User:Msjohn15/sandbox

Potential articles to contribute to

Herstory- It seems like there are more criticisms that could be explained. The article only mentions three critics at the moment.

World Courts of Women- Article is very short and vague as it is. There is only a partial list of the courts, so I think the article would be more helpful if the list was expanded.

Women in the Russian Revolution- This article is relatively short and seems to focus quite a bit on post-revolution history. There also should be more information about the effect on peasant women.

Burton v. Florida- This case is a recent and important case in abortion law. It is far too short and has no organization or sub-headings.

In re A.C.- Article is flagged for a biased tone and uncited sources. It clearly needs a lot of improvement.

Feminist views of pornography- The article is flagged for lacking any information on international feminists. I could add more information about the issue outside the United States.

Burqa Barbie- This article is a stub, even though there are lots of news articles about this. It could also be interesting to include a section about the backlash it received.

Merida- This is an interesting portrayal of a princess and the article is fairly developed, but it is tagged as lacking citations.

I am not sure which of these is at all relevant to the course. I had a difficult time finding a stub article on a topic which I had even slightly heard of.

Article Critique: Identity politics

The second to last sentence of the introduction suggests that the term in question began being used in the Civil Rights Era in the second half of the twentieth century. Similarly, the first sentence of the first section "History" states that the term emerged as early as the 1970s. Although these two facts are cited correctly and both appear to be correct, it is unnecessarily confusing to have these sentences appear consecutively. Readers may be left wondering which fact is more correct.

At the end of the first paragraph under the "History" section, there is a long quote regarding the Combahee River Collective. The quote is properly cited, but I think it is unnecessary to include such a long passage. It would be more appropriate to shorten the quote or even remove it, especially since the article already provides a link to the Combahee River Collective's wikipedia page.

Add to a page....

I felt this was relevant to the course because "burka bans" target a specific intersectional identity--Muslim women.

Africa

Morocco

The Moroccan government distributed letters to businesses on January 9, 2017 declaring a ban on the burka. The letters indicated the "sale, production and import" or the garment were prohibited and businesses were expected to clear their stock within 48 hours.

In re A.C.

Needs to be fixed

Lead- Shows immediate bias and unnecessarily uses a quote. I can rework the first couple of sentences to be more neutral.

Format- The format of this article seems odd to me. I can look at how other users have formatted similar pages about court cases to see if there is a better way to organize the information.

The Facts- This passage has no citations, which is obviously problematic. Not to mention, the section reads like a tear jerking narrative which opposes the doctors' decision to perform the operation. I need to make sure I put my personal opinions aside and state the facts as neutrally as possible. There also needs to be more defense of the doctors' actions. It is possible that most of this section will need serious rewriting.

Court Proceedings- This sections is not as biased as the former, but still need rewording in order to seem more neutral. I think there is also some legal terminology and more technical aspects of the proceedings which are missing.

References- Many of the references used appear to come from biased publications, including letters to the editor and pro-choice books. Although some of these sources may be included, I would need to find more trustworthy references.

Legacy- I think it would be reasonable to have a section discussing the legacy and aftermath of the case. Since it is often considered a "landmark case", it obviously caused some controversy and set precedent.

Draft 1: In re A.C.

Lead- changes underlined

In re A.C. was a 1987 D.C. Circuit reproductive rights case. It was the first appellate court case decided against forced Caesarean sections, although the decision was issued after the fatal procedure was performed. Physicians performed a Caesarean section upon patient Angela Carder (née Stoner) without informed consent in an unsuccessful attempt to save the life of her fetus. The case stands as a landmark in United States case law establishing the rights of informed consent and body integrity for pregnant women.

Original writing is italicized or strikethrough and two original sections have been divided into smaller sections due to complicated timeline of case. All citations were added by me.

Background

George Washington University Hospital

At age thirteen, Angela Stoner was diagnosed with a rare and usually fatal form of cancer, Ewing's sarcoma. Despite numerous doctors warning her of imminent death, she survived. After years of chemotherapy, radiation therapy , and surgery, she was declared to be in remission. She got married and sought her doctor's advice on whether she could become pregnant with her health history. Since her cancer had been in remission for several years, her obstetrician said to go ahead and get pregnant, which she did. At twenty-seven, she married and became pregnant. Carder was referred to George Washington University Hospital's high-risk pregnancy clinic during her fifteenth week due to her medical history.

During a routine hospital visit on June 9, 1987, Carder received an X ray due to complaints of back pain and shortness of breath. Her cancer was shown to have returned in the form of an inoperable tumor, causing her to be admitted to hospital two days later. In 1987, when Carder was twenty-six weeks pregnant, her cancer was discovered to have recurred and metastasized to her lung. On June 12, Carder initially expressed a desire to deliver the baby. Her initial plan was to begin radiation and chemotherapy immediately as she had been through too much already not to at least try to prolong her life, regardless of risks to the fetus. Her condition worsened and physicians notified Carder of her terminal illness on June 15, leading Carder to consent to palliative care. The intent of such treatment was to prolong her life, raising the survival rate of the fetus. Carder was again inquired as to whether she wished to deliver the baby, to which she provided an ambiguous answer. The doctors at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. immediately gave Carder only days to live and disagreed with her choice to put her own life ahead of that of the fetus. Instead of treating the cancer, they ignored her protests and inserted an oral feeding tube into her and administered sedatives in an effort to delay her death and increase her fetus' chance of continued development.

Initial Hearing and Procedure

Whatever her choice, On June 16, administrators of the hospital – who were also the liability risk managers – were concerned that she had not elected to have an immediate C-section. Fearing a lawsuit by aggressive pro-life activists, convened a court hearing at the facility to request an emergency Caesarean section. and obtained separate counsels for Carder, her fetus, and the hospital. At the hearing, family members, including Carder’s husband, parents, and personal obstetricians opposed the C-section on the ground that neither Carder nor the fetus would survive.on the grounds that she would be unlikely to survive it and that she would not want it (Carder herself, now gravely ill and heavily sedated, did not testify). Her treating physicians also opposed the procedure. However, a neonatologist not personally familiar with her medical status testified that the fetus would have at least a 60% chance of survival – nearly that of a healthy woman’s fetus at the same gestational age. Carder’s own long-term oncologist was not contacted; he has since stated that he would have called the procedure "medically inadvisable both for Angela Carder and for the fetus". Evidence to the court hypothesized that the fetus currently had a fifty to sixty percent chance of survival, which would decrease if the procedure was delayed. The court was informed that the fetus was viable, or could live outside the mother, but would be unlikely to survive a post-mortem delivery. It was also stated that Carder was likely to die sooner as a result of such a procedure. However, doctors' testimony to the court was contradicting in regards to the prognosis of the procedure. The judge had also been unable to identify Carder's wishes or her level of competency.Nonetheless, and despite medical testimony that such a procedure would probably end Carder’s life, an Ultimately, an order was issued by the judge authorizing the hospital to perform an immediate Caesarean section. The judge based the decision on both evidence provided by the hospital and precedent of In Re Madyun. Obstetricians at the hospital initially refused to carry out the procedure, but eventually one reluctantly agreed.

Carder was informed of the court's order once she became conscious and she was asked if she wanted to proceed with the Caesarean section. Although she initially confirmed her intent to proceed, she reportedly contradicted herself a few moments later. The court maintained its decision and ordered the procedure to continue. Given the apparent change in circumstances, Carder's family and attorney attempted to gain a stay of proceedings from the judge, but the request was denied.

A three-judge appellate panel upheld the decision in an emergency telephone appeal, despite Carder’s own repeated pleas of "I don’t want it done." Exactly how long the fetus survived is a matter of some dispute; the most commonly cited figure is two hours. Susan Faludi quotes the obstetrician who performed the surgery as saying attempts to inflate the fetus’s lungs were "like trying to ventilate a rock". Thus, Carder underwent the operation. The fetus reportedly survived for three hours after the surgery, while Carder survived two days before her death. Some physicians suggest that she would have lived a few days longer if not for the Caesarean section.

Angela Carder was informed of her baby's death and survived her surgery for two days before lapsing into a coma and dying thereafter.

Appeal Proceedings

In the wake of the surgery, Carder’s family and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project asked the D.C. Court of Appeals to vacate the order and its legal precedent on the issues of informed consent and bodily integrity. One hundred and twenty organizations joined amicus briefs on Carder’s behalf, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Only two Two groups defended the initial decision: the forced surgery. One of them was the Americans United for Life. The other was and the United Catholic Conference, now known as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The USCCB filed an amicus brief arguing that the lower court's decision to force Angela to undergo surgery that was likely to and did contribute to her death, was "the correct choice." The USCCB has never repudiated their position in this case. One attorney for the hospital argued that it was appropriate to sacrifice a dying woman for her fetus; an appeals court judge is reported to have replied, "Are you urging this court to find that you can handcuff a woman to a bed and force her to give birth?"  On April 26, 1990, the majority of the appeals court vacated the initial court order by issuing the ruling In re A.C.the court issued the ruling In re A.C., which vacated the previous decisions and ruled that Angela Carder had the right to make health-care decisions for herself and her fetus. The decision found the judge had failed to properly balance the rights of Carder not to consent to the procedure and the interests of the state. In re A.C. is commonly lauded as a victory for women's rights, but it did not grant absolute autonomy of a woman against procedures ordered by the state. Instead, it asserted that in "virtually all cases," a patient's desires must be adhered to if they are deemed competent.

Civil Suit

Keeping following section as is, but added citations....

At the same time as the Court of Appeals case, the ACLU and Carder’s parents, Daniel and Nettie Stoner, instituted a civil action, Stoners v. George Washington University Hospital, et al., suing the hospital for deprivation of human rights, discrimination, wrongful death and malpractice, among other charges. In November 1990, days before the scheduled trial was to begin, the hospital settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money and a promise of new hospital policies protecting the rights of pregnant women.