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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
When Mexico City decriminalized abortion in 2007, pro-choicers took it
as a sign of great things to come, possibly including a nationwide
liberalizing of abortion laws. Unfortunately, as Mary Cuddehe reports in the Atlantic,
the Catholic Church and general sexist establishment reacted with
outrage and doubled down on the war against women who want to control
when they have children. Since then, 14 Mexican states have passed laws
defining personhood as starting at conception, with some even going so
far as to ban IUDs while they were at it. The result is that women have
been going to jail for obtaining illegal abortions ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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In her first trip to Mexico as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton put some of the blame on us for the drug violence that is ravaging Mexican society and now spilling over the border. "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," she said. Ain't that the truth. I wish this meant that the Obama administration was going to consider decriminalization as the most obvious solution to this failed drug war. You'd think we would have learned from Prohibition that making illegal the human desire to take the edge off is bound to fail. You'd think the billions of dollars spent on this war and all the lives lost to violence and incarceration would have taught us that. But I'm sure there is no political will to change the institutionalized insanity of our drug laws, whose perverse incentive has been to create these criminal cartels.
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