Life Links 10/7/10

Dominic Holt-Reid has been arrested after allegedly attempting to force the mother of his child to have an abortion at gunpoint after she refused to go through with the scheduled abortion.

Police found him about 9:45 a.m. in a parking lot behind Founder's Women's Health Center, 1243 E. Broad St., said Sgt. Rich Weiner, a Columbus police spokesman.

Holt-Reid and Yolanda M. Burgess, the woman he forced to the clinic, have a child together, Weiner said. But they do not appear to share a home address, he said. State birth records show that child is a 4-year-old boy.

Burgess was in a vehicle with Holt-Reid yesterday morning after dropping their child off at school, according to a police statement. Holt-Reid became angry after Burgess refused to go through with an abortion that had been scheduled for 9 a.m. at the clinic.

Holt-Reid pulled a handgun from the glove compartment, pointed it at her and forced her to drive to the health clinic, according to police. The woman passed a note to a clinic employee, who called police.

The National Post has a story about a couple in Canada who used a surrogate in an attempt to have a child. After the child was diagnosed as having a good chance of having Down Syndrome, the parents wanted the surrogate to have an abortion.

When a B.C. couple discovered that the fetus their surrogate mother was carrying was likely to be born with Down syndrome, they wanted an abortion. The surrogate, however, was determined to take the pregnancy to term, sparking a disagreement that has raised thorny questions about the increasingly common arrangements.

Under the agreement the trio signed, the surrogate's choice would mean absolving the couple of any responsibility for raising the child, the treating doctor told a recent fertility-medicine conference......

The surrogate, a mother of two children of her own, eventually chose to have the abortion, partly because of her own family obligations.....

Françoise Baylis, a Dalhousie University bioethicist, said the case highlights how human life can become like a commodity in such transactions.

"The child is seen by the commissioning parents as a product, and in this case a substandard product because of a genetic condition," Prof. Baylis said.

Charges against a prolife protester in Tulsa have been dropped after a local prosecutor was unable to prove Carol Harp yelled so loud, she could be heard inside an abortion clinic.

During the brief trial, two employees of the abortion clinic said they could hear her shouting from across the street, "You are murderers."

Kumpe said, "They said they could hear her from 100 feet away through a brick wall and a plate glass door. We had two witnesses who say she didn't say those words and she was not louder than anyone else."

Kumpe said a pro-abortion advocate stood on the abortion clinic property and yelled at the pro-life group across the street. He yelled various things, including some comments meant to sound like they were pro-life sentiments.

A small study in the UK has found that women prefer surgical abortions to chemical abortions in the second trimester. It also notes that women who use the abortion pill later in pregnancy are more likely to have unwanted thoughts and nightmares.

As a group, the study found, women who received a medical abortion reported more pain and had more vaginal bleeding than those who'd had surgery. And two weeks after the procedure, they had a higher average score on a standard measure of "intrusive" psychological symptoms -- such as unwanted thoughts or nightmares....

n the U.S., the abortion pill is approved for use within the first nine weeks of pregnancy. In the UK, it is approved for use up through the 24th week;.....

Only 60 percent of the women in the study completed that follow-up, however.