Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

Here's a story from Mississippi concerning reproductive rights from the BBC.

Abortion battle lines drawn in Mississippi

The Jackson Women's Health Organization is an anonymous enough building in the heart of strip mall America. Anonymous save for the permanent protest outside.

Arriving here is an intimidating, even shocking, experience. Anti-abortion campaigners hold up enormous and gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses. They stop every car going into the car park and try to persuade those inside to wind down their windows and take their literature.

The women going into this clinic for an abortion are screamed at. One protester, a man, yells "Don't go to those demons, don't let them take your money, don't let them kill your baby". When I ask him why he is being so aggressive, he tells me it's because America needs to know the truth: "Abortion is murder," he says.

::::more below the fold::::also posted at Our Word::::

:::snip:::

Betty Thompson, the clinic's former director, has become its chief campaigner, fighting to keep it open. "This is a vital facility - to close it would remove an important part of women's healthcare - the women of this state need it," she says.

Pro-choice and anti-abortion campaigners at a demonstration in South Dakota where most abortions have been banned
Alongside her sits Dr Joseph Booker, who performs many of the abortions here. He explains that he now takes extra measures to protect his own security. But he won't tell me what measures. "I am concerned about my own safety but I won't let it cripple my life. To close this clinic and ban abortion would in my view violate all women's constitutional rights."

:::snip:::

Lawmakers have already drafted a bill to ban abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, and risk to the mother's life.

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Here's an Op-Ed from the Los Angeles times by a University of Texas Law professor on an inconsistency in the South Dakota abortion ban.

Abortion law's criminal loophole
Who would go to jail in South Dakota? Not women, and it's all because of politics.

WHAT IF THE Supreme Court overrules Roe vs. Wade by allowing South Dakota's new abortion statute to pass constitutional review? Abortion, which has been governed in our time by constitutional law, again would be a matter of criminal law. The chief question would be: Who goes to prison?

South Dakota's legislators included this language in their new law: "Nothing in this act may be construed to subject the pregnant mother upon whom any abortion is performed or attempted to any criminal conviction and penalty." If abortion is a crime, why excuse the woman from punishment?

In the century or so before Roe vs. Wade, when criminal abortion laws were abundant in the United States, legislatures often explicitly exempted the woman's behavior from abortion statutes. When they did not, prosecutors and courts found ways to avoid punishing the woman.

In those days, such moves were justified by rationales such as this, from the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1904: "The public policy that underlies this legislation is based largely on protection due to the woman, protection against her own weakness as well as the criminal lust and greed of others. The criminal intent and moral turpitude involved in the violation, by a woman, of the restraint put upon her control over her own person is widely different than that which attends the man who, in clear violation of the law, and for pay and gain of any kind, inflicts an injury upon the body of a woman endangering health and perhaps life."

Surely the South Dakotans won't offer such a justification now...

:::snip:::

Debate about the constitutional right to privacy and the future of Roe vs. Wade should not obscure the serious flaw at the heart of criminal abortion laws. With a legal exemption for the woman, such laws are either intentionally discriminatory or devoid of rational justification. Without such an exemption, they are politically doomed.

Lets suppose for the sake of argument that abortion is murder. This is often the cry of the anti-choice crowd. It would logically follow that the mother, by choosing to abort her pregnancy, is therefore murderer. In fact, it would be pre-meditated in almost every case. So I see the point the author is trying to make. The South Dakota law exempts the woman who aborts from murder charges but it does so for reasons of political expediency, to maintain political support for the law. Only the practitioners of abortion are criminalized. I suppose though, that many within the anti-choice movement will continue to push for full criminalization. They do like to work incrementally, always chipping away at women's rights.

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Here's a link to a guest editorial from The Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon on the South Dakota abortion ban.

Abortion ban brings bad memories

South Dakota's new law, which bans abortions except for pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother, calls to mind the days before the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, when women were denied the right to control their bodies.

Such memories are easy for me. As a clergyman and counselor in a major American city, I was aware that 4,000 women a year entered our large public hospital after illegal, bungled abortions. Unable to find physicians to perform the procedure, women turned to incompetents who left them infected, mutilated and hemorrhaging.

Some were near death when they were admitted. Some had to have their reproductive organs removed. Others suffered infections that left them sterile. And some died as the result of botched or self-administered abortions.

:::snip:::

Abortion is a serious moral concern, not to be regarded as a form of birth control. Women don't choose abortion lightly. But their concern for the lifelong welfare and nurture of children leads them to abort. They have such a strong sense of love and responsibility for their potential baby that they want it to be raised with loving concern and promising opportunities for a good life.

They seek an abortion if they feel too young, too sick or too poor; if they are single or unable to be an adequate parent; or if they have too many children already or are in an unstable or unloving relationship; or if medical tests reveal the fetus to be abnormal.

Reverend Edgar Peara seems to understand trust

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And in the news from South Dakota this week we have another report about the private funding of the anticipated court challenge to the state's recently passed law.

Questions arise over transparency of new fund

PIERRE, S.D. - At least one state lawmaker worries that a special fund created to hold donations to pay for a possible legal fight over South Dakota's abortion ban might become a kind of secret account.

"I see this fund as another way to keep information from the public," Rep. Elaine Roberts, D-Sioux Falls, said. "I believe there should be a complete and public record of donors and the amount given."

But officials say they can't answer many questions about the fund, which has become law.

:::snip:::

Sara Rabern, spokeswoman for Attorney General Larry Long, said she could not give a definitive answer about whether the donation records would be public.

The new "life protection subfund" statute says the fund must go through the informational budget process. Under that process, a report to the Legislature details the condition of every fund under the control of the entity, the nature and extent of any investments and all receipts and expenditures for each of the past two fiscal years and for the next preceding fiscal year.

Those reports would be available for legislative and public inspection, said Reed Holwegner of the Legislative Research Council.

:::snip:::

"Any of the funds going into this particular fund, I would assume, I do not know positively whether they would be open and public records," Hunt said at the time. (Rep. Roger Hunt, who came up with the subfund plan.) He said he could not point "to a particular statute that would say they would be open."

No one has yet made public the identity of an anonymous donor who reportedly is willing to give the state $1 million to defend the ban.

"The governor has seen a letter from a private individual who has promised the state $1 million in the event this is litigated," Hunt said.

So there are all kinds of questions about this matter. There are questions about reporting requirements. There are questions about whether or not the records will be public. There are even questions about taxes. But very few answers are available as lawmakers and state officials seem unable to answer many questions about the fund. And don't forget the fund is already law. Who's going to answer these questions? The state Attorney General doesn't know. Questions about tax deductibility? Direct those to the IRS. The only thing the public seems to know for sure right now is that life protection subfunds smell very fishy."

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Here's Emergency Contraception news from Connecticut.

Victim Advocate Urged To Quit

Lt. Gov. Kevin B. Sullivan called on the state victim advocate to resign Tuesday, saying James Papillo's opposition to a bill that would require hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims violates his oath of office.

"Imagine the state victim advocate testifying against victim's rights," Sullivan said at a press conference in his Capitol office.

On Monday, Papillo, also an ordained deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, appeared at a legislative public hearing and opposed the proposed law that would require the state's four Catholic hospitals to offer the so-called Plan B emergency pill to all rape victims.

:::snip:::

In his testimony, Papillo said his opposition to the Plan B requirement had nothing to do with religion. Instead, he said the Plan B issue simply obscured the real needs of victims, including the need for more money for counseling and more court-appointed victim advocates.

But in an interview Tuesday he said the state must balance the religious rights of the hospitals against the needs of rape victims.

:::snip:::

Gov. M. Jodi Rell said Tuesday that she directed her legal counsel to express her displeasure to Papillo "over the inappropriate nature of his remarks."

"I believe he now understands that he went far beyond the bounds of victim advocacy," Rell said. "Mr. Papillo knows he must not cross the line again between his personal beliefs and the interests of those for whom he advocates."

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In International news we have a story from Mexico. Mexico has some very restrictive abortion laws. Mexico does permit a woman to abort a pregnancy that occurred due to rape but this law has been abused by the authorities. This week though the Mexican government has settled a claim that was filed against it before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights.

Mexico to compensate woman denied an abortion after rape

MEXICO CITY - The Mexican government is expected to offer a financial settlement today to a woman who was raped at 13 and then denied an abortion in violation of Mexican law.

"This is the most important legal victory for women in Mexico in a decade," said Luisa Cabal of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based rights group. "It is the first time a Latin American government has acknowledged that access to legal abortion is a human right."

The center and its partners in Mexico brought the case before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights on behalf of "Paulina," whose case gained international attention after officials, doctors and anti-abortion activists in her hometown of Mexicali on Mexico's Pacific coast pressured her not to obtain an abortion.

:::snip:::

Despite such progress, legal abortions can be difficult to obtain in Mexico, rights activists say, because health officials and others routinely deny pregnant rape victims their rights.

"For many rape survivors ... actual access to safe abortion procedures is made virtually impossible by a maze of administrative hurdles as well as — most pointedly — by official negligence and obstruction," New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report Tuesday.

Titled "The Second Assault: Obstructing Access to Legal Abortion after Rape in Mexico," the 92-page report is based on interviews with more than 100 rape victims, women's rights activists, government officials and health workers. It underscores the enormous obstacles women face in obtaining abortions.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has an article on their website about this settlement.

Mexico Admits Responsibility for Denying Child Rape Victim's Rights

Washington, DC, March 8, -- the Center for Reproductive Rights and its partners in Mexico, Alaide Foppa and GIRE (Information Group on Reproductive Choice), will sign a friendly settlement with the Mexican government in a case brought before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. The case was brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights and Alaide Foppa on behalf of "Paulina," a girl who was raped at the age of 13 and then denied an abortion due to the personal and religious beliefs of justice and health authorities in her home state of Baja California, Mexico. Although first-trimester abortion is legal in cases of rape throughout Mexico, the procedure is nearly impossible to access due to a regulatory void that allows public officials to abuse their authority.

In addition to a monetary settlement, the Mexican government will issue a decree regulating guidelines for access to abortion for women who have been raped. The government also agreed to provide Paulina and her son significant compensation for health care, education, and professional development.

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Here's an editorial from the San Diego City Beat on anti-choice ballot-measure activity in California. The editorial also reports on disagreement between competing factions within the anti-choice movement on the ballot-measure issue.

EDITORIAL
Prop. 73 again

The Catholic Crusader of Coronado is at it again. Jim Holman, the reclusive publisher of the San Diego Reader and San Diego News Notes (a rabidly religious publication that rails against Planned Parenthood and gay people), and his pro-life gang have been given the go-ahead by the state to gather signatures once again for a ballot measure aimed at keeping teen girls from having abortions until their parents have been notified.

Holman and his money prevailed last year in a skirmish within the religious pro-life community. He wanted 2005’s initiative, Prop. 73, to include a provision that required doctors to report certain abortion statistics to the state, a mandate the pro-choice crowd considered a scheme to help identify and target clinics. He was also dead-set on a provision that would punish anyone—parents—who “coerce� minors to have abortions with threats of violence or withholding of food or shelter. Holman’s gang includes winemaker and former state Assembly member Don Sebastiani and Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, the Michigan resident who’s trying to build (no lie) a strictly Catholic city in Florida.

:::snip:::

This year, Holman and Co. will use in their campaign a set of covertly recorded phone calls to smear Planned Parenthood as being complicit in pedophilia. As reported by Robert Kumpel in the February edition of San Diego News Notes, a 24-year-old female employee of Life Dynamics, a Texas-based pro-life group, phoned every abortion clinic in the United States back in 2001, posing as a 13-year-old pregnant girl claiming to be in love with her 22-year-old boyfriend who, presumably, got her pregnant. There are 93 such taped conversations with clinic representatives on the Prop. 73 website. Many of the clinic representatives, Kumpel reported, told the young woman that no one had to know about the boyfriend, which, the pro-lifers charge, proves Planned Parenthood aids and abets pedophiles. (Never mind that recording phone calls without the knowledge of all parties is illegal in California.)

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Imagine for a moment that you are a crisis hotline worker. You've just received an anonymous call from someone claiming to be underage, pregnant and the caller just described an incident that you recognize as a clear-cut case of statutory rape. What do you suppose will happen to the conversation after you inform the caller that you're going to have to report her call to the police? Would you do that and then immediately ask her for her name and address and phone number for the report? Do you suppose she would give it to you? Or do you think she might hang up the phone and never call back?

One logical move might be to find out who the caller is and where she lives, or to see if you can get her to pay a visit to your facility, before reporting the event.

But you can be the judge about this issue. Here's the page where Life Dynamics discusses their investigations.

A LIFE DYNAMICS SPECIAL REPORT

I'll see if Artemisia can add a comment about crisis hotline training. She used to be involved in that in relation to physical abuse. I'll see if she can add a comment about her training.

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Here's a story from West Virginia

House refuses to consider abortion bill

Despite a warning from one delegate that their constituents would know how they voted, the House of Delegates overwhelmingly refused to consider legislation Tuesday making it more difficult for a minor to receive an abortion.

Delegate Tom Louisos, D-Fayette, made the motion to discharge the bill (SB656) from the House Judiciary Committee and bring it to the House floor. His motion failed on a 62-37 vote, mostly along party lines.

Louisos told fellow delegates they needed to “know that your constituents will know your vote is not a procedural vote� and instead was a vote to kill the bill. West Virginians for Life, a group that lobbies for tougher abortion laws, has told delegates the bill will count on their legislative scorecard.

:::snip:::

As passed by the Senate, the legislation would take away a physician’s authority to waive parental consent to allow a minor to have the procedure without contacting her parents. Instead, the only recourse for a minor would be to gain the permission of a circuit or family court judge.

Throughout two Democratic caucuses held during the last half of the 60-day legislative session, delegates have said they don’t want the legislation up for passage.

:::snip::::

All 32 House Republicans voted to discharge the bill, while Democratic Delegates Louisos, D-Fayette; Eustace Frederick, D-Mercer; Tim Miley, D-Harrison; Sally Susman, D-Raleigh; and Ken Tucker, D-Marshall, also did.

Congratulations to the Democrats who shot this bill down. Doctors are in a better position than the law in regards to judging their patient's situation. And the Democrats who supported it? Do I love congratulate those anti-choice Democrats?

No.

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A analysis of the effect of parental notification laws, done by the New York Times, was reported on the 6th.

Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents Are Told

For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.

:::snip:::

"It's one of the few areas that the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed states to legislate, so it's become a key for lowering the abortion rate," said Mary Spaulding Balch, director of state legislation for the National Right to Life Committee. Ms. Balch said she believed that consent laws were effective.

Yet the Times analysis of the states that enacted laws from 1995 to 2004 — most of which had low abortion rates to begin with — found no evidence that the laws had a significant impact on the number of minors who got pregnant, or, once pregnant, the number who had abortions.

:::snip:::

Supporters of the laws say they promote better decision-making and reduce teenage abortions; opponents say they chip away at abortion rights and endanger young lives by exposing them to potentially violent reaction from some parents.

But some workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them. And many teenagers say they never considered hiding their pregnancies or abortion plans from their mothers.

The effects of parental notification laws were much in the news this week. A study that focused on the Texas law, passed in 2000, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on the 9th. I blogged about it in a separate piece available here:

Changes in Abortions and Births and the Texas Parental Notification Law

On January 1, 2000, Texas began enforcement of a law that requires physicians to notify a parent of a minor child seeking an abortion at least 48 hours before the procedure.

Today, March 9th, The New England Journal of Medicine is publishing a statistical study entitled Changes in Abortions and Births and the Texas Parental Notification Law by Theodore Joyce, Ph.D., Robert Kaestner, Ph.D., and Silvie Colman, B.B.A. The study concerns itself with analyzing abortion statistical changes due to Texas' recently passed parental notification law.

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Here's an opinion piece by Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America that ran at Tom Paine.

Pro-Family, Pro-Choice, Pro-Women

After all the plotting and planning, the time was thought to be propitious. It was to be the conclusion of a carefully crafted, long-term effort that had been the right’s fundamental ideological objective for decades.

These opponents of reproductive rights were poised to for their grand moment—the evisceration of a woman’s right to privacy and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

2006?

No, 1989.

Republicans held the Senate and the White House. In reviewing Webster, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade . As the Court seemed poised to roll back privacy rights nationwide, anti-choice activists passed measures criminalizing abortion in Louisiana and Utah.

But none of that came to pass, and what had seemed a watershed moment for abortion opponents turned into a key rallying point for the pro-choice community across the country.

I don't know about you, but I pray daily for a strong rally of women in this nation. Without it, I think we're doomed. Get out into the streets and get in your legislator's face on women's freedom issues. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Quit having "areas of discussion" that you put off-limits with those you love out of concern for their sensibilities and correct their well-meaning, but dangerously misinformed opinions. Speak truth to power about women's lives. Act. Withdraw support from all anti-choice politicians regardless of party, Democratic or Republican.

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Here's a reminiscence from Anna Quindlen that ran this past week where she recalls the days before Roe.

Not-so-fond remembrance of things past

In the glow of modern progress, the stories I tell my children about my girlhood sound as ancient as the Parthenon, beginning with my impossible (and improbable) dream of being an altar girl. The classified ads divided by sex, the working women forced out of their jobs by pregnancy, the family businesses passed unthinkingly to sons-in-law while the daughters stood by: The witnesses to those artifacts are going gray and growing old.

One of the most haunting reminders of those bad old days is on my desk, in a book to be published this spring titled "The Girls Who Went Away." I knew instantly who they were: the girls who disappeared, allegedly to visit distant relatives or take summer jobs in faraway beach towns, when they were actually in homes for unwed mothers giving birth and then giving up their children. They came back with dead eyes and bad reputations, even though, like some of those in Ann Fessler's book, they may have gotten pregnant the first time out.

And they came back riddled with pain and rage and an unspeakable sense of loss. "I'd have an abortion any day of the week, before I would ever have another adoption - or lose a kid in the woods - which is basically what it is," recalled one woman bitterly.

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Here's another opinion piece regarding South Dakota's recent legislative assault against women's reproductive freedom.

Abortion as a crime: a nightmare reborn

Laws Like South Dakota's Won't Stop Abortion, But Women Will Be Harmed And Women Will Die

South Dakota just took a huge step backward. The state's new criminal abortion bill is patterned on laws first passed in the 1860s and 1870s -- laws that produced a public-health disaster.

Let's be clear: Making abortion illegal, except when a woman's life is threatened, does not protect women or their lives.

And now, with a Supreme Court remade by a president who is dedicated to overturning Roe vs. Wade, it is a good time to look at the centurylong history of illegal abortion in the United States.

The earlier laws never stopped abortion, but they did make it more dangerous. As police and prosecutors stepped up their enforcement in the 1940s and 1950s, they pushed good, safe abortion providers out of practice. As a result, abortion got more deadly. Many women who went to illegal abortionists were blindfolded and had abortions in secret places. Many survived, but some died and many more were seriously injured.

In the years immediately before Roe vs. Wade, hospitals around the country had separate septic abortion wards for women bleeding, injured and infected because of illegal abortions. Many of these patients had tried to abort by themselves.

Chicago's Cook County Hospital housed almost 5,000 women per year in its septic abortion wards.

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Here's some good news from Michigan

State to give birth control to the poor

Federal officials on Thursday gave Michigan approval to extend family planning services to 200,000 uninsured women, a controversial plan aimed at saving millions of Medicaid dollars.

The plan will use $183 million from Medicaid to provide birth control to women ages 19-44 who cannot afford it. The plan is expected to save at least $80 million a year because of the high costs of caring for low-income women with unplanned pregnancies. The state spends more than $270 million in Medicaid money annually on such pregnancies.

The plan also will feature education and prenatal and postnatal counseling. It will not cover abortion or infertility services.

Of course Michigan isn't immune to the ignorance that often runs rampant in this country, to wit:

"If a woman is uninsured and she can't afford birth control, she shouldn't have sex," said Anthony Berdych, an Armada resident who is Catholic.

It's because of opinions such as these that this matter is considered "controversial" in Michigan. I find it interesting though, that the gentleman referenced in the quote above appears to have no problem with medicare funding spent for the health care of his elderly parents. I hope he never has to hear someone express an opinion such as "well, they just shouldn't have gotten old, the money would be better spent elsewhere".

If you have the time, and the following link is something worth spending time reading, you may learn a little more than you know now about why some individuals have a hard time "imagining the other".

Elaine Scarry on

The Difficulty of Imagining Other People

There's a smallness of spirit in the American national psyche, often fueled by racism, thats a hindrance to this nation. The hindrance is the inability of so many Americans to "walk a mile in someone else's shoes". Sometime I fear that this defect of character will be the death of us all.

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Here's an article on the war going on over abortion. This article though isn't about the war between pro and anti-choice movements. Its about a battle going on within the anti-choice movement about how to proceed.

Abortion foes split on tactics

Here's the question: Is it smarter to try to undo the nationwide legal right to abortion with one sweeping law - a "full-frontal attack" - or via a series of smaller laws that chip away at abortion rights and severely restrict access?

The easy passage last week by the South Dakota legislature of a bill banning nearly all abortions in the state has moved the question to center stage. The bill contains no exceptions for rape or incest; it allows abortion only when it is deemed necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman. Backers of the bill across the country are urging the governor to sign it, thus sending it on a legal journey they hope will eventually reach the US Supreme Court.

...But that gambit could backfire, setting back efforts to overturn the 1973 ruling, Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in all 50 states...

"The only thing that asking for too much, too soon, produces is a further reaffirmation of Casey and Roe," says legal historian David Garrow, referring to a 1992 high-court case that reinforced the core holding of Roe. "As we heard countless times from Alito and Roberts at their [confirmation] hearings, every time a precedent is re-endorsed, it is further strengthened."

:::snip:::

Ultimately, the "chipping away" approach that has been the main strategy of antiabortion forces since the 1980s is likely to remain the movement's major focus.

The Supreme Court announced last week that it will hear a case later this year seeking to uphold a federal ban on what critics call "partial-birth abortion." That ban has a good chance of being upheld, since Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - the swing vote upholding a similar ban in 2000 - has now retired. Her replacement, Justice Alito, is expected to view abortion restrictions more favorably. If upheld, the ban would represent the first outlawing of any abortion procedure since Roe was decided, and could have a chilling effect on doctors' willingness to perform abortions, say supporters of abortion rights.

"What happens in the partial-birth case is vastly more important than anything that could happen in South Dakota," says Mr. Garrow.

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