Las evidencias hablan por sí solas!

I attended a health conference yesterday and stopped by one of my favorite orgs, Ipas, to score some swag and some abortion news. I saw a small booklet entitled "Ten Facts About Abortion." Hooray! Now, I already knew those facts, could predict exactly what they would say and how they would be described, so I decided to challenge myself. I put it down and picked up "Diez Datos Sobre Aborto." Same info, but in Spanish! So I thought I'd share it with The Abortioneers, and also with our Spanish-speaking audience. It hadn't occurred to me just how much misinformation is out there to confuse and horrify non-English speakers that we simply aren't catching. So I present to any Spanish-speakers out there who are looking for information and not finding it:

Mito: El aborto ocasiona el “síndrome postaborto”.

Dato: El síndrome postaborto no es un diagnóstico psiquiátrico válido.

Mito: El aborto causa cáncer de mama.

Dato: No existe ninguna relación causal entre el aborto (ya sea espontáneo o inducido) y un aumento en el riesgo de que la mujer desarrolle cáncer de mama.

Mito: La anticoncepción de emergencia causa aborto.

Dato: La anticoncepción de emergencia evita el embarazo. Si la mujer ya está embarazada,

la anticoncepción de emergencia no tendrá ningún efecto en el embarazo y no causará un aborto.

Mito: El embarazo es más seguro que el aborto.

Dato: Los procedimientos

de aborto

efectuados por profesionales de la

salud capacitados, en condiciones

higiénicas, son mucho más seguros

que el embarazo y el parto.

Mito: La legalización del aborto no lo hace seguro.

Dato: Cuando las mujeres tienen acceso a servicios de aborto seguro, legal y a precios asequibles, se reducen drásticamente las tasas de muertes y lesiones maternas atribuibles al aborto inseguro.

Mito: Restringir el acceso a los servicios de aborto es la mejor manera de disminuir el índice

de abortos.

Dato: La mejor manera de disminuir el índice de abortos es reducir el número de embarazos no intencionales por medio de educación sexual integral, prevención de la violencia basada en género y acceso a métodos anticonceptivos eficaces centrados en la mujer.

Mito: El aborto con medicamentos es peligroso y puede causar la muerte de las mujeres.

Dato: El aborto con medicamentos

es una opción segura y eficaz para

la interrupción del embarazo en el

primer trimestre.

Mito: Si el aborto es legal, las mujeres lo utilizarán para el control de la natalidad.

Dato: Las mujeres que no tienen información y acceso a métodos anticonceptivos confiables se enfrentan con tasas más altas de embarazo no planeado y posiblemente recurran al aborto para interrumpir el embarazo, sin importar la legalidad del aborto.

Mito: El aborto es exportado por el Occidente imperialista a los países en desarrollo.

Dato: Desde el inicio de la historia documentada, las mujeres en todo el mundo han interrumpido embarazos no deseados. Esta práctica está bien documentada.

Mito: El aborto nunca es necesario para salvar la vida de una mujer.

Dato: El aborto para salvar la vida de una mujer o una niña es médicamente necesario en ciertas circunstancias y es muy aceptado por profesionales e instituciones como la Organización Mundial de la Salud.

The best thing about this resource is that it actually provides SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE (DING DING DING!) to support these FACTS ABOUT ABORTION. Great empowerment for non-English speakers who may feel disenfranchised and under-informed in this country. Clinic workers/counselors/direct service Abortioneers, I encourage you to share this and other Ipas materials. Check their website!

"Schooling Chris Smith" on abortion's role in the UN's Millennium Development Goals

Good evening! Just wanted to let you know that Kelly, the brilliant and gracious creator of Schooling Chris Smith, is hosting a cross-post of sorts by yours truly.

Before I get ahead of myself-- do you know who Rep. Chris Smith is? Well, number one, he's a douchebag, and number two under-informed and number three not very good at rhetoric; let's just say all that up-front before you read his op-eds and injure yourself trying to understand what the fuck he's going on about.

Number four, he's also a member of Congress (R-NJ4), and among other things he's the ranking member (second only to the chair) of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs's Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health. What does all that mean? Well, as Schooling Chris Smith puts it, it means he gets "to be seen as a strong proponent of human rights despite his complete opposition to full human rights for women." To continue quoting Kelly:

Back in September, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Chris Smith urging activists not to sidetrack the U.N. summit on global poverty by talking about abortion (which is kind of hilarious, considering this is one of the guys who sidetracks women veterans' health care into abortion politics). His op-ed obviously speaks for itself by claiming all abortions cause psychological damage for women and implying that human trafficking and child soldiering are caused by abortion (I have to admit, that's a new one for me).

Some letters were published in response to this piece, but one wasn't. [That's mine! -PS]

So, yeah, being ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs's Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health (takeanotherbreath) also means he gets to say things about global health and international development policy and have them published in newspapers. Even though he hasn't done his research, doesn't know his facts, and can't string together a logical argument. (Am I bitter that I do ALL these things but don't get published in the paper? Not at all!) The Post published a couple responses that (rightly) pointed out Smith [a] was dragging abortion into the conversation from out of nowhere and [b] had glaringly omitted mention of the life-saving importance of contraception. But those responses themselves completely omitted mention of the many errors and false claims Smith made about the role of abortion in saving lives.

Even though it's well past September now, the inauguration of Schooling Chris Smith got me thinking that I shouldn't let a good letter die unread. (If I do say so myself.) Without further chitchat, here it is:

Re: "Abortion does not further children's health," Chris Smith, op-ed 9/19

Rep. Chris Smith's op-ed was long on claims, but short on facts. Having engaged in research, education and service provision in the field of reproductive health, I am left wondering on what evidence Rep. Smith based his assertion that abortion harms children's and women's health (the focuses of the UN's Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5). His attempt to exclude abortion from MDG efforts, discarding established medical evidence in the process, is the real threat to the health of women and the children they already have.

The statement that abortion is "by definition, infant mortality" is silly, as all abortions are, "by definition," performed before birth, which precedes infancy. Terminology aside, Smith's concern for embryo survival leads him to overlook the actual women who die when safe abortion care is out of reach: some develop severe pregnancy complications; some have ectopic pregnancies; others drink bleach, insert sharp objects, or jump from tall heights in an attempt to end pregnancy themselves. Each year an estimated 50 million women worldwide obtain abortions, half under unsafe conditions; worse, the vast majority (95%) of those unsafe abortions take place in the developing world where treatment for complications is harder to obtain. As a result, around 70,000 women die each year due to unsafe abortion, and millions more suffer nonfatal injury and illness. Yet abortion performed by a trained provider in a sanitary setting is one of the safest medical procedures in existence -- much safer than carrying a pregnancy to full-term delivery, as a matter of fact! Contrary to Smith's insinuation, repeated and rigorous cohort studies demonstrate the error in claiming that properly-performed abortion causes physical or psychological complications.

Disregard for the value of human life, as Smith calls it, is made manifest in the poverty, illness, and avoidable death experienced by families who cannot afford another mouth to feed or who lose a caretaker to eclampsia, hemorrhage or sepsis. If safe abortion is struck from the agenda, then unsafe abortion will simply continue to kill women and orphan their children.


placenta sandwich, A.D.D., I.B.S.
Vice-President of Irritated Blogging and Letter-Writing
The Abortioneers
Credentials Out The Ass

(Actually, I gave them my real name and my real credentials-out-the-ass.)

There was so much more I had wanted to say, but brevity is the soul of getting published, I was told. (Am I bitter that I chopped a bunch out but didn't get published? Not at all!) Like I also wanted to say that there's empirical evidence at the family level that maternal morbidity and mortality (for example from unsafe abortion) results in greater child mortality. Not a shocker. And also that anyone who knows anything about health infrastructure can tell you that women in Chile and Ireland survive (mostly survive) their countries' abortion bans because they have access to doctors trained to treat complications of illegal/DIY abortion, not because they've stopped having abortions! Anyone who thinks an abortion ban would not increase mortality in a country with poor health infrastructure and lots of remote rural area -- like, say, Ethiopia or Zambia -- would surely not qualify to be on anyone's Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, right?   Oh... wait. (Still not bitter!!)

I'll leave it there and ask you to head over to Schooling Chris Smith to discuss Kelly's question: What would your letter in response look like? What else has been left out?

Media Monday! "Abortion Democracy," the documentary

A few weeks ago I met a German woman named Sarah Diehl, who's in the US doing a screening tour for her documentary, "Abortion Democracy: Poland / South Africa." I saw a short preview of the film and have been looking forward to seeing it ever since.

Poland is one of the few countries in Europe that has criminalized abortion in almost all cases -- and this isn't an ancient law, either, but one passed in 1994. I remember a few years ago reading about a Polish woman who sued the government in the European Court of Human Rights after being denied an abortion that would have saved her deteriorating eyesight. Alicja Tysiac is functionally blind as a result of this denial; the court found that the Polish law did not even uphold the narrow exceptions it claimed to make for cases where a woman's health was endangered by pregnancy, the government had failed by the standards of its own law and  Tysiac's human rights had been violated. The court awarded her compensation, but of course that won't restore her sight. The story both outraged and terrified me: abortion policies aren't an abstraction limited to proving ideological points -- they are terribly, viscerally real for the women whose decision-making they vitiate.

South Africa, on the other hand, is one of the few countries in Africa that has legalized elective abortion. The law was changed in 1996 to allow abortion "on demand" in the first trimester and abortion on certain legal, medical or socioeconomic grounds in weeks 13-20. (Quick fact: "on demand" means that women are not required to stand before a judge, panel of doctors, or other jury who will approve or reject their 'case' for an abortion.) Yet legally-qualifying abortions are still quite difficult to obtain for many South African women, especially in the second trimester. In fact, "Abortion Democracy" suggests that it may be "easier to obtain an illegal abortion in Poland than it is to obtain a legal abortion in South Africa." In this sense, national policies are not the only thing that determines the nature of on-the-ground access, not by a long shot.

I'll be watching the movie tonight, so I'll be back with an update on how it was. In the meantime, I hope this trailer gets you as intrigued as I am.

Transition

Doing some research at work on contraceptive prevalence in some developing countries to appease a lazy donor (duh, measuredhs.com), and we decide to give them some abortion data as well. The reasoning: if our programs increase contraceptive prevalence, then it also reduces abortion prevalence. Since the DHS doesn't capture abortion data (unclear on why; political issues?) we find some Guttmacher data. Initially I was concerned that this info might confuse our donors; since ab laws have been relaxed in many places over the last decade, abortion prevalence might increase and lead them to believe horrible things about contraception and the ineffectiveness of our programs. And it's not easy to talk a donor down from a ledge.

But check it! Worldwide, ab prevalence has actually gone down. From this particular data I can't say why, but of course we'll speculate that it has to do with increases in method use, especially long-term methods (IUDs and such). But read further: though overall abortion rates have fallen, rates of illegal/clandestine abortions have stayed the same!

ACK!

So the situation is actually pretty bleak. Because the most relaxed laws occur in the most developed countries, the women at greatest risk for complications from abortion are not granted access. This report mentions 19 countries have reduced restrictions, many in the developing world, but with the same access barriers and so on that have existed forever. God bless pro choice de jure.

With all the resource allocation and funding for ab in the states, what is the prognosis for that kind of support in the rest of the world? My org is not allowed to; which orgs are? Does anybody know of prospects for abortion access overseas? Is it too much of a hot button issue? I'm so confused. So many countries' women are dying and they don't care! How is it that the world has managed to (for the most part) get on board with HIV/AIDS within a decade, but has taken centuries to do so for ab? If you ask me HIV is as tricky an issue as ab, by which I mean it's not tricky at all. Give people things so they don't die.

SOUNDS PRETTY GOOD TO ME!

If I were Miss America, I wouldn't wish for world peace. I'd wish for world abortions.

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IN OTHER NEWS:

I just received an email stating the following:

"New rule from Dept. of Health and Human Services: women with pre-existing conditions like breast cancer, AIDS and diabetes will be banned from buying insurance coverage for abortion in
high-risk insurance pools. They won't even have the option to buy coverage with their own money. Outraged? So am I."

WHAT IN TARNATION?!?!?!

End the madness!

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ALSO!

As long as I keep getting distracted at work by checking email and IMDB and other distracting sites, I found the following while reading the Wikipedia entry for Nick Cannon (don't ask):

"Cannon's music video for Can I Live? reveals that he was almost aborted by his mother, but she panicked in the abortion clinic and decided to have the baby."

Sigh. I love when people talk about this stuff as though it's an argument for abortion banning. Not that this entry was explicitly anti-choice in any way, but it reminded me of other instances in which "My mom almost aborted me and etc etc" comes into the discussion. Remember when it's "pro-choice" and not "pro-strapping-women-to-tables-and-forcing-things-between-their-legs"? Why would we not want women to have babies if they want to have them? Ack ack.