ProWomanProLife

Thanks to Julie for drawing my attention to this piece by Jill Stanek. I must say I don’t understand why the American Association of Pediatrics would worry more about cultural sensitivity than, say, the health of girls. And not just physical health, either. For there is something deeply more troubling about female genital mutilation than “just” removing body parts; it’s the idea that girls and women are not supposed to experience sexual pleasure – that they are somehow dirty, or impure, if they do. It’s not just a “cultural practice”. It’s butchery, pure and simple – and if you don’t believe me, I challenge you to watch one (ditto with an abortion). So why would we put up with it, and try to minimize it instead of just saying “No way, we’re not going to tolerate that sort of butchery on American soil”? As Jill Stanek points out:

Traditionally, feminists have strongly opposed FGM, along with all of Western civilization.

But in this new age of cultural sensitivity, attempts are being made to bridge the divide, not necessarily end the barbaric practice of FGM.

For instance, there is a call to stop using the offensive term “mutilation” in favor of “female genital cutting” or “female circumcision,” both utterly inaccurate.

There is also the recent suggestion by the American Academy of Pediatrics to barter a compromise, recommending that pediatricians offer the gentler, kinder form of FGM, Type 4: pricking, piercing, or incising. In a new policy statement on April 26, AAP recommended:

“Some physicians … advocate only pricking or incising the clitoral skin as sufficient to satisfy cultural requirements. This is no more of an alteration than ear piercing. …[T]he ritual nick suggested by some pediatricians is not physically harmful and is much less extensive than routine newborn male genital cutting. There is reason to believe that offering such a compromise may build trust between hospitals and immigrant communities, save some girls from undergoing disfiguring and life-threatening procedures in their native countries and play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC.”

I should note this recommendation is currently illegal in the U.S.

It’s also a pretty stupid idea.

Today’s Globe and Mail offered this piece on abortion in the continent.

Legalizing abortion would be a simple way to reduce the maternal death rate. In South Africa, the number of abortion-related deaths fell by 91 per cent after the procedure was legalized in 1997, according to a Lancet study.

Though, if you highlight the South African maternal mortality rates provided by the map in the article itself, you can see that in 2008 the rate was at its highest since 1980. Since the author York focuses so much on South Africa in the article, it might be important to note that in 2002 South Africa reported over 52,000 rapes.

The fact checks continue to turn up surprising results…

…virtually all of the estimated 5.6 million abortions performed annually in Africa are unsafe. Only about 100,000 are done by properly trained professionals in a safe environment, according to a report last year by the Guttmacher Institute, an advocacy organization for sexual and reproductive health.

Oh, an ‘advocacy organization for sexual and reproductive health’, well that makes me feel better. Here’s a line from their Wikipedia entry…

The Guttmacher Institute in 1968 was founded as the “Center for Family Planning Program Development”, a semi-autonomous division of The Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Perfect.

Promoting abortion to a victimized populace seems to ignore the socioeconomic reasons for their crisis pregnancies in the first place. It may even be a little grotesque, but that could just be me.

Have a look at this – from a 1952 Planned Parenthood pamphlet:

My, how things change…

A friend draws attention to this (apparently left-wing/libertarian) argument against assisted suicide and euthanasia. I’m not sure I see what’s left-wing or libertarian about it, but OK, it’s still early in the day, there’s still some hope for me. It’s not an uninteresting piece, except for this part, which made me jump out of my chair some:

But the problem arises when campaigners call upon society not only passively to accept that these acts of humanity take place, but actively to welcome them, to sanction them, even to celebrate them. Gosling and some of his supporters in the assisted suicide lobby say they want to bring these acts ‘into the open’, to raise awareness about them, and to encourage society to create new rules outlining when it is acceptable to help end someone’s life. But such acts do not belong ‘in the open’. If society were to legalise assisted suicide, it would send the very profound message that death is an acceptable solution to life’s trials and traumas. At a social level, it would elevate hopelessness and fatalism above the cultural affirmation of living, loving, fighting for another day, week, month or year.

Not sure on which planet this fellow lives, but down here it so happens that death has already been declared an acceptable solution to life’s trials and traumas.

Another great column on what exporting abortions abroad is really about:

“Population control,” through the United Nations or otherwise, has always consisted of “breeding instructions for the blacks, browns, and yellows.” And this is precisely what Ignatieff is selling, to the sort of people who want to buy it.

So when we talk maternal health, let’s talk maternal health. It is cultural imperialism of the very worst kind to take some Harvard-educated feminist’s mantra of “my body, my choice” and export it to cultures where they don’t think of killing their unborn babies as a solution to problems.

Look, I understand that Roman Polanski’s wife would try to put the best possible spin on the thing, but this is pushing it. You can’t excuse something like raping a 13-year-old girl on the mood of the “crazy” 1970s. That’s just dumb, and I wish people would stop making excuses for what he did.

A horrifying piece about RU486 and what happens to the women who take it. Is it better to abort at home, privately? I don’t think so.

The image of the baby she wrapped up and threw away would flash across her memory for a year afterwards. Stacy Massey, counselor and founder of Abortion Recovery InterNational (ARIN), said the visual memory of an RU486 abortion is the hardest. Massey lay on a table 30 years ago for her own abortion and played football the next day. But women who have a chemical abortion actually see—­sometimes floating in a toilet or a shower—the graphic aftermath of their own abortions.

A seven-week unborn child already has brain waves, a mouth, lips, forming fingernails, eyelids, toes, and a nose. After women expell their unborn babies, they have to dispose of them. Massey said she once got a desperate call from a woman who said, “My baby’s floating in the toilet. What do I do now? Do I flush it?” And one couple went to a hotel to have an abortion and the woman locked herself in the bathroom, sobbing and screaming.

The feelings of guilt can be more intense for women who have undergone chemical abortions, said Massey, since they themselves administered the pill while they were fully conscious: “For me who went and lay on a table, somebody else did it. Yes, I made the decision but I was always able to rationalize that. I didn’t kill my own baby—somebody else did.” Massey said that the trauma seems to be more severe with younger women since many older women have experienced natural miscarriages.

For the record, I don’t believe there is any way to make an abortion feel OK. But there are ways to make it be worse for the women who undergo them, and RU486 – the way it isolates the women and leaves them on their own to deal with the consequences of their choice to kill their unborn baby – certainly is one of them. How callous and lacking in basic human compassion do you have to be to give this drug to a young pregnant woman with a pat on the knee and a cheerful “Good luck!” before sending her on her lonely way???

[h/t]

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Andrea adds: A woman suffering alone at home, faced with the remains of her child is a horrifying thing. So is a sterile, government-funded clinic that “flushes” the remains for you. I guess that’s why we have this blog, to hash these things out. Pretty distressing all round.

A Montreal-area woman has a brush with death after second-trimester abortion. The story is in French, but you can find a good translation here.

In a nutshell: This 19-year-old woman, who already has one baby, doesn’t want to carry her second one to term. Because she’s past 12 weeks, she’s referred to a clinic that specializes in late-term abortions. She stays in the recovery room for 2 hours after the procedure, then gets up to go to the bathroom. There, she notices heavy bleeding. She tells the nurse, who sends her home anyway.

Understandably worried, she prefers not to stay home alone. So she accompanies her boyfriend on some errand. In the car she realizes the bleeding is getting worse and so is the pain. They head for the hospital. At that point there is a gush of blood with every step she takes (“À chaque pas que je faisais, ça coulait,” is how she put it). She received emergency surgery and blood transfusion. She says she was told in the hospital that if she’d gotten there five minutes later, she might not have made it.

The 19-year-old woman does not know whether she’ll be able to have more children.

Well.

First of all, let me concede that the reason this story made the news is because it’s so rare. But “rare” doesn’t mean “impossible”. Indeed, the story quotes a spokesperson from the Centre de santé Jeanne-Mance, a clinic that provides abortions, to the effect that, well, you know, of course there are risks related to abortion.

Les responsables du Centre de santé Jeanne-Mance assurent que toutes les mesures sont prises pour limiter les cas de complications graves, mais qu’ils font partie des risques d’une interruption volontaire de grossesse.

«Des saignements liés à l’avortement, c’est dans la normalité des choses. Est-ce qu’il y a des complications à chaque fois qu’il y a une chirurgie ? Bien sûr que non», indique Suzanne Carrière, directrice des services spécifiques au CSSS Jeanne-Mance.

Sans commenter directement le cas de Christelle Dupuis-Labelle, la directrice indique que les patients reçoivent un guide de 16 pages d’information en lien avec l’intervention. Tout ce qui touche d’éventuelles complications s’y trouve, ainsi qu’un numéro en cas d’urgence.

My translation: Bleeding after an abortion, that’s normal. Are there complications with each surgery? Of course not. The spokesperson adds that patients receive a 16-page guide before an abortion that includes information about possible complications and a phone number to call in case of emergency.

Did I tell you about my root canal last year? Probably not. It’s not that interesting. But I had a root canal last year. That’s a lucrative business, judging from the bill they handed me (it had four digits before the decimal point; I hated the whole thing). You’d think these people had an incentive to just do one root canal after another and send patients home quickly to make room for more paying patients, right? But no. Not only did the doctor who did my root canal explain, in painstaking detail, what would happen and why, I had to listen to a little lesson about possible risks and sign a whole bunch of papers saying I understood the risks and was OK with them. I was also told that there might be some pain once things thawed, but that if the pain didn’t go away after a day or so (or maybe it was 2 days, I forget), not to hesitate to give them a call. They scared the dickens out of me with those warnings, but other than burning a fine whole in my wallet the procedure did not cause me undue pain or discomfort.

I’m guessing that’s because dentists are both pro-tooth and pro-paying-patient.

I never had an abortion, and never asked for one, so I don’t have first-hand knowledge of how it goes. But I’d be curious to know. Is it more, or less, elaborate than for my root canal?

My friend muses:

So I was watching the kids out doing the Shinerama today, raising money for cystic fibrosis research when it dawned on me. They are raising money for this cause, to find a cure for an awful disease, while also supporting strongly the death of such children before they are born through their student governments and unfettered access to abortion. CF rates fell from 1/2714 before pre-natal genetic testing to 1/3608 in 2000. It could be even lower now.

I’m grateful to disability rights folks for raising these points–it’s incumbent on the rest of us to connect the dots between abortion and the effects it has on the differently-abled around us. Or not around us, as the case is more and more.

Can frank language change the outcome of a debate? Some (here and here) are saying Sarah Palin has won a round against President Obama, thanks to some “inflammatory” (if you hate Palin) or “frank” (if you like Palin) language. Her “death panel” phrase drew enough attention that part of the proposed legislation on end-of-life medical care was scrapped:

A Senate panel has decided to scrap the part of its healthcare bill that in recent days has given rise to fears of government “death panels,” with one lawmaker suggesting the proposal was just too confusing.

I am certainly an advocate for diplomacy. (Does that make me too nice?) However, the words we use do matter. (Say for example when you use “choice” or “women’s rights” instead of “killing.”)