C-Sections With No Anesthesia
  January 23, 2024 Greetings, Meteor readers, I don’t know about you all, but I’ve been in a reading funk. My usual stack of Plantagenet and Tudor historical tomes just hasn’t been doing it for me. So I ignored my incredibly robust TBR pile and bought a new book, Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice. Anyone else reading it? Let’s be book buddies. In today’s newsletter: the horrifying and intimate ways women are suffering in Gaza, Nikki Haley’s race to the finish, and what you can do to support Trans Girl Scouts. Sitting on a book stack, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ON A YOUNG DISPLACED PALESTINIAN GIRL LIVING IN RAFAH, SOUTHERN GAZA. (PHOTO BY AHMAD HASBALLAH VIA GETTY IMAGES) New atrocities: As the bombardment of the Gaza Strip goes into its fourth month, new reporting and research has shed light on what that means for Gazan women. According to UN Women, an estimated one million women and girls are living in a makeshift tent city in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, where they lack access to basic necessities like food, water, medical supplies, and…menstrual pads. For those menstruating, many have resorted to using scraps of their clothes and cutting up tents—in other words, trading their only shelter—to create makeshift pads. Without water or reliable sanitation, they’re at higher risk of dying from toxic shock syndrome or contracting life-threatening infections (which they do not have access to medicine to treat). Pregnant women also face insurmountable odds, with almost no functioning hospitals left in the region. Last week, Jezebel cited a reported 300% increase in miscarriages. Those who don’t miscarry must give birth in tents or undergo C-sections without anesthesia, where doctors aren’t even able to wash their hands to perform the procedure. The UN report found that at least two mothers are killed every hour in Gaza. So how can you help? The report lists three asks from women’s organizations: to support the “urgent need for an immediate ceasefire,” prioritize the funding of women’s organizations, and to ensure that those groups are instrumental in planning and implementing a humanitarian response. You can call your representative to urge a ceasefire and consider donating to ANERA, which is currently working on delivering hygiene and menstrual products to women in Gaza. Or you can donate to International Planned Parenthood Federation, which provides care in conflict zones worldwide.  CANDIDATE AND RACISM DENIER, NIKKI HALEY. (IMAGE BY JOE RAEDLE VIA GETTY IMAGES) The big race: With Ron DeSantis out of the running for the GOP nomination, only one person stands between Donald Trump and his potential return to the White House: Nikki Haley, who as we send this newsletter is in her last hours of her fight against Trump. Haley spent a lot of the last week defending her claim that “America isn’t a racist country”—although apparently, no one told Trump that, since he lobbed a few racist zingers at her on social media over the weekend. And if Haley did need further proof that racism exists, she might simply read her own memoir, in which she wrote that her Indian parents were barred from renting a home because her father “worked at the Black school,” and that when they did finally find a place to live, they were told “they couldn’t entertain Black people” in the house they owned. There’s a word for that kind of behavior, Nikki. It starts with an R and ends with a how can you really look America in her eyeballs and say racism doesn’t exist when you know it does??? AND:
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