Happy Valentine’s Day

On Valentine’s Day, us winning a little, losing a little.

First, Sara Robinson at Alternet discusses the positive impact of the growing trend towards medical, as opposed to surgical, abortions.

Increasingly, women seeking an abortion are bypassing the clinic entirely. Instead, they’re showing up for regular appointments, on all days of the week, at doctors’ offices all over town. Which makes it hard on the berzerkers: After all, there’s no legitimate way of knowing which doctors are in the abortion business now, or why any individual woman is seeing any given doctor on any given day. Our culture has strong, long-standing customs protecting discussions between doctors and patients, and as abortion increasingly slips behind that wall, that decision is finally ending up exactly where we’ve always argued it should be — as a private matter between a woman and her doctor.

Now, from Italy, where abortion is becoming a hot issue in the upcoming general election, a WTF story:

Police entered a hospital in Naples, interrogated a woman who had just had her pregnancy terminated, and impounded her aborted foetus after a tip-off from a caller who claimed she was having the abortion outside the legal time limits.

. . .

In fact, as doctors later confirmed, her pregnancy was terminated in its 21st week, which was within the period allowed by Italy’s 1978 abortion act. The doctors also said that tests had shown the foetus had grave abnormalities.

And finally, from the great state of Texas, a chilling story of the effect of so-called fetal protection laws, such as the one proposed by a Conservative fetus-fetishizing MP in a private member’s bill:

Texas’ highest criminal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a state law that allows prosecution for causing the death of an unborn child, affirming a conviction in the case of a 16-year-old whose belly was stomped so she would miscarry twins.

It was the second time in the past four months that the Court of Criminal Appeal has upheld the fetal protection law, which covers deaths aside from legal abortions.

The case in Lufkin was notable because of the girl’s testimony that she was a willing accomplice who beat herself in the stomach and asked to be stomped to induce the miscarriage.

And don’t forget that Texas is an enthusiatic proponent of the death penalty.

Happy Valentine’s Day from the Vicious Abortion Crusaders at Birth Pangs.

P.S. If you haven’t already done so, go here to sign a petition opposing the imposition of a ‘fetal protection law’ here in Canada.

P.P.S. We at Birth Pangs apologize for yet another unfunny post.