This Is Great!

I’m over the moon about having something good to say about Barack Obama.  Apparently his administration has decided to climb back into the leadership saddle at the UN:

After nearly a decade of an often tense and estranged relationship with the United Nations, Washington appears to be taking a much more conciliatory and multilateral approach to the world body.

U.S. President Barack Obama formally restored funding for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) Wednesday by signing a major spending bill, prompting U.N. officials to again welcome the policy shift on women’s health-related rights.

In January, Obama issued an executive order lifting an eight-year ban on U.S. funding for overseas family-planning groups and clinics that perform or promote abortion or lobby for its legalisation.

“We are delighted that the United States will, once again, take a leading role in championing women’s reproductive health, and rights,” said UNFPA’s executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid. “This is a great day for women and girls.”

During the administration of George W. Bush, the UNFPA lost its U.S. funding on charges that it was trying to promote abortion, an allegation that Obaid and other officials strongly denied.

In a recent statement, Obama said the resumption of U.S. funding would help not only to reduce poverty, but also improve the health of women and children and prevent HIV/AIDS.

UNFPA says due to the U.S. restrictions on funding its programmes, millions of women in poor countries were unable to access health care during pregnancy and that many of them died as a result.

Earlier this week, Obama signed the legislative omnibus funding bill containing a 50-million-dollar contribution to UNFPA. The funding had been in limbo since 2002 when Bush began to implement his ideologically-driven policies towards women’s rights.  [more]

The UNFPA has been almost hopelessly underfunded.  Among other things, it’s the UN agency responsible for the health of women in the DNC – those who have been raped and maimed by DNC rebels and soldiers.  Much more money is needed than will be provided by this change, but it’s a wonderful new start.  Thanks Barack!

Church Should Be SO Ashamed

A feminist theologian comments on the case of a nine-year old Brazilian girl impregnated by her stepfather.  The Roman Catholic Church publicly excommunicated her family and those involved in procuring and performing an abortion:

It is hard to find words sufficient to convey the moral indignation elicited by the Roman Catholic Church’s actions. As a Catholic feminist theologian who is pro-choice, I have dealt with abortion for decades. I thought I was inured to its callousness. Maybe it’s because I have an 8-year-old daughter that I find the Church’s actions in this case violent beyond defense.

By any measure, the family involved is in big trouble. The father is gone, the mother has at least two children, one of whom is handicapped, and the stepfather is a sexual predator. It is a recipe for a disaster. The pregnancy happened because an adult male assaulted a girl child; an oft-told story, tragic every time. The mother endeavored to do the best she could in a bad situation. Medical personnel handled it according to the law. But the Roman Catholic Church used the tragedy to make a theo-political point. Have they no shame? Are they so heartless as to kick this family while it is down?

Whatever their relationship to the institutional church, the archbishop’s claim that those who help procure an abortion are automatically excommunicated tells this family that the mother is unwelcome, unworthy to receive the sacraments. One churchman had the gall to note that the church in its infinite wisdom does not excommunicate minors, so the nine-year-old is still in full communion. Small comfort. What he failed to mention was that the perpetrator, the stepfather, never even made it to the ecclesial radar screen. I am not suggesting the man be excommunicated; no one should be. But it is sickening and morally repugnant to realize that abortion, in this case the most humane solution to a terrible problem, is the cause of excommunication while sexual abuse is not. Something is seriously wrong with this picture, and it is the Roman Catholic Church.  [more]

Right on.

UPDATE:  Fetus and Pope-ish fetishism

Sanity on the Octuplets

Hysperia loves Patricia J. Williams and has for a long time.  At The Nation, Williams adds some sanity to the discussion of the octuplets birthed by Nadya Suleman .  Here are some bits:

No doubt Suleman has emotional problems. But rather than caring about her mental health, much of the media are content to pillory her as a drain on the public dole–selfish, frivolous, calculating and cruel. No Brangelina-style accolades of “God Bless ‘Em” in People magazine. Just impassioned calls to cut off her remaining sources of income and to criminally prosecute the doctor who fertilized her. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even ran an op-ed calling for the government to appoint a legal advocate for every child born to an unmarried woman, since the “lack of a father’s guidance” must be “a major cause of [children's] suffering.” Furthermore, in the case of Suleman’s children, “the legal advocate would file suit against the fertility clinic or a physician who knowingly contributed to their abuse–life in a multiple-child household headed by a single woman.”

[...]

This past fall The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Alex Kuczynski, fashion writer and self-confessed “cosmetic surgery addict.” Her wish to have a child was framed by fierce determinism, the “natural outgrowth” of marriage to her husband–without whom she “would skip the child.” Kuczynski is married to a man whose “sperm had a track record”–six other children by two prior wives. She, the third bride and twenty years her husband’s junior, described herself as engaged in nothing less than a “battle for my fertility”; having a biological child was “necessary,” a “mad desire,” a “compulsion” and “proof” of the marital bond, without which she faced “wrecked hopes” and an “abyss of grief.” Indeed, to die “without having created a life is to die two deaths: the death of yourself and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.” When she thinks she’s pregnant, she feels a “shiver of victorious accomplishment…. my own fecundity triumphant.” When she tells people she’s not, she feels “barren, decrepit, desexualized,” “branded with a scarlet ‘I’ for ‘Infertile,’” “the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.”

Just because Kuczynski is married and wealthy does not make her less obsessive or more profound than Suleman. Kuczynski sounds like a sad, silly child mooning over “fertile but fit” stars like Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek and “John Edwards’s sometime mistress,” who all had babies in their 40s. Likewise, Suleman takes heart looking at Angelina Jolie. Suleman and Kuczynski represent disturbing emotional extremes. But that should not excuse the rest of us from examining the oppressive competitive natality that seems to have gripped us–the fantasies of “baby bumps” and breeding, always breeding, yet more of “our kind.” Our culture’s antifeminist backlash and its unrealistic aspirations have bewitched Kuczynski and Suleman, these two young women who are so addled and so suggestible, so endowed and yet so impoverished. All these years after the age of “liberation,” perhaps it is time to revisit the myths we still concoct about childless women’s worth.

Perfectly perfect.

Read the whole thing here

Oh Barack!

From Christina Page’s blog:

News story after news story reports that many Americans suffering through the collapse of the economy (like the 71,000 who were laid off yesterday) are, among other lifestyle changes, postponing having a child. Planning when to have a child based on whether you can support one seems like a pretty common sense approach. It could even be described as “responsible” — which, you will recall, was the overarching theme of our new president’s inaugural speech. One small part of the stimulus package the Democrats presented offered this family planning safety net for Americans who need contraceptive coverage but ordinarily would be ineligible for that assistance. The staged Republican freak-out revealed the degree to which they are out-of-touch with Americans’ lives, as if we needed another reminder. The more disturbing part is how quickly President Obama surrendered to this pressure. Without a single attempt to explain the importance of family planning in the lives of struggling Americans, the White House distanced itself from the provision. After a day of bizarre media misinterpretation of the proposal, Obama spokesman, Bill Burton, told Cybercast News Service that it was not Obama’s idea and that “the principles of what he thought should be in the package–that wasn’t part of that.”

Read all of it

Bush Deception, Manipulation & Subterfuge

From the abstract of a paper by Stephen P. Gordon, John Smyth and Julie Diehl:

The breadth of deception and manipulation of science by the Bush Administration is quite amazing, cutting across policy on endangered species, climate change, reproductive health, stem cell research, dietary science, and environmental pollution. This is a story of  suppressing and tampering with scientific findings, intimidating scientists, manipulating the membership of scientific committees, and allowing representatives of industry and social conservative groups to write Administration policies or legislative proposals.

From the section of the paper on reproductive health:

Despite evidence that abstinence-only sex education programs do not decrease unwanted pregnancies and may actually increase them, the Bush Administration has insisted that abstinence only programs be the only ones supported by the federal government. The Administration forced scientists from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to attend daylong sessions on the ―science of abstinence, conducted by nonscientists and absent of any scientific evidence. The CDC was forced to remove information on five comprehensive sex education programs supported by scientific studies from its website (Rushing, 2004).

To obscure the fact there is no scientific evidence indicating abstinence-only programs work in reducing unwanted pregnancy, the Administration measures the effectiveness of abstinence programs by tracking only participants‘ attendance and attitudes rather than the birth rate of female participants (UCS, 2004a).

The Bush Administration removed information on the effectiveness and proper use of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website, and replaced it with a ―fact sheet that emphasized condom failure rates and the effectiveness of abstinence. Also removed was discussion of scientific evidence that sex education does not lead to increased sexual activity (Waxman, 2003).

Research, including a Danish study of 1.5 million women, has concluded there is no link between abortion and breast cancer. However, in 2002, The National Cancer Institute (NCI) removed from its website a fact sheet that reflected scientific consensus and replaced it with one inferring studies in this area were inconclusive (Rushing, 2004). This action resulted in so much outrage from abortion rights and breast cancer advocates as well as the scientific community that in 2003 the NCI was compelled to bring over 100 experts together to reexamine the issue. The experts concluded, again, that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer (Mooney, 2005).

In 2002, Dr. W. David Hagger, a religious conservative who had lobbied for reconsideration of the Food and Drug Administration‘s (FDA) approval of the drug RU-486 and whose scholarship included medical books with conservative religious themes, was nominated to chair the FDA‘s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Previously, eminent reproductive health scientists had been nominated for this position. Following protests by scientists and others, Dr. Hager was not named the chair but he was placed on the committee (Waxman, 2003). In 2003, the acting director of the FDA‘s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research overturned the advice of two scientific panels and his own staff in refusing to approve the emergency contraceptive ―Plan B as an over-the-counter drug.

This action was taken despite the fact that the FDA is required by law to approve drugs found to be safe and effective (UCS, 2004b). In 2006, after considerable protest from the medical community and women‘s groups, the FDA approved over-the-counter nonprescription sales of Plan B by licensed pharmacists to women 18 or older, with a prescription still required for sales to women under 18.

Read the article here [pdf]

Lies About Abortion

From Chinta Puxley at the Globe & Mail:

The new chairman of a secretive Parliamentary caucus opposed to abortion is pledging to rekindle the abortion debate in Canada and bring “more value” to the lives of unborn children.

Although Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said he’s not interested in reopening the divisive issue, Winnipeg MP Rod Bruinooge told The Canadian Press people need to be better educated about Canada’s abortion stance, which he says puts the country in a “class of its own.”

“Very few Canadians appreciate the fact that essentially until a child takes its first breath, it has less value than a kidney,” says Mr. Bruinooge.

“In Canada you can’t remove your kidney and put it on eBay and auction it off. That is illegal. Whereas you actually can end a beating heart of an unborn child the second before it’s delivered. Most Canadians would agree that is truly a poor bioethical position for our country to be in.”

Pro-choice advocates say Canadian doctors only perform such later-term procedures if there’s a serious threat to the health of the mother or if it’s virtually certain the baby wouldn’t survive past birth.   [more]

Think hard everyone.  Have you ever seen a living or dead fetus auctioned on eBay?  The kidney up for auction alongside the fetus up for auction doesn’t work.  I can’t believe I’m saying that.  You’d think Mr. Bruinooge could figure this out for himself.  Fact is, he doesn’t want to.

The Conservative attempt to recast the “abortion debate” in terms more familiar to Americans is on display here.  He doesn’t point to the fact that very few, if any, late-term abortions are performed in Canada.  He doesn’t point out that any “late-term” abortions that are performed are not elective, but done to save the life of the mother or to end a pregnancy where the fetus is extremely ill.  He plays in to an image, created by the anti-abortion movement, of thousands of dead babies littering the floors of Canadian hospitals and clinics.  The bodies of the women who hosted them are conspicuously absent from this image, much less the true medical and emotional circumstances of abortion.

I’ll not pretend that I don’t have deep problems with the anti-abortion clan.  I most certainly do.  But I could get along with them a little better if they told the truth, if they didn’t try to sway people’s hearts and minds with factoids  and images that are not only distortions, but outright lies.

We don’t have accurate Canadian statistics with respect to late-term abortions.  I think whatever benefits might accrue from having them are offset by the invasion of privacy entailed by gathering them.  I don’t even want to think about the emotional harm that would be visited on women who have had to undergo such procedures if they were then subjected to the harassment that would come from the supposed “pro lifers”.

What we do know is this [pdf]:

The Canadian Medical Association’s policy is to endorse abortions on request only up to 20 weeks. Hospitals and doctors in Canada comply with this policy. Women who need abortions past 20 weeks for compelling maternal health reasons or serious fetal abnormalities can get them in a few hospitals in Canada, but more often, these women are referred to clinics in the United States (Kansas, Washington State, and Colorado). These out-of-country procedures are generally funded by provincial governments, on the grounds that they are medically required and not easily available in Canada. The lack of availability occurs because later-term abortions require a high level of skill, experience, and dedication, and there are few providers willing or able to do them in Canada. Condemning “partial-birth” abortion or the D&X technique in Canada is simply part of a political effort to promote disinformation about abortion, and to undermine all abortion rights.

 

Also to be taken into consideration, this:

Mid-term abortions result from many factors, including the delaying factors noted above as well as the need for women to figure out their options, save up funds, travel (sometimes to another province), and make arrangements for childcare and time off work. These delaying factors affect young, poor, vulnerable, and non-urban women the most.

Not all late abortions are due to delay along these lines. For some, the reasons arise in the third trimester, such as a grave threat to the health of the pregnant woman or the fetus. Advances in medical science make it possible to discover these conditions earlier. Should the state restrict or evaluate decisions in these circumstances?

Good public policy in this area, therefore, does not require new laws imposing more restrictions and regulation; it requires the removal of existing arbitrary restrictions that make access to abortion unnecessarily difficult, costly, and time-consuming.

Good public policy must also be proactive to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. One might assume widespread support for such an initiative, especially among those who oppose abortion. This is not the case.

Many abortion opponents also oppose sex education and birth control, including emergency birth control, which are proven strategies for reducing unwanted pregnancies. They regard sex education as encouragement for sexual activity outside marriage, and contraception such as the birth-control pill and morning-after pill as abortion-inducing agents.

These views cannot form the basis of public policy, because they do not serve the best interests of vulnerable and young Canadians who need protection against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Any professional offering health-related services to the public must perform that function according to public, not private, principles. Rules require application to particular individuals and circumstances. Study after study has confirmed that decision-makers in this context tend to impose their own personal moral beliefs.

It would be unfortunate if the real need for reform was obscured by proposals that do not take into account the high cost to women’s health and wellbeing under the current arrangements.

If Mr. Bruinooge and his ilk were truly interested in reducing the rate of abortion, they would work to make accurate sex education, access to contraceptives and access to free abortion readily available  as these measures have  just that effect.  Bruinooge doesn’t fool me.  It breaks my heart that he will fool many.

Mothers Make Children “Fat”

I’m just waiting for a new law requiring restaurants to post signs saying “Pregnant Women Will Not Be Served Burgers and Fries”:

Pregnant women who routinely consume fatty foods could be predisposing their children to a lifetime of overeating and obesity, according to a surprising study.

The new research demonstrates that a mother’s diet can influence fetal development, essentially hard-wiring the brain so the child instinctively craves fat.

“Exposure to a high-fat diet in utero produces permanent neurons in the fetal brain that later increase the appetite for fat,” said the senior author of the study, Sarah Leibowitz of Rockefeller University in New York City. [Globe & Mail]

You’re dooming the brain of your child if you’re “fat”.  What next?  Don’t drink the water?  On the other hand, water may well be more dangerous.

Forced Birth Control

ZOMG, an article supporting the notion that “unfit mothers” should be forced to take birth control until they magically get fit - from The Sunday Times:

 Dutch socialist politician, Marjo Van Dijken of the PvDA party (the social democratic Labour party), is putting a draft bill before the Dutch parliament recommending that unfit mothers should be forced by law into two years of contraception. Any babies wilfully conceived in that period should be confiscated at birth. Unfit mothers would mean those who have already been in serious trouble because of their bad parenting.

[...]

Dijken’s idea is to try to prevent a new pregnancy in a family whose existing children are already in care until the situation has improved enough for them to be able to come back home. Two years might be a suitable period. If, after the suggested two years of compulsory contraception, the family is still not safe for children, the contraception order could be extended by a judge’s review. “If there’s a better way, a less invasive way, I will never mention my proposals again,” she says.

If hers is not the answer to the problem, the question remains: what should be done about unfit parents? Children are increasingly being damaged by them. At the extremes, chaotic mothers who are prostitutes or addicts or mentally ill or just what my own mother called inadequate are condemning their children to the same miserable and disordered lives. Man hands on misery to man, as Philip Larkin wrote, and so does woman.

Less extremely, many children are also being damaged by parents who are not so obviously unfit, but still bad enough to do serious harm. On Friday questions by Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, revealed that more than 4,000 children aged five or under were suspended from school in Britain because of their troubled and violent behaviour. Of the 400 suspensions of children aged just two and three, 310 involved physical assault and threatening behaviour. Numbers of exclusion in all groups under 11 are increasing, mostly because of uncontrolled or violent behaviour.

[...]

It seems to me unfair to deny people any children at all. But it might be right to reduce the number to two. That would be fairer to taxpayers than expecting them to support families larger than their own and it might persuade genuinely unfit mothers that it is not in their interests to keep producing babies; they will be better off without.

It is time that, like Van Dijken, we started asking these extreme questions.

Hey cool.  Start with forced birth control and work your way up to forced sterilization of the poor and racialized.  Maybe we can eliminate those poor black people altogether.  It’s also convenient to blame the women (mothers) for parental “unfitness”.  Fathers are so terrific, after all.  Hells bells!

To be absolutely fair, the Dutch measure is directed toward families where there are children already in the care of the state and the birth restriction would be lifted when the “family” – mother? – was allowed to have already living children back hom.  I still can’t think that the state should be allowed to force a citizen to take health measures against their will.  But Minette Marrin takes the idea even farther – two children per family?  And which families would that be, pray tell?

ZOMG Fetus!

Surely this represents the zenith of fetus fetishism – a fetus waving an American flag and apparently sitting ontop of a revolver, clearly voting McCain/Palin, because how else would a red-blooded American fetus vote?  And it needs a gun to do it!  Whoa, over the top!  Wonder if the fetus is going trick-or-treating?

via Feminist Law Professors

Women of Malawi

Oh break my broken heart:

Between Oct. 12 and 18, the Malawian government, with technical and financial assistance from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), treated more than 130 destitute women who have no or little access to health care services.

Lausi Adamu, from Makanjira in Malawi’s lake district of Mangochi, who does not know her exact age, has suffered from fistula for the last 25 years. Her affliction came to an end last week, when she received an operation free of charge to stop her ailment.

Adamu told IPS reporter Pilirani Semu-Banda about her life with the disease as she recuperated in hospital after the operation.

IPS: How did you develop fistula?

Lausi Adamu: It was 25 years ago, when I was in labour for three days while giving birth to my first and only child at home.

I received no medical care throughout pregnancy, and it was only my mother who was with me during delivery. There was no midwife or doctor available. It was a very long and painful labour and the baby was stillborn when he eventually came out.

I have been unable to control the leakage of both urine and faeces from my body ever since and I haven’t had the courage to have another child.

IPS: Why did you not receive medical care during pregnancy and delivery?

LA: It takes four hours to walk from my village to the nearest hospital, and no vehicle goes into my area because the road is in a very bad condition. Most births therefore happen at home, and women rely on their mothers, their mother-in-laws or traditional birth attendants to help them during labour.

The culture in my area also demands that the first baby has to be delivered at home for elders to ensure that the husband is indeed responsible for the pregnancy. There is a belief that most women have more than one relationship after they just got married -– so the women who help at birth ask the woman in labour to mention the (name of the) real father of the baby. The belief is that if any complications develop during the process of giving birth the woman has been unfaithful.

IPS: What did you know about fistula before you developed the condition?

LA: I thought I was bewitched, but everyone else in my community thought I had been unfaithful to my husband. It was a very strange affliction. My mother took me to five different traditional healers who told me that the condition was incurable and that I should accept to live with it for the rest of my life.

However, there have been many such cases in my area over the years, and most of the women have been treated by community members the same way as me (with contempt).

Government and UNFPA staff have in the past year been coming to my area, and they have been carrying out community meetings where they are telling us that the condition is medical and that it is repairable.

I decided to come to the hospital to see if indeed I can be helped after one of the women from my community, who had a similar condition, came back cured after visiting the hospital.

Read the rest here