- World-renowned neurosurgeon Mohammed Shamji has admitted to killing his physician wife, Dr. Elana Fric. Her body was found in a suitcase near an underpass in Vaughan, Ontario, on Dec. 1, 2016. Fric died from strangulation and blunt-force trauma.
- An investigation series at The Times looking at medical transition services for UK children reveals that five NHS clinicians have resigned over the encouraging of “conversion therapy for gay youth,” while an Oxford professor of evidence-based medicine questions the research used to support medical treatments for children.
- Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, issued pardons for hundreds of women and girls jailed over illegal abortions.
- An Alabama law proposes to jail women for up to 99 years and charge doctors with felonies for abortion at any stage. It’s supported by 60 out of 105 members of Alabama’s House of Representatives.
- Afghan women continue to experience abuse after fleeing to Turkey to escape violence, at the hands of male Afghan migrants as well as Turkish men. Foreign Policy reports:
“The women who have fled Afghanistan to Turkey have typically done so with the help of smugglers. Although they are looking for safety, they often face even more abuse on the trail or in the conservative Turkish towns they are assigned to once they reach that country’s borders.
With the influx of Syrian and other refugees, Turkey stopped assigning refugees to its bigger liberal towns, which it says are overcrowded. There may be some truth to that, but it means sending women to places where they will lack a support network.
In small towns, foreign women living alone can be mistaken for prostitutes. Fatima and Madiha work in bakeries and farms seasonally, but they’ve been propositioned countless times. One morning, a group of migrant men threw a rock at their apartment window, and the women hid for a month. A Turkish social worker told me that unemployed migrant men also harass Turkish women, leading to fights with Turkish men. Lone migrant men do make up a large population of Afghans entering Turkey, and Ankara has especially focused on deporting and detaining those who are in the country without the proper documents.”