisions; repressive ones restrict them. Which side are we on when this administration votes with countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia to block funding for family planning initiatives in the United Nations?

Read Professor Conn’s entire essay:

Repressive Societies Prioritize Controlling Women’s Reproduction AOC Women's News