If the law don't get you, your regulatory body will

What fuckery is this?

From BC.

Women’s health clinics, health authorities and the Opposition NDP are lining up to criticize new fees that could lead to service cuts at community abortion clinics.

Two Metro Vancouver women’s centres and one Vancouver Island clinic are facing 400 per cent increases to regulatory fees charged by the College of Physicians and Surgeons this year, which equate to an almost $9,000 bill this year.

The College had raised these fees to other clinics a few years ago but granted the women's centres a reprieve.

Now suddenly and summarily ended.

The college is now treating the non-profit women’s health clinics the same way it treats for-profit surgical centres, and that’s not fair, said NDP Health critic Maurine Karagianis.

Supporters point out that these clinics provide a range of medical services for women. Many women don't have family doctors and don't feel comfortable having something like a PAP test done by any old random doctor one may encounter in a walk-in facility.

The fees are also not supported by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and the Vancouver Island Health Authority, which provide operating funding to the women’s centres. In a joint letter to the college, both authorities said the fee hike “seems inappropriate” and the clinics have fixed budgets, funded mainly by government, that don’t allow them to make up the extra money elsewhere.

The clinics are different from private surgical facilities, argued the health authorities. They clinics save the health care system money by treating women in the community instead of in a hospital, and provide an environment without fear and stigma for women needing [sentence ends here].

So. One's gotta wonder. What's -- or maybe more appropriately, who -- has gotten into the BC College of Physicians?

Plain brown envelopes welcome over the virtual transom.

[Blogged from my laptop! First time.]

UPDATE, March 22, 2014: BC Health Minister orders health authorities to pay the increased fees for the clinics.

Beware the Mouthy Minority

This poll released today has USian fetus fetishists stoked.

While a majority -- 55% -- still think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, that number is shrinking, down from 60% in 1995.

But what has the zygote zealots really revved is the answer to the time-limit question. As more and more states ban abortion past 20 weeks, the poll asks whether people support such a limit as opposed to the current 24 weeks.

A majority -- 56% -- prefer the lower limit.

OK. That is the Excited States where they are simply insane on the subject.

In Canada 94% of us think abortion should be legal in all or some cases according to a poll the National Post* and we reported on in July last year.

Some 60% of us also support the introduction of a law that places limits on when a woman can have an abortion, with an example: 'such as during the last trimester'.

Our fetus fetishists ignored the tiny minority who want to recriminalize abortion and instead cottoned onto that 60% as proof that a majority of Canadians are 'pro-life'. (Hint to FFs: I'd betcha that 99.99% of us are prolife, just not as you twist define it.)

What a majority of us are NOT is anti-choice. In fact, 49% believe that 'abortion should be permitted whenever a woman decides she wants one', in other words, 'on demand'.

By contrast,the new USian poll shows that only 20% of Merkins think that abortion should be legal 'in all cases'. Also, their nutbar fringe, as represented by the 'illegal in all cases' segment, is much bigger than ours at 15%. Oddly, though, a majority (54%) oppose making it more difficult for abortion clinics to function.

The state of abortion insanity in the US matters to us in Canada for two reasons: when their FFs get stoked, so do ours, and because we've still got a lot of work to do on access.

The NatPo* reported today on a new study on rural access in BC.

Bottom line: women in rural BC have way less access.

The author, Dr. Wendy Norman, said:

“What concerns us is that all surgical abortions in rural B.C. communities are performed in a hospital operating room setting, often under general anesthesia,” says Norman, one of the lead scientists on the Canadian Contraception Access Research Team (@cartgrac). “And half of the abortion providers reported difficulty booking time for abortion procedures due to conflict in operating room scheduling, or nurses or anesthesiologists who refuse to work with abortion cases.”

Bottom line there: Stigma and opposition.

But a hopeful note:

“One encouraging trend we noticed is that almost half of the rural cases are done medically, which is safe and affords women more privacy. This is much higher ratio than previously thought,” says Norman. “But we need to better educate women about this option as it is only available to women within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.”

As we've argued here repeatedly, medical abortion is the way of the future -- private, quick, and cheaper.

And now let's hear from the other coast, where there are significant barriers to women in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Again, there's access in St John's, but not so much elsewhere and the province does not cover all travel expenses.

Robin Whitaker argues that the procedure can and should be carried out in local clinics and doctor's office and medical abortion should be more widely available. But she points out that the preferable drug, RU486, is not approved in Canada.

In this province, RU486 could make early pregnancy termination locally accessible to many more women while saving public money. In addition to family doctors, there is no medical reason that these drugs could not be administered by nurse practitioners, midwives and even via telemedicine, provided that backup medical care was available. (It would also be vital to ensure that government did not download costs onto women by requiring them to pay for the drugs themselves.)

Our fetus fetishists will take anything a pandering CONservative government might offer: defunding, regulations based on spurious claims like sex-selective abortion, continued foot-dragging on the approval process for RU486.

In Ontario, panty-sniffer and amateur statistician, Patricia Maloney, is asking the courts to intervene in her quest for abortion statistics.

Make no mistake. Our fetus fetishists may be small in number, but they're LOUD and relentless. Right now they're sniffing some heady anti-choice emanations from the south.

And by SHRIEEEEKING and fomenting stigma, they have an undemocratically large influence on our private medical business.

Just look at what they're doing in the US with only 15% support.

Canadian women demand expanded, not restricted reproductive options.


*Fuck the National Post. They've just instituted a hit-and-miss paywall. Some stories I can read but can't get back to. Others have an immediate paywall. I'm not linking to them anymore and I apologize to readers of older posts that have links to them.

Domestic terrorism begins at home.

The abomination that is also known as intimate violence can be prevented and the cycle that condemns generation after generation to suffering and despair, if not death, can be stopped - with the appropriate resources - and co-ordinated services. Yet -

The B.C. government has cut funding to domestic violence programs, including a service for traumatized children in Victoria, just as a report yesterday demanded better support and co-ordination of those services.

The province's Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General has slashed $440,000 in funding this year to groups that provide counselling and support for battered women and children. ...The criticism fell on the same day as a damning report by B.C.'s Child and Youth Representative, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who said the province's system for handling domestic violence lacks proper co-ordination.

"There's no question in my mind that co-ordinating the system and that making it effective is going to take resources," said Turpel-Lafond. "It's going to take better alignment and co-ordination of what we already have. It's also going to take ... more investment."

Turpel-Lafond was entrusted with finding how Christian Lee, his mother and his grandparents could be murdered by his father.

She found a safety net with gaping holes and blamed not the many individuals who were connected with the case, but a provincial government that has not co-ordinated domestic violence programs or given teeth to family law.

Social workers, medical staff, officers from three different police departments, Crown counsel, therapists and lawyers were among those who knew of Sunny Park's fears. She warned that her estranged husband might kill the boy and pleaded for protection.

Navigating an unfamiliar system in a language she struggled to comprehend, she heard conflicting advice on how to safeguard against Peter Lee in her final six weeks as he stalked her while under a court order to stay away.

"Sunny confided a history of escalating violence and abuse. Despite her desperate dread that she would be murdered, responsibility for her safety plan was placed solely on her shoulders," Ms. Turpel-Lafond wrote. "Christian was not safe because his mother was not safe."

Meanwhile in Toronto, the trial of Chris Little who is charged first-degree murder in the deaths of his estranged wife, Julie Crocker, and of another woman, Paula Menendez has started. The women's bodies were found in Little and Crocker's home in 2007. The Crown will be presenting a jury with evidence in support of its allegation that Little kidnapped Menendez, brought her to his estranged wife's house, and killed them both - staging their deaths to make it appear as though one killed the other.

More here.

So, what's with the standard misogynist saying: "Hell hath no fury like a women scorned" which is usually screeched with testerical force by Men's Rights Advocates?

What about the cold, calculated, murderous fury of those who need to control and punish women - and are willing to harm others in order to achieve their goals?

Something Stinks

Yesterday, I got the very same reply to my letter to the BC Crown as Dr Dawg did.

The no-jail sentence for convicted rapist Fernando Manuel Alves will not be appealed.

To recap: he was convicted, he has been put on the sex offenders registry, but, for reasons that the Crown is 'not at liberty to disclose', the judge, Gregory Rideout, decided Alves should walk.

Why is the public -- and most vitally, the victim -- denied the facts, arguments, and precedents that Mr Rideout based his decision on?

Commenters at Dr Dawg's have suggested that records can be obtained by ordering and paying for them. If so, why didn't the letter(s) from the Crown inform us of that possibility?

There's something fishy here. I have sent out an inquiry to a knowledgeable acquaintance to see what we might do to obtain the facts in the matter.

Add your voice: Alves's sentence needs to be appealed

Mr. Grant Wong should be back in his office today. Mr. Wong is the person to contact in the matter of the no-jail sentence for convicted rapist Fernando Manuel Alves.

If you haven't yet written to urge the Crown to consider the message a no-jail sentence sends to future victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, please take a few minutes and do it. Now.

Letters only, by mail and/or fax. Be polite. Stick to the facts and the social policy implications.

In particular, if you are in BC or have friends and family there, your voices are needed.

The contact info again is:
Mr. Grant B. Wong
Deputy Regional Crown Counsel
222 Main Street
Vancouver, B.C.
V6A 2S8

FAX: 604.660.4347

While I was googling around looking for any more recent stories on this case, I found a CBC report from September 21, 2007 on the original bail conditions.

The 44-year-old pub owner and vice-president of the Western Ball Hockey Association appeared in B.C. provincial court on Thursday, where he was released under strict bail conditions that include:

* Posting a $350,000 bond.
* Reporting to the Vancouver police high-risk offender unit.
* Not attending any bar or nightclub except for employment at the Station Square pub in Burnaby, as approved by his bail supervisor.

Nice, eh? Alves barred from bars, except for employment and the opportunity to drug other victims. How much sense does that make?

Background here and here.

Exposing Fake Pregnancy Crisis Centres in BC

Joyce Arthur in Straight Goods: 'Exposing Fake Pregnancy Crisis Centres in BC'

Most agencies that counsel pregnant women are actually anti-abortion Christian ministries. Their main goal is to stop women from having abortions. These centres are generally not medical facilities, and most of their "counsellors" are volunteers who are not medical professionals and have no recognized training in counselling. Some of these centres are called Crisis Pregnancy Centres or "CPCs", although many of them have different names.
. . .
Previous studies have shown that most CPCs misinform and try to intimidate women out of having abortions. Women describe being harassed, bullied, and given blatantly false information. Counseling techniques used by CPCs frequently induce anxiety and emotional trauma in women considering abortion. Many women say their confidentiality has been violated, and that mistreatment by CPCs has threatened their health.

We wanted to find out what these centres were doing and saying to women in BC, and whether they were engaging in the same type of deceptive or harmful practices. Indeed, we found that they tend to hide their true agenda from women, and dispense inaccurate information about abortion, some of it dangerous.

Download a PDF of the report here.

Here are her recommendations for action:

* Stop deceptive advertising and false representations of CPCs in the media.

* Remove CPCs from referral lists used by the medical profession or social services.

* Ensure that the medical profession and social services have accurate information so they can refer women for abortion appropriately.

* Create more pro-choice counselling in communities, both options and post-abortion.

* Lobby governments and public foundations to stop funding CPCs.

* Ask Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the charity status of CPCs that have it.

Ah, that second-last one reminds me. The Trillium Foundation hasn't got back to me about funding fetus fetishists. I'll get on it.

Great work, Joyce and the Pro-Choice Action Network!

UPDATE: May 15, 2011. Updated to fix link for PDF of the report.