RU4Choice? More and more countries are!

Around the world -- with a couple of notable exceptions -- politicians are finally getting it.

Abortion is essential health care and a basic human right for people who have uteruses.

A number of countries are expanding abortion services and access.

In France, already the medical abortion capital of the world, they've approved a sweeping gender-equity bill that includes the abandonment of the requirement for women to justify their abortion decisions.

The [abortion] amendment is part of a gender-equality bill that is the most comprehensive legislation on women’s rights in the history of France. The bill seeks to give women parity with men by improving wages, strengthening laws against domestic violence and providing for equal representation in politics.

The bill also encourages fathers to seek parental leave to care for a new baby by offering six additional months of paid leave if taken by the second parent. In addition, it bans beauty pageants for girls under 13 and expands support for single mothers. Companies that do not show progress on workplace equality face monthly fines of up to 1 percent of their wage base. The bill enjoins the media from broadcasting sexist or demeaning images of women.

Israel, the darling of Tea Bag Nation, is further liberalizing its already very liberal abortion coverage. The state will now pay for all abortions.

Even the Vatican Taliban stronghold of Ireland has been forced by the cruel and needless death of Savita Halappanavar to amend its abortion regulations.

And in Australia, ousted feminist Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, left a parting shot to the nads of the old boys by including abortion drug RU486 in the state-financed pharmacare plan, lowering its cost to as little as $12 for women on benefits.

Now the exceptions. The conservatives now running Spain have taken a page out of the USian anti-abortion play-book by tackling crippling economic problems with a roll-back of women's abortion rights. But they're facing pretty stiff opposition.

And of course the Tea Baggers in the US are engaged in a veritable orgy of abortion regulations, laws, and impediments.

But there too, it looks like the tide is about to turn. This month's annual March for Lies did not garner the MASSIVE turnout they trumpeted.

Truth is, no matter how much they pretend that their movement is growing, it's stuck.

Year after year, anti-abortion faithful assemble for the march, yet their goal is elusive. Gallup found last year that 26 percent thought abortion should be legal in any circumstance, 20 percent said it should be illegal in all cases, and 52 percent thought it should be legal in certain circumstances. In 1975, those numbers were 21, 22 and 54, respectively.

So, how is lawless Canada faring? Finally, at long fucking last, Health Canada may be about to approve "the gold standard" drug for medical abortion, RU486.

It's well past time for Canadian physicians to be able offer their patients expanded abortion options. Approval of RU486 will be especially important for women living in rural or remote areas or in provinces trapped in the previous century, namely New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

And yes, our own parliamentary dinosaurs continue to bleat about Canada's lawlessness on the abortion front. But they're going nowhere. Take note, Maurice.

Today, on the 26th anniversary of our historic Supreme Court decision in R. v. Morgentaler, we'll celebrate our lawlessness, but we will also keep up the fight for improved access and more options for reproductive justice.

UPDATE: CBC reports on the status of RU486.

FURTHER UPDATE: Opposition leaders weigh in. Mulcair firmly pro-choice. Trudeau namby-pamby.

Dead women don't, and can't give life.

What a morbid thought, correct?

In Canada, 26 years ago today the Supreme Court decision R. v. Morgentaler  removed legal obstacles preventing women from accessing abortion - a medical procedure under the purview of professionals who administer the public health care system.

But in Texas where the rights of corporations, guns and fetus are promoted by Bible-thumpers who claim they represent the will of God the Father, the laws of the state can desecrate and violate the rights of ordinary living breathing people.

If there are profits to be made, weapons to be cherished and a zygote, embryo or fetus to be deployed as a weapon in the War On Women, you can bet that rightwing religious fundamentalist Republican legislators will be there to shrieeekingly defend those rights.

This happened.

Marlise, a 33-year old paramedic, got up the night of Nov. 26 to fix a bottle for her toddler son.

Her husband Erick, also a paramedic and a firefighter, woke up and realized she had not returned to bed.

He found Marlise collapsed on the floor, not breathing and with no pulse. It’s believed she suffered a blood clot to the lung that deprived her of oxygen for more than an hour.

Erick frantically performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation and called an ambulance. Marlise was taken to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth and connected to a ventilator to artificially simulate breathing.

It was too late. Marlise was gone. According to court filings, doctors knew this within two days, after tests registered a complete absence of brain function. This was not a “coma” or “vegetative state.” It is the legal and medical definition of dead.

Marlise Muñoz was an emergency medical technician, a paramedic familiar with end-of-life issues who had told her husband that she would not want to be kept "alive" by machines.

Her family hired a lawyer; a rational, sane judge heard their arguments and ordered the hospital to stop preserving the decaying body of their beloved in a technologically-assisted embalmed state.  Marlise had been declared medically and legally dead; in trying to protect the rights of the fetus as it believed Texas law instructed it to do, the hospital (or fetushists on staff) turned her into a "cadaverous incubator". More medical information here, from Dr Jen Gunter.

THIS is the nightmare that CPC MPs Vellacott and Woodworth would inflict upon Canadian women and their families.

Knight of Columbus Stephen Woodworth claims how "savage and inhumane it is to have a law on the Canadian books which falsely condemns as non-human people who are human" - quite a whopper of a word-salad obfuscation. Women have tried to instruct this obdurate Vatican Taliban foot-soldier on how women experience pregnancy — wanted or not — but he won't listen.  In his mind, he is a grandiloquent medieval cavalier, "saving" fetus everywhere and forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

"Savage and inhumane" is exactly the treatment that women would suffer if *fetus rights* forced hospitals to use women like meat incubators to placate anti-choice zealots' ideologically-dictated demands.  Would gestating women who smoke, who drink alcohol, who eat the "wrong" food, who are addicted to legal or illegal drugs and who have sex while pregnant, get strapped down and supervised to prevent actions that could imperil their fetus?

Not in my Canada.  

I applaud the recent commentary in the Canadian Medical Association Journal as well as those who are urging Health Canada to approve mifepristone as a physician-facilitated medical abortion. Also known as RU486, it is administered very early in the pregnancy instead of surgery. It induces a miscarriage, similar to spontaneous abortions that occur frequently during the first trimester.

In support of Canadian women's ongoing push-back against the reactionary individuals and groups who would deprive them of basic reproductive rights, I will continue writing and tweeting on these issues.