The maternal health saga continues:
The number of women dying in childbirth worldwide has dropped dramatically, a British medical journal reports, adding that it was pressured to delay its findings until after U.N. meetings this week on public health funding.
Get your two minutes of hate here… My favourite part:
It’s sort of a misconception in some circles that ladies who choose pregnancy termination would be interested in adoption, that’s one thing people don’t understand.
Abortion is birth control. Adoption is giving up your child and not accepting your duties as a mother. Most women are not interested in that. It’s only in a religiously-altered mind that that’s a true option.
[h/t]
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Andrea adds: Wow. That’s all I have to say at the moment.
Today’s papers are reporting that two-mother embryos may help to end hereditary diseases. Nice headline but not quite true. Before you jump to conclusions and set your hair on fire, be aware that women are not about to start self-reproducing and vote men off the island. This two-mother gig still starts with a sperm-fertilized egg. So really, the embryos are mother-father-then-add-another-mother fertilized. Read on, from the National Post:
The scientists take a fertilized egg from a mother with malfunctioning mitochondria, and extract the healthy part of its DNA that contains all the information on how her child will develop. Then, they take a fertilized egg from a donor mother which is stripped of almost all of its DNA, leaving just the shell containing its healthy mitochondria “battery.”
And it should probably be added that the touted elimination of hereditary diseases is for that particular egg only. Granted, if enough babies are fertilized in petrie dishes without hereditary diseases, the diseases will eventually be uprooted. But my uneducated feeling — watching music videos and listening to pop radio and occasionally browsing entertainment news and teen pregnancies stats — tells me that there is still plenty of sex happening the good ole’ fashioned way.
More news from the revolution!
An alarming new superbug may be on its way — an incurable form of gonorrhea. The disease, once easily killed with a shot of penicillin, is increasingly becoming drug-resistant. Soon, the world may face a version that can’t be killed by any known antibiotic, warned Catherine Ison, the director of the sexually transmitted bacteria reference library with the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency.
A reader sent the link to this McGill piece. The author is against graphic images–fine, some of the women on this team are, too. He’s also against the rather soft-spoken women of Silent No More, standing with images that say “I regret my abortion.”
Fohl’s professed love for dialogue is bizarre, since for a brief period this year, it seemed that Choose Life’s tactics had destroyed any hope of a meaningful discussion of reproductive rights on campus. When you confront a woman with a sign reading, “I regret my abortion,” for instance, you cannot expect students to eagerly engage in dialogue.
One is left with the distinct impression that the author wants women–only pro-life women, though–to go and “dialogue” in a dark closet somewhere, by themselves. Talk about a wimp. If you can’t handle a gentle woman holding a sign, you’ve got a problem and should probably get some help. Just by the by, this is precisely the sort of person I warn women against dating: in a crisis pregnancy he’ll smile and nod and say–it’s your choice, honey. (Now I’m gonna get a beer and watch the playoffs.)
Does the fetus matter or not? Is it human or not? Yes–if you think so. No–if you don’t think so. And so any circumstance can be good–if you think it is good. And alternatively, any circumstance can be bad, if you think it is bad.
No wonder pro-choicers don’t want to come out and debate very often.
Joyce Arthur’s arguments make sense to me, actually, in the context of today’s subjective culture. It’s just that they don’t hold any water when I reason it through–because that fetus either is something or it’s not and this can’t change depending on the ways the winds go…Every culture has societal norms and laws. It’s not a question of democracy. It’s a question of what we choose to classify as right and wrong. (Infanticide, slavery, anyone?)
That’s why women should be called out to think about these things, way before the moment of a crisis pregnancy. Because at that moment, someone like Joyce is going to step in and say–I couldn’t possibly tell you what’s on this ultrasound. It’s all up to you. And in the face of parents, and school, and boyfriends who aren’t ready and the thought of putting life on a different track for nine months–that is going to sound very seductive indeed. It’s quite a cruel approach when I think about it.
That’s what this story implies:
Just two years after it celebrated its opening with the blessing of a Catholic priest, a “pro-life” pharmacy in Virginia has gone belly up. The Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy in Chantilly was one of a few in the United States to peg its business model to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Accordingly, its shelves were free of condoms, porn, cigarettes, and even make-up. Turns out, though, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of stuff people actually want to buy.
Or maybe banning make-up was too much?
For those who’ve been following the failed Russian adoption story. An adoptive parent gives us some perspective on difficult cases.
Our family’s adoption was far from perfect, although for the moment it seems to have ended better than Hansen’s. Of course, we still don’t know how it really ends. Even if my adopted daughter turns out fine, there are the other children to consider — my three-year-old biological son may spend years on the couch because my adopted daughter displaced him; either my older son or my older daughter could seek the love and affection they lost this past year in a cult or a series of destructive one-night stands. We won’t know until we know (and we’ll never know what might have been different).
With the publicity surrounding his return, Hansen’s adopted son will surely be taken in by some Russian family, and no matter what’s said about it publicly, that will not be a smooth sail down the Nile. Probably none of it will work out as anyone would have intended — in fact, by definition, it already hasn’t. A perfect world would be one in which every child could be well cared for by the mother he or she was born to. That’s not what we’ve got. A “successful” adoption story is one in which you can tell yourself that it worked out better than the alternative. That has to be enough.
A study on coercion in reproductive options doesn’t appear to mention how many women are coerced into having an abortion. Haven’t read the full thing, but if this study doesn’t mention that, then there’s a terribly large blind spot.
Am I to believe there’s coercion all around but the second a woman walks into an abortion clinic it’s her own, personal, private, freestanding choice? Really?
A short segment on maternal health, also featuring yours truly (by Skype, which is why I’m never looking at the camera.)