Life Links 4/15/15

NARAL will be hosting an event where comedians make fun of crisis pregnancy centers. 

There's no shortage of these laughably absurd anecdotes, and NARAL is now hoping to shed light on the manipulative tactics and misinformation of crisis pregnancy centers through an unconventional advocacy event this week in Oakland: a comedy show.....

On April 16 at the New Parkway (474 24th St., Oakland), four comedians will speak out about crisis pregnancy centers as part of a comedy event NARAL is organizing called Stand Up for Choice. The show will feature Kurt Braunohler, a Los Angeles-based comedian and the event's headliner; Nato Green, a San Francisco-based comic and San Francisco Examiner columnist; Aparna Nancherla, a New York-based comic and former writer for W. Kamau Bell's show Totally Biased; and Eliza Skinner, an LA-based comic and Funny or Die writer. Their stand-up routines will touch on CPCs and other topics.....

A majority of the centers — some licensed as community clinics by the state, others unlicensed — referred to fetuses as "babies" and told the women they were "already a mother," NARAL reported.

NARAL’s next move will apparently be to make fun of baby showers and anyone who uses the term baby bump.



Bloomberg has an article where Congresswoman Renee Elmers signals she is in favor of a revised version of the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

Ellmers said the new version, as shown to her, would no longer require victims of rape to report the crime to law enforcement if they wish to have a late-term abortion under the law. She said the physician would have to know this was a pregnancy as a result of a rape.

A new study in Health Economics finds that making emergency contraception available over the counter hasn’t had the best results. 

Utilizing state-level variation in access to EBC, we find that providing individuals with over-the-counter access to EBC leads to increase STD rates and has no effect on abortion rates. Moreover, individual-level analysis using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth indicates that risky sexual behavior such as engaging in unprotected sex and number of sexual encounters increases as a result of over-the-counter access to EBC, which is consistent with the state-level STD findings.