Life Links 6/3/10

Researchers from Finland have found that Finnish women who have second trimester abortions are more likely to have repeat abortions.

To better understand factors associated with repeat abortion, as well as risk factors for having an abortion after the first trimester, Heikinheimo and colleagues looked at 41,750 Finnish women who had an abortion between 2000 and 2005 -- 1,900 of whom terminated their pregnancies in the second trimester.

Compared with women who had first trimester abortions, those who had second-trimester abortions were 40 percent more likely to have had a second abortion by the end of 2006, the researchers found, while they were nearly four times as likely to have a second late abortion, and five times as likely to have an abortion after 16 weeks' gestation.

And women younger than 20 years old were seven times as likely as older women to have repeat abortions, and more than 12 times as likely to have a second abortion during their second trimester of pregnancy.

Lack of access to abortions was unlikely to be a factor in whether or not women had late abortions, the researchers note, given that by Finnish law there must be "no unnecessary delays" in performing abortion once a woman decides to apply for one; also, almost all of the abortions in the study were done in public hospitals.

Something to remember when pro-choicers claim that abortion restrictions only lead to women getting later term abortions.


The health ministry of Costa Rica has shut down the country’s largest stem cell clinic because there is no evidence their adult stem cell treatments work.


An abortionist in India has been arrested after a woman bled to death after she performed on abortion on her.


Dorothy Warren writes in a solid letter to the editor of the Washington Post in response to Jessica Valenti’s editorial on Sarah Palin and feminism.

Jessica Valenti may be a passionate feminist, but she's clearly no logician. While claiming "there's no grand arbiter of the [feminist] label," she nevertheless said that it is "absolutely" possible to exclude women such as Sarah Palin from the feminist camp -- in other words, that there is a grand arbiter, and her name is Ms. Valenti.

The touchstone of this grand arbiter is no mystery. While Ms. Valenti mentioned other feminist issues -- universal suffrage, pay equity, the persistence of patriarchy -- the one measure she invoked no less than seven times was: abortion.

I’d also note that Valenti’s editorial includes the years-old media created myth that Sarah Palin slashed funding for a shelter for teenage moms.