Thanks to a series of media reports over the past few months, Americans have been learning about the grave situation facing women in Guanajuato, Mexico, where women are jailed if they are suspected of having had an abortion.
Just a few hours from Mexico City, the state of Guanajuato is an international travel destination with a modern industrial economy, and a beautiful and historic capital that has become a thriving urban center. But scratch beneath the surface and you will find that women have not been allowed to share in Guanajuato's progress.
In early September, eight women who had been jailed in Guanajuato for "homicide by way of family" -- in other words, allegedly having had abortions -- were finally released after pressure from the media and the United Nations. One was Yolanda Martínez, a 25-year-old woman who had been in prison for nearly seven years. All eight women insist they had miscarriages or experienced stillbirths. Some say they had been forced to sign confessions, and, while they have been set free, they still have not been absolved, leaving them stigmatized and under suspicion in their own community.
In the aftermath of the release of these women, the New York Times reported the case of a young woman who was bleeding as she arrived at a hospital in Guanajuato. Before doctors would care for her, the authorities were summoned to interrogate her about her sexual history. Immediately after surgery she was forced to make a statement, and she is still being investigated for possible criminal action.
Cases like these are not limited to Guanajuato. Across Mexico, women are being investigated, accused and jailed, even for the suspicion of terminating a pregnancy. Moreover, pregnant women with bleeding or other symptoms are now terrified to go to hospitals, lest they be accused of attempted "murder."
This chilling news from Mexico comes at an interesting moment, just five short weeks before a national election in the United States. For this year, even "mainstream" Republican candidates are running on a platform to overturn Roe and make abortion illegal in the United States. In other words, they want to inject a bit of Guanajuato into American life. They want to return to a time when women were forced to carry pregnancies to term, regardless of the circumstances, even in cases of rape and incest.
I wonder if the candidates from California to Delaware who are running on this platform to make abortion illegal have thought about how we would enforce this new policy. Would local police need to work in concert with doctors and nurses in the nation's emergency rooms to identify any woman claiming to have had a miscarriage -- so that she could be investigated? Would we need to put women with problem pregnancies under special scrutiny? Would we require OB/GYNs to register women who had unintended or unwanted pregnancies, in case they tried to break the law by terminating their pregnancy?
We know that before Roe, nearly 17 percent of deaths related to pregnancy were from abortion, and since Roe, instances of women dying as a result of illegal abortion have all but vanished. In fact, the statistics bear out that countries with the most restrictions on abortion have the highest rates of both abortion and maternal deaths. Making abortion illegal doesn't do anything to stop it; it simply ensures that women are forced to seek unsafe abortions.
Rather than make abortion illegal, why not make it much less necessary? When women have access to health care, education, and affordable birth control, they have fewer unintended pregnancies and therefore fewer abortions. In the U.S., with birth control pills still costing as much as $50 a month, all women don't have easy access. Sex education is still wildly inconsistent across the country, and we have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and birth of any developed nation. If candidates really want to truly solve the problem of unintended pregnancies, they must commit to making sex education and birth control more available, not making it impossible to terminate a pregnancy or prosecuting women, nurses, and doctors.
But it's a particularly bitter election year, and too many candidates are running on dangerous platforms. What we need are real solutions to the nation's very real problems, including our high rate of unintended pregnancy. As the 2010 election season gathers steam, conservative candidates across the nation are making abortion a core issue of their campaigns.
It's time to ask these candidates who want to overturn Roe just exactly what they would like to see happen once they make abortion illegal again in America. It is time for these candidates to explain how we would police our emergency rooms, and how much jail time women and doctors should serve. In Guanajuato, it seems that 25 years is the standard. American women and all who love liberty want to know just what our anti-Roe candidates and elected officials have in mind.
Cecile Richards is president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, PPFA's advocacy and political arm.
Follow Cecile Richards on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cecilerichards
It's obvious that what anti-choice candidates want is NOT to solve the problem of unintended pregnancies, but to control women. The more I see, hear, and read of the anti-abortion movement, the more strongly I believe that anyone who opposes women's reproductive rights opposes all rights for women.
http://www.amplifyyourvoice.org/u/AFY_Will/2010/3/10/Utah-A-national-model-for-the-antiabortion-movement
Ultimately, this is not about punishing women who have abortions, but if anyone, the abortion providers. The main thing is stopping what the pro-life movement sees as an abhorrent trade in child murder.
Many of the major Pro-Life organizations and movements are led not by men but by women. The National Right to Life Committee is led by Wanda Franz. Susan B. Anthony's List is led by Marjorie Danenfelser , who is both President and Chairman of the Board. Democrats For Life of America, the national organization of Congressional pro-life Democrats, is led by Executive Director Kristen Day. Judie Brown is President and Co-Founder of the American Life League. Jill Stanek is another major pro-life leader known for her opposition to Barack Obama's voting record on partial birth abortion.
The Right to Life movement, as such, is led by women with an interest in allowing other women as well as men the right to be born.
In claiming that marriage and relationships are just means to a sexually desirable experience, rather than worthwhile ends in their own, it removes the ideals and responsible attitudes that would foster marriages. Furthermore, the creation of no-fault divorce and the doctrine of irreconcilable differences, which allow couples to divorce for any reason or no reason, have nullified the vows of "until death do you part" and made marriage meaningless. As such, single mothers are no longer protected by marriage relationships, yet the solution is supposedly the same abortions which have devalued the notion of responsibility in relationships, and looking out for others rather than oneself.
I would argue the very lack of responsibility sought by both abortion and divorce advocates is what propagates the increasingly harmful environment toward women.
Taper, according to Planned Parenthood's own reporting, it received $349.6 billion in 2008 alone from government grants, of its total $966.7 billion revenue, or 36.2% directly from government funding.
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/AR08_vFinal.pdf
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/AR_2007_vFinal.pdf
Planned Parenthood likes to point out only 3% of its services are abortions. But as has been pointed out here:
http://liveaction.org/blog/data-36-7-of-planned-parenthoods-health-center-income-is-from-abortions/
" * Annual abortions performed at Planned Parenthood: 305,310
* Average cost of abortion: $450 (This is based on what Planned Parenthood across the country has told Live Action staff, although it is slightly higher or lower depending on what part of the country it is.)
* Total income from abortions: $137,389,500
* Total health center income: $374,700,000"
So you are ultimately looking at in addition to its large amount of government grant money, it also receives at least $137.4 billion from abortion revenues alone. That is a total of $483 billion for abortions alone.
United Way is just one example of one of Planned Parenthood's long-time donors. I have not made an effort to track down the most major ones at this point in time, but it is not hard to imagine many of its funders could be doing in support of the abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood.
http://www.cantonrep.com/newsnow/x1547143201/United-Way-reclassifies-Planned-Parenthood
While it would be unfair to say all abortionists or Planned Parenthood do their work solely for the money, the fact remains that since legalizing abortion with Roe v. Wade, abortion has become a highly profitable Trillion-dollar industry, with abortionists such as Dr. Anthony Levatino stating they did it for the money:
http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0422_Bernard_Nathanson.html
"It’s highly profitable. I could do three abortions in my office, in an hour and a half, and make more than caring for a woman nine months and delivering her baby."
While abortion may account for only 3% of Planned Parenthood's cumulative services, the fact remains that over half, and quite probably even more, of its operating revenue is derived from its abortion services. When abortion doctors can make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, the possibility remains that this is done for profit.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/fct.html
However, the numbers at the Planned Parenthood reports were not provided in thousands, meaning only in millions. It was a careless error though, and if I could edit the posts accordingly I would.
My numbers should be in millions, not billions. Thus, Planned Parenthood makes close to $1 billion a year, not $1 trillion. If I could edit my posts I would, but that's a bad mistake for me to make. I caught it when examining the Live Action data. My apologies though for making a bad error.
More pressing is a Congress full of corporate activists, who are not representing the interests of ordinary voters.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Gandhi
The Cristeros attempt a bloody revolt in Mexico in the late 1920s. They are the ancestors of PAN (Partido de Accion Nacional), which is the largest party in Mexico these days. They harbor some hard-core Catholic extremists.
It bears watching. Guanajuato is heavily dependent on tourism, so the outside world has some leverage on this atrocity. .
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am10
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Therefore, just because it stops being the domain of the federal government only means it reverts to the states, whether with abortion or with health care. Those arguing against federally run health care are for example actually arguing, perhaps unknowingly, for 50 state-individual health care systems instead.
At any rate, each state would then regulate abortion, and many before Roe v. Wade were enacting statutes allowing abortion in the case of rape or life of the mother.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_US_abortion_laws_pre-1973.svg
http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&contentId=121780
As such, abortion was legalized for other reasons than such rare circumstances which account for less than 1% combined of all abortions.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/abreasons.html
Reverting to the states on such an issue in some cases thus might be preferable or work better than a single federal one. At any rate, the argument when it comes to health care does not actually work for avoiding welfare, health care, or abortion, only that it should be state domain rather than federal.
And yes, what other countries do is their business, and has no reflection on what teh US does.
It's like saying I'm against taxes.... doesn't matter.
http://www.dianedew.com/sanger.htm
Most legislators would not want to touch that third rail, regardless of their own beliefs about abortion.
I repeat with conviction, Conservatives do not want to turn America into Guanajuato.
The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act passed in 2003 also had such an exception. As part of the pro-life movement, this is the first I've heard of them wanting to make abortion illegal overall apart from such logical exceptions. If you look at all NRLC legislation coming out for the past decade it has such exceptions. The Stupak amendment to the health care bill for example had such exceptions, yet the pro-choice Democrats with Reid still hated it and fought it tooth and nail.
I'm sorry, I must have missed it in the article.
Can you name them?
This is the first time I've ever heard of women paying child support. Is it a new phenomena?
----
Women pay child support and they pay to support their children. Would you like to continue to be dismissive of the sacrifices women make to gestate, birth, and raise children?
http://blog.syracuse.com/family/2008/10/study_finds_more_women_are_pay.html
"More women are paying child support these days, according to a survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.
In all, 55 percent of the respondents have cited an increase in the number of mothers who have been assigned to make child support payments over the past five years. Additionally, 42 percent of the divorce attorneys have seen the size of overall payment amounts rise during the same period of time, the study found."
http://www.aaml.org/go/about-the-academy/press/press-releases/more-moms-paying-child-support-say-top-divorce-attorneys/?keywords=women%20child%20support%20survey
"They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fu####d"
I'm old enough to remember what women went through before RoevWade, it wasn't pretty, always dangerous and left the women scarred for life.