This
poll released today has USian fetus fetishists
stoked.
While a majority -- 55% -- still think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, that number is shrinking, down from 60% in 1995.
But what has the zygote zealots really revved is the answer to the time-limit question. As more and more states ban abortion past 20 weeks, the poll asks whether people support such a limit as opposed to the current 24 weeks.
A majority -- 56% -- prefer the lower limit.
OK. That is the Excited States where they are simply insane on the subject.
In Canada 94% of us think abortion should be legal in all or some cases according to a poll the National Post* and we reported on in
July last year.
Some 60% of us also support the introduction of a law that places limits on when a woman can have an abortion, with an example: 'such as during the last trimester'.
Our fetus fetishists ignored the tiny minority who want to recriminalize abortion and instead cottoned onto that 60% as proof that a majority of Canadians are 'pro-life'. (Hint to FFs: I'd betcha that 99.99% of us are prolife, just not as you
twist define it.)
What a majority of us are NOT is anti-choice. In fact, 49% believe that 'abortion should be permitted whenever a woman decides she wants one', in other words, 'on demand'.
By contrast,the new USian
poll shows that only 20% of Merkins think that abortion should be legal 'in all cases'. Also, their nutbar fringe, as represented by the 'illegal in all cases' segment, is much bigger than ours at 15%. Oddly, though, a majority (54%) oppose making it more difficult for abortion clinics to function.
The state of abortion insanity in the US matters to us in Canada for two reasons: when their FFs get stoked, so do ours, and because we've still got a lot of work to do on access.
The NatPo* reported today on a new study on
rural access in BC.
Bottom line: women in rural BC have way less access.
The author, Dr. Wendy Norman, said:
“What concerns us is that all surgical abortions in rural B.C. communities are performed in a hospital operating room setting, often under general anesthesia,” says Norman, one of the lead scientists on the Canadian Contraception Access Research Team (@cartgrac). “And half of the abortion providers reported difficulty booking time for abortion procedures due to conflict in operating room scheduling, or nurses or anesthesiologists who refuse to work with abortion cases.”
Bottom line there: Stigma and opposition.
But a hopeful note:
“One encouraging trend we noticed is that almost half of the rural cases are done medically, which is safe and affords women more privacy. This is much higher ratio than previously thought,” says Norman. “But we need to better educate women about this option as it is only available to women within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.”
As we've argued here repeatedly,
medical abortion is the way of the future -- private, quick, and cheaper.
And now let's hear from the
other coast, where there are significant barriers to women in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Again, there's access in St John's, but not so much elsewhere and the province does not cover all travel expenses.
Robin Whitaker argues that the procedure can and should be carried out in local clinics and doctor's office and medical abortion should be more widely available. But she points out that the preferable drug, RU486, is not approved in Canada.
In this province, RU486 could make early pregnancy termination locally accessible to many more women while saving public money. In addition to family doctors, there is no medical reason that these drugs could not be administered by nurse practitioners, midwives and even via telemedicine, provided that backup medical care was available. (It would also be vital to ensure that government did not download costs onto women by requiring them to pay for the drugs themselves.)
Our fetus fetishists will take anything a pandering CONservative government might offer:
defunding, regulations based on spurious claims like
sex-selective abortion, continued foot-dragging on the
approval process for RU486.
In Ontario, panty-sniffer and
amateur statistician, Patricia Maloney,
is asking the courts to intervene in her quest for abortion statistics.
Make no mistake. Our fetus fetishists may be small in number, but they're LOUD and relentless. Right now they're sniffing some heady anti-choice emanations from the south.
And by SHRIEEEEKING and fomenting stigma, they have an undemocratically large influence on our private medical business.
Just look at
what they're doing in the US with only 15% support.
Canadian women demand
expanded, not restricted reproductive options.
*Fuck the National Post. They've just instituted a hit-and-miss paywall. Some stories I can read but can't get back to. Others have an immediate paywall. I'm not linking to them anymore and I apologize to readers of older posts that have links to them.
