Life Links 8/30/11

At the Live Action blog, Jennie Stone dismantles Charles Blow's editorial. The editorial previously (it has now be corrected) misquoted a Guttmacher Institute study about unplanned pregnancy.


A woman from Texas named Cynthia Greenwood is being charged with interfering with a rape investigation after she allegedly took her then 12-year-old adopted daughter with special needs to get a late-term abortion in Cleveland because her now 19-year-old biological son was the father.

Children’s protective services launched its investigation after someone in Texas called in anonymous tip that the 12-year-old became hysterical when Greenwood took her in for an abortion. The tip caller said Greenwood refused to say how her daughter became pregnant. Court documents said on Oct. 22, 2010, Greenwood allegedly took her daughter to a women’s clinic in Cleveland to have an abortion. She was 22 weeks pregnant.

Notice that the tip came from Texas. No one at the abortion clinic in Cleveland took the time to think about why a 12-year-old girl with special needs from Texas was in Ohio for a 22-week abortion.


In response to a push for organizations who don't provide abortion to provide abortion counseling in Great Britain, a female reporter for the Daily Mail posed as a pregnant woman and went to 5 locations (abortion clinics and pregnancy care centers) for counseling.

What happened next left me confused and traumatised — and I’m not even pregnant. I discovered that vulnerable women are being given advice that is both biased and manipulative — and could easily make them feel pressured into making a decision they will regret later.....

My first call was to Marie Stopes, a nationwide network of sexual health clinics that provide private and NHS abortions. They claim to allow women ‘access to comprehensive, impartial and non-judgmental information’ and all counsellors are members of BACP.

On the phone, the operator repeatedly tried to book me in for a medical assessment, the first step to getting an abortion — despite me stressing that I hadn’t yet made up my mind.

Biopolitical Times discusses the trend of some IVF practitioners to promote social egg freezing.

In most of the media coverage, the take-away message is that egg freezing is an unproblematic boon. NPR’s article, for example, carries the conclusive title, “Egg Freezing Puts The Biological Clock On Hold” and reports that fertility doctors “envision a time when society considers freezing eggs an act not of desperation but of empowerment.” The Vogue piece declares, “Stopping the biological clock through egg freezing has long been the ultimate feminist fantasy.”