War on Women

[giblets]

That baby is ****ed for life. Too bad the fetus didn't get aborted sooner.

[Kidlicious]

That baby is ****ed for life. Too bad the fetus didn't get aborted sooner.

Too bad the mother ****ed her baby up you *******!

[giblets]

If she had access to a safe abortion things could have been different. Fetuses are the only non-citizens of the United States you seem to care about.

[Kidlicious]

If she had access to a safe abortion things could have been different. Fetuses are the only non-citizens of the United States you seem to care about.

You're a hopeless cause.

[Thoth]

do you even care about the baby

no.

[Dinner]

Is kid still complaining about having to support his children?

[C0ckney]

probably, in between giving lectures about family values.

[rah]

and women's rights.

[Kidlicious]

That baby has a father somewhere. And that woman messed up his kid. But all you guys care about is if he pays child support.

[giblets]

and protecting fetuses

x-post

[giblets]

If men could get pregnant Kidicious would have had an abortion by now.

[giblets]

The Reproductive Rights Rollback of 2015

How many laws making it harder to get an abortion will pass before the Supreme Court sees them for what they are — part of a tireless, coordinated nationwide assault on the right of women to control what happens with their own bodies without the interference of politicians?

One answer is, no fewer than 288. That’s how many abortion restrictions states have enacted since the beginning of 2011, when aggressively anti-choice lawmakers swept into statehouses around the country.

The trend accelerated in 2015, as state legislators passed 57 new constraints on a woman’s right to choose. Hundreds more were considered, most of which could come up again in 2016. Most of the time, lawmakers are clever enough to disguise their true intent by claiming that their interest is in protecting women’s physical or mental health. But now and then the facade falls away, as when the Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, called a set of restrictions he signed into law in 2012 “the first step in a movement” that aims to “end abortion in Mississippi.”

This is the ominous purpose the justices must not ignore as they hear a major lawsuit from Texas early next year. The case involves a state law passed in 2013 requiring abortion clinics to meet the same building, equipment and staffing standards as ambulatory surgical centers, a costly and medically unnecessary standard. The law also requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic.

Laws like this — known as TRAP laws, for targeted regulation of abortion providers — have sprouted up in dozens of states as abortion opponents test the limits of the Supreme Court’s vague standard on abortion rights, which asks whether a restriction poses an “undue burden” to a woman’s right to choose.

In many states, including Texas, these laws have resulted in the shuttering of all but a few clinics that perform abortions, forcing women to travel hundreds of miles for the procedure. Among other burdens, this increases the chance that a woman will try to end her pregnancy on her own. This is extremely risky, and in some states it is even grounds for a charge of attempted murder. One study, based on a recent survey, estimated that 100,000 to 240,000 Texas women ages 18 to 49 have attempted a self-induced abortion without medical assistance. These women, the study found, were significantly more likely than average to have less access to basic reproductive-health services like birth control.

TRAP laws are the only ones currently before the Supreme Court, but they are far from the only roadblock to reproductive health care put up in 2015.

Just a few examples: Five states enacted or extended waiting periods for abortions, joining the more than two dozen states that already had such laws. Some of these laws also require a woman to undergo in-person counseling, which means two separate trips to a clinic or hospital. Two states, Arizona and Arkansas, passed laws requiring doctors to give women misleading information about the possibility of “reversing” a medication-induced abortion. Arkansas also became the third state to ban the use of the modern, evidence-based drug protocol for medication abortion, which is cheaper and more effective than what the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2000.

And then there is the unrelenting, but politically unpopular, campaign by Republicans in Congress, in statehouses and on the presidential campaign trail to deny funding to Planned Parenthood. The organization, which is the only reproductive-health service provider for millions of poorer women, is already prohibited by law from using federal funds for almost all abortions.

That doesn’t matter to anti-choice activists in places like Wisconsin and Indiana, where efforts by conservative lawmakers and governors have forced even those Planned Parenthood clinics that don’t perform any abortions to shut down. A result is that many lower-income women lose access to basic health care as well as contraceptive services that would make them less likely to have unintended pregnancies.

By any reasonable measure, Texas’ law places an undue burden on women seeking abortion services and should be struck down. Beyond doing that, the justices must send a clear and broad message affirming the constitutionally protected right of women to determine the course of their reproductive lives. Political opponents have shown how quickly they can regroup and find ways to restrict or obliterate programs and services women need.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/opinion/sunday/the-reproductive-rights-rollback-of-2015.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=opinion

[Kidlicious]

You really should stop calling killing choosing. It makes you sound like an inhuman monster.

[C0ckney]

just think of all the child support it saves.

[Kidlicious]

What chance do women have? If the conservatives don't kill them the feminists will.

http://http://www.lifenews.com/2014/...-giving-birth/

Voluntary guidelines for post-abortion mental health evaluations during the month following an abortion have failed to significantly decrease the rate of suicide after abortion in Finland, according to a new study.

Finland adopted the guidelines after a large-scale study of women’s health records, published in 1997, found that the suicide rate among women who had undergone abortions in the prior year was three times higher compared to women in the general population and six times higher compared to women who gave birth.

Mika Gissler of the National Institute for Health and Welfare, who was the lead author of the 1997 study, led a team of researchers who examined health records to see if the suicide rate went down after the new guidelines were published.

sadwoman11They found that the decrease in the suicide rate was not statistically significant.

“Women with a recent induced abortion still have a two-fold suicide risk,” they wrote. “A mandatory check-up may decrease this risk.”

Officials in Australia Also Concerned


The increased risk of suicide following abortion has been recognized in Australia as well. The 2013 Queensland Maternal and Perinatal Quality Council report noted:


Suicide is the leading cause of death in women within 42 days after their pregnancy and between 43 days and 365 days after their pregnancy. There appears to be a significant worldwide risk of maternal suicide following termination of pregnancy and, in fact, a higher risk than that following term delivery.

The potential for depression and other mental health issues at this time needs to be better appreciated. Active follow-up of these women needs to happen. Practitioners referring women for termination of pregnancy or undertaking termination of pregnancy should ensure adequate follow-up for such women, especially if the procedure is undertaken for mental health concerns.

Council chairman Professor Michael Humphrey said that “the number of suicides was a key concern,” according to a report in the Queensland Courier-Mail:


“It’s pretty scary,” Prof. Humphrey said. “But this is not just happening in Queensland or Australia. The incidence of suicide in relation to maternal deaths is
also seen very clearly in reports coming out of New Zealand and the UK. It’s a major phenomenon.’’

He said some women had taken their own lives within a year of having an abortion.

“There’s a lot of evidence that a significant proportion of women who have termination of pregnancies do have mental health issues subsequently,’’ Prof. Humphrey said. “Whether they are mental health issues related to the reason why the woman had the termination or whether they’re related to regret afterwards, we don’t know.”

Besides the Finland study, large record-based studies from the United States and Denmark have found that overall death rates were higher among women following abortion compared to those among women who had given birth.

The U.S. study examined Medi-Cal records for more than 173,000 low-income California women who had experienced abortion or childbirth. Linking these records to death certificates, the researchers found that women who had state-funded abortions were 2.6 times more likely to die from suicide compared to women who delivered their babies. Giving birth, on the other hand, was shown to reduce women’s suicide risk compared to the general population.

Abortion Not Beneficial to Women’s Mental Health
Abortion advocates have frequently argued that abortion is necessary to protect women’s mental health, or even beneficial.

But a 2011 study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that 10 percent of mental health problems among women, including 35 percent of suicidal behaviors, may be attributable to abortion. These findings were based on the combined results of all studies published between 1995 and 2009 that met strict inclusion criteria. The resulting analysis included 877,181 women from six countries.

Women who aborted were 81 percent more likely to experience mental health problems compared to all other control groups, and 55 percent more likely to have problems compared to women who delivered an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy.

Further, a meta-analysis combining the results of eight studies of women who experienced unwanted pregnancies, published in 2013, concluded that “there is no available evidence to suggest that abortion has therapeutic effects in reducing the mental health risks of unwanted or unintended pregnancy.”

Lead author Professor David Fergusson, who has described himself in interviews as a pro-choice atheist, also led the research team in a 2008 study that concluded that women who continued an unwanted or mistimed pregnancy did not experience a significant increase in mental health problems. Further, having an abortion did not reduce their mental health risks.

“In general, there is no evidence in the literature on abortion and mental health that suggests that abortion reduces the mental health risks of unwanted or mistimed pregnancy,” the authors wrote. “Although some studies have concluded that abortion has neutral effects on mental health, no study has reported that exposure to abortion reduces mental health risks.”

The Elliot Institute has called for congressional hearings to investigate the risks of suicide and other mental heath problems after abortion.