Radsloth95 - Woman = Adult Human Female. Fight Me.

I love how North Dakota and Iowa have no green counties, but then Minnesota and Wisconsin are like 1/3 green not to mention Chicago.

Habitable zone

Chicago Sun-Times

More than 500 women ask to join sex harassment suit against Cook County Jail, Sheriff Tom Dart

"I’m blown away by their courage," said Marni Willenson, a civil rights lawyer, of the female correctional officers who signed their names a

Hundreds of women are trying to join a sexual harassment lawsuit against Cook County and Sheriff Tom Dart that alleges officials didn’t do enough to stop inmates from masturbating in front of the women, who worked at the jail.

Current and former Cook County correctional officers and other workers filed suit in 2017 in U.S. District Court. At a news conference Thursday, attorneys touted their success in getting 529 women to individually join in the suit after a petition to declare the suit a class action was rejected by a federal judge.

The women are identified in the lawsuit and shared some of their stories with the court — and at the news conference.

“I’m blown away by their courage,” said Marni Willenson, a civil rights lawyer.

In the four years since the suit was filed, both the women who were harassed said that neither Dart nor Cook County made the necessary changes to protect female workers at Cook County Jail.

“These women have provided critical services, medical care, security, counseling, have endured the worst forms of harassment, only to have the sheriff’s office and county turn their backs on them,” said Caryn Lederer, a lawyer representing the women.

Lederer said that many women had male supervisors and colleagues brush off female workers’ complaints.

“They’re laughed at, told it’s their fault, that they must get used to it or, ‘What do you expect, you work in a jail,’” Lederer said.

In one incident, five inmates ejaculated in front of Bonnie Parker, a retired Sheriff’s employee. Two of those inmates ejaculated on Parker’s uniform.

“Men showing their penises, ejaculating and cat-calling took me to a dark place at one time in my career,” said Parker, who worked at Cook County Jail for 28 years. “They should be stopped and disciplined so that it can become a deterrent for the next set of guys that want to do it.”

Like many others at the news conference, Parker spoke directly to Dart.

“If his wife, daughter or any female that he knew worked at that jail for 30 days endured this type of behavior, would he be more considerate in providing a safe work environment for them?” Parker said. “We are his employees, and he should be more concerned for our safety.”

A spokesman for Dart reiterated the office’s earlier statements about the suit Thursday, saying officials have taken multiple steps to prevent and deter detainees from harassing workers at the jail, including utilizing specialized jumpsuits for detainees, increasing disciplinary consequences, filing new criminal charges against offenders.

“The Sheriff’s Office works every day to prevent and deter those ordered into its custody from engaging in acts of violence or sexual misconduct toward staff and others and has done so long before this lawsuit was filed nearly four years ago,” the spokesman said. “The safety of all persons who enter the Jail is the highest priority for the Sheriff’s Office, and we will continue to defend our record on supporting our staff and aggressively addressing incidents of sexual misconduct by detained individuals.”

Cook County Judge Matthew Kennelly will decide Friday if these additional women will be added to the case. Then, Willenson anticipates Kennelly will hold “bellwether cases” — sample trials that provide a sense of what the future trials hold.

“If other facilities can control the behavior of their detainees, inmates or convicted prisoners, then the sheriff of Cook County can do the same thing,” said Willenson.

She anticipates five to 10 trials will be held this year.

Barbara Unseld, who has worked for 30 years at the jail, became emotional while recounting being masturbated in front of on one of many occasions.

“It’s hard to relive that moment,” said Unseld. “The conditions for the women in jail are unsafe. And unless this problem is rectified by the sheriff, we have women that are walking away from this job, walking away from their careers because they can’t take it.”

A separate lawsuit that made similar allegations filed by 534 public defenders and law clerks was settled for $14 million last year.

Amen

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and a female by any other pronouns would still be oppressed in a patriarchy

“There are far more intended parents waiting to be matched with a surrogate than there are women available to carry these pregnancies, yet surrogates are taught to view themselves as disposable laborers. A doctor at a clinic in India adds that “for the surrogates it’s mostly the character of the womb that we are interested in. We make sure the surrogates know that they are not genetically related to the baby, they are just the wombs.” … The doctor superimposes a single body part (the womb) over the personhood of the surrogate as a whole being, effectively eliding her subjectivity. 

The surrogates that Pande interviewed referenced their own contributions to the pregnancy, contrasting the level of effort that they were putting into the pregnancies to that of the intended mother, who contributed “only an egg.” The surrogates were thus justified in making kinship claims to the future child … When one surrogate was told that she would have to “reduce” her pregnancy from triplets to twins, she insisted that she would keep the third baby if the intended parents did not want it because it was her blood, if not her genes … While blood does not circulate between the pregnant woman and fetus, the placenta is built from both maternal and fetal blood cells that can migrate between the two, lingering in various organs of the body and potentially impacting a variety of future conditions for the child, such as cancer risk and immune disorders.

This biological connection, however, is often downplayed because it is not genetic. In the Assisted Reproductive Technology industry, genetics are privileged over gestation, and thus the role of the surrogate is cast as that of an incubator who will not affect the appearance, intelligence, or personality of the child. This strict compartmentalization assures intended parents that their choice of surrogate will not impact the quality of their carefully selected genetic material, thus legitimizing cross-racial, cross-class, transnational surrogacy arrangements in ways that benefit the consumers of reproductive technologies. […]

Daisy Deomampo found that the intended parents she interviewed became very attached to the Indian “origin story” of their children, regardless of whether the child was conceived using Indian gametes. Parents returned from Indian with emblems of the country, “flattening out” the specificity of India and its historical and political contexts. [She] argues that parents “conflated the geographic space of India – and the attendant orientalist discourses that construct “Indian-ness” as exotically opposite to Western sensibilities – with the embodiment of the child’s identity through its gestation by an Indian surrogate mother in India” … Simultaneously Other[ing] Indian women’s bodies while incorporating romanticized and potentially colonializing notions of Indian identity or origins for surrogate-born children. 

The idea that reproductive tourists can tap in to the natural resource of Indian’s fertility is also raised … [Despite] India’s birth rate or “fertility surplus” [being] deemed a demographic problem, [it is implied] that the purported “excessive” population, bodies, and fertility of India are always an available commodity for the foreign tourist … An estimated 8-10% of Indian women suffer from infertility and most surrogate mothers have been permanently sterilized … [But] rather than addressing the health care needs of Indian citizens, foreign economic pressure and state intervention have aimed at limiting the fertility of the poor at the same time that the image of fertile Indian surrogates is used to draw in reproductive tourists.”

—Laura Harrison, Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy