The picture says it all really.

A Christian Florida hate group used the picture on the left to describe a couple that was allowed to adopt a family member’s child they had been fostering. FFPC says it was a ‘mistake’.

More Here , Here and Here

Looky here..for a statement from the Dean of The Public School of Health.

Want to let them know you agree? Tell them thanks for having our backs? contact Tim Parsons at 410-955-7619 or at tmparson@jhsph.edu

For more info on this whole thing see below, or go here or here or here.

UPDATE (4.3.08 2:40 PST) From the Radical Reference site:

See this blog entry for an alternate search strategy:http://brassratgirl.livejournal.com/417175.html

…Here is the response from POPLINE’s Debra L. Dickson:

Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. This is the broader term to our ‘Abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding ‘unwanted w2 pregnancy’ in place of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy.

You can contact Ms. Dickson here: Debra L. Dickson

POPLINE Database Manager/AdministratorINFO Project    111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, MD 21202        ddickson@jhuccp.org   Tel: 410-659-6300 / Fax: 410-659-6266 

 —

Your tax dollars at work. Yesterday I saw a posting on the Progressive Librarian Guild list stating that the word ‘abortion’ was now a stop word* on POPLINE, a database of the “World’s reproductive health literature” This means that they will not find results when a person uses ‘abortion’ as a search term. Nothing will come up. Librarian Activist says that:”A librarian wrote to the POPLINE database providers to ask why a search strategy, probably involving the word abortion, retrieved fewer results than it did 3 months earlier. The response was:

‘Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.’  

Best for now? I don’t think so. Contact POPLINE here.Info about POPLINE from their site:

POPLINE(POPulation information onLINE), the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues. POPLINE is maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development. (USAID).

* A stop word is a word like ‘and’ which databases commonly ignore.

Last September I posted a story about an appeals process in motion in Missouri, fighting for the freedom to have access to abortions in prisons. As the Feministing article pointed out last year, somewhere between 30 to 50 women inmates in Missouri are pregnant any given time, so it isnt as if this is a service that doesnt need some attention pointed to it. So, this last Tuesday the appeals court voted unanmously to allow Missouri inmates access to abortions. The Dept of Corrections had previously stated that the cost and travel issues were the reason that abortions were not allowed for inmates, but it turns out that the overall cost per woman was @ $350 for fuel and to pay two guards.. Read the story at the Kansas City Star

Human Rights Watch has just released a study on the total denial of access to abortion in Nicaragua. One of only three countries that have a total ban on abortion even in cases of incest and rape (the other two are Chile & El Salvador, can anyone say Catholicism?) this ban is causing deaths even in instances where an a back room abortion has not been done, like in the case of miscarriage and hemmorrhaging.
Read The HRW report & reccomendations here.

Thanks to Feministing for the heads up.

Take That Ohio! (And thanks to Nate at Ars Technica)

States across the country are having trouble crafting laws to control digital content without running afoul of constitutional protections on speech. And it’s not just video games, though these laws have achieved the most notoriety. The state of Ohio this week found itself on the losing end of a judicial decision that struck down a state law banning all Internet transmission of content that is “harmful to minors” if the sender should know that someone on the receiving end is a minor.

Federal judge Walter Rice issued a permanent injunction against the law after pointing out the many ways that it could restrict legitimate speech between adults. The Supreme Court has already found that Internet users have reason to believe that there are minors present in every chat room, for instance; under the Ohio law, anything deemed obscene for minors that was uttered in a chat room could therefore possibly lead to prosecution.

The law was first passed in 2002 and immediately challenged by Media Coalition, a group of booksellers, newspapers, and providers of sexual health information. (more…)

From Feministing

In the ongoing legal battle over whether Missouri inmates have a right to access abortion services, an appeals court panel heard arguments this week as to whether the state is required to transport incarcerated women off-site to have an abortion.

As we’ve noted before Missouri usually has from 35 to 50 pregnant inmates in any given month and surveys of incarcerated women have shown that more than 83 percent have had a history of unplanned pregnancy.

RH Reality Check sums up nicely what’s at stake here:

For more than twenty years, courts have ruled that incarcerated women retain their abortion rights, and yet for all those twenty years, jails and prisons have continued to violate those rights. (more…)

From Ms. online Sept. 20, 2007

A federal appeals court ended former Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline’s quest to require health care providers and counselors to report all adolescent sexual activity, even kissing. Healthcare and counseling professionals, led by the Center for Reproductive Rights, challenged the constitutionality of the policy, and in 2006 a US district judge blocked its enforcement, ruling that it violated teens’ right to privacy. Undeterred, Kline appealed. But the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit dismissed the appeal this week on the grounds that the state’s new sexual abuse reporting law instituted in January made the case moot because it does not require reporting all adolescent sexual contact.

The “kiss and tell” policy was “part of a trend by the anti-choice movement to use child-abuse reporting laws to scare adolescents away from reproductive health care,” according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. In 2003, as part of his crusade against abortion, Kline issued an interpretation of the state’s child abuse reporting law, claiming that it required abortion clinics to report teen pregnancies as evidence of criminal sexual abuse. He then extended the “kiss and tell” policy to require other health care professionals, teachers, and others to report any evidence of underage sexual activity, the Wichita Eagle reports. During his time as Attorney General, Kline became notorious for bringing charges against Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, which the Kansas Supreme Court dismissed.

“This is a great result for teenagers in Kansas, and for all those who care about protecting teen’s health and well-being,” said Bonnie Scott Jones, the lead trial attorney in the case. “Reporting suspected child abuse is one thing. But reporting all intimate conduct between adolescents simply drives a wedge between those young people and the professionals who are there to help them.”

Media Resources: The Wichita Eagle 9/19/07, 6/19/03; Center for Reproductive Rights Press Release 9/18/07; Feminist Daily News Wire 2/15/07

Massachusetts teenager Amber Abreu was recently held for 3 nights in the state’s maximum-security prison for women while her family raised $15,000 for bail, an amount inconceivable to a young woman whose Dominican street remedy for ending an unwanted pregnancy collided with American ambivalence about abortion.

The inner-city resident was arrested on the archaic-sounding charge of “procuring miscarriage” for the death of her 1 1/4-pound baby girl four days after birth. Amber knew abortion was legal in the US, but when a safe and legal one proved inaccessible she made the desperate choice of turning to a cheap home remedy commonplace in the Dominican Republic: she swallowed pills marketed to prevent ulcers but known to induce abortion. The failure of her self-induced abortion means she may now face possible manslaughter charges.

This tragedy is less a measure of one teenager’s bad choices than it is an indictment of a culture that tells all women abortion is their legal, constitutionally protected right, but tolerates a lack of access for the neediest women. A well-heeled suburban 18-year-old who chooses to terminate a pregnancy need only write a check.

read more at the Boston Globe

The FDA review process for Plan B emergency contraceptive was found to be mired in political and ideological dogma divorced from accepted science in rejecting the recommendations of both FDA officials and an advisory committee, deferring the final decision to upper managers and failing to properly document the review and decision-making timeline.
(more…)