Abortion Gang

I remember the kerfuffle caused when Gwen Jacobs walked down the street topless in Ontario. I was 11 at the time of the court case in 1996 and I remember thinking, good for her. I also remember thinking how terribly unfair it was that men were allowed to walk around topless but women couldn’t. I can’t imagine actually walking around topless but I am glad that I have the right to do so since the Federal law criminalizing it was struck down. This case could be said to be a precursor to the now famous Slut Walks taking place around the world after a Toronto cop ‘confided’ to a group of York University students that the way to prevent sexual assault was to just not dress like sluts. The story became international news and feminists around the world responded with one simple message: women never ask to be raped.

When a woman cannot dress however she wants without be subjected to constant sexual harassment, I will show you a woman who may be forced to have a sex-selective abortion or be murdered for the want of honour. I will show you a woman who is not respected, and is in fact disrespected because she is a woman. Women in the U.S. and Canada are certainly subjected to sexual harassment but the situation in India is extreme. Women in India are raped wearing traditional saris just like women here are raped wearing track pants, but the extreme violence against women in India is captured well by the Indian expression for sexual harassment: eve-teasing. As if sexual harassment is just school-yard teasing.

On the whole, women in North America have greater reproductive freedom due to a range of factors from financial resources to the law, but to trivialize Indian women’s attempts to empower themselves by declaring their right to dress however they please is to continue to oppress them. The author is correct: Indian women do have bigger fish to fry, but it’s a good idea to gut the fish before you fry it.

Slut walks have nothing to do with “self-objectification.” Women are objectified by society. There are native cultures where women walk around naked and that’s just the way it is. Objectification comes from outside, not from the individual woman. To suggest that women dressing so as to “reveal their breasts” is focusing attention on their body parts is the same as suggesting men who walk around shirtless are showing off their “breasts.”

In a shocking article recently published by the Associated Press, it was revealed that a Pennsylvania doctor has been charged with eight counts of murder in a case that screams for the public’s attention for many reasons. I will go ahead and warn you now, this is a horribly graphic and heartbreaking account, so please read with discretion. Now it is also important to note that this story is just coming to light, and so the full scope and validity of all of the allegations put forth in the article have yet to be fully substantiated. However, if true, this does highlight a number of points that need to be examined.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, made millions of dollars over 30 years, performing as many illegal, late-term abortions as he could, prosecutors said. State regulators ignored complaints about him and failed to inspect his clinic since 1993, but no charges were warranted against them given time limits and existing law, District Attorney Seth Williams said. Nine of Gosnell’s employees also were charged.

Gosnell “induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord,” Williams said.

What makes this story ever the more tragic, is that there were complaints lodged to the State that were not investigated for so long. In fact, if it had not been for complaints about drugs that stemmed from the clinic, investigators would seemingly never have looked into the complaints that were filed. How many of these victims could have been prevented had the State not only listened to the complaints being filed, but acknowledged the overwhelming number of women finding themselves in need of services they could not get anywhere else. So there are numerous implications that Pennsylvanian representatives need to address, and now!

This is a prime example of how the stigma attached to abortion, and the attacks on abortion which limit a woman’s access to safe procedures, gives rise to this kind of barbarism. If you thought that the ‘back-alley’ abortions were just a horror story of the past, then think again. Just now there are clinics like this one where women are subjected to opportunistic and conscienceless practitioners who do not have the patient’s care as a priority at all.

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A guest post from Education for Choice.

Many pro-choice Americans think we in the UK have it all: free abortion on the National Health Service (NHS), providers who don’t have to wear bulletproof vests to work, and the general acceptance amongst society that abortion is a medical procedure that women should be able to access whenever they need it.  Growing up in the Midwestern U.S., I thought these same things. Because women have free access to abortion on the NHS, even a heck of a lot of Brits think that there is no work to be done here, but I’ve been working at EFC since January 2010 and I’ve learned that there’s no room for complacency. People here are always surprised to hear that anti-choice organisations are using American-style tactics to spread lies and misinformation in schools and at crisis pregnancy centres across the UK every day.

In the U.S. there are numerous inspiring and active pro-choice activist organisations, groups and advocates, but in the UK Education For Choice (EFC) is the only educational charity dedicated to enabling young people to make and act on informed choices about pregnancy and abortion. We at EFC are here to say out loud that abortion is not a dirty word and that our abortion rights should not be taken for granted.

This month, the new Government is having a Spending Review which promises drastic public sector cuts and the strong chance that some key public health strategies will not be renewed. EFC will no longer be able to rely on funding from the Government so we are looking at alternative sources of support. We met with a professional fundraiser recently. Her first suggestion was that we should leave the word abortion out of our organisational description. She described it as ‘the A word’ and explained that ‘it puts people off’.

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By now, I think everyone knows that HIV/AIDS is a major problem, especially in Africa. Poor medical care and lack of knowledge on the disease (even here in the U.S.) have caused fear, misconceptions, dread, and depression for those who contract it. For years, becoming pregnant after contracting HIV was a death sentence for the resulting child.

A few years ago, scientists discovered a “miracle” treatment for pregnant women with HIV–a way for her to deliver the baby without the child contracting HIV. Doctors and humanitarians alike cheered this wonderful treatment. Finally, a solution to the problem of mother-to-baby transmission.

I’m kicking myself at the moment for not being able to find the interview I heard on the radio, on NPR I believe, in which a doctor discussed this procedure. However, I did find a study done in Africa on the treatment.

The woman is given a shot of nevirapine, one drug of a three drug “cocktail” used to help the immune system in AIDS treatment, during labor. The child is then given a shot of it after birth. The majority of the time, this treatment is effective in preventing the transmission, and the child is spared from the terrible life of an HIV patient.

However, what other scientists have just discovered is that the use of nevirapine during labor is actually detrimental to the mother’s treatment later. There is a chance that the mother will become resistant to nevirapine, which renders useless the three drug “cocktail” used for HIV/AIDS treatment for her later. She will die sooner because of this. Her child will be without a mother.
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Bad news sucks. Let’s be honest, it’s hard to hear news about laws that deny access to abortion and make choice impossible.

When I read about the crusade to eliminate state insurance coverage for abortion care in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Colorado and Kansas it makes me angry. I wanted to scream when I found out that Stupak was adding anti-abortion language to the health care bill. He was trying to use abortion to stop health care from being passed which is just an asshole thing to do. The health care bill should not be about abortion.

The sad stories depress me and have made me cry. When I read about women who are forced to stay in abusive relationships because they are pregnant, have no options, and can’t afford to leave the situation, I am bewildered. No woman should ever have to remain pregnant if she doesn’t want to. But knowing that there are people out there who try day in and day out to block access to abortion inspires me to fight harder for choice.
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I’m getting extremely tired of the situation affecting women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am frustrated because I feel that the United States is not taking action on this issue—there are organizations working on this issue, but there is so much more work to be done.

Just a couple of days ago, the Lord’s Resistance Army killed 321 civilians in a massacre. Approximately 80 children were killed and 250 civilians were abducted. The Lord’s Resistance Army has been raising hell for Congolese civilians for 23 years! Where is the action? Where is the help? The army pillages communities throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo; in this massacre alone they killed many women and mutilated many women and young girls. The UN Peacekeeping Mission in Congo has sent 1,000 peacekeeping troops to areas affected by the LRA’s reign of terror. I believe we need more civic action.
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1. A high-risk insurance pool to provide affordable coverage for uninsured people w/ medical problems.

2. Health insurance plans will be required to maintain dependent coverage for children until they turn 26 (after six months).

3. Insurance companies will be barred from putting lifetime dollar limits on coverage and from canceling policies except for fraud.
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As I’m sure you all know, health care reform passed recently. The health care reform battle has triggered a lot of debates concerning abortion, and people everywhere have been sharing their opinions. To my dismay, some of these people, who call themselves pro-choice, have actually been supporting Stupak and his attempts to dump abortion coverage from health care reform. The question that I have for them is this; why?

Pro-Choice: The belief that all people should have the right to decide what is going to happen to his or her body, particularly as it pertains to pregnancy. I would hope that all pro-choicers would agree on this definition. The thing is, without access to abortion, the legality of the procedure is meaningless. Operation Rescue knows this, that’s why they’re trying to exterminate abortion providers. Stupak knows this, that’s why he tried to eliminate all federal funds for abortions during the health care reform battle. Anti-choicers know this piece of information, and they’re using it as a weapon to eliminate women’s rights. However, are pro-choicers aware of this fact?

I would say that, for the most part, pro-choicers are aware of the fact that, without access, the right to abortion means nothing. However, it seems as if a good number of self proclaimed pro-choicers either don’t realize this or don’t care. These “pro-choicers” say that they support the legality of abortion, but only if the woman has a good enough reason, or only if this is her first abortion, or only if she’s not using it as “birth control”. The types of “pro-choicers” that I’ll be writing about today are the ones who support the legality of abortion, but do not support the funding of abortion.
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Over spring break, I visited my four cousins.  Two of them look enough like my brother and I to pass as our other siblings.  The other two are adorable girls adopted from China.  My uncle and aunt decided to adopt when they realized they were unable to have children and “too old” to adopt a young child in the United States’ adoption system.  They also are humanitarians who decided to do some good in the world.

So why China, and why girls?  Half the Sky, an organization devoted to making sure children in Chinese orphanages have proper care, estimates that 95% of healthy children in orphanages are female.  The ratio of females to males is leveling out a bit as more families give up children of either gender because of financial hardships, but there are still disproportionately more females than males in the social welfare system.  These girls will not grow up in a “socially acceptable” class, even if they had come from a good family, and therefore will probably not find husbands anywhere but in the lower class.  They will not have the same level of education as children allowed to stay with their families.  Most of them will never know who their parents are.  Some of them, but not many, will be lucky enough to find loving homes in the United States or Europe.

There are many, many girls in the orphanages because of China’s one-child policy.  This policy’s purpose is to control China’s outrageous population growth.  Families incur huge fines for having an illegal pregnancy—that is, one that happens without the couple first asking the government’s permission to have a child that year (and yes, the Family Planning office can tell them no).  Some provinces require women of reproductive age to take a pregnancy test every 2-3 months to try and catch pregnancies early.
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