While parental notification laws are intended to protect young women, they assume that all young women can safely involve their family in the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
Not surprisingly, Focus
on the Family doesn't support the one thing that would help reduce the number
of abortions in this country - comprehensive sex education.
The list of those visiting and communicating with the man accused of killing Wichita abortion provider George Tiller reads like a who's who of anti-abortion militants, reports Judy L. Thomas of the Kansas City Star.
Clinic violence along with the constant legislative assault on access to abortion doesn’t just hurt and marginalize providers, it denies the rights of the one in three American women who will seek an abortion in their lifetimes.
Proposed reforms in Spain's abortion laws recommended by a government-appointed commission of doctors, lawyers, academics and government representatives have the Catholic Church up in arms.
Two court cases were decided today by the Ohio Supreme Court, one limiting off-label use of RU 486 and the other protecting confidentiality by denying access by parents of one girl who received an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic to the records of other girls receiving services.
Alexander Sanger, Chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council
and grandson of Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement more
than eighty years ago, discusses the murder of Dr. George
Tiller and criticizes Right Wing talk shows, such as the O’Reilly Factor, for
providing a justification for Tiller’s murder. He writes that: those defending or excusing the murder of Dr. Tiller
adduce a perverse variation on the civil obedience argument of Gandhi and King
and Thoreau---murder for a higher principle. They press that principle further
to say that it was necessary to kill the doctor in order to save lives---the
lives of unborn children he might have aborted. This is to adapt the
Hiroshima/Nagasaki Greater Good justification (we dropped the bombs to end the
war to save American and Japanese lives, as many as a million and more) to the
abortion issue...
If there was a large network of organizations that sought to support
women during unplanned pregnancies and offer unbiased,
fact-based options information, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, such organizations don't exist.
