ProWomanProLife

Read all about this, here.

The bulk of PP’s breast-health work is simply referring their clients to outside facilities. “Sorry, no help for you here.” In fact yesterday, Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure CEO Nancy Brinker and President Elizabeth Thompson revealed they halted funding to PP for this very reason. “We have decided not to fund, wherever possible, pass-through grants. We were giving them money, they were sending women out for mammograms. What we would like to have are clinics where we can directly fund mammograms.”

The spin continues.

…then we are all supposed to find things very difficult too.

Watch this clip about the Komen Foundation coming under heavy fire for withdrawing funding (or, possibly not) from Planned Parenthood. Incidentally, you might catch the part where Nancy Brinker of Komen points out that Planned Parenthood sends women elsewhere for breast cancer screening and that they want to be directly in contact with those agencies. Makes sense. But apparently incomprehensible to Andrea Mitchell, the interviewer.

Here’s the thing. Planned Parenthood may yet be funded by Komen. So it’s hard to see what the story is, other than the media having histrionics.

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Update: About 30 seconds after publishing this post, I got word of this petition. I stand with Komen. I’ll sign it, and I think you should too. Whether or not Planned Parenthood continues to receive their funding in the future is irrelevant. The fact is, they are taking substantial flak for something they have done right now, and they ought to be aware that many people appreciate it.

This is good news, and might even give our Canadian government some chutzpah when it comes to further cuts to Planned Parenthood here.

Killing your baby is safer than having one. And way cheaper, too, while we’re at it! But that wasn’t the point of this study, which confines itself to the health benefits of offing your child.

Now here’s the thing. I’m concerned they didn’t include ALL the benefits of abortion. Did they, for example, add in the benefits, current and future, of scientific experimentation on the fetus? What about the masses who’ve been saved in vaccinations developed from fetal cell lines? I’m just trying to think of every angle.

Sometimes the abortion debate does lead to some pretty upside down, Orwellian moments.

Couldn’t have put this one better myself:

The default position of pro-choicers, whether or not they frame it this way themselves, amounts to a belief that abortion is always the right choice for women who have given it even a moment’s consideration. Once a woman has so much as considered the possibility of abortion, any effort to change her mind – or even just to give her more information to consider – is an attempt to limit her freedom of choice. A woman who doesn’t go through with her impulse to abort is a woman who has fallen victim to some sort of pro-life plot against her rights.

So in Texas it will be required that a woman seeking an abortion listen to the heartbeat of her unborn baby and hear information about fetal development, a description of the ultrasound. The usual suspects were against this:

The challengers, represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, also argued disclosure of the sonogram and fetal heartbeat was not “medically necessary” and therefore beyond the state’s power to regulate the practice of medicine.

I can think of other things that are medically unnecessary…

Also, good to see that the judge was a woman:

The required disclosures of a sonogram, the fetal heartbeat, and their medical descriptions are the epitome of truthful, non-misleading information,” Chief Judge Edith Jones wrote for the threejudge panel.

Nice.

Here’s an interesting article about body modifications and whether or not they should be made/kept legal. The arguments in favor of keeping them legal are along the lines of…

“It’s here to stay regardless of whether the medical community wants it to be here,” he said. “Now it’s a case of how do we make it safe, because kids are dumb and they’re going to do it themselves if they don’t have a professional they can go to.”

I’m not against body modifications, people who want them can get them, but is this heading in the direction of funding professionals for every “dumb” thing kids do?

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Andrea adds: I am against body modifications:

Public health authorities across Canada are struggling to address the growing popularity of body modifications such as splitting one’s tongue like a snake’s and surgically altering ears to make them elf-like and pointy, fearing the spread of infection in an unregulated industry.

I’m not “against them” the same way I’m against abortion, to be sure. I would not, for example, start up a web site to protest them, but if you asked me, I’d say I think it’s wrong to mess around surgically with your body for kicks. The sad truth for the extreme Lord of the Rings fan is that humans don’t have pointy ears… And elves aren’t real… The Shire is fictitious… I could go on…

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Jennifer adds: You’re too funny!

I also wouldn’t advocate for body modifications. I think of them in the same terms as breast implants and similar forms of plastic surgery. People probably do it for various reasons, self-esteem, attention, etc, but for me the problem is in understanding the self as something that needs to be represented by your physical appearance. What a person who gets a “body mod” doesn’t see is that it stems from the same desire for someone else to get breast implants, it’s all about the perception other people have of you. It’s not rebellious, it’s an enslavement to whatever group you’re trying to appeal to. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” -Virginia Woolf

Pro-choice activists will emphasize up and down the block how having a child is medically more dangerous than an abortion. I believe the two can’t and shouldn’t be compared.

What we hear less of, though I suspect it is common enough, are people who pulled their lives together precisely because they were having a child, and knew they had to do better with their lives as a result.

This is one such story: 

A mother-to-be has told how becoming pregnant has helped to save her life after years of suffering from a debilitating eating disorder. Catherine Thomson, 27, battled with anorexia for seven years before she fell pregnant with her first child.

I recall one woman I met last year who chose to have her third abortion, not because she didn’t want to have children, but because she didn’t want to have them under her current less than perfect circumstances. Ostensibly she’d been in those less than perfect circumstances two times before. The abortions didn’t change her debt load or her inability to form positive relationships. I’m not saying pregnancy would have solved her problems either, but the point I’m making here is that abortion doesn’t resolve problems, where wanting a better life for your child is a very strong drive indeed.

The Globe and Mail reports on a New Jersey lawsuit:

The nurses have filed a lawsuit against the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, claiming the institution violated the law earlier this fall by announcing that nurses would have to help with abortion patients before and after the procedure, The Washington Post reports.

The Globe asks “Up to what point should health-care workers be allowed to refuse involvement?”

I’d say they should be allowed to refuse all involvement at every stage. Prepping a woman for an abortion or doing post-op care simply frees up others to do the actual abortions. It’s a bit like giving money to Planned Parenthood and saying it’s not going to the side of the organization that does abortions, ie, not possible.

…Or completely out of touch with yourself? I’d heard rumors, water cooler stories, of celebrities who had elective caesarean sections. They didn’t want the inconvienience of giving birth suddenly, they had busy lives, they didn’t want to ruin their stage exposed flat tummies, but until I read this article I just chalked it up to being out of touch with reality.

The medicalisation of life continues apace with new National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) guidelines proposing caesarean section as, effectively, a lifestyle choice for all mothers, not just those who were only recently scorned as “too posh to push”.
There is so much worryingly amiss with this that it’s difficult to know where to start. From the point of view of medicine, the inherent risks of having an elective caesarean are becoming ever less of a concern – as long as you are only going to have two or three children. Have a larger family via major abdominal surgery and you risk rupture of the uterus and severe bleeding. Then there is the cost: some £800 over that of having your baby naturally, and this at a time when NHS services are being cut back so drastically. [...]
The choice is problematical, though. Should women shun medicalisation or should they demand even more medical attention for their particular needs? Should women aim to control their own bodies or seize an apparently greater power with the help of surgery – cosmetic or otherwise? As the eminent surgeon Sir Spencer Wells remarked in 1891, “Wonderful indeed, is woman’s hydra-like tolerance of sections and mutilations.”