April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

choice

The Handmaids Tale Dystopia Meets Reality

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This story is both a horrific example of the human trafficking going on in the world and a warning as to what could happen to women should the womb police get their way.

Anyone familiar with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale will recognize this type of scenario;

In its promotional material, the Asia-based operation makes pregnancy sound like an illness. Its symptoms include “loss of intimacy,” growing “out of shape” and, of course, “birth pangs.”

The solution? Fertilize a foreign stranger who will be fed nutritious meals, housed in a Bangkok suburb, monitored around the clock and kept to a precise sleep-wake schedule. “It is quite suitable,” says the agency’s broken-English pitch, “for the women who desire to have kids but no time for pregnancy.”

Sadly this lives not in the pages of a dystopian warning but is a profitable business in Asia. Recent developments of the GOP war on women in the States has many bloggers and tweeters asking if the GOP and their supporters see women as breeding stock, anti abortionists have even caused women to be investigated and arrested simply for thinking about abortion. Some lawmakers are considering investigating women for miscarriages. How long before laws are enforced that require pregnant or pre-pregnant women to adhere to specific types of behaviour very much like this;

This high degree of scrutiny is actually promoted by the company on the Chinese-language portion of its site. Surrogates are “accompanied by hand” while walking around the community, according to the site, which also promises they’ll be woken at 7 a.m., fed at specific times each day and put to bed at 10 p.m.

Forced Pregnancy or Forced Abortion is There a Difference?

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Anti-choice groups are taking the recent story of officials trying to force a woman in China to have an abortion, to reiterate their hatred of UNFPA whom they claim is implicit in this action.
UNFPA’s mission statement reads;

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.

It is hard to see how anyone could take issue with that, but then we know that choice of any kind is anathema to the forced pregnancy types. Because they are willing to force people to adhere to their rules and beliefs they cannot fathom that those of us who believe in choice believe in actual choice Meaning that we do not support forcing issue into or out of a woman’s womb. UNFPA in fact supports the choice to be mother through their campaign to make motherhood safer;

Every minute, a woman in the developing world dies from treatable complications of pregnancy or childbirth. Every minute, a family is devastated. The lives of surviving children are put at risk. Communities suffer. And for every woman who dies, as many as 20 others are seriously harmed by fistula or other injuries of childbearing.

UNFPA’s strategy for preventing maternal mortality includes:

* Family planning to reduce unintended pregnancies
* Skilled care at all births
* Timely emergency obstetric care for all women who develop complications.

UNFPA also advocates at many levels for the right of mothers to give birth safely. It spearheads the global Campaign to End Fistula, a collaborative initiative to prevent this devastating injury of childbirth and to restore the health and dignity of those who have been living with its consequences. And it is working to address the shortage of skilled midwives in much of the developing world.

However, based on the most recent statistics, maternal deaths are declining far too slowly to meet the MDG and ICPD target for a 75 per cent reduction by 2015.

UNFPA also helps in providing contraceptives and of course preventing pregnancy is the best way to prevent abortion.

Yet the shrieking continues unabated

LifeNews.com

Egged on by Planned Parenthood and NARAL, Obama has promised to restore funding to the UNFPA, the UN agency that has worked hand-in-hand with Chinese family planning officials.

Not only do Obama and his pro-abortion friends ignore the plight of women like Tursun, they’re willing to send our money to the UN group that gives the people who imprisoned her in a hospital for a forced-late term abortion a pat on the back.

“Obama to fund forced abortions” screams another.

Strangely we are to believe that their desire to force pregnancy is somehow less coercive or less a denial of human rights than forced abortion.

For a more realistic assessment we turn to RH Reality Check

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, does not support coercion or abortion. It follows the mandate of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) which clearly states that reproductive health-care programmes should provide the widest range of services without any form of coercion. All couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information, education and means to do so. In addition, the global community has decides that abortion should never be promoted as a method of family planning.

[emphasis mine]

Congratulations to Arzigul Tursun on her continuing pregnancy. May all women around the world have the opportunity to control their reproductive choices.

Reject Bill C-484

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Many others have already shown that this bill has less to do with crime prevention than it has to do with creating criminals out of women who exercise their choice.

There are those who would like to see these kinds of stories become commonplace in Canada:

Mother-of-two Alicja Tysiac was refused an abortion in Poland’s public health system in 2000 despite three doctors’ opinions that she risked loss of her eyesight as a result of the pregnancy.

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Bojorge was awaiting her second child when she and her 5-month-old fetus died this month in a public hospital in Managua. Bojorge’s family says they took her to a hospital when she complained of limb pains and weakness. When her condition worsened, doctors say they determined her fetus was dead, but Bojorge went into shock before they could save her.

and

Ana Isela Vega, who was three months pregnant when she suffered a miscarriage this month, was refused the necessary procedure to evacuate her uterus in a public hospital in the city of León, said Marta María Blandón, Central America director of Ipas. According to Blandón, the doctors worried they could not operate for legal reasons. Under pressure from women’s groups who explained that the law did not forbid removing an already-deceased fetus, the doctors finally operated.

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There are few dystopias more frightening than one in which a woman is held captive to the product of her uterus. Women continue to die in countries where doctors are afraid to even provide life saving surgery for such things as ectopic pregnancy because of the threat of prison.

Don’t let this happen here. Phone, fax, write or email your MP and send this letter to Liberal leader Dion.

[email_link]

One Body. One Person. One Count.

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There is currently before the House a private members bill that “would amend the Criminal Code to allow separate homicide charges to be laid in the death of a foetus when a pregnant woman is attacked.”

This in effect suggests that a foetus be defined as a separate “person” from the mother. This definition of ‘personhood’ would immediately open the door to criminalizing abortion and those having/performing them.

This bill is being brought forward by a special interest group.

Ken Epp is a member of the Campaign Life Coalition.

As Raymond Gravel, a Bloc MP and a priest said;

the member putting it forward is part of a pro-life group, the Campaign Life Coalition, which in my view is a rather extreme fanatical group, when it comes to life.”

I for one do not wish extreme fanatics dictating my choices. Such action leads to fascism.

For more information on this bill and to take action please visit Birth Pangs.

Choose Truth

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Ah the exploding heads have stopped by again. Jim from the Moral Science Club stopped by. Jim presumes he can dictate laws which do not even pertain to his own country. And which do not pertain to a body part he owns. This was the flaming bag of dog shit Jimmy left on the doorstep in response to this post.

Abortion is not about a culture of death, it is not about hating children or being sinners. It is about controlling ones health, ones life, ones future.

That’s all the Nazis were doing by getting rid of the Jews – it’s about controlling their economy, their lives, their future.

One day, when you know better, you will be ashamed. Your grandchildren, should any survive, will call this the Abortion Holocaust.

How wonderful that you choose to deny the importance of both abortion and genocide by attempting to link the two. Against abortion Jim? Don’t fucking have one.

Oh and clean up this mess will ya?

Celebrate Choice

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the right to reproductive liberty.

Abortion is not about a culture of death, it is not about hating children or being sinners. It is about controlling ones health, ones life, ones future.

There is a mistaken belief that if abortion were completely outlawed no more abortions would ever be preformed. This of course is ridiculous nonsense. Women have always practised birth control and abortion. And would continue to do so. [Read more…] about Celebrate Choice