Eideard

Abortion rates are higher in countries where the procedure is illegal and nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe, with the vast majority in developing countries, a new study concludes.

Experts couldn’t say whether more liberal laws led to fewer procedures, but said good access to birth control in those countries resulted in fewer unwanted pregnancies.

The global abortion rate remained virtually unchanged from 2003 to 2008, at about 28 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, a total of about 43.8 million abortions, according to the study. The rate had previously been dropping since 1995.

About 47,000 women died from unsafe abortions in 2008, and another 8.5 million women had serious medical complications. Almost all unsafe abortions were in developing countries, where family planning and contraceptive programs have mostly levelled off.

If the holier-than-thou Kool Aid Party gets its way, we can continue adding numbers of American women to that sum.

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Which Democrat is liable to copout on supporting birth control?
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A dispute has erupted between President Obama and Democrats in Congress over a proposal to broaden the exemption from new rules that require health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women free of charge.

The National Academy of Sciences recommended that the government adopt such a requirement. And Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, announced in August that she had done so. But after protests by Roman Catholic bishops, charities, schools and universities, the White House is considering a change that would grant a broad exemption to health plans sponsored by employers who object to such coverage for moral and religious reasons.

Churches may already qualify for an exemption. The proposal being weighed by the White House would expand the exemption to many universities, hospitals, clinics and other entities associated with religious organizations.

The prospect of such a change has infuriated many Democrats in Congress, who fought hard to secure coverage of birth control under the new health care law. Senators voiced their objections on Thursday in a telephone conference call with Pete Rouse, counselor to the president. House members registered their objections on Friday in a call with Valerie Jarrett, another member of the president’s inner circle.

House members have sent a letter to Mr. Obama urging him not to widen the exemption. Such a change, they said, would keep contraception out of reach for millions of women.

Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said the broad exemption was “an outrageous idea.”

“Millions of women work for colleges, hospitals and health care systems that are nominally religious, but these folks use birth control and need coverage,” said Ms. DeGette, a leader of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus…

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said: “There is not a scintilla of legislative direction in the statute that requires the broadened exemption the administration is contemplating. This change would be a reversal of the progress made in favor of reproductive rights when President Obama took office…”

When the administration announced the requirement for contraceptive coverage, it said the decision was “based on science.” The resulting uproar has forced Mr. Obama to weigh competing claims of Catholic leaders and advocates for women’s rights, including some of his strongest supporters.

You can RTFA if you feel some compelling need to examine the claims of 14th Century ideologues. The National Academy of Sciences is about as safe as houses for any politician grounded in 20th Century progress – much the 21st Century.

But, then, opportunism by just another Democrat instead of hard work and principled struggle ain’t exactly a new phenomenon.

 
Same as it ever was.

Though I have obvious reasons to remember a few coppers who beat and attacked demonstrators – scars – I always smile remembering the state troopers assigned to follow the car I was in in a southern border state on the way to a sit-in in 1959 who pulled alongside to offer directions to the town while we were gazing blankly at a road map by the side of the road.

Israel has been gripped by a guessing game over the identity of a mysterious prisoner being held in such secrecy that even his guards do not know his name.

The elusive “Mr X” is being held for unspecified crimes and confined in total seclusion within a private wing of the maximum-security Ayalon prison.

No one knew of his existence until the shroud of secrecy was briefly lifted after a story appeared on the website of Israel’s leading Hebrew-language newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

Quoting unidentified officials within the Israeli penitentiary service, it disclosed that Mr X was being held in Unit 15, a wing of Ayalon prison that contains a single cell.

He is not though to receive any visitors and his wing is cut off from the rest of the prison by double iron doors. So hermetic are the conditions in which he is held that other prisoners can neither see nor hear him.

“He is simply a person without a name and without an identity who has been placed in total and utter isolation from the outside world,” a prison official was quoted as saying.

Within hours, the story had vanished from the newspaper’s website, allegedly after Israel’s domestic intelligence service won a gagging order banning all media coverage of the case…

But one Israeli security expert said that the secrecy suggested espionage rather than terrorism is likely to lie at the heart of the mystery.

In 1983, Marcus Klingberg, a leading Israeli scientist, was jailed for 20 years for passing secrets about the country’s biological warfare programme to the Soviets. But it was only after he had been in prison for a decade that Israelis heard for the first time about Klingberg’s existence, arrest and conviction.

Always heartwarming to learn of the standards developed by our loyal allies in the War on Terror. Even as our own government is perfectly capable of adopting every aspect of fascist megalomaniac rule.

Fellow freedom-fighters.

Martin Amis told the Guardian: “What we need to recognise is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction.” He said his comments were meant to be “satirical”, rather than “glib”.

His stance on euthanasia had hardened since the deaths of his stepfather, Lord Kilmarnock, the former SDP peer and writer, in March aged 81, and his friend Dame Iris Murdoch, the novelist, in 1999, aged 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

“I increasingly feel that religion is so deep in our constitution and in our minds and that is something we should just peel off,” he said. “Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they’ll say ‘he asked me to do it’, or ‘he wanted to die’, Amis said. “That’s what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on…”

In his interview, Amis said his step father had died “very horribly”. “He always thought he was going to get better. But he didn’t get better and I think the denial of death is a great curse.”

He said Iris Murdoch, whom he had known for a very long time , was “a friend, I loved her. She was wonderful. I remember talking to her just as it started happening, and she said, ‘I’ve entered a dark place’. That famous quote. Awareness of loss is gone, the track is gone. You don’t know the day you’ve spent watching Teletubbies; it just vanished.”

The pro-euthanasia pressure group Dignity in Dying said: “Like all too many people in the UK, Martin Amis has witnessed the bad death of a loved one.” But, it added: “Dignity in Dying’s campaign for a change in the law is not about the introduction of ‘euthanasia booths’, nor is it in anticipation of a ‘silver tsunami’. Our campaign is about allowing dying adults who have mental capacity a compassionate choice to end their suffering, subject to strict legal safeguards.”

Hear, hear.

I also suggest checking out the website of the Dignity in Dying campaign if you’re in the UK. In the U.S., there is Death with Dignity. Pretty much spot on.

It’s like a game of Whac-A-Mole. The ACLU smacks down one violation of religious freedom only to watch another one pop up at some other Tennessee school. In the latest, the ACLU threatened to sue and Wilson County succumbed, agreeing to stop allowing the distribution of Bibles to students during school hours.

Here’s how it worked in Wilson County. In an annual scene not too much unlike something out of Afghanistan, fifth-graders were herded into a gym where a teacher spoke in glowing terms about the first time she was given a Bible. She then called up each row of children to retrieve a Bible from a basket full of them.

The teacher explained that taking a Bible was not necessary or mandatory. But guess what? At least one child took a Bible only because she felt pressured and was afraid her classmates would ostracize her if she didn’t. Her parents complained to the ACLU, which hit this mole directly on the head.

“Decisions about religion should be left in the hands of families and faith communities, not public school officials,” said Edmund J. Schmidt III, an ACLU cooperating attorney. “The vital constitutional principle of religious liberty is best protected when the government stays out of religion. Students and their families cannot feel comfortable expressing their religious beliefs when their teachers and administrators are imposing their own particular religious beliefs.”

Separation of public schools from religious education has long been established. Some parts of the Bible Belt still haven’t caught up with reading Supreme Court decisions from the 19th Century – much less the 20th. That’s all.

Kudos to Jeff Woods

“There’s one now. Get him!”
(His sweet spirit still guiding gently)

Liberty University will no longer recognize its campus Democratic Party club because its parent organization stands against the conservative Christian school’s moral principles.

The club, which has about 30 members, will no longer be able to use Liberty’s name, hold on-campus meetings, or be eligible for student activities money.

“I think it does the university a great disservice to stifle one side of the discussion simply because we are Democrats,” said Maria Childress, the club’s adviser and an administrative assistant at the school.

Brian Diaz, president of Liberty’s Democratic club, said he was informed of the school’s decision in a May 15 e-mail.

“The candidates supported are directly contrary to the mission of Liberty University,” the e-mail said.

Liberty has had a College Republicans club for years. The Democratic club formed in October and worked aggressively to elect President Obama.

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Daylife/AP Photo by Lewis Whyld

A British resident detained at Guantanamo Bay for more than four years has arrived back in the UK. Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, 30, landed at RAF Northolt in London on Monday afternoon, accompanied by Metropolitan Police officers.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said his release was the first step towards the goal of closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

After he landed at 1300 GMT and walked to the terminal building surrounded by officials, he was questioned and released more than four hours later.

Mr Mohamed said in a statement: “I have to say, more in sadness than in anger, that many have been complicit in my own horrors over the past seven years. “For myself, the very worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence.”

Referring to his alleged period of torture in Morocco, Mr Mohamed said: “I have met with British intelligence in Pakistan. I had been open with them. Yet the very people who I had hoped would come to my rescue, I later realised, had allied themselves with my abusers.”

Nothing like learning that a nation which officially stands for liberty and democracy is perfectly willing to turn their back on you – and their own standards – when it comes to politics and war. If in fact the US and the UK differentiate between the two.