ADHD treatment causes young boys to develop female breasts

3news.co.nz | May 26, 2009

In Janssen's own clinical trials, 43 children developed the abnormal breasts

A drug used to treat ADHD children is causing concern in the United States.

It is called Risperdal and it is supposed to be used primarily for adults with sever psychological problems.

But last year it was prescribed more than 6.5 million times.

The side effects include young males developing female sex organs.

Nineteen-year-old John was just seven when he began taking Risperdal for ADD.

Even though the FDA approved the drug only for adult patients who were psychotic, John’s doctor and others widely prescribed it to kids for less severe behaviour problems.

Once taking Risperdal, John’s mum says he became aggressive, sleepy, and developed bowel problems. But the biggest shock came when he was 14 and started developing women’s breasts.

“He asked me if he was a girl,” she says.

It turns out Risperdal can increase production of a hormone called prolactin, which stimulates breast growth. It is called gynecomastia – and it is irreversible.

Risperdal and other so-called “atypical anti-psychotics” have exploded in use.

Hundreds of thousands of kids have been prescribed Risperdal in the 14 years it has been on sale – long before the FDA approved it for very limited pediatric use in 2006.

John and most of the other children were not psychotic at all, but were given Risperdal for behaviour disorders including autism and ADD.

Attorney Stephen Sheller is suing Janssen, which makes Risperdal. He claims Janssen marketed Risperdal for unapproved uses in children, downplayed serious risks like diabetes and seizures.

Janssen would not agree to an interview but told us the breast growth risk is “clearly stated in the FDA-approved” labelling, and “we only promote our products for their FDA-approved indications.”

Nobody knows how often it happens. But in Janssen’s own clinical trials with fewer than 2,000 children (1,885), 43 developed the abnormal breasts.

Mr Sheller represents John and nine other boys – one of whom was only four when he developed a breast on one side and began producing milk.

The treatment for the unbridled breast growth is as unthinkable as the disorder: painful removal of the breasts.
Eventually, the boys can appear normal again.

The family’s lawsuit is still in court.

But John’s mother says surgery did not fix all of the problems from the medicine.

When asked if John still thinks he’s a girl his mother wells up and cries before answering, “yes.”

As for Risperdal – it’s still on the market.  And families say putting even more children at risk.

Women to delay motherhood into their 40s and beyond through ovary storage

Women will soon be able to delay motherhood into their 40s and beyond by having one of their ovaries removed and stored, the doctor behind the world’s first whole ovary transplant has said.

“They do not want to commit to a relationship until they are sure it is the right one, they want to get the degree, save a little money and buy the nice flat. It is the modern way.”

Telegraph | Nov 11, 2008

By Rebecca Smith

Dr Sherman Silber, performed the transplant between two twins last year and the recipient, who cannot be named, is due to give birth in London today.

The operation is the first where the whole organ has been transplanted from one person to another.

Previously slivers of ovarian tissue have been removed and re-implanted and have successfully begun to produce eggs resulting in pregnancies and births.

The technique will offer hope to women undergoing treatment for cancer which can leave them infertile by allowing them to store an ovary before having cancer treatment and then re-implanting it once they have the all clear.

But the ‘overwhelming usage’ will be women who want to preserve their fertility for the future and it delay the menopause, Dr Silber said.

“We are in the midst of an infertility epidemic which has become an enormous public problem.

“The reason is that women have opportunities they didn’t have before, they do not want to commit to a relationship until they are sure it is the right one, they want to get the degree, save a little money and buy the nice flat.

“It is the modern way, not just in England or the USA, everywhere women are putting off child-bearing.”

He said women could have one ovary removed and frozen in their 20s for use in the future.

Dr Silber said: “They then have a young ovary that can be transplanted back at any time and extend fertility.”

Dr Silber carried out the ovarian transplant in St Louis, Missouri, last year. Previous attempts in India and China have failed.

The donor twin, who lives in Vancouver in Canada, donated her ovary to her sister, who lives in London with her husband, who had gone through an early menopause which had left her with severe osteoporosis, due to the lack of hormones made by the ovaries.

She wanted a long-term solution rather than use hormone replacement therapy and insisted on the ‘daring procedure’, Dr Silber said.

Just a few months after the surgery, she fell pregnant.

She will have to take immuno-surpressant drugs for the rest of her life although this is not thought to harm the developing baby as experience with 2,000 births from women who have had kidney transplants has demonstrated.

The twins are identical so the suppression drugs can be kept to a minimum and also the ovary is not rejected as readily as some other organs.

The case has proven the delicate technique works and in four non-identical twins will go through the surgery next year, Dr Silber said.

But the ‘critical pay-off’, he said, was the fact that women would now be able to preserve their fertility using this method. He said it was ’so much nicer and more convenient’ than using an egg donor in order to conceive and ethically there is no problem.

Magazine Promotes Sterilization For Women In Their 20’s

‘Young, Single and Sterilized’ article advertises for birth control clinic founded by Nazi eugenicist Marie Stopes

Prison Planet | Sep 23, 2008

by Paul Joseph Watson

A popular women’s magazine in the UK recently featured an article entitled, Young, Single and Sterilized, in which women in their 20’s discussed why they had undergone an operation to prevent them from ever having children. The article is little more than PR for a “women’s charity” called Marie Stopes International, an organization that carries out abortions and sterilizations and was founded by a Nazi eugenicist who advocated compulsory sterilization of non-whites and “those of bad character”.

The story appears in a weekly magazine called Love It (click for PDF enlargement). One of the women featured in the article, Chloe, explains why she decided to have herself sterilized at the age of just 20.

“By the time I was 18, I knew I was never going to change. I couldn’t imagine letting something take over my body and then my whole life.”

“I couldn’t even look at a baby without feeling uncomfortable.”

Following the sterilization procedure, Chloe celebrates the fact that “I’ve got a lifetime of going out ahead of me now,” presumably meaning going out, getting mindlessly drunk and having sex with random strangers, as is British culture, while not having to worry about the risk of pregnancy or the responsibility of looking after a child.

Despite admitting that she has not told any of her family and not even her own mother about the sterilization, the article ends with Chloe boldly stating that it was, “the most sensible adult decision I’ll ever make.”

Another ’success story’ as the article skews it is Charlie McCann, who was sterilized on her 30th birthday and, we read, “is happy with her choice, insisting the men in her life have to adjust.” Her then boyfriend decided to adjust by ending the relationship because he couldn’t bear never having children.

Ironically, another woman speaks about how she first became interested in the idea of being sterilized after reading about the subject in a women’s magazine.

Jacquelyn Arnold tells of how she felt “irritation” at the sight of children playing in a garden and decided to go ahead with the operation, which is described in routine and straightforward terms. Arnold says she has no regrets and has ‘taken control of her life’.

Sterilization is lauded as an “excellent method of birth control” by Dr. Patricia Lohr of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

The article includes an advertisement that encourages women to seek “more information about sterilization” by contacting Marie Stopes International. We read that, “Over the past year, a quarter of the women who booked a sterilisation consultation with women’s charity Marie Stopes were aged 30 or under.”

Marie Stopes was a feminist who opened the first birth control clinic in Britain in 1921 as well as being Nazi sympathizer and a eugenicist who advocated that non-whites and the poor be sterilized.

Stopes, a racist and an anti-Semite, campaigned for selective breeding to achieve racial purity, a passion she shared with Adolf Hitler in adoring letters and poems that she sent the leader of the Third Reich.

Stopes also attended the Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935, while calling for the “compulsory sterilization of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character.” Stopes acted on her appalling theories by concentrating her abortion clinics in poor areas so as to reduce the birth rate of the lower classes.

Stopes left most of her estate to the Eugenics Society, an organization that shared her passion for racial purity and still exists today under the new name The Galton Institute. The society has included members such as Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the evolutionist), Julian Huxley and Margaret Sanger.

Ominously, The Galton Institute website promotes its support and funding initiative for “the practical delivery of family planning facilities, especially in developing countries.” In other words, the same organization that once advocated sterilizing black people to achieve racial purity in the same vein as the Nazis is now bankrolling abortions of black babies in the third world.

While the issue of abortion is an entirely different argument, most would agree that no matter how extreme it sounds, a woman has the right to sterilize herself if she so chooses, just as a man has the right to a vasectomy.

But when a magazine aimed primarily at young women all but encourages girls as young as 20 to have their fallopian tubes tied in order to prevent the “irritation” of children entering their lives and then advertises an organization founded by a Nazi eugenicist that can perform the operation, something has to be amiss.

Even more shocking than this is the fact that the majority of people in the UK routinely express their support for society’s “undesirables” to be forcibly sterilized by the state, harking back to a time when such a thing was commonplace right up to the 1970’s in some areas of America and Europe.

As we highlighted earlier this month, respondents to a Daily Mail article about Royal Mail honoring Marie Stopes by using her image on a commemorative stamp were not disgusted at Royal Mail for paying homage to a racist Nazi eugenicist, but were merely keen to express their full agreement that those deemed not to be of pure genetic stock or of the approved character should be forcibly sterilized and prevented from having children.

“A lot of people should be sterilized, IMO. It’s still true today,” wrote one.

“Just imagine what a stable, well-ordered society we’d have if compulsory sterilisation had been adopted years ago for the socially undesirable,” states another respondent, calling for a “satellite-carried sterilisation ray” to be installed in space to zap the undesirables.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer slaying church attendance among women

The old-fashioned attitudes and hierarchies of the Church of England are causing a steep decline in the number of female worshippers, according to an academic study.

Young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.

Telegraph | Aug 22, 2008

By Martin Beckford

The report claims more than 50,000 women a year have deserted their congregations over the past two decades because they feel the church is not relevant to their lives.

It says that instead young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.

The study comes amid ongoing controversy over the role of women in the Church of England. Last month its governing body voted to allow women to become bishops for the first time, having admitted them to the priesthood in 1994, but traditionalist bishops have warned that hundreds of clergy and parishes will leave if the move goes ahead as planned.

The report’s author, Dr Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby, said: “In short, women are abandoning the church.

“Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularised by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church.

“Women’s ordination, as priests and now bishops, has dominated debate and headlines – but while looking at women in the pulpit we have taken our eyes off the pews, where a shift with more consequences for the church’s survival is underway.”

Her research, published in a new book called Women and Religion in the West, cites an English Church Census which found more than a million women worshippers have left the Church of England since 1989.

Over the past decade, it claims, women have been leaving churches at twice the rate of men.

In addition, the census is said to show that teenage boys now outnumber girls in the pews for the first time.

Dr Aune says the church must adapt to the needs of modern women if it is to stop them leaving in their droves.

She believes many women have been put off going to church in recent years because of the influence of feminism, which challenged the traditional Christian view of women’s roles and raised their aspirations.

Her report claims they feel forced out of the church because of its “silence” about sexual desire and activity, and because of its hostility to single-parent families and unmarried couples which are now a reality for many women.

But it also says changes in women’s working lives, with many more now pursuing careers as well as raising children, mean they have less time to attend church.

Dr Aune believes churches must now introduce services and activities that fit in better with modern’s women’s schedules, such as Saturday morning breakfast clubs.

She said: “Gone are the days when the mother was at home during the day and had time to visit the church’s coffee mornings and mother and toddler groups.

“With the pressures women face, churches must adapt to make themselves more accessible.”

Christina Rees, chairman of the pro-women bishop campaign group Watch, said the report highlighted the damaging effect that traditionalist attitudes within the Church of England are having on women.

She added that the introduction of female bishops will lead to a renewed interest in the church among young people and women in particular, despite the opposition to the historic step from Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals who believe scripture and tradition teach that bishops must be male.

Ms Rees told The Daily Telegraph: “What this research reveals is that a lot of people are put off by traditional stances and attitudes. We still have a long way to go before women, particularly young women, feel as included in the church as men do.

“I’m absolutely convinced that when we have women as bishops that it will send out a very clear message that women are as valued as much as men.”

The Church of England declined to comment.

Men aged 18 to 30 on Viagra to keep up with Sex And The City generation

Health experts believe young men are turning to Viagra to keep up with modern women inspired by Sex And The City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker

Daily Mail | Jun 14, 2008

By  Jo Macfarlane

It used to be that men had the upper hand when it came to confidence in the bedroom.

But health experts say ever-younger men are increasingly turning to Viagra in a bid to keep up with modern women inspired by the strong female characters in films such as Sex And The City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

Relationship therapists are also seeing a rise in the number of men in their 30s asking about the impotence drug, traditionally prescribed to those more than two decades older.

Experts believe the men feel increasingly emasculated by today’s women.

They claim that women, following the example of television and film characters, are more vocal about their desires and demand a higher level of stamina and imagination in the bedroom.

The pressure is causing an increasing number of men to experience ‘performance anxiety’ and, in extreme cases, is leading to diagnoses of erectile dysfunction, requiring specialist treatment. Dr John Tomlinson, a former GP and trustee of the Sexual Dysfunction Association, said he was hearing from an ‘ enormous’ number of 18- to 40-year-olds worried about sexual problems.

He suggested advertising – such as David Beckham’s Armani underwear campaign – glamorises the well-toned male body, which men find daunting because they assume it is what women expect.

He said: ‘Men may feel emasculated by modern women and feminism has taken its toll. But most of the problems are psychological. I’m sure many of these men are fuelling the counterfeit drugs industry by buying their Viagra online, so the real picture is likely to be bigger than GPs are reporting.’

There are no official figures for the number of young men taking Viagra because it is not routinely recorded by doctors. Many also opt to seek treatment privately. BUPA said it could not provide data on consultations. However, health experts agreed the average age for men seeking the drug is falling.

Dr John Dean, a specialist in sexual medicine, said when Viagra was introduced ten years ago, it would have been unusual to treat men in their 30s. Now, however, it is common, he said.

Peter Baker, of the Men’s Health Forum website, said it is ‘well-known’ among health professionals that younger men are turning to Viagra.

Relationship experts said the prevalence of pornography in society also left men with unrealistic expectations.

Sex therapist Denise Knowles, of counselling service Relate, said: ‘Pornography affects how men see themselves and how they think women will see them. Further pressure comes from the myth that men should know what to do in the bedroom and that women are difficult to satisfy.’

Nearly 6.5 million tablets of Viagra – launched by drugs firm Pfizer in 1998 – were issued in England in 2007, costing the NHS £35million. Research in 2004 found that taking the drug recreationally could affect fertility.

Women given right to have children without fathers

Single women and lesbian couples won landmark parental rights last night as MPs voted to remove the requirement that fertility clinics consider a child’s need for a father.

Times Online | May 20, 2008

By Mark Henderson, Francis Elliott, Ruth Gledhill and Sam Coates

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will replace the rule with a “need for supportive parenting” after opponents were defeated in two votes by unexpectedly wide margins.

The Government had been prepared for defeat but won the free votes by majorities of 75 and 68. The decisions mean that the legislation will grant the most significant extension to homosexual family rights since gay adoption was sanctioned.

It will stop fertility clinics turning away lesbians and single women because their children will not have a father or male role model. While the current law does not block such therapy, it is sometimes used to justify refusals.

In another landmark decision last night, MPs rejected moves to prevent women having abortions up to 24 weeks into pregnancy. In the first vote on the issue in 18 years, an attempt to reduce the limit to 22 weeks was rejected by 71 votes. An attempt to reduce the limit to 20 weeks was defeated by a majority of 142.

The defeat came despite a high-profile cross-party campaign and the decision by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, to back a reduction in the limit to 20 weeks. The Prime Minister voted to retain the existing limit.

The Government has now won all four of the measures on which it agreed to grant Labour MPs a free vote. Moves to allow the creation of hybrid embryos for medical research, and “saviour siblings” screened as suitable tissue donors for sick children, were passed by large majorities on Monday.

MPs who backed the fatherhood amendments said the traditional family would be undermined. Iain Duncan Smith, who proposed enshrining the importance of a father and mother, said that the new law would amount to telling couples that “fathers are not important, or are less important than mothers”.

The former Tory leader said there was overwhelming evidence that children without fathers were more likely to have problems at school and with drink and drugs. He also questioned whether the existing law led to genuine discrimination, as many IVF clinics already treated lesbians and single women.

His criticisms were backed by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’ Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, in an interview with The Times. “I think it strange that the Government should want to take away not just the need for a father but the right for a father,” he said.

The law will now be brought into line with the Human Rights Act. The Bill will also allow both partners to be recognised as parents when lesbian couples conceive with donated sperm, or gay men use surrogacy. At present, only the natural mother or father is automatically considered to be a parent when gay couples have fertility treatment.

A Times/Populus poll last month found that 40 per cent of people were against the Government’s proposals and 32 per cent in favour. It also revealed a generational divide: while over-55s were strongly opposed, 18 to 34-year-olds were strongly in favour of reform.

6-Year Old Boy Accused of Sexual Harassment

Kindergarten student’s father fears his son will be stereotyped as a “pervert”

WSPA | Apr 4, 2008

A six-year old boy is accused of sexually harassing a teacher in Greer. The kindergarten student is now facing possible discipline.

Malory Pinkney, Sr. says his son came home Tuesday in tears from Skyland Elementary. His father is a minister and says his child has been accused of sexual harassment by one of the teachers there.

Pinkney says the boy brought home a discipline referral that says the child told his teacher that one of his classmates liked looking at her behind.

Pinkney doesn’t deny the allegation, but says his son is going to be labeled as a result of this situation.

“Here is my son is six years old,” says Malory Pinkney, Sr. “Now he’s getting ready to have something put on his record that’s going to follow him for the rest of his life. So whoever looks at his record, they have already stereotyped him as being some kind of little pervert or something like that. And I have to refuse that.”

The Greenville County School District responded with a written statement saying, “anytime you have a media account, you’re only going to have one side, one viewpoint. Since we can’t give the details, we can assure you the matter was handled appropriately at the school level.”

We did give the district a chance to tell their side in detail, but they declined. The district said that since it was a student discipline matter, they could not make any further comment.

Women’s Support for Clinton Rises in Wake of Perceived Sexism

NY Times | Jan 10, 2008

By JODI KANTOR

If the race wasn’t about gender already, it certainly is now.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been running for president for nearly a year. But in the past week, women in Iowa mostly rejected her, a few days before women in New Hampshire embraced her. All over the country, viewers scrutinized coverage for signs of chauvinism in the race, and many said they found dismaying examples.

Even Democratic women with no intention of voting for Mrs. Clinton found themselves drawn into the debate and shaken by what briefly seemed like a humiliating end to the most promising female candidacy in American history.

The process seems to have changed a few minds, at least for now.

“I was really pained by the thought that her campaign really was over,” said Amy Rees, a stay-at-home mother in San Francisco who will vote in the California Democratic primary on Feb. 5. “I kept thinking that the truth is, a woman — even a woman of her unquestioned intelligence and preparedness — can’t get even a single primary win. It really stung.”

Ms. Rees had favored Senator Barack Obama of Illinois; now she is thinking of voting for Mrs. Clinton.

Until a few weeks ago, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, hardly seemed like someone in need of defending — from sexism or anything else. She was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was a Clinton. And as a former first lady, she was a complicated test case for female achievement.

By losing the first presidential contest, Mrs. Clinton may have succeeded in getting more women to see her as she presents herself: not a dominant figure of power, but a woman trying to break what she has called “the highest and hardest glass ceiling” in America.

“I do want Hillary Rodham Clinton to take the White House, but until she lost Iowa, I didn’t realize how much, or how much it had to do with her being a woman,” said Allison Smith-Estelle, 37, director of a program against domestic violence in Red Lodge, Mont.

What bothered them as much as the Iowa results, said several dozen women in states with coming primaries, was the gleeful reaction to her defeat and what seemed like unfair jabs in the final moments before the New Hampshire voting.

Michelle Six, 36, a lawyer and John Edwards supporter in Los Angeles, said she was horrified to hear Mr. Obama tell Mrs. Clinton she was “likable enough” in a Democratic debate on Saturday. Ms. Six said she found the line condescending, and an echo of other unkind remarks by other men about women over the years.

The likability question, initially raised by a moderator, “wouldn’t be coming up if she wasn’t a woman,” she said.

At work, Ms. Six said, she listened to male colleagues make fun of Mrs. Clinton for choking up at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire. “She’s over,” one chortled, Ms. Six said.

With that, Mrs. Clinton “may just have earned my vote,” Ms. Six said, adding, “I don’t know if I was super-conscious” of the gender factor in the race before then.

In New Hampshire, two hecklers yelled at Mrs. Clinton to iron their shirts — stray comments that angered untold numbers of women after the incident was widely reported. And Mrs. Clinton is the only candidate whose critics complain about the pitch of her voice.

For many women, these moments are deeply personal. Though Sarah Kreps, 31, who is moving to New York, said she would vote for Mr. Obama, seeing Mrs. Clinton debate was a reminder of her time in the Air Force, and the discomfort of being the sole woman in a group of men. The criticisms of Mrs. Clinton’s voice took Ms. Rees back to the time her boss pushed the mute button on a conference call to tell her that her voice was too shrill.

Now that Mrs. Clinton has gone from a solid lead to a tie with Mr. Obama in the latest national Gallup poll, some voters are thinking back to incidents that they say now seem suspect to them: the debate in which Mr. Edwards critiqued the bright jacket Mrs. Clinton was wearing, or the one at which Mrs. Clinton was asked, by a woman, if she preferred diamonds or pearls.

Other women mentioned how they were shocked to see how the only female candidate was perceived by some voters. For Jodi Cohen, 31, a recruiter in Orange County, Calif., it was the relative who recently told her that he admired Bill Clinton but would not vote for his wife because she had stayed with her husband after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

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Cuban Women Apply for Masonic Rites

 

Maria Deraismes, French feminist author, lecturer and politician, co-founder of Co-Freemasonry along with Georges Martin, through the La Respectable Loge, Le Droit Humain, Maçonnerie Mixte (Worshipful Lodge, Human Rights, Co-Masonry) in Paris.

IPS | Dec 18, 2007

By Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Dec 18 (IPS) – A group of women are looking forward to founding the first women’s Masonic Lodge in Cuba next year, and so put an end to their traditional exclusion from Freemasonry, an esoteric society which is based on the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.

They are being helped in this endeavour by the Women’s Grand Lodge of Chile, which will send a delegation to Cuba in mid-2008 to initiate several dozen women in Havana and Pinar del Río, 157 kilometres west of the Cuban capital, the head of the Working Committee on Women’s Masonic Lodges in Cuba, Digna Gisela Medina, told IPS.

According to Medina, women have been interested in Freemasonry for centuries, but it is only recently that women’s Lodges have come into being.

“As women achieved their goals and their active participation in society grew, women’s Lodges started to be formed in many countries of the world,” she said.

This has already happened in France, Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and other countries. “It seems to be an irreversible process, and we think that sooner rather than later, women Masons will be internationally accepted by the Regular Grand Lodges,” she added.

Fabian socialist, feminist and Theosophist 33rd degree Freemason Annie Besant

Masonry is self-described as a progressive, philanthropic institution made up of free-thinking persons of good character who seek self-improvement. People of different religious creeds and atheists coexist within it, as do Masons of different political and philosophical persuasions.

But one of the ancient fundamental precepts of the United Grand Lodge of England, which sponsors Regular Lodges all over the world, is to exclude women from the brotherhood. Initiation of women Masons, therefore, would appear to be irregular and problematic.

José Manuel Collera

However, José Manuel Collera, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Cuba from 2000 to 2003, says that “like many other Masons,” he thinks this rule is now outmoded and should be revoked. “Personally, I have always defended the inclusion of women in Freemasonry,” he told IPS.

In his view, excluding women has caused the order to lose its appeal in the modern world. “Women are the most important element in society; they constitute half of humanity, and they are mothers of the other half. There is no doctrinal, philosophical, esoteric or initiatory reason to prevent a woman from becoming a Mason,” he argued.

Collera acknowledged, however, that Cuban women have had to overcome several hurdles in their quest, especially among some of the most conservative male Masons. “But these are only conflicting currents of thought, not an official position of Freemasonry as a whole,” he said.

In any event, sponsorship by the Women’s Grand Lodge of Chile removes any risk of the male Grand Lodge of Cuba losing its regularity and the recognition of the other Grand Lodges it is in amity with, by transgressing the ancient boundaries and accepting women among its numbers.

Women’s Masonry uses the Scottish rite, also practised by the male Cuban Lodges, so the symbols, rituals and initiations will be the same for men and women, said Medina, 46, who is a specialist in maxillofacial surgery at the Calixto García teaching hospital in Havana.

Among the groups of Masonic aspirants, aged 18 to 60, there are professional women and homemakers, Catholics and state employees. “The important qualities are that they should be virtuous, discreet, hardworking, and of course keen to join the Masons,” said Medina, whose father and husband are Freemasons.

Political activism or belonging to other social organisations are no bar to becoming a Mason, Collera and Medina said.

The Working Committee led by Medina was formed two years ago in Havana, and is made up of about 30 women. In Pinar del Río there are 32 women aspirants, and interest has spread to Caibarién, a town on the north coast of the province of Villa Clara, 268 kilometres from Havana, where a new group of women is getting under way.

There are plans for another Working Committee to be set up in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city, which is 847 kilometres southeast of Havana. “We are not interested so much in quantity as in quality,” Medina said.

Statistics from 2004 indicate that there are 29,000 Masons in Cuba, organised in over 300 Lodges. The governing body of the order is the Grand Lodge of Cuba, and both the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, as well as the York Rite, are practised.

According to experts, throughout the history of Cuban Masonry women have always been associated with its activities, lending external support, but until now the felt need of women to enter the inner sanctum of its mysteries has gone unrecognised.

. . .

Related 

Symposium in Cuba to study the history of Freemasonry in Latin America

Hillary Clinton gets Gennifer Flowers’ vote

The Guardian | Dec 8, 2007

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

Gennifer Flowers, once the other woman in Hillary Clinton’s marriage, is back – only this time she claims she has no intention of wrecking Clinton’s personal life or her run for the White House. Flowers may even be offering her vote.

A nightclub singer who came to national attention during the 1992 elections claiming to have had an affair with Bill Clinton, Flowers says she would consider supporting his wife’s run for the White House.

“I can’t help but want to support my own gender, and she’s as experienced as any of the others – except maybe Joe Biden,” she told the Associated Press. Flowers said she had long wanted to see a woman in the White House, and she remains partial to Democrats. “I just didn’t think it would be her,” she admitted.

She promised that she would not try to raise havoc during the campaign, or revive a defamation suit against Clinton, which judges dismissed. “I don’t have any interest whatsoever in getting back out there and bashing Hillary Clinton,” she said.

It marks a turnaround for Flowers, who nearly wrecked Bill Clinton’s campaign with her allegation of a 12-year affair. He initially denied it, but admitted years later to a single sexual encounter with Flowers in a deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit.