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Wednesday, July 20, 2005

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really hope this is the case. However, with the next election looming, the Republican party is seriously discussing opening their party to mainline abortion advocate groups so that "the two sides can see eye to eye on common issues." They are discussing allowing abortion groups full access for speeches promoting their cause at the national convention. On top of that, nearly on a daily basis, the national media finds a way to promote some survey that believes 68% of the US supports abortion (the survey has a ridiculously high +/- percentage, but then what's new with poor news reporting). It's nice that you can find some bright spots in the world even as the US seems to be walking happily in the darkness.

Anonymous said...

I fully expect that in the coming generation we will see another of those historical party platform shifts in the U.S., where the Republicans and Democrats swap most of their platforms and constituencies. I believe it's already happened twice in our history, and I think we're beginning to see signs of it already. The last one happened in the 1950s-1960s. As the country's demographics change and the Republicans seek to retain power while the Democrats seek to get it back, it's inevitable that they'll adopt new planks and abandon old ones -- parties are merely mechanisms for seeking and retaining power -- truth and morality are dispensable. The Republicans have begun wooing blacks and Hispanics, and Bush's "compassionate conservatism" tries to coopt Democratic policies and platform planks. So don't be surprised if the Republicans become more like the Democrats and the Democrats become more like the Republicans. It's happened before -- it's bound to happen again.

Anonymous said...

Hopeful signs, but is it too late?

When it costs an arm and a leg to raise kids and our culture unceasingly promotes a buy now attitude (which seems to have taken an irreversible hold), it seems actual reversal of population decline in the first world is highly unlikely. Sure, folks may be starting to recognize the problem, but how many are willing to trade their BMW and Carribean vacations for three kids and a weekend barbecue at home (a one-story 1800 sq ft one, at that)? It seems that, while some are saying we have a problem, they expect others to bite the procreative bullet for them.

We have seen this problem for a long time - I recall reading a book in the eighties called The Great American Stork Market Crash pointing out our demographic decline. 20 years later and things have gotten worse, not better.

Anonymous said...

And by the time I read TGASMC, it was already ten years old.

A measely $600 per child tax credit that gets phased out for most middle income folks is simply not going to cut it.

Anonymous said...

Place on top of that the burden of future generations to fund an older and larger (and continuing to grow) population that is demanding more and more services from federal and state funds than any generation previous to it, leaving less and less money for the current working population to support a family on - and you basically have the situation that China is in today. Scary, indeed.