Abortion

The first person Maria* called when she found out she was pregnant was her doctor. The second person was a lawyer. The single mother of one was in shock, and considering terminating the pregnancy. But she first had to make sure that she wasn’t about to do something illegal, because all she knew was that abortions were forbidden where she lived. “On top of the emotional mountain that was already there, I also had to deal with this,” Maria told me.

She also knew she wouldn’t get any information about abortions in her own country – that’s illegal too. After making her decision, she drove to a clinic across the border. It was a stressful, if short, 45-minute drive, at the end of which another hurdle was waiting: “Oh, you’re from Liechtenstein?” the receptionist said, according to Maria. “Then you have to pay immediately – 680 Swiss francs (£620) please.” She was taken aback and asked: “What if I can’t pay that right now?” The receptionist replied: “Then you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

The law must be changed etc.

Liechtenstein’s archaic abortion laws need to be modernised. But a prince is standing in the way

Dunno. The last remnant of the Holy Roman Empire might be allowed to stay different maybe?

Since 2015, women are legally permitted to have an abortion outside the country, and the external border is never more than a 15-minute drive away. And anyway, it is allowed if the woman was raped or if her health is at risk, so what more could you ask for?

Well, quite.

The Trump administration is calling frozen embryos children
Moira Donegan
A document on an embryo adoption program may be marginal – but it marks an escalation in the pursuit of fetal personhood

Moira’s wholly adamant about this. A fetus cannot be a human because if it is then we can’t kill it. Therefore….

As dystopian as this sounds, Doyley’s story is one among several of its kind, where pregnant people are being forced to undergo medical procedures such as C-sections. And it’s right on theme with the broader ways the US government is working to strip women of their bodily autonomy and their rights.

Gosh. As opposed to our Own Dear NHS whree babbies die because the madwives insist upon natural birth, right? But:

Doyley, who worked as a birthing doula, had been clear that she didn’t want a C-section unless there was an emergency. At an hours-long online court hearing conducted from her hospital bedside – while she was in labor – a judge ruled she could continue to labor, but if there were an emergency, the hospital could operate whether she wanted it or not. Hours later, she woke up to find herself being wheeled into surgery – doctors said the baby’s heart rate had dropped for seven minutes overnight – and she gave birth via C-section.

There’s at least an argument that such is a medical emergency, no?

Researchers have also found that Black and white patients declined care at the same rate, yet practitioners were more likely to accept the wishes of white patients, and more likely to go ahead with the procedure without consent when it came to pregnant Black people. This disparity falls right in line with the ways that Black women have historically been subject to all kinds of reproductive abuse, from forced sterilization to unethical experimentation.

And yet everywhere – well, everywhere there are decent statistics – black babbies die at a higher rate than white. Perhaps there’s something about the physique etc?

Ahh, here’s what it’s really about:

Another deeply troubling and dangerous aspect of all this is the way the fetal personhood crowd positions pregnant people as incubators,
….
It’s also a sign of just how far the government plans to go in stripping pregnant people of their bodily autonomy.

If more states dig their heels in on the fetal personhood movement, that will mean even more vulnerable patients at risk of being forced into procedures they don’t want.

Medical intervention means the babby is being thought of as a person, a person whose interests must be taken into account. If that happens then what happens to abortion rights?

I know how lucky I am to have two healthy children, but I longed for a third. I still can’t believe how fast my two are growing – many of my friends still have lots of time to enjoy with their toddlers. However, fears for the future and the impact on the planet left me consumed with indecision. I had counselling, which helped. My husband has always been content with two but happy to have a third if I wanted, so we tried. I got pregnant. Within a week I was wrought with an intense fear for the future and the impact of the climate crisis. I spoke to some friends, and at length to my husband, and had a termination.

Who filled this woman with such fear that she aborted her child? Once tracked, what do we do to them?

A Kentucky woman is facing multiple criminal charges after she allegedly induced her own abortion using medication.

Kentucky state police arrested the woman, Melinda S Spencer, 35, on charges of fetal homicide in the first degree, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence, according to a local Kentucky news outlet. Spencer reportedly ordered medication online to end her pregnancy, then buried the remains of her pregnancy in her backyard.

It is not clear how far along Spencer’s pregnancy was at the time of her alleged abortion, although police described the fetus as “developed”, the Lexington Herald Leader reported.

Agreed, my views here are well out of the mainstream. But there we are.

This tho’ does pose something of a problem. There are always going to be some who will violate whatever the laws are going to be here. People do about every other law after all. So, after that decision about what the law is going to be there has to be that next one, well, what happens to those caught violating the law, whatever it happens to be?

Difficult…..

A Catholic pro-life campaigner has become the first person in Britain to be charged with the new offence of breaching an abortion clinic buffer zone.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, 48, a charity worker, was arrested earlier this year after she was seen silently praying outside a facility in Birmingham.

A national “buffer zones” law was passed in October 2024, prohibiting “influence” within 150m of every abortion facility in England and Wales.

Such a free country where you may not pray, silently, in public.

We do seem to have reached an interesting argument here. We’ve one group claiming that you can try to break the back of someone with a seldgehammer because you’re doing it for a good thing. But you cannot pray silently in public because that is to be against a good thing – even, against the most sacred sacrament of feminism. It also seems to be largely the same people saying both things.

No wonder they’re having to delay elections, eh?

China is set to impose a value-added tax (VAT) on condoms and other contraceptives for the first time in three decades, as the country tries to boost its birthrate and modernise its tax laws.

From 1 January, condoms and contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – a tax from which the goods have been exempt since China introduced nationwide VAT in 1993.

It’ll have an effect at the margin, certainly. Everything has an effect at the margin.

Imagine how much we could raise the British birth rate by banning abortion?

This is actually – no, really – the LibDems being opportunistic twats.

Farage urged to explain anti-abortion links to meeting with Trump officials
Lib Dems accuse Reform leader of wanting to water down women’s rights after reports of help from advocacy group

His actual view is this:

“My point was that the 24-week limit was looking in serious jeopardy given that we actually spend a fortune saving babies at 22 weeks,” he said. “Maybe we need to rethink all of that because there is clearly a legal inconsistency.”

Which is a fair enough point even if it’s wildly milquetoast compared to my views.

But what are the LibDems actually claiming?

The meeting, first reported by the New York Times, took place in March between Farage and a delegation from Trump’s state department, which it said was overseen by the US embassy and brokered by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) group. The meeting was said to have discussed abortion rights, free speech and online safety laws.

ADF, which supports free speech and religious freedom, has worked in Britain to help challenge the prosecutions of Christians who were arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics, breaching “buffer zones”. The group, which is non-politically partisan and says it is a human rights charity, said it was not present at the meeting and had never met with Reform UK politicians to discuss abortion law.

Being able to pray outside an abortion cilinic clearly is a civil rights and free speech issue. Whichever side of that one you’re on it clearly is abut free speech and not about abortion itself.

LibDems being opportunistic twats. We’re surprised, right?

Last week it was reported that in 2022 the number of abortions in England and Wales reached a record high. Almost a third of conceptions ended in legal abortions, up from about two in 10 a decade earlier. The rightwing press was outraged.

Not sure it’s necessary to be rightwing to be worried about that statistic really.

Yes, yes, I know, I’m an extremist etc. But that is still rather a large number….

Meanwhile, some on the left are arguing the amendment doesn’t go far enough. Stella Creasy proposed a further amendment, which was written by the part-time tax barrister, occasional fox murderer and full-time tweeter Jolyon Maugham, that would have made it impossible even to prosecute those who coerced women into late-term abortions.

Is closing in on pensions age too late for an abortion with prejudice?

You might have seen their faces. Every few months nowadays, another woman appears in a British newspaper charged with a suspected illegal abortion. Often the woman looks pale and gaunt. Sometimes she hides behind sunglasses as she bows her head. The photographs of these women walking into court feel akin to a public shaming, where the stocks are replaced by a breaking news banner, but the judgment remains the same.

If this sounds like a punishment from a different time, it’s because it is. The law that’s largely used to prosecute women for a suspected illegal abortion was written in 1861 – that’s before women had the right to vote or own property independently. While the Abortion Act in 1967 gave widespread access to abortion, it was never made fully legal on the statute books.

Now that may change. After more than a century and a half, this week could see abortion decriminalised in England and Wales – and for the first time, give tens of millions of women a genuine right to choose.

The gap between legal abortion and illegal infanticide will be the length of a vagina.

Can’t help but think that’s the wrong definition.

Hawley went on to urge the FDA to restrict access to the drug and revert to pre-pandemic regulations, in which mifepristone could only be dispensed by a doctor after multiple in-person visits: a regulatory regime that would cut off abortion access to millions of women in anti-choice states.

Leave aside my own sulphurous views on the subject.

The Supremes decided abortion is a matter for the states. So, states get to decide what the rules are. So, if they decide against well, that’s the view of the folk of that state.

Which means, logically, that folk don’t get around it just be having a Zoom call.

Now, yes, obviously, people can wholly logically demand that states shouldf allow it and we’ve that democratic system to enable them to do so – get elected and change the law.

But where does this insistence that folk should be able to break local law just because they don’t like it come from?

This would mean widening eligibility for assisted dying to include people who “may not be approaching death for a considerable period of time”, it said.

Critics have warned that the Bill could be a “slippery slope”, with safeguards eroded over time and a rising number of people seeking an assisted death.

They have argued that similar laws introduced in Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium have seen their eligibility criteria widened and protections “progressively relaxed or removed”.

But the committee said that it can be “very difficult” to predict life expectancy and recognised it might be better to leave decisions to clinicians on whether an illness is deemed terminal.

Clinicians have held the line – real strictly – on the Abortion Act, right?

There was that day, back when, when young Brits used to go to America to support civil rights there.

Donald Trump’s administration is actively seeking to champion more anti-abortion protesters facing prosecution in the UK in a move that risks a transatlantic rift.

The US State Department is understood to have contacted a pro-life Christian charity asking to speak to campaigners who have suffered from “censorship” of their views.

Now, we all know that my views on the underlying are archaic to the point of antediluvian. But the idea that you’re not allowed to pray within 150 metres of a hospital does seem to restrict civil liberties just that little bit too much, no?

In October last year, a new law was introduced providing a “safe access zone” around abortion clinics, which makes it an offence for a person to do anything that intentionally or recklessly influences a person’s decision to use abortion services, obstructs them, or causes harassment, alarm or distress to someone using or working at the premises.

As far as I know at least this is the only activity so protected in law.

Why?

Medical leaders are calling for reform of abortion laws in England and Wales after an “unprecedented” rise in women and girls being prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies.

Eh?

Six women have appeared in court over the past two years under the Offences against the Person Act. There had previously been only a handful of known convictions since the law was introduced in 1861. It is a criminal offence to have an abortion after 24 weeks or without approval from two doctors, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The groups, which represent about 800,000 healthcare professionals, are calling for a halt to prosecutions, ­saying abortion should be a healthcare issue, not a criminal one.

Backed by 20 legal experts and charities including Women’s Aid and Liberty, they suggest the change could be made as an amendment to the crime and policing bill, set to be introduced to parliament in the spring. They also call for a new bill to modernise abortion legislation, “so it can be managed through the same robust regulatory and quality monitoring processes as all other healthcare”.

Ahhh.

So, they want to change the law to abortion being legal at the wish of the mother, up to term. No restrictions, no weighing of rights of in potentio and so on.

Cut up and out the 38 week baby at your pleasure.

The fuckers.

is no doubt also adding to what is being labelled by policy experts as a fertility crisis, but which is, in fact, a crisis in women’s lack of choice.

Reducing abortion reduces the fertility rate apparently.

Which is, you know, fun logic.

It argued that sexuality is subject to degrees of social conditioning,

Oh, so, Baby I Was Born This Way ain’t, in fact, true then?

Rather than a sex strike, there is another tried and tested form of activism, utilised by women and men the world over: a workers strike, the withdrawal of our wage labour that fuels the systems of capital that dare to govern us. Ban patriarchy, not sex.

And you knew that was coming, didn;t you? Capitalism is, in fact, the evil that must be expunged from society…..

One of the arguments deployed by opponents of the abortion act was that it would result in a “slippery slope” – that its strict criteria would inevitably be widened to allow “abortion on demand” up to a pregnancy’s full term.

A similar argument is being used by opponents of assisted dying. But the fears raised more than half a century ago in relation to abortion have not been realised.

We’ve got 200k abortions a year, well over 90% of which are justified on “metnal health of the mother” grounds and as that CoE curate has been shouting about, abortion up to term for things like a cleft palate or club foot does, in fact, happen.

What the fuck do the bint mean there’s been no slippery slope?

Abortion rose, upon legalisation, from 3% of all pregnancies to the current 25% or so. This is evidence against there being a slippery slope?

Maybe it’s all just performative?

Women across the world are today experiencing the visceral, secondhand body horror of another Trump administration, and that is nothing compared with the all-too-real feeling of peril that many American women will be having as I write. We hold fear, tension and trauma in our bodies, and though that is the kind of idea that strongmen such as Trump and their acolytes would snigger at, it’s well documented that, to quote the psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score. It is a complete tragedy that yet more American women are facing the prospect of their reproductive rights being curtailed even further.

This body horror will be felt by the many others on Trump’s hitlist of undesirables: immigrants, gay and transgender people, disabled people, protesters. Anyone capable of empathy. Yet in the context of the assault on reproductive rights, and being a woman myself, it is women I am writing about today.

What assault on reproductuive rights?

Recall, the Supreme Court said, in effect: “It ain’t in the Constitution so it’s for the States and democracy”. Which was, erm, nowt to do with Trump policies.

That also means that action at the Federal level – without a constitutional amendment – ain’t gonna work either. It’s for the States.

Now, without delving into really grubby detail there were 6 – I think – propositions about abortion on the ballot this week. Of which – I think – 4 passed.

Which, erm, ain’t an assault upon abortion.

There is good news for American women to cling to, with Missouri and Arizona voting to expand abortion rights, and Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada all passing measures to protect them.

See?

Guess we’ll go with performative then?

In the 18 months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, leading more than a dozen states to implement near-total abortion bans, hundreds more babies died than expected, new research has found.

The study, which was conducted by researchers from the Ohio State University and published on Monday in Jama Pediatrics, compared data on infant mortality from the months before Roe’s downfall with data from afterward. Overall infant mortality, they found, rose by 7% in October 2022, March 2023 and April 2023.

On average, in those months, researchers found that there were roughly 247 more infant deaths a month than expected. In six out of those 18 months, mortality among infants with congenital anomalies rose by 10%. In those months, there were about 210 more deaths a month than expected.

Make abortion more difficult and more potentially non-viable babies will be born. Seems logical.

Before all this there were c. 600k abortions a year. So, how many of those potentially viable now get born and are viable? That is the benefit side of that cost above, no?

To do that we’d need to look at numbers by state of course, as some have had, since Dobbs, highly restrictive lawes and others have carried merrily on. But then if we were to nail down hte effect on the unviable we’d need to do it state by state as well and they don’t. Odd that.