abortion

Buying Children, Jailing Mothers

| alexandersanger

Governments are at it again trying to increase birth rates. Recent stories out of Russia and China reveal that these government are doubling down on their policies to incentivize or force childbearing.  

Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader (the Chinese leadership is all male – not a single woman on the 24 member Politburo) – at a meeting of the  All-China Women’s Federation in November stated that “we should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture.” It is the role of party officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.” China has over the past two generations gone beyond “influence” and had mandated family size through its One Child Policy.  Are we to see a two or three child policy mandated? Whatever might happen, gender equality is not part of this culture. Currently some Chinese provinces offer cash bonuses for couples having two or three children. 

Russian authorities are cracking down on abortion access, long a means of birth control in that nation, by cracking down on private clinics offering abortion. Russia reported about 500,000 abortions in 2022. The corresponding figure in the US for 2021 is over 600,000 (the CDC and Guttmacher differ in their estimates with Guttmacher reporting over 900,000). The US population is about 2.4 times larger than Russia, indicating a greater reliance on abortion in that country. Restricting legal abortion access puts women at risk when they resort to illegal ones – making them unable to have future children – a consequence it would seem the authorities would want to avoid.

At the same time, Russia is offering speedy citizenship to foreign fighters who immigrate to fight in the Ukraine, indicating the severity of their population decline and the attitude of the Russian males to being sent to certain death in a losing battle. It seems the authorities are desperate to preserve the Russian male to further and father their race.

Countries around the world have tried and mostly failed to influence birth rates with childcare incentives, cash bonuses, paid leave etc. These policies, at most, influence timing of births, not the number. Still, many couples say they are having fewer children than they want. Many social and economic factor come into play here, along with some basic biology. 

In the US, the support for legal abortion has risen since the Dobbs decision, with 55% saying they support abortion for any reason. This is about the percent that supported abortion rights in the recent Ohio voting. This is a healthy response to the conservative attack on women’s rights.

One wonders also the connection to a recent study in the US indicating that millennial women are losing ground in health and safety, including rates of maternal mortality, suicide and homicide. But Millennial women have also seen improvement in education and earnings, with 44% completing a bachelor’s degree, up from 28% of Gen X women. Women now earn 89.7 cents per dollar as men, compared to 82.4 cents for Gen X women. No surprise that women on their own, making it on their own, with increased risk of maternal mortality and violence in their communities, support unfettered access to abortion, and that their families do too. 

The US birthrate today has fallen to 1.6 (the white rate 1.6 and the African American is slightly higher at 1.67).  If there is anything to be done about this (and there is scant evidence anything can or should be done), then maternal and child safety should be at the top of the list for policy makers, including the racial disparities in these statistics and including providing family planning and safe abortion services so that children are born when the parents deem it best and those giving birth aren’t put at increased risk.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-give-birth-to-more-soldiers-hardline-russia-turns-on-abortions

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67495969

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/28/russia-limits-womens-access-to-abortion-citing-demographic-changes

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-population-births-decline-womens-rights-5af9937b

https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/09/china-wants-women-to-stay-home-and-bear-children

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/support-for-abortion-access-is-near-record-wsj-norc-poll-finds-6021c712

Losing More Ground: Revisiting Young Women’s Well-Being Across Generations

https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children

visit to dominican republic

| alexandersanger

Last week I spent five days in the Dominican Republic visiting the Fos Feminista partner Profamilia, which has 7 clinics and 2 mobile health units. 

The DR is poor. Baseball is the national sport. Each major league team has a baseball academy in the DR. Sugar cane employment is declining. Teen pregnancy is very high – about half of teens give birth. Girls do not see much of a future. 

The clinics were spotless, full of clients and well run. You could tell the dedication of the staff and their professionalism. Clients were treated with respect. 

Abortion is totally illegal in the DR, so it is not provided. The clinics do offer harm reduction, where they explain what to do in the event the client has an illegal abortion and has complications. The Profamilia clinics can and do manage any complications or tell the patients go to a hospital. They are working with the legislature to allow three exceptions to the ban on abortion – to save the life of the mother, fetal abnormality and rape. 

The clinics offer a full range of contraception and sterilization, male and female. The pill and injection are the most common methods. Some women have to disguise their pills as vitamins from their husbands. Many men in DR want many more children than the women want. Emergency contraception is becoming used as a method of contraception. It becomes less effective if used frequently.

Pills and other methods are sold without prescription in pharmacies. Profamilia does extensive community distribution of pills.

There is universal screening for domestic violence, which is common. The clinics offer legal services for victims. There is a shortage of safe houses – there are 12- and few relocation services. There is a national DV hotline.

Men constitute 20% of patients, mostly for urology. One clinic did 20 vasectomies a day.

The clinics do HIV counseling and treatment.

The clinics offer general health care and pediatrics but no deliveries.

The services are free if the client cannot pay. There is national health insurance.

Maternal mortality is high but declining. It is about 107 per 100,000 in 2020 and increased during Covid. Illegal abortion now constitutes 8% of maternal deaths – it was 20% during Covid.

We visited three mobile health unit sites in remote villages and batayas- these are Haitian immigrant villages where sugar cane workers and farmers live. Sugar cane has become largely mechanized and many Haitians are scratching out a living farming or manual labor. $6 a day is the average wage in the batayas. If a person needs to get to the nearest hospital it costs $12 for transport. The Hailtian migrants fear hospitals due to deportation threats.

The community promoters , or promotores as they are called, are villagers trained by Profamilia, who live and travel around the batayas bringing contraceptives and general health care. The mobile health units are on a circuit and come every 30 days or so. One promoter just got her law degree and another is running for the local legislature. 

Abortion in mexico

| alexandersanger

From Fos Feminista Director Giselle Carino

I’m writing to share great news from Mexico: based on the case presented by our partner GIRE and other local organizations, the Supreme Court just decriminalized abortion in Mexico at the federal level.

Yesterday’s ruling builds on the 2021 decision in which the Supreme Court said it is unconstitutional to criminalize abortion – the decision then only applied to one state, but it opened the path for implementing decriminalization on a state-by-state basis. Up until now, 12 Mexican states had done it. Yesterday’s decision takes the step forward of imposing a federal reach into the understanding that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional, which impacts all 32 states in the country. Having been unanimously approved, the ruling becomes mandatory for all local and federal judges. In practice, the ruling opens the door for all women and people who can become pregnant to be able to access abortion services in any federal health institution in the country. 

This victory is the result of decades-long efforts of Mexican feminist movements, leaders, and organizations, and we celebrate all steps that can widen abortion access nationwide. And as we have long learned, real abortion access, particularly to those at the margins, does not happen at the stroke of a pen. So, it is to honor our Mexican partners that we must stand firm in our commitment to continue supporting their work.

Last year we were marching in the streets with the Mexican Green Wave – this year we are celebrating their bravery and sending our unwavering support.

Speech at fundraiser for Governor janet mills and congresswoman chellie pingree – august 4, 2022

| alexandersanger

With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the United States has joined such undistinguished company as Poland and Honduras as the only countries in recent decades that have enacted criminal abortion laws or made their already strict criminal abortion laws more Draconian. 

About half these united states are busy right now criminalizing abortion. 

Half our country, Kansas excepted, is now a foreign land. 

Since 2000, 37 countries have liberalized their abortion laws: Argentina, Thailand, Ireland, Mexico and most recently Colombia. Chile proposes to put reproductive rights in its new constitution. Save that thought.

We know what happens when reproductive health care, including access to safe abortion, are curtailed: More unintended and unwanted pregnancies, and for women who decide or are forced to keep the pregnancy: less prenatal care, riskier pregnancies and deliveries, especially with young women, and increased maternal and infant mortality.

And for women who decide not to keep the pregnancy:  Abortion when criminalized does not go away it just goes underground, and is later, riskier, costlier with attendant increases in maternal mortality and morbidity. The burden is disproportionate on young, poor, rural women.

Abortions by pill, already on the increase, will increase more. The risk is no medical supervision or care if it is needed for fear of prosecution.

Women with wanted pregnancies who have life-threatening medical issues are put at risk with the denial of life saving health care. 

Women who miscarry are put in prison – just look at El Salvador. Where 30-year sentences for aggravated homicide after a miscarriage are common and for women who give birth to children that they do not want, a network of Homes for Abandoned Children.

I know this from my work around the world with International Planned Parenthood. We also know that women will take extraordinary steps not to have a child they do not want. 

But Women shouldn’t have to.

Worldwide, abortions occur with the same frequency in countries that have legalized it as in countries that have criminalized it. – about 35 per 1000 women of childbearing age. 

What next? An underground railroad to Canada. The Bar Harbor to Yarmouth ferry opened just in time. To quote Richard Dreyfus in Jaws, “we may need a bigger boat.”

Will we get to a situation where lobster boats anchor outside the 3-mile limit to offer abortion medication? Will there be no law east of the breakwater?

We are one election away from losing reproductive rights nationally and in Maine. Sexual rights, LGBTQ rights. Birth control. As well as what we read.

Look at attacks on public libraries. I’ll remind you that when the Nazis burned books, one of the first into the fire were my grandmother’s, who dared to say that no women could call herself free unless she had the right to decide whether or not to become a mother.

This will take all of us – men too, and not just by lining up for vasectomies. Especially young people, who if they don’t vote now then I don’t know when. It will take good Republican men and women, as in Kansas, who have daughters and who see them as more than incubators. In Latin America there is a Green Waves of women and men demanding decriminalization of abortion. We need a Green Wave here.

Stalwart elected officials are key. We have two stalwart women here so show that this overturn of Roe, this defeat of women, will turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory: Chellie Pingree and Janet Mills.

Russia and China vs. San Marino?

| alexandersanger

The headline of the day from The Guardian: “Russia’s Population Undergoes the Largest ever Peacetime Decline.” One demographer estimated the decline to be about 1 million since October 2020. A low birth rate (1.5 est.) and high Covid deaths accounted for the overall population decline. Russia’s past efforts to increase the birthrate include subsidies to families with more than two children and attacking “gay propaganda”.

China’s population will soon decline, if it isn’t already, (both Russia and China have suspect demographic figures). Last year, China’s mothers bore fewer babies than any year since 1961. The Covid death rate is unknown. China recently attacked “effeminate men” and prohibited movies showing gay love. It has recently permitted families to have three children, though this will likely have the same effect as the laws a few years ago permitting two children, i.e. negligible.

Aside from attacking gay men and women, both countries are inching to granting subsidies only to those with large families, i.e. apartments.

Both countries are also zeroing in on their abortion laws. Abortion being generally legal in both countries, the authorities are gradually seeking to restrict its availability – sex selection abortion is already prohibited in China. In China, the recent State Council declarations said China would reduce the number of abortions for “non-medical purposes”, though this type of statement has been made before. In Russia, some in the government and the leading Patriarch have called for banning many or all abortions.

National power being dependent on demography, it is not surprising that Russia and China want an increased (or at least a not drastically decreased) population. (see my previous article on white Texas males).

Then we have the non-world power of San Marino, all 33,000 of them, hidden away within the confines of Italy and just as nominally Catholic. 40% of the population turned out to vote in an abortion referendum and 77.3% of them supported allowing abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and in some cases thereafter. This leaves Malta, Andorra and Poland as the European countries banning abortion.

History shows that banning abortion only drives it underground and makes it more dangerous for women. History also shows that men (and alas some women) in power don’t understand History.

Chile Expands Abortion Access

| alexandersanger

For the last two years, our partner, APROFA, has been working hard to officially register the abortion pill. The pill is actually two medications called Mifepristone and Misoprostol that safely end pregnancy when taken together. Access to it reduces barriers for many women and healthcare professionals, especially because it is non-invasive and can be done at home. The Chilean Government has finally approved APROFA’s application to register the abortion pill.

While abortion is only currently legal in certain circumstances in Chile, this win brings us a step closer in the fight for global reproductive rights.

APROFA will begin distributing the combination pill in early 2020.

Go Argentina

| alexandersanger

No, not for the World Cup, but for the vote today in the lower house of its Congress to decriminalize abortion up to 14 weeks gestation. The vote was 129-125. The bill next goes to the Senate. It will be close. We are ready and actively lobbying.

There are Two Choices with Abortion: Safe or Unsafe

| alexandersanger

From the just released report from Guttmacher

Notably, abortion rates are similar in countries where abortion is highly restricted and where it is broadly legal: The abortion rate is 37 per 1,000 women in countries where abortion is prohibited or permitted only to save the life of the pregnant woman, and 34 per 1,000 women in countries where abortion is not restricted as to reason. Legal restrictions do not eliminate abortion. Rather, they increase the likelihood that abortions will be done unsafely, as they compel women to seek clandestine procedures. Indeed, abortion tends to be safer in countries where it is broadly legal and in countries with a high gross national income.

 

https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2018/new-report-highlights-worldwide-variations-abortion-incidence-and-safety