Archive for the 'Abortion'

El Salvador has an absolute prohibition on all abortions — they can’t even be done to save the life of the mother (it’s a very Catholic country, are you surprised?) Now a situation has made the news that exposes the villainy of that policy. A young woman named Beatriz is petitioning El Salvador’s supreme court to be allowed to get an abortion. Why? There’s a couple of really good reasons. The four-month fetus is acephalic — no brain has formed. It’s doomed. It will never be viable. At best, it will be born, live a few days as a vegetable on life support, and die. The mother is suffering from complications from lupus and kidney disease. The fetus won’t even get to the point of being born — the mother will be killed by this pregnancy first. The heartless, amoral, religiously-based rules of that society are condemning this woman to death. In addition, if any doctor honors their Hippocratic oath and helps her live, they can be prosecuted and sentenced to long terms in prison for it. Beatriz has been refused a necessary and simple medical procedure because the demented fuckwits of the Catholic Church have prioritized dogma over human life. She has to beg authorities, right up to the highest levels of government, for the right to live. All because some old assholes believe god has told them that the dying lump of meat in her belly is more precious than a woman’s life.

The grand jury’s report on the Gosnell Women’s Medical Services clinic (pdf) is freely available online, with photographs. It’s 281 pages of gag-reflex-inducing horror. Gosnell was living the good life: the report estimates he was bringing in almost $2 million a year, a number that is only approximated from the number of abortions he was doing and the amount he was charging, because he always dealt in cash. He had a small group of poorly trained, non-professional people doing much of the ‘medical’ work — including at least one high school student who was administering tests and drugs to patients — and idled at home most of the day, coming in in the evening to do procedures. Procedures that he himself was not qualified or certified to do. He carried out many late-term abortions, often past the legal cutoff (his procedure was to do a crude ultrasound, manipulate the results, and claim the fetus, no matter how old it was, was 24.5 weeks old). His style was cheap, lazy, and harmful to the woman. The standard procedure was for the women to come in during the day, and his staff would administer drugs to induce labor — even in women 30 weeks or more pregnant — and then send them in to the bathroom, where they would ‘deliver’ into the toilet. The toilet would sometimes get clogged with aborted fetal tissue. Sometimes the fetus would be delivered alive, and at an age where, if this were done in a hospital, the newborn would have a good chance of surviving. Gosnell’s job as a doctor was to take these squirming, sometimes crying babies, and stab them in the back of the neck with a pair of scissors to kill them. Sometimes, too, the women died. All this was done in a filthy clinic cluttered with obsolete and broken equipment. There were bloodstains on the stirrups of the gynecological tables. There were jars with bits of fetuses snipped off and stored in preservatives. He was constantly late in...
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PatrickG posted this deep in the Lounge, where only the bravest, thickest-skinned hordelings venture. So I’m amplifying his signal. my partner is relentless. She keeps saying things like “you always talk about this site and how they’re so supportive of abortion rights, HIT THEM UP!”. And by hit you up, I mean it’s Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon time! Technically, has been for some time. :) So! If you’re interested in funding abortion rights in Kentucky, specifically through the Kentucky Support Network, consider wandering over here and chipping in a few dollars. Our team is aiming to raise a measly $500, and we’re almost there. :) Abortion access in Kentucky is a particular issue for me — we’ve got a part-time clinic in Lexington, a full-time clinic in Louisville… and that’s pretty much IT. Louisville has a hospital under siege by Catholics (gubernatorial action was necessary to prevent the latest merger attempt), and there’s basically nothing in northern/eastern Kentucky. They all have to travel. Added bonus (bleh): the Louisville site is heckled by protesters non-stop. In short, we might not be Mississippi or North Dakota, but we’re getting there. All the funds raised for KSN go directly to transportation, housing, and medical expenses. Administrative funds are raised strictly through grants. If you’d prefer to chaff my hide, consider donating to my partner’s page here**. She’d be thrilled to receive donations instead of me — my own father donated in her name instead of mine! But wherever you donate, it goes to the same place – the Kentucky Support Network. You know what to do.

An organization called the Susan B. Anthony List — it’s an adamantly anti-choice group that has neatly named itself after an icon of women’s liberation — has a wonderful president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, who not only opposes abortion, but is dead set against contraception. She argues here that increasing availability of contraception leads to increasing rates of abortion (what?), apparently because all those frisky couples losing their fear of pregnancy will fornicate more, leading to more unwanted pregnancies. But…but…abortion rates have been going down as pregnancy rates decline. We can’t therefore account for reduced pregnancy rates by claiming they’ve been terminated by abortion, and it seems kind of unlikely that people are having sex less often, so isn’t the correlation the reverse of what Dannenfelser claims? Also, I am greatly concerned by the implications of the statement that “to lose the connection between sex and having children leads to problems”. There were precisely 3 periods in my life in which I intentionally had procreative sex, and they were both relatively brief because I married a fertile minx who got knocked up as soon as we both put our minds to it. So, maybe three months where I’ve had sex with reproductive intent, while the other 393 months of my married life I was entirely in frivolous sex-for-fun mode. Furthermore, we have not been the slightest bit interested in having more children for 23 years. Is Dannenfelser trying to suggest that having a monogamous and healthy sex life during those decades should be causing problems because we’ve lost the connection between sex and having children?

I really don’t get it. You’d think they’d learn after getting burned on the facts, but no, Republicans seem to have a need to engage their mouths to say something stupid about human biology all the time. The latest example: California Republican Celeste Greig declares that rape pregnancies are rare. Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don’t know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act. The weirdest thing about that comment is the context. She was talking about Todd Akin’s idiotic remarks about ‘legitimate rape’, and saying that he ought to have backed down and apologized. So she’s really saying, “He shouldn’t have said that, but hey, he was right anyway”? The article goes on to explain what Greig didn’t know: that it’s biology, sperm meets egg, and that most studies show the frequency of pregnancy from sex acts consensual or non-consensual is roughly equal (with one outlier study showing the frequency of pregnancy after rape is greater than after consensual sex…probably because of reduced opportunities for contraception).