…pregnancy doesn’t have to change your A game. In fact, it may just get you to the majors.

The stork can’t stop Ashley Crain.

Crain, 26, is 8 ½-months pregnant but that didn’t prevent her from teeing off Tuesday in a 120-woman field for the Toronto Star Women’s Amateur golf tournament at Weston Golf and Country Club, scene of Arnold Palmer’s 1955 Canadian Open victory.

The Toronto native, now living near Detroit, said her game has actually improved now that she’s expecting her first child, a girl.

She recently finished second in the Michigan Mid-Amateur tournament and has beaten her father, Paul Davis, a former Ontario amateur champion, for the first time.

Crain is playing so well, in fact, that her putting style, which she had to adjust, has actually been sharper, she said.

We’ve been posting recently about what it means to be feminist, and ultimately, I believe the fundamental ideology is concerned with the advancement of the status of women. That can be defined more specifically by various feminist sects who may or may not oppose one another. It’s concerned with gender equality (which also means different things to different people). Many pro-life groups have associated themselves with the term, recognizing the need for a differentiation from other forms of feminism and feeling that they are pursuing feminist ideals by pro-life means.

The infamous Rebecca West wrote, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is:  I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute.” It is a term that has avoided rigid definition for decades, yet Gloria Steinem told us today who can and can’t use the word.

In an interview for @katiecouric, writer and activist Gloria Steinem responded to Sarah Palin calling herself a feminist, saying, “you can’t be a feminist who says other women can’t” have an abortion.

While I don’t say women can’t have an abortion, I’d prefer if they didn’t.

Steinem said of candidates like Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina: “I defend their right to be wrong.”

And I yours.

With my first pregnancy, I bought every book on prenatal care I could find. I ate well, I gave up sushi and soft cheese, and I attended Lamaze classes regularly. Educating myself, I became convinced I had achieved expert status on the subject of childbirth prior to the actual event. However, as my due date came and went without a baby in sight, I suddenly found myself scrambling for information and becoming incredibly stressed as the words ‘potential emergency Caesarean’ rebounded off the hospital walls. I had fabulous health care, I was fit, had a wonderful doctor whom I trusted, a supportive spouse, and a nearby parent. All of these factors led to a fairly easy (relatively speaking) labour, but if even one of those pillars of support hadn’t been there or had wavered during crisis moments… who’s to say what the outcome would’ve been. I’m all too aware that there are many women without such support, and they suffer needlessly because of it. Reading this article from The New York Times about the difference in the maternal mortality rate in Chelsea versus the Bronx, reminds me of how the simplest of social policy changes and education outreach programs can give support to women and potentially save their lives.

More mothers die during pregnancy or soon after in New York than in almost every other state, and according to reports released on Friday by the New York Academy of Medicine and the city’s health department, social factors like poverty, obesity and lack of insurance may be responsible.

While the total number of maternal deaths are small — an average of about 40 a year across the state — city health officials said their analysis showed that maternal mortality was being driven by environmental factors like poor nutrition that could be changed through public policy.

New York City’s analysis, billed as one of the most sophisticated looks at maternal mortality in the country, studied 161 women who died of pregnancy-related causes in the city from 2001 to 2005.

It found that 49 percent of the women who died were obese. Black women, who were more likely to be obese, were seven times as likely to die in pregnancy as white women. Hispanic and Asian women were twice as likely to die as white women.

The death rate was highest in the Bronx and Brooklyn, which have large poor and minority populations. The neighborhoods with the highest death rates were Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens. Those with the lowest death rates — actually zero — were Chelsea and Greenwich Village in Manhattan, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn and Flushing in Queens.

Women without health insurance — who may receive less preventive care — were four times as likely to die as women with such coverage, but women covered by Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, fared as well as women with private insurance, the city found.

I’d also like to note this article doesn’t mention ‘unsafe abortion’.

…this Father’s Day.

In an article in the May issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the Eastern Virginia Medical School examined 43 previously published studies involving 28,000 male and female adults and found that at least 1 in 10 fathers became depressed after the birth of their child.

A study in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology even found that half of male partners experienced varying degrees of psychological malaise following their partner’s miscarriage.

If a man can feel negative emotions after every other type of pregnancy outcome, why not after an abortion?

A 2009 study in the journal Public Health examining the associations between abortion and relationship functioning found that “for men and women, the experience of an abortion in a previous relationship was related to negative outcomes in the current relationship.”

It also discovered that an “experience of an abortion within a current relationship was associated with 116 percent and 196 percent increased risk of arguing about children for women and men, respectively.”

Men whose current partners had an abortion were more likely to report jealousy (96 percent greater risk) and conflict about drugs (385 percent greater risk). The authors conclude, “[A]bortion may play a vital role in understanding the [causes] of relationship problems.”

…go back to talking about local access. This seems to be the new motto for pro-choice enthusiasts after failing to make the kind of impact they would’ve liked on the Maternal Health Initiative.

Kimberley’s mind was made up. The mother of a toddler, she was pregnant again and wanted an abortion. But as a resident of Prince Edward Island, which doesn’t have a single abortion provider, she had to drive over four hours with her boyfriend to New Brunswick, dodge anti-abortion protesters, then pay $600 out of her own pocket for the procedure.

As a child growing up in Alaska, my small city was over three hours from absolutely everywhere. It’s the price we paid for cheaper housing, less crime, less pollution, and we looked forward to our regular road trips for shopping and sometimes for less eagerly awaited hospital visits. Here in Nova Scotia, people living rurally often travel long distances to Halifax for doctor’s appointments and specialist procedures.

Growing up rurally myself, I find it incredible that anyone would actually want an abortion clinic to move into their town. Especially in a small community, such as those in PEI (total population approx. 140,000), that relies heavily on tourism. The community would hardly want clinics dotting the landscape they’ve worked so hard to preserve.

It’s ridiculous that I have to leave my own province. It’s my own body, I need to have control over it,” said the soft-spoken woman in her mid-20s, who asked to use a pseudonym because her family and friends didn’t know she was having an abortion.

Her friends and family would have been more likely to know, had she had the procedure in a local small town hospital.

‘Wired for Sex, Lies and Power Trips‘ is the new CBC documentary I watched last night.

Whenever I talk to someone about why abortion is anti-woman, I usually do so arguing that it doesn’t stop or inhibit the violence that leads them to the abortion in the first place, but rather it helps perpetuate a vicious cycle by further demeaning them. So I had this thought in mind while one teenage girl after another reported her own story of assault (ranging from name calling to a ‘dry rape’) on sexually charged school grounds.

You know, you think that okay, then maybe I could grab her ass ’cause the way she dresses, she’s telling me to grab her ass.
Billy, 17

They keep doing it even if you say no or stop ’cause they think you’re joking so it gets kind of difficult to tell them to stop.
Kelsie, 15

They don’t think that the little things they do is sexual harassment. They just think it’s normal.
Pauline, 16

… are leading to older, much older, mothers.

For centuries, being childless in India was a stigma so severe that it drove many women to suicide and gave men grounds to take another wife. […]

…they have increasingly been seeking in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment from thousands of unregulated private clinics that have sprung up across the country.
As a result, the issue now is that women who are old enough to be great grandmothers are risking their health by undergoing fertility treatment so as not to die without a child.

The doctors who provide the treatment, mostly in the conservative northern states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, say they are helping women who feel it is their social and religious obligation to produce an heir.

… and scoot over. Is the tube a microcosm for our culture at large?

Nobody will be surprised to learn, from two separate surveys, that heavily pregnant women have trouble getting a seat on public transport. All pregnant women report this. There are several reasons, I think. One is obviously that the tubes are so crowded in the first place. Another is the  selfishness of passengers on the underground.

With a name that means ‘all’, the new drug ellaOne is being marketed as just that, an all in one ‘contraceptive’.

Ella works as a contraceptive by blocking progesterone’s activity, which delays the ovaries from producing an egg. RU-486, too, blocks the action of progesterone, which is also needed to prepare the womb to accept a fertilized egg and to nurture a developing embryo. That’s how RU-486 can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting and dislodge growing embryos. Ella’s chemical similarity raises the possibility that it might do the same thing, perhaps if taken at elevated doses. But no one knows for sure because the drug has never been tested that way.

As the National Health Service in the UK recently advised young women to “stockpile” morning after pills, we are setting a dangerous precedent for the new all-in-one pharmaceuticals. What ella does chemically is perhaps not as severe as what it does socially, which is to erase an already blurry line between contraceptive use and routine chemical abortions.

CTV reported that “three Quebec women’s groups” (ahem, those are pro-choice women’s groups) demonstrated Sunday.

…we feel that you cannot discuss women’s maternal health without also offering the possibility for women to terminate an unwanted pregnancy under safe, proper conditions,” said Alexa Conradi of the FFQ.

In Ireland the maternal mortality rate is six, that’s right… 6 a year per 100,000 live births.

I’m using Ireland as an example primarily because, at least for now, abortion is illegal except where the woman’s life is at risk. Whereas in South Africa, where abortion is available on demand up to 14 weeks, the MMR is 170. Somewhere along the way the FFQ must ask themselves what the key difference is between these two examples, since it’s obviously not the legalization of or access to abortion.

I am doubly puzzled by the final quote from this article.

“I’m a nurse by profession. Women’s health and children’s health is one of the great determinants of overall social and medical health, and Harper is going in absolutely the wrong direction. He’s putting families at risk,” said Scott Weinstein, a pro-choice demonstrator.