Torturing Women

Unusual things are happening in the feminist world. The Hungarian representative to UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) said that, in the future, abortion will be viewed by women in the same way that torture is now viewed by human rights advocates. Now, given how often the UN turns a blind eye to torture, Saddam Hussein’s regime being a fine example of the carefully shielded glance, we may justifiably wonder if this means torture will become acceptable or abortion unacceptable. But even so, the possibility that CEDAW members are beginning to question the practice is telling.

The reasons are not too difficult to find. Within the last month, headlines have revealed:

• Danco Laboratories, maker of the abortifacient drug RU 486 (Mifeprex) is changing the labels that appear on the drugs to include updated safety information. Why? Well, five women have died from using their product. Given that four of these five deaths were reported in California, there is growing suspicion that the number of national deaths is rather deeply under-reported.
• Canada’s public health department warned doctors to restrict access to Depo-Provera. It seems the drug causes massive and possibly permanent bone loss in the women who take it. Depo-Provera is a common form of abortifacient birth control for teens and young women – the very group that is supposed to be building up the solid calcium they need to survive old age without osteoporosis.
• The Associated Press reports the birth control patch (also an abortifacient) causes thrombosis, potentially deadly clots in the deep veins, lungs, heart or brain, twenty times as often as the birth control pill.
• Given that the pill itself puts women at increased risk for thrombosis, this is hardly good news. But, the news is doubly damning since it has just been verified that the low-dose birth control pill increases the rate of heart attack and stroke to a much greater extent than previously understood.
• New studies have demonstrated that women who have abortion have drug abuse rates, accident rates, suicide rates and higher morbidity and mortality rates overall than the general population. This merely confirms what has been known for over five years: women who carry to term, on the other hand, have lower morbidity and mortality rates than the general female population.
• Meanwhile, not a few Democrats are considering jettisoning the radical left-wing of the party by removing the staunchly pro-abortion plank of their platform.

Ever since the 1974 authorization of National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), American foreign policy has been built around sterilizing the population of other countries, even as it kills its own women and children through massive application of hormonal contraceptives and abortion. Now, thirty years later, the result has been a world-wide fertility decline never before seen in human history.

As the population of every industrialized country in the world rapidly ages, as the aged and disabled have begun to be systematically euthanized and the specter of depopulation haunts Japan, Europe and eventually North America, some people are beginning to wake up.

“Perhaps,” some of them have begun to say to themselves and, ever so quietly, to one another, “perhaps this approach is not the best.”

Indeed.