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.

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.

Octomom, Nadya Suleman, seems to have strange intentions for wanting 14 children. Any doctor would recognize that and send her to see a psychiatrist, but Dr. Kamrava didn’t, which is in part why he’s losing his license.

LOS ANGELES — The fertility doctor who helped a woman give birth to octuplets in 2009 will be stripped of his license by the California Medical Board because of “gross negligence.”

The board revoked Dr. Michael Kamrava’s license effective July 1, according to documents on its website alleging a number of cases of malpractice, chief among them the creation of the tabloid sensation dubbed “Octomom.”

The Beverly Hills-based board said Kamrava had committed “gross negligence, repeated negligent acts and incompetence” when he repeatedly implanted multiple embryos into Nadya Suleman, identified as “N.S.” from 2002 to 2008.

In 2009 Suleman – who was unmarried, unemployed and already had six children – gave birth to octuplets after Kamrava implanted 12 embryos the year before, far more than the maximum recommended three.

The medical board filed two lawsuits against Kamrava in 2010, accusing him of negligence and of failing to recommend that Suleman consult a mental health specialist.

While I absolutely agree with this decision, I have to wonder why it isn’t also considered “gross negligence” not to recommend women who have multi-abortions to a mental health specialist.

… are feeling the pressure.

I’m getting sick of it.

Sick of measure after measure, new legal stipulation after stipulation passing, aimed at limiting access to abortion—locally and nationally—like this past week’s Foxx amendment, which ensures that no tax dollars will be spent to train health-care providers to perform abortions. Abortion, mind them, remains a legal and crucial medical procedure for women in spite of the Draconian regulations suddenly being placed on it left and right.

[…]

A friend of mine—we’ll call her Rose—used to be on the other side of the argument. Like any good Catholic girl, she didn’t believe in abortion. Until, just as she neared her 17th birthday, the morning sickness kicked in. A hospital visit, and there it was: Her birth control had failed due to a drug interaction. She was pregnant.

“I was upset, my mom was upset and we had to tell my dad. He was really, really upset,” she recounts now, several years later. Neither she and the father (her former long-term boyfriend), nor her parents (both worked full-time) were in any way equipped to care for a baby. “It was hard, but I decided [an abortion] was the best thing.”

[…]

And so I challenge those who stand against it without understanding, those who make the laws without being there, those who spit fire at anything pro-choice without ever having had to choose: Put yourselves in her shoes. If abortion means the end of what would have been (or, to some, already was) a new life, the question is still valid: What makes that life any more important than the woman’s life, forever altered and maybe hindered by the decision to have an unplanned child? What about all the people Rose will help—the lives she’ll save when she becomes a nurse—that wouldn’t have been, had she chosen otherwise?

The comments to this article really speak for themselves (3 of the 4 I read were in favor of abortion restriction). But she asked the question, so I’ll answer. What makes a baby’s life more important than a mother’s? Nothing, and absolutely no one said it’s more important. What is important, is having a life to begin with, however altered. And those alterations, like parenting and finishing school, like parenting and working as a nurse, well, we pro-lifers have an app for that, it’s called resources. Contact any pro-life organization, or any crisis pregnancy center, and they’ll have staff and volunteers waiting to help and meet your specific needs.

And as for Rose’s potential lives saved as the nurse she wouldn’t have been with a baby (though I can’t actually think of any nurses I know who don’t have children)…I’m kind of shocked to hear someone use potentiality as an argument for abortion. What makes those patient’s lives worth more than her baby’s? And what about all those potential lives her baby could have changed?

I’m sick of it.

Sick of person after person saying women need abortion.

So, here’s my question. What makes a life as a mother so seemingly worthless and hindered that we think abortion is the favorable alternative?

Don’t let them fool you ladies, we’re a capable lot.

Let me just say, I am not a fan of linking motherhood to patriotic duty. Women shouldn’t be having babies simply because the birth rate is down, but the situation in Russia does show, on a national scale, why abortion is not a solution.

Like a scene out of an old Charles Dickens novel, Russian women who are considering abortion might soon be able to leave their newborn children anonymously at the doorstep of special government funded wellness centers if a new bill passes the Russian parliament.

The bill was sponsored by the State Duma Committee for Family Affairs and the Russian Orthodox Church. Under the proposed law, a woman who decides to leave her child at a wellness and adoption home will be exempt from parenting and financial responsibilities. The centers will only be available for children under six months old.

According to data compiled by Ria Novosti newswire in Moscow, Russians have more abortions than their European counterparts. In 2008, 87 out of 10,000 women had abortions, surpassing Romania in second place with 59 out of 10,000 women and Britian, with 35 out of 10,000 women aborting pregnancies.

Russian law permits abortions up to the 12th week of pregnancy.

Russia’s abortion totals have come down between 2004 and 2008, at least, going from 1.7 million in 2004 to 1.2 million abortions in 2008. The number of abortions in Russia was almost equal to the number of babies born in 2008. According to the Russian Health Ministry, there were 1.7 million births in Russia in 2008 comparaed with 1.2 million abortions.

Experts say the low birth rate in Russia is reaching a critical point. It began to decline in 1992 as a result of poor medical services, social problems and high alcoholism, Ria Novosti reported. The government is working to reverse the trend.

Planned Parenthood is suing another state.

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.

…would you rather have abortion access or a family doctor?

I spent last week in Prince Edward Island. Never having been there before, I was eager to see what it was like and why it was such a tourist hot spot. Crossing the long and scenic Confederation Bridge, I found myself remembering all the cries for abortion access for these tiny rural communities. And as the island came into view, I tried to imagine seeing a clinic somewhere in this landscape.

Where would you put it? On that farm? On this waterfront park? How about across from the Green Gable house? Or maybe just down from this amusement park? I couldn’t see it. In fact, when you get into PEI, you don’t see much of what you see in a bigger city, and that’s exactly why tourists go there. Many of the people, just opening up their businesses for the season over the long weekend, told us they did so much business with tourists in July and August, that they didn’t need to operate the rest of the year. One woman, who ran an in-home restaurant and gift shop, told me her daughter was in Halifax for over two months when she gave birth to her premature granddaughter as the island didn’t have the facilities to care for them.

So then there are the priorities, what services does PEI really need? The Atlantic regions, with their higher median age, will inevitably have different concerns. So it’s a shame to hear abortion advocates crying for access, while clinics who offer the services Islanders really need, like this one, have to close their doors.

Dr. Robbie Coull’s decision to leave the province and close the Phoenix Medical Practice will leave 4,500 people without a doctor. The practice employed 14 people.

“This is a disaster for health care in P.E.I.,” Coull said in a news release Friday. […]

“We lost $10,000 over the last month, and that was without me taking any salary,” he said in a release.

“Unfortunately, they’ve confirmed for us this week that that money will not be forth coming and we will not be getting negotiations for a pilot. We therefore have no option but to let go of all of our staff and to close the practice,” Coull said to CBC News.

The Phoenix Medical Practice had proposed an expansion of its current model. The three-year pilot project would have provided funding for three doctors and cared for 7,500 patients. Coull said part of the project would have been to demonstrate cheaper per-patient per-year cost than what the province is currently paying out to salaried doctors.

“We made it very clear to them that without this funding we would be forced to close our doors,” he said.

Coull said he was very concerned about what will happen to his patients. In looking at the diabetics on his patient roster, he suggested that five of them could die over the next five years if they can’t find another doctor to provide adequate care.

Dr.Richard Wedge, with Health PEI, said the affected patients will automatically be added to the patient registry of people waiting for a family doctor.

4,500 is roughly 3% of the total population of Charlottetown now without a family physician.