Mystical Pregnancies - a gynophobic, hateful trope

Feminist Frequency nails it.

Watch, listen, learn. Fundamentalist religious zealots love these.

What's Palin lyin' about, exactly?

IMHO, I suspect that deep-down, she wanted the pregnancy to end in still-birth or miscarriage.

Palin wore Spanx or whatever to hide it, and when her labour came on unexpectedly, she deliberately avoided giving birth at hospitals that would have provided her fetus with the best chances of survival.

Her behaviour is not consistent with that of a woman reconciled to a difficult pregnancy and taking all precautions needed to ensure the safe delivery of a fragile fetus in an environment that provided the most advanced medical resources and support.

By her own account, Sarah Palin's pregnancy was a "high-risk" one: she was 44 years old, and it was her seventh pregnancy (she had had two previous miscarriages); the baby had Down's Syndrome and was about to be born prematurely.

The fact that Palin, despite the obvious complications, embarked on a ten-hour plane journey from Dallas to Anchorage with a stopover in Seattle, bypassing the first-rate Baylor Regional Medical Centre in Dallas with a neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) situated ten minutes away from the conference she was attending, is mystifying – even more so since Palin then elected not to attend Providence hospital in Anchorage, which is also equipped with excellent NICU facilities that would have ensured a safe delivery for her premature son. [...]

This issue is not about misogyny, as Megan Carpentier claimed in her recent commentary in the Guardian. We are not misogynist and we have no interest in examining Sarah Palin's "vagina". The majority of our readers, supporters and researchers are female, and they are usually women with experience in giving birth. There are also many readers who have medical backgrounds who strongly question Palin's account of Trig's birth. [...]

The questions about Sarah Palin's pregnancy are relevant, because they raise issues of trust about a woman who almost became the vice-president of the US and who still has a large following and political influence. Journalists who now quickly declare this matter "closed" without having examined the evidence should be reminded that former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt is on record saying that Palin's book Going Rogue comprises "not 70%, but 100% fiction".

From here.

Maternal Health - for mothers.

CBC question of the day:

Should access to safe abortions be part of a maternal health plan?

Go vote.

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.

Death by Childbirth

Northern Ireland is struggling towards ensuring that women have choice with respect to their reproductive potential. However it does have something to offer pregnant women that is enviable and admirable.

According to the United Nations, a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth in the United States is 1 in 4,800. In Ireland, which has the best rate in the world, it is 1 in 48,000. In Sierra Leone, it is 1 in 8.

One in eight. Think of eight women you know that are pregnant or who have recently given birth. Name each one out loud. Imagine one of them dying while giving birth. Perhaps a friend, a relative, a neighbour or someone very close to you almost died, but with the intervention of prompt, efficient professional health care workers, she survived and so did her infant.

Fatmata Jalloh’s body lay on a rusting metal gurney in a damp hospital ward, a scrap of paper with her name and “R.I.P.” taped to her stomach. In the soft light of a single candle — the power was out again in one of Africa’s poorest cities — Jalloh looked like a sleeping teenager. Dead just 15 minutes, the 18-year-old’s face was round and serene, with freckles around her closed eyes and her full lips frozen in a sad pucker. …

More than 500,000 women a year — about one every minute — die in childbirth across the globe, almost exclusively in the developing world, and almost always from causes preventable with basic medical care. The planet’s worst rates are in this startlingly poor nation on West Africa’s Atlantic coast, where a decade of civil war that ended in 2002 deepened chronic deprivation.

The women die from bleeding, infection, obstructed labor and preeclampsia or pregnancy-induced high blood pressure. But often the underlying cause is simply life in poor countries: Governments don’t provide enough decent hospitals or doctors; families can’t afford medications.

The above was first posted at Birth Pangs in 2008.

More recent figures on maternal mortality are available in the World Economic Forum's recently released Global Gender Gap Report which measures the size of the gender inequality gap in four critical areas:

1) Economic participation and opportunity – outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment

2) Educational attainment – outcomes on access to basic and higher level education

3) Political empowerment – outcomes on representation in decision-making structures

4) Health and survival – outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio.

Antonia Zerbisias scrutinizes the Catholic Family and Fetal Rights Institute's distortion of the World Economic Forum report and exposes C-FAM's twisted logic and fallacious premise here. She does an excellent job of deconstructing the Institute's partial fact selection about medical care provided to women of child-bearing age, its use of false equivalency and its MASSIVE obfuscations and lies.

She demonstrates how The Fetus©™ fetishists do not value the lives of those they view only as Gestational Support Units, better known to non-zealots as women who are mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, friends and lovers.

Pregnant women refused H1N1 vaccine in Ottawa.

This was on Radio-Canada.

A group of pregnant women in their first trimester who had been waiting for hours in an Ottawa community health centre for the vaccination against H1N1 flu were told to go home. A health care worker told them that the only form of vaccine that they currently had in stock was the type with an adjuvant. The women were told that health authorities had decided NOT to administer this form of the vaccine to women in the first 20 weeks of their pregnancy.

Unfortunately this information was not communicated to media or to front line health care workers who could have determined from a preliminary triage that these women were candidates for the non-adjuvanted form of the vaccine, which won't be available until next month to clinics. I just checked the CBC news site, it still only identifies all "pregnant women" as a priority group.

One wonders how many of these pregnant women will become ill from being exposed - while waiting for hours in a community centre clinic - to a great number of people, contagious with other illnesses.

It would appear that on the Gatineau side of the river, in spite of other confusion, at least that message was clearly provided.

Update: Urgh - some public health officials are waffling about the risks of the adjuvant administered to first-trimester pregnant women, lots of loose talk about balancing danger of getting H1N1 if one has a pre-existing health conditions and the effect it might have on fetal development. More attemps to cover all eventualities and all asses. Urgh.

Another Side of Choice.

As you may recall from this previous post, I have an ambivalent view of headlines. So when this one caught my attention, I heard the siren's song. Or the muse's muttering.

A US woman who was implanted with the wrong embryo in a fertility treatment mix-up has given birth to a boy.

Carolyn Savage and her husband Sean said in a statement that the baby was delivered at St Vincent Mercy Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio. Mrs Savage, who had been told about the mix-up in February, said the family was "going through a very difficult time".

The Savages have decided to give the baby to his biological parents, Shannon and Paul Morell from Michigan. The Savages, who have three children, offered their "heartfelt congratulations" to the Morells.

Carolyn Savage chose to carry to term an embryo that had no genetic connection to her. She did it for her own personal reasons, it was difficult but nobody forced her to do it. Does anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together out there believe that Blob Blogging Wingnut understands the difference between Carolyn Savage's choice and punishing rape victims by obliging them to carry a pregnancy to term? No, I don't think SHE would get it either.

As for Carolyn Savage, she appears to have more real compassion than BBW will ever understand.

H1N1 and pregnant women

One of the many lies that pro-lies zygote zealots continue to maintain as a corollary to their belief in human incubators, is that pregnant women's lives should be sacrificed in order to save The Fetus©™. This belief is based on doctrine that claims men's role is to lead - in the Catholic Church for example - and women's is to breed. This manifests itself in the manner that church patriarchs dealt with the case of the pregnant 9 year old girl in Brazil and the comatose Eluana Englaro. In the US, personhood for The Fetus©™ regulations have run roughshod over the rights of women to life-saving medical care.

Normal people don't feel that way fortunately. As the World Health Organization and various public health and safety organizations consider the next steps in containing the H1N1 virus, pregnant women are discussing their options, in view of the high fatality rate that threatens them in particular.

Every time I see an assurance from health authorities that the H1N1 vaccine will be available in a few months, I develop a little knot of dread in the pit of my stomach. I have a big, scary decision to make soon.

I'm pregnant; the baby's due in January. That puts me in one of the high-risk categories for H1N1, and it also puts me on the priority list for the vaccine when it comes. There are excellent reasons to roll up my sleeve and take the shot. H1N1 is a known, serious risk to pregnant women; many have already fallen ill and died.

My immune system was strong before I became pregnant and I have no respiratory problems, but I know (believe me, I know) that pregnancy changes everything. I can't trust this body to act predictably anymore, not for the next six months anyway.

The trouble is, I also have trouble trusting what medical authorities tell me. It's not that I have some irrational fear of medical science in general. Medical science is great. I just returned from a visit to my new family doctor, and I couldn't be happier to have one after searching for five years. I am grateful to live in a country that doesn't have an epidemic of polio or diphtheria, and I know I can thank vaccines for that. Vaccines are up there with porcelain and the printing press on the list of wonderful, civilization-advancing inventions.

But the thing about vaccines -- and with all medical interventions -- is that every one requires an analysis of risk. In most cases, the risk of an adverse reaction to the vaccine is known and is much lower than the risk of not getting the vaccine.

As one of the priority groups for a new vaccine, though, I'll be a guinea pig, and so will my fetus. I'll need to trust that the medical authorities, who are rushing to get this vaccine into production, have conducted enough research to be sure that the risk from the vaccine is lower than the risk of contracting H1N1 and suffering major complications.

Kate Heartfield has a right to be concerned; Fatiha Idrissi Kaitouni in Montréal who contracted the virus during the last month of her pregnancy died and so did another woman in the US. Their babies survived but neither mother had the chance to hold her child in her arms.

Here's the challenge facing epidemiologists: during pregnancy, many elements of a woman's immunological defense system are suppressed so that her body does not reject the fetus. This makes her more vulnerable if exposed to pathogens.

"If we base it on what we know of the 1918, 1957 pandemics, what we know about pre-existing antibody levels to swine influenza in the population, based on that I would say for this particular virus, pregnant women may suffer more serious consequences, especially in the third trimester," she said. "And they should probably seek care early if they have influenza-like illness."

Studies done after the disastrous 1918 Spanish flu - which took its heaviest toll on young adults - showed astonishing death rates among pregnant women, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

Skowronski's review paper suggests there were also very high rates of spontaneous abortions during that pandemic - 26 per cent in pregnant women who became infected and 52 per cent among those who went on to develop pneumonia from their infection.

Osterholm explained pregnancy is a precarious state for a woman from an immunological point of view. In order that the mother's body does not reject the fetus, part of the immune system has to be effectively dialled down.

From here.

Fatiha Idrissi Kaitouni was an early childhood educator. In Québec, some school boards are being pro-active and taking measures to ensure that pregnant teachers and other workers can protect themselves from exposure to the virus, as is their right under provincial regulations.

Venomous Vultures

That is the only appropriate qualifier for the author of this shriEEEkkk!!! rant passing itself off as a reasonable opinion piece.

You remember the Vulture Culture, don't you? It's a loose alliance of fetus fetishists, religious fundamentalists, neocon rightwing authoritarians and women-haters that have come together in one MASSIVE shriek-fest for the purpose of re-criminalizing abortion. Some of them engineered last year's fiasco, The Pill Kills! campaign.

As for the drivel posted at KX.net, the standard disclaimer distances the site owner from the poison oozing from the rant:

This article is a blog post and does not represent the views or opinions of Reiten Television, KXNet.com, its staff and associates ....

But of course. Consider this gem:

What’s also stupid is this notion that abortions are somehow saving these children from lives of hardship when, in reality, most abortions are basically just birth control exercised by women too lazy or careless to either live their sexual lives responsible or face up to the consequences of their irresponsible actions. The pro-abortion crowd loves to emotionalize this issue with stories about women who allegedly would have died in pregnancy were it not for abortion, or babies who would be born with awful birth defects, but the truth is that the occurrence of these cases in overall abortion cases is so low as to be inconsequential.

Aside from the self-righteous preachiness and contempt for women, this statement trivializes women who have died in pregnancy. Women who chose pregnancy and who were confronted with state legislators, health care providers and hospital administrators who supported extraordinary medical interventions to "save" the embryos or fetus they carried - by depriving them of their own right to life.

Vulture culture zealots - because dead flesh excites them and turns their crank.

Update on the carrion gang - I wrote this before I read JJ and her blogpost at unrepentantoldhippie's about the fetus fetishists' internet pile-on when news regarding the Montana plane crash disclosed that nine members of the same family, seven of them children under the age of nine, were related to Irving Feltkamp, who owns a chain of clinics that offer abortion services.

So, about those vultures who feast on carnage? Look no further than Jill Stanek, exploiting this family tragedy with bloody beak and sharpened claws and shrieeeking about the righteousness of her fundamentalist God's vicious and unholy revenge.

Fetal personhood used to deny women who chose pregnancy their rights.

It gives us no pleasure to say we told you, but here it is. From Salon:

We all know that establishing the "personhood" of microscopic Americans is a means of characterizing abortion -- legally, and even culturally -- as murder. Though the Supreme Court decision making abortion legal turns largely on the right to privacy, it also notes -- in an aside that has become anything but -- that if fetuses were "people," they would be entitled to protection under the 14th Amendment, ergo entitled to "life." The Center for Women Policy Studies has stated that "legislative efforts to establish fetal patienthood, victimhood and, therefore, personhood represent the primary threat to Roe v. Wade." But as the National Advocates for Pregnant Women point out in a brand-new video, they also represent a threat to pregnant women -- all pregnant women, including those who plan to carry to term.

One woman featured in the video became critically ill at 25 weeks pregnant. Her doctor's hospital board filed for an emergency hearing to determine the rights of the fetus. The court supported the hospital's contention that an emergency C-section should be done without the pregnant woman's consent. Her doctor objected, stating the surgery could kill her. The operation was performed; neither woman nor fetus survived.

Thus Lifeshite and their posse of fetus fetishizing goons continue to bully legislators in their willingness to sacrifice the female vessel (aka pregnant woman) to achieve their political goal: the recriminalization of abortion.

Bravo for the National Advocates for Pregnant Women for their activism!

Un grand merci to Pareta.

Pregnancy can be fatal

Medical research has in recent years, developed more studies about the effects of pregnancy on the growth of malignant tumours. There are concerns that the hormone enriched physiological environment produced during pregnancy - which stimulates the growth of blastocytes (zygote cells) - can also encourage the proliferation of cancerous cells already present in a woman's body.

Medical case histories document 'aggressive' forms of cancer diagnosed during a woman's pregnancy. The dilemma that some pregnant women face is the following: radiation therapy, chemotherapy and in some cases, surgery may compromise the pregnancy. For some women who are pregnant because of a heartfelt decision and commitment, a diagnosis of breast cancer for example, presents them with a heart-wrenching choice.

Some survive their pregnancy, give birth and successfully battle against cancer. Some are not as lucky. After my sister died of ovarian cancer, I read Ruth Picardie - Before I Say Goodbye.

Today I read about 41 year-old Jayne Soliman who died as a result of an undiagnosed brain tumour that grew - aggressively - during her pregnancy and triggered a fatal hemorrhage. Though Soliman was clinically dead, a machine kept her heart beating and her blood pumping so that her fetus could be the beneficiary of steroids that were injected into her body. This procedure was done to artificially stimulate fetal lung development in the 48 hours before a Caesarian was practiced to remove the fragile and premature Aya Jayne from the dead woman's uterus.

One can only imagine the dilemma facing the rabid fundamentalist christian fetus fetishists and bigots, unsure whether to claim this tragedy as a triumph for their ideological zealotry, or to shrieeekkk! because Aya Jayne's father is Mahmoud Soliman. Also,

... More than 300 mourners attended Ms Soliman's funeral last weekend, which was held at the Jamia mosque ....

Yes, that should elicit some shrieeekkks and grunts from the neanderthals over at small dead brains.

The advantages of abortion: the Cons and C-484

On August 25th - shortly before calling this election - Stephen Harper shoved his low-profile Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson into the media spotlight:

to introduce a government-sanitized version of that bill to protect “pregnant
women” and not dwell on references to “unborn children”.

It was

Stevie and the Harpocrites’ way of removing the albatross that Ken Epp inadvertently hung around his party’s neck. No way the Cons were heading into a fall election, with freshly declared opposition to C-484 still breaking in the news.

One could call this tactic a political abortion; though C-484 had cleared its first and second reading, it was never allowed a complete gestation period. Yes folks, Stephen Harper aborted Bill C-484 in its symbolic ‘third trimester’ because it was politically expedient to do so.

Call them culture-killers, crime-fighters or mediabashers and they would happily cop a guilty plea, but being tagged as anti-abortion is the last label the Conservatives want plastered on their re-election resume. … While he described the need for the bill as “urgent”, Mr. Nicholson ducked repeated questions to produce statistics on the number of fetal assaults in Canada.

And if there was any doubt this move was election driven and not a legislative priority, he could not produce a text of the proposed bill, background documentation to explain the legislation or provide a date when, if ever, it would be introduced in the Commons. “We’re bringing forward a bill that makes a very clear statement on where this government stands,” was all he would say. Translation:
Nowhere near abortion.

MASSIVE public demonstrations against C-484 continue (5000 in Montréal); the aborted Bill has become a symbol for the secretive, prevaricating, manipulative and optics-controlling maneuvers of the Conservatives. Read more.

First posted at Birth Pangs.