It’s hard to believe that the hymen, a thin piece of mucosal tissue that partially covers the vaginal opening, has been getting so much airtime recently. It was only a few months ago that rapper T.I. made (unlikely) headlines when he revealed that he takes his 18-year-old daughter to the gynecologist every year to check if her hymen is intact. Earlier this year, the UK health secretary began an investigation into the “dreadful practice” of “virginity repair” surgery, following a report by the Sunday Times, which revealed that there’s at least 22 private clinics across the UK offering hymenoplasty procedures. In short: it’s 2020 and, somehow, men are still trying to control our bodies.

Despite years of research that disproves the myth surrounding the hymen – that it breaks after the first time you’ve had sex – it’s connotations of purity pertain. You can break your hymen horse-riding, or riding a bike, but the social constructs surrounding virginity seem dependent on it staying intact.

“In Muslim communities, women should be virgins when marrying their husbands. If it’s found that a woman has lost her virginity before marriage, the consequences can be dire,” says Halaleh Taheri, who heads the Middle Eastern Women and Society Organisation, which supports women refugees or asylum seekers who have experienced gender discrimination and honour-related violence. “Even if a woman is not directly pressured by her family to undergo it, the beliefs that she has been indoctrinated with since childhood, the shame and dishonour that she will bring to her family if they find out she’s no longer a virgin is enough pressure to force herself to resort to this practice, whether she wants to or not.”

KENSINGTON, N.H. – A coyote attacked several people within hours Monday before being killed by a local man after the animal tried to bite his son, according to Kensington police.

Kensington Police Chief Scott Cain said the man was walking with his family on Phillips Exeter Academy’s Red Trail on the Kensington-Exeter line when the coyote appeared and attacked the family’s young son.

Cain said the coyote was only able to bite the child’s jacket before the father grabbed the animal and strangled it to death. However, in the struggle, the father was bitten and he had to go to the hospital to receive rabies shots, Cain said.

New York could bar doctors from performing so-called virginity tests under legislation prompted by the rapper T.I.'s controversial claim that he has a gynecologist check his daughter's hymen annually.

Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages said Tuesday the bill she submitted last month would prohibit medical professionals from performing or supervising such examinations, though it's unclear how common they are in the U.S. New York would also consider it sexual assault when such tests are performed outside of a medical setting.

“It’s medically unnecessary,” the Democrat said. “It's often painful, humiliating, traumatic. All in all, it's a form of violence against women.”

Dozens of state and local prosecutors released a statement Friday vowing not to enforce extreme anti-abortion restrictions recently passed in their states.

“As elected prosecutors with charging discretion, we choose not to prosecute individuals pursuant to these deeply concerning laws,” reads the statement issued by Fair and Just Prosecution, an advocacy group whose members include local prosecutors.

A Pennsylvania man who was seemingly not in the Christmas spirit last week was arrested after he allegedly assaulted a man for singing festive songs, according to reports.

Men have found a new way to absolve themselves of the responsibility of mentoring and promoting women in the workplace: fear over the MeToo movement.

The New York Times reports that at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, basically an extended spa retreat for the mega-rich, male executives are afraid of the increasing movement to hold abusers accountable for their actions. As these two sources put it:

“I now think twice about spending one-on-one time with a young female colleague,” said one American finance executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue is “just too sensitive.”

“Me, too,” said another man in the conversation.

The lesson these men have apparently taken from MeToo is not that sexual harassment is a pervasive institutional issue, but that women are a threat, so best to just leave them behind. One economist found that nearly two-thirds of male executives were reluctant to hold one-on-one meetings with women “lest their motives be misconstrued by their colleagues.” Wall Street, already a boys club, is now reportedly excluding women from work dinners, meetings, and trips. The end result is same as the old result: women’s careers in male-dominated workplaces will continue to stall.

In June, M., a 28-year-old woman jumped from the second floor of her home in Madurai, India — 20 feet above a rocky, tar road — after a bitter argument with her husband. He had accused her of having an affair.

This was M.'s second attempt to kill herself. She survived the fall. M. had been prescribed antidepressants after her first suicide attempt seven years before but had stopped taking them. She was admitted to Madurai's Government Rajaji hospital shortly after her second suicide attempt. Three weeks later, doctors recommended that she have surgery using metallic plates to fuse her shattered spine, but her mother, uncertain and fearful about the outcome, refused to let M. go under the knife.

She was discharged a month after her ordeal and remains bedridden in her mother's home, unable to walk. Her two children, an 8-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, who last visited her a week ago, still live with their father. Her mother gave us the details of her story and asked that only her daughter's initial be used to protect her privacy.

Abortion should be as inalienable a right as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Supreme Court justices should not be chosen for their opposition to Roe v. Wade. And our country should be pouring its considerable energy and resources into creating the kind of infrastructure that supports the lives of actual babies, once they’re born: universal health care, paid parental leave, subsidized daycare, proper sex education, affordable college, affordable birth control, and easier access to that birth control to keep unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place (should the women who are lucky enough to get their hands on it have better luck than I did in the game of birth-control roulette).

On Tuesday, the Trump administration made its official position clear: Schools should limit their use of race as a factor when determining admissions. The administration is moving to rescind seven guidance documents from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Justice, according to The New York Times. These Obama-era memos encouraged elementary, secondary schools, and colleges to use race in efforts diversify their student bodies, and outlined how to do so within the law. The Trump administration will break with this precedent, and will not actively encourage schools to diversify, the Times reported.

But something that’s not getting as much attention is the fact that a more conservative court could rule against employers having to cover birth control and family planning clinics having to offer it. The potential intersection of reduced access to birth control and restricted abortion rights could set up a perfect storm of more unintended pregnancies and fewer places for women to access safe, legal abortion. Maternal death rates in the US are already too high, and the combination of some women being forced to carry an unintended pregnancy to term and likely delaying prenatal care and some women seeking abortions from unsafe providers could lead to even more women dying—particularly women of color and low-income women.

It was September of 2015 when a Tennessee woman named Anna Yocca allegedly stepped into a bathtub filled with warm water and inserted a wire hanger into her uterus. She lost a lot of blood very quickly, and was rushed to a nearby hospital where, at 24 weeks, she delivered a 1.5-pound baby boy.

Yocca was jailed and the infant was taken into state custody and later adopted. In December 2016, Yocca was charged with aggravated assault with a weapon and two other felony accounts derived from laws dating back to the 1800s: attempted criminal abortion and attempted procurement of a miscarriage. Because Yocca couldn’t afford to pay her bond, she was incarcerated throughout her case—a year and a half in total. In early January, she pleaded guilty to attempted procurement of a miscarriage and was released on time served.

That same week in Texas, a Republican lawmaker took what felt like an inevitable, almost logical, step in the state’s trajectory of abortion restrictions: He introduced legislation that would jail women who have the procedure.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked enforcement of a California law that requires faith-based crisis pregnancy centers to notify patients that the state offers subsidized medical care, including abortions.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices said the disclosure rule likely amounts to compelled speech that violates the 1st Amendment. The court did not strike down the California law, but sent the case back to lower courts with instructions that enforcement of key provisions be immediately blocked while the legal challenge continues.