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.

Moralizers' Two-Fer

Woo-hoo! Moralizers' delight! Smoking and pregnancy.

If you're a smoker and planning to get pregnant, there's good news and bad news.

First the good news: Australian researchers say women who stop smoking before 15 weeks of pregnancy cut their risk of giving birth prematurely and having small babies to the same level as non-smokers.

Now the bad: Women who don't quit by 15 weeks are three times as likely to give birth prematurely and twice as likely to have small babies, compared to women who stopped smoking.

Seems like a good research topic. Many pregnancies are not planned but welcome nonetheless. So, for smokers, this is some encouraging motivation to quit ASAP.

But have a look at some of the comments.

From RallyBoy:

I think it is a crime to smoke while pregnant and when you have kids. A person is knowingly endangering the life of a little baby and setting it up for a life-time of complications. This should be legal? When the health risk is FACT then a person should most definitely be held accountable. No different than driving without a seat belt or proper car seat for your child. It is a crime to hold a child captive in the womb while a person sits and pumps toxins into their body knowing bloody well what it is doing. If they don't know what it is doing then I'd say they don't have the mental capacity to have a child in the first place. I think the other points made in the comment above asking if we should dictate what a mother eats, etc. is just being silly. There is an obvious difference between those other points and smoking and drinking while pregnant. I'd like to think the poster is intelligent enough that I really don't need to sit here and list the major differences between smoking and drinking vs. exercise, eating and staying up late. Smoking and or drinking should be a crime while pregnant.

And Alley1800 agrees:

I completely agree!!! I think that smoking while pregnant or smoking around your kids at home or in the car should be considered a form of child abuse. Second hand smoke is just as toxic (if not more) as the smoke inhaled by the smoker. Women who smoke during pregnancy are just in denial or they just don't care enough about their child, and therefore should not be having a child in the first place!
I grew up in a smoke-filled household until I was about 13. It was just AWFUL. To this day I despise smokers and I actually have much less respect for them as people. I don't know how people can go around smelling like that 24/7. I know most of you smokers don't think that you smell because smoke is simply the air that you breathe and you are used to it, but just so you know, YOU REEK! And I know that it's none of my business what people are doing to their own health, but they are not only doing it to themselves, they are doing it to everyone around them. And just FYI for any smokers, when you smoke outside waiting for the bus or just outside a building at work, your smoke does NOT just disappear into the wind. It lingers around you and is very bothersome to the non-smokers around you.

Much more at the link.

Bonus: One of my favorite posts from Birth Pangs by Sleeping Sun who was pregnant at the time, 'Why Stop at Alcohol?'

Of mothers' milk and women's voices.

Earlier this month, we blogged about a nitwit who was stopped by traffic cops while driving under the influence of stupidity.

This week, a well-researched article by Hanna Rosin challenged the notion that all mothers must breast-feed or else. It seems that hot-button topic keeps buzzing.

I dutifully breast-fed each of my first two children for the full year that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. I have experienced ... breast-feeding-induced “maternal nirvana.” This time around, nirvana did not describe my state of mind; I was launching a new Web site and I had two other children to care for, and a husband I would occasionally like to talk to. Being stuck at home breast-feeding as he walked out the door for work just made me unreasonably furious, at him and everyone else.

In Betty Friedan’s day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around—a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the “happy housewife heroine,” as Friedan sardonically called her. When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Book—a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up—the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound.

Still, despite my stint as the postpartum playground crank, I could not bring myself to stop breast-feeding—too many years of Sears’s conditioning, too many playground spies. So I was left feeling trapped, like many women before me, in the middle-class mother’s prison of vague discontent: surly but too privileged for pity, breast-feeding with one hand while answering the cell phone with the other, and barking at my older kids to get their own organic, 100 percent juice—the modern, multitasking mother’s version of Friedan’s “problem that has no name.”

Rosin is a terrific writer. From the origins of the La Leche League, to the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves, from the insidious rigour of bossy pediatricians to the magical thinking that positions mothers' milk as "liquid vaccine" she unravels the complex discourse on breast-feeding with great skill and humour.

On the same subject, but a less fun read, the federal government released yesterday What Mother's Say: The Canadian Maternity Experiences Survey:

The MES population consisted of birth mothers 15 years of age and older who had a singleton live birth in Canada during a three-month period preceding the 2006 Canadian Census of Population and who lived with their infant at the time of data collection. Using the 2006 Canadian Census, a stratified random sample of 8,244 women estimated to be eligible was identified. Of these women, 6,421 (78%) completed a 45-minute interview at five to 14 months after the birth of their baby, conducted primarily by telephone.

Some of the highlights of this survey - pregnant Canadian women are on average subjected to 3 prenatal ultrasounds (the World Health Organization recommends ultrasound on indication only, or one at about 18 weeks), 26.3 per cent of women had caesarean births and many reported suffering birthing practices such as shaving, enemas and stirrups that are no longer supported by clinical evidence.

In January, a joint statement was released by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, the Canadian Association of Midwives, the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses of Canada, the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada that deplored the increasing use of caesarian deliveries and induction of labour before 41 weeks of gestation, in the case of low-risk pregnancies that did not require such aggressive medical interventions.

Bizarre Media Phenoms: The Baby-Bump Watch

We at DJ! are not obsessed with finding ways to bump our website stats. First of all, we don't carry advertisements (YouTubes of X-rated condom commercials don't count). We only write about famous unintended pregnancies when it is relevant to an issue near and dear to us.

So it doesn't surprise us that the latest rumour circulating on the 'net concerns the sighting of a purported baby-bump on the concave surface of Michelle Obama's statuesque and zaftig body.

The best - and only place, in our humble opinion - to read about this non-event would be Wonkette's blogpost. From the combox:

"i saw one piece of so called evidence where she was viewed slightly from the side, and arrow pointed at her thigh declaring it a baby bump. now i know a lot of white folks these days aren’t used to seeing those on a woman, but no her thigh is not a baby about to pop out of her."

Exactly.

Why yes, I will have a splash of wine with dinner ….

or a micro-brewed beer from the local ale crafters, said the pregnant woman.

All of you busybodies out there, you can choke back your ill-advised counsel to her. According to this recent study, the occasional glass of wine or pint of beer will not damage her fetus.

The University College London team asked mothers about how much alcohol they had drunk during pregnancy when their babies were nine months old. Light drinking was classed as ranging from one drink every so often to two drinks per week, while moderate drinking was between three and six units per week or three to five per one occasion. Heavy drinking was regarded as seven or more units per week or at least six per occasion. …

The researchers then went back when the children were three to ask about their behaviour and understanding. The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found boys born to light drinkers were 40% less likely to have conduct problems and 30% less likely to be hyperactive than those whose mothers had abstained. They also scored more highly on vocabulary tests and on identifying colours, shapes, letters and numbers. Girls born to light drinkers were 30% less likely to have emotional problems than those born to abstainers, although the researchers say this could be due to family and social backgrounds. ....

Dr Yvonne Kelly, the epidemiologist who led the study, said: “Our research has found that light drinking by pregnant mothers does not increase the risk of behavioural problems and cognitive defects. “The reasons behind these findings might in part be because light drinkers tend to be more socially advantaged than abstainers, rather than being due to the physical benefits of low level alcohol consumption seen, for example, in heart disease.” …

Dr Kelly added: “Our study’s findings do raise questions as to whether the current push for policy to recommend complete abstinence during pregnancy is merited and suggest that further research needs to be done.”

Most of us who were pregnant and had babies before this current hysteria around alcohol consumption during gestation always knew that.

Originally published at Birth Pangs.

The right to choose to give life.

JJ writes about the Blob Blogging Wingnut’s most recent post. While BBW might not personally be a white supremacist, she projects the zygote zealots’ own double standard onto those who support the right to choose.
Birth Pangs addressed that slimy sleight-of-hand argument last year, in The Putrid Smell of Opportunism. Here’s the irony: BBW claims higher moral ground with a specious attempt to equate no-choice supporters with abolitionists. Yet, when one reads anti-abortion, pronatalist comments at right-wing discussion boards, one notes their rabid, braying fear and hatred of black, brown and beige-skinned hordes who, it is claimed, breed more than people of pallour.

Here’s one typical racist pronatalist opinion piece:

On the May 11 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story, host John Gibson advised viewers during the “My Word” segment of his program to “do your duty. Make more babies.” He then cited a May 10 article, which reported that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson added: “By far, the greatest number of children under five are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.”

And then, there are BBW’s no-choice allies at Freaked Minions who rant obsessively about the fact that many First Nations and Muslim people have big families while most of European descent do not.

In the comments that follow BBW’s blogpost, Christina shows her bias: “That “clump of cells” is a highly organized and sophisticated organism. Without any input from the outside, it will develop into a fully-formed newborn. Everything necessary for the adult is present in that clump of cells — all it needs is time, nutrition, and a hospitable environment.”

Scientists have attempted to grow embryonic cells outside a woman’s womb, eventually they fail to thrive and develop. A pregnant woman is more than a vessel or “a hospitable environment” for fertilized ova. Pregnancy is complex: a psychological and physiological, synergetic life-giving process. The choice to give life - or the inability to do so - is equally complex.

No-choice says that it is immoral for a woman to refuse to give life.

Pro-choice says that it is immoral to force a woman to bear a pregnancy that was unintended and unwanted or that may in some circumstances, kill her.

Finally, BBW: you keep whining that feminists won’t debate you on your circumscribed playing field, where the term you use to describe the choice to terminate a pregnancy is “murder”. While that’s a belief you have the right to hold, it is not mine. I do not choose to use your subjective, pronatalist and thus racist terms to discuss a woman’s right to choose to give life.

First posted at Birth Pangs.