Life Links 11/18/13

Slate’s L.V. Anderson thinks horrific abortion stories appearing in pro-choice media outlets are good for the pro-choice movement.

It helps no one when women feel that their feelings about their own personal experiences with abortion and contraception are somehow “not okay.” Which is why it’s wonderful that New York and Elle are reclaiming these stories from religious conservatives. Some women are pressured into getting abortions, and not every abortion provider is skilled and compassionate. Some women get depressed when they take the pill, and some experience agony during their medication abortions. Abortion and contraception can be good or bad for the patient, depending on her biology, her socioeconomic circumstances, her provider. To acknowledge these realities is to treat reproductive healthcare like any other kind of medical care—and isn’t that what feminists have been fighting for all along?

I doubt that NARAL and Planned Parenthood will be sharing horrific abortion stories (unless they are pre-legalization ones) anytime soon. 


The UK’s Daily Mail has a story of a Chinese man who begged his girlfriend not to have an abortion. 

A Chinese man sunk to his knees in an abortion clinic and made a tearful plea to his girlfriend’s mother not to force her to have an abortion, it was reported in local media.

The mother, Liu Rong, had deemed the man, called Zhang, as being unworthy of her daughter as his social standing was too low.

Because Zhang worked in IT and was not from the civil servant class – the new ruling elite of China – she allegedly declared him to be ‘beneath’ her daughter’s status.

           

Mollie Hemingway writes about Planned Parenthood’s abortion theater. 

So the question is obvious. If 97% of Planned Parenthood’s services aren’t abortion, why in the world would an abortion regulation cause a dozen Planned Parenthood clinics to close?

Closing clinics make for great headlines and more dramatic court briefs. But a media mildly more skeptical of savvy public relations campaigns and well-scripted legal wrangling might serve the public a bit more.

The Toronto Star reports on declassified information from abortion debates within Prime Minister Mulroney’s cabinet in the late 80's/early 90's.