My Childhood Under Northern Ireland’s Abortion Ban

Where do its consequences begin and end?

By Rachel Connolly
Oct 6, 2022

There is a leaflet I remember reading compulsively when I was in primary school. I would have been 8 or 9 years old and got it from one of the booths set up by anti-choice protesters who would often gather in town. The text was neon pink and printed on silky black paper, design choices that made the content seem sensational, even pornographic. Across one corner there was an image of a tiny human body blurred by a glowing outline. The religious imagery I grew up with was full of saints portrayed similarly.

That leaflet lived in my pocket for a while. I unfolded and refolded it until the shininess faded and it was quartered with thick, white veins. I only vaguely remember what it said, the usual gory myths about infertility and vacuums and the capacity a fetus has to feel pain, always using the word baby instead of fetus. The feelings it evoked I recall much more clearly: revulsion, shock, and fascination.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/childhood-abortion-ban-ireland.html

06.10.2022

Featured

Opinion

Democratic Unionist Party

The language we use to talk about pregnancy and abortion is changing. But not everyone welcomes the shift

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Sun September 4, 2022

Across the US, mainstream institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and CNN are increasingly opting for gender-neutral terms such as "pregnant people," "people who get abortions" and "birthing parent" in favor of "women" when referencing pregnancy, fertility and abortion.

These shifts in terminology signal an effort to be inclusive of transgender and nonbinary people who can also get pregnant. But the changes have also prompted pushback -- not just from Republican politicians who are openly hostile to LGBTQ people but also from some cisgender women (women whose gender identity conforms with the sex they were assigned at birth) who consider themselves LGBTQ allies and who support abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/04/us/abortion-pregnant-people-women-language-wellness-cec/index.html

Abortion: Ireland’s past is America’s future

BY CHRISTINE RYAN
05/17/22

This month, four years ago, media from across the globe descended on the courtyard of Dublin Castle. They traveled to capture the scene of thousands of Irish people celebrating the results of the Irish abortion referendum. A landslide majority had “repealed the 8th” and voted to change the country’s constitution to enable legal recognition of abortion rights for the first time in the state’s history. Generations of families cheered and cried together while politicians from warring parties embraced. Viewers abroad marveled at the displays of pride, rapture, and even love.

To understand why the referendum result in Ireland prompted such
outpourings is to understand the full meaning of the right to abortion.

Continued: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3491465-abortion-irelands-past-is-americas-future/

17.05.2022

The 8th: Ireland, the abortion referendum. You can feel the tectonic plates shifting

TV: This highly watchable film chronicles the Repeal side’s winning campaign of 2018

Wed, Aug 4, 2021
Ed Power

The historic significance of the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, in the referendum of 2018, was lost on nobody at the time. Three years later, The 8th (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm) captures the sense that tectonic plates were shifting under Irish society as the electorate went to the polls to allow abortion in Ireland.

The 8th, which comes to television after a video-on-demand run earlier this year, is told largely from the perspective of the Repeal campaign, particularly that of the veteran women’s-rights advocate Ailbhe Smyth. The point she and other campaigners make over and over is that, although the vote was of course about restoring to women their bodily autonomy, the wider context was the State’s beginning a long journey of atonement for decades of institutionalised misogyny.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/the-8th-ireland-the-abortion-referendum-you-can-feel-the-tectonic-plates-shifting-1.4638914

Zimbabwe – It’s time for men, church to defend women against unsafe abortions

It’s time for men, church to defend women against unsafe abortions

Mugove G Madziyire
September 28, 2019

In 1984, when I was in primary school, Rosemary (not her name), a fellow classmate, passed away. The news shocked the whole class. At our age, death didn’t seem possible. A few days later, the headmaster spoke to us at the school assembly. He said Rosemary had “played” inappropriately with boys and become pregnant. And she died because she had attempted to abort the pregnancy. It was a big relief to us to realise that she, in fact, “deserved to die”. How could she do that?

We never thought about the man who had caused the pregnancy, why she became pregnant, and why she attempted an abortion. Today, 35 years later, as a specialist gynaecologist and a man, it is clear to me that men must ask those tough questions if we are to stop unnecessary deaths from illegal and dangerous abortions.

Continued: https://www.newsday.co.zw/2019/09/its-time-for-men-church-to-defend-women-against-unsafe-abortions/

Death sentence for abortion? The hypocrisy of US ‘pro-lifers’ is plain to see

Death sentence for abortion? The hypocrisy of US 'pro-lifers' is plain to see
The Texas state legislature is debating a provision that wouldn’t just outlaw abortion, but legally qualify it as homicide. The repercussions are chilling

Jill Filipovic
Thu 11 Apr 2019

Do “pro-life” advocates care about life or do they care about punishment? The latest abortion debate out of Texas gives a clear answer: the goal is to hurt women, not defend life.

The Texas state legislature is debating a provision that wouldn’t just outlaw abortion, but legally qualify it as homicide. For context of how extreme that is, even in the United States before Roe v Wade made abortion broadly legal, the procedure was outlawed in most states but was not considered murder – abortion was its own crime. Texas in 2019 wants to be even more barbaric than that, and turn women who end their pregnancies into felons, killers, and even death row inmates.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/11/death-sentence-abortion-hypocrisy-pro-life

The News in Motherhood: the Good, the Bad, the WTF

The News in Motherhood: the Good, the Bad, the WTF
All around the world, mothers and pregnant women are undervalued, discriminated against, and punished.

By Katha Pollitt
August 20, 2018

If women stopped conceiving, birthing, and raising children, the human race would die out. And just in case you think that’s a good idea, consider that long before the end, countries would age and wither and old people would have no one to talk to but cats and robots, as in Japan. You would think sensible societies would make everything connected with reproduction rewarding and safe for women. But no, when it comes to childbearing around the world, there’s way more stick than carrot. Consider:

In Argentina, as in the United States, most women who have abortions are low-income mothers trying to do right by the kids they already have. Despite a huge grassroots feminist movement, a vigorous campaign, and victory in the Chamber of Deputies, the Argentine Senate (42 men and 30 women) voted 37-31 in July against legalizing abortion, currently a crime except for rape and to save the woman’s life.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-news-in-motherhood-the-good-the-bad-the-wtf/

Zimbabwe: There’s no ‘goodwill’ from Robert Mugabe, a man with blood on his hands

There's no 'goodwill' from Robert Mugabe, a man with blood on his hands

Every time a man who thinks women’s lives don’t matter is granted a position of authority, the social acceptability of misogyny is reinforced

Glosswitch
Oct 21, 2017

According to the World Health Organisation, around 830 women die every day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. It’s one of those figures which, no matter how you slice it – 35 per hour, 300,000 per year – never gets any less shocking. It’s also one that isn’t likely to improve any time soon.

Around half of these deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Zimbabwe maternal mortality actually increased from 555 to 960 per 100,000 live births between 2006 and 2011, with 47 per cent of these deaths being classed as avoidable. Childbirth – a natural, necessary event, occurring daily since the dawn of humanity – is killing women, even when we have the knowledge and means to stop it.

Continued at source: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/robert-mugabe-who-goodwill-ambassador-zimbabwe-women-health-death-a8012776.html

U.S.: How Trumpcare Will Hurt Women’s Health

How Trumpcare Will Hurt Women’s Health
Posted by Angela Liu on 06/14/2017

May was not a good month for women’s health care. On May 4, a Republican-dominated House of Representatives passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which proposes to tighten existing regulations on contraceptive access and maternity care and to cut Planned Parenthood from the federal budget. On the same day, Trump signed a “religious liberty” executive order that allows organizations to limit their employees’ access to contraception and abortion based on the organization’s faith. Then, on May 23, the administration released its 2018 budget proposal, which Dawn Leguens, the vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called the “worst budget for women and women’s health in a generation.”

Continued at source: The F Bomb: http://thefbomb.org/2017/06/how-trumpcare-will-hurt-womens-health/

Farewell Jane Roe, complicated champion of abortion rights

Farewell Jane Roe, complicated champion of abortion rights
by Rosemary McLeod
February 23 2017

OPINION: It was Jane Roe's fate to be the fragile basis on which American women won abortion rights back in 1973. When she died this week her attitude to that had gone full circle, delightful ammunition for opponents of women's rights, though no great surprise in itself. She was human, after all, which is to say full of contradictions.

Her real name was Norma McCorvey, a solo mother of two children when she got pregnant a third time. She said she had been raped, which would have made the process of getting an abortion easier, but was a bad liar, wavered in her account, and was caught out. Finally, while her case, now famous as Roe vs Wade, progressed to the United States Supreme Court for a final decision based in part on her right to privacy, she carried the child to term and gave birth to it.

Continued at source: Stuff.co: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/89643820/Rosemary-McLeod-Farewell-Jane-Roe-complicated-champion-of-abortion-rights