How far would you go to have a biological child?

Women and girls changing their worlds — and ours. No Images? [Click here]( [Across Women's Lives]( Next week, Across Women’s Lives takes a look at the issue of surrogacy for money, with a three-part series, My Baby, Her Body. Correspondent Allison Herrera meets with parents in the US and surrogates in Ukraine, to investigate the practice of commercial surrogacy. Also, Chhavi Sachdev reports from India on how the country once known as the the "womb of Asia" came to ban international surrogacy. Tune into The World and online, next week — and we'll have more right here next Friday. Before we start, though, [we're asking about your experience]( trying to have a child. Also, reporter Venetia Rainey [found a Dutch brothel]( where the women who work there run it for themselves. And [Broadly introduces us to Finstas](, a space online for women who wear hijab but want to express themselves without their hair covered. Have a great weekend and as always, please join in on the social conversation on [Facebook]( or [Twitter,]( with our hashtag, #womenslives. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? [Sign up]( to receive it every week. [We want to hear from you]( Surrogacy is a multimillion-dollar, global industry. Our latest series, My Baby, Her Body, kicks off next week and examines questions around the ethics of this growing industry. People who face infertility have tough choices when it comes to deciding whether to keep trying to get pregnant via infertility treatments like in vitro fertilization — only to experience disappointment when it doesn’t work — or resort to surrogacy, which can get complicated. We want to hear what your experience has been like either trying to get pregnant or using a surrogate. With your permission, we’ll feature some of your answers online and on the air. Please take [our survey](. From purple and red walls to safes in every room, just about everything at this brothel has been designed with input from the women who work there. It’s also almost completely run by former or current sex workers, something rare in Amsterdam’s prostitution district. The women belong to a voluntary community-based organization formed in 2011 to bake and sell cakes. The larger goal is to "improve the social-economic status of the people who were affected by the Northern Uganda war insurgency." Sally and I arrived at NASA at the same time in 1978 — she as part of the "Thirty-Five New Guys" astronaut class. She preferred to be considered one of 35 new astronauts, and notr one of six women in the 1978 class — and to be judged by merit, not gender. If you’d told Vangay a decade ago that she would be injecting sterile mice with human stool samples and on the precipice of completing a doctorate in bioinformatics and computational biology, she might not have believed you. Back then, she was working in Silicon Valley and earning a very good living as a software engineer, writing what she calls “pretty code.” The troupe Dancing Queens, India’s first trans women-led dance collective, will perform a medley of freestyle, contemporary and folk dances set to Bollywood tracks. That may sound fairly typical for an Indian dance ensemble — but with a mix of trans women performers and stories of their lives thrown in, the show is unique and pathbreaking. Empower more women. Share this newsletter with your friends. [forward to a friend]( The best content about women and girls from across the web, curated by AWL Editors. In ICE detention, a Honduran woman fears deportation without her son, [The New Yorker]( “They didn’t say anything,” Rivera told me. “They just walked over and grabbed Jairo. It felt like my son was stuck to me. He clung to me, cried and screamed. They had to pull him away.” She pleaded with agents to tell her what was going on. Afghanistan's first lady Rula Ghani wants to build local institutions, not fundraising campaigns, [Devex]( Rula Ghani, Afghanistan’s first lady and a champion for women’s rights, fashions herself as a grandmotherly figure for a nation struggling to reclaim its history and traditions as a springboard to a more stable future. Walking the City with Jane: An illustrated celebration of Jane Jacobs and her legacy of livable cities, [Brain Pickings]( She revolutionized our ideas about what makes a livable, human-centric city. Her legacy inspired the wonderful Jane’s Walk — an annual festival of free, citizen-led peripatetic conversations in cities around the world, in which people get to hear and share the stories of their neighborhoods and communities. Misogyny Is boring as hell, [Vulture]( Carmen Maria Machado’s critically acclaimed debut collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, was published just two days before news broke that Harvey Weinstein had been preying on Hollywood starlets for decades and getting away with it. As the world began to pay attention to women’s stories of abuse, her queer, liminal stories held a flickering candle to the subtle forms of cruelty that continue to go undiscussed. The forgotten gender nonconformists of the Old West, [JSTOR Daily]( In the Old West, cross-dressing was sometimes a disguise for criminals on the lam. But, one historian argues, in many cases these “cross-dressers” were probably people who we would identify as transgender today. For women who wear hijab, Finstas can be a space to let loose online, [Broadly]( I knew many women who wore hijabs who would set their Instagram profiles to private, write “WOMEN ONLY” in their bios, and post pictures with their hair down. Across Women’s Lives is PRI’s ambitious multi-platform journalism and engagement initiative about the connection between the empowerment of women and girls, and economic development and improved health around the world. This newsletter highlights our reporting and the work from staff at PRI, The World and The Takeaway in calling attention to the ways that women are shaping a better future for their communities. Please Support AWL [donate]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( [Website]( PRI Public Radio International Hear a Different Voice [Forward]( [Preferences]( | [Unsubscribe](