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In June in Lufkin, Texas, 19-year-old Gerardo Flores was convicted of murder for the deaths of five-month-old twin fetuses carried by his girlfriend, 17-year-old Erica Basoria. Basoria testified that inducing a miscarriage was her idea–she’d repeatedly hit herself in the stomach–and that it had taken her two weeks to persuade Flores to help by stepping on her belly, but under state law a woman can’t be charged with causing the death of her own fetus. Causing the death of someone else’s fetus, however, is a capital crime in Texas; because prosecutors chose not to pursue the death penalty, Flores automatically received a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years.
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In March a columnist for the Australian newspaper wrote about a women’s beauty procedure she said was growing in popularity: sphincter bleaching. One beautician in Sydney described a client who wanted the skin around her rectum lightened after her boyfriend commented on how “clean and light” Playboy models looked. Another beautician, who uses a different lightening product, said she’d been providing the service to sex workers and strippers for years but agreed there’d recently been a sharp rise in mainstream demand: “I explain that it will give them eczema and so on, but they want it anyway.”
