The term “human rights” can be applied to many, many things. After the Bellevue Hospital Natural Birth center in Manhattan, one of the few centers that cater not to the wealthy but to poor women, closed this month amid controversy, we decided to take a look at the way the health care system treats pregnant women. Our panelists consider giving birth in an environment of your choice to be a basic human right.

Katherine Abelson, midwife at the Brooklyn Birthing Center, Elan McAllister, doula and president and founder of Choices in Childbirth, and Debra Pascali-Bonaro, doula and director and producer of Orgasmic Birth talk about the way our health care system fails pregnant women.

Meanwhile, in a different human rights discussion, last month, Laura moderated a debate sponsored by the Middle East Institute at Columbia University on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (BDS) in pursuit of a just peace in the Middle East. Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and of the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. and George Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School and author of Rethinking Criminal Law, discussed whether the BDS strategy is helpful or counterproductive.

Alec Loorz was inspired by Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, to become an educator on the issue of climate change.  Founding his own organization, Kids vs. Global Warming, Alec continues to fight fossil fuels and other contributors to global warming, and encourages his peers to do the same. He was honored with a Brower Youth Award from the Earth Island Institute. Thanks to Rikshaw Films for the video.

In 128 cities in 17 countries last week, people gathered to remember transgender victims of violence. This year alone, more than 160 transgender people have been murdered—and that’s just the ones we know of. Because of a lack of understanding of gender identity issues, it is nearly impossible for organizations such as Transgender Europe to track down all actual cases of violence against trans people, or to determine whether they are all hate crimes, but the brutality involved in many of them implies that they are.

Barack Obama recently signed into law the Matthew Shepard/James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which includes gender identity in its protections, and Kalamazoo, Michigan passed a trans-inclusive law that bans discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodation. But a national employment non-discrimination act still lags behind, and the hate crimes bill was too late for 21-year-old Tyli’a Mack, stabbed in the streets of Washington, D.C. not far from the offices of Transgender Health Empowerment, an advocacy organization, and Paulina Ibarra, 24, stabbed to death in her Hollywood apartment.

Too often transgender people only turn up in the media as victims of violence, misgendered and wrongly portrayed as gay or lesbian, and discussions of gender identity, like the one around South African runner Caster Semenya, are dehumanizing and offensive. Transgender people too are often thrown under the bus in legislative compromises, like the last round of debate over ENDA. Though the health care bill that passed the House mentions that gender identity is a factor in people experiencing “significant gaps in disease, health outcomes, or access to health care,” that on its own will do little to ensure better care.

Tobi Hill-Meyer of the blog No Designation writes “Traditionally defined as a person who doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, I prefer to shift the focus away from assigned gender and define transgender as a person whose gender is not universally considered valid.”

We have all had moments where our very identity is called into question by another, when someone assumes that they know better than we do who we are. It is important to remember those who have been victims of violence, but we need to also remember the lives of transgender men and women, and not pay attention only when another murder makes headlines.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

The School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Georgia, has long been a training facility for Latin American military officers, many of whom have gone on to be involved in gross human rights violations. A graduate of the SOA is one of the coup leaders in Honduras.

Twenty years ago last week, SOA graduates massacred six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America in San Salvador. We look back at the effects of US intervention in Latin America and connect the patterns to the current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq with Christian Parenti, Nation contributor and author of The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror, Rev. Luis Barrios, chair of the Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies at John Jay College in New York,  and Bill Quigley, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage.

We’ve been talking about blowback on GRITtv today, and we can see the same patterns emerging in economic policy. The pattern of subcontracting work over and over until the original company can claim they have nothing to do with the work that gets done, for example, isn’t limited to the military and it doesn’t just happen overseas.

In Illinois, not far from where the Republic Windows & Doors employees staged their successful factory occupation, warehouse workers for a subcontractor of Bissell, the vacuum cleaner manufacturer, are being fired and threatened after voting to form a union. Monica Sanchez, an employee at the warehouse, joins us along with Abraham Mwaura of Warehouse Workers for Justice and Mark Brenner of Labor Notes to tell the workers’ side of the story.

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

So begins independent journalist Jeremy Scahill’s latest bombshell story on the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater. Published Monday at TheNation.com, the story details Blackwater’s covert activities, which are unaccountable to Congress in way that even CIA activities are not.

Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, has reported on Blackwater for years. He joined Laura in the GRITtv studio to talk about this latest development in the story of the company that seems to pop back up in conflict zones over and over again.

President Obama is expected to announce that he will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan next week. In the wake of that decision, discussion of the consequences of United States intervention around the world becomes even more important. It’s not only wars that produce blowback for the US; training and funding for right-leaning groups in Latin America has been a long-standing source of resentment and anger around the world.

Today on GRITtv, we look back at the effects of US intervention in Latin America and connect the patterns to the current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq with Christian Parenti, Nation contributor and author of The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror, Rev. Luis Barrios, chair of the Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies at John Jay College in New York,  and Bill Quigley, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage.

Parenti, along with director Ian Olds, made a film about one indirect victim of US policy in Afghanistan: Ajmal Naqshbandi, a “fixer” who helped Parenti in his reporting in the country.  Naqshbandi was kidnapped along with an Italian journalist; she was released, he was not. Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi follows Parenti when he returns to Afghanistan to tell Naqshbandi’s story, and we feature it here.

Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill notes that the war in Afghanistan is “hemorrhaging” into Pakistan. In his latest bombshell story on the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, published Monday at TheNation.com, Scahill details Blackwater’s covert activities, which are unaccountable to Congress in way that even CIA activities are not. He joined Laura in the studio to talk about the way the war is creeping across borders and continues to involve unaccountable private contractors.

Finally, in a bit of economic policy blowback, the pattern of subcontracting work over and over until the original company can claim they have nothing to do with the work that gets done isn’t limited to the military and it doesn’t just happen overseas. In Illinois, not far from where the Republic Windows & Doors employees staged their successful factory occupation, warehouse workers for a subcontractor of Bissell, the vacuum cleaner manufacturer, are being fired and threatened after voting to form a union. Monica Sanchez, an employee at the warehouse, joins us along with Abraham Mwaura of Warehouse Workers for Justice and Mark Brenner of Labor Notes to tell the workers’ side of the story.

Unemployment is up, Wall Street is reporting record profits, the health care debate is dragging on, and Americans are angry. There’s no doubt about the anger, anyway. But it hasn’t translated thus far into any increased agitation for labor. Workers are getting squeezed from all sides–more work, less pay, the constant fear of job loss, and employers using the specter of that job loss as a bulwark against complaints. “You’re lucky to have a job,” indeed.

What happened to organized labor in the US? With the decline of manufacturing jobs and rise of female-dominated service fields, does the old labor union model still hold up, or do we need new ways of organizing and supporting workers? And what happened to solidarity?

Paula Finn, Editor of the New Labor Forum, Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew and Wall Street Journal columnist, Tom Geoghegan, labor lawyer, recent Congressional candidate, and author of Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back joined Laura to talk about labor’s problems and suggest some solutions to help all of us, whether we’re union members or not.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote of the dangers of Bisphenol A, a common chemical in plastics and can liners:

While the evidence isn’t conclusive, it justifies precautions. In my family, we’re cutting down on the use of those plastic containers that contain BPA to store or microwave food, and I’m drinking water out of a metal bottle now. In my reporting around the world, I’ve come to terms with the threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas. But endocrine disrupting chemicals — they give me the willies.

Kristof isn’t the only one who gets the chills at the thought of BPA, a synthetic estrogen linked to reproductive cancers. Nena Baker wrote a book, The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being, on this very subject, and joined Laura in the studio to discuss what can be done about these frightening chemicals.

Noting that neither Republicans nor Democrats want their kids ingesting harmful substances, Baker called for government action. “We can’t shop our way out of this problem.”

Green jobs have been touted over and over as the solution to the crisis in manufacturing in the US, able to solve climate problems and employment issues at the same time. But they won’t be any kind of solution at all if they aren’t available to those who need them the most.

The Applied Research Center has put together a toolkit for ensuring that federal funds for green jobs are used to create well-paid, union-represented jobs that are available to women and people of color and that help to rebuild communities that have been hardest hit by the economic collapse.

Matthew Hoh was the first US civilian official to resign in protest over the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post called him “exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts.”

In this video from Brave New Films, Hoh reads his letter of resignation and explains why he decided to make a public statement. “The people that are fighting us there are fighting because they’re occupied,” he says of Afghanistan.