Should police officers really be using sex as a weapon?

Undercover police officers routinely adopted a tactic of “promiscuity” with the blessing of senior commanders, according to a former agent who worked in a secretive unit of the Metropolitan police for four years.

The former undercover policeman claims that sexual relationships with activists were sanctioned for both men and women officers infiltrating anarchist, leftwing and environmental groups.

Sex was a tool to help officers blend in, the officer claimed, and was widely used as a technique to glean intelligence.

[…]

“When you are using the tool of sex to maintain your cover or maybe to glean more intelligence – because they certainly talk a lot more, pillow talk – you would be ready to move on if you felt an attachment growing.

“The best way of stopping any liaison getting too heavy was to shag somebody else. It’s amazing how women don’t like you going to bed with someone else,” said the officer, whose undercover deployment infiltrating anti-racist groups lasted from 1993 to 1997.

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Andrea adds: Apparently, not always super effective:

The officer added that undercover police were strictly encouraged not to form a bond with women they were sleeping with and said that he knew Jim Boyling, the undercover officer who married an activist he was supposed to be spying upon.

So “keeping emotional distance” from people you are sleeping with doesn’t always work? Who knew? Yeesh.

In the UK, Tory MP Nadine Dorries is making headlines in this article from the New Statesman.

Anti-abortionists are feeling emboldened and they have adopted a new tactic. In both the United States and Britain, campaigning groups no longer implicitly state that they are against abortion, but claim instead that they are offering women “real choices”.

[…]

Her intention is to introduce “fully informed consent” for women seeking abortion, she says, rather than to campaign for a return to illegality. “There are 1,300 couples in this country wanting to adopt, but women are rarely told of that option. They feel railroaded into a cattle-market process and end up in clinic with 60 or so other women every day who are not treated with particular kindness.”

It’s a lengthy read with many issues crowding in for their share of the soapbox, but the general idea is that the pro-life movement worldwide is leaning toward a PWPL style mission. A world without abortion. By choice.

Maybe it’s the realization that laws aren’t enough, or that laws aren’t always enforced, or maybe it’s that this kind of mission does offer real choice (or maybe it’s that PWPL is highly popular and extremely influential). Pregnant, need help? Need housing? Need money? Need support? Need adoption advice? A large and ever growing network of organizations and volunteers are getting those bases covered. And if there is one thing that pro-abortion feminists (because not ALL feminists are in fact pro-abortion) hate, it’s other people offering women choices.

From the Herald Sun,

So determined are the couple to have a girl that they recently terminated twin boys conceived through IVF.

[…]

The woman, who is consumed by grief over the daughter who died soon after birth, admits she has become obsessed with having a daughter and it has become vital to her psychological health.

Victoria’s Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 bans sex selection unless it is necessary to avoid the risk of transmission of a genetic abnormality or genetic disease to a child.

All IVF clinics in Australia must stay within National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines that say sex selection should not be done except to reduce the transmission of a serious genetic condition.

Australian IVF pioneer Gab Kovacs – not involved in the case – said he could not understand why the couple should be banned from having a girl.

“I can’t see how it could harm anyone,” he said.

“Who is this going to harm if this couple have their desire fulfilled?”

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Brigitte bites: “I can’t see how it could harm anyone”, he said. Gee whiz, I don’t know. I suppose this works if we decide that the twin boys summarily dispatched just don’t count.

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Véronique adds: Harm anyone? How about the poor girl who will eventually be conceived? I can’t see any harmful psychological baggage here (shaking my head in disbelief). When “having a daughter (…) has become vital to her psychological health” it makes you wonder how fit to parent the mother is. Children, girl or boy, don’t fit neatly in the little moulds their parents want to fit them into.

Thailand has something of a tarnished track record when it comes to enforcing legislation. Prostitution, you may be surprised to know, is actually illegal in the country, regardless of how many women and children are trafficked in and out each year for the sex trade. Considered a “sex tourism” hot spot, it is not far fetched to think that abortions, also illegal, occur within its borders.

This article from Times LIVE discusses the finding of 2,000 tiny aborted bodies in a Bangkok temple in November of last year, a finding that has the Thai government threatening to “ban sex with girls under 20”. The article uses a 17 year old unidentified girl as its primary source, while at the same time stating that only 12 to 15 percent of all abortions in the country are performed on teenagers. It seems our reaction in the West, as well as that of the Thai government, is misdirected towards the smallest percentage of women affected. However, given the country’s habit of making unenforced laws to placate a voting public, whatever the legislative outcome may be, it may directly not affect the lives of the Thai people and their unfortunately high abortion rates.

…from Philadelphia, (warning: readers may find this story disturbing)

An abortion doctor has been arrested and charged with the murder of a patient and seven live infants whose spines were severed with scissors at a West Philadelphia clinic that has been described as a house of horrors, officials said today.

District Attorney Seth Williams said the doctor, Kermit P. Gosnell, was charged following a grand jury investigation.

Gosnell, 69, lost his medical license last year after health officials determined his clinic posed “a clear danger to the public.”

Gosnell was arrested this morning, officials said. He has maintained his innocence.

The seven infants were born alive in the 6th, 7th and 8th months of pregnancy and killed by severing their spinal cords with scissors, William said.

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Brigitte adds: Safe, legal and rare. Yeah, right.

Bombarded with a gambit of DIY television, people in the UK may have a utopian image of what doing something yourself entails. The UK’s “largest single abortion provider”, bpas, wants to extend this DIY spirit into the medical field. For most medical abortions, a woman is given mifepristone (RU-486) in a clinic, then returns to the clinic in a day or so to be given a second drug, misoprostol. The bpas doesn’t want women returning to the clinic for that second visit.

British abortion provider BPAS has launched a legal challenge to a United Kingdom abortion statute requiring that medication abortion drugs are prescribed and administered in a clinic, the London Telegraph reports. The legal challenge seeks to change the interpretation of the law by amending the requirement that the drugs be “prescribed and administered in the clinic” to state that they can be “prescribed and issued” in a clinic.

At issue is the administration of the second drug in the two-drug medication abortion regimen[…]

Doctors have said it is unnecessary for women to return to the clinic for the second drug, as research shows it is safe and effective for women to take the medication on their own (Smith, London Telegraph, 1/13). BPAS and other abortion-rights advocates argue that the U.K.’s 40-year-old Abortion Act must be updated to recognize the latest medical science. Most countries, including the U.S., allow women to take the second pill at home, which many women find more private and convenient.

According to BPAS CEO Ann Furedi, the group provides 17,500 medication abortions annually. Furedi added that many women express concern about bleeding on the trip home from the clinic after receiving the second drug. BPAS has been trying to persuade the health department to change the requirements for 10 years (Boseley, London Guardian, 1/13).

Furedi said abortion services “should be shaped by best clinical practice,” adding, “It is wrong to compromise women’s care through unnecessary restrictions imposed by officials who fear criticism from those who oppose abortion in principle.”

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Brigitte adds: Not to be overly cynical or anything (more than usual, I mean), but I get way more professional attention than that from my dentist. What is it about “Take this pill, go away, bleed your baby out by yourself and don’t bother us with possible complications” that women find empowering?

…to “come out” to colleagues that you’re pro-life. For me personally, it doesn’t affect my job, though it will I’m sure affect any further university study I do. Even then, I admittedly have to overcome a certain level of personal apprehension. But what if you work in the educational or health care fields where your opinion might just have more of an impact? That’s when a pro-life stance is seen as dangerous.

A Christian mental health worker is facing the sack after giving two colleagues a leaflet warning of the physical and psychological damage some women suffer after having an abortion.

Margaret Forrester passed the booklet to family planning staff at the health centre where she works because she felt that the NHS was not offering patients enough information about the risks associated with terminating a pregnancy.

But Ms Forrester, 39, said she was suspended from her job as a psychological wellbeing practitioner based in Westminster because managers at Central North West London Mental Health Trust disagreed with her personal beliefs.

She will appear in front of an internal disciplinary committee on Wednesday, charged with “distributing materials some people may find offensive”. Her supporters fear that she could lose her job.

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Brigitte adds: What bugs me the most about all this is the use of euphemisms. Distributing materials some people may find offensive? My foot. What they mean is: We are pro-abortion and those who want to be pro-life will have to be pro-life somewhere else. They could at least have the guts to say it.

Still think it’s because they want what’s best for women?

London – “The global hormonal contraceptive market is a fast growing market, with oral contraceptives considered to be the most common method of avoiding unplanned pregnancies by women. In 2009, the global contraceptives market was $11.2 billion and is forecast to grow to $14.5 billion by 2016, which represents a growth rate of 4% between 2009 and 2016.”

You can’t find reports like this on Men’s Health Markets, because they don’t exist. Sure, there are reports on Viagra revenues, but nothing to the extent of a Contraceptives Market report. $14.5 billion makes that Facebook kid look like a bellhop, and it’s not an amount the major pharmaceutical players are willing to part with easily. New growth is on the way, with new players vying for their piece of the birth control pie. What can we expect? More ads, new forms of contraceptives, and all of this at a record pace. We can also expect more of the same in terms of real consideration for women’s health.

Hundreds of women have become pregnant after a long-term contraceptive implant failed, it emerged last night.

Even more have complained that they were left injured or scarred by the rod inserted into their arm, which was supposed to protect them against conceiving for three years.

The NHS has had to pay compensation to women hurt when the implants were inserted and seven women who were left traumatised by unexpectedly becoming pregnant have received payouts totalling more than £200,000 – an average of more than £28,000 each.

A lawyer revealed that many of the women affected had suffered ‘psychological difficulties’, had miscarriages or decided to undergo abortions after the implants went wrong.

One woman who became pregnant and underwent an abortion said the trauma had led to her marriage ending.

The fiasco involving the implant, called Implanon, is one of the worst mass contraceptive failures to hit the NHS in living memory.

A total of 584 women who had the hormone-filled rod inserted in their arms have reported unwanted pregnancies to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency – the Government’s drugs and medical devices watchdog.

But the total could be far higher, as many women may not have complained after becoming pregnant and either undergoing abortions or giving birth.

The MHRA received 1,607 complaints about the implant going wrong, some from doctors deeply concerned that the devices are difficult to insert and that it is impossible to check if they are correctly installed because they are invisible to X-rays.

Implanon’s manufacturer MSD, a subsidiary of global pharmaceutical giant Merck, has now replaced it with an updated product called Nexplanon, which has a new pre-loaded applicator and can be detected by X-ray or CT scan.

I know when I use a product that injures me and fails miserably that I’m certainly not going back for a refill from the same supplier. Merck, hmm, why does that name sound so very familiar? MSD are not the only giants scampering to release new product, Bayer (partnered with the IPPF) is also looking toward the next big market.

Objectives of Bayer’s Sustainability Program

Lighthouse project “Family Planning”

• Introduce original contraception products at prices in line with the market in 11 African countries jointly with USAID by 2012
• Double current family planning activities in collaboration with our partners (e.g. USAID, UNFPA, IPPF) by 2012
• Increase annual provision of oral contraceptives to 110 million cycles jointly with partners (e.g. USAID)

The pipeline looks something like this: A projection of $14.5 billion in contraceptive revenue is made, companies push to produce, approve and market the next big drug, Bayer sends out a “Youth Truck” to assess the prospective customers and get Ugandan children familiar with the idea of prescription birth control (while women in the west see more and more ads), and Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes have their clinics, those philanthropic beacons of family planning, write the prescriptions. At what point are we going to realize that women’s health may not be at the forefront of their priorities?

From the Belfast Telegraph,

Ireland’s smallest surviving premature baby is today thriving at home with her parents.

Tiny Sive McDonald was just 420g — less than a pound — when she arrived into the world 16 weeks early.

She was smaller than the palm of her dad’s hand at full stretch — about the length of a Biro (ball-point pen).

Aisling McDonald (32), from Mullingar, Westmeath, and her husband John McDonald (30), from Bagenalstown, Carlow, met in Australia and married back home. They were looking forward to the birth of their first baby last summer.

But they were given “no hope” when baby Sive had to be delivered 16 weeks premature on June 11.

Aisling suffered from high blood pressure during her pregnancy.

“It all happened really quick. We were brought from St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny to Waterford Regional Hospital where there is a special baby unit,” said Mr McDonald.

“They were giving us no hope, to be honest. They gave us a room to stay in by ourselves and were really supportive. There was a priest there all the time and we were facing the worst-case scenario.”

Aisling’s system was under pressure and the doctors wanted to ensure her life was not in danger.

“She could have had a stroke. They said they were doing the best for the baby but Aisling was the priority.”

[…]

“We were told babies don’t survive outside the womb unless they are more than 24 weeks. Sive was 23 weeks and five days.”

[…]

“We still can’t believe it. We brought her home to Kilkenny a month before Christmas and she is 9lb 6oz now. She’s the equivalent of two months old. Her eyes are perfect, her ears are clear and she’s responsive for two months.”

The parents are sharing their story to comfort other families of premature babies. “We are doing up a poster for the wall of the special baby unit to show how Sive survived. She’s the best. We feel like the luckiest people alive.”

A recent comment from a reader about regret and abortion led me to question the link between regret and our current cultural climate. Studies vary on the percentage of women who do and do not regret their decision, some quoting 70% do not regret it, others quoting 80% (pregnant from sexual assault) regretted their decision. Assuming for the sake of argument the 70% for absolutely no regrets is accurate, one wonders how this high percentage is possible.

In a growing “Culture of Me”, perhaps instead of thinking these figures are high we should be asking ourselves why women who undergo abortions should be any more remorseful than the rest of the population. In fact, narcissism, a primary trait of which is lack of empathy, has become so prevalent in our society it may no longer be considered a disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association recently announced it’s considering lifting narcissistic personality disorder — along with four other personality disorders — from its highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

[…]

…the diagnosis may be dropped for the manual’s 2013 edition, Campbell says, essentially because it’s a manifestation of normal personality.

So, he says, the same patient would be told he or she has “a combination of traits that maybe lie on a continuum or a spectrum. You have high levels of traits that are associated with narcissism.”

A New Normal?

But the way narcissism is treated — in the majority of cases, with therapy — wouldn’t change much.

“There’s no treatment for extreme narcissism that’s somehow different than moderate narcissism,” Campbell says.

And while things won’t change much for those on the couch, he says, the way we talk about narcissism in culture might.

“When this happened I went and looked at Twitter just to see what people were saying about it,” Campbell says.  “The most common response was, ‘It must be so normal now, it’s no longer a disorder.'”

And the second-most?

“‘Gee, I guess I’m OK, then’,” Campbell says. “People see there’s narcissism everywhere, and they’re just shocked … that they’re considering getting rid of it. It’s such a perfect term for so much of what we see in society.”

It’s easy to laugh at the amount of “Me” promoting we all participate in on a daily basis, the status updates of our every thought and a general sense of entitlement to whatever we desire. We should have it, we deserve it, and dag nabbit we want it now. Quite a disconnect from Mother Teresa’s “A life not lived for others is not a life.” to Snooki’s “I think I’m fascinating.” But what effect will a narcissistic society have on our children?

The Narcissist turns other people from people into objects and they relate to other people primarily in terms of what the other can do to enhance their self esteem.   This is what I mean by my title, “objectifying the object.”

In our culture, one of the worst outcomes of such objectification concerns the way in which we treat our children.  We give lip service to the idea that our children are the most important people in our country and then turn around and make cultural and legal decisions that enhance the desires and pleasures of adults, often at the expense of children.

A growing body of literature supports the idea that children do best when raised by two, married parents.  (There is not enough data yet to know how children of same-sex couples fare.)  Yet our culture has consistently made it easier for people to have children without marriage and easier to divorce once children are in the picture. In the weighting of what is best for the parents versus what is best for the children, the children’s needs come in a distant second.

Another place where this is an issue is in abortion. At one time there was no question among people that life began at conception. Whether or not you believe that holds, it is certainly true that for a wanted pregnancy, the child begins to become a real person, invested with the love, hopes, and dream of its mother, fairly early in pregnancy. By the time of quickening, when the baby’s first movements are felt, no prospective mother would call her baby anything but a human being. On the other hand, in order to make it psychologically possible to abort an unwanted baby, the prospective child has to be turned into a devalued object, a mere “fetus” or a “choice”.

[…]

In a Narcissistic culture, children are increasingly seen as objects, possessions, if you will. Abortion fits into this paradigm because a possession can be easily disposed of while a child is a person who may have other desires.

If NPD is removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will it simply be the norm? Currently, there is no treatment for narcissism, but the first step, as always, is to recognize that there is a problem.