Abortion

Thank you nooneknow1028 for the link. George Carlin's rant about anti-abortion conservatives is right on the money.

I am really starting to love Senator Barbara Boxer.  According to Boxer, the Senate has enough votes (60) to defeat the Stupak-Pitt amendment which bans coverage for abortions if insurance companies receive one penny in government subsidies:

"If someone wants to offer this very radical amendment, which would really tear apart [a decades-long] compromise, then I think at that point they would need to have 60 votes to do it," Boxer said. "And I believe in our Senate we can hold it."

"It is a much more pro-choice Senate than it has been in a long time," she added. "And it is much more pro-choice than the House."

I've been watching the health care debate and all the statements about abortion.  I do believe that Nancy Pelosi was torn about the Stupak-Pitts Amendment barring women from using their insurance to pay for abortions (if your policy is subsidized by the government by a penny then you can't use it to get an abortion) and having to concede to conservatives to get the new healthcare bill through the house. 

But hearing Obama state publically that "this is a healthcare bill not an abortion bill' has my panties in a bunch.  As a young woman, abortion is part of your health care.  No form of birth control is 100% and women choose not to become mothers because they can't afford it and they know that being a single mom relegates you to a life of poverty.  So you make the choice.  And why is that choice NOT part of my healthcare but the choice to have a child IS?

Every now and then we have to celebrate our victories.  Today, Oklahoma was told to step back and legally blocked from releasing ONLINE the personal information of women who've had abortions in the state. 

If you haven't been following the story, here's the breakdown.  The Oklahoma legislature has a long history of placing obstacles in the path of women seeking abortions.  In their latest attempt, legislators passed a law mandating that detailed information about patients who have abortions be published on a state Web site. 

A new study concludes that carefully crafted informed consent laws, rather than discouraging women to forgo an abortion, have zero impact on the amount of abortions performed in the states that choose to mandate these "scary briefings."  While the purpose of informed consent laws is to educate women considering an abortion, they apparently do little to dissuade them from proceeding.

Those of us who are still around from the early feminist days of fighting for the right to have abortions will have to remind our worthless government once again that women own their own bodies! They do not belong to those sexless old men with white hair in congress.

Call your senators today and tell them to stand up for women's health. And this is the important part: we need you to commit to keeping up our side of the debate by calling once a week until health care reform that protects women is a reality. Click here to call now: http://www.ppaction.org/network/hcr09callvisibility.html?qp_source=hcr09visib_e1_ppol

Thank you, Tommy, for the link.  I'm outraged.  Abortion is legal yet our government turns a blind eye to the criminal harassment, death threats, and murder of its citizens.  Why do they continue to kow tow to the religious right?

Despite mounting threats to the clinic--and potentially to the life--of Nebraska Dr. Leroy Carhart, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has removed the federal marshals earlier charged with protecting him.

Dr. Carhart lost his federal marshal protection two weeks ago, much to the alarm of pro-choice leaders, leaving him vulnerable at a time when anti-choice violence has been escalating across the country, and when Carhart himself has been openly targeted by groups such as Operation Rescue, which is calling for protests at his clinic later this month. In addition, members of the Army of God, an organization that promotes the use of violence against providers of abortion care, and glorifies those who commit acts of murder, are also targetting Dr. Carhart.

Even China gets it - if you don't make sex education and contraception accessible to women, you end up with unwanted pregnancies and abortions.  You can't leverage women into motherhood:

Authorities in China have highlighted inadequate knowledge of contraception and poor sex education as major factors in the high number of abortions there.

There are 13 million abortions each year, compared to 20 million births, according to newly published research.  Researchers believe the real figure could be even higher because there are many abortions at unregistered clinics.

Other countries have higher rates. They include Russia - which some years has more terminations than births.

My heart sank when I read this article.  The fight to end legal abortion and intentional motherhood is clearly about women being relegated to baby machines.  First, they focused on closing the clincs.   Now they're challenging the pill by defining personhood as an "egg".  Does that mean I'm guilty of murder when I get my period?  And what about sperm?

A resurgent movement to place "personhood" measures on state ballots across the nation to ban abortion and comprehensive reproductive care could have far more sweeping implications than the trial balloon Colorado voters soundly defeated last year.

Far from being dissuaded by the 3-to-1 loss from their 2008 campaign to confer zygotes with legal rights, abortion opponents are regrouping with a broader initiative that purports to address life span issues, from conception to death.

Betty and I feel that we should target Randall Terry the founder of Operation Rescue (the group responsible for publishing George Tiller's name, address, and where you could find him on a sunday morning) and paint "killer" on his house in red paint.  According to the NY Times, the anti-abortion forces have nothing to do now that Tiller is gone:

For the first time in years, only a Wichita police car has been waiting outside the abortion clinic of Dr. George R. Tiller, who was shot to death a week ago. Gone are the trucks bearing enormous images of bloody fetuses, the signs offering the home addresses of clinic workers, the crowd of protesters yelling to women as they enter.

Before Dr. George R. Tiller was killed, his Wichita clinic was a regular target of abortion protesters, including this man wielding a cross at a demonstration in 2006.

Over almost 20 years, a vocal, diverse constellation of anti-abortion forces has grown up in this conservative city with an intensity rarely seen elsewhere, converging around Dr. Tiller's practice. With his death, its future suddenly seems uncertain, too.

This episode is dedicated to the life and work of Dr. George Tiller and all those who've fought to protect our reproductive rights and support intentional motherhood. It's time to revive feminism...this time by honoring pussy power. Here's the link to the book A New View of a Woman's Body:

Found this on Susie Bright's blog. She found it on John Cole's Balloon Juice, which she found through Bitch PhD's blog.

"In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn't be certain but thought that she might be having twins.

"We were thrilled and couldn't wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants.

Now we know why they have to bus in to New York AND THERE ARE SO MANY LATE TERM ABORTIONS:

It's about intentional motherhood people.  Can we finally stop guilting young women who have to make tough decisions and make nonsurgical abortions available so they don't have to risk their lives? 

Unwed pregnant teens and twenty-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to obtain abortions than their peers from public schools, according to sociological research published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

"This research suggests that young, unmarried women are confronted with a number of social, financial and health-related factors that can make it difficult for them to act according to religious values when deciding whether to keep or abort a pregnancy," said the study's author, sociologist Amy Adamczyk, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.