Late last week, the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists released a statement (PDF) saying that women who have abortions might be at risk for mental health breakdowns. The College recommended that women be told about potential mental health problems before choosing to have an abortion.
According to The Sunday Times,
Some MPs [Members of Parliament] also want women to have a “cooling off” period in which they would be made aware of the possible consequences of the abortion, including the impact on their mental health, before they could go ahead.
Right. This is one of many similar efforts that attempts to “protect” women from abortion. Women who are considering abortion should be presented with all relevant medical findings, including those about mental health. But such findings are often tied to a set of incredibly one-sided policy proposals, like this one, which strip the research of its objectivity and credibility.
Popularization of these “cooling off” periods, for instance, promotes the idea that a woman is not fit to make her own decision about abortion—she is emotionally confused, and her tiny girl-brain needs extra time to make such an important choice about her body.
Moreover, folding post-abortion depression into an inflexible argument against abortion reduces the likelihood that post-abortion counseling will be taken seriously. As Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain write in this fantastic piece in The American Prospect,
The figure of a woman suffering abortion grief invokes a deep truth about mother love that, in different ways, is recognized by advocates across the political spectrum. But the anti-abortion movement is deploying this image to excite acts of public coercion that will not make women, or their families, more natural or loving or free.
Seriously, read this article. It’s a very compelling look at the way people pushing abortion restrictions—like those being advocated in the UK—paint women as helpless victims of biology and pro-abortion advocates.
I’ve been working on this post all day, trying to make my opinions on abortion rights sound cool or heartfelt or something. The point is: I’m pro-choice because some of my closest friends have had abortions. It’s an extremely difficult decision to make, and abortion is an ugly, ugly thing that they’ve spent a lot of time and heartache dealing with. Anyone who suggests that women take it lightly, or that women don’t comprehend the decision they’re making, needs to spend less time humanizing fetuses and more time talking to real women.
I’m all for political activism and the power of impassioned arguments—I blog about sexual politics all the time, I was the president of the Women’s Issues Organization in college, and I bring up sex ed approximately once every 5 minutes—but talking to a close friend about her abortion is an irreplaceable, undeniably jarring experience. And difficult though the decision is, none of my friends regret their abortions. Their circumstances are wildly different, but they all agree that they were not responsible enough, or ready enough, or prepared enough to raise a child.
Looking at other women I care deeply about—like my younger sister, who wants to go to law school in a couple years—I hope and pray that they never have to make the choice to have an abortion. But if they are, they deserve to have a safe, legal, unobstructed choice.
A recently completed study by the Guttmacher Institute found that 1.2 million abortions were performed in America in 2005—the lowest annual rate since 1976. Abortion rates in the U.S. have been dropping fairly steadily since the early 1990s.
While the study doesn’t identify specific causes for the drop, its researchers have some ideas:
"It could be more women using contraception and not having as many unintended pregnancies. It could be more restrictions on abortions making it more difficult for women to obtain abortion services. It could be a combination of these and other dynamics," said Rachel K. Jones of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research organization, which published the report in the March issue of the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.
While the report’s findings are promising for anyone interested in making abortion safe and rare, some of its specifics are less encouraging. 87% of counties in the U.S. lack an abortion provider—which means that 24% of women who live in metropolitan counties and 92% of women who live in nonmetropolitan counties face serious barriers to access.
I’m also curious about the age distribution of the study, which isn’t broken down in the copy I read. According to other info from Guttmacher, 33% of abortions are obtained by women aged 20-25, and 17% of abortions are obtained by teenagers. The teen birth rate jumped in 2005 for the first time in over 15 years, likely due in large part to the simultaneous promulgation and ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education.
So what do we make of these seemingly conflicted numbers? Fewer women are having abortions, but more young women are getting pregnant. It seems we’ve failed to provide young women with the tools they need to prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place: sufficient education about and access to birth control. It’s time to give up on what we know doesn’t work—if this isn’t an argument for eschewing abstinence-only in favor of comprehensive sex ed, I don’t know what is.
Rudy Giuliani has already created an image for himself that even the casual observer could probably identify. He reminds us daily that he was, in fact, the Mayor of New York City during the September 11th terrorist attacks, (a point which I will do my best to remind you of, in case you don't already it have stuck in your head like the lyrics to a bad song). He speaks ad nauseam about his tough stance on terrorism, and his apparent affection for constitution-bending Jack Bauer-style interrogation techniques. Speaking about the torture technique known as waterboarding, Giuliani said:
Well, I'm not sure it is either. It depends on how it's done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it's been defined in the media, it shouldn't be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that's the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn't be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is.
Giuliani, (the Mayor of New York City during the 9/11 terrorist attacks) is right: The "liberal media" must be making it look much worse than it is. When I think about having someone "simulate" the experience of drowning, it sounds like a blast to me. Don't they offer that at Club Med these days right after snorkeling?
The presidential hopeful (and, did I mention, the Mayor of New York City during the 9/11 terrorist attacks) has developed a bit of an odd talent. Odd talents, like a knack for solving Rubik's Cubes or juggling chainsaws, may have a way of attracting voters on the campaign trail. Other odd talents, such as being able to skew statistics to suit a political message, seem to do anything but win the affection of the public. As it turns out, Giuliani has quite the habit of skewing statistics in just such a way.
When discussing the issue of abortion, Giuliani loves to talk about his success in lowering the number of abortions during his tenure as Mayor of New York City, (during which time he dealt with the 9/11 terrorist attacks). His campaign has said on numerous occasions that "Adoptions went up 65 to 70 percent; abortions went down 16 percent." As FactCheck.org points out, while those numbers aren't exactly a flat out lie, they also aren't the most honest statistics. FactCheck points out that:
Adoptions had already increased by 257 percent in the seven years prior to creation of ACS, the agency Giuliani credits with increasing adoptions...[and] adoptions declined in five of the mayor's last six years.
Perhaps more blatantly misleading is how Giuliani, (who bravely walked the streets of New York City with the Firefighters while they saved lives in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center by Islamic extremists), uses deceptive numbers regarding healthcare. His campaign recently released a radio ad in which he denounces "socialized medicine" by explaining that he would likely have died of his prostate cancer, had he lived in a country like England that has a form of "socialized medicine." The campaign proclaims that only 44 percent of men survive similar cases of cancer, but here in the US, the chances are 82 percent. FactCheck discovered that those numbers aren't just misleading, they are just flat out lies:
We tracked down the source of that number, which turns out to be the result of bad math by a Giuliani campaign adviser, who admits to us that his figure isn't "technically" a survival rate at all. Furthermore, the co-author of the study on which Giuliani's man based his calculations tells us his work is being misused, and that the 44 percent figure is both wrong and "misleading." A spokesperson for the lead author also calls the figures "incorrect survival statistics."
In the campaign's defense, the stats were apparently taken from an opinion piece from a conservative think tank. That seems like a good place to get statistics for a political ad.
Jonathan Garro is editor of SkipperStyle, a political blog.
Broadsheet does some good work at keeping the MSM honest. Apparently Reuters thought RU-486 and Plan B are the same thing. They're not. Broadsheet explains why:
So what's the big deal, you ask? The abortion pill, the morning-after pill -- they all end pregnancies, right? Well, no. As many of you no doubt already know, the morning-after pill prevents pregnancy by blocking embryos from implanting in the uterus. RU-486, on the other hand, terminates an already established pregnancy. So in the first article, when the pope criticized drugs "whose aim is to stop an embryo implanting," he could not have been talking about RU-486. And yet for some reason, Reuters devotes the entire article to "the abortion pill" without making a distinction between Plan B and RU-486. In fact, the article doesn't even mention Plan B or, for that matter, refer to RU-486 by name.
Ann Friedman has a great piece right now in The American Prospect reporting on the significant financial challenges faced by reproductive health clinics. Turns out abortion clinics are subject to many more legal and infrastructural challenges than right-wing backed “pregnancy centers.”
Friedman visits a small, independent clinic in Nebraska that fought so many legal battles in the last seven years that the owner can’t afford upkeep on the clinic’s exterior. She also profiles the much-discussed $7.5 million Planned Parenthood facility in Aurora, IL. Construction went as planned until conservative activists realized the building would house a Planned Parenthood, at which point they pressured city officials into denying the clinic an occupancy permit. While the city attorney insists the conflict is about permit regulations, Planned Parenthood lawyers point out that “We wouldn’t be here if this was a foot care clinic.”
As in many policy areas, financial differences between the pro- and anti-choice movements are stark:
The biggest piece of this puzzle is always financial. It's tough to see a run-down abortion clinic, with high concrete walls and peeling paint, next to a sparkling new "crisis-pregnancy center." But the bottom line is that it's really, really expensive to provide actual medical care. And it's cheap to run an office-slash-misinformation center. Roll one ultrasound machine in, buy some beige furniture and, bam, you're done. Lots of money left over to spend on the landscaping.
Via Feministing. While the main focus of the choice discussion is centered on abortions and abortion accesses (which, by the way, is abysmal), Cristina Page, author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex, has a great piece this week in the Balitmore Sun about the National Right To Life conference. Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney tried to convince pro-lifers that he was their candidate, but meanwhile she noticed some subtle language that indicated that he was willing to continue Bush's work against access to contraception.
No matter that emergency contraception has the same mode of action as the birth control pill and every other hormonal method of birth control. To the anti-abortion movement, contraception is the ultimate corruptor. And so this year, the unspoken rule for candidates seeking the support of anti-abortion groups is that they must offer proof they're anti-contraception too.
Annika blogged earlier today about how even though Plan B is "available" over the counter now, it is in practicality unavailable to many women and girls under the age of 18. This is just one of the many subtle battles that choice faces under rule of conservatives.
The BBC reports that Amnesty International, which had maintained a neutral stance on abortion, now says they want "to ensure women have access to health care when complications arise from abortion and to defend women's access to abortion, within reasonable gestational limits, when their health or human rights are in danger."
This is a pretty conservative endorsement, if you ask me, but given the fact that AI does a lot of work in countries with a heavy Catholic populations. I'm not sure how they determine what a "reasonable gestational limit" is, but it seems like they're recognizing that by being neutral they were actually serving an injustice.
Scott Lemieux had a great review of Helena Silverstein's new book, Girls on the Stand: How Courts Fail Pregnant Minors. It's a great book that examines the real implications of such Supreme Court decisions as Planned Parenthood v. Casey:
Silverstein's book is an especially welcome addition because, rather than focusing on normative debates about abortion that almost anyone interested in the question is already familiar with, she focuses on how parental notification laws actually work on the ground. The book is judicious and moderate in tone; indeed, I can imagine some who agree with her conclusions wishing she had been more forceful in her criticisms of the policies she studies. But the book would not be as powerful as it is if it were not also a first-rate work of social science.
Fom an otherwise interesting article about a new way to engage those who believe abortion should be illegal: ask them how much jail time a woman convicted of having an abortion should get.
"They never connect the dots," says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa. But her organization urged voters to do just that in the last gubernatorial election, in which the Republican contender believed abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. "We wanted him to tell the women of Iowa exactly how much time he expected them to serve in jail if they had an abortion," June recalled. Chet Culver, the Democrat who unabashedly favors legal abortion, won that race, proving that choice can be a winning issue if you force people to stop evading the hard facts. "How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?" June says.
While flyering for the Clean My Ride campaign, our fellow interns ran into some people from the Republican Youth Majority. It's not a clone of Young America's Fascists...er, Foundation, but rather has three main positions: pro-choice, pro-environment, and fiscally conservative. Board members include some of moderate Republicanism's greatest hits: Pete Wilson, Bill Cohen, William Weld, and so on.
What to make of this? The not-surprising part is that there is a group like this; many young people (and plenty of older ones) are sick of the litmus tests in politics, and young people(even with evangelical Republicans) are almost always to the left of their parties - though the Iraq War is a notable exception to this rule. The surprising part is their choice of issues. More in extended.
D.C. commuters may have noticed a series of unusual advertisements appearing on the public bus system in the past few months. Sponsored by an enigmatic organization known as the “Second Look Project,” the ads feature solemn-looking young women accompanied by provocative messages about abortion in America.
One particularly absurd ad reads:
“Myth: Abortion is legal only in the first three months of pregnancy. Fact: It’s legal for the entire nine months for virtually any reason.”
Um, no. A woman can’t just ask for an abortion in her third term because she "feels like it," for example. Late-term abortions occur rarely and are always subject to a multitude of restrictions.
I find this fascinating. ABC News is reporting that "Israeli police detained an Orthodox Jewish man carrying a small homemade bomb in Jerusalem on Thursday, as thousands of Israelis marched in support of gay rights in defiance of religious protesters." But something about ABC's reporting is weird...
“The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this. ... And I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say: “You helped this happen.”
The founder of Moral Majority, the evangelist who made hate speech profitable and established fundamentalists as a viable political force, Jerry Falwell has died at age 73.
We are facing two scary pushes from the extreme right in terms of reproductive freedom. First, as reflected in the Supreme Court's Carhart decision two weeks ago, there's a new willingness to stop short of protecting women's health and allow certain abortion procedures only in the extreme situation of a woman's life being at risk. This standard would allow states to outlaw abortions in cases (like this Irish example) in which the fetus is not viable outside the womb, forcing women to carry deeply traumatic pregnancies to term. The second push, as The American Prospect's Sarah Blustain reported on so thoroughly here, are "informed consent" laws like the one in South Dakota, which force women to hear ideologically-compromised statements on fetal pain, the sanctity of the mother-child bond, or adoption before allowing them to exercise their right to choose.
In light of these trends, the New York Times story today on the efforts of parents with Down syndrome children to dissuade others from ending Down syndrome pregnancies raises questions about how disability issues will factor into the shifting political and ethical debate on abortion. Because of new, safer testing methods, all women can now opt to screen for the disease with a simple sonogram and two blood tests in the first trimester. Ninety percent of women who receive a diagnosis of Down syndrome for their fetuses choose to abort. At some hospitals, parents of children with Down syndrome have organized programs to speak to obstetricians and genetic counselors about the joys of raising Down syndrome children, and have asked the hospital to put them in touch with expectant parents who have received a diagnosis of the disease.
As anyone who's had their life enriched by a loved one with a disability can attest, these conversations are incredibly fraught. But without judging any family's choice to either end or continue such a pregnancy, the issues remain the same -- the right to choose an abortion and the freedom from coercive pressure. Expectant parents should be given information, resources, and support as they make these complex choices. But expect the antis to boil this issue down into a talking point and portray pro-choicers as mad scientists trying to genetically manipulate the human race.
The Irish government is preventing a four-month pregnant 17-year old from traveling to Britain to have an abortion, even though her fetus is missing parts of its brain and skull and will be unable to live outside her womb for more than four days.
In Ireland, abortion is legal only if the mother's life is in danger. This is the same logic the Supreme Court majority embraced in the Carhart decision, which for the first time since Roe, did not contain broad protection for "women's health." How many of us really want to live in a country where a Court has to give you permission to abort a fetus that can't live outside the womb? It's almost unthinkable.
Two points, really. The first is on the world’s fascination with “virginity” and America’s obsession over it. The second point is about the emphasis society tends to put on the act of sex.
Reading one of the Campus Progress web logs this morning, I ran across an interesting statistic – that just about or more than 50 percent of college students are “still virgins.” My question: why do we care? Why is it that, as a society, we treat losing one’s virginity as sort of a rite of passage in which a new person is born and the old, less mature person is gone? It’s to say, as if, a person’s accomplishment in life is based on whether or not that person has engaged in sex. With rite-of-passage teen movies like “American Pie” being a part of the popular culture, it seems the message we’re sending teens is: your worth and dignity is based on whether you’ve “done it.” Yet, they also get messages from the Christian-right about remain “pure” and “untouched” until marriage. The result is a clash of culture, in which, on one hand, the message is about the importance of having sex. On the other hand, the message is about “saving” oneself until marriage. What’s a kid to do, really, in that situation? If virginity is so special, how come the majority of us aren't even in touch with the person to whom we "lost" it? The truth is when it comes to virginity, there is nothing lost, and nothing gained.
Besides, what's the exact definition of a virgin anyhow? One who's pure in both thoughts and mind? One who's never orgasmed? One who's never had intercourse? One who's had intercourse but never orgasm? Does oral sex count? What about priest sex? It's all confusing, really -- yet we're still obsessed with the idea of virginity.
The fact of the matter is that there are more important things to worry about in one’s lifelong accomplishment than sex and “virginity.” We see movies like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” but we don’t see movies like, “The 40-Year-Old Bum Who Hasn’t Done a Damned Thing to Make the World Better.”
Sometimes, I wonder why. Why can’t we just teach kids, from both the left and the right that sex is something amazing and wonderful that should only be had with responsibility, respect and readiness? Isn’t that a much better message than: if you aren’t having sex, you’re a loser or if you’re having sex, you’re a slut?
Wouldn’t it make the whole abstinence education debate much easier to digest? Wouldn’t it make birth control much more easily gotten? Wouldn’t it strike down patriarchy and society’s ideal of a family at its root? It certainly would. Just by changing our personal outlooks on virginity and sex, we can certainly make move the world in the right political direction.
Second point: why does society put such a strong emphasis on the act of sex? It is, after all, only sex. I don’t mean to sound like a frat boy here, but sex is just an act. It’s neither holy nor God’s gift. It’s neither divine nor special. It’s purely biological, just like any other activity that we engage in as humans. Sure, sex is certainly not making love, but it’s got a quality of its own. Just like going for a walk, having dinner or spending the afternoon with someone, sex is just an act. It only becomes special when the person with whom we are sharing it is special. Other than that, sex is just – sex. Why make things any complicated than life already is? To be sure, one should always be monogamous in a relationship, but let’s not treat sex anymore special than just a kiss. A kiss, after all, without any emotions put into it, is just a kiss.
That's the number of women who died annually from botched abortions in the 1930s, when birth control and abortion were both illegal.
I'm still here in Cambridge at the Women, Action, Media! conference, and I'm watching a screening of "I Had an Abortion," a documentary that features 10 women, 21 to 85, who've had an abortion. The first woman to tell her story in the film had an underground abortion in 1938. When she contracted an infection in the following days and sought care at a hospital, the nurses shunned her because she refused to reveal who had performed her abortion.
Another woman was hauled in front of a New York City grand jury in the 1950s and asked to testify against the kind doctor who had performed her abortion.
Senators Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer and representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler will reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress today, and will announce hearings on women’s equality in the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Conservative online media is already up in arms, lamenting the funding the ERA would likely provide, for the first time, to poor women on Medicaid who need to access abortion. Yes, the ERA would help progressives fight for women’s bodily rights. But it is also a crucial legal protection -- one first introduced in Congress in 1923 -- necessary to end workplace discrimination against women, fight wage inequality, and stop obviously sexist corporate practices, such as insurance companies covering the cost of Viagra, but not birth control pills. I remember Maloney speaking at a young women’s leadership event last summer and lamenting the Democratic Party’s move away from strong support for the ERA. Hopefully these new hearings, held under a Congress with its first female speaker, will be a step toward reversing that trend. The amendment simply reads:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
It’s time to put the Phyllis Schlafly era behind us. What’s so offensive in 2007 about equal rights for women?
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