You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Reproductive Freedom’ tag.
Our friends who live on the East coast seem to be clinging to a few anachronistic views about the autonomy of women and the spectrum of choice that should be available to them when it comes to reproductive services.
“Even though it’s a legal medical procedure, P.E.I. remains the only province where abortion services are not offered locally.”
The general notion is that because P.E.I is so darn small some medical procedures necessitate a trip out of province.
Doug Currie the Health Minister says: “There are many services that are currently not available on P.E.I. that Islanders do have to travel off Island for. Unfortunately, due to our limited resources here on P.E.I., being a small province, being a small population, there is just so much money to go around.”
Well Doug, I think it might be time to add one more service to list, call it expanding the economy or increasing your governments commitment to the people but let’s get all of Canada up to speed on its offerings of health and medical services.
Liberty in the land of the brave, and the home of the free seems to be missing a clause somewhere because liberty is not really working well for women, especially if looking for access to reproductive health services such as abortion. The Alternet article lists the top 10 states where Abortion is virtually illegal. For me this is a bottom 10 list, and I will highlight the lowlights of this particular list.
“1) Idaho. Even though the constitutional right to abortion has been established for 38 years, a woman in Idaho was arrested and charged for aborting her pregnancy. The woman bought some drugs online to terminate her pregnancy, and was ratted out by an acquaintance who disapproves of a woman’s right to choose.”
2) Iowa – Christine Taylor accidentally fell down some stairs and went for treatment at the hospital. While telling the nurse about her personal problems, a common enough situation at a hospital, Taylor let on that she had briefly considered abortion early in her pregnancy. The nurse called the cops, claiming the accident was an attempt at self-abortion. Taylor suffered three weeks of purgatory before the D.A. dropped the charges, but the fact remains that a woman was arrested and charges were considered on the grounds that she’d thought about exercising her constitutional rights.
3) Utah. As Michelle Goldberg explained in the Daily Beast, no woman’s story is too heart-rending for anti-choice zealots not to try to put her in jail for attempting an abortion. A pregnant 17-year-old who lived without electricity or running water in rural Utah, who may have been exploited by an older man and who certainly had no way to get to a doctor or pay for an abortion, paid a man $150 to beat her in the stomach.
4) Louisiana. Using law enforcement creatively to get around the legal right to abortion is done in ways other than prosecuting women, of course. There’s also the practice of targeting abortion providers and hitting them with unnecessary, harassing regulations that aren’t applied to any other medical facilities.
5) Kansas. It may still be legal to get or provide abortion in Kansas, but it’s become increasingly dangerous to do so. Human rights aren’t really being secured if trying to exercise them means facing threats of violence, as the civil rights activists of the past can tell you. Already one abortion provider in Kanas, Dr. George Tiller, has been assassinated, which dropped the number of providers in the state from four to three.
6) Virginia. Virginia is quickly rivaling some of the more deep South states in the art of using legal harassment to run abortion providers out of business. Not only is the legislature trying to pass regulations that hold abortion clinics to hospital-level standards, but anti-choicers are trying to interfere with the Department of Health’s decisions allowing abortion clinics to operate in the state.
7) Mississippi. The legal battles continue over whether or not it’s legal for the state to issue a ballot initiative on the question of whether a fertilized egg should be legally considered a “person.” If civil liberties groups challenging the ballot initiative lose out, it will probably pass into law, which not only threatens abortion, contraception and IVF access, but could result in legal actions taken against women who merely miscarry or give birth to stillborns.
8) Indiana. Indiana has dropped from 15 providers in 2005 to 12 in 2008. Law enforcement in the state has been looking for creative ways to put women in jail for failing to bear live children. A woman who attempted suicide while pregnant, only to give birth to a baby who didn’t survive, has been charged with murder.
9) Ohio. Luckily, legislation that would ban abortion of any pregnancy where the fetus has a heartbeat is currently stalled in the legislature, but if this bill moves forward, it could be nearly as dangerous as a bill defining a fertilized egg as a person.
10) South Dakota. South Dakota legislators passed the most stringent waiting period law in the country, requiring a woman to wait 72 hours for an abortion and consult with a registered anti-choice pregnancy center before getting her abortion.
As no anti-choice centers have signed up yet, the law functionally bans abortion in South Dakota.
My personal favourite is Mississippi where they are really going wild-crazy-sauce with trying to legislate into existence the definition person being a fertilized egg. It just scary really how far the anti-choicers are willing to go force pregnancy on women. Women are not incubators yet it seems Mississippi legislators are doing their best to turn them into exactly that.
Hopefully, there remains some sensible people down south who can throw out this attack on women.
I follow the news at the Guttmacher Institute. I have reprinted many of their articles here at DWR because of they are factual, easy to comprehend and generally reflect my views about the reproductive rights of women and their bodies. They recently produced a video about abortion in the US, take careful note about what they identify as the root cause of many of the problems women in the US face today, they identify,correctly, inequality as the culprit. Address that and so many of societies problems are lessened or even solved. The first step, of course, is making taxation progressive so we all contribute our fair share toward the overall benefit of society.
I cringe a little on the inside when I put up abortion posts because it is a dog whistle for all sorts for the anti-choice cranks who seem to regard the female as a secondary player in the reproductive process. C’est la vie. 
Like this:
Well our Prime minister has enough sense not to tamper with women’s rights (well at least while he has a minority government).
You womenz can keep your rights... for now.
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he opposes any new abortion law for Canada and will vote against any of his backbenchers’ attempts to bring in such legislation.”
Furthermore he clarifies with regards to private members bills:
“My position is quite clear: I will oppose any attempt to create a new abortion law,” he told reporters in Niagara Falls.”
I have no doubt that his political pragmatism has gotten the best of him. We can breathe a small sigh of relief, but must remain vigilant as the Conservatives will continue to chip away at women’s rights.
FGM: Never accetpable
Female Genital Mutilation just made the news again because the American Association of Pediatrics proclaimed in their article the following:
“There is reason to believe that offering such a compromise may build trust between hospitals and immigrant communities, save some girls from undergoing disfiguring and life-threatening procedures in their native countries, and play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC. It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm.”
Okay, so by tolerating ‘just a little’ female disfigurement we can make the problem of major disfigurement go away?
Unbelievable.
The level of dissonance from this article is staggering. It appears that the APP is speaking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue.
“FGC becomes a physical sign of a woman’s marriageability, with social control over her sexual pleasure by clitorectomy and over reproduction by infibulation (sewing together the labia so that the vaginal opening is about the
width of a pencil).”
We certainly cannot weigh in on the cultural norms being expressed here, that would be colonial and ethnocentric of us to do so… Horsepucky. Disfiguring women in order to control them transcends the bounds of the cultural-relativist argument. From a purely physiological standpoint here is what FGM does to women:
“Infibulation (type 3 FGC) is often associated with longterm gynecologic or urinary tract difficulties. Common gynecologic problems involve the development of painful subcutaneous dermoid cysts and keloid formation along excised tissue edges. More serious complications include pelvic infection, dysmenorrhea, hematocolpos, painful intercourse, infertility, recurrent urinary tract infection, and urinary calculus formation. Pelvic examination is difficult or impossible for women who have been infibulated, and vaginal childbirth can present significant challenges. Scarring may prevent accurate monitoring of labor and fetal descent. Although deinfibulation may facilitate delivery, women who have undergone deinfibulation are at increased risk of complications, including perineal tears, wound infections, separation of repaired episiotomies, postpartum hemorrhage, and sepsis.”
In other words, a fully loaded shit-bucket of ugly side effects that detract and can even take a woman’s life.
“Many anti-FGC activists in the West, including women from African countries, strongly oppose any compromise that would legitimize even the most minimal procedure.4 There is also some evidence (eg, in Scandinavia) that a criminalization of the practice, with the attendant risk of losing custody of one’s children, is one of the factors that led to abandonment of this tradition among Somali immigrants”
This is precisely the view that should win out. We do not accept barbaric acts of disfigurement in our secular society. It is something to be educated about, rallied and fought against. I commend the AAP for including a dissenting view in the corpus of their article.
What remains is the suggestion brought forth by the APP that FGM in some forms is an acceptable practice in our society. FGM in any form is, according the article, still illegal in the US. I think it is irresponsible to suggest that certain forms of mutilating women’s bodies becomes an acceptable standard practice in any context.
Whoops, not Canadian, no reproductive rights for you!
The Conservative government of Canada once again proves that it is anti-choice, anti-rational and anti-woman. The CBC said:
“A Liberal motion to include a broader range of family planning programs, including contraception, in a maternal health initiative for developing countries, was defeated 144-138 in the House of Commons Tuesday.”
A Liberal motion in the house of commons that was based on fact and evidence in the field was voted down.
“The motion tabled by Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae said Canada’s maternal health proposal to G8 nations must be based on “scientific evidence, which proves that education and family planning can prevent as many as one in every three maternal deaths” and refrain from the “failed right-wing ideologies” of former U.S. president George W. Bush.”
Shocking as it may seem to the CPC, access to reproductive services saves lives.
“Earlier in the day, Rae said the government has refused to acknowledge scientific evidence that shows reducing deaths of women during childbirth in developing countries is inextricably linked to the availability of family planning”
So rather than own up to their anti-woman, anti-science platform the Conservatives decide this is an attempt to reopen the abortion debate? How the frack does this make sense? The question of Abortion in Canada has been settled legally (Access to facilities though is another story). Women have the legal right to access abortions and other health services when they deem fit. Nothing to debate. What minister Oda says is just a sad attempt to cover the Canadian government’s twisted socially conservative roots.
Denying Women Rights World Wide - A compassionate conservative.
“Oda described the Liberal motion as a “transparent attempt to reopen the abortion debate that we have clearly said we have no intention to getting into.”
She insisted the government understands the urgency of ensuring that women can have a safe, healthy pregnancy, and she cited statistics suggesting that as many as 80 per cent of deaths during childbirth are easily preventable by providing basic needs such as clean water and access to trained health-care workers.”
Just be open with us Bev, the freedoms Canadian women have should not apply to women of other countries, after-all it is God given right for a woman to die in childbirth.
Canada, despite being currently ‘governed’ by a conservative minority government is still a pretty good place to be. The important date that I refer to in is January 28th, 1988. It was when the Supreme Court of Canada made this landmark ruling on abortion in Canada.
Jan. 28, 1988: The Supreme Court of Canada strikes down Canada’s abortion law as unconstitutional. The law is found to violate Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it infringes upon a woman’s right to “life, liberty and security of person.” Chief Justice Brian Dickson writes: “Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and thus a violation of her security of the person.” Canada becomes one of a small number of countries without a law restricting abortion. Abortion is now treated like any other medical procedure and is governed by provincial and medical regulations.
One of the few times that I’ve actually felt some national pride for Canada. Canada in this one instance lives up to it ‘reputation’ for being a caring progressive nation.
I shudder at the kludge of access and availability of reproductive services in the United States. It is certainly not perfect in Canada, as access is not %100 in all provinces, but at least we have the notion that women are autonomous beings codified in law and can use the law to further access to reproductive services across all of Canada.
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