Healthcare: Unequal Access Is UnCanadian

Sound familiar?

Although abortion has been legal for 41 years in the U.S. and it is a very safe procedure, we still face many challenges.

Since legalization, we have faced a relentless anti-choice movement that is well-funded and organized, and backed by Evangelical and Catholic churches. More recently, those within the movement have shifted their focus from making abortion illegal to making it inaccessible.
....

These restrictions have led to a situation where even though abortion is still legal in all 50 states, a woman’s access to care in the U.S. is largely dependent on where she lives and often her economic status.

Hell, New Brunswick practically invented TRAP (targetted regulation of abortion providers) laws, with its Regulation 84-20.

Abortion is legal in Canada, sure. But in PEI, it is just not done, and in New Brunswick, the province won't fund it unless TWO doctors give PERMISSION.

PERMISSION.

Canadians elsewhere can make their own damn decisions and refer themselves to an appropriate health care provider.

Is it OK that such a right depends on where you live and whether you can pay?

Emma doesn't think so.

If you'd like to see this situation corrected, consider contributing to Reproductive Justice New Brunswick's first step in guaranteeing equal abortion rights for all.

Emma the Embryo visits us courtesy of the fab Alison of Creekside.


UPDATE: And now for people who prefer to donate by cheque, a mailing address:

A huge thank you to all the support we've received already!! For those who want to mail a cheque to RJNB instead of doing an online donation, our mailing address is: PO Box 761 Stn. A Fredericton NB E3B5B4

Again, a huge thank you to everyone who has donated already!!!

Emma the Embryo: The Formative Years (Days?)

I was looking for early uses of 'massive' as MASSIVE. (Saw a tweet about the #millionhoodies protest with 'MASSIVE'.) I thought 'we' (being Canadian feminazis) initiated the use over the MASSIVE push-poll that tried to discredit the award of the Order of Canada to Dr Morgentaler.

Can't verify that yet, but look what I found.

Emma the Embryo: the early years

Earlier this week we launched a new Emma the Embryo strip, as penned by Alison at Creekside and voiced by pro-choice activists - every one, once an embryo - I might add.

Alison created Emma a few years ago and she's been going strong since then.

Watch for her!

She has a LOT to say to Womb Wacko MP Woodworth and to his anti-choice colleagues in Parliament.

Emma the Embryo is back.

Emma is the potential everyhuman being.

She is prochoice because gestation is a procreative process.

She's a pragmatist because pregnancy is not *motherhood*.

She believes that every child should be wanted and welcomed, and every mother willing and supported.

Added: deBeauxOs is co-author on this post.

Added by fern hill: Please steal and post farnwide.

Creepy, just creepy

Why George Bush is anti-choice. His mother showed him his sibling as jarred fetus.

To be fair, Babs Bush is pro-choice, but she has a lot to answer for nonetheless.

Paging Alison. I think this bit of weirditude demands the return of Emma the Embryo.

(Read the comments at the links. Some funny stuff.)

Spin and shrieeekkk watch.

Pro-choice supporters advocates have allowed to a certain extent pro-lies zealots to set the terms of an 'abortion vs no abortion' orthodoxy.

Because abortion-criminalizers are rigid, absolute, dogmatic, uncompromising, and extreme in their ideological discourse, pro-choice individuals and organizations have articulated and developed official positions that offer the same political intransigeance, as counter-weight.

Frances Kissling - you may remember her from this - raises some challenging and complex questions in the first part of an essay posted at Salon.

We are pro-life to the extent that we do not want to abuse or harm living things if we can avoid it. That at least is our ideal -- which we then regularly violate with war, torture, the death penalty, and the callous way in which we deny those in need healthcare, food, shelter and education. Still, I realize that expressing pro-life values, when you're pro-choice, is much more complicated. The fact that the fetus resides in the body of a woman requires special consideration of her rights.

Protecting the fetus in any way comes with a cost that only women can bear. But I have come to believe that women's autonomy does not require that all efforts be made to protect women from pain or from hearing the word "no." The Supreme Court attempted to balance women's autonomy and respect for life in Roe [vs Wade] by allowing states to "proscribe abortion [after viability] except when it is necessary to protect the life or health of the mother."

These are valid considerations in the US where the laws are different. In Canada, the termination of a pregnancy has been for over 20 years a strictly medical intervention regulated by the health care system. Yet we know for a fact that access to first-trimester abortion is not quickly nor easily available in all jurisdictions and that has consequences for women's reproductive health as well as their choices.

It's safe to predict that Blob Blogging Wingnut and other fetus fetishists will prevaricate and spin snippets of Kissling's reflection while ignoring its resolutely pro-choice foundation. SHE has sneered and twisted HER own meaning from such iconoclastic musings before - it may be the fact that Kissling is a former president of Catholics for Choice that gets HER knickers in knots.

In parting, we at DAMMIT JANET! support Emma the Embryo and her perspective, as drawn below by Alison at her own blogsite Creekside.