A horrifying piece about RU486 and what happens to the women who take it. Is it better to abort at home, privately? I don’t think so.

The image of the baby she wrapped up and threw away would flash across her memory for a year afterwards. Stacy Massey, counselor and founder of Abortion Recovery InterNational (ARIN), said the visual memory of an RU486 abortion is the hardest. Massey lay on a table 30 years ago for her own abortion and played football the next day. But women who have a chemical abortion actually see—­sometimes floating in a toilet or a shower—the graphic aftermath of their own abortions.

A seven-week unborn child already has brain waves, a mouth, lips, forming fingernails, eyelids, toes, and a nose. After women expell their unborn babies, they have to dispose of them. Massey said she once got a desperate call from a woman who said, “My baby’s floating in the toilet. What do I do now? Do I flush it?” And one couple went to a hotel to have an abortion and the woman locked herself in the bathroom, sobbing and screaming.

The feelings of guilt can be more intense for women who have undergone chemical abortions, said Massey, since they themselves administered the pill while they were fully conscious: “For me who went and lay on a table, somebody else did it. Yes, I made the decision but I was always able to rationalize that. I didn’t kill my own baby—somebody else did.” Massey said that the trauma seems to be more severe with younger women since many older women have experienced natural miscarriages.

For the record, I don’t believe there is any way to make an abortion feel OK. But there are ways to make it be worse for the women who undergo them, and RU486 – the way it isolates the women and leaves them on their own to deal with the consequences of their choice to kill their unborn baby – certainly is one of them. How callous and lacking in basic human compassion do you have to be to give this drug to a young pregnant woman with a pat on the knee and a cheerful “Good luck!” before sending her on her lonely way???

[h/t]

_____________________

Andrea adds: A woman suffering alone at home, faced with the remains of her child is a horrifying thing. So is a sterile, government-funded clinic that “flushes” the remains for you. I guess that’s why we have this blog, to hash these things out. Pretty distressing all round.

Or so it seems. Claudia Schiffer, 39 and still working as a professional model, is pregnant with her third child. Good for her (and hubby, of course). Here’s the part of the story I like best:

The 39-year-old catwalk star – who is one of the world’s most successful models – has previously spoken about how motherhood changed her entire attitude to her career.

Claudia – who married Michael, 38, in May 2002 – said: “I used to work every single day and travel round the world. I worked weekends, I never took one second off. When I met my husband I said, ‘You know what, this is important. I’m not going to work weekends any more.’

“And when I had kids, I became even more careful. Modelling work is fine because you can do one day here, two days there, you’re never long gone.”

That’s an Angus Reid headline, not mine. See the poll results, here.

Most interesting to me is the wrong information floating around:

Only one-in-five Canadians (20%) are aware of the current status-quo of abortion in Canada: a woman can have an abortion at any time during her pregnancy, with no restrictions whatsoever. A large proportion of respondents (43%) mistakenly believe that, under current guidelines, a woman can have an abortion only during the first three months of her pregnancy, with no other restrictions. Two other incorrect responses also garnered mentions. Ten per cent of Canadians think a woman can have an abortion at any time during her pregnancy, but only if her life is in danger, if she has been the victim of rape, or if the fetus has serious defects, and 14 per cent believe a woman can only have an abortion during the first three months of her pregnancy, and only if her life is in danger, if she has been the victim or rape, or if the fetus has serious defects.

Parenthood good for your heart, researchers say. Woo-hoo!

Contrary to popular belief, having kids might actually lower your blood pressure. Despite the often hair-raising trials and tribulations of raising a little one, researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah say parenthood has a positive effect on the heart akin to cutting out salt or taking up exercise. The study, published in the Annals of Behavioural Medicine, measured the blood pressure of 200 adults (70 per cent of whom were parents), and found that those with kids had systolic blood pressure 4.5 points lower and diastolic blood pressure three points lower than non-parents. The effect is greater on mothers, whose systolic blood pressure was on average 12 points lower and the diastolic seven points lower than their childless counterparts. As Julianne Holt-Lunstad, the psychologist who led the research explains, “While caring for children may include daily hassles, deriving a sense of meaning and purpose from life’s stress has been shown to be associated with better health outcomes.”

Lorne Gunter has a column about the abortion/breast cancer thing Andrea mentioned earlier. Personally, I’m not all that excited. I find that being afraid of getting breast cancer is not exactly a stellar reason to choose not to abort a pregnancy, and besides, it’s not right to scare people with risks that appear to be (if I understood correctly) fairly small. But there is a but. Two, actually.

One: If there is a reasonably good reason to believe that a procedure might increase certain risks (cancer, depression, etc.) and/or have undesirable side effects, it simply is wrong not to mention those risks and side effects and make sure the patient understands them before performing the procedure. If relevant information is suppressed, the choice can’t be free.

Two: If we decide that low risks of getting cancer are not worth mentioning, then maybe we could lay off the double standard and give smokers a break. As Lorne says:

There is plenty of hypocrisy in this, too. Second-hand smoke increases non-smokers’ risk of lung cancer by less then 20%, even with prolonged, heavy exposure. That’s about half the apparent increased risk of developing breast cancer from having an abortion. Yet governments have passed all sorts of laws shielding the public from secondhand smoke at work, the arena, the mall and the stadium.

I don’t want laws banning abortion. I just want people to stop treating abortion as though it were as simple and consequence-free as brushing your teeth in the morning.

I thought it was somehow against the rules of feminism to conform yourself to arbitrary beauty standards in order to please the males in your lives. Evidently, there’s something I’m not getting.

When U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid proposed a five per cent levy on elective cosmetic surgeries and procedures to help fund the US$848-billion Senate health care bill last month, a Robin Hood-style logic appeared to be at work: let those who can afford Botox or facelifts subsidize low- to middle-income citizens currently without health care to the tune of US$6 billion over 10 years. What he didn’t foresee was that those very low- to middle-income Americans would take to the streets to protest the so-called “Bo-tax” as an infringement of a perceived enshrined right to smooth foreheads and surgically enhanced breasts.

“Washington leave our boobs alone” read a placard at a rally in New York’s Times Square organized by a Park Avenue cosmetic surgeon. “The tax directly affects me,” Irma Cadiz, a 33-year-old hairstylist saving for a US$7,000 tummy tuck, told the New York Daily News. “If I have a heart attack, will they tax that, too?” she asked, revealing how conflated elective cosmetic procedures have become with necessary medical intervention. Opposition to the Bo-tax from the American Medical Association further muddled the matter. As did its denunciation by the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest feminist lobby in the U.S. NOW’s president Terry O’Neill argued the Bo-tax unfairly targeted women, who comprise 90 per cent of cosmetic surgery recipients—especially middle-aged women facing workplace discrimination who rely on sometimes risky cosmetic procedures to “freshen” their image.

I’m confused. Am I supposed to care what I look like, or not?

I love the New Hampshire license plates. Live free or die! And now, New Hampshire folks can live and die in freedom with this good news from their legislature. They have rejected a so-called death with dignity bill.

Yeesh:

A groundbreaking Canadian study of heterosexual couples has found that more than half of young adults engaged in a new sexual relationship were infected with the human papillomavirus (HPV).

Of this group of young adults, 44 per cent had the type of HPV that causes cancer, according to results from the HITCH Cohort Study — short for HPV Infection and Transmission in Couples through Heterosexual activity.

“It is a high number, but that number was not entirely unexpected,” said Ann Burchell, the study’s project co-ordinator and a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit. “We know that HPV is a very common infection already, particularly in young people. We know that people are at a high risk of getting HPV just after acquiring a new partner.”

So you’re reading this thinking, “Oh, I’m probably fine since we always use condoms”? Think again.

The use of condoms generally reduces the rate of infection, Burchell said, but they don’t provide perfect protection.

“Even among couples in our study that used condoms all of the time, still more than 40 per cent of those men and women had an HPV infection,” she said.

There is no such thing as “safe” sex. There is only sex (with all its associated risks – and the fun bits, too), and no sex. I’m not saying young people should not be having any sex. I’m just saying they should be very careful who they’re having sex with.

Andrea adds: This seems like a good moment to advertise that Dr. Miriam Grossman, who as campus psychiatrist at UCLA has seen some of the mental health effects for young women engaging in risky sex,  is coming to Ottawa on March 11. For more information, check here.