The Republican state convention delegate was discussing with a prominent Utah GOP elected officeholder the issue of immigration when the delegate whined that a fence should be constructed to span the entire USA-Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants.
GOP OFFICIAL: What happens when they climb the fence?
DELEGATE: You electrify it. Then they won't touch it.
GOP OFFICIAL: But what if they touch it? You would let them die?
DELEGATE: It would be their choice.
GOP OFFICIAL: What about a mother with a baby strapped to her back? You would let the mother and the baby die?
DELEGATE: It would be the mother's choice to kill that baby.
GOP OFFICIAL: Then you're in favor of abortion?
[Dead silence]
Showing posts with label Abortion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abortion. Show all posts
Friday, May 9, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Post your abortion story on NPR's blog!
In honor of the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, NPR posted the following blog:
Click here to post your own abortion story on NPR's blog.
****
One More Taboo...
In the Sex and the City episode "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda," Carrie Bradshaw tackled one of the subjects most familiar and least handled in popular culture -- Abortion. In it, Carrie admits that she got an abortion herself after a drunk one night stand over a decade ago. This, for the show that regularly did competely unprintable things with say, wheatgrass, doesn't seem to be taboo, right? Except, abortion is one of those things that women rarely talk about after they've had them -- whatever the reason. It doesn't matter if you're pro-choice or pro-life or in-between -- many women don't talk about past abortions -- even with their dearest friends or family. So today, we're going to do it -- and we're asking you to tell your stories -- whatever they are. If you had an abortion, tell us about it, and how you felt at the time. And why, if this is your experience, you do or do not talk about it now.
Barrie Hardymon
Click here to post your own abortion story on NPR's blog.
****
One More Taboo...
In the Sex and the City episode "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda," Carrie Bradshaw tackled one of the subjects most familiar and least handled in popular culture -- Abortion. In it, Carrie admits that she got an abortion herself after a drunk one night stand over a decade ago. This, for the show that regularly did competely unprintable things with say, wheatgrass, doesn't seem to be taboo, right? Except, abortion is one of those things that women rarely talk about after they've had them -- whatever the reason. It doesn't matter if you're pro-choice or pro-life or in-between -- many women don't talk about past abortions -- even with their dearest friends or family. So today, we're going to do it -- and we're asking you to tell your stories -- whatever they are. If you had an abortion, tell us about it, and how you felt at the time. And why, if this is your experience, you do or do not talk about it now.
Barrie Hardymon
Monday, November 12, 2007
If Roe Falls, States Ready to Curb or Ban Abortion
Article link
(WOMENSENEWS)--Women in a majority of U.S. states risk losing the right to obtain an abortion due to changes on the Supreme Court bench and the proliferation of abortion bans--some enacted, some in waiting--the Center for Reproductive Rights said yesterday in its "What If Roe Fell?" report.
A reversal of Roe v. Wade--the 1973 Supreme Court decision that decriminalized abortion--would mean that abortion law falls to the states, where anti-choice activists are pursuing a steady, two-front attack against abortion rights.
On one front, activists are pushing contentious legislation challenging Roe that is designed to be fought up to the Supreme Court. In the last three years, 27 such abortion bans have been introduced in 14 states, including Colorado, Georgia, Missouri and West Virginia.
Other states--such as Alabama, Delaware, Massachusetts and Michigan--enacted bans prior to the Roe decision that are still on the books. Many of the pre-Roe bans have been overturned or at least not been enforced since 1973 but could be revived. Many include exceptions to protect the life or health of the woman.
On the second front, activists are introducing "abortion bans-in-waiting," or laws that would be enacted by a Roe reversal. Because these state-level bans are not yet law, it is not possible for pro-choice groups to mount legal challenges against them.
'Hard to Galvanize Public Response'
"It's a good strategy . . . a way for them to silently lay a foundation largely without public knowledge," says Katherine Grainger, state program director for the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights. "Because they don't immediately go into effect now, it's hard to galvanize a public response."
There were no abortion-bans-in-waiting laws in 2004, the center's report notes, but by 2007 four states--Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota--had passed them. Another five states--Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah--have already considered or are currently considering them.
Authors of the report--including Grainger and other legal researchers--estimate as many as 30 states--including Ohio, Michigan, Louisiana, Indiana, Oklahoma and Texas--could pass legislation to restrict or altogether ban abortions in the wake of a Roe reversal.
Alaska, California, Florida, Maine, Vermont and New York are among the 20 where abortion is not expected to face immediate legal challenge.
Changes on the Bench
As state activism pressures Roe from below, Roe is also vulnerable from above. Authors say changes on the Supreme Court--in particular the July 2005 retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, her replacement by Justice Samuel Alito and the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts--have shifted the balance.
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision last April in Gonzales v. Carhart upheld a federal law that banned a specific abortion procedure used after 12 weeks of pregnancy and eliminated the precedent that legal restrictions placed on abortion must include an exception to protect the health of the woman.
"I remember when abortion was illegal, the days of coat-hanger abortions," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said at the report's launch. "I'm very worried a Supreme Court decision now would take us back there. It is time to mobilize women to fight."
Sixty-three percent of 1,000 registered voters surveyed agreed that Roe v. Wade is vulnerable, and 42 percent said they opposed leaving the matter up to the states rather than the Supreme Court, in a poll conducted by Lake Research Partners that accompanies the report. Seven in 10 respondents said the government should not interfere with abortions that are medically necessary.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which promotes reproductive rights nationally and internationally, issued a similar report in 2004.
Flagging a Quiet Effort
President Nancy Northup said the group updated the report to flag a quiet but "dramatic and frightening attempt to create a post-Roe world."
Legislative opposition to abortion rights is underway in 17 states and the report's authors say the goal is to get a case to the Supreme Court where a reversal of Roe v. Wade is now possible.
The year following O'Connor's departure a dozen states passed or attempted to pass laws to limit abortion rights. By 2007, the number of such bills that were introduced skyrocketed to 38 in 17 states. It was the most concerted legislative challenge since the early 1990s, when a 1992 Supreme Court decision--in Planned Parenthood v. Casey--held that a state could enact laws to affect access to abortion in the first trimester as long as exceptions to protect the health of the woman were secure.
The only states where abortion rights would be preserved are those that have protections established in their state constitutions, or where state laws are already in place, the report finds. "Given the variations in law and political climates in the 50 states, the overturning of Roe would result in a patchwork of rights in which women seeking abortions would be strongly protected in some states and completely denied the right in others, with different levels of protection in between."
Low-income women in particular would be affected, the report finds, because they already struggle to find and pay for a local, legal abortion.
"If Roe is overturned, there is a strong possibility that a clandestine, illegal underground will again emerge to meet the need for abortions, a need that virtually no one believes will disappear," the report warns, noting that seven of the 10 poorest states in the country are considered likely to ban abortions within a year of reversing Roe.
Pro-choice activists call for counter-activism to repeal existing legislation, preparation to battle new state restrictions and support for the Freedom of Choice Act, now being lobbied in Congress and some states.
Introduced last April by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the bill provides protection for women to make decisions regarding their individual reproductive health needs without any government interference, even if Roe v. Wade is reversed.
***
Juliette Terzieff is a freelance journalist currently based in Tampa, Fla., who has worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN International and the London Sunday Times during time spent in the Balkans, the Middle East and South Asia.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Telling the Stories Behind the Abortions
"Because it is such a secret, we lose sight of how common it is."
- Dr. Susan Wicklund
New York Times
November 6, 2007
By CORNELIA DEAN
Dr. Susan Wicklund took her first step toward the front line of the abortion wars when she was in her early 20s, a high school graduate with a few community college credits, working dead-end jobs.
She became pregnant. She had an abortion. It was legal, but it was ghastly.
Her counseling, she recalls, was limited to instructions to pay in advance, in cash, and to go to the emergency room if she had a problem. During the procedure itself, her every question drew the same response: “Shut up!”
Determined that other women should have better reproductive care, she began work as an apprentice midwife and eventually finished college, earned a medical degree and started a practice in which she spends about 90 percent of her time on abortion services. Much of her work is in underserved regions on the Western plains, at clinics that she visits by plane.
In her forthcoming book “This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor” (Public Affairs), Dr. Wicklund describes her work, the circumstances that lead her patients to choose abortion, and the barriers — lack of money, lack of providers, violence in the home or protesters at clinics — that stand in their way.
But she said her main goal with the book was to encourage more open discussion of abortion and its prevalence.
“We don’t talk about it,” she said in a telephone interview. “People say, ‘Nobody I know has ever had an abortion,’ and that is just not true. Their sisters, their mothers have had abortions.”
Dr. Wicklund, 53, said that at current rates almost 40 percent of American women have an abortion during their child-bearing years, a figure supported by the Guttmacher Institute, which researches reproductive health policy. Abortion is one of the most common operations in the United States, she said, more common than tonsillectomy or removal of wisdom teeth. “Because it is such a secret,” she said, “we lose sight of how common it is.”
But Dr. Wicklund acknowledges that abortion is an issue fraught with dilemmas. In the book, she describes witnessing, as a medical student, the abortion of a 21-week fetus. She writes that at the sight of its tiny arm she decided she would perform abortions only in the first trimester of pregnancy. She says late-term abortions should be legal, but her decision means she occasionally sees desperate women she must refuse to help.
Dr. Wicklund describes her horror when she aborted the pregnancy of a woman who had been raped, only to discover, by examining the removed tissue, that the pregnancy was further along than she or the woman had thought — and that she had destroyed an embryo the woman and her husband had conceived together. And she describes the way she watches and listens as the women she treats tell why they want to end their pregnancies. If she detects uncertainty or thinks they may be responding to the wishes of anyone other than themselves, she says, she tells them to think it over a bit longer.
On the other hand, Dr. Wicklund has little use for requirements like 24-hour waiting periods, or for assertions like those of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said in a recent Supreme Court decision on abortion that the government had an interest in protecting women from their own decisions in the matter.
“It’s so incredibly insulting,” Dr. Wicklund said in the interview. “The 24-hour waiting period implies that women don’t think about it on their own and have to have the government forcing it on them. To me a lot of the abortion restrictions are about control of women, about power, and it’s insulting.”
Dr. Wicklund said she would put more credence in opponents of abortion rights if they did more to help women prevent unwanted pregnancies. Instead, she said, many of the protesters she encounters “are against birth control, period.” That is unfortunate, she said, because her clinic experience confirms studies showing that emphasizing abstinence rather than contraception may cause girls to delay their first sexual experience for a few months, but “when they do have intercourse they are much less likely to protect themselves with birth control or a condom.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, about a quarter of pregnancies in the United States end in abortion. Dr. Wicklund says that is why she believes far more people favor abortion rights than are willing to admit it in polls. For example, she said in the interview, an abortion ban that seemed to have wide support in South Dakota was put to a vote and “when people got behind those curtains and nobody was watching it was overwhelmingly defeated. Unfortunately, people are not willing to say what they really think.”
One of these people might be a woman she recognized as one of the protesters who regularly appeared, shouting, outside a clinic where she worked. Only now the woman was in the waiting room, desperate to end an unwanted pregnancy. Dr. Wicklund performed the procedure.
And then there is Dr. Wicklund’s maternal grandmother, a woman she was afraid would disapprove of her work. But it turned out that she had a story of her own. “When I was 16 years old, my best friend got pregnant,” is how the story began. Her friend turned to her and her sister for help. They did the only thing they could think of — putting “something long and sharp ‘up there,’ ” according to the book. The girl bled to death, and the cause of her death was kept secret.
“I know exactly what kind of work you do,” the grandmother told Dr. Wicklund, “and it is a good thing.” One question Dr. Wicklund hears “all the time,” she said, is how she can focus on abortion rather than on something more rewarding, like delivering babies.
“In fact, the women are so grateful,” Dr. Wicklund said in the interview. “Women are so grateful to know they can get through this safely, that they can still get pregnant again.
“It is one of the few areas of medicine where you are not working with a sick person, you are doing something for them that gives them back their life, their control,” she added. “It’s a very rewarding thing to be part of that.”
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Adoption And The Role Of The Religious Right
By Mirah Riben
Click here for article
04 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
November is National Adoption Awareness Month: time to take stock and rethink our adoption practices and goals.
Recent headlines reveal such contradictions as:
- 3,700 U.S. families in the process of adopting children from Guatemala are concerned, upset and unsure about their pending adoption because of Guatemala’s crack down on child trafficking.
- British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and his wife are joyously celebrating their second adoption: both adopted as newborns fresh from American delivery rooms.
- Six French “child rescuers” are among sixteen jailed for illegally taking 103 children from Chad who were neither starving nor orphaned.
Adoption Awareness Month was intended to increase the awareness of the needs of US orphans in foster care who could benefit from adoption. Today, such children number in excess of 100,00 of the half million children in foster care, while we promote and encourage adoption without distinguishing these children from infants who are sought after.
The U.S. imports more infants for adoption that any other nation, while also exporting Black children to Canada and white infants to the wealthy in Britain, Mexico and elsewhere in a seeming endless redistribution redistributing these marketable commodities as private entrepreneurs profit from their demand with little to no regulations.
L. Ann Babb, author of Ethics in American Adoption. reports that American adoption “[professionals] have yet to develop uniform ethical standards… or to make meaningful attempts to monitor their own profession … In other professions and occupations, licensing or certification in a specialty must be earned before an individual can offer expert services in an area. The certified manicurist may not give facials; the certified hair stylist may not offer manicures ….Yet…individuals with professions as different as social work and law, marriage and family therapy, and medicine may call themselves ‘adoption professionals’.”
Babb continues: “There remains no national professional organization for adoption specialists, no professional recognition of adoption practice as a specialty of any discipline, no established education and training requirements, and no regular professional meetings and forums for adoption ‘professionals'.”
Brits are lauding America’s lax regulations that allowed the Miliband’s to twice adopt an American infant. The British media articles bemoan the fact that Britain does not allow such exploitive measures, as if adoption was about providing babies in the quickest way possible with the least amount of red tape, eliciting comments such as:
American websites currently offer[ ] mouth-watering
incentives to would-be buyers. "Delivery within four
months", "Discounts of up to $19,000", they proclaim.
If it were cars they were selling this would not seem
odd, but it's babies that are for sale – bright,
smiling newborns to tempt the childless into parting
with about £20,000.
There is no shame in treating babies like any other
purchase in America, where the adoption industry is
largely privatized… (“Why adoption is so easy in
America” Telegraph.co.uk 10/31/07)
Is there no shame?
Why are infants such as these are leaving the US while US couples are traveling half way around the word to meet their desire for a baby when both countries have children in foster care?
The answer is that adoption is far from an altruist social program to care for needy orphans. Instead, adoption is a business; babies are priced based on age, race, ethnicity, health, and physical ability. It all sounds vulgar because it is.
“It feels harsh to use concepts like supply and demand when talking about children and obviously it’s wrong to say that international adoption is just a trade in children,” says Riitta Högbacka, University of Helsinki, Finland, reporting on the global market for adoption . “But if we look at the direction of this human flow—which countries are sending children, which countries are receiving and who is doing the adopting—then it is very clear. It goes from the South to the North and from the East to the West. The recipients are always the richer countries in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Evan B. Donaldson Institute for Adoption, Anaheim Conference “Money, Power and Accountability: The ‘Business’ of Adoption” summary: No., 1999, concludes:“Thinking of adoption in economic terms is an uncomfortable reality. There has been a deterioration of the constraints once put in place to protect members of the triad from exploitation, with market factors such as inflated inventories, scarce commodities, demographic trends in the marketplace, products in oversupply, and the principles of supply and demand affecting adoption services.”
“Profit-based motivation in child placement [that] is … loathsome” and “largely driven by money… Money has become the critical variable for determining who gets a child….” according to L. Anne Babb: The fees western adopters are willing to pay to obtain a child often support a lucrative black market coercing mothers, stealing and kidnapping babies and children that are sold to orphanages to be internationally adopted.
International adoption has become an unregulated “entrepreneurial venture,” according to Debra Harder, network director for Adoptive Families of America. (Laura Mansnerus, “Market Puts Price Tags on the Priceless” New York Times, October 26, 1998)
Högbacka additionally finds that internationally, as well as domestically: “Demand is focused on quite a small group of under three-year-olds, where the number of potential parents far exceeds the supply of children.” (Feb 22, 2006 “The global market for adoption.” SixDegrees cover story)
Child trafficking for adoption is an issue of concern addressed by UNICEF and other non-profit watchdog agencies throughout the world. Sandra Soria, executive director of Peru’s nonprofit Institute for Infancy and the Family said: “It’s a situation that favors the proliferation of these trafficking rings and creates the markets and conditions for these international networks to operate,” said. Soria notes that it is impossible to know how many children are sold each year, for adoption, forced labor, or the sex trade. (Rick Vecchio, “Pregnant Teen’s Murder Shocks Peru.” Associated Press, March 13, 2006.)
The recent incident in Chad illustrated the fact that worldwide 80% of children targeted for international adoption have parents. Even those in orphanages have family who visit them and use these institutions for temporary care. Such was the case with the family of David Banda who Madonna adopted. Children who are truly orphaned, could be adopted within their own nation if not for the competition of foreign fees to orphanages.
Program director of International Social Service, Chantal Saclier is responsible for the United Kingdom’s ISS Resource Centre on the Protection of Children in Adoption. Saclier finds that although inter-country adoption is intended to find stable homes for children who do not have the opportunity for a loving family environment, many of the children being adopted have a family that could have been preserved. Factors such as pressure from wealthy adoptive families, and the selfishness and greed of officials, have created a situation in which economically disadvantaged children are exploited and sold. (Chantal Scalier, “In the Best Interests of the Child? International Resource Centre for the Protection of Children in Adoption.” In: Selman, P., Ed.)
Peter Dodds, author Outer Search\Inner Journey: An Orphan and Adoptee's Quest finds: “International adoption isn't the answer to improving the overall plight of children in developing countries. Even the strongest supporters admit the movement of adoptees across international borders represents only a tiny fraction of the neglected, abused and abandoned children in these countries. And supporters of international adoption are quiet about the children who are not adopted and left behind.”
The stripping of children from eastern Europe, Asia and South has been called colonialism and cultural genocide. According to Ethica, thirteen countries have suspended or ended their adoption programs in the past fifteen years. Another half dozen countries have temporarily stopped adoptions to investigate allegations of corruption or child trafficking, the latest Chad.
Jane Jeong Trenka (jjtrenka.worldpress.com)is a Korean born adoptee whose Korean mother searched and found her after she was sent to the U.S. and before she was legally adopted. Trenka was raised in rural Minnesota by white American parents, and has been going back and forth from Korea since 1995 maintaining continuous contact with her Korean family since 1988. She writes extensively about the need to end exporting children from Korea. Other Korean born adoptees are returning to their homeland, and some are filled with pain and anger that they were torn from their rich cultural heritage. (Vanessa Hua, “Korean-born in U.S. return to a home they never knew Many locate lost families, others work to change international adoption policy” San Francisco Chronicle. September 11, 2005)
Trenka says, “South Korea’s dependence on the international adoption program has stunted the growth of more appropriate government-funded social welfare programs, as well as delayed the social acceptance of single-parent families….International adoption is NOT the solution. Instead, the South Korean government must find its own solution by investing in sex education, supporting single parents and creating incentives for domestic adoption.” (Adoption from South Korea: Isn’t 50 Years Enough? Jane’s Blog, June 27th, 200)
Jae Ran Kim, a South Korea-born/American raised adoptee and social worker in the field of adoption and child welfare laments: “It is ethnocentric and arrogant to think that the United States has any business telling another country how they should manage the problem of orphaned, abandoned or relinquished children. We can’t even solve this problem within our own shores.
(http://harlowmonkey.typepad.com/harlows_monkey
/2006/08/adoptee_vs_adop.html)
Maureen Flatley political consultant and media advisor specializing in child welfare and adoption, observes: “Our national policy allows large sums of cash to leave the country in an entirely unregulated system and browbeating foreign governments into surrendering children in a decision-making process for their foster children that none of our fifty states would permit for America’s waiting children….Lacking training in foreign policy or a sound regulatory framework, would-be adoptive families and their adoption agencies are encouraged to navigate the increasingly complex and treacherous geopolitics of countries around the world with virtually no training and in many cases a vested self interest. The result has been diplomatic and emotional chaos.” (“Federal Regulation of International Adoption,” Decree, American Adoption Congress, 1999. www.childlaw.us/2005/05/federal_regulat.html)
Who is behind it all?
The Brits have also rightly pointed to U.S. restrictions on birth control and abortion as a contributing to “marketable” infants in the U.S. The religious right’s imposed morality is perfectly partnered with those whose livelihoods depend upon the redistribution of children.
In May, 2007 Evangelical Christians organizations such as Focus on the Family and pastors from across the nation held a three-day summit in Colorado. members of to promote adoption via a media blitz.
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, a major player in this new path of evangelism, and present at the summit, expressed concern that foster parents typically are permitted to take children to church but cannot force religion on them. They must adhere to other state guidelines as well, some of which may contradict their faith such as parents “disciplining” their children physically with switches as taught by Dobson, a child psychologist.
While some of the flock may in fact adopt children from foster care, concern for orphaned and abandoned children is a smoke screen to use adoption as a tool against abortion, against single parenthood, and for evangelism. That is why, among those present at this event was Tom Atwood, president of the National Committee for Adoption, the largest lobbying organization of adoption agencies, primarily those of the Later Day Saints. The NCFA is also the major opposition to legislation aimed at restoring adoptees’ right to their own true identity.
The NCFA web page purports to be about finding homes for children in foster care, yet their mission page shows in black and white their first and foremost agenda item: “Train pregnancy counselors and health care workers in infant adoption awareness, so women and teens with unplanned pregnancies can freely consider the loving option of adoption.”
And, contrary to promoting the adoption of U.S. orphans, on the NCFA agenda is “Work[ing] with the U.S. and foreign governments to establish sound policies for inter-country adoption, so foreign orphans can be placed with loving, permanent families.”
The NCFA and the religious right are partners in a full-fledged propaganda war being waged to recruit Christian soldiers through adoption. With all the ingenuity and marketing skills available to them, the NCFA and the religious right couch their pro-adoption stance as a noble plan to help the hundred of thousands of children in foster care, using these kids as the foot in the door by both to get tax incentives and other benefits for their clients who seek to adopt primarily infants. All good social engineers know the advantages of starting with a “blank slate.” (For more on American adoption as social engineering see Barbara Melosh, Ellen Herman, and E. Wayne Carp.)
Ken Connor, the attorney who represented Governor Jeb Bush in the Terri Schiavo case and Vice Chairman of Americans United for Life, reporting on the pro-adoption summit (A Selfless Choice: In Celebration of Adoption, Townhall.com May 12, 2007) calls abortion big business and extols the “virtues” of adoption—a far bigger and corrupt—multi-billion dollar industry.
Connor goes on to tout infant adoption as a win-win for everyone including the mother who suffers a lose-lose: the irrevocable permanent loss of parental rights, her child, and her relationship with him.
Lost in the dogmatic rhetoric being spewed by both ideological extremes among pro-choice and pro-life proponents….is pro-family. UNICEF’s position is that adoption should be a last resort. “Families needing support to care for their children should receive it, and that alternative means of caring for a child should only be considered when, despite this assistance, a child’s family is unavailable, unable or unwilling to care for her or him.”
The only reason to encourage and promote more relinquishments and more adoptions is to fill a “demand” for healthy white infants, which, in fact, is counter to a goal of finding homes for older, non-white, or physically challenged children being supported by state funds. It is uncharitable and un-American. The same is true for supporting and encouraging international adoption.
Other items on their agenda list include the promotion of anti-family, anti-parenting programs such as so-called “safe havens” that allow for the legal abandonment of infants and putative father laws to speed relinquishments of newly born babies, causing one to ask if the real reason is to maintain the supply of “adoptable” [read acceptable] babies for their contributors, cronies, constituents or clients.
Pro-life organizations can be known by whatever family-orientated, all-American cutesie “baby saving” and “hope-filled” names…they may even invoke the name of, or believe that they are doing the work of, God…. but their tactics are all counter to true Family Preservation as spelled out in the constitution of the United States which protects parental rights; the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; and message of Judeo-Christianity. Being pro-family means being supportive of all families…not judging who has the necessary finances or marital status.
Worldwide 80% of children in orphanages have families, most who visit them and hope to regain custody. Poverty is the major cause of children needing adoption, not abuse, neglect or abandonment. Removing children from impoverished families does nothing to ameliorate the plight of the family, village or nation from where they originate.
Not all international adoptions—nor all domestic infant adoptions—support corruption, but there is no way to distinguish which do or to determine the accurate source of children offered by international orphanages. We thus need to rethink our romanticized view of adoption as a “rescue” mission as well as ethnocentric international adoption policies that in many cases support black market trafficking operations. We need to rethink our child adoption policies that ignore the needs of hundreds of thousands of children in domestic foster care who cannot be reunited with family and might benefit from caring homes, and reduce tax loads, while we continue to import children for placement with families ill-equipped to handle their special needs.
Only when adoption puts the needs of orphans first before the demands of those seeking to be parents, can it be “celebrated”, encouraged and promoted.
Mirah Riben is the author of shedding light on…The Dark Side of Adoption (1988) and THE STORK MARKET: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry (2007) http://www.AdvocatePublications.com and on the Board of Directors of Origins-USA.org
Click here for article
04 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
November is National Adoption Awareness Month: time to take stock and rethink our adoption practices and goals.
Recent headlines reveal such contradictions as:
- 3,700 U.S. families in the process of adopting children from Guatemala are concerned, upset and unsure about their pending adoption because of Guatemala’s crack down on child trafficking.
- British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and his wife are joyously celebrating their second adoption: both adopted as newborns fresh from American delivery rooms.
- Six French “child rescuers” are among sixteen jailed for illegally taking 103 children from Chad who were neither starving nor orphaned.
Adoption Awareness Month was intended to increase the awareness of the needs of US orphans in foster care who could benefit from adoption. Today, such children number in excess of 100,00 of the half million children in foster care, while we promote and encourage adoption without distinguishing these children from infants who are sought after.
The U.S. imports more infants for adoption that any other nation, while also exporting Black children to Canada and white infants to the wealthy in Britain, Mexico and elsewhere in a seeming endless redistribution redistributing these marketable commodities as private entrepreneurs profit from their demand with little to no regulations.
L. Ann Babb, author of Ethics in American Adoption. reports that American adoption “[professionals] have yet to develop uniform ethical standards… or to make meaningful attempts to monitor their own profession … In other professions and occupations, licensing or certification in a specialty must be earned before an individual can offer expert services in an area. The certified manicurist may not give facials; the certified hair stylist may not offer manicures ….Yet…individuals with professions as different as social work and law, marriage and family therapy, and medicine may call themselves ‘adoption professionals’.”
Babb continues: “There remains no national professional organization for adoption specialists, no professional recognition of adoption practice as a specialty of any discipline, no established education and training requirements, and no regular professional meetings and forums for adoption ‘professionals'.”
Brits are lauding America’s lax regulations that allowed the Miliband’s to twice adopt an American infant. The British media articles bemoan the fact that Britain does not allow such exploitive measures, as if adoption was about providing babies in the quickest way possible with the least amount of red tape, eliciting comments such as:
American websites currently offer[ ] mouth-watering
incentives to would-be buyers. "Delivery within four
months", "Discounts of up to $19,000", they proclaim.
If it were cars they were selling this would not seem
odd, but it's babies that are for sale – bright,
smiling newborns to tempt the childless into parting
with about £20,000.
There is no shame in treating babies like any other
purchase in America, where the adoption industry is
largely privatized… (“Why adoption is so easy in
America” Telegraph.co.uk 10/31/07)
Is there no shame?
Why are infants such as these are leaving the US while US couples are traveling half way around the word to meet their desire for a baby when both countries have children in foster care?
The answer is that adoption is far from an altruist social program to care for needy orphans. Instead, adoption is a business; babies are priced based on age, race, ethnicity, health, and physical ability. It all sounds vulgar because it is.
“It feels harsh to use concepts like supply and demand when talking about children and obviously it’s wrong to say that international adoption is just a trade in children,” says Riitta Högbacka, University of Helsinki, Finland, reporting on the global market for adoption . “But if we look at the direction of this human flow—which countries are sending children, which countries are receiving and who is doing the adopting—then it is very clear. It goes from the South to the North and from the East to the West. The recipients are always the richer countries in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Evan B. Donaldson Institute for Adoption, Anaheim Conference “Money, Power and Accountability: The ‘Business’ of Adoption” summary: No., 1999, concludes:“Thinking of adoption in economic terms is an uncomfortable reality. There has been a deterioration of the constraints once put in place to protect members of the triad from exploitation, with market factors such as inflated inventories, scarce commodities, demographic trends in the marketplace, products in oversupply, and the principles of supply and demand affecting adoption services.”
“Profit-based motivation in child placement [that] is … loathsome” and “largely driven by money… Money has become the critical variable for determining who gets a child….” according to L. Anne Babb: The fees western adopters are willing to pay to obtain a child often support a lucrative black market coercing mothers, stealing and kidnapping babies and children that are sold to orphanages to be internationally adopted.
International adoption has become an unregulated “entrepreneurial venture,” according to Debra Harder, network director for Adoptive Families of America. (Laura Mansnerus, “Market Puts Price Tags on the Priceless” New York Times, October 26, 1998)
Högbacka additionally finds that internationally, as well as domestically: “Demand is focused on quite a small group of under three-year-olds, where the number of potential parents far exceeds the supply of children.” (Feb 22, 2006 “The global market for adoption.” SixDegrees cover story)
Child trafficking for adoption is an issue of concern addressed by UNICEF and other non-profit watchdog agencies throughout the world. Sandra Soria, executive director of Peru’s nonprofit Institute for Infancy and the Family said: “It’s a situation that favors the proliferation of these trafficking rings and creates the markets and conditions for these international networks to operate,” said. Soria notes that it is impossible to know how many children are sold each year, for adoption, forced labor, or the sex trade. (Rick Vecchio, “Pregnant Teen’s Murder Shocks Peru.” Associated Press, March 13, 2006.)
The recent incident in Chad illustrated the fact that worldwide 80% of children targeted for international adoption have parents. Even those in orphanages have family who visit them and use these institutions for temporary care. Such was the case with the family of David Banda who Madonna adopted. Children who are truly orphaned, could be adopted within their own nation if not for the competition of foreign fees to orphanages.
Program director of International Social Service, Chantal Saclier is responsible for the United Kingdom’s ISS Resource Centre on the Protection of Children in Adoption. Saclier finds that although inter-country adoption is intended to find stable homes for children who do not have the opportunity for a loving family environment, many of the children being adopted have a family that could have been preserved. Factors such as pressure from wealthy adoptive families, and the selfishness and greed of officials, have created a situation in which economically disadvantaged children are exploited and sold. (Chantal Scalier, “In the Best Interests of the Child? International Resource Centre for the Protection of Children in Adoption.” In: Selman, P., Ed.)
Peter Dodds, author Outer Search\Inner Journey: An Orphan and Adoptee's Quest finds: “International adoption isn't the answer to improving the overall plight of children in developing countries. Even the strongest supporters admit the movement of adoptees across international borders represents only a tiny fraction of the neglected, abused and abandoned children in these countries. And supporters of international adoption are quiet about the children who are not adopted and left behind.”
The stripping of children from eastern Europe, Asia and South has been called colonialism and cultural genocide. According to Ethica, thirteen countries have suspended or ended their adoption programs in the past fifteen years. Another half dozen countries have temporarily stopped adoptions to investigate allegations of corruption or child trafficking, the latest Chad.
Jane Jeong Trenka (jjtrenka.worldpress.com)is a Korean born adoptee whose Korean mother searched and found her after she was sent to the U.S. and before she was legally adopted. Trenka was raised in rural Minnesota by white American parents, and has been going back and forth from Korea since 1995 maintaining continuous contact with her Korean family since 1988. She writes extensively about the need to end exporting children from Korea. Other Korean born adoptees are returning to their homeland, and some are filled with pain and anger that they were torn from their rich cultural heritage. (Vanessa Hua, “Korean-born in U.S. return to a home they never knew Many locate lost families, others work to change international adoption policy” San Francisco Chronicle. September 11, 2005)
Trenka says, “South Korea’s dependence on the international adoption program has stunted the growth of more appropriate government-funded social welfare programs, as well as delayed the social acceptance of single-parent families….International adoption is NOT the solution. Instead, the South Korean government must find its own solution by investing in sex education, supporting single parents and creating incentives for domestic adoption.” (Adoption from South Korea: Isn’t 50 Years Enough? Jane’s Blog, June 27th, 200)
Jae Ran Kim, a South Korea-born/American raised adoptee and social worker in the field of adoption and child welfare laments: “It is ethnocentric and arrogant to think that the United States has any business telling another country how they should manage the problem of orphaned, abandoned or relinquished children. We can’t even solve this problem within our own shores.
(http://harlowmonkey.typepad.com/harlows_monkey
/2006/08/adoptee_vs_adop.html)
Maureen Flatley political consultant and media advisor specializing in child welfare and adoption, observes: “Our national policy allows large sums of cash to leave the country in an entirely unregulated system and browbeating foreign governments into surrendering children in a decision-making process for their foster children that none of our fifty states would permit for America’s waiting children….Lacking training in foreign policy or a sound regulatory framework, would-be adoptive families and their adoption agencies are encouraged to navigate the increasingly complex and treacherous geopolitics of countries around the world with virtually no training and in many cases a vested self interest. The result has been diplomatic and emotional chaos.” (“Federal Regulation of International Adoption,” Decree, American Adoption Congress, 1999. www.childlaw.us/2005/05/federal_regulat.html)
Who is behind it all?
The Brits have also rightly pointed to U.S. restrictions on birth control and abortion as a contributing to “marketable” infants in the U.S. The religious right’s imposed morality is perfectly partnered with those whose livelihoods depend upon the redistribution of children.
In May, 2007 Evangelical Christians organizations such as Focus on the Family and pastors from across the nation held a three-day summit in Colorado. members of to promote adoption via a media blitz.
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, a major player in this new path of evangelism, and present at the summit, expressed concern that foster parents typically are permitted to take children to church but cannot force religion on them. They must adhere to other state guidelines as well, some of which may contradict their faith such as parents “disciplining” their children physically with switches as taught by Dobson, a child psychologist.
While some of the flock may in fact adopt children from foster care, concern for orphaned and abandoned children is a smoke screen to use adoption as a tool against abortion, against single parenthood, and for evangelism. That is why, among those present at this event was Tom Atwood, president of the National Committee for Adoption, the largest lobbying organization of adoption agencies, primarily those of the Later Day Saints. The NCFA is also the major opposition to legislation aimed at restoring adoptees’ right to their own true identity.
The NCFA web page purports to be about finding homes for children in foster care, yet their mission page shows in black and white their first and foremost agenda item: “Train pregnancy counselors and health care workers in infant adoption awareness, so women and teens with unplanned pregnancies can freely consider the loving option of adoption.”
And, contrary to promoting the adoption of U.S. orphans, on the NCFA agenda is “Work[ing] with the U.S. and foreign governments to establish sound policies for inter-country adoption, so foreign orphans can be placed with loving, permanent families.”
The NCFA and the religious right are partners in a full-fledged propaganda war being waged to recruit Christian soldiers through adoption. With all the ingenuity and marketing skills available to them, the NCFA and the religious right couch their pro-adoption stance as a noble plan to help the hundred of thousands of children in foster care, using these kids as the foot in the door by both to get tax incentives and other benefits for their clients who seek to adopt primarily infants. All good social engineers know the advantages of starting with a “blank slate.” (For more on American adoption as social engineering see Barbara Melosh, Ellen Herman, and E. Wayne Carp.)
Ken Connor, the attorney who represented Governor Jeb Bush in the Terri Schiavo case and Vice Chairman of Americans United for Life, reporting on the pro-adoption summit (A Selfless Choice: In Celebration of Adoption, Townhall.com May 12, 2007) calls abortion big business and extols the “virtues” of adoption—a far bigger and corrupt—multi-billion dollar industry.
Connor goes on to tout infant adoption as a win-win for everyone including the mother who suffers a lose-lose: the irrevocable permanent loss of parental rights, her child, and her relationship with him.
Lost in the dogmatic rhetoric being spewed by both ideological extremes among pro-choice and pro-life proponents….is pro-family. UNICEF’s position is that adoption should be a last resort. “Families needing support to care for their children should receive it, and that alternative means of caring for a child should only be considered when, despite this assistance, a child’s family is unavailable, unable or unwilling to care for her or him.”
The only reason to encourage and promote more relinquishments and more adoptions is to fill a “demand” for healthy white infants, which, in fact, is counter to a goal of finding homes for older, non-white, or physically challenged children being supported by state funds. It is uncharitable and un-American. The same is true for supporting and encouraging international adoption.
Other items on their agenda list include the promotion of anti-family, anti-parenting programs such as so-called “safe havens” that allow for the legal abandonment of infants and putative father laws to speed relinquishments of newly born babies, causing one to ask if the real reason is to maintain the supply of “adoptable” [read acceptable] babies for their contributors, cronies, constituents or clients.
Pro-life organizations can be known by whatever family-orientated, all-American cutesie “baby saving” and “hope-filled” names…they may even invoke the name of, or believe that they are doing the work of, God…. but their tactics are all counter to true Family Preservation as spelled out in the constitution of the United States which protects parental rights; the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; and message of Judeo-Christianity. Being pro-family means being supportive of all families…not judging who has the necessary finances or marital status.
Worldwide 80% of children in orphanages have families, most who visit them and hope to regain custody. Poverty is the major cause of children needing adoption, not abuse, neglect or abandonment. Removing children from impoverished families does nothing to ameliorate the plight of the family, village or nation from where they originate.
Not all international adoptions—nor all domestic infant adoptions—support corruption, but there is no way to distinguish which do or to determine the accurate source of children offered by international orphanages. We thus need to rethink our romanticized view of adoption as a “rescue” mission as well as ethnocentric international adoption policies that in many cases support black market trafficking operations. We need to rethink our child adoption policies that ignore the needs of hundreds of thousands of children in domestic foster care who cannot be reunited with family and might benefit from caring homes, and reduce tax loads, while we continue to import children for placement with families ill-equipped to handle their special needs.
Only when adoption puts the needs of orphans first before the demands of those seeking to be parents, can it be “celebrated”, encouraged and promoted.
Mirah Riben is the author of shedding light on…The Dark Side of Adoption (1988) and THE STORK MARKET: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry (2007) http://www.AdvocatePublications.com and on the Board of Directors of Origins-USA.org
Monday, October 29, 2007
The adoption vs. abortion myth
Why politicians are wrong to trumpet the former as a solution to the latter.
Article
By Cory L. Richards
October 29, 2007
Striving to find the "middle ground" on abortion -- that is, coming up with ways acceptable to pro-choice and pro-life Americans alike to reduce the number of abortions in the United States -- is a worthwhile undertaking. But it also has given rise to some fairly resilient myths about the best way to achieve this goal.
Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani prominently featured one such myth in his speech Oct. 20 to a group of social conservatives. The former New York City mayor stated that "we increased adoption by 133% over the eight years before I came into office. And we found that abortions went down by 18% during that period of time. I believe we can do that in the United States."
But Giuliani's implied causality between these two statistics is unsupportable for this simple reason: The increases he cites were in the rate of adoptions of children out of New York City's foster care system, not in the rate at which women were continuing unwanted pregnancies and placing their infants for adoption rather than having abortions. Nothing in the data he cites indicates that there was any significant increase in the city's newborn relinquishment rate while he was mayor.
Giuliani is not alone in misrepresenting the adoption-abortion link in this way. Politicians from both parties frequently promote tax credits and other incentives to ease the way for adoptive parents to demonstrate that they want to "do something" about abortion. Facilitating adoptions, especially of hard-to-place children, deserves our strong support. But it does nothing to affect the abortion rate. To assert that it does is either ill-informed or simply cynical, and it should stop.
Meanwhile, we know that very few women actually place their infants for adoption. In the United States, fewer than 14,000 newborns were voluntarily relinquished in 2003 (the latest year for which an estimate is available), according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That proportion -- just under 1% of all the children born to never-married women -- has remained constant for almost two decades. It's down considerably from the early 1970s, but even in those days, more than nine in 10 unmarried women who gave birth kept their babies.
The 2003 infant relinquishment figure is minuscule when compared to the almost 1.3 million abortions that took place that year. And even then, it would be wrong to assume that every one of those relinquishments actually averted an abortion. Many women placing their baby for adoption may never have considered abortion in the first place.
Among the main explanations cited in the HHS report for decline in relinquishments since the '70s are that "the increased social acceptance of single parenthood has led more unmarried women to keep their children" and that "a higher proportion of unmarried mothers are in their 20s rather than their teens, so the personal and financial stresses may not be as great as in the past." More important, the researchers do not consider abortion to be a significant factor and suggest that "the decline in abortion rates shows that the decline in relinquishment is not a result of increasing selection of abortion over relinquishment."
Politicians of all stripes, and whatever their position on abortion, should face reality. Increasing the rate of completed adoptions, however valid on its own merits, is irrelevant to the abortion rate. And increasing the rate of newborn relinquishments, even assuming it could be done in an ethically and socially acceptable way, at best would be tinkering at the margins. Even if relinquishments doubled, and each one of them represented an averted abortion, it would make hardly a dent in the abortion rate.
In his recent speech, Giuliani did leave himself an opening to embrace evidence-based policies when he offered that he would "support any reasonable suggestion that promises to reduce the number of abortions."
In fact, there are plenty of proven, common-sense policies that he (and all those who are still promoting adoption as a viable anti-abortion strategy) could support. Chief among them is to expand women's access to high-quality contraceptive counseling and services and to support comprehensive sex education that teaches young people about both delaying sex and using protection when they do become sexually active.
As a just-published Guttmacher Institute study shows, abortion rates are extremely high in many countries where contraceptives are not readily available and contraceptive use is not encouraged, even though abortion is highly restricted in those places by law. And the world's lowest rates of abortion by far are found in Western Europe, where very few legal restrictions are placed on abortion but contraceptive use and comprehensive sex education are widespread.
Behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. The sooner politicians accept that the only way to meaningfully achieve fewer abortions is to do better in helping women and their partners prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place, the better.
**
Cory L. Richards is senior vice president and vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, an independent think tank in the field of sexual and reproductive health.
Article
By Cory L. Richards
October 29, 2007
Striving to find the "middle ground" on abortion -- that is, coming up with ways acceptable to pro-choice and pro-life Americans alike to reduce the number of abortions in the United States -- is a worthwhile undertaking. But it also has given rise to some fairly resilient myths about the best way to achieve this goal.
Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani prominently featured one such myth in his speech Oct. 20 to a group of social conservatives. The former New York City mayor stated that "we increased adoption by 133% over the eight years before I came into office. And we found that abortions went down by 18% during that period of time. I believe we can do that in the United States."
But Giuliani's implied causality between these two statistics is unsupportable for this simple reason: The increases he cites were in the rate of adoptions of children out of New York City's foster care system, not in the rate at which women were continuing unwanted pregnancies and placing their infants for adoption rather than having abortions. Nothing in the data he cites indicates that there was any significant increase in the city's newborn relinquishment rate while he was mayor.
Giuliani is not alone in misrepresenting the adoption-abortion link in this way. Politicians from both parties frequently promote tax credits and other incentives to ease the way for adoptive parents to demonstrate that they want to "do something" about abortion. Facilitating adoptions, especially of hard-to-place children, deserves our strong support. But it does nothing to affect the abortion rate. To assert that it does is either ill-informed or simply cynical, and it should stop.
Meanwhile, we know that very few women actually place their infants for adoption. In the United States, fewer than 14,000 newborns were voluntarily relinquished in 2003 (the latest year for which an estimate is available), according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That proportion -- just under 1% of all the children born to never-married women -- has remained constant for almost two decades. It's down considerably from the early 1970s, but even in those days, more than nine in 10 unmarried women who gave birth kept their babies.
The 2003 infant relinquishment figure is minuscule when compared to the almost 1.3 million abortions that took place that year. And even then, it would be wrong to assume that every one of those relinquishments actually averted an abortion. Many women placing their baby for adoption may never have considered abortion in the first place.
Among the main explanations cited in the HHS report for decline in relinquishments since the '70s are that "the increased social acceptance of single parenthood has led more unmarried women to keep their children" and that "a higher proportion of unmarried mothers are in their 20s rather than their teens, so the personal and financial stresses may not be as great as in the past." More important, the researchers do not consider abortion to be a significant factor and suggest that "the decline in abortion rates shows that the decline in relinquishment is not a result of increasing selection of abortion over relinquishment."
Politicians of all stripes, and whatever their position on abortion, should face reality. Increasing the rate of completed adoptions, however valid on its own merits, is irrelevant to the abortion rate. And increasing the rate of newborn relinquishments, even assuming it could be done in an ethically and socially acceptable way, at best would be tinkering at the margins. Even if relinquishments doubled, and each one of them represented an averted abortion, it would make hardly a dent in the abortion rate.
In his recent speech, Giuliani did leave himself an opening to embrace evidence-based policies when he offered that he would "support any reasonable suggestion that promises to reduce the number of abortions."
In fact, there are plenty of proven, common-sense policies that he (and all those who are still promoting adoption as a viable anti-abortion strategy) could support. Chief among them is to expand women's access to high-quality contraceptive counseling and services and to support comprehensive sex education that teaches young people about both delaying sex and using protection when they do become sexually active.
As a just-published Guttmacher Institute study shows, abortion rates are extremely high in many countries where contraceptives are not readily available and contraceptive use is not encouraged, even though abortion is highly restricted in those places by law. And the world's lowest rates of abortion by far are found in Western Europe, where very few legal restrictions are placed on abortion but contraceptive use and comprehensive sex education are widespread.
Behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. The sooner politicians accept that the only way to meaningfully achieve fewer abortions is to do better in helping women and their partners prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place, the better.
**
Cory L. Richards is senior vice president and vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, an independent think tank in the field of sexual and reproductive health.
'RH Reality Check' Counters Anti-Choice Rhetoric
By Sheila Gibbons
WeNews commentator
Article
The Web has provided a vibrant breeding ground for the anti-choice movement and its rhetoric. Sheila Gibbons prefers a dose of reality from a new site that tackles misinformation and aims to build advocacy support for women's health.
(WOMENSENEWS)--It's troubling to see how much distortion is presented as fact on sites operated by abortion opponents.
Take, for instance, VirtueMedia, which produced an ad asserting that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, a claim debunked by the American Cancer Society.
Or try going to Abortionfacts.org. It's operated by the Life Issues Institute of Cincinnati and describes its founders--a physician and his wife who draw parallels between abortion and euthanasia--as "the greatest single resource of educational information on abortion and related issues in the world."
As silly as these examples might seem when they're isolated and pulled out one by one, they have, as a concerted onslaught, achieved considerable influence.
For one thing, they have helped shift the abortion debate from women's rights to unborn babies, says Deana Rohlinger, a sociology professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee who has conducted several studies on media tactics employed by pro-choice and anti-choice groups.
She found that where abortion opponents initially focused their efforts on religious media, believing that secular media would not give them a fair hearing, they became more sophisticated in their message development and distribution.
"The pro-life movement both put a human face on a fetus and vividly illustrated the 'violence' done to unborn children," Rohlinger told me. "With its April 2007 ruling outlawing the D and X procedure, the Supreme Court has demonstrated a willingness to redefine the contours of the abortion debate and the pro-life movement has taken up the call. Armed with this ruling, pro-life activists have adopted the language of pro-choicers and are pushing legislation that advocates 'informed choice.'"
Poor reality. It's undergoing such intense manipulation it's hard to know where to look for it.
Web Site to the Rescue
Fortunately, a Web site offering verifiable facts has recently come to the rescue.
RH Reality Check.org--launched in 2006 to rebut misinformation and disinformation and to demonstrate how progressives can harness new media--provides information, analysis, news, commentary and links to sources that support sexual and reproductive health.
"We began as a simple little blog to introduce the concept to the leadership of the major advocacy organizations in the reproductive health community," says Editor Scott Swenson. "Then we began to put the pieces together to grow what is a thriving new media site."
A project of the United Nations Foundation, RH Reality Check is packed with content generated by its own small staff (five, some part-time), freelancers and bloggers.
Its "Leading Voices" feature showcases longtime advocates such as Gloria Feldt, former president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who is also an occasional commentator for Women's eNews.
There are also contributions from writers making a name in the blogosphere, and from young writers around the world who offer unique viewpoints from a rising generation.
It also serves as a reference hub for material coming out of reproductive and maternal health advocacy groups, think tanks, universities and health research organizations.
'Reckless Rhetoric'
But the "Reckless Rhetoric" department--which steers readers to comments that are misleading, dangerous or just plain ridiculous--might just be the most jaw-dropping reading.
A recent display: "There are two questions at issue here. One is medical (Is there ever need for an abortion to save the mother's life?) and the other is moral (Would an abortion in that case be justified?). The answer to both questions is no." The quote is attributed to Father Frank Pavone, the anti-choice crusader who heads the New York-based Priests for Life.
I also found this gem from Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly. "According to an Australian-Chinese study published in the International Journal of Cancer, moderate exercise such as housework decreases the risk of ovarian cancer in women. The more and the harder the housework the housewife does, the more she benefits . . . The doctor who presented the findings recommended the exercise of walking. (He neglected to suggest walking behind a vacuum cleaner)."
In addition to blunting these kinds of salvos, RH Reality Check is focused on uniting a diverse reproductive health advocacy community that, as Swenson puts it, "doesn't always agree with itself."
"The advocacy community is very strong but a lot of conversations seem to have been behind closed doors," says Associate Editor Amie Newman. "RH Reality Check has the potential to bring the dialogue out in public. It's a little scary for the reproductive health communities to have this out in the open, but through the site we can host articles from major leaders and writers who can discuss political strategies and a whole range of issues."
Spotlight on Global Gag Rule
The site has gotten into full swing at a timely political juncture as the "global gag rule," one of the major controversies in reproductive health circles, is claiming wider attention.
The global gag rule--or more formally the Mexico City Policy because it was first announced by President Reagan at the International Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984--is the nickname for a federal policy prohibiting overseas organizations that provide abortion counseling, services or advocate for changes in their nation's abortion laws from receiving U.S. funding.
This summer, for the first time, both houses of Congress repudiated it.
"We're sort of at this historic place where the House and the Senate are in some sort of agreement that this should no longer be in place," Newman says. "I don't know how large an issue this will be in the presidential campaign, but global women's health issues should be a larger issue for all the candidates."
RH Reality Check visitors can customize their content preferences so they regularly receive what they want.
But Swenson and his staff also push information out to target audiences. Swenson, for instance, says they offer a daily package to the progressive blogosphere "where we feel there's a dearth of information on female health issues."
There's also a monthly editorial memo to 1,600 journalists. The goal, he says, "is to elevate the profile of people who are writing on our site so journalists can go directly to them."
In a reproductive health debate dominated by hype, spin and claims of moral superiority, RH Reality Check is a welcome newcomer. Check it out.
Sheila Gibbons is editor of Media Report to Women, a quarterly news journal of news, research and commentary about women and media. She is also co-author of "Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism," Strata Publishing Inc., which received the "Texty" Textbook Excellence Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association, and of "Exploring Mass Media for A Changing World," Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, publishers.
Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For more information:
Scott Swenson, "Building Community,"
RH Reality Check Oct. 2007 report:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2007/09/28/building-community-rh-reality-check-q3
"Strategic Gains Nurture Bolder Anti-Choice Moves":
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3200/
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
With Facts on Our Side - by Katha Pollitt
The Nation
Click here for article
[from the November 5, 2007 issue]
For years feminists and prochoicers have pointed out that women have abortions whether or not the procedure is legal.
That was true here before Roe v. Wade, and it is true today in countries where abortion is restricted or banned. The difference is that when abortion is legal it is a remarkably safe procedure; when it is illegal, women are injured, women die, children are left motherless. (True, these are already-existing, sinful children, not embryos or fetuses, but still.) This simple public health argument has gotten lost in a thicket of theology, sexual morality, "family values," politics, spin and outright disinformation. The coat hanger has become a political cliché, a relic of the '60s, like the peace sign. Oh, that old thing.
Now comes an article in The Lancet that shows in cold hard data how right we've been all along. "Induced Abortion: Estimated Rates and Trends Worldwide," a study conducted by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, is the first global analysis of abortion incidence since 1995. It finds that rates of abortion (the number of abortions per 1,000 women) are relatively unaffected by whether it is legal. Thus, in South America, where abortion is largely illegal, the rate is 33; in northern America, where it is legal, the rate is 21. "The legal status of abortion doesn't predict whether abortions occur," study co-author Gilda Sedgh told me by phone. "It predicts whether they are safe. South Africa liberalized its abortion laws in l997, and maternal deaths from unsafe abortion have plummeted by 90 percent." Around the world 48 percent of abortions are unsafe--that's more than 20 million. Some 67,000 women die from unsafe abortions--13 percent of maternal deaths, almost all of them in the developing world, where abortion is mostly restricted or banned. Many times that number are injured or maimed.
The good news is that the global trend is toward legalization: as Susan Cohen reports in the upcoming Guttmacher Policy Review, since the Beijing conference on women seventeen countries have liberalized their abortion laws, while three have tightened restrictions (including, most recently, Nicaragua, where abortion is now illegal even to save the woman's life--thank you, Daniel Ortega). The bad news is that, due to population growth, the percentage of abortions that are unsafe has increased since 1995.
The big takeaway from the Lancet article is this: there is basically only one thing that lowers the rate of abortion for more than the minute and a half it takes women to figure out how to evade a new legal restriction: contraception. The countries with the lowest abortion rates, like the Netherlands, have few abortion restrictions and lots of birth control. Consider Eastern Europe. Under communism, abortion was virtually the only family planning method. As contraception has become more available, the abortion rate has plummeted--from 90 in 1995 to 44 in 2003. Indeed, Eastern Europe accounts for almost the entire worldwide decline in abortion in the period covered by the study. Meanwhile, for all our Sturm und Drang, with women in many states having to jump through more hoops than a circus tiger, the decline in the US abortion rate has been small.
I was curious to know how antichoicers would respond to what certainly seems like a devastating refutation of their position. "Anybody can look at data and pick and choose whatever they want," Jim Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, told me. "The real fact is that abortion is ending life in the womb and should never be legal." I asked him if he accepted the finding that abortion was more dangerous where it was illegal. No, he said. "When something is illegal, people are more careful." So legal abortion is more unsafe? According to Sedlak, it is indeed.
As for contraception lowering the rate of abortion, that's an illusion: contraception is abortion. "Most methods of birth control kill babies in the womb by preventing implantation," said Sedlak, who'd like to see the pill, the IUD and most other methods outlawed. The American Life League, although not an official Catholic organization, explicitly follows Catholic teaching--unlike most Catholics, as Sedlak admitted. But so far as I know (and Sedlak agreed with me here) there is no antichoice organization that endorses contraception. Not one. Even Democrats for Life of America has refused to support Congressional legislation expanding funding for contraception. "Between Title X and Medicaid, the government has made a tremendous investment in contraception," DLA executive director Kristen Day told me. Actually, the government has done the opposite. Title X, which funds contraception for low-income women, has 61 percent less money in real terms than it had in 1980, to serve a much larger population. Had funding merely kept pace with inflation, it would be more than $725 million, instead of $283 million. As for Medicaid, skewed eligibility rules actually deny contraceptive benefits to many poor women who qualify for pregnancy care.
In the past few months, due to a technicality in the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, the price of contraception in campus clinics has skyrocketed, from around $15 for a pack of pills to more than $50. Some college health centers have simply stopped offering the pill. When you consider that 3 million college women take the pill--38 percent of female students--you can see the disaster in the making. That won't bother the new head of the HHS Office of Family Planning, Susan Orr, a longtime opponent of birth control formerly with the Family Research Council. "We're quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease," Orr told the Washington Post in 2001, praising a Bush proposal to stop mandating contraceptive coverage in federal employees' health plans.
Between facts and theology, antichoicers choose the latter every time.
* * *
Click here for article
[from the November 5, 2007 issue]
For years feminists and prochoicers have pointed out that women have abortions whether or not the procedure is legal.
That was true here before Roe v. Wade, and it is true today in countries where abortion is restricted or banned. The difference is that when abortion is legal it is a remarkably safe procedure; when it is illegal, women are injured, women die, children are left motherless. (True, these are already-existing, sinful children, not embryos or fetuses, but still.) This simple public health argument has gotten lost in a thicket of theology, sexual morality, "family values," politics, spin and outright disinformation. The coat hanger has become a political cliché, a relic of the '60s, like the peace sign. Oh, that old thing.
Now comes an article in The Lancet that shows in cold hard data how right we've been all along. "Induced Abortion: Estimated Rates and Trends Worldwide," a study conducted by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, is the first global analysis of abortion incidence since 1995. It finds that rates of abortion (the number of abortions per 1,000 women) are relatively unaffected by whether it is legal. Thus, in South America, where abortion is largely illegal, the rate is 33; in northern America, where it is legal, the rate is 21. "The legal status of abortion doesn't predict whether abortions occur," study co-author Gilda Sedgh told me by phone. "It predicts whether they are safe. South Africa liberalized its abortion laws in l997, and maternal deaths from unsafe abortion have plummeted by 90 percent." Around the world 48 percent of abortions are unsafe--that's more than 20 million. Some 67,000 women die from unsafe abortions--13 percent of maternal deaths, almost all of them in the developing world, where abortion is mostly restricted or banned. Many times that number are injured or maimed.
The good news is that the global trend is toward legalization: as Susan Cohen reports in the upcoming Guttmacher Policy Review, since the Beijing conference on women seventeen countries have liberalized their abortion laws, while three have tightened restrictions (including, most recently, Nicaragua, where abortion is now illegal even to save the woman's life--thank you, Daniel Ortega). The bad news is that, due to population growth, the percentage of abortions that are unsafe has increased since 1995.
The big takeaway from the Lancet article is this: there is basically only one thing that lowers the rate of abortion for more than the minute and a half it takes women to figure out how to evade a new legal restriction: contraception. The countries with the lowest abortion rates, like the Netherlands, have few abortion restrictions and lots of birth control. Consider Eastern Europe. Under communism, abortion was virtually the only family planning method. As contraception has become more available, the abortion rate has plummeted--from 90 in 1995 to 44 in 2003. Indeed, Eastern Europe accounts for almost the entire worldwide decline in abortion in the period covered by the study. Meanwhile, for all our Sturm und Drang, with women in many states having to jump through more hoops than a circus tiger, the decline in the US abortion rate has been small.
I was curious to know how antichoicers would respond to what certainly seems like a devastating refutation of their position. "Anybody can look at data and pick and choose whatever they want," Jim Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, told me. "The real fact is that abortion is ending life in the womb and should never be legal." I asked him if he accepted the finding that abortion was more dangerous where it was illegal. No, he said. "When something is illegal, people are more careful." So legal abortion is more unsafe? According to Sedlak, it is indeed.
As for contraception lowering the rate of abortion, that's an illusion: contraception is abortion. "Most methods of birth control kill babies in the womb by preventing implantation," said Sedlak, who'd like to see the pill, the IUD and most other methods outlawed. The American Life League, although not an official Catholic organization, explicitly follows Catholic teaching--unlike most Catholics, as Sedlak admitted. But so far as I know (and Sedlak agreed with me here) there is no antichoice organization that endorses contraception. Not one. Even Democrats for Life of America has refused to support Congressional legislation expanding funding for contraception. "Between Title X and Medicaid, the government has made a tremendous investment in contraception," DLA executive director Kristen Day told me. Actually, the government has done the opposite. Title X, which funds contraception for low-income women, has 61 percent less money in real terms than it had in 1980, to serve a much larger population. Had funding merely kept pace with inflation, it would be more than $725 million, instead of $283 million. As for Medicaid, skewed eligibility rules actually deny contraceptive benefits to many poor women who qualify for pregnancy care.
In the past few months, due to a technicality in the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, the price of contraception in campus clinics has skyrocketed, from around $15 for a pack of pills to more than $50. Some college health centers have simply stopped offering the pill. When you consider that 3 million college women take the pill--38 percent of female students--you can see the disaster in the making. That won't bother the new head of the HHS Office of Family Planning, Susan Orr, a longtime opponent of birth control formerly with the Family Research Council. "We're quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease," Orr told the Washington Post in 2001, praising a Bush proposal to stop mandating contraceptive coverage in federal employees' health plans.
Between facts and theology, antichoicers choose the latter every time.
* * *
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Legal or Not, Abortion Rates Compare
Legal or Not, Abortion Rates Compare
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Click here for NYT Article
ROME, Oct. 11 — A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.
Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.
The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.
“We now have a global picture of induced abortion in the world, covering both countries where it is legal and countries where laws are very restrictive,” Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the W.H.O. Department of Reproductive Health and Research, said in a telephone interview. “What we see is that the law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion. If there’s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.”
But the legal status of abortion did greatly affect the dangers involved, the researchers said. “Generally, where abortion is legal it will be provided in a safe manner,” Dr. Van Look said. “And the opposite is also true: where it is illegal, it is likely to be unsafe, performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.”
The data also suggested that the best way to reduce abortion rates was not to make abortion illegal but to make contraception more widely available, said Sharon Camp, chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute.
In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with those in Western Europe. “In the past we didn’t have this kind of data to draw on,” Ms. Camp said. “Contraception is often the missing element” where abortion rates are high, she said.
Anti-abortion groups criticized the research, saying that the scientists had jumped to conclusions from imperfect tallies, often estimates of abortion rates in countries where the procedure was illegal. “These numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data,” said Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington.
He said that the major reason women die in the developing world is that hospitals and health systems lack good doctors and medicines. “They have equated the word ‘safe’ with ‘legal’ and ‘unsafe’ with ‘illegal,’ which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal,” he said.
The study indicated that about 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year and that 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal.
The researchers used national data for 2003 from countries where abortion was legal and therefore tallied. W.H.O. scientists estimated abortion rates from countries where it was outlawed, using data on hospital admissions for abortion complications, interviews with local family planning experts and surveys of women in those countries.
The wealth of information that comes out of the study provides some striking lessons, the researchers said. In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.
The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
Worldwide, the annual number of abortions appeared to have declined between 1995, the last year such a broad study was conducted, and 2003, from an estimated 46 million to 42 million, the study concluded. The 1995 study, by the Guttmacher Institute, had far less data on countries where abortion was illegal.
Some countries, like South Africa, have undergone substantial transitions in abortion laws in that time. The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found.
Abortion is illegal in most of Africa, though. It is the second-leading cause of death among women admitted to hospitals in Ethiopia, its Health Ministry has said. It is the cause of 13 percent of maternal deaths at hospitals in Nigeria, recent studies have found.
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Click here for NYT Article
ROME, Oct. 11 — A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.
Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.
The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.
“We now have a global picture of induced abortion in the world, covering both countries where it is legal and countries where laws are very restrictive,” Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the W.H.O. Department of Reproductive Health and Research, said in a telephone interview. “What we see is that the law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion. If there’s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.”
But the legal status of abortion did greatly affect the dangers involved, the researchers said. “Generally, where abortion is legal it will be provided in a safe manner,” Dr. Van Look said. “And the opposite is also true: where it is illegal, it is likely to be unsafe, performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.”
The data also suggested that the best way to reduce abortion rates was not to make abortion illegal but to make contraception more widely available, said Sharon Camp, chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute.
In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with those in Western Europe. “In the past we didn’t have this kind of data to draw on,” Ms. Camp said. “Contraception is often the missing element” where abortion rates are high, she said.
Anti-abortion groups criticized the research, saying that the scientists had jumped to conclusions from imperfect tallies, often estimates of abortion rates in countries where the procedure was illegal. “These numbers are not definitive and very susceptible to interpretation according to the agenda of the people who are organizing the data,” said Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington.
He said that the major reason women die in the developing world is that hospitals and health systems lack good doctors and medicines. “They have equated the word ‘safe’ with ‘legal’ and ‘unsafe’ with ‘illegal,’ which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal,” he said.
The study indicated that about 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year and that 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal.
The researchers used national data for 2003 from countries where abortion was legal and therefore tallied. W.H.O. scientists estimated abortion rates from countries where it was outlawed, using data on hospital admissions for abortion complications, interviews with local family planning experts and surveys of women in those countries.
The wealth of information that comes out of the study provides some striking lessons, the researchers said. In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.
The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
Worldwide, the annual number of abortions appeared to have declined between 1995, the last year such a broad study was conducted, and 2003, from an estimated 46 million to 42 million, the study concluded. The 1995 study, by the Guttmacher Institute, had far less data on countries where abortion was illegal.
Some countries, like South Africa, have undergone substantial transitions in abortion laws in that time. The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found.
Abortion is illegal in most of Africa, though. It is the second-leading cause of death among women admitted to hospitals in Ethiopia, its Health Ministry has said. It is the cause of 13 percent of maternal deaths at hospitals in Nigeria, recent studies have found.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Zambia stalls on legalizing abortion; calls for more "discussion" on the issue
Zambia: 'State Will Let People Debate On Abortion Before It Acts'
The Times of Zambia (Ndola)
NEWS
24 September 2007
link to article
GOVERNMENT will only recommend whether or not to fully legalise abortion as demanded by some health experts after the issue is exhaustively debated by members of the public, chief Government spokesperson, Mike Mulongoti, has said.
Mr Mulongoti said in an interview in Lusaka yesterday that the Government would not rush into taking a position on the highly controversial issue because the matter was still being debated.
"We cannot make any recommendations on abortion now since medical and ethical experts are still debating. Let them continue debating. As Government we shall only come in at an appropriate time if need arises," Mr Mulongoti said.
He said the Government would have to go back to Parliament to amend the existing Act on abortion if members of the public strongly felt that there was need to fully legalise abortion.
Mr Mulongoti, who is Information and Broadcasting Services Minister, said Zambia had strict laws, which were still in force and could not be thrown out without following the right procedure.
Health Deputy Minister, Lwipa Puma, however, warned in an interview yesterday that legalising abortion in Zambia would mean lawlessness and would promote unsafe sex leading to increased numbers of HIV/Aids as women would be aborting freely.
Dr Puma advised those making such recommendations to consider the repercussions if the Government went ahead. He also advised stakeholders to include tradition leaders in their debates to be aware of the dangers of unsafe abortions.
University Teaching Hospital (UTH) experts in obstetrics and gynaecology last week blamed Zambia's high maternal mortality rate on illegal abortions conducted illegally by unqualified people and appealed to the Government to fully legalise it to curb such deaths.
The experts said 30 per cent of the maternal deaths at the UTH were a result of unsafe abortion and called on the Government to legalise it so that people could seek professional service.
But anti-choice activists like the Catholic Church insisted that abortion was wrong and vowed to continue opposing it whatever the justification given by the medical experts.
The Times of Zambia (Ndola)
NEWS
24 September 2007
link to article
GOVERNMENT will only recommend whether or not to fully legalise abortion as demanded by some health experts after the issue is exhaustively debated by members of the public, chief Government spokesperson, Mike Mulongoti, has said.
Mr Mulongoti said in an interview in Lusaka yesterday that the Government would not rush into taking a position on the highly controversial issue because the matter was still being debated.
"We cannot make any recommendations on abortion now since medical and ethical experts are still debating. Let them continue debating. As Government we shall only come in at an appropriate time if need arises," Mr Mulongoti said.
He said the Government would have to go back to Parliament to amend the existing Act on abortion if members of the public strongly felt that there was need to fully legalise abortion.
Mr Mulongoti, who is Information and Broadcasting Services Minister, said Zambia had strict laws, which were still in force and could not be thrown out without following the right procedure.
Health Deputy Minister, Lwipa Puma, however, warned in an interview yesterday that legalising abortion in Zambia would mean lawlessness and would promote unsafe sex leading to increased numbers of HIV/Aids as women would be aborting freely.
Dr Puma advised those making such recommendations to consider the repercussions if the Government went ahead. He also advised stakeholders to include tradition leaders in their debates to be aware of the dangers of unsafe abortions.
University Teaching Hospital (UTH) experts in obstetrics and gynaecology last week blamed Zambia's high maternal mortality rate on illegal abortions conducted illegally by unqualified people and appealed to the Government to fully legalise it to curb such deaths.
The experts said 30 per cent of the maternal deaths at the UTH were a result of unsafe abortion and called on the Government to legalise it so that people could seek professional service.
But anti-choice activists like the Catholic Church insisted that abortion was wrong and vowed to continue opposing it whatever the justification given by the medical experts.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
How much time should a woman do for having an abortion?
Monday, August 27, 2007
Some uncomfortable questions about abortion
One of my sons has just dawn my attention to this thought-provoking, six-minute-long YouTube posting, featuring a polite, off-screen interviewer asking anti-abortion activists at a demonstration in the U.S. earlier this summer a very good set of questions, which can be summed up as:
1. Do you think abortion should be illegal? (The answer was invariably Yes).
2. OK, then, if abortion becomes illegal, what do you think the penalty should be for a woman who has an abortion?
It's a logical and pertinent question, but not a single one of the demonstrators had a well-thought-out answer. Most of them initially suggested that the woman would have to answer to God, but then later displayed some discomfort when the interviewer pointed out that if abortion were simply a matter between a woman and God, then there was no reason to make it illegal.
It should be noted that one of the demonstrators suggested that the interviewer talk to the event's organizer for a detailed policy response. Either the interviewer failed to do so or he chose to omit the interview from the posting.
The demonstrators showed admirable honesty and also displayed commendable empathy for women who find themselves in so deep a personal crisis that they choose to abort their children. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the obvious gap in the pro-life platform when it comes to sentencing. Indeed, I cannot recall hearing the issue discussed in Canada, for example, in the decade and a half since the Senate killed the Mulroney government's abortion-regulation bill. And I have to admit I personally haven't given it much thought.
So, are pro-lifers hypocrites for, on one hand, calling abortion "murder," but on the other hand appearing to not have the fortitude to demand murder-like sentences for women who abort their unborn children? If so, does this signify that the abortion question is really a moral one, not a legal one?
Is the more culpable criminal in an abortion actually the abortionist? If so, is the mother really another victim?
Monday, August 27, 2007
Celebrating Grace Paley
Grace Paley will forever live on as a beloved champion of feminist causes including abortion, and a well lauded literary figure. Thank you Grace for a life well lived and creating a legacy that will live on.
* * *
L’Chaim! A Celebration of Grace Paley by Robin Morgan
August 27, 2007
First the factual stuff—Because some people care about that sort of thing, she would have said, So a person should try to act polite even if they’re a writer maybe especially if and even though factual stuff never tells what really went on, which was plenty. Raising children. Picketing. Teaching. Making soup. Arguing. Showing up.
So this next part will be factual stuff. Meanwhile, she might have said, Sit, drink your coffee We’ll get to the real stuff in a minute Or you could skip down a paragraph if you’re the impatient type.Grace Paley, one of America’s most beloved writers, was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1922, and died last week, on August 22, at home in Thetford, Vermont. A self-described “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist,” Grace was a lifelong activist in social-justice movements: civil-rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, feminist, whatever needed revolution. Her books of short fiction and essays include The Little Disturbances of Man (1959); Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974); Later the Same Day (1985), Long Walks and Intimate Talks (with Vera B. Williams, 1991); and Just as I Thought (1998)—a collection of articles and talks “representing about 30 years of political and literary activity with a couple of occasional glances over my shoulder into disappearing family and childhood.” She wrote several volumes of poetry, including Leaning Forward (1985), New and Collected Poems (1991), and Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000). Her Collected Stories (1994) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. She and her husband, Robert Nichols, compiled their poems and stories in Here and Somewhere Else, published earlier this year by The Feminist Press at CUNY. She taught for 18 years at Sarah Lawrence. Among her numerous honors was a Guggenheim, awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts (for a lifetime’s contribution to literature), the first Edith Wharton Citation of Merit, and being named the first official New York State Writer and poet laureate of Vermont.
There. That’s the factual stuff. There’s also a good interview on Salon in which her funny, wise voice comes through sharp as freshly grated horseradish.
Now for the real stuff.
I loved her. In this, I was part of another mass movement.
She was one of the great story-tellers. But what the literary tributes won’t necessarily mention is that Grace knew the personal was political before feminism did, and was holistic before new agers were born: fierce atheist, fierce Jew, fierce radical traditionalist feminist wife mother grandmother artist. If anybody had a problem with the seamlessness of that cloth or tried to inflict contradictions on it, how silly: a shrug and loud crack of the ever-present chewing gum at them.
What the political eulogies won’t necessarily mention is how generous she was to younger writers—Audre Lorde, Andrea Dworkin (both also gone, alas), numerous others; I can personally testify to that. She was also unfailingly supportive of small literary ventures (like the recent founding of an online literary journal by older women, Persimmontree), and small presses: The Feminist Press, Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, and many more, including her own venture with Bob Nichols, Glad Day Books (named for a William Blake etching).
What the obituaries cannot mention is how hilarious an experience it was to edit her; I can testify to that, too. When I was editor of Ms. in the early 1990s, I published Grace as often as possible. I never touched her deceptively simple poems or superbly honed fiction (though she always asked me to “Please fix anything stupid, Honey”–an opportunity that never presented itself). She would apologize for her “messy” copy, typescript (no computer, no print-out), all the x-outs and scribbled write-ins evident—Sorry, Toots, rushing to a demonstration, no time to retype. How could she realize my delight in tracking those breadcrumbs of her revisions as clues to the brilliant exercise of her craft?
Editing her nonfiction is where the hilarity came in.
First, she’d be late on deadline. I don’t mean late the way all us writers are late: The cats peed on my draft My computer crashed My grandfather died (again). I mean really late. So I’d nag. She’d apologize: I feel so guilty Honey, my grandkids were visiting, tomorrow, I swear. A few days later, I’d nag. She’d apologize: Oh I’m a bad person no don’t you apologize for nagging it’s a woman’s art-form besides I come from a nagging people Jews survive by nagging the world.
But eventually, Grace would appear, essay not in hand but in shopping bag. Fragments would emerge, to be spread across desk or table or even the floor: half-page typed bits; a post-it or twelve; a paper napkin with a few ink-blurred lines; the back of a grocery list sporting two paragraphs in pencil. She would grin and crack her gum. There! she would beam, Arrange ‘em how you like. I would reply Grace, as calmly as I could, Grace. You’re a literary lion, also a pal, I wouldn’t dare “arrange” your work. Dare schmare, she’d shrug—the least pretentious anti-diva I ever met—You’ll see, Toots, maybe they’ll fall into place, I trust you, do whacha want. Then she’d ask after my son, hug me, scurry off. And of course, I learned that if you studied the highly sophisticated shards of this Linear B closely enough, they inevitably “fell into place.”
This ritual repeated itself not long ago when I asked Grace to write the essay on peace for my anthology Sisterhood Is Forever. Here’s an excerpt from “Why Peace is (More Than Ever) a Feminist Issue”—which once lay, a paper carpet, fluttering across my study floor:
“Patrimony and matrimony do not say what they mean. . . . Patrimony is what you inherit from your father. Matrimony is the state of being in a marriage. Now men live in it—marriage—as well as women and it is therefore a little joke for men that this word is used about a condition in which women and families have often suffered the strongest patriarchal oppression. Matrimony is not what you inherit from your mother, probably because in history she didn’t own much of anything. This was true at least 500 years ago, sounding a little more French. If marriage and its historic condition has been what women leave to their daughters and sons, what is it that men leave? Wars, of course.”
Grace was my neighbor, too, a decades-long Greenwich Village denizen. When I’d find her leafleting on 6th Avenue—for lesbian marriage, Palestinian rights, whatever—I’d stop to chat or join her. Passers-by rarely recognized the 4-foot-10-inches-tall, age-84 “little old lady in tennis shoes” as a titan of American literature. Once, while I skimmed a leaflet’s jargon, she whispered sadly, “I didn’t write it.” Obvious, but her wordsmith’s standards leaked, though she quickly added, “Lissen, so what, it says what’s needed.”
Her own lovely work feeds our lives, and I wish we had more of it than we do. But she honored her choices without regret, sometimes “settling this morning for a responsive eatership,” as in these lines from her poem, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative”:
“I was going to write a poem/I made a pie instead it took/about the same amount of time/of course the pie was a final//draft a poem would have had some/distance to go days and weeks and/much crumpled paper//the pie already had a talking/tumbling audience among small/trucks and a fire engine on/the kitchen floor//everybody will like this pie/it will have apples and cranberries/dried apricots in it many friends/will say why in the world did you/make only one//this does not happen with poems.”
We live in fearful times. Powerful men build walls against immigrants and fuel our fear of the Stranger. Nothing and nobody was Other to Grace. Her art gave voice to the Outsider: “a literature that chants the disappearance of tongues” (from her poem “The Immigrant Story”). That voice is rich and moist with the past but heartcrackingly eager for the crisp future promised and betrayed in the New World. Her characters are people who smell of onions, yell at each other, mourn in darkened kitchens. A reader might laugh out loud recognizing the small cruelties of merciless family love, but that laughter rises through a lump in the throat.
Intensely present, she loved life and lived it well. And not even death was Other to Grace. In “Therefore,” she knew:
“When I am old/I will not be surprised . . . for I have built my Ship of Death . . . I will live though I die old/in passion like a fool . . . this window makes such light it is/the natural law as any child/would know of moon and love and night.”
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