The US is Overrated

I found The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World to be the most interesting [in a shocking kind of way] piece we’ve read yet this semester. Although it was very informative I was honestly more disgusted than anything at most of what I read/saw. Here I was living in my own little world believing women were practically equal-- a clearly naïve thought. I had always thought the United States was so advanced in the majority of aspects of life, in comparison with other countries; to find that we weren’t is what concerned me the most. For example in the “In Their Place” section, the United States is equal to places like Libya, Sudan and Nigeria in its “religious fundamentalism and nationalist pressure on women, resulting in heightened legal and social restrictions (late 1990s – 2002). And as of May 2002 the United States was one of the ONLY countries (1 of 3) to have signed but not ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The United States also has the second highest (behind South Africa) amount of “actual number of rapes estimated to occur each year” at 700,000. These statistics are bewildering to me and I can’t believe I thought so highly of the US for so long.
What bothered me the most in the book though, were the statistics on death from illegal abortions in Africa; almost 50% of the deaths that occur from illegal abortions occur in Africa. If you compare these numbers to the number of available contraceptives in Africa, you can see a lot of these deaths could be prevented so easily [not to mention how much basic sexual knowledge and contraceptives could aid in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic].