meta-roj

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Monday, May 2, 2005

let’s talk about abortion and the culture of life

since two little items came through my sphere of awareness, let’s go ahead and put them together.

item, the first:

A pregnant 13-year-old has been blocked from having an abortion after state authorities in Florida won an emergency injunction against her, arguing that she was too immature to make such a decision.

“It would make no sense to have the baby,” said LG, who became pregnant after running away from her care home in January. “I’m 13, I’m in a shelter and I can’t get a job.”

sense, in this case, is not relevant to policy or law. apparently, the child in question (the mother) is a ward of the state, and her legal guardian, the state of florida, cannot consent to an abortion.

item, the second,

It was futile to keep on wishing that the baby would disappear, so Anne decided to take fate into her own hands and a kitchen knife to her belly.

The teen-age schoolgirl was rushed to a Kenyan hospital, her stomach a mess of stab wounds.

Surgeons struggled to patch up her shredded uterus and stem the bleeding, but Anne died on the operating table — another statistic in Kenya where up to 2,000 women die every year because of complications arising from botched abortions.

welcome to kenya, florida.

The picture is amplified across sub-Saharan Africa where 30,000 women die each year from unsafe abortions, and millions more suffer life-long problems.

For every death, 20-30 women suffer permanent damage to their uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, intestines or bladder.

this is not my culture.

update: there’s another story that managed to escape my attention. fortunately, there’s a lot of attention available on this internet, and ann bartow has it at sivacracy:

“Flores resorted to an abortion using illegal drugs sent to her from Mexico and wound up in jail for four months under a rarely used state law that makes it a crime for a woman to perform an abortion on herself.

update (2005.05.03): Fla. Judge OKs Abortion for 13-Year-Old and Florida ends fight against abortion for 13-yr-old.

posted by roj at 12:31 am