Thread by @AliVelshi

Gender equality is "vanishing before our eyes.”

That was the warning from the U.N. Secretary General ahead of #InternationalWomen's day last week. 🧵

He made special reference to Afghanistan, saying that women and girls have been “erased from public life” under the Taliban, and he singled out Afghanistan as the most repressive nation in the world for women and girls.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has restricted education for girls after the sixth grade. Women are banned from public spaces, from parks and gyms.

The Associated Press reports that despite the extreme crackdown on women's freedoms, small groups of women did gather to advocate for their right to an education to mark International Women's Day.

And about 200 small business owners, all women, met to exhibit their products and protest the impact that Taliban rule has had on their work.

There have been more than 30 Taliban orders barring women from public life and severely limiting their rights, since the Taliban takeover in 2021.

In Pakistan, authorities banned and suppressed Women's Day protests. In the eastern city of Lahore, the local government imposed a ban on protests, gatherings, rallies, or any kind of Women's Day demonstration. Women showed up anyway.

In the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, police attempted to prevent an International Women's Day march by blocking off roads, using shipping containers to block gathering areas, and razor-wire to deter protesters.

Women showed up anyway, chanting “women have woken up” - they marched for their safety, demanding an end to gender-based violence and discrimination.

Protests for women's rights in Iran continued this week, and have been ongoing for seven months now, following the death of Mahsa Amini three days after she was detained by the so-called “morality police”.

The Iranian government has detained tens of thousands of people since the protests erupted in September, and hundreds of people have been killed as the government has cracked down on the movement.

In a brief expression of freedom, five teenaged girls posted a video of themselves dancing on International Women's Day. According to Radio Free Europe, Iranian Authorities are now searching for the girls, who may face arrest.

In Japan, women's rights activists organized a rally to demand that the government allow women not to take their husband's last name.

Thousands of women took to the streets in Bogota, Colombia to protest femicide and to demand further protections for women's rights. Just last year, Colombia decriminalized abortion up to the 24th week.

Throughout Brazil, women marched for their rights, and President Lula de Silva announced measures to achieve equal pay, reduce gender-based violence, and bolster women's healthcare.
In Manila, women marched for better jobs and fair wages and were met with police pushback.

In Paris, and in Madrid, and in Berlin, women showed up to demand the wage gap finally close. Around the world, women are calling for equality. Equality that seems elusive as time goes on.

Here in America, work remains to be done as we inch ever so slowly to equity for women. We are still fighting to close the gender wage gap.

Data collected by the Commonwealth fund found that the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy nation - disproportionately affecting women of color, particularly black women.

And this year, abortion is now illegal in twelve states, and highly restricted in over half of the country.

Some people are being forced to carry pregnancies they don't want, while others are being denied lifesaving medical treatment because physicians are scared to face felony charges for administering it, even if the fetus is nonviable, even if it puts the life of the mother at risk.

Women and doctors are being forced to speak in code, because in some places in this country, doctors are afraid to lose their licenses - or be charged - if they even give advice on abortion related care.

And now that abortion is harder to get in clinics and medical facilities, women in America are increasingly turning to medication abortions, which can be done safely at home.

But now the nation’s second largest pharmacy, Walgreens, has announced that it will not distribute abortion medication in 20 states, including at least four in which abortion remains legal.

International Women's day was first established in 1977 - the constitutional right to abortion was established in 1973. So in this country, we have never acknowledged “international women's day” without the constitutionally enshrined right to bodily autonomy.

Until this year.

This year, millions of Americans have *fewer* rights, and *less* bodily autonomy, than they did just one year ago.

Gender equality... "vanishing before our eyes."