ProWomanProLife

Recently, Nebraska failed to pass its legislation requiring higher standards of practice for abortion clinics, but where Nebraska has failed, Virginia has prevailed.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli issued a legal opinion yesterday that empowers the Virginia Board of Health to require women’s health clinics that offer abortion procedures to meet hospital-like standards.

The new regulations will cover medical investigating to rule out coerced abortion and statutory rape possibilities prior to an abortion. It is up to the Health Board now to enforce them.

The reason for the many inconsistencies in patient treatment at abortion clinics versus those in a hospital is down to the fact that abortion is considered an out-patient procedure. So, like getting Botox injections on your lunch break, it’s too simple and quick a procedure to require all the paperwork, patient screening and face time with medical staff. The difference is the effects of Botox wear off over a few months.

Clinics view these regulations as an attempt to close them down, but the arguments for them consider how these patients’ lives will be effected physically and mentally after the procedure. Hospitals are required to know their patients’ history, and they are held accountable for a failure to do so. There is no reason an abortion clinic shouldn’t be required to do the same.

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.

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?

With my first pregnancy, I bought every book on prenatal care I could find. I ate well, I gave up sushi and soft cheese, and I attended Lamaze classes regularly. Educating myself, I became convinced I had achieved expert status on the subject of childbirth prior to the actual event. However, as my due date came and went without a baby in sight, I suddenly found myself scrambling for information and becoming incredibly stressed as the words ‘potential emergency Caesarean’ rebounded off the hospital walls. I had fabulous health care, I was fit, had a wonderful doctor whom I trusted, a supportive spouse, and a nearby parent. All of these factors led to a fairly easy (relatively speaking) labour, but if even one of those pillars of support hadn’t been there or had wavered during crisis moments… who’s to say what the outcome would’ve been. I’m all too aware that there are many women without such support, and they suffer needlessly because of it. Reading this article from The New York Times about the difference in the maternal mortality rate in Chelsea versus the Bronx, reminds me of how the simplest of social policy changes and education outreach programs can give support to women and potentially save their lives.

More mothers die during pregnancy or soon after in New York than in almost every other state, and according to reports released on Friday by the New York Academy of Medicine and the city’s health department, social factors like poverty, obesity and lack of insurance may be responsible.

While the total number of maternal deaths are small — an average of about 40 a year across the state — city health officials said their analysis showed that maternal mortality was being driven by environmental factors like poor nutrition that could be changed through public policy.

New York City’s analysis, billed as one of the most sophisticated looks at maternal mortality in the country, studied 161 women who died of pregnancy-related causes in the city from 2001 to 2005.

It found that 49 percent of the women who died were obese. Black women, who were more likely to be obese, were seven times as likely to die in pregnancy as white women. Hispanic and Asian women were twice as likely to die as white women.

The death rate was highest in the Bronx and Brooklyn, which have large poor and minority populations. The neighborhoods with the highest death rates were Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens. Those with the lowest death rates — actually zero — were Chelsea and Greenwich Village in Manhattan, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn and Flushing in Queens.

Women without health insurance — who may receive less preventive care — were four times as likely to die as women with such coverage, but women covered by Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, fared as well as women with private insurance, the city found.

I’d also like to note this article doesn’t mention ‘unsafe abortion’.

…go back to talking about local access. This seems to be the new motto for pro-choice enthusiasts after failing to make the kind of impact they would’ve liked on the Maternal Health Initiative.

Kimberley’s mind was made up. The mother of a toddler, she was pregnant again and wanted an abortion. But as a resident of Prince Edward Island, which doesn’t have a single abortion provider, she had to drive over four hours with her boyfriend to New Brunswick, dodge anti-abortion protesters, then pay $600 out of her own pocket for the procedure.

As a child growing up in Alaska, my small city was over three hours from absolutely everywhere. It’s the price we paid for cheaper housing, less crime, less pollution, and we looked forward to our regular road trips for shopping and sometimes for less eagerly awaited hospital visits. Here in Nova Scotia, people living rurally often travel long distances to Halifax for doctor’s appointments and specialist procedures.

Growing up rurally myself, I find it incredible that anyone would actually want an abortion clinic to move into their town. Especially in a small community, such as those in PEI (total population approx. 140,000), that relies heavily on tourism. The community would hardly want clinics dotting the landscape they’ve worked so hard to preserve.

It’s ridiculous that I have to leave my own province. It’s my own body, I need to have control over it,” said the soft-spoken woman in her mid-20s, who asked to use a pseudonym because her family and friends didn’t know she was having an abortion.

Her friends and family would have been more likely to know, had she had the procedure in a local small town hospital.

For me, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been a longstanding example of why abortion simply doesn’t solve any problems for the women of Africa. As we in the west debate the maternal health initiative, the Congolese women are supporting themselves and each other by any means necessary in otherwise insurmountable conditions.

Theirs is the stigmatized sorority of rape.

Behind these courtyard walls at Heal Africa, they’ve found a sanctuary and femaled a village of the otherwise damned.

Erased as wives and daughters for a crime done to them, they’ve been cast out from their homes, expelled from their hamlets, reviled by husbands and fathers and brothers, ostracized by neighbours

There is a fundamental problem in the DR Congo. It’s not lack of ‘access’ that plagues the lives of these women, but it’s that they are abused then shunned because of it. Often severely injured, women of rape are not welcome in their own homes or even the homes of relatives, so with no one left to turn to, these women have erected their own communities, safe havens, from the rubble of war and systemized abuse.

It was through the assistance of a local “listening house” — a network of counselling shelters that functions also as an underground railroad for disenfranchised rape victims — that Ushindi made her way to the central Heal Africa establishment in the North Kivu capital.

These women, some trained as counsellors, and their children, conceived through rape, now occupy the 28 safe houses HEAL Africa has provided.

When the subject of abortion is raised, if she’d ever considered ridding herself of the fetus, Ushindi gasps. Not only is the procedure illegal in the Congo — except when the mother’s physical health is endangered — but she, like the majority of Congolese, is Catholic, not the pick-and-choose kind either.

“That would be killing. There is already so much killing in my country. An abortion would make me just another killer, like the soldiers.”

HEAL Africa is not only providing safe houses and care but also works to combat gender and justice issues that are ultimately at the core of the mistreatment of the Congolese women.

HEAL Africa’s hospital and community development work address the root causes of illness and poverty for the people of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The hospital and the 28 women’s houses in Maniema and North Kivu have provided a safe place for many victims of the war, and have been a motor for combating poverty and promoting community cohesion over the past 14 years.

While HEAL Africa is doing all of the right things to empower women, it is all the more imperative that the G8 initiative works to preserve the goals and ideals of such organizations and allows them access to much needed funding without abortion agendas.

During a fervent storm of figures related to the maternal health initiative, the Lancet study brings good news.

With the best methods possible, the Lancet study shows that maternal deaths have declined since 1980 from more than a half-million annually to 342,900. That’s without abortion being declared an international right and without $30 billion additional funding for family-planning groups.

Abortion activists have been storming Capitol Hill, citing the discredited figures and reciting the mantra that abortion rights will lower global maternal deaths. At one briefing, speakers demanded U.S. funding of international abortions because “public funding of abortion is a human right.”

A right abortion activists declare, for the sake of funding, is necessary to further reduce the claimed 13 percent of women who die annually from unsafe abortions. So while we’re talking about numbers, here’s a follow-up to the Margaret Somerville article stating she’s exaggerating the numbers for the other side.

She deduces that there are at least 800 late-term abortions carried out in Canada each year, which amounts to less than 0.3 per cent of live births, a miniscule [sic] figure she nonetheless seems to think puts paid to the myth that they are “not rare.”

She then claims that pregnancy complications that threaten the mother’s health and well being are, in fact, “rare.” Canada’s maternal death rate is eight out of 1,000 births. Our late-term abortion rate, by the most generous extrapolation of Somerville’s numbers, is about half that, yet somehow “not rare.”

When I hear a number like 0.3 percent, I think to myself, that’s not as significant as the 13 percent of maternal deaths we’re told are from unsafe abortions. When does a percentage become significant then? Is 0.3 percent indeed “a miniscule figure”?

There are 19 million unsafe abortions each year according to the World Health Organization statistics, which they sum up like this.

about 20 million of them (women with unplanned pregnancies) resort to unsafe abortion…

Rounding up a million? Okay, let’s keep reading.

Unsafe abortion – defined as a procedure for terminating an unwanted pregnancy either by persons lacking the necessary skills or in an environment lacking minimal medical standards or both – results in the deaths of 67 000 women every year…

Even if we conceded that 13 percent of all maternal mortalities are in fact from unsafe abortions, the percentage of women who die from them, according the the WHO’s own statistics, is 67,000/19,000,000 or 0.35 percent. Canada’s own maternal mortality rate is over double this, at 0.8 percent.

To put it plainly, less than half of a tenth of a percent of unsafe abortions result in maternal death.

For me, 19,000,000 is the most striking number in this mix, and it’s the number of abortions that I want to tackle, along with the other 87 percent of maternal deaths that seem to have been lost in the storm.

Academic papers have throughout history been subject to selective use. A group or ideology will refer to only those quotations that support their arguments. So if you have the time to cut out the middle man on the recent paper ‘G8 Academies Joint Statement on Health of Women and Children’, you can read it in full for yourself here.

I saw the headline to this story and started worrying, but it turns out they meant “right to die” in the good old-fashioned sense of being allowed to refuse treatment even when doctors think there’s still hope.

Doctors could be struck off if they fail to respect the wishes of terminally ill patients who want to die by refusing treatment, the General Medical Council is to announce.

They must allow the terminally ill to refuse food and water if the patient does not want treatment that prolongs their life and must abide by “living wills” in which patients specify in advance that they do not want to be resuscitated.

I’m sure there are still plenty of problems with patients whose will cannot be clearly expressed (for whatever reason) or with patients who seem to be pressured into death by relatives, and who knows what all. But in principle, if you’re determined not to continue treatment come what may, then your wishes ought to be respected.