Ça grouille

Alison of the blogs Creekside, The Galloping Beaver and Dawg's Blawg observed how perfectly apt and appropriate were the US president's and Canada's PM respective response to events in Egypt. "It's perfect, really. Obama quoted MLK; Harper quoted HR Haldeman." She elaborates:

"Haldeman used the same 'not going to get the toothpaste back in the tube' analogy at the Watergate hearings to explain why they didn't get away with the Watergate break in. I just thought it fitting that while Obama quoted MLK, Steve chose a phrase made famous by a Watergate felon."

If you search grouiller, "Ça grouille" on French google you'll discover many meanings, including one connected to Isabella Rossellini's Green P0rn short performance pieces. I'm posting this one as an amusing foreplay to Valentine's Day.



Can you hear The Fetus©™ fetishists, *The Pill Kills* anti-contraception RightWingNutJobs, assorted religious fundamentalist zealots and John "Sperm Holocaust" Pacheco shrieeeking?

Good.

June 5: Kill the Pill Day

In the midst of perhaps the worst-ever environmental catastrophe, the fetus fetishists are jumping on the enviro-bandwagon.

Really.

Stirring their usual brew of prurience, misogyny, and homophobia, the batshitcrazies are linking the evul birth control pill to intersex fish. Poor fishies turned gay by feminazis killing their pre-born one-celled eggs bay-beez!

And the target audience of batshitcrazies are eating it up, so to speak.

Dig this from a Freak named Hodgson:

The Pill has done more damage to Western Civilization than Hitler, Heroin and Pierre Trudeau combined.

Woo. More damage than PET! That's saying something on the Dark Side, where PET is evul incarnate.

So, to recap: the pill kills bay-beez, turns fishies gay, outstrips a genocidal fascist, a drug, and a Canadian PM in destruction and, of course, 'harms' those vulnerable women the fetus fetishists are so keen to protect as long as they're preggers.

Funny. The sciencey-facty folk at the British Medical Journal reported just the opposite. In a MASSIVE study that followed 46,000 UK women for up to 40 years, here's the conclusion:

Women in the UK who have ever used oral contraceptives are less likely to die from any cause, including all cancers and heart disease, compared with never users.

There are many potential reasons for that result, of course: more contact with the healthcare system, less exposure to the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, higher income, and so on.

But primarily, we would humbly submit, because these pill-popping women have avoided the toxic and life-threatening effects of consorting with batshitcrazies.

Hm. Maybe I'd better stop visiting the Dark Side.

But not just yet. BONUS lunacy from Hodgson, who asks:

If abortion is made illegal again, would we retroactively round up every woman who's had an abortion in Canada and jail them?

We're talking millions and millions of people!

Also, all the doctors and nurses who participated would have to be tried.

Well, first, butthead, the entire legal system would have to be turned inside-out in order to prosecute people retroactively.

Ah. Hodgson has a kinder, gentler side. Viz --

If abortion is made illegal again, I would recommend amnesty for practical reasons.

But a particularly loathesome character over there named Edward Kennedy has no such wussy inclinations:

...with exception...the workers of iniquity who knew it was murder but practiced it for the love of the damned dollar should be prosecuted and partlal [sic] birth abortionists executed.

Remember, they call themselves 'pro-life'.

Barbara Kay would like to remind you she's not getting any.

This post was originally titled: "Why does Barbara Kay hate women's freedoms?" Then I took another look at the churlish, sour puss decorating her column and reconsidered. Because there's really no other reason for writing such a resentful, gynophobic screed.

It's a bizarre spin about a relatively reliable contraception. Does she really believe that contemporary women are so shallow that their 'happiness' rests on medication? Clearly Babs misses the pharmaceutical fog that Valium gave her peers, back then.

Instead of putting the focus on the fact it allows women to plan when to be pregnant (or not to be, ever) and couples to control their reproductive abilities so they can parent the children they want as best as they can, Kay quotes skewed research from the obscure Timothy Reichert - you could at least spell his name correctly, toots. As you can well imagine, Reichert's bloviations have become akin to the New Testament, over at LifeShite.

But in the final analysis, Babs is shrieeekkking at all those selfish, selfish, selfish!!! young women who turned down her son's Jonathan's invitation to be his baby mama, and to give her the grandchildren she wants, dammit!

Recent research proves zygote zealots are wrong - again.

Remember those religious extremist fetishists of The Fetus©™ who shrieeeked: The Pill Kills!!!

These rightwing fundamentalists, for example?

According to a study just published in the British Medical Journal it seems that The Pill actually saves women's lives:

Those who had used the contraceptive were less likely to die from a range of diseases, including heart disease and cancer, researchers found. Overall, the drugs cut the risk of death from bowel cancer by 38 per cent and from any cause by around 12 per cent.

The findings will be reassuring for millions of women who are taking or have taken the Pill, following a number of health scares, according to experts from the University of Aberdeen, who carried out the study.

Although there was small increased risk of death among women under 45 taking the Pill, in part because of the well-known increased chance of suffering a blood clot, that effect disappeared after around 10 years. And the health benefits to women as they got older more than offset the risks to under 45s, the researchers said.

Introduced in 1961, and initially for married women only, around three million women in Britain are now thought to take the Pill regularly to prevent unwanted pregnancy. [...]

Dr Alison Ross, from Cancer Research UK, said: “This large study should help to reassure women that on average, the long-term benefits of taking the Pill, including lower odds of dying from cancer, outweigh the risks. "We still need more research to understand how the balance of risks and benefits might change in specific groups of people taking the current versions of the Pill. "Even so, it is encouraging to see that using the Pill appears to substantially lower the risk of dying from bowel, womb and ovarian cancers.”

As well, women who used this contraceptive avoided dying from health complications arising from pregnancy.

Grand merci to Croghan who brought this news item to my attention.

Men impregnating women against their will?

According to a recent report, 25% in a group of female patients surveyed said they had experienced "reproductive coercion". This percentage may be higher or lower in other communities.

The research report, “Pregnancy coercion, intimate partner violence and unintended pregnancy,” highlights a phenomenon we labeled reproductive coercion to describe explicit male behaviors to promote pregnancy. Particularly for women with a history of partner violence, these behaviors are significantly linked with unintended pregnancy.

Such reproductive coercion takes many forms, but frequently involves a male partner’s direct interference with a woman’s use of contraception (‘birth control sabotage’). It includes removing condoms during sex to get her pregnant, intentional breaking of condoms, and preventing her from taking birth control pills.

SUZY ALL-CAPS would probably justify their actions in a number of ways.

1. It's for women's own good. If God gave them wombs, He wants them to breed.


2. The Pill Kills!!! It's heroic to replace oral contraceptives with fakes or to flush them.


3. Condoms Kill!!! Won't someone think about the sperm Holocaust?


4. Women Lie!!! They say their husbands or lovers sabotaged their birth control but can we really trust what they say? After all, those murderous sluts enjoy having abortions.


5. A whole bunch of religious celibate men (also known as the Vatican Taliban) don't believe in contraception. Get with the program.

That's probably how Blob Blogging Wingnut - The Queen of The Fetus©™ Fetishists - would defend their behaviour.

One step forward for Italy; two steps back for Québec?

Italian women may soon have access to RU 486 medication on a limited basis.

The Vatican and Catholic politicians today reacted with dismay to a decision by Italy's drugs agency to approve limited use of the abortion pill Mifepristone, which has been available in much of the rest of Europe since the 1990s. Senior Vatican officials said women who took the pill would be excommunicating themselves, as would doctors who prescribed it and nurses who administered it. Because of the high proportion of conscientious objectors to abortion in the Italian health service – some 70% – it is likely that use of the pill will be circumscribed.

After a reportedly heated four-hour session that ended late on Thursday, the board of the Italian pharmaceuticals agency, AIFA, voted by four to one to approve Mifepristone. But it stipulated that the pill should only be administered in hospital during the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

Unfortunately it appears that new health care regulations in Québec will make it more difficult for women to obtain a IVG (interruption volontaire de grossesse) in the future. Le Devoir and other media report that the requirements of Bill 34 which establishes understandably rigorous standards for private clinics, in the wake of medical accidents such as Micheline Charest's death in 2004, may lead to the closure of some abortion clinics. Physicians and obstetricians are lobbying the government to exclude IVG procedures from Bill 34, since in their professional opinion there is no justification to apply such requirements. Abortions practised in the first trimester are normally performed with the administration of a local anaesthetic; complex root canals are more risky than such IVG. Doctors and nurses who work in clinics and in hospitals have pointed out that first trimester abortions provided in institutional settings do not have to meet these requirements.

It's one of those events that, as with federal Bill C-484 (now-defunct), makes you wonder if a tiny group of anti-choice bureaucrats and politicians hoped to sneak these restrictions under the radar, without the benefit of public scrutiny. Polls have indicated that the majority of Canadians support access to abortion.

One inadvertently comic note about the Italian story, which includes far too much information about the Italian prime minister (emphasis ours):

For Silvio Berlusconi's government and its supporters, this was a delicate moment for any announcement bearing on sexual ethics. Recordings purportedly made by a prostitute who claims that she spent the night with Italy's 72-year-old married prime minister have focused public attention on his own apparently wide-ranging sex life. In one, a businessman who allegedly supplied women for parties at Berlusconi's home can be heard warning one of them that the prime minister never uses a condom.

That must make him a good Catholic - right?

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.