Read The World Split Open for Free Online Page B

pregnancies. The U.S. State Department freezes $3 million in funding for the World Health Organization because it conducts research on mifepristone.
    HBO broadcasts Eve Ensler’s play
The Vagina Monologues
and 800 events promote V-Day around the world to fund shelters for abused women, anti-rape campaigns, and women’s centers.
    Women who work as painters, steamfitters, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, and other trades form the first nationwide female trade union—Tradeswomen Now and Tomorrow (TNT).
    Halle Berry becomes the first women of color to win an Academy Award for best actress.
    A new international study reveals that hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women does not decrease the danger of heart disease, prevent Alzheimer’s disease, urinary incontinence, major depression, or osteoporosis.
    The National Organization for Women names Wal-Mart a “Merchant of Shame” for its exploitative working conditions, sex discrimination, low wages, and unaffordable health benefits.
    California becomes the first state to require employers to provide half pay for six weeks of parental leave. It also obliges accredited medical schools to offer abortion training, permit nurses, physicians assistants, and midwives to prescribe mifepristone, and protect abortion rights if
Roe v. Wade
is overturned.
    Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) becomes the first female House Democratic Whip.
    The New York Times
begins including same-sex unions among its wedding announcements.
    The National Cancer Institute Web site posts an unproven link between abortion and breast cancer and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site casts doubt on whether condoms effectively protect against pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Critics argue the Bush administration is politicizing science.
    Time
magazine names three women—Enron accountant Sherron Watkins, World Com internal auditor Cynthia Cooper, and FBI agent Coleen Rowley—as “persons of the year” because, as whistleblowers on corporate corruption, they upheld “American values.”
    President Bush withdraws his support for the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 (and signed by 180 nations by the end of 2005).
    The U.S. Health and Human Services department announces new rules that make unborn fetuses, but not pregnant women, eligible for prenatal care.
    2003   A UNICEF report reveals that the United States still has the highest teen birth rate among the twenty-eight most developed nations. The Bush administration increases spending by $60 million on abstinence-only programs that do not permit discussion of birth control.
    Hans Blix, head of the U.N. weapons inspection team, finds no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. For the first time in history, some 10 million people on five continents, with many women in leadership positions, march against a war that has not yet begun.
    The United States invades Iraq on March 20 after arguing that Saddam Hussein’s regime possesses weapons of mass destruction, which are never found.
    Joe Wilson, former ambassador to Niger, writes an op-ed publicly critizing the Bush administration for inaccurately stating that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger. Through leaks to the media, unknown top White House officials expose that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is an undercover CIA agent, which endangers national security.
    U.S. propaganda casts Private Jessica Lynch as a heroine who fought off Iraqis and was beaten and raped. But she tells the public she did not engage in combat and was well-cared for by Iraqis. Dr. Sally Ride, who became the first female astronaut in 1983 in space on the shuttle Challenger, is inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
    The Supreme Court strikes down as unconstitutional a Texas law banning sodomy.
    A feminist worldwide campaign, which