October 26th, the Nicaraguan National Assembly voted to criminalize therapeutic abortion, making Nicaragua one of only three countries in the Western Hemisphere where abortion is illegal even in cases where a pregnant woman's life is in danger. Nineteen medical associations opposed the ban, and now that it's likely to be signed into law, physicians are understandably alarmed. The proposed ban carries four- to eight-year prison sentences for women who seek abortions, as well as anyone who assists them - a scenario that could force doctors to choose between upholding the Hippocratic Oath and respecting the Nicaraguan Penal Code.
Two days after the National Assembly voted, the Nicaraguan Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (SONIGOB) sent an urgent letter to President Enrique Bolaños and the Minister of Health asking what actions would be taken to protect both patients and health workers in light of the new law.
Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline finally obtained private medical records from Kansas abortion clinics last week, though months ago the Kansas Supreme Court made efforts to protect people's medical privacy by limiting the scope of information. Someone else had been seeking them too, Fox News' own Bill O'Reilly, who said on his program Friday that he had been seeking these records for months and months, and finally got them, from an "inside source."
According to John Hanna of the Associated Press in Topeka, Kansas, a spokesperson for the Attorney General said they assumed the "inside source" for the O'Reilly Factor must have been inside the clinic. But if the O'Reilly Factor's source was "inside the abortion clinic" why would the news of those records not have been televised before this?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that Kline's efforts to obtain private medical records, allegedly to pursue criminal cases against rapists, has resulted in those records being obtained by a cable network news anchor to air just days before an election. Coincidence? According to the AP, the records do not contain names of patients, so they could not be used for any criminal investigation. The clinics have asked for further investigation into Kline and O'Reilly's use of these private medical records.
Originally from the east coast, Donna McNichol is the mother of two teenagers, regional director of Planned Parenthood Shasta Diablo, and spends her weekends watching her daughters play soccer.
A couple of months into my first pregnancy, I feared that something may be wrong. I started bleeding. While some days the bleeding was lighter than other days, I bled every day. We kept hoping that I would stop and my pregnancy would continue normally. Since we did not know the cause of my bleeding, my doctors did not know how to stop it. My health was at risk.
[img_assist|nid=1353|title=Special Series|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=89|height=100]I was very concerned about being able to continue the pregnancy and the possibility of giving birth to a baby that would die. My family and loved ones were also concerned about my health. The hardest part was not knowing what to do. There was not a right or wrong answer.
My husband and I, after consulting with my family, my doctor and my loved ones, decided to end the pregnancy in order to protect my health. I was only halfway into my pregnancy, approximately 20 weeks. I never once considered asking my elected officials what I should do. It was so very personal.
Priests for Life claims to be "the nation's largest Catholic pro-life organization." However, in 2000, the group claimed a mere 13% of the nation's priests as members. Today, it reports no membership income on its tax returns and has lost even more ground among priests.
After more than 15 years trying vainly to grow his Catholic antichoice group into the mass clerical movement envisioned in its rhetoric, its leader, Frank Pavone, now finds himself banished to a Texan wasteland and able to count on a mere 2.5 percent of the nation's priests (some 1,000) as supporters.
His hagiographic campaigning style, with unapologetic electoral campaigning, and unabashed cooperation with some of the most militant antichoice figures, has led him from New York to Amarillo, Texas, where he broke ground on a seminary for his new order of priests, Missionaries of the Gospel of Life. On the same day, the Religion News Service reported the new order had only one member, Pavone himself.
Women who come to my office for late abortions are, without exception, in extreme distress. The most difficult situations are those in which the pregnancy is desired but a diagnosis of fetal abnormality or genetic disorder has been made. Also, medical conditions occur that require termination of the pregnancy, sometimes under emergency conditions. These are not uncommon, especially in a practice such as mine that specializes in late abortion. The anguish that women and their partners and family experience under these circumstances is profound. It is a major life event and it is a terrible loss.
There are teenagers who have become pregnant following a[img_assist|nid=1353|title=Special Series|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=89|height=100] first sexual intercourse and who are uninformed about anatomy, physiology, and pregnancy. They are often terrified and don't know what to do until a family member sees the obvious evidence of advanced pregnancy. Outside of tribal societies in which adolescent pregnancy and family formation is the norm, what 14 or 16 year-old girl in this society is prepared to raise and nurture a child? The medical risks of adolescent pregnancy are very serious, and they have life-threatening and life-altering effects.
We do not endorse candidates, parties, ideologies, or faiths. We endorse the truth. We endorse responsibility. We endorse reality.
On Wednesday, nine justices of the United States Supreme Court will choose between the health of the mother and if it should be considered when writing legislation, or if her unborn child's rights supercede hers. The case was decided six years ago, but now the make-up of the court has changed.
We will see if Justices Roberts and Alito will truly evaluate these cases on their merits. We will see if they are true to their sworn testimony about stare decisis. These are sham cases. Women having late-term procedures did not simply "change their mind" about their pregnancy: their lives or their fetus were in danger and they needed medical help.
The Supreme Court's choice follows the choice millions of Americans will exercise next Tuesday. If a choice is partisan, based more in ideology than fact, made from fear, or against anyone or any party, then expect the consequences of that choice. Instead, if a choice is made from a place of hope, faith in something better, not faith in being better than someone else, but faith in each other to work together solving tough problems, then one could expect more positive results.
We have been down this road before. And we really shouldn't be going down this road again. Let me start with this term, "Partial-Birth Abortion." There is no such medical procedure as "Partial-Birth Abortion." It is a political soundbite.
The Center for Reproductive Rights brings cases[img_assist|nid=1353|title=Special Series|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=89|height=100] both in the United States and around the world and works with women's health advocates to strengthen laws protecting women's reproductive health. And we don't deal with this issue of "Partial-Birth abortion" anywhere else in the world. And that is because it was created as a political soundbite here, for American politics.
This case is about second-trimester abortions. That is all that this case is about. Second-trimester abortions. Babies are not born in the second trimester. Third trimester abortions are outlawed in most states around the United States, as long as there is a constitutional protection for women's life and health. So this is not about babies about to be born.
Marianne Mollmann is Advocacy Director for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
It's easy to get discouraged if you support women's right to decide over their bodies and choices, what with the blanket ban on abortion in Nicaragua passed last week, the imposition of demonstrably harmful "abstinence-only" sexual education in the United States and elsewhere, and the lack of access to comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care for women generally. But this month I am getting a much-needed injection of "it's possible."
I am not talking about the U.S. elections, though some electoral campaigns have given me hope that not all politicians have sold out to focus group research.
I am talking about Verónica Cruz.
Verónica Cruz is the co-founder and leader of the organization "Las Libres" (The Free Women) in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. She is also one of only three recipients of this year's Human Rights Watch annual award for exceptional human rights activists. Part of the prize is a three-week speaking tour of the United States and Canada, where I, as her Human Rights Watch host, get to accompany her. Our trip only started Monday, but I am already energized by her enthusiasm and inherent belief that justice is possible. Even for women. Even for poor women. Even for poor, indigenous, illiterate women.
Dr. Connie Mitchell is a nationally recognized expert on the health care of victims of violence and abuse. She serves on the AMA National Advisory Council on Violence and Abuse and is a member of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health.
I grew up as one of four daughters in a middle-class family. As sisters, we shared everything: bedroom, clothes, cars and double dates. It was a loving and lively home and one, I thought, of few secrets. But recently, after one of my sisters was killed in a tragic accident, another sister told me of the secret the two of them had kept for many years. At age 16, my deceased sister was pregnant and wanted to terminate the pregnancy. She sought the counsel and support of the sister now disclosing the story and got the reproductive health care she needed.
Later, I asked my mother about her reaction to the story, as I too was raising teenagers and would appreciate her perspective. My mother began to cry, but she quickly let me know that these were not tears about the abortion. Her tears flowed because the story made her feel so inadequate. She said, "I wish that I could ask her what I might have said or done differently so that she would know, really know, that I understood life provides challenges, that I loved her no matter what, and that I respected her as a young woman."
The first sentence of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is a lie. It's also an appalling run-on sentence, but we won't get into that. The Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2003; challenged and struck down by three separate federal judges in 2003 and 2004; and now, amazingly, making its way onto the Supreme Court docket for November 8; starts like this:
A moral, medical, and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a partial-birth abortion - an abortion in which a physician deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn child's body until either the entire baby's head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the baby's trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act (usually the puncturing of the back of the child's skull and removing the baby's brains) that the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant, performs this act , and then completes delivery of the dead infant - is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.
Here's how you can already tell that the framers of this bill are already lying: the term "partial-birth abortion" is not recognized by the medical community (as Scott pointed out in his overview of the case's main issues yesterday, the first sentence of the American Medical Association's statement opposing the legislation reads, "The term ‘Partial birth abortion' is not medical terminology.").
