Category Archives: Abortion

Rebecca Long-Bailey’s Labour leadership bid risked being derailed by a row on abortion, as it emerged that she objected to the current law on late terminations.

Labour MPs accused the pro-Corbyn candidate of holding “absolutely toxic” views after she said she disagreed with the exemption allowing abortions on disability grounds after the 24 week limit for healthy foetuses.

Quite apart from anything else it seems to breach the Disabilities Act*.

We’re not allowed to discriminate – either for or against – those in wheelchairs for example. Except we can kill those who might need a wheelchair because of spina bifida when we can’t kill those who might not. Sure sounds like discrimination to me.

*Or whatever it’s called.

Our happy ignorance had a lot to do with the victories of feminism. Germany’s women’s movement started in the 1970s with the fight against section 218 of the country’s criminal code, which punished abortions with jail sentences of up to 10 years – for both the woman and the doctor. That’s why it was such a big thing when 374 film stars and other famous women declared “We’ve had abortions” on the cover of Stern magazine in 1971. Because the law didn’t mean fewer terminations; only more women dying of abortion by coathanger. Women like my great-grandmother. I am yet to meet a German person who does not have a section 218 victim in the extended family.

Willing to agree that legal abortion will lead to fewer dying of coathangers. Can’t see it possibly being true that legal abortion leads to no more abortions tho’. That’s most certainly not the experience here, is it?

And the idea that every German family – however extended – has someone who died from an illegal abortion is absurd. The overall death rate of all women of reproductive age from all causes isn’t high enough for every family to have a victim is it?

Most of us will be familiar with the “12-week” rule – the longstanding social convention that dictates that women mustn’t tell anyone they’re pregnant before the 12-week mark, “in case something happens”. It’s time to talk about the insidious effect it has on women who suffer a miscarriage early in their pregnancy.

An estimated 650 babies are miscarried every day in the UK, with the vast majority occurring during the first trimester. Most of these losses will be suffered in silence, because it’s considered so socially unacceptable to reveal that you’re pregnant before 12 weeks – let alone that you were pregnant, but now you’re not. It’s baffling that in 2019 we seem so wedded to an anachronistic superstition……

Yes, but we’ve also got rather a lot of people saying that in the early stages it is nothing but some gob of meiotic cells that can – possibly should – be done away with. With no more consideration than a blowing of the nose.

Anti-Cakeism sorta demands that either it’s something to be mourned and not killed or it’s a nothing that can be excised at will but not noted.

The Court of Appeal has blocked a mentally ill woman’s abortion after the Catholic church warned it would infringe her human rights.

Three senior judges overturned a ruling made on Friday that the woman, who is in her 20s and 22 weeks pregnant, should have a termination against her wishes because it was in her best interests.

Trans people need to fight to protect abortion, this ban impacts us too

Rilly?

….but we face our own particular set of challenges on top of access to abortion. This includes access to sperm banks and freezing eggs to be able to pro-create, as hormone therapy and especially genital surgery can render people unable to conceive or get pregnant. Making sure trans people have access to this is therefore a reproductive rights issue.

So artificial conception is the same thing and cause as unconception?

“Abortion kills babies” is an article of faith on the American right.

Well, it is at least arguable that they’ve got a point.

It’s really not quite that simple:

Moreover, as tempting as it is to think of Ivey, the executioner’s friend, as a monster who happens to be female – in which the worst qualities of Agatha Trunchbull, Dolores Umbridge and Margaret Atwood’s Aunt Lydia manifest as a homely-looking 74-year-old – she runs a state in which a majority of both sexes oppose abortion rights.
Nationally, the slight gender differences on abortion choice have been related by one US pollster, Celinda Lake, to religious faith. “Women are more religious than men, and so women are slightly less pro-choice than men.”

Yes, yes, however. Democracy. Isn’t it supposed to be the people who make the law?

Google has already come under pressure in the past for running advertisements that appear to violate its own policies against misrepresentation in advertising, yet the company continues to publish ads for clinics that seem to offer abortion services but are actually opposed to terminations and try to dissuade women from seeking them out.

Offering abortions, yes, we know what that means. Come over here Honey and lie down while I turn the vacuum cleaner on.

OK.

But abortion services? Is this just some modernism for abortions?

Or, well, are we talking about some wider thing. Say, an explanation that sure, there is indeed abortion. There’s also this mother and baby home. Adoption exits and there’s a massive hunger for new borns. So, now we’ve offered the service of explaining your options, what?

Or even, is there some Federal funding restriction here? It’s possible to gain access to a flow of tax cash if you’re offering “abortion services” but not if you’re offering “abortions”?

Lysistrata Won’t Work Today – Alyssa Milano’s Call For Sex Strike Over Abortion Laws #SexStrike

Although perhaps it might work. There’s be a reduction in the abortion rate, right?

GRIEVING FOR ALL THOSE ALISONS WHO NEVER WERE

Oh, you mean it’s not about those aborted?

Of all the abominations against women, forcing them to bear a child against their will is one of the most life-changing cruelties.

It’s certainly life changing. Possibly even life saving or life creating dependent upon your view of the vivacity of the foetus. But cruel? That’s to be argued, isn’t it?

In the UK, one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime – neither shame nor tragedy, just a common medical procedure.

It’s a tragedy for at least one of the life forms involved Polly.

What was it? Reduce the incidence?

A third of pregnancies among women in their early 20s end in abortion for the first time, official data has revealed.

Every woman in their 20s has an absolute right to free, buckshee, and effective, contraception. So, how’d that work out then?

Well, it would appear that lowering the cost of each incidence of shagging has raised the frequency. Not unexpected as a result. But the elasticity seems to be that it raises the incidence of abortion. Not quite the elasticity that was predicted really.

Today, the state of Georgia passed a law banning abortion at the point a heartbeat can be detected – usually by six weeks. The move is, according to Renitta Shannon, Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives, “a death sentence for women”; those who undertake the procedure past the ordained point will be liable for criminal proceedings, as will the medical professionals who carry them out.

Previously set at 20 weeks, House Bill 481 – nicknamed the Heart Beat bill – “effectively outlaws abortion in Georgia as most women will tell you by the time they know they are pregnant, a heartbeat can already be detectable,” Rep Shannon explains.

Not that I think it a sensible law to be making but the very point of it is to effectively ban abortion in Georgia. The people who passed the law are quite aware of the implications here.

ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXIST, LOVE AND BE LOVED

Today a coalition of women’s healthcare organisations and Royal Colleges have written to the national broadcaster demanding its ban on providing information about abortion is reviewed.

“Abortion is not a ‘contentious issue’ — it is a routine part of NHS-funded healthcare, provided by doctors, nurses and midwives every day in hospitals and clinics across the country,” they write.

It’s still contentious. To prove that it isn’t you’d have to prove that there were no votes against the most recent changes to abortion law when it went through Parliament….

Was it planned? There’s something so gothic about being asked if your baby is wanted. Clearly the only response to this is, “No, so I’ll put it in the recycling bin along with the other unsolicited junk mail.”

But:

As well as my two children, I’ve had the odd abortion and miscarriage, so this is not my first time on the pregnancy rodeo.

Given that one did, voluntarily, get put out for the recycling bin it seems like a fair enough question actually.

An unborn baby was removed from its mother’s womb for life-changing surgery before being put safely back inside, her mother has revealed.

Surgeons performed the pioneering operation at 24 weeks’ gestation after scans revealed the feotus had spina bifida.

The condition can leave sufferers with walking difficulties and even paralysis because the spinal cord does not fully develop during pregnancy.

Surgeons from University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital, along with Belgian colleagues, managed to repair the spinal cord and it is now hoped the baby will be born healthily in April.

At what point does the ability to correct defects means that abortion of one with defects isn’t morally justified?

Don’t forget, the 24 week limit doesn’t apply in the case of defects.

We are already saying “24 weeks is close enough to human that no abortion. Except in the case of defects.” So, at what point of repairability does the “except” no longer apply?

Common, in-clinic procedures performed by other specialists have far greater risks than abortions. The death rate associated with colonoscopies is 40 times greater than that associated with abortion, according to the American Public Health Association.

I’m really pretty sure that one person doesn’t die per colonoscopy.

Yes, yes, I know. Person and foetus etc. But still that’s an incorrect statement above.

The world’s first ever no-kill eggs are now on sale in Berlin after German scientists found an easy way to determine a chick’s gender before it hatches, in a breakthrough that could put an end to the annual live shredding of billions of male chicks worldwide.

The patented “Seleggt” process can determine the sex of a chick just nine days after an egg has been fertilised. Male eggs are processed into animal feed, leaving only female chicks to hatch at the end of a 21-day incubation period.

“If you can determine the sex of a hatching egg you can entirely dispense with the culling of live male chicks,” said Seleggt managing director Dr Ludger Breloh, who spearheaded the four-year programme by German supermarket Rewe Group to make its own-brand eggs more sustainable.

We rather expect that abortion reduces infanticide in humans…..

NHS to carry out spinal surgery for unborn babies

They carry out significant surgery on 300,000 unborn babies a year already, don’t they?