From The Guardian,
Isabelle Caro, a French actress and model whose emaciated image appeared in an Italian ad campaign and whose anorexia was followed by other sufferers of eating disorders, has died aged 28.
For at least the last decade, young girls in search of something to be a part of have been lulled into anorexic culture. I won’t link to any of the Pro-Ana/Pro-Mia websites, because medical studies have universally shown that simply viewing the sites can result in lower self-esteem.
They lure the impressionable and persuade them that the Pro-Ana community is providing caring and nurturing advice.
[…]
A study published in European Eating Disorders Review exposed healthy college girls with no history of eating disorders to 1.5 hours of pro-ED sites and they showed decreased caloric intake the week following their exposure. Some participants admitted using techniques and tips they viewed on the sites and had “strong emotional reactions” up to three weeks after the study.
It’s easy to blame the fashion industry for these unhealthy ideals, promoting images of increasingly thin women, but we could just as easy blame the myth of “choice” for the epidemic, a product of a world view that sees the self as a decision one makes as an isolated individual.
What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity – and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour. (David Gauntlett, Media Gender and Identity, Routledge, 2002)
The Pro-Anorexic community claims the disease is a “lifestyle choice”, that this choice should be respected by the medical community and their family and friends.
Pro Anas who defend their anorexia not as a disorder or an affliction from which to recover, view it instead as an accomplishment of self control and a part of their identity and one that defines them to a very significant extent.
It’s difficult for me, as a women myself, to see others conned into the belief that something so terrible, menacing and deteriorating for them is something to be respected. Sound familiar?
by 
I think it would be helpful to know how abortion may affect girls re eating disorders. The first girl I ever spoke to who had an abortion developed anorexia and bulimia immediately after having the abortion. She knew that she just wanted to die. It was years before she recovered her health, and she told me that psychiatrists never wanted to discuss her abortion, since they would not venture into moral areas. They always said it was an experience from which she had to move forward, so she could not admit guilt and remorse.
She finally went through a 12-step program to find recovery.
WTH? I was directed here after searching for an article about Isabelle Caro. Instead, I find some ranting, raving, ridiculous neanderthal site carrying on about abortion and other non-issues. How disgusting.
BTW, I have never – not for a second – regretted my abortion. If you know what a mathematician is, find one and have him/her explain this equation to you:
Life > Existence
Funny how the women who never, not for a second, ever regret their abortion find it necessary to tell us so with that much vim and vigor.
Sorry for your loss, Erica.
Interesting that Erica says she never regretted her abortion when, of course, it was never her abortion as she was never aborted. It was her abortion of her unborn child / fetus.
Dick Chaney’s victim may speak about “my shooting” but Chaney wouldn’t speak of “my shooting” but rather “my shooting of…(whoever they guy was he shot).
This distinction seems meaningless but such linguistic habits shape imagination. In order for slavery to happen the victims of slavery needed first to have their status as persons removed, so too with the Shoah. Abortion takes it one stage further and robs the unborn not only of personhood but even “thingness”. “my abortion” leaves out the whom or what aspect, which is grammatically required, and in so doing it annihilates the child from the cultural and personal memory. Crucially, Erica regrets nothing because, as her language shows, she has been conditioned to think that there is, literally, no thing to regret! The abortion is the whole thing, there is no victim of it, no thing, even a fetus, aborted. The term abortion without reference to the subject who was aborted is itself a method for shaping the minds and brutalizing the ethical imaginations of people like Erica.
I’m glad of course it wasn’t “her abortion” and that Erica wasn’t aborted. I’m also glad that this is such a forum for dialog that people like Erica can come on here and voice her extreme minority position that abortion is a “non issue” and confuse quantitative approaches to things (mathematicians) with qualitative ones (“life > Existence”) and still be welcomed! One of the challenges for the pro life by choice movement is how best to change the cultural context that shapes imaginations such as those of Erica when we see them having being shaped in such subtle ways by such culturally mandated terminological habits.