Safe and Legal in Ireland Abortion Rights Campaign

David McKittrick : article relating to A.B. and C v Ireland from Dec 2009

2010-02-04T07:37:00.000-08:00

The Big Question: After decades of controversy, could abortion become legal in Ireland?

By David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent, The Independent

Friday, 11 December 2009

Why are we asking this now?

This week three women mounted a legal challenge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, arguing that the Irish Republic's strict abortion laws violated their rights. Specifically they claim that they had to go abroad for abortions and in doing so their health was put at risk. They say this amounted to inhumane treatment. Two of the women are Irish while the third is a Lithuanian living in Ireland. One was an unemployed long-term alcoholic who lived beneath the poverty line and was trying to regain custody of her four children when she became pregnant. Another was at risk of an extra-uterine pregnancy while the third was recovering from cancer and feared a relapse. The women are said to have borrowed money from friends and a money-lender to travel abroad for their abortions.

What do the lawyers say?

A statement on their behalf said: "All three women complain that the impossibility for them to have an abortion in Ireland made the procedure unnecessarily expensive, complicated and traumatic. In particular, that restriction stigmatised and humiliated them and risked damaging their health and, in one applicant's case, even her life." Their case is that Irish abortion law breaches several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, including the rights to life, privacy and family life, and further represents discrimination against women.

What do their supporters and opponents say?

The Irish Family Planning Association, which supports the case, declared: "This is hugely significant for reproductive rights in Ireland. The fact that Ireland's draconian laws on abortion have been put under the spotlight is a landmark. They are totally out of step with those of its European neighbours. Women and girls do not give up their human rights when they become pregnant." Pro-life campaigners responded by accusing the Family Planning Association of "creating unnecessary fears about women's health in an attempt to have abortion foisted on Ireland by a European court."

How have the Irish authorities responded?

The Irish government sent a strong legal team to Strasbourg, headed by Attorney-General Paul Gallagher, to contest the women's challenge. He characterised the claim that their health was threatened as "a significant attack" on the Irish health service and the treatment, advice and support it offered, including aftercare and post-abortion counselling.

He asserted that Irish laws – which have forbidden abortion in almost every case for a century and a half – were based on "profound moral values deeply embedded in Irish society." He said anti-abortion legislation had been endorsed in three separate referendums.

Are there any abortions in Ireland at the moment?

They are extremely rare. But each year thousands of Irish women make the journey abroad, mainly to British clinics, to have their pregnancies terminated. Last year at least 4,600 did so, and over the decades an estimated 140,000 have made the trip. A recent Trinity College Dublin study concluded that almost one in 10 Irish pregnancies ends in an English abortion clinic. This cross-channel traffic has long been regarded as a fact of life.

Does this case have global implications?

Yes. Abortion is a highly emotive issue in many countries and in the US, for example, it is a highly important political issue. In some countries, such as Britain, termination is readily available while in others the law allows it in cases such as rape or serious risk to the woman's life or health. European court rulings are not always automatically and fully put into effect but, representing as it does 47 member countries of the Council of Europe, its judgments carry substantial weight.

Why is Ireland so strongly anti-abortion?

It always has been, with the right of the unborn child to life enshrined in the constitution of this overwhelmingly catholic country. Over the years church authority has been in decline, largely because of the child abuse scandals. The emergence of a more secular and cosmopolitan society has brought a marked relaxation in laws and general public acceptance of issues such as divorce, homosexuality, contraception and co-habitation rather than marriage. But abortion has always been regarded as a special case, a fraught issue which has been a particular battlefield between liberals and conservative elements which touches the rawest of nerves.

Why have a referendum?

Making important changes to the anti-abortion measures means changing the constitution, and that means having them approved in a referendum. Recent decades have been littered with bitter abortion controversies and a series of

referendum votes, some of them intensely hard-fought and traumatic. None of the various referendum campaigns was fought on the basis of legalising abortion, instead centring on amendments which made often confusing adjustments to legal wording. As a result the exact status of the law has lacked clarity, although the general sense that the authorities frown on abortion has been clear enough.

Referendums have often served to show the depth and starkness of divisions. One in 2002, which aimed at further tightening the law, was rejected by the narrowest of margins – 50.42 per cent to 49.58 per cent. Outcomes such as this have caused many politicians to steer away from an issue on which no consensus seems possible.

Have cases in the courts had an effect?

Two cases over the years have attracted great attention and caused national soul-searching. In one a 14-year-old girl who had been raped by a neighbour was initally prevented from travelling to England for an abortion. This was overturned. In another a health authority sought to prevent a 17-year-old girl, who was four months pregnant, travelling to England to abort a foetus suffering from a brain condition which meant it could live for only a few days after birth. A court gave her permission to travel.

What happens if the court demands Ireland legalise abortion?

The result could be uproar. Although the Court is entirely separate from the EU, the Irish public has recently shown itself to be in two minds about Europe in general. During a referendum campaign on European issues earlier this year, centring on the Treaty of Lisbon, Irish bishops assured their flock that the Treaty "does not undermine existing legal protections in Ireland for unborn children." But anything that seemed like a directive from another part of Europe on such a contentious issue would create major controversy. Enacting such a directive would presumably involve a referendum, and referendum campaigns are often bitter and divisive.

More to the point, they have often proved unpredictable. Ireland is a country in deep trouble at the moment, struggling to cope with a shocking economic downturn and problems such as the church abuse scandal. Most of its politicians would almost certainly shy away from the abortion issue if they possibly could, preferring to continue with the present approach, even though that would allow drift and confusion to prevail.

Would legalising abortion benefit Ireland?

Yes...

* It would show Ireland as more secular, shrugging off the dominance of the Catholic church

* It would end the trail of pregnant women travelling to England for abortions

* It would de-criminalise abortion, gradually removing the stigma attached to it in Ireland

No...

* Legalising it would probably result in more abortions, putting Ireland out of line with other Catholic countries

* Introducing abortion would fly in the face of more than a decade of Irish tradition and culture

* Legalising it would create yet more division in a country which already has other deep problems

Guardian: Summary of Irish Abortion Legislation Report

2010-02-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

Summary of the Irish abortion legislation report
What Human Rights Watch discovered in its investigations of abortion laws and pro-life groups in Ireland

Alexandra Topping guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 January 2010

The Human Rights Watch report A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland accuses the Irish government of limiting information about how to access abortion services abroad.

According to the report, "rogue" agencies, representing themselves as providers of information about abortion, have told women that, should they choose to have an abortion, their relationships are likely to fail, that they may become infertile or need a hysterectomy, or a colostomy bag after the procedure.

Sinead Ahern from Choice Ireland, a pro-choice group, went undercover to visit an agency. Having told the woman that she was five weeks pregnant, at which point her foetus would have been the size of a grain of rice, she was shown a plastic fetus the size of a pen.

"[The woman] told me that's what my baby looked like … the plastic foetus was sucking its thumb and had eyelashes."

She described being asked to sign a consent form. "It said I understand that I most certainly will need a hysterectomy ... that I might end up with the need for a colostomy bag ... [it said] most women end up with infections, infertile."

Another woman who visited an agency with her boyfriend described being separated from him. "They said I'd probably never have kids [if I had an abortion] that we'd probably split up … They said your family is going to reject you."

A women who contacted a service called British Alternatives in the Golden Pages [the Irish equivalent of the Yellow Pages] was asked from the start of her consultation about adoption.

"I was devastated I was in this situation and I was afraid of getting a doctor who was unsympathetic [...] Nothing tipped me off about whether they were pro-life. I was in a state and just looking for something friendly. British Alternatives sounded very friendly."

France 24: Ireland's Abortion Laws 'Violate Human Rights'

2010-02-04T05:38:00.000-08:00

Dublin 28th January 2010
Click headline above for France 24 film report.

Irish abortion laws 'violate human rights' Human Rights Watch has accused Ireland of violating women's rights with its strict legislation on abortion. Terminating a pregnancy in the Irish Republic is illegal, unless the mother's life is in danger. Punishable by life in prison, the only alternative for Irish women is to travel to Great Britain or the rest of Europe and pay for the operation themselves.

http://www.france24.com/en/20100128-Ireland-accused-of-violating-womens-human-rights

From Irish Central.com: Ireland's War on Women

2010-02-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

You wouldn’t expect a country like Ireland to be accused of breaching human rights. Our little green nation is best known for its rich culture and friendly customs. We’ve never invaded another country or annoyed anyone too much.

But on Thursday the respected international advocacy group Human Rights Watch published a report saying Ireland deprives many of its citizens of their basic entitlements.

The report is called “A State of Isolation.” It tells how the government blocks the way of women who look for information on abortion or seek care abroad.

Marianne Mollmann, women's rights advocacy director at HRW, said such women “are actively stonewalled, stigmatized, and written out."

Today in Ireland, abortion is allowed if a woman’s life is at risk. But otherwise a woman who has one potentially faces a life term – yes, life – in prison.

It’s a good time to recall that the Irish government has not yet agreed to compensate the women who spent decades, some of them a lifetime, imprisoned in the Magdalene Laundries, often for crimes that included getting pregnant or giving birth.

Not that government policy has prevented terminations. Every year thousands of women and girls (7,000 by one estimate) travel from Ireland to other European countries in order to end their pregnancies. Officials may have tried to stop abortion, but all that has happened is that the country has inadvertently outsourced it.

In this sense Irish women have been lucky. The price of a botched backstreet abortion is high: in the developing world 68,000 women die of complications every year, according to a BBC report.

The European Court of Human Rights is currently considering the case of three Irish women who argue their rights were denied because they were forced to abort outside their home state: one was a former substance abuser whose other children were in care; one wished to avoid an ectopic pregnancy (where the fetus develops outside the womb); the third became pregnant while undergoing chemotherapy and feared for her own well-being, as well as the child’s.

This decade has seen a plague of problems afflict Ireland: sex abuse revelations in the Catholic Church, political corruption, and more recently, an economic crisis, the housing boom and bust, and some environmental issues too. Many real crimes have occurred and gone unpunished.

The phrase “war on women” gained currency to refer to the experiences of women living in places far away from Ireland. But Ireland should take heed. It’s time to give women a choice in this vital matter. This is 2010, not 1950.

IFPA Welcomes International Scrutiny of Ireland's Restrictive Abortion Laws By Human Rights Watch

2010-02-04T05:32:00.000-08:00

The Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) has today (28.01.10) welcomed the publication of the Human Rights Watch report A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland.

The IFPA is not surprised that the Irish Government has been criticised by this important international human rights group. As a service provider IFPA has extensive knowledge of the extreme physical, financial and emotional hardship experienced by women who are forced to travel abroad for health care that should be available to them at home.
According to the IFPA, the criminalisation of abortion in Ireland violates international human rights standards because it disproportionately harms women's health and well-being. The organisation believes that women and girls do not give up their human rights when they become pregnant nor should the State take these human rights away with impunity.
The experiences of women outlined in the Human Rights Watch report are illustrative of the reality faced by thousands of women in Ireland. Since 1980, at least 138,000 women have been forced to travel abroad to access safe and legal abortion services. The IFPA believes that the criminalisation of abortion has little impact on abortion rates, it merely adds to the burden and stress experienced by women experiencing crisis pregnancies.
Ireland’s restrictive laws on abortion are out of step with those of its European neighbours. Forty four out of 47 European countries provide for abortion to protect women’s health.
This is the second time in the last two months that Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws have been scrutinised by international human rights bodies. In December the European Court of Human Rights heard a challenge to Ireland’s abortion laws.
According to the IFPA, Ireland has a strong reputation for promoting human rights values around the world, yet it is unwilling to recognise the human rights of women in its own country. Ireland’s restrictions on abortion put it firmly outside of human rights norms.
The IFPA has called on the Government to take responsibility and stop exiling women experiencing crisis pregnancies.

ENDS

About IFPA:
The Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) has been to the fore in setting the agenda for sexual and reproductive rights in Ireland for the last 40 years.
The IFPA offers a comprehensive range of services which promote sexual health and support reproductive choice on a not-for-profit basis, including clinical and counselling services, sexual and reproductive health information, education, training and awareness raising.

Guardian: Ireland Accused Of Exposing Women To Anti-Abortion Lies

2010-02-04T05:30:00.000-08:00

Ireland accused of exposing women to anti-abortion liesHuman rights group says women seeking information about terminations are told they will often cause irreparable damage

Alexandra Topping guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 January 2010

The Irish government came under increasing pressure to overhaul its ban on abortion today, after it was accused of exposing women to "grossly misleading" information about the procedure.

According to Human Rights Watch, Irish legislation – under which women who have an abortion in Ireland face a life sentence in prison if prosecuted – is putting women's health at risk and exposing them to deliberate misinformation from rogue pro-life agencies.

Women have been told they may become infertile, require a hysterectomy or possibly need a colostomy bag after an abortion by agencies that target women seeking advice about unwanted pregnancies, says the report.

It comes as Ireland waits for a landmark ruling from the European court of human rights on the case of three women who accuse the government of putting their health at risk by forcing them to travel abroad for terminations.

"Women in need of abortion services should, as a matter of international law and human decency, be able to count on support from their government as they face a difficult situation," said Marianne Mollmann, the women's rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. "But in Ireland they are actively stonewalled, stigmatised, and written out."

According to the report, the government limits information about legal abortion services and has failed to crack down on false claims from "rogue" agencies masquerading as unwanted pregnancy support groups.

One 29-year-old woman was shown a video of ultrasound images and pictures of mothers by an agency called "British Alternatives".

"[The woman] put a model of a small foetus in my hand ... told me to name my baby, asked me how I would feel if I killed the baby," she said.

Another woman described being harassed over the phone by a pro-life agency for weeks: "They would ask 'Is your baby still alive? Have you killed it yet?'."

The Irish government recently launched a campaign urging women who feel that have been given false information about abortions to inform the authorities, but this assumes that women have access to the correct information, said Mollmann.

"This is abdicating their responsibility and putting it on the shoulders of already distressed women. The government needs to take decisive action to shut down and prosecute these rogue agencies," she said.

It is currently illegal to have an abortion in Ireland under any circumstances, unless the life of the pregnant woman is at risk, although women have the legal right to terminate their pregnancy abroad.

According to UK Department of Health figures, 4,600 women who had abortions in the UK in 2008 gave Irish addresses, but the real number of Irish women having terminations is likely to be significantly higher, said Mollmann.

"This law does not stop women getting abortions but it does prevent them getting one in a timely manner, which increases the risk involved," she said.

The difficult economic situation in Ireland is making it increasingly difficult for some women to meet the cost of an abortion, estimated by HRW at between €800 and €1000 (£690 and £862) for the procedure and travel costs, said Niall Behan, CEO of the Irish Family Planning Association.

"We are increasingly seeing women who can't travel being forced to look at other options that are not safe. There is evidence to suggest that women are having illegal abortions, not on a huge scale, but on any scale is unacceptable," he said.

The Pro-Life Campaign in Ireland has previously accused the IFPA of creating unnecessary fears about women's health and argues that Ireland without abortion is the safest country in the world in which to be pregnant.

In the case currently before the European court , three women, known as A, B and C, are arguing their right to privacy and family life have been violated.

One of the women who had a termination became pregnant while undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer and feared for her health and that of her child. Another is a former alcoholic and drug addict whose four children were in care. She feared her pregnancy would prevent her getting her children back, and borrowed cash from a money lender to finance the termination. A judgment is expected in the autumn.

'I was very angry. I felt let down, maltreated'

2010-02-04T05:28:00.000-08:00

‘I was very angry. I felt let down, maltreated’
By Evelyn Ring The Irish Examiner

Friday, January 29, 2010

NONE of the 13 women interviewed by Human Rights Watch wanted to be identified, even though all had told friends and family about the abortion and had received support and understanding.

The women interviewed described feelings of isolation and shame, and their fear of public disapproval.

Sarah B talked of the "shame factor" and being "terrified of people judging me". She also spoke of her anger at being made to feel like a criminal by her country.

Aisling J had an abortion abroad after a scan conducted in another European country showed that the foetus she was carrying had spina bifida and hydrocephalus and could not survive.

She recounted several obstacles she experienced accessing diagnostic tests in Ireland during the early stage of her pregnancy .

"I was very angry. I felt let down, maltreated," she said.

Siobhán G was pregnant with twins when she discovered that both had fatal birth defects.

"I was forced to leave home and do everything in secrecy... I was made to feel that I was doing something wrong."

Mary H ended her pregnancy in Britain after antenatal tests showed that the foetus had Edwards syndrome, which leads to severe physical and mental disabilities.

"I was all over the place... Then (after an initial visit to an Irish clinic) I was on my own. I had to contact the place, make my own travel arrangements, hotel arrangements."

Aoife C, who is from a rural part of Ireland, was almost 28 weeks’ pregnant when she finally had an abortion in Britain and blamed a lack of information for having the termination so late in her pregnancy.

"Information wasn’t easily available... it was really hard to make the right connections," she said.

All the women interviewed for the report said costs associated with travelling was their most immediate and urgent concern once they had decided to have an abortion.

Sarah B went to Britain for an abortion when she was a student and part-time waitress. "First and foremost was the money thing, I was so broke, I was up to my eyeballs in debt."

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, January 29, 2010

Read more: http://www.examiner.ie/ireland/i-was-very-angry-i-felt-let-down-maltreated-110783.html#ixzz0eZcnnNkN

Human Rights Group Attacks State Policy on Abortion

2010-02-04T05:26:00.000-08:00

Human rights group attacks state policy on abortion
By Evelyn Ring The Irish Examiner

Friday, January 29, 2010

WOMEN entitled to a legal abortion in Ireland cannot get one because of deliberately obscure anti-abortion policies, a leading human rights organisation has claimed.

Human Rights Watch has accused the Government of actively seeking to restrict access to abortion services and information, both within Ireland and for residents seeking care abroad.

In particular, it has criticised the lack of legal and policy guidance on when an abortion might be legally performed within Ireland.

"The Irish Government has failed utterly to ensure that health services are available to those women who are legally entitled to an abortion," claims a report by the independent body.

It says some doctors in Ireland are reluctant even to provide pre-natal screening for severe foetal abnormalities and very few, if any, women, have access to legal abortions at home.

Marianne Mollmann, women’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said women in need of abortion services should be able to count on support from their government as they face a difficult situation.

"But in Ireland they are actively stonewalled, stigmatised and written out," Ms Mollmann said at the launch of a 57-paper report, entitled A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland, in Dublin yesterday.

"Irish law on abortion is in and of itself an affront to human rights. But it is made worse by the fact that even those who may qualify for a legal abortion in Ireland cannot get one due to deliberately murky policies that carry an implied threat of prosecution."

Ms Mollmann said women should have publicly available information on how to seek abortion services abroad and there should be medical guidelines for the kind of abortions that are currently legal within Ireland.

"Your newspaper (Irish Examiner) just published a survey saying that over 60% of young adults agree that abortion should be legalised. So it is a little bit of a myth that the Irish population believes that abortion should be a criminal offence."

Rosie Toner, crisis pregnancy counsellor with the Irish Family Planning Association, said the report illustrated the reality faced by thousands of Irish women. Since 1980, over 140,000 women have been forced to travel abroad for an abortion, she pointed out.

"Women are put under severe burdens of distress to try and find medical services in other countries to give them a service they believe should be available to them here in Ireland," said Ms Toner.

The IFPA had been advocating for safe and legal abortion in Ireland over the last two decades.

The Cork Women’s Right to Choose Group said the report and three cases taken by Irish women to the European Court of Human rights demonstrate that successive governments had been blind to women’s needs.

"Making abortion illegal does not stop it happening, it simply makes it more stressful and dangerous," said spokesperson Dr Sandra McAvoy.

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, January 29, 2010

more info »

Read more: http://www.examiner.ie/ireland/human-rights-group-attacks-state-policy-on-abortion-110782.html#ixzz0eZcEavOL

In Their Own Words Women Who Travelled Abroad for Abortions

2010-02-04T05:23:00.000-08:00

In their own words women who travelled abroad for abortions
Irish Times Friday January 29th 2010

“I was forced to leave home and do everything in secrecy . . . I was made to feel that I was doing something wrong.” Siobhán G was pregnant with twins when she discovered that both had fatal birth defects.

“When I came back, I rang the hospital and asked for follow-up care . . . I told them that I had a therapeutic abortion and asked about genetic testing. They just said to me, come back when you’re pregnant again.” Aisling J encountered problems in accessing diagnostic tests during her pregnancy and discovered late that her foetus had spina bifida. She had no access to follow-up care

“I think they weren’t used to girls coming with their boyfriends, so they separated us. One person spoke to each of us . . . from what I remember, they said we’d probably split up . . . they said your family is going to reject you.” Jane H was misled by an advertisement by a rogue crisis pregnancy agency

Source: Human Rights Watch

Irish Times: State's Erratic Response to Abortion Creating 'Climate of Shame' - report

2010-02-04T05:20:00.000-08:00

State's erratic response to abortion creating 'climate of shame' - report
JAMIE SMYTH Social Affairs Correspondent The Irish Times January 29th 2010

THE GOVERNMENT’S erratic and divisive response to the abortion issue has contributed directly to the violation of women’s human rights and increased risks to their health, a human rights watchdog has claimed in a new report.

Human Rights Watch also accused the State yesterday of creating a “climate of fear and shame” that has deepened the emotional trauma and despair felt by tens of thousands of Irish women with crisis pregnancies.

A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland calls for the immediate decriminalisation of abortion for women and the development of a new national regulatory framework to guarantee access to legal abortion.

“Women in need of abortion services should, as a matter of international law and, frankly, human decency, be able to count on support from their government as they face a difficult situation. But in Ireland they are actively stonewalled, stigmatised and written out,” said Marianne Mollmann, women’s advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

She said the Government “actively sabotaged women’s health” by not allowing women to access abortion services in the Republic and aggressively discouraging them from seeking the care they need abroad.

“The Irish Government is complicit in the distress they feel. In other words, the Government contributes directly to undermining women’s health dignity and human rights,” said Ms Mollmann, who added that preventing women from having abortions in a timely manner could have a detrimental effect on their health.

Human Rights Watch said it sought interviews with senior people in Government about the report but these were refused.

A letter sent by the secretary general of the Department of Justice Sean Aylward to Human Rights Watch while compiling its report suggested there would be no change in policy on abortion.

“Ireland has held five separate referenda on three separate occasions on this issue. I am not aware of any proposal to put this issue before the people again,” wrote Mr Aylward in a handwritten addition to a standard reply letter.

The Human Rights Watch report called on the Government to ensure “truthful and objective” information on abortion is available to all women and to take action against “rogue” agencies that disseminate misleading information to pregnant women.

The report was compiled following interviews with 13 Irish women who had abortions abroad. One woman described how she attended a crisis pregnancy agency called British Alternatives, which had been advertised in the Golden Pages. She said the agency first asked about the possibility of adoption and then left her to watch a video of an ultrasound of a baby. She was then asked how she would feel if she “killed the baby”.

Anti-abortion campaigners said the claims made by Human Rights Watch were ridiculous. “Seeking to protect both mother and baby during pregnancy is not a violation of any human right. In fact it is the complete opposite,” said Dr Ruth Cullen of the Pro-Life Campaign. “Human Rights Watch cannot credibly claim to be a human rights organisation while at the same time denying the rights of unborn children throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy.”

Human Rights Watch: Ireland: Abortion Limits Violate Human Rights

2010-02-04T05:15:00.000-08:00

Ireland: Abortion Limits Violate Human Rights
Policies Designed to Sabotage Access Both at Home and Abroad
January 28, 2010

A State of Isolation.

'Women in need of abortion services should, as a matter of international law and – frankly - human decency, be able to count on support from their government as they face a difficult situation. But in Ireland they are actively stonewalled, stigmatized, and written out.
.Marianne Mollmann, women’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch .

(Dublin, January 28, 2010) - The Irish government actively seeks to restrict access to abortion services and information both within Ireland and for its residents seeking care abroad, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 57-page report, "A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland," details how women struggle to overcome the financial, logistical, physical, and emotional burdens imposed by restrictive laws and policies that force them to seek care abroad, without support from the state. Every year thousands of women and girls travel from Ireland to other European countries for abortions.

"Women in need of abortion services should, as a matter of international law and - frankly -human decency, be able to count on support from their government as they face a difficult situation," said Marianne Mollmann, women's rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. "But in Ireland they are actively stonewalled, stigmatized, and written out."

In Ireland, abortion is legally restricted in almost all circumstances, with potential penalties of penal servitude for life for both patients and service providers, except where the pregnant woman's life is in danger, but there is little legal and policy guidance on when, specifically, an abortion might be legally performed within Ireland. As a result, some doctors are reluctant even to provide pre-natal screening for severe fetal abnormalities, and very few - if any - women have access to legal abortions at home. The government has indicated that it has no current plans to clarify the possible reach of the criminal penalties. The government does not keep figures on legal and illegal abortions carried out in Ireland, or on the number of women traveling abroad for services.

"Irish law on abortion is in and of itself an affront to human rights," Mollmann said. "But it is made worse by the fact that even those who may qualify for a legal abortion in Ireland cannot get one due to deliberately murky policies that carry an implied threat of prosecution."

But women also face more active sabotaging of their health decisions by the state. Throughout the last two decades, the Irish government has used injunctions to prevent individuals from traveling abroad for abortion. As recently as 2007, a 17-year-old girl in the custody of the Health Services Executive had to go to court to get permission to travel to the United Kingdom for an abortion.
Organizations that provide information on how to access abortion services abroad face restrictions on when and how this information can legally be conveyed, under threat of penalties. And the government does nothing to prevent "rogue" agencies that represent themselves as providers of information about abortion from circulating blatantly misleading and false information.

"Women should not have to make decisions about their health and lives based on lies," Mollmann said. "Yet the law leaves ‘rogue' agencies unregulated and threatens honest service providers with fines or worse if they help a distressed woman make a phone call to a clinic abroad."

Maman Poulet Blog: Human Rights Watch Launch Report on Abortion and Ireland

2010-02-04T05:05:00.000-08:00

Posted by Maman Poulet on 28 Jan 2010 at 11:00 am | Tagged as: Abortion

'The Irish government should take all necessary steps, both immediate and incremental, to ensure that women have informed and un-coerced access to safe and legal abortion services within Ireland as an element of women’s exercise of their reproductive and other human rights. In the interim, the government should immediately ensure that those abortion services that are currently legal under Irish law be provided to all who need them without discrimination, and that full and accurate information on how to obtain safe abortions both within Ireland and outside its borders be available to all women, without discrimination.'

Human Rights Watch (HRW) have today released their report A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland on the human rights implications of Irish legislation and policies regarding residents access to abortion. The report highlights international law and treaties and how they detail that people should be free from Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and how Ireland’s treatment of pregnant women seeking abortions contravenes this and other rights.

It details the situation facing women seeking access to legal abortion with no clear policy in place enabling these to take place. HRW chronicle the reluctance of the Department of Health, the medical council and many members of the medical profession in becoming involved in forming policy in the area though attitudes towards the women involved are changing.

Women seeking information on abortion are still at risk of receiving information from agencies (state funded) who do not support a woman’s right to choose or receive impartial information or indeed rogue agencies who are allowed to exist unregulated targeting women. (See earlier post on the actions of the state in trying to make women feel guilty about attending rogue agencies)

Women travelling outside the state wishing to access a termination continue to face many barriers in organising travel.

Quote from Report:
'The women interviewed by Human Rights Watch described a climate of fear and shame, at least in part attributable to the criminalization of abortion. They explained their concerns about disclosing that they had had an abortion and the burden of secrecy that they are forced to carry. They also described their confusion about whether they could legally leave Ireland to access an abortion in the UK or other parts of Europe, and their concerns about whether to access post-abortion care, legally available in Ireland.

They also described financial constraints. Every woman interviewed for this report told Human Rights Watch how difficult it was to raise the money needed to pay for travel and the costs of the abortion. Even those who were employed indicated that the costs related to traveling created a significant barrier and delayed their access.'

Asylum seekers face financial and freedom of movment barriers in accessing abortions abroad.

Quote from Report:
'Asylum seekers are in a particularly vulnerable position. Often isolated, without family and other social support, they fear the consequences of seeking permission to leave the country to have an abortion. They also face additional costs as they have no travel documents, and must therefore apply and pay for emergency temporary travel documents, which are issued by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. They will also have to apply and pay for visas to enter the UK, or Schengen visas to enter into a European Union (EU) country. Currently the cost of a UK visa is £65 (€72).[105] Application fees for a Schengen visa to the Netherlands cost £60 (€67).[106]

A service provider, who spoke to Human Rights Watch on condition of anonymity, described the situation of a young female asylum seeker she had worked with:

She could not legally leave the country. Her difficulties were that she didn’t know where to go … money and her legal status. We made the call to Holland … she needed to get a re-entry visa to return and to apply for a Schengen visa…. She needed a temporary travel document from the Department of Justice—we had a contact there—not sure how someone without a contact would do this…. It took a whole month to organize this. She was just over 12 weeks pregnant when she went to Holland. There were fees attached to the issuing of all the documents and there was no funding available for this.[107]'

These issues and recommendations may not be news to many of us, though we often forget about them or have decided that nothing can be done. But it is the first time in some years that all the issues affecting the human rights of women in trying to access information and services inside and outside the state have been researched and documented in one place.

The Department of Justice by the way don’t think that there is a problem regarding the issue in Ireland and refused to be interviewed by Human Rights Watch and said they had no intentions of doing anything on the matter.

I expect many of the agencies cited to come out denying that there is anything amiss in the country while women silently organise to travel or indeed as one person mentions in the report go through ‘desperate pregnancies’.

Comment related to launch of Human Rights Watch report

2010-01-28T08:03:00.000-08:00

Irishhealth.com

• Irish abortion laws criticised

Deborah Condon

The Irish Government has been severely criticised for its restrictive abortion laws.

According to a new report by the international organisation, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Government ‘actively seeks to restrict access to abortion services and information both within Ireland and for its residents seeking care abroad’.

"Women in need of abortion services should, as a matter of international law and frankly, human decency, be able to count on support from their government as they face a difficult situation. But in Ireland they are actively stonewalled, stigmatised, and written out," said Marianne Mollmann, HRW’s women's rights advocacy director.

The 57-page report, A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland, details how women struggle to overcome the financial, logistical, physical and emotional burdens imposed by Irish abortion laws and policies, which force them to seek care abroad without support from the state.

The report notes that in Ireland, abortion is legally restricted in almost all circumstances, with potential penalties of penal servitude for life for both patients and service providers, except where the pregnant woman's life is in danger. However there is little legal and policy guidance on when, specifically, an abortion might be legally performed within Ireland.

As a result, some doctors are reluctant even to provide pre-natal screening for severe foetal abnormalities, and very few, if any, women have access to legal abortions at home.

The report points out that the Government has indicated that it has no current plans to clarify the possible reach of related criminal penalties and that it does not keep figures on legal and illegal abortions carried out in Ireland, or on the number of women travelling abroad for services.

"Irish law on abortion is in and of itself an affront to human rights. But it is made worse by the fact that even those who may qualify for a legal abortion in Ireland cannot get one due to deliberately murky policies that carry an implied threat of prosecution,” Ms Mollman said.

According to the report, women also face ‘active sabotaging’ of their health decisions by the state. It notes that throughout the last two decades, the Government has used injunctions to prevent individuals from travelling abroad for abortion. As recently as 2007, a 17-year-old girl in the custody of the HSE had to go to court to get permission to travel to the UK for an abortion.

Meanwhile, organisations that provide information on how to access abortion services abroad face restrictions on when and how this information can legally be conveyed under threat of penalties. The Government also does nothing to prevent ‘rogue’ agencies that represent themselves as providers of information about abortion from circulating ‘blatantly misleading and false’ information.

"Women should not have to make decisions about their health and lives based on lies. Yet the law leaves ‘rogue' agencies unregulated and threatens honest service providers with fines or worse if they help a distressed woman make a phone call to a clinic abroad,” Ms Mollman added.

The report has been welcomed by the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA). It said it is ‘not surprised’ that the Government has been criticised by HRW.

“Since 1980, at least 138,000 women have been forced to travel abroad to access safe and legal abortion services. We believe that the criminalisation of abortion has little impact on abortion rates, it merely adds to the burden and stress experienced by women having crisis pregnancies,” the organisation said.

The report was also welcomed by the Marie Stopes Reproductive Choices clinic, which provides women with information on abortion, contraception and sexual health.

“The Government’s approach to abortion is restrictive and archaic and a violation of women’s basic right to health and information. Women facing an unwanted pregnancy are in desperate need of non-judgemental, accurate information and support to allow them to make the right choice for their individual circumstances,” said Gabrielle Malone, Programme Director with the clinic.

Mamanpoulet.com

• Human Rights Watch launch report on Abortion and Ireland

Human Rights Watch (HRW) have today released their report A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland on the human rights implications of Irish legislation and policies regarding residents access to abortion. The report highlights international law and treaties and how they detail that people should be free from Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and how Ireland’s treatment of pregnant women seeking abortions contravenes this and other rights.
It details the situation facing women seeking access to legal abortion with no clear policy in place enabling these to take place. HRW chronicle the reluctance of the Department of Health, the medical council and many members of the medical profession in becoming involved in forming policy in the area though attitudes towards the women involved are changing.

Women seeking information on abortion are still at risk of receiving information from agencies (state funded) who do not support a woman’s right to choose or receive impartial information or indeed rogue agencies who are allowed to exist unregulated targeting women. (See earlier post on the actions of the state in trying to make women feel guilty about attending rogue agencies)

Women travelling outside the state wishing to access a termination continue to face many barriers in organising travel.
The women interviewed by Human Rights Watch described a climate of fear and shame, at least in part attributable to the criminalization of abortion. They explained their concerns about disclosing that they had had an abortion and the burden of secrecy that they are forced to carry. They also described their confusion about whether they could legally leave Ireland to access an abortion in the UK or other parts of Europe, and their concerns about whether to access post-abortion care, legally available in Ireland.

They also described financial constraints. Every woman interviewed for this report told Human Rights Watch how difficult it was to raise the money needed to pay for travel and the costs of the abortion. Even those who were employed indicated that the costs related to traveling created a significant barrier and delayed their access.

Asylum seekers face financial and freedom of movment barriers in accessing abortions abroad.
Asylum seekers are in a particularly vulnerable position. Often isolated, without family and other social support, they fear the consequences of seeking permission to leave the country to have an abortion. They also face additional costs as they have no travel documents, and must therefore apply and pay for emergency temporary travel documents, which are issued by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. They will also have to apply and pay for visas to enter the UK, or Schengen visas to enter into a European Union (EU) country. Currently the cost of a UK visa is £65 (€72).[105] Application fees for a Schengen visa to the Netherlands cost £60 (€67).[106]

A service provider, who spoke to Human Rights Watch on condition of anonymity, described the situation of a young female asylum seeker she had worked with:
She could not legally leave the country. Her difficulties were that she didn’t know where to go … money and her legal status. We made the call to Holland … she needed to get a re-entry visa to return and to apply for a Schengen visa…. She needed a temporary travel document from the Department of Justice—we had a contact there—not sure how someone without a contact would do this…. It took a whole month to organize this. She was just over 12 weeks pregnant when she went to Holland. There were fees attached to the issuing of all the documents and there was no funding available for this.[107]

These issues and recommendations may not be news to many of us, though we often forget about them or have decided that nothing can be done. But it is the first time in some years that all the issues affecting the human rights of women in trying to access information and services inside and outside the state have been researched and documented in one place.

The Department of Justice by the way don’t think that there is a problem regarding the issue in Ireland and refused to be interviewed by Human Rights Watch and said they had no intentions of doing anything on the matter.

I expect many of the agencies cited to come out denying that there is anything amiss in the country while women silently organise to travel or indeed as one person mentions in the report go through ‘desperate pregnancies’.

Human Rights Watch report launched in Dublin

2010-01-28T03:23:00.000-08:00

Human Rights Watch have just launched a report in Dublin 'A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland'

Check women's rights section of www.hrw.org.

Will post link up later.

Irish Examiner: 60% In Favour of Legal Abortion

2010-01-26T04:25:00.000-08:00

Irish Examiner January 21 2010

Survey: 60% in favour of legal abortion
By Catherine Shanahan and Orla Barry

Thursday, January 21, 2010

THREE-in-five 18-35 year olds believe abortion should be legalised, according to a sex survey which found one-in-four women has experienced an unplanned pregnancy.

The national poll also found almost 10% of 18-34 year olds has been involved in a relationship where an abortion took place.

The survey carried out by Red C on behalf of the Irish Examiner found three-in-four women believe the morning-after pill should be available over-the-counter (OTC). Curiously, less than one in seven men said they had been in a relationship that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. But Dr Stephanie O’Keeffe, research and policy manager with the HSE Crisis Pregnancy Programme, said not all men may know their partner is pregnant.

According to the Irish Family Planning Agency (IFPA), the cost of accessing the morning-after pill has been an increasing cause of complaint, particularly in the last 12 months.

CEO Niall Behan said they had also seen a fall in the numbers seeking long-term contraceptive methods because of prohibitive costs. The morning-after pill is inexpensive but a GP prescription is required.

Dr Mel Bates, spokesperson for the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP), does not believe that free GP visits for the morning-after pill would work. "The woman will come in for the pill, but we may deal with many other issues. How would you decide who to charge and who not to charge?" he said.

Kerry-based GP Dr Eamonn Shanahan said he used the opportunity to "talk to her about why she found herself in this predicament and what her plans are for her sexual health in the future".

Family planning clinics, the Wellwoman Centre and the HSE Crisis Pregnancy Programme are all in disagreement with doctors over fears about abuse of emergency contraception if it was available OTC.

Dr O’Keeffe said a number of studies had concluded that the pill does not impact on a woman’s primary use of contraception.

The recession may also be impacting on the numbers becoming pregnant. Women in their late 20s and 30s attending Dublin’s Wellwoman Centre on discovery that they are pregnant are less distressed than during the healthy economic times. The clinic believes women see the recession as a good time to have a baby.

"I noticed the change about a year and a half ago" said Dr Shirley McQuade, the centre’s medical director.

"Women in long-term relationships with mid-range jobs were saying this might not be the worst time to be pregnant. Most are working shorter weeks and they don’t see themselves in line for a bonus anytime soon."

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Thursday, January 21, 2010

Read more: http://www.irishexaminer.com/archives/2010/0121/ireland/survey-60-in-favour-of-legal-abortion-110224.html#ixzz0dikMjuwQ

Spanish Lawmakers Vote To Ease Abortion Law

2009-12-21T03:55:00.000-08:00

Spanish lawmakers vote to ease abortion law
Associated Press

Lawmakers voted to ease Spain's abortion law Thursday, approving a bill to allow the procedure without restrictions up to 14 weeks. The change would bring this traditionally Roman Catholic country in line with its more secular neighbors in northern Europe.
The measure now goes to the Senate, where passage is expected some time early next year.

Abortion reform was the last major pending issue in a bold reform agenda undertaken by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, a Socialist who took power in 2004.
Under Zapatero, Spain has also legalized gay marriage and made it easier for Spaniards to divorce in a drive that has infuriated conservatives and the Roman Catholic Church.

The vote in the 350-seat Congress of Deputies was 184-158 with one abstention.
Under the current law, which dates back to 1985, Spanish women could in theory go to jail for getting an abortion outside certain strict limits - up to week 12 in case of rape and week 22 if the fetus is malformed.

But abortion is in effect widely available because women can assert mental distress as sole grounds for having an abortion, regardless of how late the pregnancy is. Most of the more than 100,000 abortions carried out each year in Spain were early-term ones that fell under this category.
The bill approved Thursday wipes away the threat of imprisonment and declares abortion to be a woman's right.
"We are legislating women's right to decide whether to be mothers," said Carmen Monton, the Socialists' spokeswoman on gender issues.

Conservative Popular Party spokesman Santiago Cervera insisted there was no clamor in Spanish society for changing the existing law and the government instigated it just to raise a stir and distract people's attention away from the country's economic recession.
Anti-abortion demonstrators wearing sandwich boards rallied outside the legislature during debate on the bill. One of the boards showed a picture of a child with Downs syndrome asking Zapatero "why are you letting them kill me?"

The new bill would also also allow 16- and 17-year-olds to have abortions without parental consent, as is the case in other European countries such as Germany, Britain and France.
This clause proved to be among the bill's most controversial ones.

In the end, the ruling Socialist party agreed to amend it so that such minors must inform their parents or legal guardian if they plan to undergo an abortion - although still with no need for their permission - except if they can show that doing so would expose them to violence within their family, threats or coercion.

The Spanish Bishops' Conference warned last month that legislators who voted in favor of the bill would be sinning and no longer eligible to receive Communion. This was particularly touchy for parliamentary speaker Jose Bono, a Socialist who is a practicing Catholic. Bono responded saying "My conscience is clear".

In October, a rally against the reform bill drew hundreds of thousands of people to Madrid. This showed that for all the changes Zapatero has introduced, abortion remains sensitive in a country where most people call themselves Catholic, even if few churches are full on Sundays.

The new bill, besides allowing unrestricted abortion up to 14 weeks, would permit it up to 22 weeks if two doctors certify there is a serious threat to the health of the mother, or fetal malformation.

Beyond 22 weeks, it would be allowed only doctors certify fetal malformation deemed incompatible with life or the fetus were diagnosed with an extremely serious or incurable disease.

Source: Associated Press, 17 December 2009

Doctors Fear Abortion Charge If They Direct Patients Abroad

2009-12-14T08:19:00.001-08:00

Irish Independent Monday 14th December 2009

Doctors fear abortion charge if they direct patients abroad

Dearbhail McDonald Legal Editor

DOCTORS treating pregnant women whose unborn babies have serious foetal abnormalities are afraid to refer them to expert facilities abroad because of fears of being accused of procuring an abortion.

Professor John Bonnar, the former chairman of the institute of obstetrics and gynaecology, said that Irish-based doctors were afraid that if they referred a patient to a foreign facility, they would be arrested and brought before the courts.
"It (a criminal prosecution) is not going to happen," Professor Bonnar told the Irish Independent.

"But doctors are reluctant, they are wary in case they have gardai arriving at their door. There is a fear that if you refer your patient to an expert foetal clinic or hospital and she ultimately decides to discontinue her pregnancy, you will stand accused of being involved in an unlawful abortion."

The debate around the status of legal abortion in Ireland has been revived in the wake of a landmark legal action earlier this week in the European Court of Human Rights where the Government robustly defended Ireland's restrictive abortion regime.
Three women, known as A, B and C, told a 17 judge Grand Chamber -- which is convened in cases of major importance -- that their health and human rights were violated because they had to travel to Britain to terminate their pregnancies.

The ECHR asked the Irish Government to provide statistics or information as to how many lawful abortions were carried out every year in Ireland.
In response, the State supplied a list of figures for women discharged with a diagnosis of ectopic pregnancies between 2005 and 2008, but could not state how many women had miscarried naturally or required a termination.

No figures were provided for women forced to undergo a radical hysterectomy -- the removal of her uterus and cervix -- to save her life.
During the hearing, lawyers for the State argued that there was a "clear and bright blue line" in Irish law that was known and applied where there was a risk to the life of the mother.

But that view has been rejected by the Irish Family Planning Association which supported the three women in the action.
"While abortion is technically legal in Ireland when a woman's life is at risk, there are no legal or clinical guidelines to assist doctors in assess whether a particular risk qualifies as a risk to life," said an IFPA spokesperson.

"The Government makes no provision to protect a woman's health and well-being.
"Asking a doctor to distinguish between a threat to a woman's life and a threat to her health in medical practice is unworkable.
"Moreover, forcing a woman to endure a progressive and increasingly dangerous condition before she is deemed eligible for a legal abortion is both impractical and inhumane."

Prof Bonnar, who has carried out up to five terminations throughout his medical career to save the life of a pregnant woman, said doctors had nothing to fear if they intervened to save a mother's life.
But he said that advances in medical technology, which have resulted in pregnant women seeking pre-natal tests to ascertain if their unborn child had any abnormalities, had placed doctors in a difficult position as they were ethically obliged to provide vital after-care and support should a woman abort her foetus.
"If a woman has a radical hysterectomy to save her life resulting in the termination of her pregnancy, it is not an abortion as the surgical procedure would be carried out whether she was pregnant or not," said Prof Bonnar who has called on fellow doctors to "speak out" on medical practice surrounding lawful abortions in this country.

Why TDs Harbour Secret Hopes Over Abortion Challenge

2009-12-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

Sunday Times 13th December 2009

Why TDs harbour secret hopes over abortion challenge

Liam Fay

Hands Off Ireland! was the slogan on placards waved by anti-abortion activists protesting outside the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg last week. The campaigners were directing the warning at judges hearing the legal challenge taken by three women who claim Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws endangered their health and violated their rights because they had to travel abroad to terminate their pregnancies.

As pro-life sloganeering goes, Hands Off Ireland is relatively mild. Ironically, the phrase can also be read as an uncannily accurate commentary on a political regime that has reneged on its obligation to confront the pressing requirement for abortion legislation. ‘Hands-Off Ireland’ is a place where seeing and hearing no evil is government policy.

It’s now 17 years since the X Case — the shameful saga of a 14-year-old girl who was raped by a friend of her father’s, travelled to the UK for an abortion and was brought back to Ireland by order of the attorney general.

After years of theological hypothesising, the messy complexities of real life had delivered an abrupt wake-up call. In two subsequent referenda, the electorate voted in favour of according women the right to information about overseas abortion clinics, and the right to travel to use such clinics. In a third referendum in 1992, a proposal to permit limited abortion to save a woman’s life was defeated.

In overturning the attorney general’s decision on the X Case, however, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion is legal here in cases where the mother’s life is at risk, and this includes the risk of suicide. Legislation was obviously needed to clarify the law around abortion but successive governments have refused to enact it.

This dereliction of duty has created enormous uncertainty, especially for medical practitioners. Nevertheless, the Oireachtas persists in turning a blind eye. Most politicians seem content that thousands of women go abroad for abortions every year as long as the pretence is maintained that Ireland is a uniquely fortunate haven where abortion services are neither needed nor wanted.

Thankfully, reality has again gate- crashed the fool’s paradise. The three women who’ve taken the Strasbourg legal challenge have an undeniably strong case. Clearly conscious of this, the government has fielded a high-powered defence team led by Paul Gallagher, the attorney general. Nevertheless, lawyers for the women seemed to win the early skirmishes simply by highlighting the myriad ways in which Irish abortion law breaches the European convention on human rights, to which Ireland is a signatory.

Two of the women are Irish while the third is a Lithuanian living in Ireland. One was an unemployed, long-term alcoholic who was trying to regain custody of her four children when she became pregnant. Another was at risk of an extra-uterine pregnancy, while the third was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and feared a relapse. All three say they were forced to travel abroad for abortions, making the procedures “unnecessarily expensive, complicated and traumatic”.

Pro-choice campaigners aren’t alone in hoping that a court ruling in the women’s favour would lead to a de facto unravelling of Irish abortion law. Privately, liberal TDs within Fianna Fail and Fine Gael must also share this wish, as an edict from Strasbourg would potentially get them off this most troublesome of hooks.
While they occasionally rail against Eurocrat intrusion, many Irish politicians actually welcome the alibi it provides. It was, after all, a European court ruling that provided Fianna Fail with the cover to decriminalise homosexuality in 1993.

This time there’s a complication. In statements agreed between Irish government officials and their EU counterparts, the Irish people’s stated abhorrence of abortion is embedded in protocols attached to the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties. So if the European court rules against Ireland next year, legislators will face unpicking the complicated knot of their own pieties. Having overplayed the hands-off strategy, politicians could soon find themselves with their hands full.

Church And State Not Operating In The Real World

2009-12-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

Irish Examiner Monday 14th December 2009

Church and state not operating in the real world

Ann Cahill, Europe Correspondent

IRELAND has an ability to produce parallel universes that are breathtakingly wide of reality, and during the past week there were two such instances.

One was unveiled in the Grand Chamber of the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on Wednesday and the second in St Peter’s Square in Rome on Friday.

The Ireland being described by the state’s legal team in relation to abortion was unrecognisable. The Irish people in the court looked at one another incredulously, wondering if any of the 17 judges had any way to judge the reality for themselves.

Moral ethos was a phrase bandied about, along with reassurances that there were any number of Irish doctors willing to carry out abortions on women whose lives were at risk from their pregnancies.

That the state was unable to give figures to prove this shows doctors are not in fact willing to risk a lifetime in jail for carrying out an abortion in the absence of clear legal guidelines as requested by the courts.

The Attorney General drew gasps when he referred to a "fine bright line" that allows doctors to tell the difference between women whose lives were at risk and those whose health was an issue and, therefore, would not qualify for an abortion in Ireland.

Was he referring to the fine bright blue line on pregnancy testing kits many wondered? He insisted there was help, support and advice for women in Ireland, but made no reference to the fact that each year more Irish women have abortions than those in many other European countries where it is legal.

As a result there is no help, support or advice available for Irish women, other than from voluntary organisations, when they are in crisis or when they return from having an abortion abroad. Rogue groups who try to dissuade people from abortions by frightening them with lies often compound their difficulties.

The Attorney General referred repeatedly to the guarantees in the Nice and Lisbon Treaties on Ireland’s unique position on abortion, which he fought to have included. He made no mention of the fact that our EU colleagues regard this as a neat piece of hypocrisy, since so many Irish women travel abroad to their countries for their abortions.

The second incidence of a parallel universe involved the reaction of the Catholic Church to the Murphy Report on clerical sex abuse.

The senior clergymen appeared to inhabit a different world from the rest of us as they spoke of renewal, culture change and repentance. Their frustration at the repeated questions of when we were going to see bishops dismissed was understandable in their world.

Each diocese is an independent republic we are told and the Pope can only request a bishop to resign. Firing bishops would be beside the point, they suggest, and say what is needed is a reorganisation of the Church in Ireland.

This is sensible, but sometimes people want to see those who have been in positions of power do something painful that shows they understand and are sorry.

For the Pope to say, "I am sorry" in plain English would have been a start.

A little humility does not require one to be humiliated after all. But in the all-male preserve of the Church where bureaucrats rise to power, their main job is to preserve the structures of their power, and the Church in Ireland has not shown itself to be any different.

Until there is an inclusive church with gender equality throughout the ranks, changing culture will be just another academic exercise.

Abortion Is A Reality In Ireland. An Irish Woman Having An Abortion Across A Narrow Strip Of Sea Is Still An Irish Abortion

2009-12-14T05:41:00.000-08:00

Una Mulally The Sunday Tribune Sunday December 13th 2009

In Strasbourg's European Court of Human Rights last week, three women who claimed their human rights were infringed upon by being forced to travel to Britain for abortions brought their case to be heard. They are known as A, B, and C. A's children had already been taken into care when she was pregnant. She had suffered from substance abuse and post-natal depression and knew she wouldn't have been able to care for another child. B, who had taken a morning-after pill, had concerns over an ectopic pregnancy. C was in remission from cancer when pregnant, and failed to gain solid medical advice about what the impact of chemotherapy would have on her foetus.

The state feels so strongly about maintaining the ban on abortion that it dispatched an eight-strong legal dream team to Strasbourg, Attorney General Paul Gallagher, Donal O'Donnell SC and Brian Murray SC among them. In his address to 17 judges on Wednesday, Gallagher said that Ireland's ban on abortion was "based on moral values deeply embedded in Irish society". You can insert your own snide joke about 'morals' and 'Irish society' here.

The same court ruled against a state in 2007, when a Polish woman brought a case against her country after being forced to carry a pregnancy to full term in spite of concerns about her eyesight (she was visually impaired, and upon giving birth suffered haemorrhages in her retina and is facing a serious risk of complete blindness). The court ruled that Poland violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to respect for their private and family life, home and correspondence.

So although Lisbon 2 reaffirmed the protection of the right to life in Article 40.3.3 of the Irish constitution, the state could be in trouble here, as it is obliged to listen and act on the court's ruling, something that could provide a gigantic headache for a government in disarray, that is, if it's still in existence in mid-2010 when the ruling will be made.

No one is asking a European court to foist its opinions and rulings on our constitution. But the fact that it has come to this is our fault. The Irish state has for generations ignored this issue.

Abortion is a reality in Ireland. An Irish woman having an abortion across a narrow strip of sea is still an Irish abortion, even if we insist on palming off a very Irish problem onto our British neighbours.

The state's argument that this case should be kicked back to Irish courts is also redundant. It is not up to our courts to create legislation, nor should they have to make judgements on bad law. There needs to be legislation in place to both acknowledge the reality of Irish abortions and clarify the existing murky laws.

Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, wrote last week: "The illegality of abortion at home [Ireland] has consequences even for those women wealthy enough and informed enough to travel. It means they have limited opportunity for counselling before they come here, and little access to aftercare when they return home. They carry the emotional burden of seeing an 'illicit' solution. The truth needs to be heard. Legal abortion is safe and benefits society. And Ireland can only exist as a modern society because of abortion clinics in England."

The Attorney General argues that A, B, and C have "no specifics with regard to the alleged refusal of treatment, the inability to provide treatment, the concerns that treatment would be refused or they would be disapproved if they sought treatment".

But evidence repeatedly shows how women travelling for abortions feel – the shame imposed upon them by the nature of abortion's illegality in Ireland, their reluctance to seek aftercare, the secrecy, the financial strain, the lack of closure because abortion is the unmentionable.

If the state legal team wants 'specifics' on this, then talk to 7,000 women who travel abroad annually for abortions. Don't just assume that these 'specifics' don't exist just because they aren't talked about.

Those specifics were courageously described by Amy Dunne, the young woman known as Miss D, whose case became headline news when the HSE, in whose care she was living, banned her from travelling to Britain for an abortion even though her baby could not be born alive.

She went public on Prime Time last Thursday, describing the ordeal of her court case as she ran the gauntlet of pro-life protestors and told of what it felt like to rely on the comfort of strangers in a hospital where nobody understood her case. Every specific was an ordeal for Amy – right down to not knowing how to arrange to bring home a tiny white coffin.

umullally@tribune.ie

3 Women Challenge Irish Abortion Ban In European Court

2009-12-14T02:39:00.000-08:00

Boston Globe
Friday December 11th 2009

3 women challenge Irish abortion ban in European Court

DUBLIN - Three women filed a lawsuit in a European court against Ireland’s abortion ban yesterday, claiming the government violates the human rights of pregnant women by forcing them to travel abroad for abortions and denying them appropriate medical care at home.

The three women took the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. A verdict is expected next year.

If they win, the women could force Ireland - one of only a handful of European countries that still outlaws abortion - to liberalize a system that inspires more than 7,000 women annually to travel to other countries, chiefly England, for abortions.

But the Irish government fielded a high-powered legal team of constitutional lawyers and Attorney General Paul Gallagher to defend its health policies. They rejected the women’s central claim that they couldn’t receive proper medical care in Ireland before or after abortions abroad.

Gallagher told the judges that the women should have sued the government in Ireland first, exhausting legal options here before turning to the Strasbourg court, which casts a legally binding eye on human rights standards in all 47 nations of the Council of Europe.

Gallagher said an Irish court would have established whether the women’s claims were factual. “If these issues are to come before this court, it should be on the basis of established facts,’’ he told the judges.
The attorney general defended Ireland’s abortion ban as reflecting “profound moral values deeply embedded in Irish society.’’

But the women’s lawyers, who are supported by the Irish Family Planning Association, said taking a court case in Ireland would have been costly and futile, and could have forced them to relinquish their anonymity.
The three women, who were not present at yesterday’s court hearing, were identified in court only by the letters A, B and C.

This is the first Irish case to be heard by the European Court of Human Rights since 1988, when Dublin gay activist David Norris sued the Irish government over its law defining homosexuality as a crime. Ireland decriminalized homosexuality in 1993.
In 1983, Ireland’s voters inserted an abortion ban into its constitution, reflecting the state’s overriding Roman Catholic ethos of the day. Opinion polls over the past two decades have indicated growing support for legalizing abortion here.

Nonetheless, Irish abortion law has fallen into legal limbo since 1992, when a pregnant 14-year-old girl who had been raped by a neighbor successfully sued the government to permit her to travel to England for an abortion. The government tried to stop her, arguing it could not facilitate an illegal act, even though she was threatening to commit suicide.

The Irish Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that traveling to obtain abortions abroad was legal, and Ireland itself should provide abortions in cases where a continued pregnancy would threaten the life of the pregnant woman.

The women’s lawyers argued yesterday that, despite the Supreme Court ruling, Irish doctors continue to fear having anything to do with women who seek an abortion even on live-saving medical grounds. They contended that this makes the Irish medical system unsuitable for women seeking a foreign abortion for personal health reasons.

Women 'Lose Health, Money and Dignity' Because Of Law

2009-12-14T02:34:00.000-08:00

Irish Times
Thursday December 10th 2009

Women 'lose health, money and dignity' because of law

CARL O'BRIEN

THE CHALLENGE: THREE WOMEN were subjected to indignity, stigmatisation and ill-health as a result of being forced to travel abroad for their abortions, the European Court of Human Rights heard yesterday.

Legal representatives for the women – who are supported by the Irish Family Planning Association – said their clients were unable to challenge the laws in Ireland because there were no effective domestic legal remedies available to them.
Addressing the court, counsel for the women Julie Kay said taking a case in the Irish courts would have been “costly, futile and could have forced them to relinquish their anonymity”.

Both the State and legal representative for the women outlined their cases before a panel of 17 judges in the court’s grand chamber. High Court judge Mrs Justice Mary Finlay Geoghegan was among the judges on the panel.

Ms Kay contested the Government’s claim that abortion was available in Ireland in the case where a mother’s life was at risk.

While this was provided for following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1992 “X” case, she said the Government had failed to produce any legislation for doctors or medical practitioners on this issue.

As a result, doctors were not willing to intervene for fear of potential imprisonment or losing their medical qualifications if the termination was later found to be unlawful or unnecessary. Ms Kay added: “In fact, there are no relevant statistics to show that any life-saving abortions have been carried out since the X case.” Under the 1861 Offences Against the State Act, it remains a criminal offence to “unlawfully procure a miscarriage”.

On the issue of whether the facts of their case were reliable, Ms Kay said their statements had been accepted by the court and pointed out that the State had not sought any additional information in relation to the three women’s cases.

Taking issue with the Government’s insistence that Ireland’s abortion laws were safeguarded as a result of protocols attached to Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, Ms Kay said this was irrelevant and they could not be used as an excuse to affect women’s rights.

Other grounds on which the women’s human rights were violated included through financial discrimination, the court heard.

Ms Kay said some of the women had to borrow money from friends or money lenders to travel abroad, contravening protections under the European Convention.
The women also faced sexual discrimination through the Government’s failure to provide access to vital healthcare which is only needed by women, Ms Kay said.

The court also heard that Ireland’s laws were out of step with its European neighbours, given that 44 out of 47 European countries now provide for abortion to protect women’s health and wellbeing.

Ms Kay, along with senior counsel Carmel Stewart, represented the women in court yesterday. Speaking after the hearing, Niall Behan, of the Irish Family Planning Association, said that he was confident the court’s judgment would “establish a minimum degree of protection to which a woman seeking an abortion to protect her health and wellbeing would be entitled”.

Also yesterday, a small group of anti-abortion campaigners from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children gathered outside the court, holding a prayer vigil while the case was being heard. They said a positive ruling could have a similar effect to the landmark Roe vs Wade case in the US..

Their Stories: Three Women At The Centre Of The Challenge
Ms A
She was unmarried, unemployed and living in poverty when she became pregnant unintentionally. She had four young children, all in foster care as a result of problems she had faced as an alcoholic.

In the year before her fifth pregnancy, she remained sober and was in constant contact with social workers with a view to regaining custody of her children. She felt a further child would jeopardise the successful reunification of her existing family.

She decided to travel to Britain to have an abortion. The British NHS refused to carry out the operation at public expense, so she borrowed money from a moneylender. Her difficulty in raising the money delayed the abortion by three weeks.
On her return, she experienced pain, nausea and bleeding for up to nine weeks, but was afraid to seek medical advice because of the prohibition on abortion.

Ms B
She was single when she became pregnant unintentionally. She had taken the morning-after pill the day after intercourse, but was advised by two different doctors that it had not only failed, but had given rise to a significant risk that it would be an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the uterus.
She was not prepared to become either a single parent or run the risks associated with an ectopic pregnancy.

She travelled to Britain for an abortion.
On her return, she started passing blood clots and, since she was unsure whether this was normal and could not seek medical advice in Ireland, she returned to the clinic in Britain.

The impossibility for her to have an abortion in Ireland made the procedure unnecessarily expensive, traumatic and complicated.

Ms C
A Lithuanian national living in Ireland, she had been treated with chemotherapy for cancer over the course of three years.

The cancer went into remission and she became unintentionally pregnant. She was unable to find a doctor willing to make a determination as to whether her life would be at risk if she continued to term or to give her clear advice as to how the foetus might have been affected.

Given the uncertainty about the risk involved, she decided to have an abortion in Britain. Although her pregnancy was at an early stage, she could not have a medical abortion (where a miscarriage is induced) because she was a non-resident. Instead, she had to wait eight weeks until a surgical abortion was possible. On returning home, she suffered the complications of an incomplete abortion, including prolonged bleeding and infection.

Irish Abortion Laws Defended

2009-12-14T02:32:00.000-08:00

Irish Times
Thursday December 10th 2009

Irish abortion laws defended

CARL O'BRIEN, in Strasbourg

The Government has issued a robust defence of Ireland’s restrictions on abortion at the European Court of Human Rights today.

The case involves three women, known as A, B and C, who say abortion restrictions in this country have jeopardised their health and violated their human rights.
In a hearing which could have implications for Irish abortion law, the Attorney General Paul Gallagher insisted that the country’s abortion laws were based on “profound moral values deeply embedded in Irish society”.

Mr Gallagher said the country’s legal position on abortion had been endorsed in three referendums, as well as being safe-guarded in protocols attached to the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties.

He said that the European Convention on Human Rights has recognised over 60 years the diversity of traditions and values of the member states, as well as extending protection to unborn children.

However, the case being taken by the three women sought to undermine these fundamental principles and align Ireland with other countries with more liberal abortion laws.

The Attorney General was part of an eight-strong legal team, including senior counsel Dónal O’Donnell and Brian Murray, as well as four female legal advisors.
Criticising the nature of the case taken by the three women – who are supported by the Irish Family Planning Association – Mr Gallagher said their case was based on “legal and factual propositions which, when analysed, cannot be supported”.
He said the fact that the cases involving the three women had not been before a domestic court meant the facts of case had not been established.

In addition, he said, many these facts were of an assumed and conditional nature, such as a woman not going to a doctor because she feared treatment would not be available.
“Many of these facts are of an assumed nature… if these issues are to comet before this court, it should be on the basis of established facts.”

The court, which is separate from the EU, adjudicates on human rights issues among all 47 member states of the Council of Europe.

As a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights – now incorporated into Irish law – the Government is obliged to seek to implement whatever decisions are made by the courts.

If successful, the court’s ruling could lead to the liberalisation of the State’s abortion laws. At present, abortion is only permitted in the circumstances of the “X” case, where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother.
The three women at the centre of the case include a woman at risk of an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the womb; a pregnant woman who received chemotherapy for cancer; and a woman whose children were placed in care as she was unable to cope.

The women, who have sought to have their anonymity protection, were not in court. They were represented by counsel Jule Kay and senior counsel Carmel Stewart
Addressing the court, Ms Kay said said the lack of any effective remedy in Ireland meant the women had been forced to have their cases heard before the European Court of Human Rights. She said taking a case domestically would have been costly, futile and could have forced them to relinquish their anonymity.

Ms Kay contested the Government's claim that abortion was legal in Ireland in the case where a mother's life was at risk. While this was provided for following the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1992 "X" case, she said the Government has failed to produce any legislation for doctors or medical practitioners on this issue.
As a result, doctors were not prepared to intervene for fear of losing their medical licences or facing potential life imprisonment is the termination was later found to be unlawful or unnecessary.

She said it was highly significant that the State had no statistics to show how many, if any, of these lawful abortions have taken place in Ireland.

Women Challenge Irish Abortion Ban In European Court

2009-12-14T02:29:00.000-08:00

The Guardian

Thursday December 10th 2009

Women challenge Irish abortion ban in European court

Ian Traynor in Brussels

Ireland's ban on abortion faced one of its biggest challenges today when three women forced to travel abroad for terminations turned to the European court of human rights.

In a case being watched closely in other Catholic countries such as Poland, Spain and Malta, the Strasbourg court heard the arguments for the ban from the Irish government and from lawyers for the one Lithuanian and two Irish women.

The three women, known only as A, B and C, travelled to Britain to have abortions and claim their health was imperilled and that they were traumatised and humiliated by the Irish anti-abortion laws. "All three women complain that the impossibility for them to have an abortion in Ireland made the procedure unnecessarily expensive, complicated and traumatic. In particular, that restriction stigmatised and humiliated them and risked damaging their health and, in the third applicant's case, even her life," said a court statement.

One of the women is a former alcoholic and substance abuser whose four children were in care. She feared her pregnancy would prevent her getting her children back, and went to a money lender to finance the abortion in England. Another became pregnant while undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer and feared for her own health and that of her child.

Lawyers and lobby groups for the three argue that the abortion ban breaches several articles of the European convention on human rights, which is policed by the court, notably the rights to life and to privacy and family life, as well as bans on inhuman and degrading treatment and on discrimination.

Today the Irish government fielded a high-profile team led by the attorney general, Paul Gallagher. He argued that the right to life extended to the foetus and said broad Irish support for the abortion ban had been tested in three referendums and was strongly embedded in the moral fabric of Irish society. The complaint was based on "legal and factual propositions which, when analysed, cannot be supported".

Abortion was outlawed in Ireland in 1861 and can bring a sentence of life imprisonment. The "right to life of the unborn" is enshrined in the constitution. According to the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) at least 138,000 women have travelled abroad, mainly to England, since 1980 to obtain abortions.

The Irish backed the EU's Lisbon treaty only after the other 26 countries promised its abortion ban would not be affected by the charter. But the Strasbourg court has nothing to do with the EU. It is the supreme human rights authority for the 47 countries in the Council of Europe.

Representing the women, Julie Kay told the 17 judges of the grand chamber that all three women had to borrow money to travel abroad for "clandestine" abortions and dismissed as bogus government claims that abortions were allowed in cases where the women's lives were at risk. She said that pursuing the case in court in Ireland, as demanded by Gallagher, would have been "futile and costly".

The women are being supported by the IFPA and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service on a complaint that took four years to be heard in Strasbourg and on which no ruling is expected until next year.

"Today is a hugely significant day for reproductive rights in Ireland. The fact that Ireland's draconian laws on abortion have been put under the spotlight is a landmark for women living in Ireland," said the IFPA. "Ireland's restrictive laws on abortion are totally out of step with those of its European neighbours … Women and girls do not give up their human rights when they become pregnant."

Patricia Lohr, medical director of the BPAS, said: "There is never any moral justification for the law to place a barrier between women and medical care. The Irish abortion ban risks women's physical health, requires abortions to be performed later than necessary, and creates serious emotional upset."

US anti-abortion lobbyists have been allowed to submit arguments to the court. The US Alliance Defence Fund said "the stakes are high for all of Europe" and that Ireland's defence "of innocent life is under attack".

Rights and risks

Poland
Abortion is permitted only in cases of rape, where the foetus suffers severe abnormality, or if the woman's life is at risk. The need must be certified by a doctor other than the one performing the abortion. After 12 weeks, abortions are permitted only if the life or health of the woman is endangered.

Spain
Abortions became legal in 1985. Terminations are permitted in cases of rape, up to the 12th week of pregnancy, if the rape has been reported to police. Abortions can be performed up to 22 weeks in cases of foetal impairments. Two specialists must certify that the child would suffer severe defects. There is no time limit if a woman's physical or mental health is at risk.

Malta
Abortion has been illegal under all circumstances since 1981. A woman who consents to an abortion can be jailed for up to three years, and doctors, surgeons, obstetricians or pharmacists who perform abortions up to four years.

Fear Dictates Ireland's Abortion Policy

2009-12-14T02:27:00.000-08:00

Guardian.co.uk
Thursday December 10th 2009

Fear dictates Ireland's abortion policy

Pro-life hatred so dominates the debate it's hard to imagine any real change following this bid to overturn the Irish abortion ban

It has always taken guts to stand up for abortion rights in Ireland, north and south of the border. Straight off, you're likely to be hit by a slew of strident invective from the pro-life lobby, trailing pictures of aborted foetuses in their wake, and nameless bloggers will fall over each other to brand you a baby-murderer. Sure enough, the three women trying to overturn the Irish abortion ban in the European court of human rights were immediately accused on anti-abortion sites of having "travelled abroad to have their children killed". Known as A,B and C, the women have decided to remain anonymous. Smart decision. Why expose yourself directly to such hatred?

Such nasty outbursts could be dismissed as so much ridiculous hysteria, were it not for the fact that the anti-abortion lobby, with its scare tactics, "prayer vigils" and wild accusations, has effectively been allowed to define the situation in Ireland, shifting the entire discourse on to moral grounds. Their own very specific either/or, black or white, baby-killer or baby-lover brand of morality, that is. Discussion of any other kind – such as the moral argument for women's agency over their own fertility – is all too often obliterated by the anti-choice campaign.

In some ways, by making women fearful to open their mouths, the anti-abortionists have won already. Yes, it's got so bad that we can't even talk about abortion. Of course, we do discuss it in private. We all know women who have made that silent, miserable, expensive journey across the Irish sea. But few of us feel comfortable speaking out openly, in public. So there is no debate, no honest exchange of opinions. The result is stasis.

And our political representatives haven't got the gumption to tackle the issue. Their approach is simply to pretend the exodus of women isn't happening, especially in the north. Regardless of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, politicians there are united in their insistence that there is no demand for abortion. And the illogical rejoinder is that if women do want it, well, they can go over the water to access services there. You export it, so we don't have to see it – that's the message.

That see-no-evil piety meets blatant self-interest when the anti-abortionists come to town. Several politicians in the republic had their homes and constituency clinics picketed by activists, and it's been reported that Catholic TDs have been warned they risk excommunication for expressing support for abortion. Dispiriting, but not surprising then, that they find so little to say on the matter.

No ruling is expected on A, B and C's case in Strasbourg until next year. And while pro-choice campaigners are heartened by a ruling handed down by the court that instructed Poland to guarantee access to legal abortions, it's hard to imagine real change in Ireland happening any time soon. Even if the women were successful, I can't see Irish politicians – wary, deeply conservative and haunted by painful memories of the messy Lisbon treaty referendums – tripping over themselves to remedy the law.

And so we wait. Meanwhile, hysteria, hypocrisy and spineless denial remain the watchwords of this (lack of) debate.

Legal Challenge To Abortion Law A 'Momentous Day'

2009-12-14T02:22:00.000-08:00

Irish Times Wednesday December 9th 2009

Legal challenge to abortion law a 'momentous day'

CARL O'BRIEN Chief Reporter

THE SPONSORS of a legal challenge to Ireland’s abortion laws, due to be heard at the European Court of Human Rights today, say their case represents a “momentous day” for reproductive rights.

The case, taken by three women who say their health was put at risk by being forced to go abroad for abortions, will be heard before the court’s grand chamber of 17 judges.

If successful, the court’s ruling could lead to the liberalisation of the State’s abortion laws. At present, abortion is only permitted in the circumstances of the 1992 “X” case, where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother.
The case will be watched closely by observers, given a ruling by the same court in recent years which resulted in Poland being instructed to guarantee access to legal abortions.

Based in Strasbourg, the court, which is separate from the EU, adjudicates on human rights issues among all 47 member states of the Council of Europe. As a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights – now incorporated into Irish law – the Government is obliged to act on whatever decisions are made by the courts or risk flouting international laws.

The identities of the women, known as A, B and C, will remain confidential as the case proceeds.

They include a woman who ran the risk of an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the womb; a woman who received chemotherapy for cancer; and a woman whose children were placed in care as she was unable to cope.

They argue that the restrictions on abortion, as well as a lack of post-abortion care and counselling, amounted to a violation of their human rights.
They also say the lack of any effective legal remedy in Ireland meant taking a case in the State would have been costly and futile, and could have forced them to relinquish their anonymity.

The Government, however, is expected to argue that the case should be heard in the Irish courts.

It says the recent “Ms D” case – which centred on the right of a 17-year-old girl in the care of the HSE to travel for an abortion – shows that the issue of abortion is arguable in the domestic courts.

It also robustly challenges suggestions by the women that there is a lack of post-abortion care or counselling in Ireland.

In addition, the women’s claim that they experienced “inhuman or degrading treatment” is contested on the basis that aftercare and post-abortion counselling services are available in Ireland.

The Government will be represented at the court in Strasbourg by a team led by Attorney General Paul Gallagher, as well as constitutional lawyers Brian Murray SC and Donal O’Donnell SC.

In a statement yesterday, the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) said today was a “landmark day for reproductive rights in Ireland”. “It is our view that the criminalisation of abortion in Ireland is disproportionate and unnecessary; the law fails to adequately protect a woman’s health and wellbeing and has violated the rights of the applicants,” the association said.

Criticising the motives of the IFPA, the Pro-Life Campaign said the case ignored the fact that Ireland without abortion was “the safest country in the world in which to be pregnant”, and there was growing evidence that abortion had very serious negative consequences for some women.

Dr Berry Kiely of the Pro-Life Campaign said: “It is regrettable that the IFPA creates unnecessary fears about women’s health in an attempt to have abortion foisted on Ireland by a European court.”

Case Seeks To Clarify Deadly Grey Area

2009-12-14T02:20:00.000-08:00

Irish Examiner Wednesday December 9th 2009

Case seeks to clarify deadly grey area

The rights of mother and the foetus are competing when the health of one means the death of the other, Writes Europe Correspondent Ann Cahill

THE Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights gathers today to hear the case of three women challenging the ban on abortion in Ireland.
The chamber of 17 judges is only assembled to hear cases that raise serious questions on the European Human Rights Convention - a document Ireland has signed up to together with the 47 members of the Council of Europe. This is a completely separate body to the European union.

The court's decision - which will not be available for months - is binding, but is unlikely to force Ireland to introduce abortion on demand. If it finds in favour of the women, it will insist that Irish abortion law respects their human rights.
Julie Kay is an international expert on reproductive law working now in the US but she is well aware of the Irish "Catch 22" situation in relation to abortion. She has been working for the past few years with the three women who have agreed to take their cases to the court in Strasbourg.

An Irish woman can be jailed for life if she has an abortion in Ireland, but if she can afford to travel she can get one abroad legally. Malta is the only EU country with more stringent law where it is illegal for women to have an abortion outside the country.

The state has no figures for abortions and the only ones available are from the British clinics where about 4,000 Irish women a year say they are from Ireland. Many more go to the Netherlands and Spain where costs are lower, according to the Irish Family Planning Association that is supporting the latest case.
But even these figures, although low by international standards, are higher than those for Belgium and the Netherlands where abortion is legal.

The case revolves around Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution that states: "The state acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."
But the rights of the mother and the foetus are competing when the health of one means the death of the other.

"The state has a right to protect prenatal life, bit not at such a high cost to the woman - there is no balance in Irish law and the Irish Constitutions requires that there be as fair a balance as is practicable," said Ms Kay.
The three women involved in this latest case represent typical cases where it might be decided that the woman's right to life and health was paramount and so could allow her an abortion in Ireland.

In one case, the foetus had no chance of surviving; in another the mother's life was at risk from cancer and in the third the mother was unable to cope with an addition to her family.

"It's difficult to get any real discussion on this issue, but it's a reality for a lot of women who need a solution - and going abroad is not the answer," she said.
The X case in the early 1990s made it clear that abortion was allowable when a woman's life is at risk, but the courts or the state have not said just when this is the case.

"She has a right, but this right is hollow as there are no services available.
"Physicians face life in jail if they were found to be performing abortions illegally. They need some kind of guidelines to say what they are doing is legal."
This is not the first time the court has dealt with abortion issues from Ireland. Two years ago they refused to give a ruling on the D case where a 45-year-old woman lost one of the twins she was carrying and the second had a fatal syndrome that meant it would die days after birth.

She had an abortion in Britain and had to return home without receiving counselling or support or information on the likelihood of her suffering further similar pregnancies.

But the court said she should have taken her case to the Irish courts.
Lawyers say their action as telling the Irish authorities to clear up the issue and a statement from the court made it quite plain that she had a case that could be dealt with by the Irish courts and they believed it was important to give the courts an opportunity of interpreting the Constitution.

The judges' statement said the X case had recognised an exception to the constitutional ban on abortion when the mother's life was at risk from self harm. This had shown that the Irish constitutional courts could develop the protection of individual rights through interpreting the Constitution.

Their statement said: "It was particularly important in a common law system to allow the courts to develop constitutional protection for fundamental rights by way of interpretation, particularly when the central issue was a novel one, requiring a complex and sensitive balancing of the constitutionally enshrined equal rights to life and demanding a delicate analysis of country-specific values and morals."
At the time they also said that from the evidence they had heard: "Since abortions (in the case of a real and substantial risk to the mother's life) were already available in Ireland and since the evidence was that the masters of the main obstetric hospitals were not against terminations in the case of a fatal foetal abnormality, the court considered that the relevant declaratory and mandatory orders could have been implemented in good time."

Since then there has been no effort made by the courts or the Government to clarify the situation or balance the equal rights to life mentioned in the Constitution.
Many believe that the Grand Chamber might now do so, as it did in the Norris case that successfully challenged Ireland's criminalisation of gay people.

A Thin Blue Line

2009-12-14T02:17:00.000-08:00

Irish Examiner Wednesday 9th December 2009

A Thin Blue Line

Women don’t give up their human rights when they get pregnant and the state should not be able to take them away with impunity, writes Niall Behan chief executive of the Irish Family Planning Association

A CHALLENGE to Ireland's restrictive laws on abortion at the European Court of Human Rights today major landmark for the furthering of women', reproduc¬tive rights.
Three women known as A, B & C are challenging Ireland's criminalisa¬tion of abortion in the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that the application of the law jeopardised their health and their wellbeing in violation of their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

This case, involving three women who travelled abroad for abortion services, concerns some of the most intimate and private decision making that a woman must make - decisions that no woman makes easily.

The experiences of the three appli¬cants are illustrative of the physical, emotional and financial hardship faced by over 138,000 women living in Ireland who are forced to travel abroad to access safe abortion services.

This case highlights in an interna¬tional forum the Irish Government's refusal to address the reality of wom¬en's hues and health in Irish law and policy.
Human Rights is a strategy that has, in the past, been successful in changing Ireland's laws and bringing Ireland in line with internationally' accepted norms of human rights such as in the case of Norris v Ireland and Open Door and Well Woman v Ireland.

The consistent restrictive application of Irish law means that women and girls who need to terminate their pregnancy are unwilling to risk their privacy and health before the Irish courts when there is no chance of an effective remedy.
The dysfunctional way women's need for abortion has been dealt with in Ireland has resulted in a lack of balance and clarity in Irish laws that ignore the reality of women and girls’ lives and disregards their rights.

The three women at the centre of the case being heard today in Strasbourg are appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to recognise that in its aim to "protect prenatal life", the state must have due regard for women's health and wellbeing.

This approach is consistent with human rights standards and reflects the overwhelming European consensus on abortion which allows for the balanc¬ing of women's health and wellbeing with that of the foetus by applying a more effective, less punitive approach than in force in Ireland.

Ireland has been repeatedly criticise by international human rights bodies in relation to access to safe and legal abortion services.
In July 2008, the UN Human Rights Committee's concluding observations on Ireland stated: "The state party should bring its abortion laws into line with the Covenant. It should take measures to help women avoid unwanted pregnancies so that they do not have to resort to illegal or unsafe abortions that could put their lives at risk (article 6) or to abortions abroad (articles 26 and 6)."

However, successive governments have unashamedly stated they have no intention of addressing abortion in the legislature or in the provision of guidelines to protect women's health and rights. Political leaders promised to legislate for the X case if the last abortion referendum was defeated.
Nothing has been done.

The fact that the European Court of Human Rights has not only ordered the Government to respond to the complaints of ABC, but has sent the case to its highest chamber of 17 judges speaks to the seriousness of the violations claimed.

This court only sits to hear exceptionally important cases - cases which raise serious questions affecting the interpretation of the European Human Rights Convention.

In 2008 the European Court of Human Rights delivered judgments in 1,881 applications, but only 21 of these were from the Grand Chamber.

The Grand Chamber will decide on the admissibility and the merits of the case; however it is clear that Ireland can no longer justify its denial of women's human rights to privacy, dignity, self determination and health.
The divisive way that the courts, legislators, the medical establishment has created a discourse that says "abortion is somehow different in Ireland: it's too sensitise, too controversial".

The IFPA does not agree. Women and girls need access to safe abortion services in every country around the world and Ireland is no different.

Agreeing on legislation and regula¬tions on abortion is always politically sensitive, controversial and difficult regardless of whether you live in Canada or Sweden or Zambia.

The IFPA hopes this case will help move the dialogue on abortion beyond this stalemate.

Using human rights to bring the focus back to women's and girls' health and wellbeing and calling the indignity of being forced to travel abroad for an abortion what it is - a violation of women and girls' rights that they are entitled to, because they are human.

Women and girls don't give up their human rights when they become pregnant nor can the state take them away with impunity.

Ireland Must Stop Banishing Women, Says National Women's Council of Ireland

2009-12-14T02:15:00.000-08:00

NWCI.IE

Ireland must stop banishing women, says the National Women’s Council of Ireland

Press Statement: The days of banishing women to seek healthcare must end, according to the National Women’s Council of Ireland. Speaking on the eve of a landmark case before the European Court of Human Rights [Wednesday 9 December 09], the director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, Susan McKay said: “Irish women have always had to flee this country like criminals to terminate pregnancy. The government seems to believe that now that we have won the right to travel to attend to our reproductive health, that this is the end of the matter. We applaud the courage of the three women who have brought these cases, and the Irish Family Planning Association, which is supporting them, has our full backing.”

The Court, sitting in Strasbourg, will hear that the women, known as A, B, and C, were forced to travel to England to access abortions because their circumstances made it impossible for each of them to continue their pregnancy. The applicants’ legal team will argue that this violated their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The NWCI is the umbrella group for women’s groups and organizations in Ireland and campaigns for women’s equality. Delegates at its Annual General Meeting this year unanimously passed a motion from the IFPA (a member of the NWCI) calling for safe and legal abortion in Ireland. “Attitudes to women’s right to reproductive health have dramatically changed in recent years,” said McKay. “A majority of Irish people now recognize that many women face harsh dilemmas in pregnancy, and have a right to choose abortion in certain circumstances. It is time for the government to face up to its responsibilities.” If the challenge brought to the European Court of Human Rights succeeds, the outcome will be binding on the Irish government.

Choice Ireland Express Solidarity With Women At The Centre ABC Case

2009-12-14T02:12:00.000-08:00

ChoiceIreland.ie

Wednesday December 9th 2009

Choice Ireland express solidarity with women at the centre ABC case

This week, three Irish women will take a case to the European Court of Human Rights arguing that Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws violate their human rights. The women include one woman who was told that she risked an ectopic pregnancy where the foetus develops outside the womb, another who was undergoing chemotherapy and a third who’s children had been taken into care will be known as A, B and C in order to protect their anonymity.
Commenting in advance of the case, spokeswoman Sinead Ahern said “ It is appalling that these women, having already come through difficult circumstances, have been forced to go through the courts to vindicate their rights. This case is yet another in a long line that highlight the flaws in Irish abortion law and the devastating effects it imposes on Irish women. Choice Ireland commends these women for their bravery and calls upon the government to face up the real and often cruel consequences of Ireland’s ban on abortion.

Irish Abortion Laws Challenged In Court

2009-12-14T02:10:00.000-08:00

Irish Abortion Laws Challenged in Court
Tuesday December 8th 2009

Geoff Meade Press Association

Ireland's abortion laws are being challenged in a landmark European court hearing which could overturn the Republic's sovereign right to protect unconditionally ``the life of the unborn'.
Three women living in Ireland claim the Republic's abortion ban violates the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Ireland is a signatory.
Backed by the Irish Family Planning Association and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the three anonymous women - identified only as ``A, B and C' in court documents - say that being forced to travel abroad for abortions endangered their ``health and wellbeing'.
The case will be heard on Wednesday in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, with Irish Government lawyers arguing that the safeguards of the Human Rights Convention cannot be interpreted as endorsing the right to abortion.
They will also insist that, despite the abortion ban, Ireland does supply post-abortion care and counselling.
Abortion was outlawed under an 1861 rule which still sets life imprisonment as an option for women convicted of ``unlawfully procuring a miscarriage'.
Ireland's constitution ``acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right'.
The ban was reinforced by public backing in a 1983 referendum.
The three women now challenging that law are claiming that being forced to leave Ireland to terminate their pregnancies caused hardship and unnecessary costs.
One of the three had been diagnosed as at risk of an ectopic pregnancy, with the foetus developing outside the womb. Another had become pregnant while receiving chemotherapy for cancer. The third already had children who had been taken into care because of her inability to cope.
They all complained in 2005 that the pro-life Irish law breached Human Right Convention guarantees of the ``right to respect for private and family life', their ``right to life', the ``prohibition of discrimination' and ``prohibition of torture'.
After this week's one-day hearing, the final ruling is excepted next year. If the women win their case, Irish abortion law may have to be adjusted to take account of the health and well-being of pregnant women.
Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the charity which provides abortions and contraception in Britain to women travelling from the Republic of Ireland, commented: ``Hundreds of women travel each year to BPAS from the Republic of Ireland in order to access safe, legal abortion care.
``This is provided to women in almost every other country as a matter of necessary and responsible law-making.'
BPAS Medical Director Patricia Lohr said there could never be any ``moral justification' for putting barriers between women and medical care: ``Women from the Republic of Ireland often arrive for treatment alone, because they can't afford to bring their partner or mother to accompany them.
``They are understandably very often apprehensive, having had to travel for hours or days to reach an unfamiliar clinic in England.
``It's disturbing that the law in Ireland forces women to pay privately for care abroad. This creates weeks of delay before seeing a doctor while women try to borrow or save up money to pay for travel, accommodation and for their abortion.'
She went on: ``The ban means that doctors in Ireland are not routinely issued with proper training and guidance to care for patients in the extremely common situation of seeking an abortion.
``Post-abortion aftercare and follow-up is not easily available in Ireland, meaning women may not get help if they need it, or have to pretend they've had a miscarriage to get help.
``As doctors, we're concerned at the needless burden of additional risk caused by treatment delays. You don't have to be medically qualified to understand that the Irish abortion ban risks women's physical health, requires abortions to be performed later than necessary, and creates serious emotional upset for women at an already stressful time.'

Criticism Ahead of Abortion Ban Fight

2009-12-14T02:08:00.000-08:00

Irish Examiner Tuesday December 8th 2009

Criticism ahead of abortion ban fight

Catherine Shanahan

AN international pro-choice movement has criticised the Government for failing to protect the reproductive rights of women on the eve of a legal challenge to the Irish ban on abortion.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), of which the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) is a member, said the Government had "consistently put barriers in the way of women" who seek an abortion, forcing them to travel overseas.

The federation’s director general Dr Gill Greer, said: "In this the Irish Government is not only going against the global trend to legalise and liberalise abortion laws, they are going against the majority of their own citizens whom recent opinion polls show to be broadly in favour of liberalising the law."

The hearing begins tomorrow in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg where three women living in Ireland will challenge the Republic of Ireland’s ban on abortion.

The women, known as A, B and C, are challenging the ban on the grounds that the law jeopardises their health and wellbeing in violation of their rights under a number of articles in the European Convention on Human Rights The three women at the centre of the case include:

* A woman who was informed by her doctor that she was at risk of an ectopic pregnancy, a potentially life threatening condition.

* A woman who had been undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, who became pregnant unintentionally and was unaware of her pregnancy.

* A woman who was living in poverty and whose children had been taken into the care of the state; at the time she became unintentionally pregnant she was in the process of improving her circumstances with a view to regaining custody of her children. She considered a further child would jeopardise the reunification of her family. All three women were forced to travel to England to access legal abortion services.

The women lodged a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights in August 2005. If successful, the case would establish a minimum degree of protection to which a woman seeking an abortion to protect her health and well-being would be entitled, under the European Convention of Human Rights.

Yesterday the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said there was "never any moral justification for the law to place a barrier between women and medical care".

The IFPA said that since 1980, at least 138,000 women and girls have travelled aboard to access safe and legal abortion services. The IFPA said it "has extensive knowledge of the extreme physical, financial and emotional hardship experienced by women forced to travel abroad for health care they believe should be available to them at home".

However a statement from the Pro-Life Campaign said the IFPA’s "sponsorship of the A, B and C cases... ignores the fact that Ireland without abortion is the safest country in the world in which to be pregnant and the growing evidence that abortion has very serious negative consequences for some women".

Irish Times: European Court To Be Told Irish Abortion Ban Violates Rights

2009-11-30T09:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2009/1130/1224259710533.html

European court to be told Irish abortion ban violates rights

CARL O'BRIEN, Chief Reporter

THE EUROPEAN Court of Human Rights will press the Government on whether its ban on abortion violates women’s human rights at a legal challenge to the State’s abortion laws next week.

The case, taken by three women who say their health was put at risk by being forced to go abroad for abortions, is due to be heard before the court’s grand chamber of 17 judges.

Information circulated to legal teams for the Government and the three women show one of the main lines of questioning will focus on whether the State’s abortion law violates a key article of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Article 8 says a person has the “right to respect for private and family life” and public authorities should not interfere with this right.

The court will also seek information on what exact procedures are in place where a pregnancy poses a risk to the life of the mother, and how a woman pursues a lawful abortion in Ireland. Under the State’s laws, abortion is illegal here but may be performed if there is a substantial risk to the mother’s life, including the threat of suicide.

The court is to have a full hearing of the case before its grand chamber of 17 judges on December 9th.

Based in Strasbourg, the court, which is separate from the EU, adjudicates on human rights issues among all 47 member states of the Council of Europe. As a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights – now incorporated into Irish law – the Government is obliged to seek to implement whatever decisions are made by the courts.

The identities of the women, known as A, B and C, will remain confidential as the case proceeds.

They include a woman who ran the risk of an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the womb; a woman who received chemotherapy for cancer; and a woman whose children were placed in care as she was unable to cope.

They argue that the lack of any effective remedy at home means they have satisfied the requirement to exhaust domestic legal remedies. In addition, they say that taking a case would have been costly, futile and could have forced them to relinquish their anonymity.

The Government, however, contends that domestic legal remedies have not been exhausted by the women. It also robustly challenges suggestions by them that there is a lack of post-abortion care or counselling in Ireland. Among the questions the court will ask of the Government, and the the three women, include:

Have the applicants exhausted domestic legal remedies available?

What guarantees of confidentiality could the women have had regarding such domestic proceedings, bearing in mind other cases such as the “D” case (which involved an Irish teenager in the care system who won a legal battle to be allowed have an abortion abroad)?

The case will be watched closely by observers given a ruling by the same court in recent years that resulted in Poland being instructed to guarantee access to legal abortions.

How Long Can We Continue To Dodge The Abortion Issue?

2009-10-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

The Sunday Times (Irish Edition)
Sunday October 18th 2009

• How long can we continue to dodge the abortion issue?

JUSTINE McCARTHY

A Colorado woman has been receiving death threats since publishing her memoir, Testimony of an Abortion Addict. Well, I don't imagine that Irene Vilar made the decision to reminisce about her 15 abortions in 17 years in the expectation of attracting a Pulitzer rather than a Howitzer.

The abortions, according to the 40-year-old mother of two girls, were motivated by spite against her "controlling" husband. It began when she was 16, and her husband was 50. He didn't want children. It became her routine to "forget" to take her contraceptive pills, become pregnant and get an abortion. How such a cycle of self-abusive behaviour was meant to exact revenge on her husband is a mystery but, then again, any woman who submits herself to 15 abortions needs not only her conscience examined, but her head too.

Irene Vilar is a gift to the anti-choice lobby. Such case histories of cold-blooded self-centredness are ripe for vilification; a favourite tactic of anti-choice campaigners.

I can still hear the hearts of the majority moderates in the pro-choice corner hitting their shoes in 1992 when Albert Reynolds, then the taoiseach, invited Sinéad O'Connor to his office for a chat before announcing a referendum on women's rights to travel for an abortion, and to access information about it. Those were the days when the Irish editions of Cosmopolitan came with blank pages where advertisements for abortion clinics appeared in the British editions, and the printers of the state's telephone directories feared criminal prosecution if they displayed phone numbers sought by desperate women.

By parachuting enfant terrible O'Connor into the debate, Reynolds became vulnerable to accusations of treating a life-and-death issue as a rock-star lifestyle choice. Then, he over-compensated by threatening that, if the electorate rejected his proposed amendments to the constitution, he would legislate to give effect to the landmark Supreme Court judgment in the X Case.

The X Case is the big, bad wolf. Even 17 years later, it can still make Mother Ireland quake in her boots. Under that judgment, abortion is legal in this country. It may be performed where there is a threat to the life of a pregnant female, including the danger of suicide. But just you try asking for an abortion in an Irish hospital.

Official Ireland is shamelessly lily-livered.
We have come through two Lisbon referendum campaigns in which Coir, one of the most vocal anti-treaty groups, propounded that the EU was itching to impose abortion on Holy Catholic Ireland. Most voters have the smarts to recognise scaremongering, but what was most demoralising was the spinelessness of politicians who dared not even challenge the deceit head-on. Don't mention the A-word, was the governing dictum.
It's understandable that politicians want to bury their heads in the sand after several of them had their homes and constituency clinics picketed by anti-choice activists (Fianna Fail withstood the invasion of an ard fheis), and Catholic TDs have been warned they risk excommunication for expressing support for abortion. The silence of the lambs in Dail Eireann would convince a visiting Martian that there's a consensus in Ireland that abortion under any circumstances would never be tolerated by the people.

Not true. Two years ago, after Miss D was sanctioned by the High Court to travel abroad for a termination on learning her baby would not survive outside her womb, a poll showed that two-thirds of people backed abortion when life was unviable after birth.

Yet, in the same year, when Enda Kenny said that, if elected taoiseach, he would not enact abortion law, no dissent was raised. It was a chilling measure of how effectively the moral majority has been gagged.

If Ireland is forced to legalise abortion, the order could come sooner rather than later from the European Court of Human Rights under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Three Irish women, backed by the Irish Family Planning Association, are arguing that their rights were infringed by the state ban. The women-named as A, B and C- wanted to have their pregnancies terminated after, respectively, suffering an ectopic pregnancy, receiving chemotherapy for cancer, and having children taken into foster care because of financial issues. They claim the criminalisation of abortion stigmatises women, increases feelings of guilt, impedes access to follow-up care, contravenes their right to life, and is discriminatory on the basis of gender and financial status.

Reports of the case on anti-abortion websites characterise the three women as having "travelled abroad to have their children killed". No wonder they insist on remaining anonymous.

The fault line in the abortion debate is the fear of being labelled pro-abortion. It strangles candid dialogue. It is a fear that has been exploited by the anti-abortion lobby, which pigeonholes as "pro-abortion" anyone brave enough to assert that it can be a necessary evil in certain circumstances. Even the supposedly radical Greens, when renegotiating the programme for government, did not address the issue, but found time to propose that the nation amend the constitution's enshrinement of a woman's place "in the home".

It is time we grew up. We cannot dodge this issue forever. Even by discussing it, society can benefit. There was a time when women who suffered miscarriages were treated with cruel insensitivity. They were told by well-meaning professionals to get over it. I know of one couple who were handed the remains of their dreamt-for child in a Calvita cheese box.

While the abortion debate polarised society, it also exposed the hypocrisy of a nation that, out of one side of its mouth, cherished the unborn and, out of the other side, treated children born dead as unworthy of normal human courtesies. Nowadays, prayerful respects are the norm in hospitals following miscarriages.

Every year, about 6,000 Irish women travel abroad for abortions. As recession bites, we can expect that number to rise because financial means, like it or not, is a strong motivating factor. More test cases will come before the courts.

We could avoid much of the inevitable hurt by taking our courage in our hands, along with our destiny. Is it so heinous to say that a 13-year-old girl made pregnant by rape is entitled to have abortion available as an option? Were we to try talking about this, our maturity might surprise us.

Pro-Choice Lobby Urged To Go Beyond Abortion Issue

2009-10-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

THE IRISH TIMES SATURDAY OCTOBER 17TH 2009

KITTY HOLLAND

THE PRO-CHOICE lobby must progress its argument beyond abortion rights to include the rights of marginalised women to have children and keep them, a leading US campaigner on the issue has said.

Loretta Ross, founding member of the SisterSong organisation based in Atlanta, said there were disabled, poor, homeless and ethnic minority women whom wider society often judged “unfit to have a child and if she has one, to parent that child”.
Addressing a conference on reproductive justice, hosted by the Irish Family Planning Association and the UCD Women’s Studies Centre in Dublin yesterday, she said: “We need a new framework beyond the abortion arguments”.

“The saddest thing I think is when a woman chooses abortion for a child she really wanted to have, but couldn’t have because she doesn’t have healthcare, or she’s in poverty, or homeless, or she’d be kicked out of school, or she’d face violence from her family or the father.

“Women are blamed and while we have to fight for the right to abortion and family planning many women have to fight for the right to parent.”

She said if there was adequate support for mothers contending with disability, poverty, ethnic minority status, “many wouldn’t need to fight for abortions anyway”.
Aoife Dermody, co-founder of feminist group Lash Back, said that for many marginalised women the pro-choice campaign was irrelevant “luxury”. Their concerns were around “fears their kids might be taken into care, around housing, or childcare”.

Rosaleen McDonagh, Traveller and disability rights campaigner, said there was an assumption Traveller women were sexually repressed.
She said disabled women were mothers, carers, lovers and yet were viewed as dependent and were infantilised by wider society, and often judged as asexual. This was wrong.

The Guardian: A is for Abortion

2009-10-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

•A is for abortion

Branding women with a 'scarlet letter' won't reduce abortions. As a global study shows, contraception and education are key

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is forced to walk amid her small, Puritan community wearing a red "A" on her chest for the social crime of having sex outside of the bounds of marriage. Some things in America haven't changed as much as we'd like to believe.

A new law scheduled to take effect in Oklahoma would establish an online, publicly accessible database of information about every woman in the state who sought or had an abortion. While it would not require doctors to report the names and addresses of patients seeking or obtaining a legal medical procedure many conservative lawmakers think should be outlawed, the 37-question survey would (among other things) establish the women's race, age, education level and county of residence.

Women would be required to disclose if they are state employees and what method of insurance, if any, they are using for the procedure. It would require women to specify the number of pregnancies, children, miscarriages and previous abortions they've had. And it even asks for the length of the pregnancy and whether the women were using birth control when they conceived.

The surveys would all be sent to the Oklahoma health department, where state employees would aggregate the data into a searchable, sortable database and make it available to "researchers" online.

Aside from the fact that a woman working for the state health department could, in fact, have her survey reviewed and posted by her own colleagues (and have her identity compromised to her co-workers), there are other privacy concerns. In Cimarron County, for instance, the US census says that there are 2,500 residents, among them 18 African-Americans, 32 Native Americans, five Asians and 485 Latinos. If there is, say, only one 35-year-old African-American woman in the county with a college education who seeks to have an abortion, the fact that she did so will be immediately apparent to her neighbours – and to the anti-abortion protesters whose tactics include individual threats and harassment.

Legislators who passed the law are open about their motivations. They want to use the questionnaire and the online database to stop women from having abortions. Seemingly, they don't care whether they do so by intimidating women, allowing others to harass them or by making it difficult to obtain medical care. But the absence of any political will to do so through comprehensive sex education, economic support or a dedication of law-enforcement resources to protecting women from rape and sexual abuse seems rather telling about the anti-abortion movement's priorities.

A new study published by the Guttmacher Institute this week shows yet again that anti-abortion advocates' obstructionary tactics do little to reduce the prevalence of abortion. The decline in worldwide abortion rates is almost entirely due to a decline in unintentional pregnancy through access to contraception and education – and there's no correlation to the legality of abortion or not.

Making abortion illegal or difficult to obtain doesn't reduce its prevalence in a country. It simply increases the health risks to the women who seek them anyway. The only proven way to stop women from having abortions is to help them make their own choices about when to become pregnant.

Unfortunately, anti-abortion advocates are no sooner going to turn into pro-contraception advocates than they are to adopt the children that result from forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. As the pro-choice movement has often charged, they don't care about making it easier for women to avoid unwanted pregnancy or carry a child to term despite her economic circumstances. Their focus is on the foetus, and the foetus alone.

Republicans like to tout themselves as the party of limited government, and, this summer, town halls in Oklahoma and elsewhere echoed with the refrain that the government should never, ever come between its citizens and their doctors. But when it comes to reproductive health decisions, it seems, Oklahoma Republicans are proud to stand between their female constituents and their doctors, scarlet letters at the ready, and be the party of a limiting government.

BBC News: Bans 'Do Not Cut Abortion Rate'

2009-10-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Bans 'do not cut abortion rate'
BBC News

Most safe abortions are carried out using vacuum aspiration
Restricting the availability of legal abortion does not appear to reduce the number of women trying to end unwanted pregnancies, a major report suggests.

The Guttmacher Institute's survey found abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is legal and regions where it is highly restricted.

It did note that improved access to contraception had cut the overall abortion rate over the last decade.

But unsafe abortions, primarily illegal, have remained almost static.

The survey of 197 countries carried out by the Guttmacher Institute - a pro-choice reproductive think tank - found there were 41.6m abortions in 2003, compared with 45.5 in 1995 - a drop which occurred despite population increases.

Nineteen countries had liberalised their abortion laws over the 10 years studied, compared with tighter restrictions in just three.

But despite the general trend towards liberalisation, some 40% of the world's women live amid tight restrictions.

On some continents this is particularly pronounced: well over 90% of women in South America and Africa live in areas with strict abortion laws, proportions which have barely shifted in a decade.

Researchers also noted that while liberalisation was a key element in improving women's access to safer terminations, it was far from the only factor.

Even in countries where abortion is legal, lack of availability and cost may prove major obstacles. In India for example, where terminations are legally allowed for a variety of reasons, some 6m take place outside the health service.

The costs of unsafe abortions, which can include inserting pouches containing arsenic to back street surgery, can be high: the healthcare bill to deal with conditions from sepsis to organ failure can be four times what it costs to provide family planning services.

In the developed world, legal restrictions did not stop abortion but just meant it was "exported", with Irish women for instance simply travelling to other parts of Europe, according to Guttmacher's director, Dr Sharon Camp. In the developing world, it meant lives were put at risk.

"Too many women are maimed or killed each year because they lack legal abortion access," she said.

"The gains we've seen are modest in relation to what we can achieve. Investing in family planning is essential - far too many women lack access to contraception, putting them at risk."

Double Dutch

Western Europe is held up as an example of what access to contraceptive services can achieve, and the Netherlands - with just 10 abortions per 1,000 women compared to the world's 29 per 1,000 - is held up as the gold standard.
Here, young people report using two forms of contraception as standard.

Even the UK, which has a relatively high rate, fares well in comparison to the US, where the number of abortions is among the highest in the developed world. The institute says this rate is in part explained by inconsistencies in insurance coverage of contraceptive supplies.

In much of eastern Europe, where abortion was treated as a form of birth control, abortion rates have dropped by 50% in the past decade as contraceptives have become more widely available.

And globally, the number of married women of childbearing age with access to contraception has increased from 54% in 1990 to 63% in 2003, with gains also seen among single, sexually active women.

But there were still significant unmet contraception needs, and a lack of interest among pharmaceutical companies in developing new forms of birth control that provide top protection on demand, the institute said.

Josephine Quintavalle of the anti-abortion Comment on Reproductive Ethics said stopping women falling pregnant in the first place was an area where minds could meet.

"Abortion - back street or front street - is not the answer. Ensuring women have the means to end their pregnancies is not liberating them - they should be able to make real choices before they fall pregnant in the first place," she said.

"But that shouldn't necessarily mean taking pills every day. There will always be problems with access and cost, particularly in countries where people struggle just to buy food.

"What we need is to better understand our fertility - if there are just 24 fertile hours in a month, we need to work out a cheap, effective way for women to know when they can fall pregnant. That would be freedom, and that's what we should aim for."

COUNTRIES WHERE ABORTION HAS BEEN RESTRICTED
1997: Poland re-instated law outlawing abortion except when mother's life at risk or she had been raped
1998: El Salvador outlaws all abortions even when mother's life at risk
2006: Nicaragua similarly eliminates all grounds for legal abortion
Every year, an estimated 70,000 women die as a result of unsafe abortions - leaving nearly a quarter of a million children without a mother - and 5m develop complications.

A Woman's Plight Exposes Our Hypocrisy on Abortion

2009-09-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/martina-devlin/a-womans-plight-exposes-our-hypocrisy-on-abortion-1882325.html

September 10th
A woman's plight exposes our hypocrisy on abortion
Martina Devlin The Irish Independent

I was having a tooth drilled when Ray D'Arcy began reading aloud a listener's email. His Today FM show was playing in the background but I paid no attention initially -- preoccupied by the dental treatment.

The story proved impossible to ignore, however: its details demanded a hearing. A 28-year-old single Irishwoman was explaining why she flew to England recently for an abortion, what happened during the course of that harrowing day, and how she felt in the aftermath.

She described fainting in the airport as she waited five hours for her return flight to Ireland, and the guilt, shame, and above all secrecy, which added their weight to this daunting experience.

If the procedure had been available at home, it would have taken two hours. Instead she caught two flights, underwent an 18-hour day and endured the experience on her own because of the stigma attached to abortion, which remains illegal in Ireland.

Her conclusion was that women should not be obliged to travel to another jurisdiction if they decide against continuing with a pregnancy; that the State is shirking its duty towards living citizens -- as opposed to unborn ones -- by denying them the option of a termination on home ground.

There were three women in that dental surgery on Tuesday morning: the dentist, her assistant and myself. All of us were riveted.

For the first time, I sat on in the chair after my molar was filled, reluctant to leave. I wanted to hear the outcome -- we all did. Afterwards we looked at one another, dazed.

The three of us did not share a viewpoint on abortion, but none of us felt anything but compassion for the woman. An appalling experience was intensified by the State's Pontius Pilate approach to abortion: do as you like but not in our back yard.

We venerate motherhood in Ireland, between our Virgin Mary cult, our Mother Ireland iconography and the general Mammy fixation.

Yet even within this context, it seems excessive that our laws make motherhood compulsory. That's what our anti-abortion decree amounts to -- mandatory mothering.

The nature of the human condition is to buck against what is obligatory, so women have always tried to circumvent pregnancy in circumstances where having a baby is unwelcome.

In previous years there were DIY abortions, sometimes with disastrous results. More recently, Irish women from both sides of the Border go to Britain for terminations.

Politicians find this export trade convenient, since it saves them from the inevitable furore that would be stirred up by legislating for abortion.

Tearful, scared and often alone, these women deal with their pregnancies in circumstances made more distressing by our unwillingness to accept that abortions happen, whether we legalise them or not.

No one takes the decision to end a pregnancy lightly, and no doubt many live with guilt. But they do what they need to, for a variety of reasons. Compulsory motherhood is never advisable.

By vetoing abortion, one sector of society is imposing its moral standards on another. It is not just making windows into women's souls, but usurping control of their bodies.

The subject is a guaranteed catalyst for dissent, with middle ground difficult to find. People are either vociferously pro-choice or passionately pro-life. Some pro-lifers denounce abortion as murder, and claim legalising it would lead to abortion being used as a form of contraception.

Few pro-choice advocates would argue that abortion is positive -- most accept it as sad, and best avoided -- but they defend a woman's right to decide for herself.

A woman would have to be

very stupid to see abortion as a birth control option. It comes down to the rights of the mother versus the rights of the unborn child.

For me, the rights of the living always take precedence over those not yet born, but many -- perhaps the majority in the country -- disagree. Their viewpoint is enshrined in the Constitution, which protects the unborn baby.

But this shield does not mean that no Irish child is ever aborted. It means abortions happen outside our territory. In this age of cheap air fares, no line is being held.

The abortion debate is coming to the fore again because it is being mobilised as ammunition in the anti-Lisbon campaign.

Alarmist tactics have already begun. European law cannot impose abortion if the Lisbon Treaty is passed, but protesters suggest that ratifying the treaty will bring about backdoor admission to abortion.

Abortion has only entered the discussion as a means of manipulating people into voting against Lisbon.

This is no climate in which to be eurosceptic -- indeed, we are in danger of self-destructing if we reject Lisbon a second time -- but activists urge anyone opposed to abortion to reject the treaty. It's scaremongering, but some find it persuasive.

European law cannot supersede our constitution and abortion law will remain a matter for each member state. But it is more convenient for anti-Lisbonites to stir up doubt and confusion.

Meanwhile, thousands of Irish women go to Britain to have their abortions, and the Irish State looks the other way. Hypocrisy has always been our drug of choice.

Queensland Abortion Law Change is Women's Best Hope

2009-09-01T05:11:00.000-07:00

Queensland abortion law change is woman's best hope
Jamie Walker | August 31, 2009
Article from: The Australian

THE pregnant woman at the centre of Queensland's abortion law standoff is pinning her hopes on legislation being fast-tracked into state parliament to allay doctors' concerns about performing drug-induced terminations.

Shay, whose unborn child is so severely malformed as to have no prospect of survival, has been told the pregnancy must be aborted for the sake of her health.
But with medical abortion services suspended due to the impasse between doctors and the state government over the legality of the procedure, no hospital will admit her.
"This is not a moral issue, it is to save someone's health," her father, Gary, told The Australian.

"Everyone should get off their high horse and get my daughter into theatre. Every day that goes by is a day too long for her."

The predicament of 19 weeks pregnant Shay, 24, has added an intensely personal dimension to the legal and political imbroglio that erupted after police moved to prosecute a couple in Cairns for illegally procuring a medical abortion, prompting obstetricians to demand the scrapping of criminal sanctions on abortion.

The government will amend a section of the criminal code, exempting doctors from prosecution for performing otherwise illegal abortions, to cover recently developed medical techniques involving drugs such as RU486 and misoprostol.

Police allege a consignment of these drugs was illegally imported by Cairns mechanic Sergie Brennan, 21, to terminate the pregnancy of his 19-year-old girlfriend Tegan Simone Leach. The couple are due to face Cairns Magistrates Court on Thursday for committal proceedings.

With state parliament sitting this week, Shay's family is hoping legislation amending section 282 of the criminal code can be rushed through, clearing the way for medical abortion services to be resumed.

Shay has been told a conventional surgical abortion would increase her chances of experiencing future pregnancy and birth complications.

Three Queensland women have been referred interstate for treatment since Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital stopped medical abortions last week and other hospitals followed suit, but Shay wants to be near her family for support. Brisbane obstetrician Adrienne Freeman has offered to perform a medical abortion at Shay's home or in a hotel room but the young woman says she would feel safer having it done in a hospital.

"The best outcome ... would be to let Shay have a termination in Queensland and for the doctors to know they are not going to get into trouble," her father said.

Cairns obstetrician Caroline de Costa, who has also suspended her clinical service using RU486, said yesterday amending section 282 would not remove doctors' concerns.
Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians president Ted Weaver separately advised members "the threat of prosecution remains".

"It would not be enough for us to resume, no," Professor de Costa said of the proposed amendment to section 282. "We would still be concerned about the possibility of prosecution."

Anti-abortion group Cherish Life Queensland said "pro-abortion doctors" were running a "contrived campaign" to put pressure on the government to decriminalise abortion.
President Teresa Martin said no doctor in Queensland had been charged with an abortion-related offence since the late Peter Bayliss and Dawn Cullen faced court in 1986. The case formed one of the planks of case law that widened access to abortion, even though it remained banned by criminal statute.
"The law as it stands should be enforced," Ms Martin said.

Professor de Costa said the position of colleagues working in the public hospital sector was that they would not perform medical abortions while there was question over their legality.

Australia- Bligh to Rewrite Law to Abortion to Protect Doctors

2009-08-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

Bligh to rewrite law to abortion to protect doctors

Jamie Walker | August 21, 2009
Article from: The Australian

QUEENSLAND will rewrite part of its hotly contested law on abortion to accommodate doctors' concerns that they may be liable to criminal prosecution for performing drug-induced terminations.

Premier Anna Bligh, confirming a report in The Australian today, said the Government would review a section of the Criminal Code that is supposed to provide a defence for doctors to perform an abortion, otherwise banned by state law, to preserve the mother's life or health.

Doctors at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital this week suspended medical abortions out of concern that section 282 of the criminal code referred only to surgical abortions and so did not cover them for terminations involving drugs such as the abortion pill, RU486.

The issue has been brought to a head by the charging of a couple in Cairns with criminal offences for illegally procuring an abortion, allegedly with RU486 and another abortion drug, misoprostol, smuggled into the state from overseas.

Ms Bligh, who is on the record as personally favouring decriminalisation of abortion, said today that doctors performing authorised medical abortions were entitled to same legal protection surgical procedures had under the law.

"What we are looking at is where a doctor provides medicine, that is authorised for any purpose, that they should be entitled to the same protection already provided under the criminal code for any authorised surgery, whether it is in relation to termination of pregnancy or indeed any other surgery,” Ms Bligh said.

Deputy Queensland Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg said the Liberal National Party would be willing to support the change, provided it did no more than clarify the existing law, and did not make abortion more readily available.

Obstetricians at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital were due to meet this afternoon to discuss an appeal by the Government to resume their medical abortion service.

NSW and Victoria both said today there were mechanisms for patients to be referred from Queensland on a case by case basis, and neither government would block such access.

Queensland retains the harshest laws in the country against abortion, with offences carrying up to 14 years' jail.

Ms Bligh, however, has ruled out wider reform of the contentious law.

Australia- Caught in Abortion Crossfire

2009-08-21T02:57:00.000-07:00

Caught in abortion crossfire
The Australian Newspaper

SPARE a thought for Tegan Leach and her boyfriend, Sergie Brennan.

Late last year they were faced with a decision 100,000-odd Australian women make annually: Leach, 19, had become pregnant and, after talking things through with her partner, is alleged by police to have resolved not to have the baby.

The steps the couple are alleged to have taken are now the subject of intensely watched court proceedings in Cairns, north Queensland. Police have charged Leach with the offence, under the Queensland Criminal Code, of procuring her own miscarriage, the first such prosecution for more than a half century.

But that's not all that gives this case its political needle; Leach is alleged to have terminated her pregnancy with contraband RU486, the abortion pill that was allowed into the country just three years ago, and only after federal MPs and senators exercised conscience votes to overturn a ban on its importation.

If convicted, she faces up to seven years' jail.

Brennan, 21, has been charged with one count of attempting to procure an abortion, an offence carrying up to 14 years' imprisonment, and a further count of supplying drugs to procure an abortion, punishable by three years' jail. Neither has entered pleas.

As detailed in the paper's news section today, the couple's problems don't end there.

Their home was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail and Brennan's car was smashed up. The young man believes the attacks were no coincidence, though Cherish Life Queensland, the state's main pro-life group, has strongly denied any association with violence.

The couple has moved to a new address in Cairns secured by closed-circuit cameras and guard dogs.

"It was pretty bad," Brennan tells Inquirer in his first interview. "Everyone in Australia knew who we were and where we lived."

Forces on both sides of the bitter abortion divide are mobilising across the country. In cyberspace, a dedicated page has been set up on social networking site Facebook to support the couple.

Children by Choice in Queensland is using the case to step up its campaign for abortion law reform; specifically, for the 110-year-old provisions of the criminal law against abortion to be repealed and for abortion to be regulated instead through the state's Health Act. Essentially, this is what Victoria did last year when it decriminalised abortions up to week 24 of gestation. Anti-abortion rights activists are organising in Queensland to block the renewed push for law reform in that state.

Toowoomba general practitioner David van Gend, who campaigned strongly to keep RU486 out of the country, has re-emerged to back the police in prosecuting the prosecution of the Cairns couple, saying bluntly: "Where consenting adults conceive a baby, both they and their doctors have a duty of care to that child that cannot be abrogated and any attempt to take its life must be restrained by law. Does our position mean couples should be prosecuted for self-procurement of abortion, such as with RU486, where there is no medical necessity? Yes. We either enforce, with an appropriate deterrent, some agreed limits on abortion, or sink to the depraved depths of the current Victorian regime."

Cherish Life Queensland president Teresa Martin says the group has had observers in court to track the case as it grinds through the judicial process. Leach and Brennan are due toappear at a committal hearing next month in Cairns, where a magistrate will decide whether there is sufficient evidence to put them on trial.

Martin insists that her people have no truck with the aggressive tactics adopted by some anti-abortion groups; they don't confront women outside abortion clinics, for example, though they sometimes mount "silent protests" there.

Anyone who used violence would be drummed out of Cherish Life, Martin says. "In no way, shape or form would we accept that."

The case has already exposed deep-seated problems with the abortion laws in Queensland. Cairns obstetrician and professor of medicine Caroline de Costa, who was at the forefront of the campaign in 2005-06 to bring RU486 into the country and established the first clinical service using the drug, has stopped prescribing it because of what she says is the uncertainty in the law.

There were two factors in this decision, de Costa says. Strictly speaking, elective abortions are banned by statute law in Queensland. Section 282 of the criminal code, however, does allow an abortion to be performed "for the preservation of the mother's life".

In 1986, Brisbane judge Fred McGuire interpreted this exemption broadly to create one of the planks in Australian case law that gives women access to elective abortion, even when it is banned by statute.

De Costa's primary concern is that the legal situation is unstable, and the prosecution of Leach and Brennan reinforced that.

"Cairns has become something of a centre of abortion radicalism, if you like, compared to the rest of Queensland," she says. "And so when this case presented we felt it just wasn't a coincidence."

The second issue she has with the existing law is the wording of section 282, which refers to "a surgical operation" to save the mother's life. How does the common law defence apply to her work with RU486, she wonders, when it is medical in its application, not surgical?

"It's not about the ethics or morality or what anyone thinks about abortion," she says. "It's about making sure that the law is clear and consistent with the rest of Australia."

All of which is something of a headache for Premier Anna Bligh, just what she doesn't need right now when the unions are kicking up over the state government's $15 billion assets sell-off and the Labor mates affair continues to unspool.

Bligh's Labor predecessors Wayne Goss and Peter Beattie each reformed Queensland's antiquated laws on prostitution but shied away from abortion. Bligh, to date, has continued to follow the path of least resistance, saying she would support a private member's bill if it happened to lob in parliament, but the legislation wouldn't come from her, and if it were presented she doubted whether it would pass.

Bligh, a former women's activist, said she feared access to abortion could be made more restrictive if the legislation were amended "in its manifestation through the debate".

That would be a terrible outcome for women, the Premier said.

Leach, awaiting her day in court in trepidation with her boyfriend, could probably tell Bligh a thing or two about that.

Australia- Abortion laws 'feed illegal drug trade'

2009-08-21T02:44:00.000-07:00

Abortion laws 'feed illegal drug trade'
By Bronwyn Herbert for The World Today ABC News Australia

The president of the Australian College of Obstetricians has renewed the call for abortion to be decriminalised throughout Australia.

For many women, attending an abortion clinic is unaffordable or out of reach, so increasingly it seems some women are turning to what is known as a "medical" abortion - in others words, terminating a pregnancy by drugs rather than by surgery.

And the obstetrician Caroline de Costa says many of them are illegally buying a drug to induce their own abortions at home.

"The drug Misoprostol, which is legally available for a number of reasons in Australia, is also being used undercover or covertly by some women for procuring an abortion for themselves in Australia," she said.

"I think this is probably most common amongst some immigrant women from China and from south-east Asia, where the drug is widely used in this way anyway."

Dr de Costa is a professor of gynaecology and obstetrics at James Cook University's School of Medicine in Cairns. She is also an advocate of medical abortions carried out under a doctor's supervision.

Dr de Costa says it is disturbing to hear of women buying the drug illegally.

"I'm aware of anecdotal evidence that this is happening; I've spoken to colleagues who have also mentioned that they have come across cases," she said.

"We know that it is easy to access the drug on the internet, it is sold in Australia and prescribed in Australia for other purposes so it can be illegally accessed that way."

Medical abortions are available in many western countries including the US, Sweden and New Zealand, but not in Australia unless you visit one of a handful of gynaecologists.

Edith Weisberg is the director of research at Family Planning New South Wales and a senior clinical lecturer at Sydney University.

"I think the problem is that Australia is one of the few western countries that doesn't have medical abortion available as an option for women needing an abortion," Dr Weisberg said.

Another drug used for medical abortions is RU486 and Dr Weisberg says it is concerning to hear that some women in Queensland have also been illegally sourcing this drug.

"The problem is that first of all we don't know where they're sourcing it from and how good the product is - that's the first thing," she said.

"And the second thing is that RU486 used as an abortifacient is only about 85 per cent effective if you use it by yourself, so these women may in fact have incomplete abortions and need surgical evacuation of their uterus afterwards."

Ted Weaver is the president of the Royal Australian College of Obstetricians.

"We think that if people have to resort to backyard approaches for doing these things then we think that's probably not a good idea," he said.

"There's a potential for harm for women; these drugs aren't without risk and whatever the rights and wrongs of abortion we think that women, if they choose to do this, should be able to access a safe service."

Dr Weaver says abortion needs to be decriminalised nationwide.

"There needs to be legislative certainty for doctors that they won't be prosecuted for performing abortions, if that's what they want to do, and that women shouldn't be prosecuted for trying to access one, if that's also what they want to do," he said.

"So we need to take it out of the criminal code, essentially.

"Some states have enacted law reform, Victoria has and South Australia has, but in Queensland abortion is still contained within the criminal code.

"The College's position would be that it should be taken out of the criminal code and if people want to access that service, and that's their business, then those services should be provided in a safe way."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/04/2645919.htm?section=australia

It's Time The State Faced Up To Abortion Realities

2009-07-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

The Irish Examiner - Letter to the Editor

It's time the state faced up to abortion realities

Thursday, July 30, 2009

HOW ironic if, as Dan Buckley suggests (July 21), a European Court of Human Rights decision in the A,B and C abortion cases becomes Europe's equivalent of Roe v Wade.

Anti-choice groups have influenced the Irish state's policy on this matter to the extent that it has failed even to legislate on the protection of a woman's life when, in the words of the X case judgment, there is a "real and substantial risk" that she will die because of her pregnancy.

It is surely no defence to claim that every woman in the country who finds herself in situation where she wishes to choose abortion has the option of exposing her most intimate concerns before a court in order to seek permission. It is time the state was honest and admitted that far from being a shining example of difference from our European neighbours, abortion is commonplace here.

Failure to face up to that reality and give Irish women access to those reproductive rights shared by most European women has meant that, as US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg recently said of the situation in the USA, "we have a policy that only affects poor women ... and I don't know why this hasn't been said more often".

A period of recession can only deepen the inequalities between Irish women who have the means to define and exercise their right to choose abortion and can travel to Britain, the Netherlands or further afield and those who do not. The matter of abortion involves complex issues of rights and ethics which Irish politicians have grappled with only at the most simplistic level – and rarely with a focus on the rights, experiences or health of women.

The Irish state's failure to address this issue and its lack of interest in or understanding of the difficulties pregnant women may face deserves to be exposed in an international arena.

Dr Sandra McAvoy
Douglas Road
Cork

Read more: http://examiner.ie/opinion/letters/its-time-the-state-faced-up-to-abortion-realities-97641.html#ixzz0MjQGEMI0

Amnesty Condemns Abortion Ban in Nicaragua

2009-07-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

The Irish Times July 29th

• Amnesty condemns abortion ban

TRACY WILKINSON in Mexico City

NICARAGUA’S TOTAL ban on abortion is a violation of human rights and is killing a growing number of women and children, Amnesty International has said in launching a campaign to have the measure repealed.

In a report released in Mexico City yesterday, the international human rights organisation said Nicaragua’s law, which went into effect in late 2006, put it in a group with only 3 per cent of the world’s nations that do not allow abortion under any circumstance.

Citing statistics from the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health, the report said 33 women and girls died from pregnancy complications in the first 19 weeks of this year, compared with 20 in the same period last year.

But it added that the real numbers were probably much higher.

Nicaragua has one of Latin America’s highest rates of sexual violence, with the abuse often perpetrated by fathers, uncles or other relatives. At least 50 per cent of reported rapes are of girls under 18, and most of those who get pregnant are under 15, the report said.

Women and girls who have been impregnated by rapists or whose life or health is at risk are not allowed to abort.

“A festering, debilitating human rights situation [is] bringing grave fear, threat, harm and even death to Nicaragua’s girl children and women,” Kate Gilmore, executive deputy secretary general of Amnesty International, said in Mexico City.

Abortion laws are generally restrictive in most of Latin America. The irony in Nicaragua is that the ban was backed by now-president Daniel Ortega, who led the left-wing Sandinista revolution 30 years ago and championed women’s rights. In the middle of the 2006 election season, Mr Ortega promoted the law to gain the support of the Catholic Church and return to power.

The ban ended a 100-year-old exception that had allowed abortion when the woman’s health was at risk.

Amnesty International issued its 50-page report following an investigation in Nicaragua by Ms Gilmore and a team of experts. She said Mr Ortega refused to see them, and the health minister dismissed their findings of a growing mortality rate among pregnant women as unfounded.

Dr Leonel Arguello, president of the Nicaraguan Society of Medical Practitioners, said the ban has had a chilling effect on doctors.

“Not being allowed to do everything to save your patient goes against medical ethics,” he said in a telephone interview from Managua.

Fearing they will break the law, many doctors decline to treat pregnant women in obstetric emergencies, or delay treatment, increasing the risks, he said.

The ban initially contained penalties of as long as six years for women who had abortions and the doctors who performed them. The penalty was raised to eight years last year. Some advocates wanted sentences of as long as 30 years. No one has been charged or put on trial yet.

While criticised by human rights and women’s groups since it was first drafted, the prohibition received wide support from the church and from several political parties in addition to Mr Ortega’s Sandinistas. A petition supporting the ban collected 300,000 signatures.

Proponents contended at the time that advances in medical science now allowed doctors to bring a foetus to the point of viability without endangering the woman’s life and that warnings of heightened dangers were exaggerated. But Ms Gilmore said lawmakers ignored expert opinion to the contrary.– ( LA Times-Washington Post service)

Human Rights Court To Hear Irish Abortion Case

2009-07-15T05:08:00.001-07:00

• Human rights court to hear Irish abortion ban case

CARL O'BRIEN, Social Affairs Correspondent The Irish Times

THE EUROPEAN Court of Human Rights has agreed to hear a challenge by three women in Ireland to the Government’s ban on abortion in a full hearing before its grand chamber of 17 judges.

The women claim the restrictive nature of Irish law on abortion jeopardises their health and their wellbeing and violates their human rights. The identities of the three will remain confidential.

The court in Strasbourg, which is separate from the EU, adjudicates on human rights issues among the 47 states of the Council of Europe. Any court decision at this level is binding on the state involved.

The court’s decision to hold a hearing before the grand chamber rather than a smaller chamber of seven judges is regarded by legal experts as a sign of the significance of the issues at stake.

The three women at the centre of the case include a woman at risk of an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the womb; a pregnant woman who received chemotherapy for cancer; and a woman whose children were placed in care as she was unable to cope.

Their complaints centre on four articles in the European Convention on Human Rights, including protection from “inhuman or degrading treatment” and freedom from discrimination. The case is expected to be heard later this year, although no firm date has been set.
In papers filed with the court and seen by The Irish Times, the Government has indicated it will launch a robust defence of the State’s restrictions on abortion.

It also insists the European Convention on Human Rights does not confer even a limited right to abortion and it would be “inconceivable” that member states would have agreed to this in drafting the convention. The main plank of its defence is that domestic legal remedies have not been exhausted by the women.

The women at the centre of the case – who are supported by the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) – say the lack of any effective remedy at home means they have satisfied the requirement to exhaust domestic legal remedies.

In addition, they say that taking a case would have been costly, futile and could have forced them to relinquish their anonymity.
Niall Behan, chief executive of the IFPA, said: “The women are looking forward to have their voices heard in the grand chambers and having their human rights vindicated.”

After several referendums in recent decades and rulings by the higher courts, abortion is illegal but may be performed if there is a substantial risk to the mother’s life, including the threat of suicide. Abortion in the case of foetal abnormalities is not provided for. The case will be watched closely by observers given a ruling by the same court in recent years that resulted in Poland being instructed to guarantee access to legal abortions.

The case has drawn the interest of a large number of groups with divergent views on abortion who have sent in observations to the court on the case.

These groups, along with the three women and the State, will be asked to send in new briefs or observations to the court over the coming weeks.

Teen Rape Victim Files Case Against Peru in U.N. Committee

2009-06-22T03:44:00.000-07:00

• Teen Rape Victim Files Case Against Peru in U.N. Committee

From Reproductiverights.org

Today, a 16-year-old Peruvian rape survivor who suffered devastating consequences after being denied an abortion filed a human rights petition against her government before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The CEDAW Committee monitors states’ compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. L.C., who wishes to remain anonymous, charges that Peru’s failure to implement measures that guarantee a woman’s ability to obtain essential reproductive health services in a timely manner, particularly legal abortion, not only violates the Peruvian Constitution, but international treaty obligations.

“Extreme human rights violations against women and girls, such as L.C., occur in Peru on a daily basis,” said Lilian Sepúlveda, regional manager and legal adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who represents L.C. along with the Center for the Promotion and Defense of Sexual and Reproductive Rights (PROMSEX). “As L.C.’s case illustrates, it is not enough to simply pass a law that permits access to abortion—-it is imperative that governments establish and enforce regulations that guarantee women are able to obtain those services and obtain them safely.”

In 2006, L.C., 13-years-old at the time, was repeatedly raped by a 34-year-old male who lived in her neighborhood, the district of Ventanilla, an impoverished section in the province of El Callao near the capital city of Lima. By 2007, she learned that she was pregnant. Desperate, L.C. attempted to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of a building next door to her house. Neighbors discovered her and rushed her to the hospital. After examining her condition and diagnosing an immediate referral to realign her spine, doctors refused to provide her with urgent care arguing that they could not operate on L.C. because she was pregnant. Even though Peru allows abortion in cases where the mother’s health and life are at risk, hospital officials failed to treat L.C. L.C. eventually suffered a miscarriage because of the severity of her injuries.

Several weeks after the miscarriage, four months after she was told she needed surgery, L.C. did undergo the spinal procedure, but was told shortly thereafter that the surgery would have little to no effect and that she would remain paralyzed.

“What happened to L.C. is a travesty.Requiring a woman to carry a pregnancy to term when the pregnancy threatens her physical and mental health constitutes discrimination because it prioritizes her reproductive capacity over her health,” said Susana Chávez, director of PROMSEX. “As a medical procedure sought only by women, the denial of a timely abortion constitutes discrimination.”

In 2002, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a similar case against Peru before the U.N. Human Rights Committee (UNHRC). In 2005, that committee ruled against Peru for failing to protect K.L., a young woman who was forced by state officials to carry to term a pregnancy with fetal abnormalities incompatible with life. The UNHRC found that denying access to legal abortion violates women's most basic human rights and ordered Peru to adopt the necessary regulations to guarantee access to legal abortion. The government has failed to abide by the decision.

Among other remedies, L.C. is asking that the Peruvian government acknowledge the human rights violation; provide L.C. with reparations, including physical and mental rehabilitation; and issue necessary measures so that no other woman is denied her right to comprehensive health care and therapeutic abortion.

Petition Filed Against Peru with UN CEDAW Committee

2009-06-22T02:40:00.000-07:00

Petition Filed Against Peru with UN CEDAW Committee

A 16-year-old Peruvian rape survivor filed a petition with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) against Peru yesterday. While abortion is legal in Peru in case of risk to a woman's health or life, the petition alleges that the failure of the Peruvian government to adequately enforce existing laws led to the anonymous survivor's paralysis.

At age 13, the young woman was raped by a 34-year-old man and became pregnant. After discovering the pregnancy, she attempted suicide by jumping off a building. Doctors treated her injuries, but refused to perform necessary spinal surgery when they realized she was pregnant. Ultimately, the young woman had a miscarriage as a result of her injuries, but remained paralyzed after undergoing surgery.

A similar case was filed against Peru by the Center for Reproductive Rights in 2002. In that case, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled in favor of a young woman who was forced to carry to term a fetus with fatal abnormalities. The Committee ruled that access to abortion in the case of threats to maternal health is a human right and Peru was ordered to change their abortion laws.

Peru signed CEDAW on July 23, 1981. CEDAW is the most comprehensive international agreement that seeks women's advancement. It establishes rights for women in areas not previously subject to international standards. Moreover, the Convention establishes a committee to periodically review the progress being made by its adherents. The US is the only industrialized western country that has not ratified CEDAW, which has been ratified by 185 countries.

Media Resources: Center for Reproductive Rights 6/18/09; Feminist Daily News Wire 2/25/04, 4/14/09; United Nations CEDAW

Jamaica: For an Abortion Law That Reaches The Poor

2009-06-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

JAMAICA: For an Abortion Law That Reaches the Poor
By Zadie Neufville

KINGSTON, Jun 14 (IPS) - When a Jamaican women’s group Sistren realised the voices of poor women were missing in a national debate on abortion rights, they boldly staged a play before parliamentarians reviewing a draft law that seeks to clarify when abortion can be deemed legal.

Called ‘Slice of Reality’, the performance was aimed to give "a voice to groups of women whose experiences may not otherwise be heard", says Lana Finikin, Sistren’s executive director. It tells the stories of "poor women who are being robbed of the right to make decisions concerning their own bodies" she told IPS in an interview.

The right to abortion is outlawed in Jamaica under an archaic Offenses Against the Persons Act, which is modeled along the lines of an English law of the same name, legislated in 1861. It prescribes life imprisonment for a woman who aborts her foetus and up to three years in jail for the doctor who helps her.

The common law under which abortions may be legally carried out, women’s activists say, perpetuates a situation where only the rich are able to take advantage. Abortions are allowed in cases of rape, incest, and extreme abnormality of the foetus or danger to the mother, but the only hospital that provided the service to the poor closed in the mid-90s.

Sistren’s taut, 10-minute performance on Mar. 12 was one of dozens of presentations before a joint select committee of parliament reviewing the pending Termination of Pregnancy Act. The new law seeks to clarify when abortions can be termed legal.

In Kingston’s tough inner-city communities, an unplanned pregnancy can mean a lifetime of poverty. Abortion which carries a stigma - scorn and social ostracism - is out of the reach of most women. With only a few doctors willing to do the procedure, the cost of a termination is high, starting at 250 dollars, when daily wage workers earn roughly 43 dollars a week.

As a result, according to Finikin, many risk their lives in unsafe abortions or by consuming dangerous herbal concoctions or lethal drug combinations to cause miscarriages. Health Ministry data show that between Mar. 1 and Aug. 31, 2005, there were 641 admissions due to complications from botched abortions at the island’s main maternity hospital in Kingston.

For more than a year now, the joint select committee has been hearing pro- and anti-abortion arguments as it seeks to re-write the draft legislation.

Finikin feels that the debate is confined to the rights of the foetus and the immorality of the act without regard for the reasons why women decide to abort. She is upset that a poor woman who is raped has no choice. "When you tell me that somebody rapes me, that I must walk with that trauma for nine months and then bring it to fruition…" she said, very graphically expressing the pain many women who have to raise a child born out of rape.

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), a Caribbean women’s rights forum, which has been coordinating the campaign for a just abortion law for the poor, issued a statement. "To continue to criminalise abortion puts women’s lives at risk, and suggests that the right of the foetus outweighs the right of women to have control over their own body and life," it noted.

The Sistren Theatre Collective, one of the members, has been at the forefront of educating women about their rights for more than 32 years.

Meanwhile, the pro-life lobby has several well-known members of the Christian clergy in its ranks including a well-known playwright, actor and Jesuit priest Father Richard HoLung, a longtime advocate for the poor and founder of the Missionaries of the Poor.

They have accused parliamentarians of supporting abortion, "a barbaric and evil" act, in order to secure money for HIV/AIDS programmes from the European Union and the U.S., charges which both have denied.

Opposition member of parliament Lisa Hanna who is on the joint parliamentary committee told IPS that in her rural north coast constituency of South Eastern St. Ann, women and girls who are desperate to end their pregnancy resort to all sorts of life threatening solutions.

A Slice of Reality portrays these and other stories of insane or other mentally challenged women and those without social support who are preyed on by abusive men, or girls who are forced into sexual relationships with gunmen in their communities.

Slice of Reality portrays like these and other stories of women without social support who are preyed on by abusive men, or girls who are forced into sexual relationships with gunmen in their communities.

In addition, there are teenager victims of incestuous relationships who are sworn to secrecy by their families, and women whose husbands refuse to permit them to access birth control methods.

Lobbying for support for women’s reproductive rights and (access to) abortion, DAWN states "it is a woman’s right to have all options available to her" so she can make an informed decision.

While the common law allows abortions under specified conditions, it "gives doctors the right over women’s lives since not all situations in which women become pregnant, may be strictly in line with the definition provided for under the law", according to DAWN.

With the hearing almost completed, the parliamentary committee will soon make its recommendations.

"All information taken in these hearings will be taken into consideration. The chairman will make our report to parliament and the legislation will be redrafted," says MP Hanna. She is optimistic that the committee will be able to table the bill in Jamaica’s lawmaking lower house of parliament by year end.

Kenya: Abortion: The Bitter Truth

2009-06-11T03:11:00.000-07:00

Abortion: The bitter truth
The Standard, Nairobi, Kenya.

Published on 04/06/2009

By Dann Okoth

Unsafe abortions are taking a heavy toll on women and the heath care system with three of 10 pregnancy related deaths arising from botched attempts to end pregnancies, a Government survey reveals.

As young people continue to rely on sex myths, the Church adamantly against lifting the ban on abortion, courts dodging the matter and pro-abortion activists in no mood to compromise, the situation is bound to get worse. According to the survey, unsafe abortions account for a staggering 35 per cent of all maternal deaths with public hospitals spending over Sh18 million on treatment of related complications.

The survey conducted by the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation and Ipas, an international NGO that works around the world to increase women’s ability to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, finds that there are 380,000 unsafe abortions annually. This amounts to an incredible 800 unsafe abortions a day up from 700 cases 2002.

"A whopping Sh18 million of taxpayer’s money goes to mitigate the effects of the botched abortions," says Dr B Kigen the Deputy Head of the Division of Reproductive Health in the ministry.

Teenagers represent nearly 16 per cent of failed abortion cases that end up in public hospitals.

The survey whose findings have been collected and collated since 2004 reveals that for every 100,000 births there are 414 stillbirths directly associated with unsafe abortions.

The figure is double the amount set aside for the ministry in this financial year’s supplementary estimates for basic wages for temporary employees which stands at Sh12 million.

Tip of the iceberg

The figure could be a tip of the iceberg. "The numbers could be much higher and cost to the economy much bigger especially considering that the survey only captures cases that report to public health institutions for treatment," Kigen says.

The financial cost is not fully reflected in the figures because treatment in public hospitals is subsidized. For instance, Kenyatta National Hospital only charges Sh300 for cleaning the womb and associated treatment for each botched abortion. A similar service could cost upwards of Sh150,000 in a private hospital in Nairobi. "In private hospitals such cases are considered surgical where the requirement is that a patient deposits Sh100,000 . Ultimately, the cost of such operations run into several hundred thousand shillings depending on the gravity of the condition," says a lead surgeon in one of the leading private hospitals in Nairobi.

It is not yet clear how many cases end up in ragtag health outlets scattered across the country.

A recent case where a self-professed gynaecologist in Nairobi was hauled to court accused of illegally carrying out abortion and foetuses found dumped along the roadside in the city points to a growing problem. Indeed the fact that many young girls who procure such abortions never come out from these insidious health joints alive is a wake up call for the authorities to act.

But just to give a glimpse of what burden unsafe abortion has become, Kigen says that now such cases take up 50 per cent occupancy in gynaecological beds in public hospitals.

This essentially points to the fact that a huge chunk of the health ministry budget goes to take care of such cases.

"One per cent of women admitted to public hospitals with abortion complications die," Kigen says.

Incredibly, 16 per cent of the cases are girls under 19 while 70 per cent are women aged between 20-34 years.

The shocking revelations come a few months after doctors petitioned the Government to lift prohibitive laws on abortion with the view to saving lives of women who seek the service illegally.

Under the auspices of the Kenya Obstetrical and Gynaecology Society the doctors said the State should address abortion more objectively to improve the maternal mortality. While addressing a members’ gathering in Mombasa in February the Society chairman Dr Omondi Ogutu said maternal deaths could now be standing at double the official ratio of 141:100,000 yet most countries were now targeting a single digit ratio.

Reproductive Health

They called for the fast tracking of the Reproductive Health and Rights Bill which they say would address the abortion issue and cater for a wide range of issues including family planning and men’s reproductive rights .

To counter the increasing number of botched abortion Kigen says the Government has embarked on a programme to train staff on proper abortion care.

"The programme aims to address among other things post abortion care, strengthen family planning programmes especially targeting adolescent people in the reproductive age," he says.

The World Health Organisation, United Nations Population Fund, KWF and United States Agency for International Development, he says, support the effort.

RH Reality Check blog: Abortion Law Liberalised in Catholic Monaco

2009-06-11T03:02:00.000-07:00

Abortion Law Liberalized in Catholic Monaco
By Anna Wilkowska-Landowska, RH Reality Check, Eastern Europe

June 5, 2009 - 8:00am

Last month, after five years of advocacy, Monaco approved a new law, which legalizes medically necessary abortions. Monaco was one of the last three states in Europe where abortion was illegal. The other two countries are Ireland and Malta.

The law was passed unanimously by the National Council, Monaco's parliament, in a 26-0 vote. This is significant because 90 percent of Monaco's population is formally Catholic. As generally known, the Roman Catholic Church believes that life begins at conception and opposes abortion under all circumstances. However, the modern Catholic position states a medical procedure needed to save the life of the mother, but that may result in the death of the "pre-born child" as a secondary effect, is morally acceptable.

Until now, Monaco has had one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. Under Monaco's Criminal Code, there were no stated exceptions to a general prohibition of abortion. Nonetheless, under general criminal law principles of necessity, an abortion could be performed to save the life of a pregnant woman. Any person performing an illegal abortion was subject to one to five years imprisonment and a fine. A woman who induced her own abortion or consented to its being induced was subject to six months to three years imprisonment and a fine. Physicians, surgeons, midwives and pharmacists who performed abortions were liable to harsher penalties including suspension from their profession.
The process of adopting a new bill calling for increased abortion access took years of struggling against religious beliefs. Like many other Catholic Church representatives, Archbishop Pernard Barsi of Monaco said there are a few fundamental principles that come not from religious morality, but from the natural law itself, that applies to all modern civilized societies: Life begins at conception. "What we term ‘interruption of pregnancy,' no matter what the motive is, remains an abortion. One of the most fundamental human rights is the integrity of the person at all stages of life. Civil law must never abridge the moral law," he said.

The Catholic Church in Monaco continuously claimed that permitting deliberate abortion for medical reasons or rape would inevitably lead to abortion on demand, and sooner or later, to the total liberalization of abortion. Barsi was pointing to the progression of laws permitting abortion in countries with no restrictions on the procedure. Instead of focusing on termination of pregnancies, he suggested looking closer at the problems faced by women and families dealing with difficult pregnancies, and called for increased support in society for them. "It's not by legalizing the 'interruption of pregnancies for medical motives or rape' that we will help women, couples and families. We must in fact accompany women by putting in place concrete measures within our institutions to foster solidarity," he said.

The new law permits abortion for "hard cases" including rape, fetal deformity, fetal illness or danger to the life of the mother. Catholic authorities argue that new regulations on termination of pregnancy are "incompatible" with the constitution of Monaco, which recognizes the Catholic faith as the state religion. They fear, for example, that there will be further attempts to conform Monaco to what they consider lowest ethical standards.

Adoption of the new bill on abortion in Monaco should be regarded as an important step on the way to providing sufficient guarantees for women within the area of reproductive rights. The fact that currently there are only two states in Europe where abortion is illegal and therefore totally prohibited, is a genuine proof that societies can change mentality, despite religious constraints that very often constitute serious obstacles when discussing controversial matters, especially abortion. Monaco serves as a perfect example.

German Parliament Votes To Change Law on Late-Term Abortions

2009-05-27T04:27:00.000-07:00

German Parliament Votes to Change Law on Late-Term Abortions

In the Bundestag vote on 14 May, 326 delegates voted in favor of the consultation period which includes a doctor's psychological evaluation. Of the 612 parliamentarians involved in the vote, 234 voted against and 52 abstained. Parliamentarians also voted in favor of increased consultations and support for families with handicapped children considering a termination.

The motion mandates that women receive counseling from a doctor about the medical and psychological consequences of a late-term abortion. The doctor should also inform the patient about living with a physically or mentally disabled child, and point her towards other means of support. A woman considering a late-term abortion would also have a three-day waiting period between the counseling session and the procedure to give her time to think about her options. After being approved by the upper chamber of parliament, the Bundesrat, it should come into effect in January 2010. (DW/AFP)

Abortion Bill Approved in Monaco

2009-05-27T04:25:00.000-07:00

Abortion Bill Approved in Monaco

The Monaco Parliament (National Council) has unanimously approved a bill authorizing medical abortions. The bill was passed in a 26-0 vote, despite the fact that 90% of its population is formally Catholic. The legislation had been in process for five years and it is the first case of legalizing abortion in the country where Catholicism is the state religion.

UN Committee Concludes That Abortion Law in Northern Ireland Should Be Amended

2009-05-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

press statement from fpa Northern Ireland:

Tuesday 27 May 2009

UN Committee concludes that abortion law in Northern Ireland should be amended

For the third time in ten years, another United Nations human rights monitoring body has recommended that the abortion law in Northern Ireland should be amended and better protection afforded to women’s human rights. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the monitoring body of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights met in Geneva on the 12 and 13 of May 2009, to examine the UK and Northern Ireland government. In its concluding observations, the Committee recommended that the abortion law in Northern Ireland should be brought into line with the rest of the UK.

It stated:
“The Committee calls upon the State party to amend the abortion law of Northern Ireland to bring it in line with the 1967 Abortion Act with a view to preventing clandestine and unsafe abortions in cases of rape, incest or foetal abnormality.”

Reacting to the Committee’s recommendations, Dr Audrey Simpson, fpa Director Northern Ireland said:
“Once again the ongoing discrimination of Northern Ireland women has been acknowledged in Europe. It is totally unacceptable for the UK Government and the Northern Ireland Assembly to continue to ignore UN human rights monitoring bodies. It is a blatant disregard for women’s human rights in relation to their reproductive health.”

Women's Group in Malawi Sues Government Over Abortion Rights

2009-05-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

HEALTH-MALAWI:
Women’s Group Sues Govt Over Abortion Rights
Pilirani Semu-Banda

LILONGWE, Apr 29 (IPS) - An influential women rights organisation in Malawi, Women in Law in Southern Africa-Malawi (WILSA-Malawi), is suing the government of Malawi for preventing women from accessing safe abortion.

Malawian law prohibits abortion - Section 149 of the country’s penal code says any person who administers abortion shall be liable to imprisonment for 14 years, while Section 150 indicates that any woman who solicits abortion is liable to seven years imprisonment.

But WILSA-Malawi’s executive director, Seodi White, calls the existing laws nonsensical because they infringe on women’s rights. She says they force women to seek back-street abortions from traditional healers and illegal clinics thereby putting their lives in danger.

"These laws do not make sense at all. They are contributing towards the death of so many women. We need to get rid of them as soon as possible," urged White.

Government statistics in Malawi indicate that up to 30 percent of maternal deaths in the country are due to abortion. Malawi’s maternal mortality is one of the highest in Africa - second only to war-torn Sierra Leone.

White says refusing women the right to abort is discrimination. "Access to legal and safe abortion services is essential to the protection of women’s rights to non-discrimination and equality. Where women are compelled to continue unwanted pregnancies, it puts them at a disadvantage because abortion is a medical procedure that only women need," she told IPS.

White argues that the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has implied that the denial of medical procedures that only women need is a form of discrimination against women. "Therefore, restrictive abortion laws may amount in certain cases to discrimination against women," she concluded.

WILSA-Malawi is also contending that when pregnancy is unwanted, a legal requirement to continue the pregnancy may constitute government intrusion on a woman’s body. "We are therefore taking the Malawi government to court for failing to protect the women in the country," explained White.

WILSA-Malawi, whose main mandate is to work towards improving women's human rights from a legal and social perspective, has already celebrated one major success in changing legislation to improve women’s rights.

In 2006, the organisation facilitated the enactment of the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act, after a long battle against the country’s deeply rooted culture and beliefs that wife beating was normal.

Legal battle

Meanwhile, a number of other organisations have joined WILSA-Malawi in the debate on unsafe abortion. For instance, the Malawi Human Rights Commission (MHRC), a government body working on developing and sustaining a culture of respect for human rights among all people in Malawi, indicated that one of the issues the country needs to tackle is abortion.

"This is part of addressing reproductive and sexual health rights of all Malawians. This is important, because there is overwhelming evidence of dangerous termination of pregnancies among women and girl children of Malawi," said MHRC executive director Dr. Aubrey Mvula.

He says the initiative is in line with global women’s rights protocols, such as the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and the Beijing Declaration and its Platform of Action. ICPD objectives include universal access to reproductive care services, while the Beijing Declaration urges governments to review laws that contain punitive measures against women who undergo illegal abortion.

Mvula stressed the fact that international human rights law supports the need to terminate pregnancy to promote and protect other human rights.

"Therefore, MHRC submits that Malawi needs to move forward and significantly promote the health of women and the girl child by making sure that all dangerous pregnancies acquired through unwanted, ill-advised and accidental sexual activities or economic problems need to be terminated on that basis," he said.

Unsafe abortions

In response to demands by MHRC and WILSA-Malawi, the Reproductive Health Unit (RHU) within Malawi’s Department of Health admitted that unsafe abortions are rampant in the country.

RHU deputy director Fannie Kachale points out that most countries with low maternal death rates, such as South Africa and Ghana, have had to permit induced abortion and that legalising abortion has not led to increased number of abortions in those countries. "It has just shifted [numbers from] unsafe to safe abortions," she said.

Kachale explained that while the government of Malawi does not permit abortion, it indirectly acknowledges the fact that illegal abortions take place, because it provides post-abortion care to women who underwent abortions and have developed complications.

According to IPAS, an international organisation working globally to increase women's ability to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights and to reduce abortion-related deaths and injuries, by providing post-abortion care, the government of Malawi is confirming that there is a problem that needs to be resolved.

Dr. Eunice Brookman-Amissah, vice president of IPAS Africa, told IPS that women usually have valid and important reasons for abortion. "Women tend to seek abortions when pregnancies are not supported by their partners, families or communities, when the pregnancy may threaten the woman’s health or survival or when the foetus has abnormalities. It’s not for immoral reasons," she said.

Brookman-Amissah also explained that the medical process of abortion is usually simpler and cheaper than post-abortion care. "Induced abortion is one of the safest medical procedures. But with unsafe abortion, women easily develop complications, such as hemorrhage, infections, incomplete abortion and secondary infertility. These conditions are very expensive to treat," said Dr. Brookman-Amissah.

As the example of Malawi shows, making abortion illegal does not prevent them from happening. "Where safe abortion is unavailable, women go for unsafe abortion through the ingestion of herbs, bleach, gasoline and gun powder. Others go for vaginal insertions of sharp tools such as twigs and pouches filled with arsenic," explained Brookman-Amissah.

Some women have also been reported to hit themselves into the stomach, while others throw themselves from high places to abort the foetus. According to IPAS, apart from death, consequences of unsafe abortion include significant short and long-term illness, injury and infertility.

Legal Abortions on New South Wales Agenda

2009-04-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

Doctors, law reformers and politicians are joining forces to de-criminalise abortion in New South Wales state in Australia. NSW Attorney-General Mr John Hatzistergos issued a statement on 8 March confirming the Government's reluctance to change laws that make abortion a crime in some circumstances.

After a long public campaign, the abortion law in Victoria state was amended in November 2008. Abortion is now available on demand until 24-weeks gestation in that state. Greens MP Ms Lee Rhiannon said change would be tougher in NSW because of the number of social conservatives in power. Ms Rhiannon said abortion remained a serious criminal offence in NSW, attracting a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Irish Women Challenge Abortion Ban in European Court

2009-04-21T09:04:00.000-07:00

Carl O'Brien- The Irish Times 21st April 2009

THE GOVERNMENT is to launch a robust defence of the State’s ban on abortion before the European Court of Human Rights in the face of a legal challenge by three women who claim the restrictions violate their human rights.

The Strasbourg-based court is considering the admissibility of a legal challenge by the women, who claim their rights were denied by being forced to terminate their pregnancies outside the State.
The women say the restrictive nature of Irish law on abortion jeopardised their health and wellbeing.

The identities of the three – known as A, B and C – will remain confidential as the case proceeds through the court.

While it has been known for some time that the case is pending, papers lodged with the court show in detail for the first time how the Government will contest the case.
The main plank of its defence rests on its contention that domestic legal remedies have not been exhausted by the women.

It also robustly challenges suggestions by the women that there is a lack of post-abortion care or counselling in Ireland. It also insists the European Convention on Human Rights does not confer even a limited right to abortion and it would be “inconceivable” that member states would have agreed to this.

The women at the centre of the legal challenge include a woman who ran the risk of an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the womb; a woman who received chemotherapy for cancer; and a woman whose children were placed in care as she was unable to cope.

The court, which is separate from the EU, adjudicates on human rights issues among all 47 member states of the Council of Europe. Any decision of the court is binding on the member states and must be complied with, except if it consists of an advisory opinion.

The women’s complaints centre on four alleged violations of articles in the European Convention on Human Rights, including protection from “inhuman or degrading treatment” and freedom from discrimination.

The women at the centre of the case – who are represented by the Irish Family Planning Association – say the lack of any effective remedy at home means they have satisfied the requirement to exhaust domestic legal remedies.

In addition, they say that taking a case would have been costly, futile and could have forced them to relinquish their anonymity. While the case has passed the first stage of the hearing process, a formal hearing on the admissibility and merits of the case is expected shortly.

The case will be watched closely by observers given a ruling by the same court in recent years which resulted in Poland being instructed to guarantee access to legal abortions.

• Validity of decision to bypass domestic courts is central legal point of argument

CARL O'BRIEN
ANALYSIS: The applicants say Irish law is inadequate but the State argues domestic remedies are untried

THE CASE being taken to the European Court of Human Rights by three women – known as A, B and C – centres on whether their human rights were infringed because they were unable to terminate their pregnancies in Ireland.

In their legal submissions, they say the ban on abortion jeopardised their health and well-being. Travelling abroad placed “enormous physical, emotional and financial burdens” upon them. The law created delays and hardships for each woman, resulted in each having a later abortion, at greater risk to their health. Abortion restrictions interfered with the most intimate aspects of their private and family lives without adequate justification, they say.

This, they submit, is in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides a right to respect for one’s “private and family life”. In addition, the abortion laws impeded the ability of some of the women to obtain necessary follow-up medical care upon their return to Ireland, they claim.

On the point of dealing with the issue through the domestic courts, the applicants say that they had “no chance” in domestic proceedings. “The inadequacy of domestic remedies to address the Irish abortion laws is clear and has been demonstrated previously before this court,” their submission says. It says the burden on the State is to demonstrate that there are domestic remedies, both in theory and in practice.

The Government, in its submission, insists that the applicants have failed to exhaust their domestic remedies and, as a result, the application should be declared inadmissible. It also says there has been no breach in human rights, as protected under the European Convention. “It does not appear that any of the applicants took legal advice from an Irish barrister or solicitors as to the prospect of success in any legal proceedings instituted by them,” the Government’s submission says.

As a result, it says the applicants have no evidence to suggest their application would be futile. It points to the recent “Ms D” case – which centred on the right of a 17-year-old girl in the care of the HSE to travel for an abortion – as an example of how the issue of abortion is arguable in domestic courts.

In addition, it draws attention to the X case in which the then chief justice indicated in his ruling that no interpretation of the Constitution was intended to be final for all time.

The Government says the fact that claims made by the applicants have not been tested in any court undermines their claim. Factual assertions made by the applicants are crucial. Yet, as they have chosen to bypass the Irish courts, there has been no determination made on the “correctness of the assertion”.
“Significant issues of fact are left unascertained and the Court is to a significant extent being asked to make rulings of law on the basis of untested assertion,” the Government submission says. “This is, self-evidently, highly unsatisfactory and – it is submitted – properly impermissible.”

Because one of the women based in Ireland is Lithuanian, the government of that country has also sent in observations on the case to the court. In papers filed to the court, it invites the court to take the opportunity presented by the case to state “general principles on the minimum degree of protection” that should be afforded by the convention to women seeking an abortion.

It adds that it “seems more likely” that the applications of the three women would not be successful in the Irish courts. In response, the Irish Government rejects this assertion. It also says the court cannot be asked to set guidelines for future application, as requested by the Lithuanian government.

The case has drawn the interest of a large number of groups with divergent views on abortion who have sent in observations to the court on the case.

Among those supporting the stance of the three women are the British Pregnancy Advisory Services, Doctors for Choice and the US-based Center for Repoductive Rights.
Groups which have sent in observations defending restrictions on abortion include the Pro-Life Campaign, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and the European Centre for Law and Justice – on behalf of Kathy Sinnott MEP – and the Alliance Defense Fund.

Case details

Ms A
She was unmarried, unemployed and living in poverty when she became pregnant unintentionally. She had four young children, all in foster care as a result of problems she had faced as an alcoholic.
In the year before her fifth pregnancy, she remained sober and was in constant contact with social workers with a view to regaining custody of her children. She felt a further child would jeopardise the successful reunification of her existing family.
She decided to travel to Britain to have an abortion. The British NHS refused to carry out the operation at public expense, so she borrowed money from a moneylender. Her difficulty in raising the money delayed the abortion by three weeks.
She travelled to Britain alone. On her return, she experienced pain, nausea and bleeding for up to nine weeks, but was afraid to seek medical advice because of the prohibition on abortion.

Ms B
She was single when she became pregnant unintentionally. She had taken the morning-after pill the day after intercourse, but was advised by two different doctors that it had not only failed, but had given rise to a significant risk that it would be an ectopic pregnancy, where the foetus develops outside the uterus.
She was not prepared to become either a single parent or run the risks associated with an ectopic pregnancy. She travelled to Britain for an abortion. On her return, she started passing blood clots and, since she was unsure whether this was normal and could not seek medical advice in Ireland, she returned to the clinic in Britain.
The impossibility for her to have an abortion in Ireland made the procedure unnecessarily expensive, traumatic and complicated.

Ms C
For three years she was treated with chemotherapy for cancer. The cancer went into remission and she became unintentionally pregnant. She was unable to find a doctor willing to make a determination as to whether her life would be at risk if she continued to term or to give her clear advice as to how the foetus might have been affected.
Given the uncertainty about the risk involved, she decided to have an abortion in Britain. Although her pregnancy was at an early stage, she could not have a medical abortion (where a miscarriage is induced) because she was a non-resident.
Instead, she had to wait eight weeks until a surgical abortion was possible. On returning home, she suffered the complications of an incomplete abortion, including prolonged bleeding and infection.

Source: Edited extracts from the European Court of Human Rights’ “statement of facts” regarding the A, B and C cases.

Women's eNews: Vatican Should Start Outcast Honor Roll

2009-03-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

A Brazilian archbishop's decision to excommunicate the mother of a 9-year-old rape victim who had an abortion, as well as the girl's doctor, outrages Anne Eggebroten. She says Catholic leaders need to revisit their own religious teachings.

Here's today's update:

COMMENTARY

Vatican Expulsion Should Start Outcast Honor Roll
By Anne Eggebroten
WeNews commentator

Editor's Note: The following is a commentary. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the views of Women's Enews.

(WOMENSENEWS)--Saving the life of a 9-year-old rape victim is a crime, according to Brazilian Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Congregation for Bishops at the Vatican.

The "crime" of ending the pregnancy last week in Brazil has earned excommunication for the mother and doctors of the child, but not for the stepfather who apparently sexually abused the child for three years, and her sister as well.

This kind of ethics can only marginalize a church that would like to portray itself as a leading force for moral guidance in the world.

"Life must always be protected," said Re to the daily La Stampa in Rome.

Read: unborn life. The cardinal made no comment on the need to protect little girls or their lives.

"In essence, it appears the church's attitude and the stepfather's attitude are no different, namely, the idea that a female body is not the girl's or woman's own but belongs to men to determine whatever they want with it," notes Letha Dawson Scanzoni, a writer on religion and social issues.

The abortion was legal because Brazil permits the procedure in cases of rape and to save a woman's life, although it outlaws all other abortions. This case qualified on both counts; the child's life was in danger because she was bearing twins and her body weight was just 80 pounds. The girl's stepfather has been jailed and faces criminal charges.

Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and its progressive health minister, Jose Gomes Temporao, have criticized the excommunication and defended the doctor for performing the legal procedure. Temporao has already called for reforms to Brazil's abortion law in the interest of protecting women's health. About 1 million illegal abortions are performed each year in the nation, and about a quarter-million women are hospitalized after receiving botched procedures, according to the reproductive rights group Ipas.

Father Knows Best
But Father knows best. The Roman Catholic Church in Brazil and in Rome ruled that Brazilian law is wrong: the twin fetuses carried by the 9-year-old had a right to live, a right that outweighed her possible death.

Let's count the crimes here:

a child is raped;
the Roman Catholic Church wanted to force her to carry twins to full term and undergo either childbirth or Caesarean section;
the church doesn't mind risking the girl-child's life and sanity;
a Brazilian archbishop excommunicated the child's family and her doctors;
local priests may actually deny the Eucharist to these people.
The list could continue.

On the other hand, Catholic priests who commit sexual abuse of children are not excommunicated but rehabilitated.

Prominent Catholic feminists have called the church to task, notably Frances Kissling of Catholics for Choice, and leaders of the Women's Ordination Conference, who underline the continuing need for women in leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.

A further irony, highlighted by Aisha Taylor and Erin Saiz Hanna of the Women's Ordination Conference, is that Pope Benedict XVI issued a March 8 proclamation of the church's commitment to "every woman . . . obtaining complete respect for her dignity," one day after the cardinal's "right to life" words.

Did the archbishop in Brazil or the cardinal in Rome call for prayers for this child and her family? Who is paying for the counseling this child surely needs? Is a priest or nun visiting the child and her mother and assuring them that God loves and forgives their decision, or even approves it?

Not likely. Archbishop Sobrinho reportedly told the press that abortion is an even more serious crime in the church's view than the rape of a child.

Another Faith May Comfort Her
One blessing in the church's decision to expel the child's family is apparent: She will not remain within a system teaching her that she and her family have committed an unforgiveable sin, a murder. Many other religious communities exist in Brazil, some of which offer a more just interpretation of this tragedy.

Apparently these Catholic leaders have not read chapter 8 of the Gospel according to John lately. When the religious leaders of the first century are about to stone an anonymous woman (but not her partner) for adultery, Jesus warns them, "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."

By excommunicating the mother and doctors who made a difficult decision in an ethically complex crisis, the men of today's church defy these words.

Honor Roll of the Excommunicated
To demonstrate the irrelevance of the church's position, women's groups around the world need to start an honor roll of people excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church, starting with Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, who attended and affirmed the ordination to the priesthood of a Roman Catholic woman in Kentucky last August.

Then add the names of Dr. Rivaldo Albuquerque--who performed the girl's abortion--and others involved in this case, as well as other Catholics whom the church has silenced or excommunicated, primarily for disagreeing with the church's position on social issues such as contraception, gay rights, women's ordination, and clerical celibacy.

Some organization could hold an annual honors banquet with a cash award, or perhaps the excommunicated could be given travel expenses to the annual conference of a para-church group like Call to Action, where they could meet together for support.

I hear the voice of Jesus here:

"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the realm of heaven.

"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." (Matthew 5:10-12)

Anne Eggebroten is the editor of "Abortion--My Choice, God's Grace: Christian Women Tell Their Stories" (Pasadena: New Paradigm Books, 1994) and teaches Women and Religion at California State University, Northridge. She blogs about women's rights and lives at www.marthaymaria.blogspot.com.

Nine-Year-Old's Abortion Outrages Brazil's Catholic Church

2009-03-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

Nine-Year-Old's Abortion Outrages Brazil's Catholic Church
By Andrew Downie / São Paulo Friday, Mar. 06, 2009

Demonstrators hold a banner during an antiabortion march in Brasília
Jamil Bittar / Reuters

The case of the pregnant 9-year-old was shocking enough. But it was the response of the Catholic Church that infuriated many Brazilians. Archibishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho of the coastal city of Recife announced that the Vatican was excommunicating the family of a local girl who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather, because they had chosen to have the girl undergo an abortion. The Church excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure as well. "God's laws," said the archbishop, dictate that abortion is a sin and that transgressors are no longer welcome in the Roman Catholic Church. "They took the life of an innocent," Sobrinho told TIME in a telephone interview. "Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored."

The case has caused a furor. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape or when the mother's life is in danger, both of which apply in this case. (The girl's immature hips would have made labor dangerous; the Catholic opinion was that she could have had a cesarean section.) When the incident came to light in local newspapers, the Church first asked a judge to halt the process and then condemned those involved, including the 9-year-old's distraught mother. Even Catholic Brazilians were shocked at the harshness of the archbishop's actions. "In this case, most people support the doctors and the family. Everything they did was legal and correct," says Beatriz Galli, the policy associate for Ipas Brasil, an NGO that fights to give women more say over their health and reproductive rights. "But the Church takes these positions that are so rigid that it ends up weakened. It is very intolerant, and that intolerance is going to scare off more and more followers."

Brazilian devotion to the Catholic Church has declined over the past several years. Whereas Brazil was once an almost entirely Catholic nation, only 74% of Brazilians today admit allegiance to Rome, with large numbers, especially the urban poor, having defected to Protestant Evangelical sects. Many more water down their Catholicism with dashes of African religions such as Candomble or spiritist beliefs such as Kardecism. Only recently has the decrease in Catholic affiliation seemingly leveled off.

Evangelicals have not projected a united pro-life platform in Brazil, certainly not one as monolithic as the Catholic Church's. But at least one major sect, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, has taken a stance that showcases its differences with its Catholic rival. The Universal Church's television channel TV Record recently aired spots featuring a woman declaring, "I decided who to marry. I decided to use the pill. With my vote I decided who'd be elected President. I decided to work so that I won't be discriminated against. Why can't I decide what to do with my own body? Women should be able to decide for themselves what's important."

The public-relations campaigns of the Catholic Church's rivals do not impress Archbishop Cardoso Sobrinho. He told TIME that the Vatican rejects believers who pick and choose their issues. Rome "is not going to open the door to anyone just to get more members," he said after comparing abortion to the Holocaust. "We know that people have other ideas, but if they do, then they are not Catholics. We want people who adhere to God's laws."

In Brazil, that hard line carries over into public life and government policy. While equally devout neighbors Mexico, Colombia and Uruguay have taken steps to give women more of a say in the matter of terminating pregnancies, Brazilian public opinion supports the status quo, and the country's Congress last year voted overwhelmingly to reject a modest attempt at decriminalizing abortion. The advances that have taken place are mostly local initiatives carried out almost surreptitiously, such as the move by São Paulo states to offer the morning-after pill and heavily discounted contraceptive pills at state-run pharmacies.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did make a halfhearted attempt to spur a national debate last year, calling abortion a public-health issue — even as he declared himself steadfastly against it. But with the Church quick to stifle such talk and the general public not sufficiently engaged to demand action, the debate never took off. In truth, abortions and unwanted pregnancies are a sad constant in Brazil. Although abortion is illegal, an estimated 1 million women each year have one. The poor are forced into clandestine clinics or take medication, while the better-off are treated by qualified physicians at well-appointed surgeries known to anyone with money and overlooked by colluding authorities.

That secrecy has a price. More than 200,000 women each year are treated in public hospitals for complications arising from illegal abortions, according to Health Ministry figures. Those who don't have the courage or the money to be treated take the pregnancy to term. Although the fertility rate has fallen considerably in Brazil (from 6.1 children in 1960 to about 2 today), 1 in 3 pregnancies is unwanted, according to Dr. Jefferson Drezett, head of the Hospital Perola Byington, Latin America's largest women's health clinic. Meanwhile, 1 in 7 Brazilian women between the ages of 15 and 19 is a mother, and the average age at which women have their first child has fallen to 21, from 22.4 in 1996, according to a government-funded study.

Those numbers shock the Catholic Church. But the Church's response to the Recife rape and abortion has shocked public opinion. Some Brazilians hope the controversy may compel the country to deal seriously with an issue that affects so many of its citizens. "Brazil wants to be a world leader, but the government can't guarantee equality for women," says Galli. "This is not a topic that anyone wants to debate."

Excommunicated doctor hailed for abortion on child rape victim

2009-03-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

BRASILIA, Brazil (CNN) -- A doctor excommunicated by the Catholic Church for performing an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim received a standing ovation during a national convention on women's health, according to a local media report.

Archbishop Don Jose Cardoso Sobrinho excommunicated the doctors who performed the child's abortion.

The response came during the opening ceremony of an event hosted by Brazilian Minister of Health Jose Gomes Temporao.
The newspaper O Povo reported that Temporao called on the audience to acknowledge the "brilliant" work done by a medical team in the abortion, performed in Brazil's northeastern city of Recife.

The girl was pregnant with twins after being raped, allegedly by her stepfather, police were quoted in media reports as saying. The abuse had gone on since the girl was 6, authorities said.

The abortion was performed March 4 during the fourth month of pregnancy, according to media reports

Archbishop Don Jose Cardoso Sobrinho of Recife excommunicated the doctor, the child's mother and the medical team involved in the procedure.

However, the stepfather was not excommunicated, with Sobrinho telling Globo TV that, "A graver act than (rape) is abortion, to eliminate an innocent life."

The child was not excommunicated, Sobrinho said, because Catholic Church law says minors are exempt from excommunication.

"The church is benevolent when it comes to minors," he told Globo TV. "As for the adults, especially those who approved it, performed this abortion, the excommunication is applicable."

"God's law is above human laws," Sobrinho said.

The case has outraged the Brazilian public and fueled a controversy reaching the highest levels of church and state in a nation whose law bans abortion except in cases of rape.

Temporao recently said doctors must put law before religion.

"The question posed is very simple. There is a Brazilian law which states that a pregnancy can be interrupted in case of rape," Temporao said.

"It is legitimate for the church to have its dogmas, but these dogmas must not be imposed on society as a whole," he added.

Earlier, a verbal spat ensued between President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the archbishop over the church's decision.

"As a Christian and a Catholic, I find it deeply lamentable that a bishop of the Catholic Church has such a conservative attitude," Lula said on Globo TV.

"In this case, the medical profession was more right than the church," he said.

Meanwhile, a Vatican cleric told Italy's La Stampa newspaper that he supports the Brazilian archbishop's decision to excommunicate all involved in the abortion except for the child.

Dr. Olimpio Moraes, one of the doctors involved in the procedure, said he thanked the archbishop for his excommunication because the controversy sheds light on Brazil's restrictive abortion laws. He said women in Brazil's countryside are victimized by Brazil's ban on abortion.

Some of the doctors vowed to continue attending church services, despite being expelled.

"The fact that I was excommunicated will not keep me from going to Mass, praying, conversing with God, and asking him to illuminate me and my colleagues in our medical team to help us take care of people in similar cases," one doctor said.

TV Globo reported that the child, who is from a town outside Recife, has stayed in the city to recover and to escape media coverage. Her current condition is not known.

A new report by Brazil's IPAS, a non-governmental organization that works with the health ministry, indicates that more than 1 million women undergo illegal abortions in Brazil each year. About 250,000 are treated by doctors for traumas due to botched abortions, said Beatriz Jalli, an IPAS official.

Studies at a Brazilian hospital dedicated to treating female victims of violence, the Perola Byington in Sao Paulo, indicated that more than 40 percent of the cases involved children.

"This is why the Recife case is so important for women in Brazil," Jalli said.

Jalli said the liberated "Girl from Ipanema" image that many foreigners have of Brazilian women is far from reality.

"We live in a male chauvinistic, patriarchal society with a very high rate of sexual crimes against women and minors," she said. "Our reproductive rights are constantly criminalized."

Spain Prepares to Fully Legalise Abortion

2009-02-25T03:54:00.000-08:00

Spain prepares to fully legalise abortion

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/4734734/Spain-prepares-to-fully-legalise-abortion.html

Spain is preparing to fully legalise abortion for the first time to allow women to have terminations on demand in the early stages of pregnancy.

By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Last Updated: 4:36PM GMT 20 Feb 2009

The move has put the Socialist government on a collision course with the Catholic Church which has argued the need "to restrict and not expand abortion" in Spain.

A parliamentary committee presented recommendations to Congress this week that included legalising early stage abortions, while gradually imposing more restrictions as pregnancies progress.

The proposals will form the basis of a draft bill to be presented to Parliament later this year that will tackle one of the traditionally Roman Catholic nation's final taboos and bring the abortion law in line with most other European countries.

The move is the latest in an ambitious programme of social change under Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero that has seen him clash repeatedly with the Roman Catholic Church.

Since coming to power in 2004 his socialist government has legalised gay marriage, eased divorce laws and dropped religious education from the curriculum in public schools, all measures which have deeply angered church leaders.

In Spain abortion was decriminalised in 1985 but it is offered only under restricted circumstances and rarely in a public hospital. Terminations are only allowed until the 12th week of pregnancy in cases of rape or until the 22nd week in cases of severe fetal malformation.

In early 2008, some 25 women and doctors were arrested in raids on abortion clinics in Madrid accused of falsifying doctors' certificates. The raids sparked a nationwide strike by the clinics, and forced the government to fast-track the new legislation.

Proponents of the new proposals say it is about treating women with respect, allowing them to make their own reproductive decisions rather than forcing them to seek a doctor's approval.

Carmen Monton, spokesman for the ruling Socialist party, said: "What we are talking about is for women not to face persecution when they decide about their own motherhood."

Earlier this month on a visit to Madrid, the Vatican Secretary of State met with representatives of the socialist government to oppose the softening of abortion laws.

Vatican deputy Tarcisio Bertonem said: "I tried to make them understand that it is necessary to restrict and not expand abortion."

Monsignor Martinez Camino, president of the Spanish Bishops Conference, has denounced the proposed law in strikingly political terms, saying it targeted the defenceless.

"The unborn don't vote," he said. "They don't organise." And he reiterated the Church's stance on those who have abortions or perform them. "They face automatic excommunication," he warned.

Czech Republic: New Bill on Abortion

2009-02-02T05:46:00.000-08:00

Czech Republic: new bill on abortion.

Under current Czech law, unrestricted abortion is allowed until 12 weeks gestation, and with "medical indications" until 24 weeks. Fetuses diagnosed with serious abnormalities can be legally aborted at any gestational age. The only restrictions beyond these say that abortions must be spaced at least six months apart and the pregnant woman must be at least 16 years old, unless she has the permission of her parents. New bill further extending conditions for abortion, and liberalizing rules of assisted fertilization, sex change, sterilization and other specific treatments was unanimously approved by the Czech cabinet in December 2008. The European Union rules state that all participating member states should provide the same services and care to all EU citizens that local citizens receive. If the new bill is passed by the parliament, it will extend abortion privileges and other health services to all European Union citizens.

Northern Ireland: Internet Boom in DIY Abortion Pills

2009-02-02T05:43:00.000-08:00

Northern Ireland: Internet boom in DIY abortion pills
The Guardian February 1st.

Women in Northern Ireland are turning to the internet to buy £60 abortion pills because they cannot afford to travel to mainland Britain to terminate their pregnancies, it has been claimed.

Audrey Simpson, director of the Family Planning Association in Belfast, revealed that a rising number of women had contacted her to say they had suffered complications after taking the pills.

"These calls are increasing all the time," she said. "Travelling for an abortion is expensive by comparison."

Simpson said she was concerned that some women purchasing the pills, which should only be used up to the ninth week of pregnancy, had lied about the stage they were at on online questionnaires.

While the pills are legal to buy over the internet, campaigners fear that women may face a larger risk because they do not have a face-to-face consultation with a doctor. They also worry that women will not seek medical help if they suffer complications because they fear being arrested for inducing an abortion.

"Women in Northern Ireland ring us all the time asking if the sites selling the pills are reputable," said Simpson.

"There are women who have 'lied' about how far pregnant they are to get these pills. Yet if they suffer complications and go to their local A&E, doctors can report them for illegal conduct which can potentially land them with a hefty prison sentence."

Dawn Purvis, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), the only party in Northern Ireland that is "pro-choice", described the online pills as a new "form of backstreet abortion".

"There have been cases documented around the world where women have died from sourcing bogus medication or taking more than is required," said Purvis.

"I know of women who have taken several doses to make sure it worked. One woman contacted me after she had suffered internal haemorrhaging. I am hearing more about these 'pills' at the moment with the recession in full swing. Money is short and it's mainly working-class women who can't afford to travel. Buying the pills off the net is an easy solution."

A report published last year by the International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics attested that in Europe, to date, more than 1.5 million women have terminated their pregnancies with mifepristone and misoprostol. The combination of the two pills causes the non-surgical termination of a pregnancy and can be taken in the early stages.

As it stands, abortion is illegal in Northern Ireland, with the exception of one circumstance: where it can be proved that continuation of a pregnancy results in a woman's mental or physical health being in "grave" danger of "serious and permanent damage".

To date, this does not include a woman who becomes pregnant as a result of rape or incest.

It also doesn't include pregnancies which are terminated due to foetal abnormality, tests for which are freely available in Northern Ireland from the 12th week of pregnancy.

"Basically the case law in Northern Ireland is based on the Bourne ruling which dates back to 1939 and the prosecution of a doctor who performed an abortion for a suicidal 14-year-old who became pregnant from gang rape," explains Dawn Purvis.

"However, there is plenty of 'anecdotal' evidence that abortions are available here for middle-class clientele in private clinics."

According to Purvis, women who have later abortions in the UK or Europe are nearly always "working-class" women who can't get the money together in time.

"And if they do get the money, they can't afford to bring anyone with them, so do that journey alone," she added.

Although there are no "official" figures on abortion in Northern Ireland, last year 1,345 women who had abortions in clinics in England and Wales gave addresses in Northern Ireland.

The FPA pointed out that the number did not take account of women who travelled for abortions in Scotland or further afield to countries such as Belgium.

Induced abortion is one of the most common gynaecological procedures in the UK, with about 186,000 terminations performed annually in England and Wales and about 11,500 in Scotland.

"Women cannot avail of their rights under the law, while pro-life politicians deny the facts," says Goretti Horgan, spokesperson for Alliance for Choice.

"The vast majority of women I speak to are lone parents or women in poverty who cannot afford to have another child. They are devastated by this difficult decision and often feel suicidal."

But Unionist party MP Jeffrey Donaldson says the FPA and other organisations need to produce substantive evidence to support claims that more women are using the abortion pill.

"If there is greater use of this pill, it is because there are organisations in Northern Ireland which are promoting the use of this medicine which needs to be looked at by the law here," he said.

The director of Precious Life, Bernadette Smyth, said she was greatly disturbed that women were able to buy pills which can terminate a pregnancy from the web. "This is a horrendous type of abortion, which will traumatise many, many women. This is the equivalent of bringing backstreet illegal abortions to Northern Ireland," she said.

Source: The Guardian, 1 February 2009

'Global Gag Rule' Lifted

2009-01-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

'Global Gag Rule' Lifted
By Barbara Crossette The Nation

January 25, 2009

On Friday evening, a time favored by officials trying to avoid attention, President Barack Obama issued a statement reversing one of the most damaging policies ever visited on developing nations by Republican administrations. This was the "global gag rule," which forbade US government support for any organization that in any way fostered, provided or even advised women about abortion. It was a policy foisted on an unsuspecting world by the Reagan administration at, of all events, a United Nations conference on women and development held in Mexico City in 1984.

What became known as the "Mexico City policy" was always a political football. It was rescinded in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, then reimposed in 2001 by George W. Bush, who also proceeded to deal a second harsh blow to the world's poorest families by cutting off American assistance to the United Nations Population Fund, the largest global provider of family planning assistance. The reason, or excuse--rejected by the administration's own internal report--was that the Population Fund was linked to forced abortion practices in China. The fund has lost about $250 million in American aid since 2002.

Millions of women and their families were the direct victims of these shortsighted steps, taken in the name of people who called themselves "pro-family," but appeared to be woefully ignorant of the harm they caused in homes around the world. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, based in London, estimates that in the last eight years alone as much as $100 million in US aid was lost to its affiliates in 100 countries because of their refusal to accept an abortion ban. The federation estimates this lost aid could have prevented 36 million unintended pregnancies and 15 million abortions, often acts of desperation. More than 80,000 women and more than 2.5 million children might not have died.

Not surprisingly, the rate of unsafe abortions is highest in the poorest countries, where at least 200 million women cannot get contraceptives. The World Health Organization, which supports safe abortion as a tool of last resort, estimates that of 45 million abortions globally every year, 19 million take place under unsafe conditions, causing at least 68,000 deaths. Forty percent of those most dangerous abortions involve teens and women between the ages of 15 and 24. A woman in the developing world--primarily in Africa and parts of Asia--is at least 100 times more likely to die of a botched abortion than a woman in the industrial North.

Which raises the question why President Obama--and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, once an outspoken champion of women's rights in the developing world--made so little of this policy reversal. Is abortion still too skittish a topic to talk about in public? Even when a presidential order signals a promising new approach to development aid?

President Obama also pledged to work with Congress to restore contributions to the Population Fund, known as UNFPA. "By resuming funding to UNFPA, the US will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries," his statement said.

Not lost on Thoraya Obaid, the courageous Saudi woman who is executive director of UNFPA, was President Obama's focus on poverty reduction as a byproduct of family planning, giving millions of the world's poorest women some of the same reproductive choices and life opportunities enjoyed in richer nations.

"President Obama's decision could not have come at a more critical time," Obaid said in a statement hours after the White House announcement. It was, she added, "an essential step towards creating a world where all women have the opportunity to participate as equal members of society." The rate of death from pregnancy and childbirth--99 percent of which occur in developing countries--has fallen just one per cent between 1990 and 2005 around the world, the UNFPA statement noted. "Every minute, a woman dies giving life, totaling up to 10 million women during a generation," it said.

UNFPA has argued tirelessly at the UN, where population growth is not a fashionable issue, that high fertility (mostly not a woman's choice) lowers per capita income, reduces education levels and consumes resources necessary to sustain healthy, productive lives. It also creates a generation of poorly educated, unemployable young people shorn of hope and open to recruitment by militant organizations of all kinds, threatening the stability of countries trying to make still-shaky democracies work.

Secretary of State Clinton, who has said she will focus on democracy and development, now has her mandate.

Steven Sinding, a former director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, a Columbia University professor and advisor to the World Bank, was working on family planning in the US government in 1984 when the gag rule was first announced in Mexico City, taking American officials on the scene by surprise.

Sinding has been campaigning ever since against this destructive policy, which for the IPPF alone, he said in an e-mail, "necessitated clinic closures, staff layoffs and, ultimately, curtailment of family planning services to hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of women in developing countries.

He described President Obama's reversal of the order as something akin to "a glorious sunrise after a long and exceptionally dark night."

About Barbara Crossette
Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.

She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by Random House/Vintage Destinations in 1996, and a collection of travel essays about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a century after their creation, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, published by Westview Press in 1998 and in paperback by Basic Books in 1999. In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century, published by Indiana University Press in 1993.

Vatican Attacks US Abortion Move

2009-01-27T02:19:00.000-08:00

Vatican attacks US abortion move
BBC News January 25th 2009

The Vatican has condemned President Obama's move to restore US funding for family planning clinics abroad that give advice on or carry out abortions.

One Vatican official warned against the "arrogance" of those in power who think they can decide between life and death.

Another official said it dealt a blow to groups fighting against "the slaughter of the innocents".

The White House says the move aligns the US with other nations fighting poverty and promoting health care.

On Friday, Mr Obama ended a ban on giving US federal money to international groups that perform abortions or provide information about them.

Robust language

In an interview published in an Italian newspaper on Saturday, senior Vatican official Monsignor Rino Fisichella urged Mr Obama to listen to all voices in America without "the arrogance of those who, being in power, believe they can decide of life and death."

"If this is one of President Obama's first acts, I have to say, in all due respect, that we're heading quickly toward disappointment," Mr Fisichella, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life, told the Corriere della Sera.

Another Academy official, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, said it had dealt a harsh blow to US Catholics and people across the world who are fighting against "the slaughter of the innocents".

The criticism from the Vatican adds to concerns from evangelical Protestant groups that the US decision could presage a wider dismantling of the legal limits of abortion.

Critics of the former funding ban had long argued that it hurt some of the poorest people in the world by denying money to groups that might support abortion, but also work on other aspects of reproductive health care or HIV/Aids.

The ban was first introduced in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan. It was rescinded by President Bill Clinton, before being reinstated by President George W Bush in 2001.

Statement from President Obama, Secretary of Sate Hillary Clinton and UNFPA on Rescinding of 'Global Gag Rule'

2009-01-26T08:23:00.000-08:00

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

_________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release January 23, 2009

Statement of President Barack Obama on Rescinding the Mexico City Policy

"It is clear that the provisions of the Mexico City Policy are unnecessarily broad and unwarranted under current law, and for the past eight years, they have undermined efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning in developing countries. For these reasons, it is right for us to rescind this policy and restore critical efforts to protect and empower women and promote global economic development.

"For too long, international family planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us. I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate.

"It is time that we end the politicization of this issue. In the coming weeks, my Administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world.

"I have directed my staff to reach out to those on all sides of this issue to achieve the goal of reducing unintended pregnancies. They will also work to promote safe motherhood, reduce maternal and infant mortality rates and increase educational and economic opportunities for women and girls.

"In addition, I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund. By resuming funding to UNFPA, the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries,” said President Obama.

________________________

Memorandum for the Secretary of State
the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development

Subject: Mexico City Policy and Assistance for Voluntary Population Planning

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2151b(f)(1)), prohibits nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive Federal funds from using those funds "to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning, or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions." The August 1984 announcement by President Reagan of what has become known as the "Mexico City Policy" directed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand this limitation and withhold USAID funds from NGOs that use non-USAID funds to engage in a wide range of activities, including providing advice, counseling, or information regarding abortion, or lobbying a foreign government to legalize or make abortion available. The Mexico City Policy was in effect from 1985 until 1993, when it was rescinded by President Clinton. President George W. Bush reinstated the policy in 2001, implementing it through conditions in USAID grant awards, and subsequently extended the policy to "voluntary population planning" assistance provided by the Department of State.

These excessively broad conditions on grants and assistance awards are unwarranted. Moreover, they have undermined efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning programs in foreign nations. Accordingly, I hereby revoke the Presidential memorandum of January 22, 2001, for the Administrator of USAID (Restoration of the Mexico City Policy), the Presidential memorandum of March 28, 2001, for the Administrator of USAID (Restoration of the Mexico City Policy), and the Presidential memorandum of August 29, 2003, for the Secretary of State (Assistance for Voluntary Population Planning). In addition, I direct the Secretary of State and the Administrator of USAID to take the following actions with respect to conditions in voluntary population planning assistance and USAID grants that were imposed pursuant to either the 2001 or 2003 memoranda and that are not required by the Foreign Assistance Act or any other law: (1) immediately waive such conditions in any current grants, and (2) notify current grantees, as soon as possible, that these conditions have been waived. I further direct that the Department of State and USAID immediately cease imposing these conditions in any future grants.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

The Secretary of State is authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE, January 23, 2009.

# # #

_____________________________

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
For Immediate Release January 23, 2009
2009/077

STATEMENT BY SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

Repeal of the Mexico City Policy

President Obama's repeal of the global gag rule, which has prevented women around the world from gaining access to essential information and healthcare services, is a welcomed and important step taken during the first days of the Administration.

For the past seven years, this policy has made it more difficult for women around the world to gain access to essential information and healthcare services. Rather than limiting women's ability to receive reproductive health services, we should be supporting programs that help women and their partners make decisions to ensure their health and the health of their families.

As I said in Beijing at the United Nations 4th World Conference on Women, women must not be denied the right to plan their own families. I look forward to working with the President, my colleagues in the Administration, and the NGO community to promote programs and policies that ensure women and girls have full access to health information and services.

# # #

______________________________

HQ/2009/4
23 January 2009

UNFPA WELCOMES RESTORATION OF U.S. FUNDING

UNITED NATIONS, New York, 23 January 2009- The United Nations Population
Fund (UNFPA) applauds today's statement from United States President
Barack Obama restoring U.S. funding for UNFPA's operations.
President Obama said: "I look forward to working with Congress to
restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund. By resuming
funding to UNFPA, the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations
working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women
and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to
women in 154 countries."

UNFPA Executive Director, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid welcomes President Obama's
decision to restore funding and noted how quickly he addressed the
issue. "The President's actions send a strong message about his
leadership and his desire to support causes that will promote peace and
dignity, equality for women and girls and economic development in the
poorest regions of the world. And access to reproductive health is at
the core of all of these issues."

There is much to be done. More than halfway towards the 2015 target date
for the Millennium Development Goals, the goal that addresses improving
maternal and reproductive health has made the least progress and is the
most underfunded.

"We are confident that under the new President's direction, the U.S.
will resume its leadership in promoting and protecting women's
reproductive health and rights worldwide," said. Ms. Obaid. "This is an
essential step towards creating a world where all women have the
opportunity to participate as equal members of society."

Globally, the rate of death from pregnancy and childbirth has declined
just one percent between 1990 and 2005. Every minute a women loses her
life giving life, adding up to 10 million women over a generation.
Ninety-nine per cent of these deaths occur in developing countries,
particularly in Africa and Asia.

"President Obama's decision could not have come at a more critical
time," said Ms. Obaid. "If women are to stop dying in childbirth and if
reproductive health for all is to become a reality, we need increased
political and financial commitment at all levels to implement strategies
that we know will work. With the renewed US support to women and to
UNFPA, the odds of that happening are greatly improved."

Congressionally-approved funding for UNFPA has been withheld by the U.S.
Administration for the past seven years. During that time, the Fund has
not received a total of $244 million in U.S. funding. "Restoration of
funding will allow us to maintain recent gains during the current
financial crisis and provide support to women in some of the poorest
countries in the world," said Ms. Obaid. "Progress for all will not
happen without progress for women. This means working to promote, as an
international priority, the advancement of women's health, rights and
equality."

UNFPA also welcomes President Obama's decision to engage his
administration on family planning issues, restoring critical efforts to
protect and empower women. Access to voluntary family planning is one of
the most effective ways to prevent unintended pregnancies and reduce
abortions.

"UNFPA stands ready to work with President Obama, Secretary Clinton and
the American people to achieve our dream of helping women and girls in
the poorest countries reach their fullest potential. We welcome the
opportunity to work with the United States again as a full partner."
***

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an international
development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child
to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports
countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce
poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is
safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with
dignity and respect. UNFPA -- because everyone counts.

From Guttmacher Institute: Obama Rescinds 'Global Gag Rule', Commits to Funding UNFPA

2009-01-26T08:19:00.000-08:00

Obama Rescinds “Global Gag Rule,” Commits to Funding UNFPA

President Obama on January 23 affirmed his administration’s strong commitment to women’s health and international family planning assistance by rescinding the “global gag rule” and by committing the United States to restoring support for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The global gag rule—also known as the Mexico City policy—prohibited overseas organizations from receiving U.S. family planning assistance if they used their non-U.S. funds to provide abortion information, services or counseling, or engaged in any abortion rights advocacy.

Tragically, the policy may have only increased the need for abortions (most of them unsafe) by reducing access to family planning services in many developing countries. It also created more obstacles for some of the world’s poorest women seeking information about how to avoid unsafe abortions. The global gag rule was first imposed by President Reagan in 1984, rescinded by President Clinton in 1993 and then reinstated by President Bush in 2001.

The Bush administration and other anti–family planning administrations had also denied U.S. support to UNFPA—which works to reduce the need for abortion by promoting voluntary family planning in more than 150 poor countries. The Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations all blocked any U.S. contribution to UNFPA on the grounds that it indirectly supported coercive abortions in China, despite U.S. government findings clearing UNFPA of any involvement in coercive practices.

Congress has consistently appropriated funds for UNFPA since the United States helped to found the agency in 1969. Most recently, UNFPA received U.S. contributions during the Clinton administration and the first year of the Bush administration. The Bush administration reversed itself in 2002 and subsequently blocked about $244 million in funding over seven years.

There is overwhelming evidence that helping women avoid becoming pregnant too early, too late or too often benefits them and their children. Currently, 500 million women in the developing world are using some form of family planning, thereby preventing 187 million unintended pregnancies, 60 million unplanned births, 105 million induced abortions, 2.7 million infant deaths and 215,000 maternal deaths (which would leave 685,000 children motherless) each year.

However, another 200 million women throughout the developing world who would like to delay or limit their births lack access to contraceptives. Filling the unmet need for contraceptives would further reduce global rates of maternal mortality by 35% and would lower the overall number of abortions by 64%, many of which would have been unsafe abortions. More than 95% of abortions in Africa and Latin America are performed under unsafe circumstances, as are about 60% of abortions in Asia. Almost 70,000 women die each year from complications following unsafe abortions, and thousands more suffer serious, permanent injuries.

Despite the clear benefits of family planning for women worldwide, both the global gag rule and the refusal to fund UNFPA were part of a broader erosion of support for international family planning assistance under the Bush administration. The Obama administration’s reversal of both policies not only will strengthen the global fight against maternal and child mortality. It also is firmly in line with President Obama’s goal of finding common ground in the abortion debate by focusing on preventing unintended pregnancies—including through the provision of contraceptives—and thereby reducing the need for abortion.

However, even with these policy changes, direct U.S. funding for abortions overseas will continue to be prohibited under the Helms Amendment.

The Safe and Legal in Ireland Abortion Rights Campaign has joined Facebook

2009-01-14T12:06:00.000-08:00

Please find us on Facebook and join us!
Thanks.

Irish Women Still Subjecting Themselves To DIY Abortions

2009-01-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

Irish women still subjecting themselves to DIY abortions
Sunday Business Post

We are well into the 21st century and yet Irish women are still subjecting themselves to DIY abortions
Sunday, January 11, 2009 By Jennifer O’Connell

Helen has other things to worry about apart from whether she’s part of a disturbing new social trend. She’s pregnant. Again. She already has two young children, and an unsupportive, disinterested husband.

Actually, he’s not totally disinterested. He did take it upon himself to go on the internet and order her an ‘online abortion’. She doesn’t want to take the pills that arrived in an unmarked, brown envelope a couple of weeks ago. She is worried about the consequences to her health, and the truth is that she really wants to keep the baby.

On the parenting website where she eventually wound up looking for advice, almost all those who replied to her urgent posting implored her not to take the pills. If she decided she didn’t want to go ahead with the pregnancy without her husband’s support, there were better ways, they said. Buying medication from the internet is no answer. But for a number of distressed Irishwomen, it appears to be the only answer.

Last summer, the soon-to-be swallowed up-by-the-HSE Crisis Pregnancy Agency reported falling numbers of Irishwomen seeking abortions overseas. The agency seemed slightly puzzled by this development. Perhaps more women were travelling to the Netherlands, it speculated. Or maybe people were being more careful about using contraception.

But Helen’s story might hold a clue to another, silent factor behind the decline. Once, having an abortion meant seeking a referral from an agency here; booking flights to Britain; finding someone to mind the other kids, if there are other kids; getting a sick note from work; finding between €600 and €2,000 to pay for it; and then travelling to the clinic to have the procedure.

Now, it’s all over with a click of the mouse, a payment of as little as €52 on your credit card, and a day or two’s sickness in the comfort and privacy of your own home. At least, that’s the theory. You can see that it might be an attractive route for a woman who finds herself pregnant and in despair.

As one Irishwoman calling herself simply C explains on one of the most reputable websites offering online abortions, Womenontheweb.com: ‘‘I was just over nine weeks’ pregnant when I carried out the medical abortion at home with mifepristone and misoprostol obtained from the web. I never told anyone, not even my partner, what I was doing. My partner knew I was pregnant. Once the cramps and bleeding started, I told him I was having a miscarriage. This was the only option I had, as I couldn’t afford to go to England. I did a lot of research before taking the tablets, and I would advise other women to do the same.”

But as C - who already had three teenage children and felt she couldn’t cope with another pregnancy - discovered, the procedure wasn’t quite as straightforward as she had hoped. ‘‘The bleeding and cramps were quite severe, more than I expected, even though I was over nine weeks. It was a frightening experience, and at one stage I thought of going to hospital. I would not recommend doing this on your own.”

Afterwards, she said she felt ‘‘numb’’. ‘‘The experience was frightening but after the worst of it was over, I did feel relieved but also sad for the loss of my child.”

C, it seems, was one of the lucky ones. According to the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 11 per cent of women who ordered their abortion medication through this website - and remember, this is one of the better ones - ended up needing a surgical procedure to stop excessive bleeding or complete the termination. But a far higher proportion (58 per cent) said they were simply grateful to have been able to have an abortion in this way.

The consequences of abortions being sold online are simply terrifying. Last year, the Irish Medicines Board warned of the emergence of this trend, urging women in the strongest possible terms not to use this - or any medicine - purchased over the internet, ‘‘as there can be no guarantees on the quality, safety, or effectiveness of products purchased in this manner’’.

Women buying from Women ontheweb.com can at least expect their medication to arrive in proper packaging, with a doctor’s signature enclosed. The website asks for a €70 donation, seeks reassurance from clients that they are less than nine weeks’ pregnant, and stays in touch with them afterwards. It has a discussion forum where they can share their experiences also.

Other websites cost even less and are not quite so careful, offering no information about possible risks and consequences, and dispatching packets of pills with no instructions, no labelling and no back-up if things go wrong.

For some years, Ireland has occupied an uneasy no-man’s-land on the abortion issue, opting to avoid answering the difficult question of where exactly we stand, and exporting the problem instead. Now, it seems, many women may be choosing to import their own version of a solution. And what an imperfect solution it is; little better, really, than a 21st-century version of the herbal remedy and the coat-hanger.

The advances in technology that allow people like Helen’s husband to order an abortion for his reluctant and frightened wife with the ease with which he could buy her a handbag on eBay may finally force us to get off the fence.

Because whatever our personal feelings about abortion, there is, and always has been, a demand for it from women desperate enough to do just about anything. Pretending that we can legislate away this demand is no longer an option.

If the prospect of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of traumatised women subjecting themselves to DIY abortions, all alone in their bathrooms, isn’t enough to frighten us out of our complacency, then the European Court of Human Rights might just force us out of it.

The court is due shortly to hear a challenge by three Irishwomen to the government’s ban on abortion. The women claim that their rights were denied by being forced to terminate their pregnancies outside the state.

The government is planning to contest the claim, but the Irish Family Planning Association believes the women have a ‘‘strong’’ case.

It points to a ruling by the court two years ago, which resulted in Poland being instructed to guarantee access to legal abortions.

One way or another, this is an issue that’s back on the table. Sigh as the rest of us might, for women like Helen, it’s not coming a moment too soon.

For Privacy's Sake, Taking Risks to End Pregnancy

2009-01-05T09:58:00.000-08:00

The New York Times January 5, 2009

For Privacy’s Sake, Taking Risks to End Pregnancy
By JENNIFER 8. LEE and CARA BUCKLEY
Amalia Dominguez was 18 and desperate and knew exactly what to ask for at the small, family-run pharmacy in the heart of Washington Heights, the thriving Dominican enclave in northern Manhattan. “I need to bring down my period,” she recalled saying in Spanish, using a euphemism that the pharmacist understood instantly.

It was 12 years ago, but the memory remains vivid: She was handed a packet of pills. They were small and white, $30 for 12. Ms. Dominguez, two or three months pregnant, went to a friend’s apartment and swallowed the pills one by one, washing them down with malta, a molasseslike extract sold in nearly every bodega in the neighborhood.

The cramps began several hours later, doubling Ms. Dominguez over, building and building until, eight and a half hours later, she locked herself in the bathroom and passed a lifeless fetus, which she flushed.

The pills were misoprostol, a prescription drug that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for reducing gastric ulcers and that researchers say is commonly, though illegally, used within the Dominican community to induce abortion. Two new studies by reproductive-health providers suggest that improper use of such drugs is one of myriad methods, including questionable homemade potions, frequently employed in attempts to end pregnancies by women from fervently anti-abortion cultures despite the widespread availability of safe, legal and inexpensive abortions in clinics and hospitals.

One study surveyed 1,200 women, mostly Latinas, in New York, Boston and San Francisco and is expected to be released in the spring; the other, by Planned Parenthood, involved a series of focus groups with 32 Dominican women in New York and Santo Domingo. Together, they found reports of women mixing malted beverages with aspirin, salt or nutmeg; throwing themselves down stairs or having people punch them in the stomach; and drinking teas of avocado leaf, pine wood, oak bark and mamon fruit peel.

Interviews with several community leaders and individual women in Washington Heights echoed the findings, and revealed even more unconventional methods like “juice de jeans,” a noxious brew made by boiling denim hems.

“Some women prefer to have a more private experience with their abortion, which is certainly understandable,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, an obstetrician with Ibis Reproductive Health in San Francisco, which joined Gynuity Health Projects in New York in conducting the larger study. “The things they mention are, ‘It is easier.’ It was recommended to them by a friend or a family member.”

Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, an obstetrician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, said the trend fits into a larger context of Dominicans seeking home remedies rather than the care of doctors or hospitals, partly because of a lack of insurance but mostly because of a lack of trust in the health care system. “This is not just a culture of self-inducted abortion,” she said. “This is a culture of going to the pharmacy and getting the medicine you need.”

Physicians say that women can obtain the pills either through pharmacies that are willing to bend the rules and provide the medicine without a prescription or by having the drugs shipped from overseas.

It is impossible to know how many women in New York or nationwide try to end their pregnancies themselves, but in the vibrant, socially conservative Dominican neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan, the various methods are passed like ancient cultural secrets. In a study of 610 women at three New York clinics in largely Dominican neighborhoods conducted eight years ago, 5 percent said they had taken misoprostol themselves, and 37 percent said they knew it was an abortion-inducing drug. Doctors and community leaders say they have not seen any signs of the phenomenon disappearing, which they find worrisome because of concerns about the drug’s effectiveness and potential side effects.

Sold under the brand name Cytotec, misoprostol is approved to induce abortion when taken with mifepristone, or RU-486; doctors also sometimes use it to induce labor, though it is not approved for that use. A spokesman for Pfizer, which manufacturers Cytotec, declined to comment beyond saying that the company does not support the off-label use of its products and noting that the label includes “F.D.A.’s strongest warning against use in women who are pregnant.”

That warning, in capital letters, also notes that the drug “can cause abortion.”

But it does not always do so, not least because notions of how best to use it vary from inserting several pills into the vagina to letting them dissolve under the tongue. The side effects can be serious, and include rupture of the uterus, severe bleeding and shock.

“We do worry because we don’t know where women are getting the instructions from,” said Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, which was also a partner on the Ibis study. “We imagine that there is misinformation on how to take it, which is why it could be hit or miss.”

In 2007 in Massachusetts, an 18-year-old Dominican immigrant named Amber Abreu took misoprostol in her 25th week of pregnancy and gave birth to a 1-pound baby girl who died four days later; a judge sentenced her in June to probation and ordered her into therapy. In South Carolina in February, a Mexican migrant farm worker, Gabriela Flores, pleaded guilty to illegally performing an abortion and was sentenced to 90 days in jail for taking misoprostol while four months pregnant in 2004. A Virginia man, Daniel Riase, is serving a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2007 to slipping the pills into his pregnant girlfriend’s glass of milk.

Researchers studying the phenomenon cite several factors that lead Dominican and other immigrant women to experiment with abortifacients: mistrust of the health-care system, fear of surgery, worry about deportation, concern about clinic protesters, cost and shame.

“It turns an abortion into a natural process and makes it look like a miscarriage,” said Dr. Mark Rosing, an obstetrician at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx who led the 2000 study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association. “For people who don’t have access to abortion for social reasons, financial reasons or immigration reasons, it doesn’t seem like this horrible thing.”

Ms. Dominguez, for her part, said she had no insurance or money to pay for an abortion, and could not fathom getting one for fear her mother would find out. One of her friends had spent $1,200 on an abortion that left her with a uterine infection, and another friend endured the procedure without anesthesia, she said. In addition, Washington Heights is a tightknit community where abortion — as well as birth control — is shunned; if Ms. Dominguez were spotted entering a clinic, rumors could fly.

“There are scary moments, and you got to have a friend right next to you,” said Ms. Dominguez, now 30 and a mother of four. “It’s cheap but dangerous. Certain people are more delicate than others. But afterwards, I felt relief.”

A friend of Ms. Dominguez’s said her stepsister took the pills last year because she was in the country illegally, and worried that a doctor might turn her in. “She was just scared,” the woman said, speaking on the condition that her name not be published to protect the stepsister’s privacy. “She had no papers, no insurance, no nothing.”

The woman went to a free clinic afterward to make sure the pills had worked (they had). Health care workers and other community leaders say such visits are how they discovered widespread illicit use of the drug as well as homemade potions.

Dr. Rosing said he learned about Cytotec during his residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital in Washington Heights, where he saw a lot of Dominican immigrants with incomplete abortions in the emergency room. They spoke of taking the “star pill,” a nickname for the hexagonal shape of one form of misoprostol. He suspected “that has to be the tip of the iceberg,” he said, “and it was.”

The pills allow pregnant women a degree of denial over what is taking place. Like Ms. Dominguez, many women in the neighborhood talk about the need to bring on — or “down” — their periods, not abortion. Afterward, they might tell doctors or relatives they had lost the baby.

The Planned Parenthood study concluded that women in both nations “seemed to see inducing the termination of pregnancy, or abortions, as a part of the reality of their lives,” in a community where, as one interview subject put it, “we are all doctors.” The report noted that in a culture steeped in machismo, birth control is generally seen as the woman’s responsibility.

“If I introduce the condom into a relationship, I’m basically saying I’ve had somebody else, and I’ve not been faithful to you,” said Haydee Morales, a vice president at Planned Parenthood of New York.

Debralee Santos, program director at Casa Duarte, a community arts organization in Washington Heights, said that while she had never had reason to distrust medical professionals, she understood the apprehensions that kept other women from seeking them out. “I get it, I really do,” she said.

“It’s a community that, even as it comes of age, always relies on itself first,” explained Ms. Santos, who was born in the United States to immigrant parents. “Women, in particular, continue to help each other in ways that speak to tradition and solidarity.”

Ms. Dominguez, who volunteers at Casa Duarte and is known as Flaca, Spanish for skinny, did not want her name or photograph published at first. But after some thought, she decided to allow it so more people would learn about the trap many pregnant Dominican women feel they are in.

“It’s a health risk,” she said. “There’s a lot of girls in situations like that, and they’re overwhelmed.”

The Huffington Post: On Abortion, Pro-Choice is the Compromise Position

2009-01-05T05:16:00.000-08:00

From Sam Sedaei's blog, posted on December 22nd 2008.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-sedaei/on-abortion-pro-choice-is_b_152744.html

The Bush administration is scrambling to issue a number of anti-abortion rights executive orders before leaving office. This is of course just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the hostile actions that the current administration has taken to make choice and family planning harder for women and families throughout the country.

The mainstream media and politicians -- including President Elect Barack Obama -- have presented abortion as an issue on which the country is evenly divided between two camps -- pro-life and pro-choice -- and the only way to deal with the issue is to come up with a grand compromise. However, a thorough analysis of the two platforms demonstrates that the pro-choice stance is the compromise position and the next administration must not negotiate away abortion rights.

One can explore this reality by looking at the specific list of choice-related issues that the Obama administration will face, and why he must support the pro-choice stance on them. The questions that the next administration has to answer are as follows:

-Whether to reverse Bush's newly implemented "Right of Conscience" view.
-Whether to overturn regulations such as one that makes fetuses eligible for health-care coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program.
-Whether to cut funding for sexual abstinence programs, and whether to increase funding for comprehensive sex education programs that include discussion of birth control.
-Whether to allow federal health plans to pay for abortions.

But at the heart of these questions and the Supreme Court's decision on Roe v. Wade that started this 3-decade long debate on abortion is a central question: Is a fetus a human being?

If it is, it must possess all the characteristics of a human being, not the least of which is independent biological viability. Merriam-Webster defines viable as "capable of existence and development as an independent unit." According to The Endowment for Human Development, by 21-22 weeks (5 months and one week) after fertilization, the fetus's lungs gain some ability to breathe air, and this is considered the age of viability as "survival outside of the womb becomes possible for some fetuses." However, the fetus's dependence on the umbilical cord continues well into the third trimester of the pregnancy. While there may be other elements on which one can rely to determine the viability of a fetus, the concept of independent viability remains the central characteristic of any living organism, including human beings.

Science clearly establishes that an unborn or unhatched vertebrate cannot be considered to be a human even after attaining the basic structural plan of its kind - hence the term "fetus" to refer to all vertebrates at this stage. However, there continue to be millions of American who -- because of their church's teachings, genuine belief or as an excuse to control women's health decisions - matter-of-factly claim that a fetus is a human being while relying on no scientific or empirical arguments.

But even if one allows for some subjective discretion in defining the point at which a fetus turns into a human, the pro-choice position (one taken by the Supreme Court during Roe v. Wade in 1973) presents itself not as the liberal position, but the compromise position. What's important to note about the ruling is that while it did not declare abortion unconstitutional or force the viewpoint of the anti-choice camp over the pro-choice camp, it also did not force anti-choice Americans to accept the biological and scientific definition of what constitutes a human being. The ruling rather allowed those who believe a fetus is a human being to keep their fetuses and carry their offspring and those who believe a fetus is not a human being to choose whether they are socially, economically and emotionally ready to have a child.

But that was not good enough for most ardent anti-choice advocates. Since 1973, they have organized themselves around the ultimate goal of overturning Roe v. Wade and force their nonscientific and subjective definition of human being on everyone else. But in the mean time, they have also done what they could to make getting abortion as difficult as possible for women. Their efforts have ranged from violent means -- including bombing abortion clinics and killing doctors that perform abortions (ironic since the criminals commit this in the name of saving "life") -- to lobbying state and federal governments to take legislative and executive action to limit the accessibility of abortion. They use sensational language in making their arguments - such as calling pro-choice citizens "murders" and showing graphic images of abortion procedures to appeal to people's emotions so they no longer have to argue their point based on logic.

So how should President Elect Obama address the questions above in the context of existing national debate on abortion? Let's review the questions in greater detail.

Should Obama reverse Bush's newly implemented "Right of Conscience" view?
In the eleventh hour of his lame duck presidency, George Bush is trying to establish a "Right of Conscience," allowing medical practitioners and staff to refuse to participate in any practice they object to on moral grounds, including abortion, birth control and other health care as well. But think about the implication of opening the door of having the doctors decide what operations to conduct and what not to conduct based on personal moral beliefs; where would it stop? What if a doctor decides that heart transplants are immoral? Should she be allowed to willfully allow the patient to die? What if a doctor believes delivering a child is immoral because the world is over-populated, or that as long as gays do not have the right to marry and adopt children, justice is best served by preventing everyone from having children? Would these anti-choice advocates be willing to accept the risk that this doctor may be the only doctor on call when they take their pregnant loved one to hospital? The fact is that anti-choice advocates only wish to defend a doctor's "right" to refuse service based on moral objections if those objections fall in line with their anti-choice agenda.

The United States is a country of laws. One cannot drive through a red light if one morally opposes traffic lights because the laws are not written only to protect she who must follow it, but protect others from her actions. For the same reason, doctors are not legislators and have no right to impose their subjective moral view on everyone else. If a physician believes that his career choice forces him to compromise his moral beliefs, they are free to pursue other career options. Or alternatively, he can try to lobby the Congress or the American public to change the laws he opposes. But those physicians who decide to remain in the field must be legally obligated to follow the laws, whether they like it or not. The "Right of Conscience" view is an action that President Elect Obama needs to reverse immediately after taking office.

Should Obama overturn regulations such as one that makes fetuses eligible for health-care coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program?
In order for one to be a child, one has to be a human being, and human beings are biologically independent and viable organisms, which fetuses are not. Therefore based on the discussion above, a fetus cannot be considered a child, and therefore should not be eligible for coverage under federal health insurance programs. And it is quite ironic that the Bush administration is interested in simultaneously blocking the passage of Children's Health Insurance Program and advocate for coverage of fetuses under the program. President Elect Obama cannot allow anti-choice advocates to play politics with important programs and reignite the social culture wars of the past in order to make statements and advance their narrow agenda.

Men's Rights in Abortion
It is important to discuss one aspect of abortion that President Elect Obama must bring into the national dialogue, and that involves a situation in which the right of a man must be protected. Pro-choice advocates rightly point out that as long as a fetus is not biologically viable, the woman carrying the fetus must have the exclusive right to decide whether or not to carry her pregnancy. If both the man and woman agree on whether to have the baby, there is complication in the decision-making. If the man wants the baby but the woman does not, the man must respect the decision of the woman. But what if a married woman decides to have the baby after finding out about her pregnancy, but her husband does not? Should a man be forced to fulfill child support and maintenance obligations for the child as required under Family Law? While the right to decide whether or not to have a baby exclusively belongs to the woman, the man should have the legal right within the first few months of the woman's pregnancy to choose and declare whether or not he accepts the financial obligations as they are required of the father under Family Law.

Should Obama cut funding for sexual abstinence programs and increase funding for comprehensive sex education programs that include discussion of birth control?
The goal of sexual abstinence program is to educate young people about how to prevent unwanted pregnancy and avoid sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). For that reason, teachers cannot teach their students that abstinence is the only way to prevent unwanted pregnancy, because it is not. There are many ways to have control over whether and when to have a child, including contraception, safe sex practices, sexual orientation and abortion. While the most comprehensive research done on the impact of abstinence-only programs showed that they had no visible impact in terms of delaying a teenager's sexual activities, latest data shows that nearly $175 million of federal spending continue to go into these programs every year. In comparison, teen pregnancy in the United States continues to be twice that in many European countries that advocate comprehensive sex education. In the meantime, more than 8 out of 10 Americans support education of both abstinence and other methods to prevent unwanted pregnancy and STDs. As part of his short-term agenda, President Elect Obama must push for the channeling of nearly all abstinence-only education funding to comprehensive programs that have both the support of the American public and have proven to be more effective.

Should Obama allow federal health plans to pay for abortions?
Even President Clinton who supported the right to choose did not allow any federal funds to be used to cover abortion costs. His argument was that he did not want to use federal funds that had come not just from pro-choice citizens, but anti-choice ones as well, toward an operation that did not have the moral support of all citizens. While the argument sounds reasonable, one cannot help but wonder why Presidents who use these arguments do not apply the same logic to other policies of the federal government. It is safe to say that most of the tax-paying citizens in this country have a moral objection to the continuation of the Iraq War. So why should they be forced to continue to support this war through their taxes (which by the way is leading to the killing of actual human beings)? The notion that anti-choice citizens should have the right not to have their taxes used under state and federal programs for an operation that is as legal and legitimate as any has no logical justification. President Elect Obama must make sure that as long as abortion remains legal, women have access to it. But as for any other operation, limits should be placed to prevent abuse.

President Elect Obama has presented himself as a president ready to compromise on important issues. But as he proceeds through the first few months of his presidency, he cannot treat abortion as another issue on which to negotiate. Instead, he has a unique opportunity to use his political capital to fundamentally reframe the debate and permanently establish one important fact: abortion is as legal and legitimate of a medical operation as any, and the government needs to do what it can to help women get educated about it and have easy and safe access to it.

Northern Irelands Record Abortion Figures Shock

2009-01-05T05:11:00.000-08:00

Northern Ireland's record abortion figures shock
Friday, 2 January 2009 The Belfast Telegraph

A record number of women from Northern Ireland are opting to go to England and Wales to terminate a pregnancy, the Belfast Telegraph can reveal today.

Figures released by Health Minister Michael McGimpsey show that there were 1,343 abortions carried out in England and Wales where the woman gave a home address in Northern Ireland in 2007 — the majority of which would be regarded as illegal here.

According to the Department of Health statistics, 6,400 abortions were performed on women from Northern Ireland in hospitals in England and Wales between 2003 and 2007.

The latest figure was a rise of 48 on that for the overall 2006 tally while 179 more women went for abortions in 2007 compared to 2005.

However, it is feared that the number of women being forced to leave Northern Ireland for a termination is actually much higher as the figures do not include numbers of women travelling to Scotland or further afield for an abortion.

While abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland, it can be carried out when a pregnancy causes a severe risk to the life of the mother and Mr McGimpsey has revealed that 99 such abortions were performed on women in Northern Ireland hospitals in 2007 — a rise of 36% from 2003.

The figures prompted a leading pro-life organisation to today call for the circumstances behind the terminations in Northern Ireland hospitals to be opened to public scrutiny.

Precious Life also said that the doctors who performed the 99 abortions in 2007 must be challenged about the legality of their actions and also called for police investigations into any believed to have been carried out illegally.

Director of the pro-life charity, Bernie Smyth, said: “These figures raise all sorts of further questions and we will be working to establish the answers in the New Year. A termination is illegal unless the life of the mother is at risk and there is a question as to whether these abortions were legal or illegal.

“It is a serious offence to take the life of an unborn child. We want to know why each and every one of these 99 abortions were carried out. I have been given information by someone with inside knowledge who said that an abortion was carried out at a hospital in Northern Ireland because the child was disabled.

“We want to know what happened to the bodies of these babies and whether death certificates were issued. If any of the abortions were illegal, the medical staff involved must be questioned by police and charged.”

The right of women in Northern Ireland to have a termination remains a controversial subject which threatened to collapse the Assembly earlier this year as a number of MPs from the mainland tabled a Parliamentary motion to bring legislation governing abortions in Northern Ireland into line with the rest of the UK.

Diane Abbott, one of the MPs who has campaigned to legalise abortion in Northern Ireland, said the figures released by Mr McGimpsey show there is a need for women to be able to access the same level of healthcare in Northern Ireland as the rest of the UK.

“The number of abortions and the number of women travelling from Northern Ireland to the British mainland for abortions continue to rise,” she said.

“This gives the lie to the claim by some politicians in the province that there is no demand for safe and legal abortion in Northern Ireland.

“In particular, I believe that women who travel from Northern Ireland to the British mainland for an abortion should not have to pay for the abortion. It is long overdue that this manifest unfairness was ended.”

Alliance MLA Anna Lo, a pro-choice campaigner, also said that the issue of legalising abortion in Northern Ireland is a matter of equality.

“Women who travel abroad for abortions are having to pay about £2,000 on top of travel and accommodation expenses so this is also a class, economic and social issue, and there are some women who can’t afford this option and go on to the internet to get tablets which cause a pregnancy to terminate, which can lead to medical complications,” she said.

Meanwhile, Dr Audrey Simpson, director of the Family Planning Association in Northern Ireland, said the figures prove there is a need for a Northern Ireland-based service whereby women can undergo an abortion without stigma or judgement.

“This highlights that fact that women in Northern Ireland will at certain stages in their life need to have an abortion and these women should be treated with respect and compassion,” she said.

“Politicians must recognise that women in Northern Ireland will always need abortions and they should fulfil their statutory obligation by legislating for easier access to abortions in Northern Ireland.”

Czech Republic: Abortion Services Not 'Abortion Tourism' For EU Citizens

2008-12-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

Published on RHRealityCheck.org (http://www.rhrealitycheck.org)

Czech Republic: Abortion Services Not "Abortion Tourism" for EU Citizens
By Anna Wilkowska-Landowska
Created Dec 23 2008 - 8:00am

Recently, the Czech Republic cabinet unanimously approved a new bill that would extend abortion privileges and other health services to all European Union (EU) citizens. Opponents of the bill claim that the new regulations will enable "abortion tourism" from the other European states where termination of pregnancy is significantly restricted.

The European Union rules state that all participating member states should provide the same services and care to all EU citizens that local citizens receive. Even so, the bill is strongly opposed by deputies of the Christian Democratic Union (KDU-CSL), a junior governing party, who have concerns the Czech Republic will become an "abortion tourism destination" for EU citizens. Christian Democratic Union ministers in the cabinet, who approved the bill, are strongly being pressured to withdraw the bill before it is submitted to the Parliament by deputy party members, according to Ceske Noviny newspaper [1]. As a reason for their opposition, the KDU MPs gave their "conscience objections" to the bill's provision enabling EU citizens to undergo abortion in the Czech Republic.

The bill is part of the crucial and controversial package of reform legislation promoted by Health Minister Tomas Julinek. Apart from abortion, the bill deals with rules of assisted fertilization, sex change, sterilization and other specific treatments.

The Christian Democrats have had long term reservations about the planned provisions on abortion. They have campaigned steadily in previous months against the abortion bill, as well as another that would loosen restrictions on in-vitro fertilization. The party had proposed abortion restriction legislation in April, which included a stricter time limit on health-related abortions and heightened consent requirements. The Christian Democrats proposed to limit abortions on "health grounds" to the 18th week of pregnancy and proposed to allow fathers to have a say in whether a child is aborted, although the father's opinion will not be a "veto." They also proposed to raise the age at which parental consent is required from 16 to 18 years old.

Under current Czech law, unrestricted abortion is allowed until 12 weeks gestation, and with "medical indications" until 24 weeks. Fetuses diagnosed with serious abnormalities can be legally aborted at any gestational age. Abortion was legalized under the communist regime in 1957. The only restrictions beyond these say that abortions must be spaced at least six months apart and the pregnant woman must be at least 16 years old, unless she has the permission of her parents.

The opponents also say the bill makes abortion rules excessively liberal, and that the Czech Republic might become an abortion tourism destination. The "abortion tourists" would most likely come from neighboring Poland, where abortion is permitted only in cases of rape, significant fetal abnormality, or the presence of a serious health threat to the mother. Abortion was made illegal in the country after the collapse of communism in 1993. Though coming to the Czech Republic for abortion care has been illegal until now according to Czech law, Polish women seeking abortion have traveled to the Czech Republic for the procedure.

It is important to add that in spite of very liberal abortion legislation, the number of abortions in the Czech Republic has been constantly dropping since the collapse of the communist regime in November 1989. In 1970 almost 148,000 children were born and 72,000 abortions were performed. In 2006, there were 25,400 abortions for a total population of 10,228,744 in the country. Last year, in 2007, over 114,000 children were born and 25,414 abortions performed.

"The reason for high abortions during communist times is that contraception was not available, and the abortion law was very permissive," said Radim Uzel, executive director of the Czech Family Planning Association.

Despite the Czech Republic having one of the lowest birth rates in the world - well below the replacement rate of 2.1, at 1.22 - the citizens of the Czech Republic continue to strongly favor abortion. A new public opinion poll conducted by the Public Opinion Research Center CVVM [2] among residents of the Czech Republic in June 2008 finds more people are inclined to favor keeping abortions legal. The poll found about 75 percent of Czech citizens want abortions to stay legal, an increase of about three percent from the poll conducted in 2007. Some 15 percent said abortions should be limited to only legitimate health reasons, another 6 percent said abortions should only be allowed if the mother's life is threatened and one percent want all abortions made illegal.

The Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic [3] reported that women who already have children were more likely to get an abortion. Some 35 percent of those obtaining abortions already have two children, for example. That figure is consistent with most other European countries.

Adreinne Germain's Blog: Women's Rights Are Human Rights

2008-12-17T05:40:00.000-08:00

Past Time for Change: Women's Rights Are Human Rights

Adrienne Germain on December 10th.

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/12/09/past-time-change-securing-womens-health-and-rights

Adrienne Germain's blog

On its sixtieth anniversary, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is still a distant dream for most of the world's girls and women. One in every three women in the world experiences violence in her lifetime just because she is a woman. In Africa, three million girls are at risk of female genital mutilation, and ten million girls worldwide face early and forced marriage each year.

While gender gaps in education have recently been closing, 70% of children not in school are girls, and sex discrimination pervades most other sectors. For example, only 16% of parliamentarians worldwide are women.

Nowhere are violations of women's human rights greater than in the health sector. Half a million women die and 10-15 million are permanently disabled each year from entirely preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the lifetime risk of dying in childbirth is more than 300 times higher than in rich countries. The health impacts of poverty and injustice are not distant challenges: the United States ranks 41st in the world in maternal mortality, behind Latvia, Portugal, and Poland. In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 60 percent of adults, and 75 percent of young people, living with HIV/AIDS are female.

Eleanor Roosevelt, architect of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, understood that such daily violations of the rights to life, dignity, and equality are the core human rights challenge. In 1958 she said,

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home... the neighborhood... the school... the factory, farm, or office... Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere."

But countries and the international system have only paid lip service to Eleanor Roosevelt's wisdom. Over a dozen United Nations agreements have elaborated in detail the human rights of women and actions required to protect them. In 1979 the Convention on the Elimination of the Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a legally binding treaty, took effect and has been ratified by all but eight of the world's governments, including, unfortunately, the United States.

In 1993, the World Conference on Human Rights again recognized the human rights of women and of the girl child and said that they are "priority objectives of the international community." Two years later, at the Fourth World Conference on Women, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton nonetheless felt compelled to point out once more that "Women's rights are human rights."

So what is the way forward?

Based on decades of international work, we know that there will be no global peace or security until we secure every woman's right to a just and healthy life. Only healthy women whose human rights are protected can be fully productive workers and effective participants in their country's political processes. Only when women are healthy and empowered can they raise and educate healthy children. These are imperative in their own right, and also the building blocks of stable societies and growing economies.

How do we get there?

President-elect Barack Obama has the unique opportunity, and the profound responsibility, to reestablish U.S. credibility and global leadership on human rights for all. The first step is to help strengthen the United Nations as a vehicle to hold governments accountable for human rights protection and for meeting unfulfilled commitments to girls and women. Second, the United States can once again lead the world in making access to comprehensive reproductive health services a reality for women and young people here in the United States and globally.

Only when women are able to exercise control over their bodies are they able to fully realize other human right such as access to education and employment, political participation and legal equality. Third, the new President should prioritize asking the Senate to ratify CEDAW. Finally, the United States, at home and abroad, can enable new generations to live the principles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. A key vehicle is comprehensive sexuality education, which teaches young people how to establish equality in relationships; respect the right to consent in both sex and marriage; and end sexual coercion and violence against women.

The next Administration will have the opportunity and the power to make these changes and to create a different kind of world for millions of girls and women, boys and men. It will take courage and vision to act boldly. The reward -- in lives saved and in our restored reputation as a global leader for social justice -- will be incalculable.

This article was first posted on The Huffington Post.

Loretta Ross Blog: Re-enslaving African American Women

2008-12-09T02:55:00.000-08:00

Re-enslaving African American Women

This article was originally published in On The Issues Magazine.com.
www.ontheissuesmagazine.com
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/cafe2php?id=22

Loretta Ross on December 8, 2008 - 8:00am
Posting on rhrealitycheck.org

I have spoken on many campuses in the wake of the “Genocide Awareness Project,” which displays posters at colleges to create controversy among young people about Black abortion. Students are understandably confused when presented with seemingly fact-based information that claims that Black women are the scourge of the African American community. I provide accurate historical and contemporary information about Black women’s views on abortion.

African American women who care about reproductive justice know that the limited membership in the Black anti-abortion movement doesn’t represent our views and we are not fooled into thinking that they care about gender justice for women. In fact, if they had their way, we would be re-enslaved once again, based on our fertility.

But the Black anti-abortion movement needs to be taken seriously. The people involved in it carefully exploit religious values to make inroads into our communities. They poison the soil in which we must toil.

Carefully orchestrated campaigns by Black surrogates for the religious and political right not only oppose abortion, but they also organize on behalf of many other right wing causes, such as opposing stem cell research, supporting charter schools and opposing affirmative action.

Through clever positioning and photo-ops by the right wing, the Black anti-abortion movement appears stronger and more numerous than it actually is. Generously funded by a predominantly white anti-abortion movement desperate for Black representatives, the Black anti-abortion movement seeks to drive a wedge into the African American community.

They tell African American women that we are now responsible for the genocide of our own people. Talk about a “blame the victim” strategy! We are now accused of “lynching” our children in our wombs and practicing white supremacy on ourselves. Black women are again blamed for the social conditions in our communities and demonized by those who claim they only want to save our souls (and the souls of our unborn children). This is what lies on steroids look like.

Opposition Research Needed

Who are these people in the Black anti-abortion movement? This movement needs to be carefully studied through opposition research. Information on them, their connections to white anti-abortion groups and their sources of funding is scant.

Of course, the most famous of the Black anti-abortionists is Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She is a Pastoral Associate, a member of the avid anti-abortion group Priests for Life, and Director of African American Outreach for the Gospel of Life Ministries. Because her father was Dr. King’s brother, Alveda is the leading voice for linking the anti-abortionists to the Civil Rights movement. This is despite the fact that both Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King were strong supporters of family planning in general, and Planned Parenthood in particular. Alveda King, who lives in Atlanta, has also spoken out strongly against gay rights and in support of charter schools.

A widely known Black anti-abortion minister is Rev. Clenard H. Childress of New Jersey, founder of the BlackGenocide.org project and website. He is the president of the Northeast Chapter of Life Education and Resource Network (L.E.A.R.N.), established in 1993. He claims that the “high rate of abortion has decimated the Black family and destroyed Black neighborhoods to the detriment of society at large.” He led protests at the 2008 NAACP convention in Cincinnati and has accused the organization of practicing racism against Black children. He is also on the board of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform that circulates the Genocide Awareness Project.

Alan Keyes, perennial presidential candidate, is also well known in anti-abortion circles. Keyes first came to national attention when President Reagan appointed him as adviser to Maureen Reagan (daughter of the president), as she led the official U.S. delegation to the UN World Conference for Women in Kenya in 1985. At this meeting, the U.S. affirmed its support for the infamous 1984 “Mexico City” policy that banned U.S. funds from supporting abortion worldwide. Keyes helped lead the anti-abortion protests at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, and is a favorite of the right for his fierce extreme views on a number of issues.

There are a handful of other Black spokespeople for the anti-abortion movement. The point is not how many there are, but the disproportionate impact they have. They have created the false impression that if only Black people were warned that abortion is genocide, women would stop having them in order to preserve the Black race, either voluntarily or pressured by the men in their lives.

The Sexism They Sell

The sexism in their viewpoints is mind-boggling. To them, Black women are the poor dupes of the abortion rights movement, lacking agency and decision-making of our own. In fact, this is a reassertion of Black male supremacy over the self-determination of women. It doesn’t matter whether it is from the lips of a man or a woman. It is about re-enslaving Black women by making us breeders for someone else’s cause.

I am reminded of the comments of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman in Congress, who dismissed the genocide argument when asked to discuss her views on abortion and birth control:

To label family planning and legal abortion programs “genocide” is male rhetoric, for male ears. It falls flat to female listeners and to thoughtful male ones. Women know, and so do many men, that two or three children who are wanted, prepared for, reared amid love and stability, and educated to the limit of their ability will mean more for the future of the Black and brown races from which they come than any number of neglected, hungry, ill-housed and ill-clothed youngsters.

We need our leading African American women’s and Civil Rights organizations to speak out more strongly in support of reproductive justice. We need to organize young people to resist the misinformation directed at them by these groups. Many of our campuses are unaware of the activities of the Black anti-abortionists until they show up, usually invited by a white anti-abortion group.

But mostly, we need to let the world know that they do not speak for Black women. As my mother would say, “they might be our color, but they are not our kind.”

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/12/04/reenslaving-african-american-women#comment-11986

From www.abortionreview.org: A Depressingly Narrow Debate

2008-12-05T03:38:00.000-08:00

5 December 2008
Comment: A depressingly narrow debate
http://www.abortionreview.org/index.php/site/article/459/

The ‘yes it does / no it doesn’t’ reaction to claims that abortion damages mental health distracts from the more useful and difficult questions about women’s experience. By Jennie Bristow.

The publication of some new studies examining the possibility of a link between abortion and mental health has sparked a predictable media debate about whether abortion causes mental illness, and whether women seeking abortion should be ‘informed’ that the procedure might make them depressed.

A study by Professor David Fergusson and colleagues from the University of Otago, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, claims that women who had abortions had rates of mental health problems that were almost 30% higher than in the other women in the study. A second study in the same journal, by Kaeleen Dingle and colleagues at the University of Queensland, Australia, shows that women who lose a baby by the age of 21 – either through an abortion or a miscarriage – are three times more likely to develop a drug or alcohol problem than others. These studies led to headlines proclaiming ‘Abortions linked to mental illness’ (Daily Telegraph, UK); ‘Abortions may cause drug, alcohol addiction’ (Times of India); ‘NZ research uncovers abortion and mental health link’ (New Zealand Herald); and ‘Call for mental health support after abortion’ (Irish Times).

On the other side, a systematic review of 21 high-quality studies involving more than 150,000 women, conducted by Dr Robert Blum and a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, and published in the journal Contraception, found no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and other women. ‘The best quality studies indicate no significant differences in long-term mental health between women in the United States who choose to terminate a pregnancy and those who do not,’ they wrote, noting that ‘studies with the most flawed methodology consistently found negative mental health consequences of abortion.’ ‘Abortion not seen linked with depression’, reported Reuters on 4 December.

The ongoing debate about whether abortion is or is not associated with mental health problems has triggered several major reviews: most recently, by the American Psychological Association (APA). New studies attract over-stated, and often contradictory, news headlines, depending on the particular newspaper’s stance on abortion. Attempting to untangle the science of it all could leave even experts rather confused. But for this reason, we need to step back from the claims and counter-claims about this issue, and ask: What is really being said here?

Claims and counter-claims

On the science front, the balance of opinion seems to be a cautious recognition that some women who have abortions may suffer some mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety or self-harm. However, the evidence does not show that the abortion itself causes these problems: rather, these problems are likely to be a continuation of pre-existing mental health problems that the woman has suffered. Furthermore, those women who may experience serious mental health problems are a minority of those who have undergone abortion.

These are the conclusions reached by the APA, and by the British Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in its 2004 guidance. It is worth noting that they are also the conclusions broadly reached by Fergusson and his team. Fergusson’s work on abortion and mental health is often used by the anti-abortion lobby in an attempt to strengthen the argument that women need to be protected from abortion. A 2006 study that he published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry prompted a group of 15 British obstetricians to write to The Times (London), demanding that the RCOG revisits its guidance and arguing that ‘doctors have a duty to advise about long-term adverse psychological consequences of abortion.’ The APA’s recent review devotes a significant section to examining this 2006 study, and noting where its results should be treated with caution.

However, despite the alarmist headlines that greeted Fergusson’s new study, published this week, the conclusions and findings of his team were measured. They concluded that the overall effects of abortion on mental health were small, and that exposure to abortion accounted for 1.5-5.5 per cent of the overall rate of mental disorder in the group of women studied. Furthermore, they stated:

‘[T]he results do not support strong pro-life positions that claim that abortion has large and devastating effects on the mental health of women. Neither do the results support strong pro-choice positions that imply that abortion is without any mental health effects. In general, the results lead to a middle-of-the-road position that, for some women, abortion is likely to be a stressful and traumatic life event which places those exposed to it at modestly increased risk of a range of common mental health problems.’

Psychiatrists will continue to debate the precise nature of such ‘common mental health problems’, their relationship with abortion, and the number of women who may be affected. As Margaret Oates, consultant perinatal psychiatrist with Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust, has suggested in a commentary on the 2008 Fergusson study, it is unlikely that even these specialists will ever agree.

Abortion and the Syndrome Society

However, it is undoubtedly the case that abortion can be experienced by some women as a highly stressful and difficult life event, which happens in the context of other problems in their lives. Relationship breakdown, financial and other practical pressures, problems with alcohol or drugs, and ambivalence about whether they want to have a baby or not – we know that these are factors in some women’s decision to have an abortion, all of which can be intensely experienced in a very negative way. This is not the case for all women – for many, the issue is a more practical one of being pregnant when they do not want to be, and the predominant emotion following abortion is relief. But for some, abortion can be experienced as one more bad thing happening in an already bad set of circumstances.

Furthermore, we live in a cultural context where people routinely use the word ‘depressing’ to describe negative feelings or upheavals in their lives, whether that be moving house, having a baby, experiencing trouble at work, or splitting up with a partner. Whether people are actually suffering from depression as a result of these things or whether they simply feel they are is in many ways a moot point: the fact is that they feel they are depressed, that they experience these events as causing mental health difficulties, and they expect that they will receive a particular kind of recognition and support for their problems.

In this way, the category ‘mental health problems’ has expanded to encompass the way that people feel about all manner of difficult life events. It would be highly peculiar if abortion, and all the reasons leading to why women have abortions, were immune to this trend. A woman who has had an abortion may well feel very miserable, even ‘depressed’, and dwell on her decision for some time to come; she may require extra care and support. Abortion providers recognise this, which is why they are very careful to ensure that a woman seeking an abortion is sure about her decision, and why emotional support is offered afterwards as part of the package of care.

It is in many ways unfortunate that discussions about how women experience abortions, and what providers can do to help manage the negative emotions in some of their clients, tend to be clouded by the ‘abortion and mental health’ debate, which has politicised and polarised this issue. As Dr Ellie Lee, author of the important critique Abortion, Motherhood and Mental Health, recently wrote on Abortion Review, the history of the debate about the mental health effects of abortion is a political one. It arises from persistent attempts by the anti-abortion lobby to ‘de-moralise’ claims about the problem of abortion, by using science (or pseudo-science) to argue that abortion has negative effects upon women’s health.

This means that, as Roger Blum’s team argues, ‘[s]cientists are … conducting research to answer politically motivated questions’. The anti-abortion lobby thinks that if a scientific study can prove that abortion causes depression, it will have won an argument; in countering such claims, the pro-choice lobby can sometimes come across as denying the reality of some women’s struggle with abortion. This is not a helpful situation for women seeking abortion, and nor it is a useful framework for the abortion debate. As Margaret Oates argues, ‘abortion is not a psychiatric but a moral, ethical and legal issue’. It is one which should be debated, not in the laboratory, but out in the world.

Jennie Bristow is editor of Abortion Review

CEDAW and Ireland: Concluding Observations on Abortion, 1989/1999/2005

2008-12-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

CEDAW and Concluding Observations on Abortion, Ireland, 1989/1999/2005.

IRELAND CEDAW A/44/38 (1989)
Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women:

The Committee considered the initial report of Ireland (CEDAW/C/5/Add.47) at its 135th and 140th meetings, on 22 and 24 February 1989 (CEDAW/C/SR.135 and 140).

89. In the area of health, more information was requested on the degree of access to contraceptives for women under the age of 18 in the light of the rising incidence of teenage pregnancies, generally. It was asked why a prescription was required for contraceptives. Statistics, if available, were requested on the number of Irish women who had had clandestine abortions (in Ireland or abroad). It was also asked whether the fact that abortion was illegal was not considered by the Government to be contrary to the objectives of equality of opportunity and self-determination enshrined in the Convention. Exact data were requested on deaths resulting from illegal abortions and it was asked whether any action had been taken to stem the increase in deaths. Further, the Committee wanted to know if there was a strong movement from feminist groups with regard to legalizing abortion and if anything was being done to change the law. The Committee also wished to know whether abortion in the case of rape was illegal and whether there were any legal consequences for persons in that situation.

State Party(Ireland) reply:
123. The representative responded to the questions in the area of health. On the subject of abortion, he explained that Irish law did not distinguish between clandestine and other abortions. Abortion had been illegal since 1860 and the provision had been upheld by a referendum held in Ireland in 1983. A number of women’s groups had played a prominent role in lobbying for abortion rights during the debate preceding the referendum but the feminist movement was not united on the issue.
Police authorities had not reported any incidences of clandestine abortion in Ireland and it was believed not to occur as Irish women could avail themselves of legal and safe abortion facilities in the United Kingdom. On the question of the demand for abortion, the number of women who had given an address in the Ireland and who had availed themselves of an abortion in the United Kingdom in 1987 was reported to be 3,700, but it was considered that that figure might be low due to under-reporting. In answer to the question of whether the absence of abortion rights meant that many women would have to function as single parents with the attendant economic difficulties, the representative informed the Committee of the special weekly unmarried mother’s allowance, which was available subject to a means test.

Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women : Ireland. 25/06/99.
A/54/38,paras.161-201. (Concluding Observations/Comments)

Convention Abbreviation: CEDAW
Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
Twenty-first session 7–25 June 1999

Principal areas of concern and recommendations:

180. The Committee notes that although Ireland is a secular State, the influence of the Church is strongly felt not only in attitudes and stereotypes but also in official State policy.
In particular, women's right to health, including reproductive health, is compromised by this influence. The Committee notes that Ireland did not enter a reservation to article 12 upon ratification of the Convention. The Committee recommends implementation of this article in full.

185. While noting with appreciation the existence of a Plan for Women's Health, 1997-1999, and the establishment of a Women's Health Council, as well as the wide availability of various programmes to improve women's health, the Committee is concerned that, with very limited exceptions, abortion remains illegal in Ireland. Women who wish to terminate their pregnancies need to travel abroad. This creates hardship for vulnerable groups, such as female asylum seekers who cannot leave the territory of the State.

Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
Thirty-third session 5-22 July 2005

Concluding comments: Ireland
1. The Committee considered Ireland’s combined fourth and fifth periodic report (CEDAW/C/IRL/4-5) at its 693rd and 694th meetings, on 13 July 2005.

Introduction by the State party(Ireland)
7. Steps had been taken to integrate a gender dimension into the health service and to make it responsive to the particular needs of women. Additional funding had been provided for family planning and pregnancy counselling services. The Crisis Pregnancy Agency had been set up in 2001. Extensive national dialogue had occurred on the issue of abortion, with five separate referendums held on three separate occasions. The representative noted that the Government had no plans to put forward further proposals at the present time.

Principal areas of concern and recommendations of CEDAW Committee:

38. While acknowledging positive developments in the implementation of article 12 of the Convention, in particular the Strategy to Address the Issue of Crisis Pregnancy (2003) that addresses information, education and advice on contraceptive services, the Committee reiterates its concern about the consequences of the very restrictive abortion laws under which abortion is prohibited except where it is established as a matter of probability that there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother that can be averted only by the termination of her pregnancy.

39. The Committee urges the State party to continue to facilitate a national dialogue on women’s right to reproductive health, including on the very restrictive abortion laws. It also urges the State party to further strengthen family planning services, ensuring their availability to all women and men, young adults and teenagers.

Ireland is due to be examined under CEDAW in 2009. An NGO Shadow Report is being prepared and is coordinated by the Irish Women’s Human Rights Alliance.

Uruguay Senate Votes to Depenalise Abortion- Breaking News

2008-11-11T10:16:00.000-08:00

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — Uruguay's Senate has voted to depenalize abortion — a rare step in a Latin American nation. President Tabare Vasquez says he will veto the measure.

Ruling party Sen. Monica Javier says 17 of the 30 senators present voted for Tuesday's bill, which would remove penalties for abortion during the first 12 weeks of gestation.

The country's Roman Catholic Church has crusaded against the measure, which give Uruguay the most liberal abortion laws in South America.

The country now bars abortion in all circumstances.

Gloria Feldt on the Election of Obama

2008-11-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

The Tide in the Affairs of Election 2008

Pundits make their living trying to tell us why politics happens as it does. They are always arguing about what the one driving factor was in a given election. Well, take it from someone who has worked in campaigns from the lowliest grass roots to the highest halls of power--not a one of them looks from the outside like what they look like from the inside. I don't care how "perfectly executed" the campaign might be. There's a lot of luck involved and there is never just one deciding factor.

But the biggest factor in 2008 was: it's just damn time.

People are ready. People are fed up. Enough trumped up war. Enough high gas prices and mortgage meltdowns and corporate greed taking the hard working middle class's life savings down with them. Enough slashing and burning of women's rights to equal pay and reproductive justice. Enough of a president who you might want to have a beer with (I personally don't) but who can't string a sentence together, and who squandered America's global standing at the same time he lost his dice roll that our economy wouldn't crash till he got out of Dodge with his cronies' fortunes safe.

The deciding factor in 2008 was simply that "tide in the affairs of men", and more especially, of women, that when it crests, get out of the way because that force for change will not be stopped.

That said, Barack Obama, unlike Al Gore and John Kerry who both snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, ran a strategically brilliant campaign. Obama saw the tide and repeatedly took the wave that leads to fortune. He did what leaders must first and foremost do: create a story we can all see ourselves in. He did it with his personal narrative. He did it with the race speech. He did it by tangibly engaging an enormous chunk of America, including millions of newly activated voters, in his quest.

We must also remember that Hillary Clinton would have represented transformational change too had she become the first woman president. I am sad I won't see her inaugurated in January. But the truth, much as it hurts me to say it, is that it is just damn time in America for Barack Obama.

(The full quote, lest someone accuse me of plagiarizing Shakespeare):

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
William Shakespeare (English Dramatist, Playwright and Poet, 1564-1616)

Gloria Feldt looks back to Beijing in a post from March 2006

2008-11-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

Gloria Feldt is the author of The War on Choice: the Right-wing Attack on Women’s Rights and How to Fight Back and Behind Every Choice Is a Story. She was president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1996-2005 and is a Columnist for MaximsNews.

UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com/ 21 March 2006 - Think back with me to September 1995, to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing .

Thrilling and ambitious goals were set for improving the lives of women, and that improves the lives of their families, their communities, and the world.

The official conference was in Beijing , but the much larger convocation of nongovernmental organizations was literally stuck in the mud in Huairu, an hour's drive from the city.

Thousands of us got there early on the morning of 6 September. We stood packed together under a roof of brightly colored umbrellas, jockeying for the few hundred seats inside the auditorium where then first lady of the United States , Hillary Clinton was slated to give a speech.

All those years of clinic defense had taught me how to get through a crowd unscathed. I was fortunate not only to get inside but to get a seat.

The program was running late; Hillary was running even later and the crowd was getting restive. Just as it seemed a revolt might be brewing, Shirley May Springer Stanton, the cultural coordinator of the conference, walked onto the stage and began to sing a capella, ever so softly:

Gonna keep on moving forward, never turning back, never turning back.

Then she asked the audience to join her.

Gonna fight for women’s freedom, never turning back.

Pretty soon the house was rocking.

By the time the first lady arrived and gave her brilliant "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights" speech, it truly felt like the global movement for women's rights was unstoppable.

It was, you might say, an ovular moment.

Here in the United States , that moment seems long ago.

Our administration's federal budget slashes and gags funding for international family planning services that could reduce the millions of unsafe abortions and risky pregnancies that cause 500,000 women’s deaths each year unnecessarily.

But the U.S. women's movement can take inspiration from working in sisterhood with women from around the globe.

While the United States fails to meet its commitments to the global public-health community, and indeed is rolling back women’s human rights to make their own childbearing decisions every day, many other countries have stepped in to fill the void left by America 's abdication of leadership.

Women's development projects are also fueling economic growth around the world while bringing greater equality to the women in their societies.

Sex trafficking and other acts of violence against women, long merely routine facts of life, are becoming subjects of international media attention and human rights action and female heads of state have been elected in Europe, Africa and Latin America just in the past year.

Maybe in the U.S. next time around?

The recent deaths of Betty Freidan who sparked American feminism’s second wave, Rosa Parks, who showed that one woman can change the world, and Coretta Scott King, whose definition of civil rights always included women’s rights, were a sharp reminder to me that no movement for social justice moves forward without struggle, nor does forward movement necessarily go in a straight line.

Televangelist and political power broker Rev. Pat Robertson called feminism a "socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

We can laugh at this outrageous statement only long enough to notice who holds political power in all three branches of the federal government and many sates today.

In the pressure cooker of vilification and political retribution, it is tempting to quit or squabble about strategy.

To question the agenda, to retreat, reframe, retrench—when we know we must always move forward, fueled by passionate commitment for our mission and values.

The global women’s movement--not those who have opposed progress for women--has always advocated for the full panoply of just social policies from economic justice to universal access to quality health care.

And all of us who support it need the political will, courage, commitment, stamina and a never-ending creation of inspiring initiatives that touch real people's lives.

A movement, after all, has to move.

Let us remember, proudly, that we have changed the world -- much for the better -- for justice and equality. That's exactly what scares our adversaries so much.

We will keep on moving forward. We will not be deterred.

I’ll never forget a group of African women at the Beijing conference who told a story about how they stamped out spousal abuse in their village.

The women banded together, took their cooking pots and took up positions outside of the homes of men who had committed violent acts against their wives.

They banged those pots so loudly that the whole neighborhood took note and the men agreed to change their behavior.

Each country has different reasons to bang the pots on this international women's day 2006.

But the refrain for all of us who aspire to global justice for women is the same.

Gonna raise our voices boldly, never turning back, never turning back.

Gonna keep on moving forward, never turning back, never turning back.

Feminist Majority Foundation: Nine New Pro-Choice Democratic Women to Enter Congress

2008-11-07T02:31:00.000-08:00

Source: http://feministmajority.org/elections/2008.asp

Dear Congressional Council Members,

Thank you for all you did to help make the 2008 elections a smashing win for feminists. We are all so excited.

We just completed an analysis of the election. Nine new pro-choice Democratic women will be entering Congress: seven in the House [Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ); Betsy Markey (D-CO); Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL); Debbie Halvorson (D-IL); Chellie Pingree (D-ME); Dina Titus (D-NV); and Marcia Fudge (D-OH)] and two in the Senate [Kay Hagan (D-NC) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)], Two more pro-choice women may still win in House races that they are still counting [Darcy Burner (D-WA) and Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH)].

We picked up at least 18 pro-choice votes in the House and 5 in the Senate - with 8 House seats still to be determined and 4 Senate seats. We are still hoping for more gains.

We defeated all 3 anti-choice state ballot measures in South Dakota, Colorado, and California. Actually we smashed the fetal personhood ballot measure in Colorado 73%-27%. Hopefully we will NEVER see it again on a state ballot. In South Dakota we defeated the abortion ban for the 2nd time by a strong 55%-45%. And finally we defeated for a third time the California parental notification initiative, 52.4% to 47.6%. In both the South Dakota and California initiatives the deceptive wording tactics did not work. We are still waiting to see if we finally defeated the Colorado Affirmative Action Ban - we are ahead as they continue to count the votes.

Yet even on this marvelous Election Day we had some crushing losses. Notably Proposition 8 (gay marriage). And too many talented feminist women candidates lost - some in close races. But we will be back - stronger and stronger.

Please visit our 2008 Election Central - http://feministmajority.org/elections/2008.asp - for election results on Ballot Measures, Women Candidates, Reproductive Choice and Balance of Power (Democrats v. Republicans).

We're very excited about the future possibilities. We will no longer have to fight daily to save the gains of the last 40 years. And at last, we will move forward again.

Thanks again for all you do - if you have any exciting ideas for the transition let us know. Let's dream big and then help to make it happen.

For Equality,

Eleanor Smeal
Feminist Majority PAC

Women's eNews: House Races in U.S. Push Women's Numbers to New High

2008-11-07T02:26:00.000-08:00

Election Night nudged up the female composition of the next U.S. House of Representatives by three lawmakers, to a record 74, Alison Bowen reports today. But the political gender gap remains wide, with women's share of the House staying at 16 percent.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

House Races Push Women's Numbers to New High
By Alison Bowen
WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)--The number of women in the U.S. House of Representatives will reach a high of 74 when the victors of Tuesday's elections take office in January.

While marking a gain of three legislators, the results failed to push women's stake into the 20 percent territory considered minimal for exerting significant voting-bloc pressure.

"I think it shows us that victories are incremental," said Claire Giesen, executive director of the Washington-based National Women's Political Caucus. "Most of the time it's two steps forward and one back. We just have to keep at it."

"It's great that we are gaining momentum, because that's important," said Marie Wilson, founder and president of the White House Project, the New York group that promotes more women in office. "But it just really speaks to the fact that we have to do a great deal more if we're going to reach parity in government."

Wilson and others think 33 percent is a better figure to work toward. She says women can take more control when they have one-third of power, as they do in Norway, which has more than 33 percent of women in its legislature.

The elections were nonetheless cheered by groups such as the National Women's Political Caucus and Washington-based political action committee EMILY's List, who expect Congress to provide much stronger support for a woman's right to choose.

One major symbol of that was the victory by Democrat Betsy Markey over Republican incumbent Marilyn Musgrave in Colorado.

"It's a positive sign for us when we replace women with women who stand for our issues," Giesen said.

Social Issues Flavored Colorado Race
Markey edged out Musgrave by 10 percentage points in a race that featured a wave of negative campaign ads highlighting their contrasting positions on social issues including abortion.

The race drew more than $3 million in independent spending from interest groups, according to a report in the Fort Collins Coloradoan.

Musgrave's re-election bid was viewed as a bellwether of the declining influence of social conservatives both in Congress and in Colorado, where the once solidly Republican electorate has shifted to the Democrats.

Musgrave made abortion rights a key issue for her term in Congress and introduced a federal bill to require parental notification for minors seeking abortion.

Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in New York, said that a higher number of pro-choice politicians "represents a major step toward getting our country back on track and ensuring that our lawmakers have the right priorities, like support for women's health care."

Two factors in particular--a high number of female political veterans and a strong Democratic headwind--helped women in the election. Of the 133 female major party nominees, 96, or 72 percent, were Democrats.

"Women in Congress are disproportionately Democrats, so big Democratic years tend to be good for women candidates," says Susan Carroll, senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick.

Ten More Women in the House
Five women won open House races, where there were no incumbents. And five female challengers unseated incumbents.

Those 10 join 64 female incumbents who were re-elected.

Some of the challengers prevailed over other women--such as Markey v. Musgrave in Colorado--which combined with some women's losses and others' retirements to keep the female percentage of the House stagnant at 16 percent.

Darcy Burner, a challenger in Washington state, is the only race left that is "too close to call" by the Center for American Women and Politics, which tracks women in political office.

Both Burner and Republican incumbent Dave Reichert had 50 percent of the vote with 41 percent of precincts reporting by Wednesday afternoon. Burner worked for Microsoft before running for Congress in 2006, when she lost narrowly to Reichert in a recount.

"She never stopped running," Giesen said. "She brought youth and freshness to the race. I'm really surprised that she didn't run away with a victory."

Democrat Marcia Fudge of Ohio won her race easily against Republican Thomas Pekarek. Fudge filled the seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who died Aug. 19 at age 58. Tubbs Jones, a prominent African American House member, was Fudge's mentor.

Democrat Chellie Pingree of Maine secured 56 percent of the vote in her race against Republican challenger Charles Summers.

But Democrat Kay Barnes in Missouri failed to unseat incumbent Rep. Sam Graves, who received 59 percent of the vote. Barnes' support dwindled last month and she was unable to close the gap.

And in Ohio, the race between Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy and Republican Steve Stivers remains unsettled. Wednesday morning, CNN projected that Kilroy had lost but retracted the projection in the afternoon.

Losses for Women as Well
Giesen said she was stunned at the losses of three Democrats: Linda Stender in New Jersey, Judy Baker in Missouri and Christine Jennings in Florida.

Stender, a Democrat, ran for an open seat in New Jersey against Republican Leonard Lance and lost by 10 percentage points, a big gap for those who expected her to win easily.

In Missouri, Baker lost by three percentage points to Republican Blaine Luetkemeyer.

In Florida, Jennings' also was a large loss. She won 38 percent of the vote against opponent Republican incumbent Vernon Buchanan, who received 55 percent of the vote.

Three Democratic candidates finished strongly for House seats. In Florida, Suzanne Kosmas was projected to win by 16 percentage points against Republican incumbent Tom Feeney. In Maine, Chellie Pingree won by 10 percentage points against Republican Charles Summers. And in Arizona, Ann Kirkpatrick won by 16 percentage points against Republican Sydney Hay.

Giesen hoped a Democratic tide would produce upset victories for two Democrats in Ohio: Victoria Wulsin and Sharen Neuhardt. Both women lost, but four other women picked up wins in the state, including Fudge and three incumbents: Republican Jean Schmidt, Democrat Marcy Kaptur and Democrat Betty Sutton.

Two Democrats considered potential upsets were Linda Ketner in South Carolina and Annette Taddeo in Florida. Both lost to incumbents.

Ketner, who challenged Republican Henry Brown, would have been the first openly gay South Carolinian to take office. Taddeo challenged Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who has been in office for nearly 20 years.

The White Houses Project's Wilson said she kept her eye on two Western races: Republican Cynthia Lummis in Wyoming, who won by 10 percentage points; and Democrat Jill Derby in Nevada, who lost by 11 percentage points.

Alison Bowen is a New York City-based reporter covering the presidential campaign for Women's eNews. Her work also appears in the New York Daily News.

Obama Statement on 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Decision from January 2008

2008-11-06T02:43:00.000-08:00

Obama Statement on 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Decision
Chicago, IL | January 22, 2008

Chicago, IL -- Senator Barack Obama today released the following statement on the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

"Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, it's never been more important to protect a woman's right to choose. Last year, the Supreme Court decided by a vote of 5-4 to uphold the Federal Abortion Ban, and in doing so undermined an important principle of Roe v. Wade: that we must always protect women's health. With one more vacancy on the Supreme Court, we could be looking at a majority hostile to a women's fundamental right to choose for the first time since Roe v. Wade. The next president may be asked to nominate that Supreme Court justice. That is what is at stake in this election.

"Throughout my career, I've been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"When South Dakota passed a law banning all abortions in a direct effort to have Roe overruled, I was the only candidate for President to raise money to help the citizens of South Dakota repeal that law. When anti-choice protesters blocked the opening of an Illinois Planned Parenthood clinic in a community where affordable health care is in short supply, I was the only candidate for President who spoke out against it. And I will continue to defend this right by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president.

"Moreover, I believe in and have supported common-sense solutions like increasing access to affordable birth control to help prevent unintended pregnancies. In the Illinois state Senate, when Congress failed to require insurance plans to cover FDA-approved contraceptives, I made sure those contraceptives were covered for women in Illinois. In the U.S. Senate, I've worked with Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) on a bill that would make birth control more affordable for low-income and college women, and introduced the Senate version of Representative Hilda Solis' bill to reduce unintended pregnancies in communities of color. As President, I will improve access to affordable health care and work to ensure that our teens are getting the information and services they need to stay safe and healthy.

"But we also know that Roe v. Wade is about more than a woman's right to choose; it's about equality. It's about whether our daughters are going to have the same opportunities as our sons. And so to truly honor that decision, we need to update the social contract so that women can free themselves, and their children, from violent relationships; so that a mom can stay home with a sick child without getting a pink slip; so that she can go to work knowing that there's affordable, quality childcare for her children; and so that the American dream is within reach for every family in this country. This anniversary reminds us that it's not enough to protect the gains of the past – we have to build a future that's filled with hope and possibility for all Americans."

www.barackobama.com/2008/01/22/obama_statement_on_35th_annive.php

Ipas calls on US President-Elect to be Global Leader for Women's Rights

2008-11-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

Ipas calls on U.S. president-elect to be global leader for women’s rights

Ipas welcomes Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Under President-elect Obama’s leadership, the new administration will be able to restore the United States to the forefront in the global movement to promote women’s reproductive health and rights. Ipas calls on the new administration to take early action to rescind the Global Gag Rule, eliminate abortion funding bans and meet our international commitments to protect women’s health.

“More than 500,000 women have died from unsafe abortion during the eight-year tenure of the Bush administration because they have not had access to comprehensive reproductive health care,” said Elizabeth Maguire, President and CEO of Ipas. “President-elect Obama has an opportunity — and we believe the passion and commitment — to make a huge difference for women’s reproductive health and rights.”

President-elect Obama can take three steps almost immediately following his inauguration to dramatically improve women’s health:

1. Rescind the Global Gag Rule. The Global Gag Rule disqualifies private organizations in the developing world from U.S. funding if they engage in any abortion-related work, even if they engage in this work with their own funds. Eliminating this ban will allow family planning programs to expand their work preventing unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions, re-open clinics and outreach services, and enable health-care experts to freely participate in debates to improve health policies for women.

2. End ban on U.S. funding for abortion care. A 1973 law named after Sen. Jesse Helms blocks U.S. foreign assistance from being used for abortion care, referral and advocacy. These activities are legal in the United States and virtually all aid-recipient countries. The Helms Amendment severely limits effort to reduce maternal mortality in countries like Nepal. In 2002, Nepal legalized abortion to reduce maternal deaths and injuries from unsafe abortion. Without the Helms Amendment, U.S. foreign assistance could play an important role in training and equipping health care providers to provide safe abortion care, saving tens of thousands of lives and dramatically reducing unintended pregnancy. In the past decade, another 15 countries have expanded the grounds for legal abortion; the United States should support their efforts to prevent deaths and injuries from unsafe abortions.

3. Rejoin the global community and support international efforts to improve women’s access to family planning and safe abortion care. Before the current Bush Administration, the United States helped shape international agreements that were both essential for women’s health and rights and consistent with fundamental American values and constitutional principles. President-elect Obama can demonstrate his commitment to international cooperation by restoring funding to UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, to support the critical work that agency does to promote voluntary family planning and maternal health in 150 countries. Furthermore, we call on President-elect Obama to work with global partners to transform the international agreements the United States has forged and signed into real, lasting improvements for women’s health and rights.

“Ipas’s partners and colleagues around the world — women and health-care providers and policymakers — are eager for new leadership from the United States,” said Maguire. “In the years to come, we are confident that the new administration will provide that leadership. The lives of millions of women, girls and their families are at stake.”

# # #

Ipas is an international organization that works around the world to increase women's ability to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, and to reduce abortion-related deaths and injuries. We believe that women everywhere must have the opportunity to determine their futures, care for their families and manage their fertility.

Catholics for Choice Statement on U.S. Election Results

2008-11-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

Washington DC—Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, issued a statement today on the US election results and the priorities for the next president.

“Initial results show that 54% of the Catholic vote went to President-elect Barack Obama. This shows that the majority of Catholics voted their conscience when deciding who should be the next president, and ignored the single-issue dictates of a few bishops who declared that it was unacceptable to vote for him because of his prochoice position.

“The next administration will have to work hard to repair the damage done during the last eight years. Undoubtedly, concerns about America’s economic security and military engagements overseas will garner a great deal of attention. However, the next administration and Congress must also work for advances in reproductive health care in the US and abroad. The priorities include:

Providing comprehensive and affordable health care to all Americans. This includes funding for comprehensive sex education and family planning programs that reduce unintended pregnancy and the need for abortion, as well as providing support for women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term.

Restoring the United States’ leadership position on women’s rights, international family planning and global development issues. This includes the restoration of the US contribution to UNFPA and the repeal of the Mexico City policy that restricts US funding for foreign NGOs that work on abortion.

Working towards an end to the culture wars over abortion and towards an era that respects the right of women to access legal abortion in a timely manner. To that end, we need to restore scientific integrity to federal agencies by appointing qualified personnel to leadership roles and advisory committees irrespective of their personal beliefs about abortion and contraception and by appointing judges who will uphold the long-standing precedent of Roe v. Wade.

Respecting the conscience of each American. The next president should remove any refusal clauses affecting federal health programs beyond the traditional exemption for the direct provision of abortion and work to make the equitable provision of reproductive-health services a priority at both the state and federal levels.”

-###-

Catholics for Choice shapes and advances sexual and reproductive ethics that are based on justice, reflect a commitment to women’s well being and respect and affirm the moral capacity of women and men to make decisions about their lives.