Here’s an optimistic article from the U.S.

Healthcare reform represents a historic victory for millions of Americans previously denied access to quality and affordable medical care. Among the law’s many benefits for vulnerable families are funds just announced by the Obama administration that will help low-income pregnant women. This overlooked but significant achievement has established common ground between pro-life and pro-choice leaders who agree on a common goal: reducing the number of abortions by addressing its root causes. […]

More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States every year. Canada, Germany, Japan and Britain all have lower abortion rates than the U.S., despite having less restrictive abortion laws. Why? In large part because those countries offer comprehensive healthcare that includes robust pre-natal and post-natal care. British Cardinal Basil Hume once told a reporter: “If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?”

While I’m a strong supporter of health care reform, I fear that it will have little impact on abortion rates. The U.S. has a higher percentage of women in “high risk” demographics for crisis pregnancies (higher percentages of women living below the poverty line etc.) than the compared countries, and I believe this is the reason for the higher abortion rates. Health care reform, while it will impact women for the better, won’t bring about the dramatic changes necessary to move women outside of those demographics. I hope I’m wrong.

For those of you familiar with Lila Rose, undercover investigations of crisis pregnancy centers is a familiar plot line. This week, however, it was pro-abortion advocates doing the impersonating.

The report, titled “Unmasking Fake Clinics: the Truth about Crisis Pregnancy Centers in California,” asserts that the clinics make false claims linking abortion to breast cancer and infertility and dissuade particularly vulnerable women from receiving accurate medical advice.

The investigation, which included visits to 14 clinics in six counties and phone calls to an additional 200 centers across the state, was conducted by the NARAL Pro-Choice California Foundation unpaid staff and volunteers over a six-month period ending in August 2009. […]

More than half of the clinics investigated highlighted mortality as a claimed complication from abortion and the unpaid volunteer investigators were ultimately “dissuaded from considering abortion as an option.”

Really? If they had been dissuaded, would they continue to volunteer for NARAL?

Amy Everitt, the California organization’s state director, said that the report will be distributed to community-based organizations that provide medical referrals to the most at-risk groups of women, including those who are young, low-income, of color or from rural locations.

Because medical staff don’t need to provide abortion alternatives to those women?

Part of the problem, Everitt said, is deceptive advertising, which is why the organization collected more than 66,000 signatures on a petition targeting two online information sites, YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com

On these sites, more than thirty centers nationwide, including two in California, were listed under “abortion information and referral services” or “abortion clinics”, but were found not to offer those services or referrals, according to the report.

One crisis pregnancy center, Options for Women in Concord, which is listed on the crisis pregnancy clinic website www.lifecall.org, is a self-described “abortion clinic alternative”.

If only there was a category for “abortion clinic alternatives” in my phone book. There wasn’t, but when I looked for “tattoo removal”, low and behold they were lumped in with the tattoo parlours. Shameful… those two things aren’t related at all.

Follow-up to the Nebraska law LB 594:

OMAHA – A federal judge will hear arguments Tuesday about whether to block a new Nebraska law requiring mental health screenings for women seeking abortions.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland filed a lawsuit last month challenging the new law, saying it could be difficult to comply with and could require doctors to give women information irrelevant to the procedure.

State officials have defended the law. They say the law is designed to make sure women understand the risks and complications that may accompany an abortion.

Planned Parenthood generally tells women the in-clinic procedure takes 2-3 hours from start to finish, including “a recovery period of about one hour”. The pill procedure takes significantly less time at the clinic. This new law will require doctors to evaluate their patients to ensure they can mentally endure the procedure as well as determine whether or not they have been coerced, an evaluation Planned Parenthood’s attorney Mimi Lui calls an “exhaustive review”. Ultimately, it would take more time per patient. And in an industry that boasts…

Abortions are very common. In fact, more than 1 out of 3 women in the U.S. have an abortion by the time they are 45 years old.

…time is money. The evaluations would also cramp the “no big deal” style of the organization’s message. With only two federal judges in the Nebraska District (one appointed by Bill Clinton, the other by George Bush Senior), the outcome is unpredictable.

I’ve never seen this show, but it is a very strange argument in any case.

Seated at Tami Taylor’s kitchen table, Becky Sproles wrenchingly lays out her dilemma: The only child of an embittered single bartender who gave birth to her when she was a teenager, Becky is faced with the prospect of recycling her mother’s past and she doesn’t know what to do. […]

Is she seeking an abortion simply to counter her mother’s example? What if she were capable, caring and present as a parent? What if, as an emotionally wounded 10th grader without resources living in Dillon, Tex., with its pageant of grim futures, she could defy sociological prediction?

The tortured expression on Becky’s face tells us how profoundly she would like this to be so and yet how clearly she foresees the bleaker reality. “I can’t take care of a baby,” she tearfully tells Tami, matriarch to Dillon’s lost youth. “I can’t.”

With those words Becky decides to have an abortion.

It seems to make the agrument that if Becky had never been born, her mother wouldn’t have ended up an embittered single bartender. The article ends,

Again and again, “Friday Night Lights” seems to remind us, as if in klieg lights, of the consequences of parenthood pursued by accident or default.

Australia has been abuzz with pregnancy related news this month, covering everything from drinking during pregnancy to prenatal vitamins. But it’s the abortion debate that’s been picking up momentum this week.

The survey of 1050 Australians investigating attitudes to early and late abortion is published in the Medical Journal of Australia. It shows remarkably strong public support for women being able to access abortion at all stages of pregnancy, including after 24 weeks. The level of support depends on the circumstances.

One of the differences between this survey and previous ones is that respondents were asked to think specifically about situations where either they or someone close to them such as a partner, sister, daughter or close friend was facing specific clinical and social circumstances.

The Sydney Morning Herald titled this article “Abortion laws don’t reflect public opinion,” citing this study by Crosby/Textor as its supporting evidence. In my opinion, asking someone what they think about their daughter’s hypothetical abortion is a very emotive and inaccurate indicator of their position on the legal status of abortion. But Crosby/Textor seems to have little interest in gathering factual, usable data…

Knowing what people think is one thing. Taking this knowledge and using it to influence the way people behave to achieve your goals is another.

So who hired Crosby/Textor and employed their ‘results driven approach’? I’m not pointing fingers, but I will say that it comes as a striking coincidence that Marie Stopes International Australia, the countries leading abortion provider, launched it’s new awareness campaign promoting their services and focusing on contraception the day this article was published (after a six month lull in their Australian news department). Notice the paragraph in the awareness campaign details dedicated to a mysterious company titled MSD who wants you to ‘be well’ at the bottom? It appears disconnected from the rest of the campaign information. Who are MSD anyhow, and what do they have to do with Marie Stopes or awareness? Well, they’re a large pharmaceutical company who sells, among other things (like Nasonex, the nasal spray with the cute little bee in the commercial), contraceptives. It seems there is a lot of money to be made backing a campaign that pushes your product, but Marie Stopes and MSD just want what’s best for women, right? Right.

The Spanish government is about to amend its abortion law, falling into line with its European neighbours, though local demonstrators are protesting the new law as unconstitutional.

The Socialist government’s new abortion reforms — which notably allow all women to end their pregnancies up until 14 weeks — take effect on Monday.

It’s still unclear how this will affect abortion rates in the country.

Last year around 115,000 abortions were carried out in Spain, according to the health ministry.

The vast majority took place in private clinics and were justified on the grounds that the pregnancy posed a “psychological risk” for the health of the woman.

Currently, the law allows for abortion if the woman’s health is ‘at risk’. Which begs the question, what is good health and how do we measure the risk to it? How individual states answer this question constitutes the ‘grey zone’ of abortion law, in between legal upon request and illegal without exception. So what is good health?

The most famous modern definition of health was created during a Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948.

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

The Definition has not been amended since 1948.

By this definition, the WHO model of health allows for the individual to define what health and well-being are, rather than offering a concrete and universal definition. So what shapes our individual visions of health?

What is MasterCard selling in their “priceless” advertising campaign? They are selling meaning and telling us that for 9.7% (for you), or 19.7% (for me), we can have it. MasterCard is selling us moments of meaning, right relations with our spouse and children, meaningful encounters with art and sport, security in old age; MasterCard is selling us wellbeing. Priceless? No, in fact these “priceless” moments can be yours for only 19.7% apr.

Again, take anti-cholesterol medication Lipitor, it advertises itself not as anti-cholesterol medication but as a gateway to fishing with our grandchildren (which is depicted in its advertising), it is selling us not an object such as a pill but, rather, it is selling us familial relations, things of “real” value, it is selling us meaning.

The most significant point, however, is not simply that such companies are trying to sell us meaning. They are also telling us what “meaning” actually is.

Abortion is packaged in such a way when we begin to discuss risk, that it is a relief of pain, stress, hardship, unease. That it is a potential gateway to well-being, but by whose definition?

If you talk to almost any woman long enough, you’ll uncover an incident of violence (physical or emotional) somewhere in her past. While men are victims of violence just as often, the aggressors of women are most often male. It comes as no surprise then that the new study from Statistics Canada reveals that the majority of dating violence victims are female.

While teenage girls experienced 10 times as much violence as boys their age, a Statistics Canada study released Tuesday says that rates of police-reported dating violence are highest for those in their 30s. Between 2004 and 2008, rates of reported violence rose 40 per cent for women and 47 per cent for men. Women were victims of dating violence 80 per cent of the time, with a majority of incidents occurring after the relationship ended.

Unfortunately, under-reporting may mean the actual rates are much higher.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland has been having a difficult time lately. Following the introduction of telemedical abortion pill administration, the organization has been accused of patient neglect and an investigator has been assigned to the case.

Roughly two years ago, Iowa became the first state in the nation to carry out the telemedicine program, which uses “modern technology and telecommunications” to connect a patient from a rural area with a doctor at a remote location.

Planned Parenthood has telemedicine programs in 16 locations throughout the state, including Iowa City.

If a woman chooses a telemedical procedure, the medical staff provides her with an examination and an ultrasound.

Results are then sent to a doctor who meets with the patient via a closed-circuit video conference to discuss any concerns.

Once the doctor has determined the woman is medically eligible to take the abortion pill, a medication dispensing unit is unlocked and the patient has access to the pill, misoprostol or mifepristone.

The doctor observes the patient take the pill and provides her with additional instructions for follow-up care.

But Planned Parenthood is not a group that rests on its laurels. Concurrently, the organization is suing the state of Nebraska for law LB 594, a law which requires abortion providers to evaluate and inform patients of possible complications and risk factors based on information that has been published in accepted “peer reviewed journals” and to determine that the patient has not been coerced prior to the procedure. Obligations not easily fulfilled in a telemedical situation and that will slow down the process with a thorough review of patient history.

The possible penalties? $10,000 per uninformed patient and recovery sums for women who were the victims of coerced abortions that providers knowingly (or negligently) preformed.

The legislation, which was passed in April and is scheduled to go into effect on July 15, has been controversial for several months. According to Planned Parenthood, which services portions of Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska, the law in question seeks to “ensure that women are ‘informed’ before consenting to an abortion, [but] actually imposes requirements that are both impossible to meet and require physicians to flood their patients with false and misleading information.”

With money no object for legal fees, I’ll be watching this case as it climbs the judicial ranks.

…doesn’t mean you’re not alive.

When the study from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists delivered the message that a fetus feels no pain prior to 24 weeks gestation, the conclusion became a line in the sand which will effect abortion limitations on both sides of the argument. In places where abortion is illegal prior to 24 weeks based on the possibility of fetal pain (like Nebraska where the procedure is barred after 20 weeks), activists are now pushing to move the limit forward based on this new research. In places where abortion is illegal only after 24 weeks, the study comes as a blow to pro-life advocates pushing for restrictions.

The situation illuminates the problem with gestational timelines as a basis for abortion law. When did pain become the determining factor for whether or not a person or animal is deserving of life (I blame Peter Singer personally)? After all, there are adults who don’t feel pain…

Physicians ultimately diagnosed Julie, now 28 and living in Manchester, with a rare form of congenital insensitivity to pain.

She has no sensation of touch, temperature, deep pressure or vibrations in her limbs and parts of her chest and back.

She does have sensation in her head and portions of her trunk. Julie’s motor nerves work correctly. She can move her arms and legs and turn her head at will.

The disorder is caused by a gene mutation that disrupts the development of sensory nerve fibers – those that carry sensations such as touch, pain, temperature to the brain.

There is an assumption in sections of our culture that abortion is progressive, that history is moving inevitably towards greater acceptance of abortion globally. But legalized abortion is not in any way a new or a recent phenomenon. Abortion was legal in many ancient societies, including that of Rome. Not simply abortion, but infanticide. The killing of babies was common.

An extensive study of a mass burial at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley suggests that the 97 children all died at 40 weeks gestation, or very soon after birth.

The archaeologists believe that locals may have been killing and burying unwanted babies on the site in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire.

At this particular site, Sheppard Frere claims in his work Britannia that these children were not only victims of infanticide but were the unwanted female offspring of the slave-run establishment. The site is now believed to have been a brothel. There are interesting parallels between these gruesome practices and those of today, as Roman infanticide led to the deaths of many more girls than boys, boys being considered more valuable. So to consider abortion as progressive, when it is a legislative regression to a time when the value of life was bound up with a perceived worth based on gender, wealth and power, is incorrect.

Infants were not considered to be human beings until about the age of two and were not buried in cemeteries if they were younger than that.