Indian Activist Urmi Basu: Sex Selection Fuels Human Trafficking
By Viji Sundaram,
New America Media
| 09. 24. 2012
Editor's Note: The practice of gender selection, grinding poverty among the people and the stifling caste system have contributed to making India the country with the largest number of human trafficking victims in the world today.NAM editor Viji Sundaram talked with Urmi Basu, founder and trustee of the Kolkata-based New Light shelter program for prostitutes and their children, while Basu was on a brief visit to California. The trip comes ahead of the U.S. broadcast of the PBS documentary, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which features the work of the activist.
The heart-wrenching film takes the readers to several countries in Africa, Southeast Asia and India where young girls are victims of unspeakable violence, but where too women’s rights activists are providing them opportunities to get back on their feet when they leave their oppressors. The four-hour film was inspired by the widely acclaimed book of the same name by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.NAM: When and why did you start New Light, and could you...
Related Articles
By Nick Paul Taylor, BioSpace | 03.14.2024
A U.K. watchdog balked at the cost-effectiveness of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CRISPR-based sickle cell disease therapy Thursday, recommending against funding the treatment unless uncertainties can be cleared up satisfactorily.
The U.K. became the first country to authorize Vertex’s Casgevy (exagamglogene...
By Anna Collinson, Maryam Ahmed and Bella McShane, BBC | 03.12.2024
Women who freeze their eggs are being misled by some UK clinics about their chances of having a baby, a fertility charity says.
The Fertility Network was reacting to BBC analysis that found 41% of clinics offering the service privately...
By Isabelle Bartram, Guest Contributor
| 03.13.2024
Note: This article was originally published in February 2024 in issue 268 of the German-language journal Der Gen-ethische Informationsdienst (GID). It is also part of an English-language dossier on Heritable Human Genome Editing published at the same time. Minor edits have been made.
Calls for German embryo research
Pressure on the German Embryo Protection Act is growing. The scientific community is launching a renewed attack on the controversial law and demands access to embryos for so-called high-ranking research objectives. "Germline therapies" are...
By Andrew Joseph, STAT | 02.22.2024
In the years leading up to Russia’s invasion, Ukraine had become a burgeoning hub of clinical trials, particularly in oncology. The war put a hold on the vast majority of those studies.
But as the country marks two years this...