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Marina Lacroix

Abortion for Rape Victim Causes Nationwide Dispute | Krakow Post - 0 views

  • A 14-year-old girl was raped by her older friend and became pregnant. It took her and her mother two weeks to be granted the abortion that she was entitled to according to the law.
  • In Poland, a woman is entitled to an abortion when the intercourse was forced on her, or when the pregnancy may seriously affect her health, and then it can only be performed before the 12th week of pregnancy.
  • Agata - the name that Gazeta used for the girl who wished to remain anonymous - went to a gynaecologist after the rape, who in turn informed her mother and the police. After discussing the problem, they agreed it would be best for the young girl?s future and health to terminate the pregnancy, and applied for and were granted permission for an abortion.
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  • the girl was refused in two hospitals in her hometown of Lublin due to a conscience clause, which is the right of a doctor to refuse an abortion if it's contradictory to his/her religious beliefs.
  • In one hospital, as the mother was talking to the senior registrar, a priest arrived and attempted to persuade the girl not to have the abortion
  • According to Wanda Nowicka, the head of the Foundation for Women and Family Planning, an obvious violation of doctor-patient privilege had taken place, not to mention the girl's right to privacy
  • Unofficially, the doctors wouldn't perform the abortion because the hospital was raided by pro-life activists and spammed by e-mails expressing both pleads and threats. To the staff's horror it turned out that personal data of the girl had been leaked, including her mobile number, on which she received threats and pleads via SMS. When the girl left the hospital, she was followed by pro-life activists on the street and even at the police station where she and her mother sought refuge.
  • Finally, thanks to the Foundation for Women and Family Planning, the girl and her mother found a place where they could perform the abortion and it was carried out on the last day possible - at the very end of the 12th week of pregnancy
Marina Lacroix

'We're talking about women's lives' | Life and style | The Guardian - 0 views

  • the UK's 1967 Abortion Act was passed when Northern Ireland had its own parliament - and even after direct rule was imposed in the early 1970s the law was never extended. Now that could be about to change.
  • more than 50,000 women have had to leave Northern Ireland in search of abortions in the past 40 years - many in the later stages of pregnancies because of delays caused by financial hardship. In 2007 alone, it estimates, around 1,400 women fled, paying up to £2,500 each for clinic and travel costs
  • some women are so desperate they are buying abortion pills on the internet. She adds that, according to one survey of GPs in Northern Ireland, 11% "have seen the results of amateur abortions"
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  • the louder anti-abortion voices "drown out" those of more moderate women and men who support the right to choose. "We are criminalising women and we have a situation where people are fearful of talking openly about abortion, never mind admitting to having one."
  • Les Reid of the Belfast Humanist Association, another pro-choice advocate, believes that for all the threats of constitutional crisis, the anti-abortion lobby's protestations may come to nothing in the long term. "The DUP and the Catholic church warned that gay rights would never be accepted in Northern Ireland, but time has proved them wrong," he says.
  • For Smith, an extension in the law can't come a moment too soon. "I understand that many people do not agree with abortion," she says. "That is their right and I respect it. But I don't see why they should be able to impose their views on me or any other woman
Marina Lacroix

Dept. of Disputation: Red Sex, Blue Sex: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
  • Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
  • Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.
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  • This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.
  • Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage.
  • More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse.
  • pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s.
  • Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost.
  • Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture.
  • Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.
  • In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.
  • The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.
  • Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives.
  • In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
  • Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it.
  • Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue.
  • But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor
  • Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.”
  • A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway.
  • It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a “secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.
Marina Lacroix

Sexual Rights position paper - European Women's Lobby - 0 views

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    European Women's Lobby position paper on sexual rights of women in Europe. Includes historical background and information and statistics on the current situation in EU-countries on topics such as abortion, legislation, contraception, prostitution, STDs and sex education. The EWL concludes with recommendations to member states and the EU.
Marina Lacroix

South Korea, Where Boys Were Kings, Revalues Its Girls - New York Times - 0 views

  • According to a study released by the World Bank in October, South Korea is the first of several Asian countries with large sex imbalances at birth to reverse the trend, moving toward greater parity between the sexes. Last year, the ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, still above what is considered normal, but down from a peak of 116.5 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990.
  • The most important factor in changing attitudes toward girls was the radical shift in the country’s economy that opened the doors to women in the work force as never before and dismantled long-held traditions, which so devalued daughters that mothers would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.
  • The government also played a small role starting in the 1970s. After growing alarmed by the rise in sex-preference abortions, leaders mounted campaigns to change people’s attitudes, including one that featured the popular slogan “One daughter raised well is worth 10 sons!”
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  • In 1987, the government banned doctors from revealing the sex of a fetus before birth. But experts say enforcement was lax because officials feared too many doctors would be caught.
  • In China in 2005, the ratio was 120 boys born for every 100 girls, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Vietnam reported a ratio of 110 boys to 100 girls last year. And although India recorded about 108 boys for every 100 girls in 2001
  • The Population Fund warned in an October report that the rampant tinkering with nature’s probabilities in Asia could eventually lead to increased sexual violence and trafficking of women as a generation of boys finds marriage prospects severely limited
  • “When I first joined the company in 1995, a woman was expected to quit her job once she got married; we called it a ‘resignation on a company suggestion,’” she said. Now, she said, many women stay after marriage and take a three-month break after giving birth before returning to work. “If someone suggests that a woman should quit after marriage, female workers in my company will take it as an insult and say so,” Ms. Shin said.
  • In 1990, the law guaranteeing men their family’s inheritance — a cornerstone of the Confucian system — was the first of the so-called family laws to fall; the rest would be dismantled over the next 15 years.
  • And last year, a study by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs showed that of 5,400 married South Korean women younger than 45 who were surveyed, only 10 percent said they felt that they must have a son. That was down from 40 percent in 1991.
Marina Lacroix

Stolen Kisses: Iran's Sexual Revolutions - 0 views

  • While this portrait of Iranian sexual experimentation may be shocking on its surface, it has grown familiar to most people who have visited Iran or followed cultural developments there in the past decade. Less well known is that, for all their promiscuity and seeming sophistication, many of these young Iranians suffer from a lack of sexual education and resources that fits the official culture of pious abstinence rather than the actual one of looseness and risk. The birth control method of choice among Mahdavi's informants is withdrawal. Women who take the pill frequently lack the most basic information and take it only erratically, depriving themselves of almost all of its effect. Condoms are considered so filthy and embarrassing that even people who share florid details about their sex lives with Mahdavi blush at their mention, and no one wants to be seen requesting them at a pharmacy. AIDS, educated young Iranians tell Mahdavi, is transmitted through visits to the dentist or hairdresser, and other STDs come only from a certain unsavory sort of woman. While wealthy women can obtain abortions--illegal in most cases but common, thanks to poor contraception--from sympathetic doctors at vast expense, poorer women acquire on the black market pills or injections meant for animals. Mahdavi went to a back street where dealers sell these medications, just to see how easily they could be acquired. A dealer sold her a vial of pills without the least instruction on what to do with them. Physicians she interviewed told her that they see a great many women seriously injured or rendered infertile by self-administered abortions meant for animals.
  • Yet there is good news in Mahdavi's study. Close to the ground, where it counts, Iranian doctors, parents, educators and even institutions are bending to the forces of change. For example, since 2000 the Islamic Republic has required Iranians who seek marriage licenses to attend state-administered classes on family planning. One that Mahdavi attended in Tehran's central business district sounds perfectly appalling. A chador-clad woman shrilly lectures a room of gum-snapping, nail-filing, indifferent young women, offering the following counsel: "You must always be ready for your husband's sexual needs. If perchance he is watching a football game on television, you should be resting to prepare yourself, or else preparing your bed for the evening. If you should feel overcome by fatigue yourself, make sure always to ask your husband, 'Is there anything else you need from me?' or 'Would you like to have me later?' before retiring."
  • But then Mahdavi attends another such class, this time in the city's north, in the upscale shopping district near the Tajrish bazaar. This class covers disease transmission, contraception, fertility, mental health, marital relations and even female sexual pleasure. The teachers wear the less forbidding hijab--head scarf and fitted thigh-length coat--common among their students, and the women attending these classes, Mahdavi reports, confide freely to the teachers about their relationships and their sex lives. Here, and in her chapter about the older generation's response to the sexual revolution, Mahdavi shows us a society beginning to shake off its denial and rigidity out of the sheer necessity of serving the burgeoning needs of its young--a generation of adults who have either grown sympathetic to young people's yearnings or, like Mrs. Erami, recognize that they risk greater losses than they can bear.
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  • Mahdavi cannot be everywhere at once, and her study does not purport to explain the sexual behavior of everyone in Iran. Rather, it focuses on upper-middle-class, heterosexual Tehrani youth.
  • it excludes the social base of the ruling regime, which is rural Iran, where village life is the norm and values may be changing but where they remain, by all accounts, more traditional than in the bigger cities
  • Mahdavi is optimistic for the future of reform and brushes off the crackdown under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which has had only limited effect on fashion and sexual practices. But she does not mention the wholesale exclusion of reformers from government, or the imprisonment and torture of dozens of feminist activists, starting in 2006, for the crime of circulating a petition calling for the amendment of laws that classify women as second-class citizens. (Among other things, the petition calls for equal rights for women in marriage, inheritance and divorce; an increase in the age of criminal responsibility from 9 to 18 for girls and from 15 to 18 for boys; the prosecution of honor killings; equal consideration of a woman's testimony in court to that of a man; and an end to the capital punishment of female adulterers.)
  • Many twentysomething Tehranis--bored, sexually frustrated, infantilized by the state and their families--live like teenagers in small-town America. They spend a lot of time in cars, getting high on ingeniously obtained or concocted substances, and looking for sex.
Marina Lacroix

Youth reproductive and sexual health - USAIDS 2008 report - 0 views

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    The study provides information on key reproductive and sexual health indicators in young women and men age 15-24 in 38 developing countries. The data come from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and AIDS Indicator Surveys (AIS) conducted between 2001 and 2005. Indicators are selected for the following key areas: background characteristics; adolescent pregnancy; contraception; sexual activity; and HIV/AIDS-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Additional analysis examines the association of various individual and household characteristics with the key indicators.
Marina Lacroix

nu.nl/gezondheid | Gros abortussen door verkeerd pil- of condoomgebruik - 0 views

  • Twee derde van alle vrouwen die abortus heeft laten plegen, had ook de pil of een condoom gebruikt om zwangerschap te voorkomen.
  • Dat concludeert de Rutgers Nisso Groep in een onderzoek naar abortussen in 2007.
  • Volgens het kenniscentrum gebruiken met name tienermeisjes en allochtone vrouwen de voorbehoedsmiddelen verkeerd
Marina Lacroix

Le Monde.fr : Sarah Palin, féministe? - 0 views

  • contre l'égalité de salaires, contre l'avortement (même en cas de viol ou d'inceste), contre l'éducation sexuelle, le contrôle des naissances,
  • Palin ne partage rien d'autre qu'un chromosome avec Clinton
  • le féminisme n'a jamais eu pour objet de faire obtenir un poste à une femme, plutôt de rendre la vie plus juste pour l'ensemble des femmes
Marina Lacroix

Philippine economy struggles with high birth rates - International Herald Tribune - 0 views

  • He compares the Philippines to Thailand. In 1975, both countries had similar population sizes of 41 million to 42 million. Then Bangkok began a major family-planning effort that included condom distribution as well as an awareness campaign. Now Thailand has a population of about 64 million and is the world's top exporter of rice. Meanwhile, the Philippines, with a population of 90 million, is the world's top rice importer. Thailand had a gross annual per capita income of $7,880 in 2007, while in the Philippines it was $3,730.
  • Pernia said that if the Philippines had followed the population growth trajectory of Thailand between 1975 and 2000, then its per capita income would have been at least 22 percent higher and there would have been five million fewer poor people.
  • Nearly half of the estimated 3.1 million pregnancies that occur every year in this Southeast Asian country are unplanned. Around half a million end in illegal and often dangerous back-street abortions.
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  • A month's supply of the pill costs 39 pesos, or around $0.86 - about half the average daily salary of almost half the population. A lack of accurate information and access is also a problem.
  • Joseph Juico, a councilor in Quezon City in Manila, was denounced for introducing a family-planning program in schools.
  • compulsory family-planning seminars
Marina Lacroix

Kristof: Can this be pro-life? - International Herald Tribune - 0 views

  • the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-funded condoms, birth control pills, IUDs or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.
  • The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described 'pro-life' movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births
  • the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.
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