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U.S. women are on track to triple political giving in 2008 compared to 2000, we report in our weekly round up of cheers and jeers. On the sobering side: UNICEF calls maternal mortality worst health inequity in the world.

Here's today's update:

CHEERS AND JEERS OF THE WEEK

Women Give More to a World That Lets Them Die

By Soguel and Thurston
WeNews correspondents

(WOMENSENEWS)--

Cheers

Women are on track to triple their political giving in 2008 compared to 2000, a jump spurred by three decades' of income gains, which have fattened their pay checks by 60 percent, the Women's Campaign Forum Foundation reported Sept. 23.

So far women have given $200 million to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama and $109 million to his GOP opponent Sen. John McCain. Women donated $120 million to Sen. Hillary Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination.

With all that, women still represent just 27 percent of all campaign contributions. But in other categories of civic generosity--philanthropy and donations--women have surpassed men for the first time, U.S. News and World Report reported Sept. 23, citing federal tax data from 2005 that pegged women's gifts at $21.7 billion and men's at $16.8 billion.

More News to Cheer This Week:

• Diane Schroer won her sex discrimination case against the Library of Congress, the Advocate reported Sept. 23. The library argued that federal law did not protect Schroer as a transgender woman. Schroer applied for the job as a male then disclosed that she would transition to a woman after she was hired.
• A Malian woman received a second shot at asylum in the United States after Attorney General Michael Mukasy ordered a midlevel federal court to reconsider the case based on female genital mutilation on Sept. 22. U.S. immigration courts rule on 40,000 cases per year but the attorney general has weighed in only three times in three years, AP reported.
• A Women's Sports Foundation analysis this week of collegiate athletics concludes Title IX has not caused the elimination of men's teams, the Wall Street Journal reported Sept. 24. The study partly blames unrestrained spending on the most lucrative sports, football and men's basketball, for cutbacks in other programs.
• New regulations require Chinese police to respond to the scene of all complaints of domestic violence, the People's Daily Online reported Sept. 24.
• The eighth annual Brides' March in New York on Sept. 26, organized by New York Latinas Against Violence, continued to memorialize the 1999 wedding-day murder of Gladys Ricart.
• A Sept. 29 concert at the Times Center in New York will feature a program of music entirely composed by living U.S. women.

Jeers

Half a million women continue to die in pregnancy or child birth ever year while another 10 to 15 million sustain injuries during delivery.

Maternal mortality is the largest health inequity in the world, according to UNICEF. A woman in Niger faces a 1-in-7 chance of dying from childbirth-related causes, while a woman in Sweden's risk is 1- in-17,400.

An additional 334,000 midwives could reduce the number of women dying in pregnancy and childbirth worldwide by 75 percent, the World Health Organization reported. In a bright spot, The United Nations Population Fund pledged $9 million on Sept. 17 to improve access to midwives in 11 countries in Africa with high maternal mortality rates.

More News to Jeer This Week:

• Declines in U.S. abortion rates mask the problem of unintended pregnancy among women of color and women with lower incomes, data released by the Guttmacher Institute on Sept. 23 showed. Abortion rates dropped 33 percent between 1980 and 2004, reaching the lowest level since 1974. But amid that, the abortion rate for black women was five times higher than for white women, and Latina women had a rate three times higher. The abortion rate for teens dropped to 17 percent in 2004 from 33 percent in 1974, and account for 7 percent of all terminations. Sixty percent of women who had abortions already had children.
• TV star Alec Baldwin is promoting the debunked theory of parental alienation syndrome in a new book, "A Promise to Ourselves" about his bitter custody dispute with actress Kim Basinger, the group Voices of Women Organizing Project announced in a press release. The parental alienation argument is often used to award custody to fathers and away from battered women who have accused the father of family violence. Proponents of the alienation syndrome argue that mothers are making the using abuse claims only as leverage in custody battles.
• Acute poverty in central Uganda is causing more girls to be sold into early marriage and prostitution, the Kampala-based Daily Monitor Website reported Sept. 20. In Wasiko district, 29.4 percent of school children have STDs, 60 percent suffer abuse, and 29.5 percent of dropouts are from school after pregnancies or early marriage, according to a study by Concern for Children and Women Empowerment, an advocacy group.
• In the United Arab Emirates 39 percent of women are employed compared with 92 percent of men, The National, based in Dubai, reported Sept. 26. Many women seek jobs abroad, widening the gender gap in work force participation, according to the Ministry of Labor.
• Researchers found cancer related chemicals in the blood and urine sample of 20 teenage girls from across America, USA Today reported Sept. 25. While those teen in the study used many cosmetics with the potentially harmful ingredients, the tests also indicated the presence of many other potentially dangerous chemicals. The ingredients in common cosmetics impact hormones and could cause cancer or other health problems, the Environmental Working Group report said.

In Memoriam:

• Nancy Hicks Maynard, the first African American woman to own a major daily U.S. newspaper, died Sept. 21 from organ failure in Los Angeles. The trailblazer was 61. Maynard also co-founded the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education to train minority reporters and encourage newsrooms across the country to diversify their staffs and reporting. She and her husband took over the Oakland Tribune in 1983, then sold it in 1992. "She was fearless, always very optimistic also about what could be achieved," her former colleague Steve Montiel told the paper. "She understood power and was able to get leaders in the industry and heads of companies to listen to what she had to say."
• Mary Garber, known as "Miss Mary" to colleagues, died at age 92 in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Sept. 21. She is the only woman to win sports journalism's highest honor, the Red Smith Award, and is believed to be the first female staff sports reporter at a daily paper. Early in her career she wore skirts--the only acceptable attire for a woman at the time--as she ran up and down the sidelines of football games. At the Winston-Salem Journal, where she spent much of her 51-year career, she covered all the male sports and also reported on female athletes and games held at historically black colleges and high schools that were ignored by other papers.

Dominique Soguel is Arabic editor and Jennifer Thurston is associate editor of Women's eNews.

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