ProWomanProLife

preventative - remedy that prevents or slows the course of an illness or disease; “the doctor recommended several preventatives”

Pregnancy, is not an illness. But the Obama administration has just classified what your body does naturally as something that needs prevention. More from The Associated Press,

WASHINGTON (AP) — A half-century after the advent of the pill, the Obama administration on Monday ushered in a change in women’s health care potentially as transformative: coverage of birth control as prevention, with no copays.

Services ranging from breast pumps for new mothers to counseling on domestic violence were also included in the broad expansion of women’s preventive care under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Since birth control is the most common drug prescribed to women, health plans should make sure it’s readily available, said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Not doing it would be like not covering flu shots,” she said.

Of course breast pumps and counseling are wonderful things, but comparing birth control with flu shots? When you get influenza, your body is a host for a virus. This is not what your body was made to do. When you get pregnant, your body hosts a baby. Something the female body has been doing since the beginning of humankind (our mammalian ancestors did it that way too).

I wrote the following for the March for Life this year, so I’ll say it again…

Does not reigning in and restricting the feminine functions of our bodies, namely the ability to become pregnant and carry a child, in order to succeed by some predetermined standard devalue the very thing that is “womanhood”?

Can we imagine, if in any other civil rights movement, that the group fighting for those rights would be told that in order to achieve the freedoms they desire, they must first put in check the very things that make them different from the ruling majority?

It’s unthinkable, and yet this is what women across the globe are being led to believe and reiterate day after day.

Pharmaceutical companies are first and foremost companies. It’s not in their best interest to make one-shot wonder drugs that get you sorted out for life, so they aren’t on the market. Contraceptives are no different. With over 50% of women in the US using “The Pill”, that is big business. Multiply that by their average length of usage, which from the women I’ve spoken to can be anywhere from 5 to 35 years, and you’ve got yourself a money making scheme with serious longevity. So will this new male contraceptive see the light of day?

After a more than 30-year struggle, an unassuming Indian engineer named Sujoy K. Guha is on the brink of what could well be the most revolutionary contraceptive technology since the pill — and this time it’s for men. [...]

So what you get is a one-time, hormone-free sperm blocker that you can turn off whenever you want. [...]

“We had no support from industry,” Guha said. “And basically neither I nor my colleagues were really knowledgeable and experienced with respect to new drug development.”

Part of the problem was the elegance of Guha’s design, which from a marketing perspective was, frankly, too effective.

“To men, an ideal method would be cheap and long-lasting. To company shareholders, an ideal method would be expensive and temporary,” Lissner explained by email.

“Pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to develop a cheap long-lasting method, and we can’t expect them to take the lead. Men will get one if, and only if, they demand it of their governments,” she said.

I’m not in favour of this drug, but this article exposes the problem with pharmaceutical companies not wanting to make anything “too effective”. What’s worse is that they tie themselves to social issues in a way that has sway on public opinion (throwing a few million to advertising for Marie Stopes is going to have big impact). They simply won’t manufacture a product or support an organization that won’t make them serious bank, social impact be damned. And this is a problem, because the consumer/patient ends up with a product that they’re told is in their best interest when it’s really in the best interest of the company. I’m not sure we can have it both ways.

I’m reviewing Unnatural Selection, the recent book by Mara Hvistendahl about female sex selection resulting in 160 million missing women. It’s equal parts fascinating and depressing. I could easily cut and paste the whole book into a blog post. But here’s just one part in the section about how the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were enthusiastic promoters of population control in India, alongside the Population Council, staffed by an American, Sheldon Segal, who likewise supported sex determination “as an effective method of population control.” (Segal is also the inventor of Norplant, the contraceptive implant.)

The Emergency [started on June 25, 1975] as the period came to be known, affected all areas of life in India, crippling the economy and scaling back civil liberties. But it was an especially blean era for reproductive rights. Health officials in Indira Gandhi’s administration saw an opportunity to force drastic measures on Indians who had previously resisted birth control. The task of overseeing the gruesome campaign fell to Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi, who held no official political title. He wasted little time in announcing a massive effort to sterilize poor men. Widespread sterilization was an idea that had been introduced to India by Western advisers, but Sanjay Gandhi ratcheted it up to an unprecedented scale. At first his mother’s government rewarded men who consented to vasectomies. Before long, however, Sanjay Gandhi was issuing quotas so high that local officials could meet them only by dragging men to the operating room—typically a makeshift camp that had sprung up practically overnight. (Nearly two thousand men died from botched operations.) In some areas, police surrounded villages in the middle of the night and apprehended all the men. In others, they combined sterilization with slum clearance, razing whole neighborhoods and robbing men of both their reproductive ability and their homes at the same time. Protestors were killed. The scale of the campaign, which was memorialized by Salman Rushdie in the novel Midnight’s Children, is striking, given that many Americans today remain unaware of its existence. By the time democratic rule was restored, 6.2 million Indian men had been sterilized in just one year—fifteen times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis.  (pp. 87-88)

Many Americans remain unaware of this, and many Canadians too, including me.

The review will follow when it’s published. Getting into the realm of massive understatements, suffice to say that “population control” has wreaked a lot of havoc in nations across the globe, including as one outcome, missing women at a devastating scale.

I could have written this, so wholeheartedly do I agree with it. The one section I might add is the physical repercussions for many women of taking said pill every day, effects which are not liberating by a long shot. This section on how the Pill increased abortions is something we have yet to fully grasp hold of. It’s very counter-intuitive:

Originally, the Pill was expected to reduce abortion by reducing unwanted pregnancies. However, this “iron curtain” between sex and the possibility of babies had the unintended consequence of dramatically boosting the rate of abortion, which spiked dramatically around 1968-70, well before 1973’s Roe v Wade. This was because of the growing sense of having a “right not to be pregnant” if a sexually active woman didn’t want to be. She could also face pressure toward abortion from her partner who didn’t want his sexual partner hampered by pregnancy.

Things to think about and talk about, to be sure, since every woman gets on the Pill at one point or another.

People ask from time to time what my position on abortion after rape is. This time I was asked this by a reader because of this CNN column.

My line for the media is that I’d be happy to discuss abortions for rape victims in more detail when we eradicate the 98 percent of abortions that are not the result of rape.

Behind that answer, however, lies a deep concern for the victims of rape, and a deep conviction that abortion kills a human being and is therefore not a solution for a rape victim.

Today we live in a culture that accepts abortion as a solution. People’s views vary, but generally, for many Canadians, abortion is a plausible solution for an unwanted pregnancy in any of the following life circumstances: Poverty. Life stage. Wanting to finish education. Wanting to compete in an athletic event where nine months out would mean you couldn’t. Not wanting to be in contact with the father, who you believe will be involved and you don’t want him to. The list goes on.  

None of these reasons consider the humanity of the child. And the humanity of the child doesn’t change, given the reason for having an abortion.

We are appalled when someone is raped. And the circumstances are horrifying. We don’t view abortion as horrifying, and therefore, to many, abortion in the case of rape makes sense. I get that.

However, I am horrified by abortion, and so, in my mind, when you consider the trauma of rape you don’t top it up with the trauma of abortion. 

I know I’m in the minority on this one, and so I return to my media line. Let’s have a big discussion of rape when the vast majority of abortions for social reasons have been eradicated.

I’m not sure what it will take to change the societal attitude that abortion is AOK. I recently spoke to a woman who was about to go for her third abortion. To be clear: She is using abortion as birth control. I was definitely more eaten up by this situation than she was. I jumped into high gear to try and help her, because I thought she wanted help. Turns out she actually didn’t. She was being offered help up and down the block, but abortion was the “solution” she wanted. Some kid paid the price because she didn’t feel like it. Not claiming her circumstances were ideal, no, but they weren’t dire either. I’m just saying it’s a sad world when help is offered and denied when someone’s life is on the line.

We don’t view abortion as a life and death circumstance. And if we did, we wouldn’t offer it up as a solution to rape victims.

(And by the way, I think the politician’s dialogue clipped here by the author sounds terrible, callous and useless, but then again, so is this CNN columnist’s viewpoint.)

The abortion rate for UK women over 40 is up by one third.

Josephine Quintavalle, of the Pro-Life Alliance, said: “These figures are extraordinarily depressing -when we see high rates of teen pregnancy we often end up debating whether ignorance is to blame, but you would think that by the age of 40 women would have some idea how things work.”

I too would have hoped that by 40 women would have some idea of how things work and wouldn’t use abortion as birth control.

People! Sex remains connected to pregnancy.

Abby Johnson, former Planned Parenthood clinic director turned pro-life, has done this ad. I am reading her book and I just hit the part where she is told to increase abortions for financial reasons. Giving out birth control was not making the money. Abortions did.

That’s the not-so-subtle message of this ad. I could rant about this all day long, instead, just watch for yourself:

“You know what you want today. But you never know what you might want for tomorrow.” For so many women what they want tomorrow is children. Only the birth control pill helps them delay and delay until it’s too late. Thanks, Beyaz. And it’s not just those of us who hate the Pill who don’t like this ad. I guess I shouldn’t expect any different. I had not watched TV for a long time before I tuned in and caught…this. Guess it’s back to reading for me.

From The Week,

The morning-after pill might soon need a new moniker. A new report in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology suggests the emergency contraceptive might also work well as a woman’s go-to form of birth control, a use doctors have typically discouraged in the past.

Bernard Nathanson has passed away at the age of 84. Initially one of the founders of the abortion rights movement in the USA, his conversion to becoming a supporter of the pro-life cause was an amazing turn around for someone so embedded in the abortion world. It would be as if Henry Morgentaler changed his mind tomorrow. He is also the doctor who said they made up the numbers of women dying from unsafe abortions, as they did with the numbers of women undergoing illegal abortions. I remember reading his autobiography, The Hand of God and thinking how mundane his change of heart was… there were no bolts of lightening, no visions from on high. He (as I recall, it’s been a while since I read the book) basically realized one day he couldn’t deliver babies on one floor of a hospital and kill them on another.

A life story of redemption and courage.

_________________________

Brigitte adds: His documentary, The Silent Scream (warning: graphic) was an important turning point for me. I used to be against abortion, but this film made me want to do more – in particular help Andrea launch and maintain this website. I challenge every pro-choicer to watch it.