2016-03-01  International Women's Day

"March 8 is Women's Day. Every other day of the year is Men's Day." One person who tries to redress this problem is former US president Jimmy Carter in his book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power

Carter quotes Mao Zedong's famous words "Women hold up half the sky" but he shows how women are so unjustly treated by those who hold up the other half of the sky. He has most disturbing information about the use of rape in war zones - at least 250,000 women were raped during the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

He describes how efforts in China, India and elsewhere to outlaw gendercide and the use of sonograms for gendercide have been unsuccessful, to the point that "more than twice as many girls have been killed by their parents during my lifetime as the total number of combatants and civilians lost in World War II. The number of girls that have been eliminated by abortion, neglect or murder is horrendous."

He concludes that abuses of women and girls (slavery, genital cutting, child marriage, rape) can be reduced only if women have more access to information about the  agencies that are responsible for publicizing and ending these abuses.