Like a broken clock, Blob Blogging Wingnut is sometimes correct.

SUZANNE SAID: "The vast majority of feminists do not care what happens to the fetus."

Shorter Blob Blogging Wingnut: How do you like MY anti-feminist generalization? I got a MILLION of them!

SHE is right. Abortion-criminalizing, zygote zealots are the ones who obsess about "the fetus" - and nothing but "the fetus".

While feminists care about women.

There's a lot of posturing and blathering in rightwing neocon and in anti-feminist fundamentalist religious groups about individuals taking responsibility for their own actions, and how the government interferes too much with the lives of private citizens. So let women be responsible for decisions regarding their own fetus.

Feminists care when women become pregnant - with or without intent - we care whether they have access to the medical care they need. If women choose to give life, to carry their pregnancies to term and to give birth, feminists care that they're able to do so in the best conditions possible.

Feminist advocacy for women's reproductive health includes all aspects from menarche to menopause. And health care providers need to get it.

One of the themes of the annual meeting of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada is to consider how inducting labour rather than letting it proceed as it does normally has negative outcomes.

For most expectant mothers, labour begins spontaneously, at about 40 weeks into the pregnancy.Induction of labour occurs when medications such as prostaglandin and oxytocin are used when a woman is past her due date to ripen the cervix and get the uterus contracting.

Says Dr. Andre Lalonde, “The message to doctors, nurses and midwives is, be patient and do not consider inductions before the end of the 41st week,” said Lalonde. “If you wait that extra week to 10 days, you will find that most women — a large percentage — will go into spontaneous labour.” He says “the number one risk” of induction is that it leads to earlier decisions about a C-section, which now stand at an all-time high in Canada. Nearly 28 per cent of babies were born surgically in Canada in 2007-08, according to a national report released last week. That’s up from five per cent in 1969.

Induction can lead to longer, more painful labour and continuous electronic monitoring of the baby’s heart rate, which itself increases the risk of C-sections, because it generates “a lot of information. In fact, too much information,” says Dr. William Ehman, a family doctor in Nanaimo, B.C. who will be leading a session on normal birth at this week’s meeting of pregnancy doctors and gynecologists. “So you are trying to sort out the important things versus what’s not important.”

Research shows that, in healthy pregnancies, checking the baby’s heart rate after contractions by listening, or using a hand-held device, reduces the risk of interventions.

Healthy pregnancies for women. Because pregnancies have consequences.

The photo was taken from Birthing without fear.