Adelaide Abankwah’s request for asylum in the United States made headlines and earned support from politicians such as Hillary Clinton and actors such as Julia Roberts and Vannessa Redgrave. Abankwah claimed she had been chosen “queen mother” of her tribe in Ghana and would be subjected to female genital mutilation if forced to return to that nation. She eventually won her asylum case, but now it turns out her entire story was false.

The woman’s real name is Regina Norman Danson, and she made up the story after being caught trying to enter the United States illegally in 1997. Somehow the real Adelaide Abankwah’s passport ended up in Danson’s hands, and Danson decided to assume the woman’s identity in an effort to stay in the United States. The real Abankwah says she didn’t come forward to dispute Danson because she was fearful of being deported due to unrelated immigration problems.

The Washington Post reported that prosecution of Danson was hindered by bureaucrats who didn’t want to embarrass the Clinton administration officials who had championed her asylum claim.

Source:

Hillary’s asylum queen was a fake. The Times (UK), December 21, 2000.

Peggy McMartin Buckey, 74, was found unconcious at her California home and prounced dead on December 15, 2000. McMartin should have lived the last years of her life peacefully but instead was one of the victims in a witch hunt that claimed too many lives.

Buckey helped her family operate the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, California. In 1983 children who had attended the McMartin Pre-School began telling fantastic tales of ritual sexual abuse directed at them, much of which allegedly took place in secret tunnels beneath the pre-school. Ultimately 349 of 384 students at the pre-school told investigators that they had been sexually assaulted at the pre-school. The fact that there simply no secret tunnels and that the claims of the children proved false in many details did not deter prosecutors from charging McMartin Buckey and others with sexually assaulting children

The case helped kick off a nationwide hysteria about Satanic and ritual abuse of children, helped on by a gullible media. McMartin Bukey was charged with sexual assault, but the case against her fell apart after it became clear that the testimony of the children had been improperly shaped and coerced by social workers who acted as latter day agents of the Inquisition. McMartin Buckey was acquitted on all charges, but was shadowed by the destruction of the business she helped run and the stigma attached to those even accused of sexual abuse of children.

Investigator’s relied on the highly specious belief that children always told the truth about such acts and could not be coerced to give false testimony or fail to remember accurately. In a series of experiments, memory expert Elizabeth Loftus demonstreated that it was relatively easy to get young children to falsely believe in events that had never happened.

Unfortunately there are still many people in jail based on testimony gleaned under such coercion or based on psychologists who used false memory techniques on their clients. The hysteria is largely over, but the effects still remain.

Source:

McMartin Case’s Legal, Social Legacies Linger. Ted Rohrlich, The Los Angeles times, December 18, 2000.

Art historian and radical feminist Tricia Cusack is concerned about the patriarchal bent that Christmas is taking. Specifically, there are just too many snowmen appearing on Christmas cards these days, according to Cusack, who is a professor at Great Britain’s Birmingham University.

In a press release put out by Birmingham University, Cusack writes,

In both the UK and US, Christmas has been gendered as women’s realm in its emphasis on children and family…

The snowman’s location in the semi-public space of garden or field reinforces a spatial-social system marking women’s spheres as the domestic-private and the men’s as the commercial public.

In other words, the prevalence of snowmen is evidence that Western culture is regressing into a far more conservative, patriarchal form more akin to the Medieval period.

Who knows how much worse the diagnosis will be should she turn her brilliant mind to the hidden meaning behind Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Source:

Snowmen ‘reinforce gender stereotypes’, says doctor. Ananova, December 20, 2000.

A Kenyan judge recently granted an injunction sought by two teenage girls to stop their father from forcing them to submit to female genital mutilation — the first time that a court has intervened to stop the practice which is prevalent in rural Kenya.

The BBC reported that,

The human rights group [The Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Kenya] says girls from the Kalenjin tribe are normally subject to circumcision and immediately forced into sexual activities or marriage.

Source:

Kenyan girls win circumcision ban. The BBC, December 13, 2000.

I knew some women experienced morning sickness while pregnant, but nothing prepared me for what my wife had to go through while pregnant with our daughter. Every morning for literally six months was a routine of vomiting that was so severe at one point that her doctor considered having her hospitalized. The sad thing was a perfectly save medication could likely have prevented her vomiting, but trial lawyers had driven it off the U.S. market in the 1980s.

The drug was benedictin and it had been widely prescribed to pregnant women since the mid-1950s as an anti-nausea agent. In the 1970s, however, some women began to complain that the drug had caused or contributed to their children’s birth defects and sued. By 1983, the manufacturer of the drug, Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, threw in the towel on the drug and said the litigation over the birth defects was simply too costly to justify continued production of the drug. No longer would women with morning sickness have access to the drug in the United States.

Ironically, that was about the time when numerous studies demonstrated what a close look at the evidence hinted in the 1970s — benedictin was completely safe. About three percent of all infants born in the United States suffer from birth defects, and the children of women who took benedictin had the same rate of birth defects as those born to women who didn’t take the drug. Even teh Food and Drug Administration exonerated the drug and declared it safe.

But it was too late. Nobody was willing to take on manufacturing the drug and risking the inevitable lawsuits over birth defects. Now, though the drug seems to be making something of a comeback thanks to a Canadian company, Duchesnay Inc., which is seeking FDA approval to sell a generic version of benedictin. Duchesnay’s diclectin has been available in Canada since 1975.

Hopefully women in America will soon have the choice to use the same drug that women in Canada and the rest of the world have been using safely for the past couple decades.

Source:

Once maligned morning sickness drug prepares for comeback. The Associated Press, October 10, 2000.