"There Is a Big Question Mark": Managing Ambiguity in a Moroccan Maternity Ward.

In Morocco, where extramarital sex and abortion are illegal, single mothers' ambiguous status before the law inflects medical decision-making. Leaky boundaries between the court and the hospital required doctors and administrators to work with multiple forms of documentation while anticipating external surveillance. Gaps between everyday experience and legalized forms of identity created confusion across multiple institutions. When discussing single mothers, hospital staff often spoke of "question marks" that flagged tensions between legibility and liability, disappearance and documentation. Managing question marks ramified surveillance and categorization. Ultimately, however, attempts to administratively resolve single mothers' ambiguity created gaps and inconsistencies that allowed vulnerable patients to disappear from view.

A survey of judicial decisions concerning surrogacy disputes in Taiwan.

OBJECTIVE: Currently, Taiwan's Artificial Reproduction Act denies the legality of practicing surrogacy in Taiwan. The fact that numerous intended parents access surrogacy through fertility tourism or illegal practice leads to various types of disputes. This article illustrates the types of surrogacy-related disputes in Taiwan's legal environment, which lacks all regulation of surrogacy. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study used "surrogacy" and "surrogate mother" as keywords to search for related district court civil and criminal decisions in the Law and Regulations Retrieving System maintained by the Judicial Yuan of the Republic of China. The authors read and selected decisions with true relevance to surrogacy issues, analyzed all cases, and categorized the cases according to the various types of disputes. RESULTS: This study found 27 surrogacy cases with 62 decisions and 2 records, which were categorized into five types: 1. Fraud and forging instruments (5 cases); 2. Contract disputes (2 cases); 3. Loss of consortium and adultery (5 cases); 4. Paternity and adoption issues (16 cases); and 5. Broker and medical institution's responsibility (5 cases). CONCLUSION: Many patients in Taiwan are eager to access surrogacy, but the law does not allow it. Many disputes occur simply because the law forbids surrogacy. In Taiwan's current situation, some intended parents attempt fraudulent access to surrogacy. The authors of this article urge the Taiwanese government to legalize surrogacy to resolve intended parents' difficulties and avoid numerous possible disputes.

[The mortality rate for homicide among women in Italy: a historical and geographical analysis as a contribution to the study of femicide]. / La mortalità per omicidio tra le donne in Italia: un'analisi storico-geografica come contributo allo studio del femminicidio.

As 70% of the killings of women takes place in the context of relational dynamics and in 80% of the cases the perpetrator is a man, we can presume that femicide constitutes much of the homicide mortality among women. Epidemiological surveillance of the killings of women can, therefore, provide indicators on the trends and geographical distribution of femicide and, indirectly, of the more general phenomenon of harassment and violence against women. The analysis of 40 years of mortality shows only a slight decrease of the murders of women nationwide. This suggests that the factors that underline this phenomenon are deeply rooted in the relationship between men and women. The decrease has taken place mainly in the South and Islands and the percentage SMRs point to a reversal of the relationship between geographic areas: thus, at the end of the observation period the North-West assumes a greater weight than the South and Islands. So we cannot exclude that part of the decrease in murders of women can be attributed to the overall decrease in homicides related to criminal activity, most pronounced in the South and Islands.

The other woman and her child: extra-marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth-century Britain.

This article investigates the numbers of 'other women' and their children up until the 1960s in Britain. It analyses 'irregular and illicit unions' in the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now One Parent Families/Gingerbread), and explores evidence on these unions in the debates over the passage of the Divorce Acts of 1923 and 1937 as well as the Legitimacy Acts of 1926 and 1959. It suggests that the prevalence of illicit unions throughout the twentieth century and before allows us to question contemporary concerns about our supposed 'divorcing society' and the decline of family life in modern Britain.

The mistress, the midwife, and the medical doctor: pregnancy and childbirth on the plantations of the antebellum American South, 1800-1860.

This article represents a step towards examining the relationship between three key figures in the antebellum American South: the plantation mistress, the slave-midwife, and the professional male physician. It elucidates how the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, which brought women close to death, formed the basis of a deeper, positive relationship between the black and white women of the antebellum South, and assesses the ways in which the professionalization of medicine affected this reproductive bond. Evaluating such a complicated network of relationships necessitates dissecting numerous layers of social interaction, including black and white women's shared cultural experiences and solidarity as reproductive beings; the role, power, and significance of slave-midwives and other enslaved caretakers in white plantation births; the cooperation between pregnant bondswomen and plantation mistresses; and the impact that the burgeoning profession of medicine had on the procreative union between antebellum black and white women.