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Irish Poised to Revisit Abortion Law

The New York Times
By CAROL RYAN
Published: February 21, 2012

DUBLIN — Abortion is back on the agenda in Ireland after a European Court of Human Rights ruling last year found the state in violation of its own Constitution on the matter. Ireland’s abortion laws are the strictest in Europe, but the Irish government may be about to address the previously unapproachable: whether to loosen restrictions on ending a pregnancy.

A woman who has never gone public with her name, and thus can be identified only as “Ms. C,” as in court papers, and who suffered from a rare form of cancer, won her case in the human rights court after she couldn’t find an Irish doctor willing to tell her if her life was at risk if she continued her pregnancy.

In response to the ruling, the Irish government has set up an expert group that includes prominent obstetricians, psychiatrists and lawyers to advise it on its options. Members of the group, who all declined to be interviewed for this article, must report back to the government by summer.

The European ruling, coupled with the dwindling power of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, has campaigners for abortion rights hopeful that change may be afoot.

Catholic morality has influenced Irish social policy in the past, but Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s speech attacking the Vatican last summer following another damning report on clerical sex abuse, and the subsequent shuttering of the Irish Embassy to the Holy See, marked a sea change in the relationship between church and state.

Abortion was illegal in all circumstances until the situation was thrown into confusion after the “X” case in 1992, when a 14-year-old girl was prevented from leaving the country to have an abortion after she became pregnant from rape.

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Read the complete article and related information at Abortion Laws Revisited in Ireland

Poverty Matters Blog

Posted by Ofra Koffman
Friday 10 February 2012 02.00 EST

Girls sell coffee in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Photograph: Alamy

Many development organisations see empowering girls – and enabling them to delay childbearing – as a powerful means to tackle poverty, but the evidence so far doesn’t bear this out.

The call to invest in adolescent girls has been sweeping the development field in recent years. Among the supporters of this policy are key stakeholders such as the UK Department for International Development (DfID), the World Bank and several UN agencies.

In part, this is linked with the effort of Nike and its philanthropic arm, the Nike Foundation. Several years ago the foundation began focusing on adolescent girls, coining the term the “girl effect” (on development). The empowerment of girls, it is argued, is a powerful way to tackle poverty. This is because, as a special UN taskforce claimed in 2010, empowered girls will “marry later, delay childbearing, have healthier children, and earn better incomes that will benefit themselves, their families, communities and nations”.

The slogan used by DfID describes this as “stopping poverty before it starts”. But is it really so straightforward? At the heart of this policy is the assumption that the prevalence of early marriage and childbearing is a key factor affecting a country’s economic prospects. However, a glance at the statistical data reveals there are many developing countries in which adolescent fertility is actually less prevalent than in the US, one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

For example, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Burma, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco, all had lower rates of adolescent fertility than the US in the last reported year. In Rwanda, one of the countries where DfID and the Nike Foundation are rolling out girl-focused interventions, adolescent fertility is not much higher than in the US. These examples highlight the limit of the association between the prevalence of early childbearing and a country’s economic standing.

Even more questions arise if we consider the UK’s experience of teenage pregnancy prevention. In the UK, teenage motherhood was described as linked with incomplete education, economic difficulty and poor health. In the late 1990s, the Labour government launched a 10-year strategy to curb the rate of teenage pregnancy. The effort was based on the assumption that if young women postponed childbearing, their economic prospects would improve.

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Read the complete article and related information at Will the ‘girl effect’ really help to combat poverty?

NPR

by Shefali S. Kulkarni
February 8, 2012

Teen pregnancies are at their lowest rate in nearly 40 years, according to the latest data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focused on sexual and reproductive health.

The report shows that about 7 percent of U.S. teen girls between the ages of 15 to 19 were pregnant in 2008 — a decline from the high of more than 11 percent in 1990. Abortions among teen girls fell from a peak of more than 4 percent in 1988 to about 1.8 percent in 2008, the latest year for which data are available.

While overall rates have dropped, there is still a major gap separating white, Hispanic and black teenagers.

Non-Hispanic white teen pregnancy rates fell by 50 percent from their peak; Hispanic teen pregnancy rates, 37 percent; black teen pregnancy rates, 48 percent.

Yet, according to the report, “the abortion rate among black teenagers was four times the rate for non-Hispanic whites, while the rate among Hispanic teenagers was twice the rate for non-Hispanic white teenagers.”

“The disparity has pretty much been unchanged,” said Kathryn Kost, a Guttmacher researcher and co-author of the report. “If you think of these rates as lines on a graph, they are all going down, but the distance between them is pretty much unchanged.”

The report does not distinguish between married and unmarried teens.

Kost said the increase in contraceptive marketing has helped to reduce pregnancies, but Heather Boonstra, a senior public policy associate at Guttmacher said the cost of contraceptives continues to be a factor. Boonstra said increasing the age limit for dependent health care coverage to 26 will increase access to birth control for many teens.

“There’s plenty of evidence that shows that if you take away cost in the equation,there is going to be better contraceptive use, fewer unintended pregnancies, fewer abortions, better birth outcomes,” she said. “The health care reform law was not designed with teens in mind, but … the more parents that are insured, the more teens or their dependents are insured, so certainly that will help.”

Bill Albert, the chief program officer of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, said the decreased rates are a sign of progress, but more remains to be done. He noted that 3 in 10 girls are pregnant by age 20.

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Read the complete article and related information at Teen Pregnancies Hit New Low, But Disparities Remain

The Telegraph

Girls as young as 13 will be pressed to have contraceptive jabs under Government plans to “urgently” bring down teenage pregnancy rates.

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Read the complete article and related information at Ministers tell councils to push contraceptive jabs and implants

What they are not telling you is that Depo is also used as a castration drug on sex offenders in prison.  First HPV vaccination and now birth control without parental consent?

Girls as young as 13 have been fitted with contraceptive implants at school without their parents knowing.

The Telegraph

10:46AM GMT 07 Feb 2012

Health chiefs have defended sexual health services going into schools, saying teenage pregnancies had dropped by 22 per cent as a result Photo: Alamy

The procedure was carried out in Southampton, Hants, as part of a government initiative to drive down teenage pregnancies.

Read the complete article and related information at 13 Yr. Old Girls Get Contraceptive Implants at School

Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

re: Cycles

July 29th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

In our May 28 “Saturday Surfing” round-up of recommended reading, we highlighted Lynn Harris’ essay for The Nation about new research on “reproductive coercion”: the alarming frequency with which young men try to get their partners pregnant, often by sabotaging birth control methods. Yesterday, GritTV with Laura Flanders interviewed Harris and Elizabeth Miller, the researcher who conducted the study, about the phenomenon and public health responses.

Watch the Video here…

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The Nation

Leyla W. couldn’t figure out where her birth control pills kept going. One day a few tablets would be missing; the next, the whole container. Her then-boyfriend shrugged and said he hadn’t seen them. She believed him—until she found them in his drawer. When she confronted him, he hit her. “That was his way of shutting me up,” says Leyla, who is in her mid-20s and living in Northern California. (For her safety, Leyla wishes to withhold her last name and hometown.) He also raped her and, most days, left her locked in a bedroom with a bit of food and water while he went to work. (A roommate took pity and let her out until he came home.) Thanks to the missed pills, she got pregnant twice, the second time deciding against abortion.

Despite his role in getting her pregnant, when Leyla decided she did not want to have an abortion, her boyfriend did a 180, screaming at her belly that he didn’t want the baby to live, threatening to “kick the baby out” of her stomach and even, one day, pushing her down a flight of stairs. Her pregnancy was “hell,” says Leyla. Perhaps mercifully, it ended at thirty-seven weeks—the baby arriving three weeks early, her doctor speculated, because of his mother’s profound stress. (Her doctor was aware, to some degree, of the abuse, and told Leyla the best thing she could do was leave.)

Leyla eventually did just that, getting herself out of her abusive relationship and into a support group. “I do ask every day why I stayed with him for seven years,” she says (though she now says that witnessing her father abuse her mother corrupted her sense of what counts as “normal” in a relationship). She married a “wonderful” man last November who is, she says, “a great father” to her son, Eddie, now 2.

Leyla’s story turns a modern fable on its head: that of the woman—call her the femme fertile—who conspires to get pregnant, perhaps by “forgetting” to take her birth control pills, as a way to “trap a man” and force marriage—or at least keep him in her life. In reality, experts researchers on dating violence and unintended pregnancy say, it’s Leyla’s version of that story is all too common.

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Read the complete article and related information at When Teen Pregnancy Is No Accident

the star online

Malaysia

April 25, 2010

By Dr MILTON LUM

Statistics show that there are more pregnancies outside of wedlock, and hence more babies born out of wedlock. with its subsequent consequences. This article seeks to empower the young, their parents, and everyone who care about them to prevent unintended pregnancies following unprotected sexual intercourse.

IT is common to come across media coverage of abandoned newborns since the new millennium began. What is worrying in recent reports is that some of the newborns have been harmed as well.

Whilst the actual numbers may be unknown, the Social Welfare Department has stated that they recovered 315 abandoned babies between 2001 and 2004, and police statistics indicate an average of 100 cases annually.

It is a fact that sex and reproduction are pivotal to humans and that young people are sexual beings. They account for a disproportionate burden of global sexual and reproductive ill health i.e. the number one killer of young women is pregnancy and childbirth related causes; 45% of all new HIV infections occur in those aged between 15 and 24 years; and there are about 500,000 new curable sexually transmitted infections occurring in young people every day.

Young are already having sex

Various local data indicate that many young and unmarried people are already having sex. The decrease in the age of menarche and the increase in the age of marriage, together with socioeconomic changes, have contributed to this trend.

The Second National Health and Morbidity Survey (1996) reported that 1.8% of male students were sexually active with the incidence in male students twice that of female students. The relationships were heterosexual in 63.2% and homosexual in 19.9% (13.7% gays and 6.2% lesbians). 9.4% had sex with prostitutes.

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Read the complete article and related information at It’s an emergency! Pregnancies out of Wedlock

Medical News Today

Morning sickness, also known as nausea gravidarum, nausea/vomiting of pregnancy (NVP) , emesis gravidarum or pregnancy sickness is a condition that affects over 50% of all pregnant females. The woman feels nauseous, sometimes vomits and is often tired. Women who use hormonal contraception or HRT (hormone replacement therapy) may also have morning sickness symptoms.

Typically, morning sickness occurs in the early hours of the morning, and gradually improves as the day progresses, hence the name. However, some experts say that the term is a misnomer as it can come on at any time of day. The nausea may be mild, or severe enough to induce vomiting.

Sometimes symptoms may be so severe that the woman suffers from dehydration, weight loss, alkalosis (a dangerous drop in the normal acidity of the blood) and hypokalemia (low blood potassium). When symptoms are very severe, the condition is called hyperemesis gravidarum, and develops in approximately 1% of all pregnancies.

According to the National Health Service (NHS), UK, about 28% of women experience nausea without vomiting.

If nausea and vomiting is to occur it will usually do so during the 6th week of pregnancy, but in some cases it may strike during the second week. For many women the symptoms of morning sickness are their first signs of pregnancy. Most pregnant women find that the morning sickness improve after the 12th week of pregnancy. Unfortunately, for some women symptoms persist throughout their pregnancy.Typically, morning sickness occurs in the early hours of the morning, and gradually improves as the day progresses, hence the name. However, some experts say that the term is a misnomer as it can come on at any time of day. The nausea may be mild, or severe enough to induce vomiting.

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Read the complete article and related information at What Is Morning Sickness? What Causes Morning Sickness?

(CNN) — Most sexually active unmarried young adults believe pregnancy should be planned, but about half do not use contraception regularly, according to a study published Tuesday.

The survey of 1,800 people age 18 to 29 was conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

“What is surprising is just how wide the gap is between single young adults’ intentions and behavior on this very important issue,” said Bill Albert, chief program officer at the organization.

Also, 29 percent of women and 42 percent of men said it is at least slightly likely they will have unprotected sex in the next three months — and it’s quite likely or extremely likely for 17 percent of women and 19 percent of men.

The discrepancy between both wanting to plan pregnancy and having unprotected sex may have something to do with a focus in recent years on abstinence-only education, said Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.

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Read the complete article and related information at Gaps found in young people’s sex knowledge