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:
Florida judge blocks abortion for 13-year-old [news.telegraph, 2005.05.01)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,
Kenyan Women Take Risks with Backstreet Abortions [reuters, 2005.04.29]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.
Kenyan Women Take Risks with Backstreet Abortions [reuters, 2005.04.29]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.