Archives for June 2011

An article about a woman who takes beautiful pictures of babies who have died just as soon as they are born, as a memory for the grieving family:

Many people find the idea of photographing deceased children morbid, and I respect this view. But these grief-stricken parents must, for the most part, leave the hospital empty-handed. This life they dreamed of and hoped for stays behind – in the morgue. While other parents leave clutching a treasured bundle, the families I photograph take only a baby hat, footprints and handprints, and a tiny hospital bracelet. My photos are powerful. My photos are proof. They say to one and all: This life was lived, even if only in utero. This life mattered. This baby was our baby and we love him.

Pro-choice folks make fun of pro-lifers. They call us “fetus fetishists” and other odd assorted names. But is it so funny to consider these fetuses as lives lived, even if only in utero? Is it so risible to envision that those lives matter? It’s simply consistent when pro-life people step back and say these lives matter, wanted or unwanted. It’s not so strange to think of the fetus in the womb as a life lived. This article shows that really well.

I do support the use of graphic visuals in the abortion debate:

But Andrea Mrozek, of the Ottawa-based group Pro Woman Pro Life, said she supports the Calgary demonstrations because they shed light on an issue few want to discuss in Canada. “Abortion is very hidden and concealed in our culture and [this tactic] brings it out into the open in a way that can’t be avoided. I think that’s very important.”

Ron Paul, a libertarian politician and once presidential candidate in the United States discusses abortion:

Morality has a lot to do with legislation,” explained Paul. “We don’t have abortions today because the law permits it – that’s made it worse – but the law accommodated the social changes that had occurred. It was the breakdown in our social system at the time…We would like to think that all we have to do is elect the right politicians and everything is going to be okay. But the government is a reflection of the people and their values,” he continued. “That is why the burden is on people like you to make sure we have those values.”

That’s my burden, so to speak, to make sure we have pro-life values; to change hearts and minds, not necessarily legislation.

When I was a preteen, the Cat Who… books accompanied me everywhere. They were fun, intriguing, and a great escape. If they were full of “sex and violence”, at that age I may never even have gotten the chance to read them.

Lilian Jackson Braun – the author of 29 The Cat Who… books about a crime-solving journalist and cat owner called Jim Qwilleran – has died aged 97.

After her first book, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, was published in 1966, the New York Times called her “the new detective writer of the year”.

[…]
Her husband, Earl Bettinger, told the AP news agency she had parted company with her first publisher in the 1960s because she had refused to add sex and violence to her fourth book.

[…]
“A woman from Germany called and said she was coming to America and said she would like to meet Jim Qwilleran,” said Mr Bettinger.

“That’s how real her characters were.”

Will an abortion make them magically wealthy? Will an abortion end her employment in the sex trade? Will an abortion find them child care arrangements for their other children? The majority of unplanned pregnancies are red flags that a woman’s life, not just her pregnancy, isn’t going the way she planned.

It seems that abortion proponents are happy to overlook this blazing neon sign, and instead believe that lower income women just aren’t educated or don’t have enough access to birth control to prevent a pregnancy from happening. But does sex ed and birth control at an early age really break the cycle?

Teenage pregnancy is linked to several risk factors. Being poor, living in a single-parent household, child abuse, and risky behaviors such as drug abuse and early or unprotected sex are all predictors of whether a teenager will become pregnant (Kirby 1997*; Dillard*).

It seems that being poor doesn’t just lead to more unintended pregnancies but also to an earlier age of sexual activity. And if this isn’t desirable for us as a society, then birth control is not the answer. Something fundamental must change, especially as poor women are at a higher risk of sexual violence.

Poor women and girls may be more at risk of rape in the course of their daily tasks than those who are better off, for example when they walk home on their own from work late at night, or work in the fields or collect firewood alone. Children of poor women may have less parental supervision when not in school, since their mothers may be at work and unable to afford child care. The children themselves may, in fact, be working and thus vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Poverty forces many women and girls into occupations that carry a relatively high risk of sexual violence,^[22] particularly sex work.^[23] It also creates enormous pressures for them to find or maintain jobs, to pursue trading activities and, if studying, to obtain good grades all of which render them vulnerable to sexual coercion from those who can promise these things.^[24] Poorer women are also more at risk of intimate partner violence, of which sexual violence is often a manifestation.^[25][26]

The answer is not to sterilize these women and children so that their exploitation doesn’t lead to an unintended pregnancy, the answer is to stop and condemn the exploitation and violence.

A man puts up a billboard following his girlfriend’s (EX-girlfriend’s) abortion:

The sign on Alamogordo’s main thoroughfare shows 35-year-old Greg Fultz holding the outline of an infant. The text reads, “This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To Not KILL Our Child!”

Think about it. The man lost his child, a person he would have valued deeply, a person of great personal significance. Every abortion is about one person’s life, and that life is connected to aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers and friends.

On a bad day, if I were this man, I think I’d put up a billboard, too. And my other thought is God Bless America, for having people with gumption like this.

From the NY Times:

Governor Daniels and Republican lawmakers, by depriving Planned Parenthood of about $3 million in government funds, would punish thousands of low-income women on Medicaid, who stand to lose access to affordable contraception, life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Making it harder for women to obtain birth control is certainly a poor strategy for reducing the number of abortions.

Health care in the US is still, but finally, under reform. My personal hope is that with the funds taken from the privatization of women’s health care to organizations with their own agendas (like Planned Parenthood) they can create a system that enables women to make positive changes in their lives and provides them with a higher standard of care. Because, for me, it’s not only about “reducing the number of abortions” (but yes, I want that), it’s about reducing the number of women who even want abortions by giving them more confidence and more control over their lives.

Women who have had multiple abortions throw bricks into the glass ideology that having an abortion will allow you to have a “better life”. Abortion proponents are awfully fond of the twenty something woman, standing up with her college degree in hand, saying “I don’t regret my abortion.” But this politically marketable image is far from the reality in the majority of abortions.

From the Guttmacher Institute:

• A broad cross section of U.S. women have abortions:
  • 58% of women having abortions are in their 20s;
  • 61% have one or more children;
  • 56% are unmarried and are not cohabiting;
  • 69% are economically disadvantaged;
  • 72% report a religious affiliation.

Looking at these figures, we can assume that the typical abortion that occurs in North America is had by lower income women, most of whom already have born children.

But without making any positive fundamental changes to a woman’s life, what does having one abortion do? If it didn’t change your situation, then it could very well lead to yet another unplanned pregnancy and yet another abortion.

NEARLY a quarter of women under 25 who had an abortion last year in South Yorkshire had already undergone a previous termination, according to latest figures.

A total of 919 abortions were given to under-25s in Sheffield last year – 221 of them, or 24 per cent, to women who had undergone a termination before.

In Rotherham, 91 out of a total 396 abortions, or 23 per cent, were to women under 25 who had undergone one before.

In Barnsley and Doncaster the figure was 27 per cent – 93 out of 345 abortions in Barnsley, and 153 out of 566 in Doncaster.

The South Yorkshire figures mirror the England average of 25 per cent.

Do we really still think this shouldn’t have legislation?

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.

A great quote:

Her most recent stint behind bars goes back to January 2009. Ms. Gibbons says the last 28 months were long, but that she compartmentalized her own problems to focus on counselling fellow inmates. “I’m either counselling the women on their addictions, or I’m counselling some woman not to have an abortion, sharing the faith with them or giving them some encouragement to get through the day,” she says. “When you’re in [jail], you’re not saying, ‘I wish I wasn’t here.’ You’re just saying, ‘What do I do here?’”