“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

…if a woman decides that the best thing for her to do is to self-induce an abortion, she should have access to the best information available on how to do this safely (ie with medicines, NOT herbs) and know where to go in case of a complication.  Criminalizing her choices does not protect her health. If we believe that women have the right to control their fertility, then we must also trust women with the right to choose the methods that make the most sense for them.

A few things spring to mind as to why this is a very bad idea. One is the fact that making abortion drugs available for at-home use might cause a higher rate of coerced abortion. Coerced abortion is still legal in Canada, and sometimes the only person who actually asks if you’re being coerced is medical staff. Remove these middlemen/women, and coercion becomes all the easier.

Since coercion isn’t a crime, what about slipping over-the-counter purchased mifepristone into your partner’s drink? Is that a criminal offense?

I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to make self-abortion a regularity, given the possible mental health effects, the possible abuses of these kinds of drugs, and the isolation a woman must experience as she self-aborts her child.

Criminalizing this “choice” may in fact protect her health and save the lives of both mother and child.

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Andrea adds: Same article I linked to for a game of Count the Euphemisms, “Self-Abortion Care” being the first one I spotted, in the title.

 It is now commonplace that people around the world are told there is a new international right to abortion.

Those who receive this message are people who have the power to change abortion laws; parliamentarians, lawyers, judges and others.
Those delivering this message are influential and believable people; UN personnel, human rights lawyers, judges and others.

The assertion they make is false. No UN treaty makes abortion an international human right.

So the San Jose Articles were born, as a tool to help countries and their citizens stand up to these false claims. Read them, print them, reference them, and pass them along.

Canada will fund an organization that provides family planning services around the world — but only in countries where abortion is illegal in most cases, CBC News has learned.

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda has decided to approve a proposal by the International Planned Parenthood Federation to provide sex education and contraception in five developing countries.

…and the other concerns funding for maternal and child health projects.

Canada has selected 28 maternal and child health projects to share $82 million in funding between now and 2016, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Tuesday.

The money was committed in the G-8 Muskoka Initiative, 15 months ago. It brings the total allocated under the fund to almost $740 million for projects in Africa, the Americas and Asia.

What are your views on these proposals?

The bill would require a doctor to check for a fetal heartbeat and inform the woman. If there is a detectable heartbeat, an abortion would be prohibited unless there was a risk of death or major injury to the woman’s health. Supporters believe the bill would block tens of thousands of abortions, as a fetal heartbeat can be typically heard around the sixth week of pregnancy, and sometimes as soon as three weeks’ gestation.

In three new rulings, federal judges in different states have acted to block immediate enforcement of measures that restrict abortion rights and women’s access to affordable contraception, lifesaving cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These rulings are important victories for women’s health and reproductive rights. [...]

On July 1, Judge Carlos Murguia, a federal district judge in Kansas, blocked immediate enforcement of a new Kansas licensing law and health department regulations imposing extensive, medically unnecessary requirements on the state’s three remaining abortion providers — like mandating 50 square feet of storage space for janitorial supplies — with the obvious goal of shutting them down.

While these rulings are preliminary, each is a determination that enforcing the law would cause irreparable harm and that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail at trial. They do not, however, address other threats to women’s health. Those include the slashing of state support for family-planning services by governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey, and attacks from Congress like the bill Republicans pushed through the House in May that would use the nation’s tax system as a weapon to end abortion insurance coverage in the private market.

Still, these rulings serve as a reminder that courts have a vital role to play in blocking the extreme anti-abortion, anti-family-planning movement accelerating in the states and in Washington.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A woman who had an affair with Laurens County Sheriff Ricky Chastain said in a lawsuit filed this week she was sexually harassed and wrongfully forced out of her county job after refusing the sheriff’s request to have a second abortion.

Chastain, who for more than a decade has been sheriff in the county about 70 miles northwest of Columbia, has admitted to a two-and-a-half year affair with Haley Manley but has denied that he forced her to quit.

According to her lawsuit, filed Thursday in Laurens County court, their affair began a month after she started working for Chastain in January 2008, and Manley became pregnant in the summer of 2010. After Chastain said she’d either have to have an abortion or quit her job, Manley says Chastain drove her to Charlotte, N.C., in his county-issued vehicle and paid for her to abort their child.

In September, Manley says Chastain again demanded she get an abortion when she told him she was pregnant a second time. When Manley refused but told Chastain she wanted to keep her job, she says the sheriff told his subordinates during an October meeting to do “whatever it took” to make her resign, tactics the lawsuit says included “threats of violence.”

Manley subsequently resigned and later opted to have a second abortion, WSPA-TV has reported.

[...]

Chastain on Friday referred comment to an attorney, who did not return a message. In several media interviews, Chastain has said he drove Manley to have the July abortion but has denied he forced her to quit.

PIERRE, S.D. — Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit in federal court yesterday seeking to block a South Dakota law that would require women seeking abortions to face the nation’s longest waiting period — three days — and undergo counseling at pregnancy help centers that discourage abortion.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to suspend the law until a final ruling on whether it violates a woman’s constitutional right to abortion established under the US Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. The law is set to take effect July1.

The legal challenge was filed in Sioux Falls, where Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota operates South Dakota’s only abortion clinic.

State Representative Roger Hunt, Republican of Brandon, the chief sponsor of the bill, said the lawsuit was expected.

“I don’t understand why, because it just seeks to give women more information, and it seeks to remove coercion, seeks to deal with a number of coercion elements where you have possible rapes and problems within families and whatnot, and we’re trying to help those women deal with that coercion,’’ said Hunt.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. – There’s a political shift in many states across the country, including Missouri, where lawmakers are trying to pass tougher abortion restrictions. Those watching these bills say the number filed has dramatically increased nationwide, with bills in more than 30 states. They include measures that would require an ultrasound before an abortion, restrict insurance coverage on abortion or ban late-term abortions because of alleged fetal pain.

According to reproductive health advocates, changes in the political composition of state legislatures after last fall’s elections have played a role in the increased number of such bills filed. The Rev. Rebecca Turner with Faith Aloud says the economy and jobs were on the minds of voters last fall, not abortion.

“This is definitely the most extreme swing to the right that we have seen. It has been building for quite a number of years. This happened at this particular time because of a bait-and-switch in the last election.”

Many sponsors of these bills argue they would give women more information before making a decision about an abortion. Turner calls that information misleading and inaccurate.

I vehemently disagree with just about everything Rebecca Turner says, and this article is no exception. Ultrasounds are misleading? Anyhoo, the times are changing, and that’s a good thing.

In a ruling that affirmed France’s ban on surrogacy, the country’s top court refused on Wednesday to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States who carried the babies for a French couple. The Court of Cassation said that a California county went too far by ruling that a French couple are legally the twins’ parents. The ruling exposes the legal limbo that many would-be parents find themselves in because of inconsistencies on surrogacy between countries like the United States, which legally recognizes it, and those that ban it. While the court ruled that the girls could not be listed in France’s civil registry, it also said that nothing prevented them from living with the couple in France. The couple’s lawyer said they planned to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.