The Indelible Bonobo Experience

When you perform late-term “abortions” by inducing labor, you get babies. Live, breathing, squirming babies. By 24 weeks, most babies born prematurely will survive if they receive appropriate medical care. But that was not what the Women’s Medical Society was about. Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered: he killed them. He didn’t call it that. He called it “ensuring fetal demise.” The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that “snipping.” Over the years, there were hundreds of “snippings.” Sometimes, if Gosnell was unavailable, the “snipping” was done by one of his fake doctors, or even by one of the administrative staff. But all the employees of the Women’s Medical Society knew. Everyone there acted as if it wasn’t murder at all. Most of these acts cannot be prosecuted, because Gosnell destroyed the files. Among the relatively few cases that could be specifically documented, one was Baby Boy A. His 17-year-old mother was almost 30 weeks pregnant — seven and a half months — when labor was induced. An employee estimated his birth weight as approaching six pounds. He was breathing and moving when Gosnell severed his spine and put the body in a plastic shoebox for disposal. The doctor joked that this baby was so big he could “walk me to the bus stop.” Another, Baby Boy B, whose body was found at the clinic frozen in a one-gallon spring-water bottle, was at least 28 weeks of gestational age when he was killed. Baby C was moving and breathing for 20 minutes before an assistant came in and cut the spinal cord, just the way she had seen Gosnell do it so many times. And these were not even the worst cases. (via Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic)

Poor hygiene and mistreatment of women and the desperation of women forced into such situations should be news. Other than that, I still support the right of a woman to dispose of her own body as she desires and have an abortion at any time in her pregnancy.

and thus, I started following vicemag :)

vicemag:

About My Abortion

Manifesto of the 343 was published in France in 1971, when abortion was still illegal. It was a confession of having had an abortion, something that made you liable for arrest, signed by 343 famous women. Among them were Catherine Deneuve and Marguerite Duras, Francoise Sagan, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jeanne Moreau. Nearly every cigarette-sucking French sex symbol admitted she had had the procedure. The newspapers called them “the 343 Sluts.” Leave it to the French to make abortion glamorous.

In 1974, abortion was legalized in France. The 343 sluts changed everything.

In America today, abortion is legal. But few famous women would add themselves to a similar list.

When some defenders of choice talk about abortion, they often focus on edge cases: rape victims, life-threatening pregnancies, or teens who don’t know how babies are made. That kind of dialogue sometimes makes it seem like abortion is reserved for “other” women. Women who aren’t like them. Which, despite all delusions of enlightenment, is exactly what I thought when at 20, I realized I had an embryo growing inside of me.

Then, just like that, the other was me. 

There are so many reasons why women need abortions. Those reasons are often wedded intractably to money. Some women have to abort longed-for pregnancies because of illness. Abortion is sometimes a trauma, sometimes an anticlimax, sometimes a relief. There are a million abortion stories just like there are a million stories of fucking and giving birth and going to war. None are representative. This is mine.

For me, whether or not I would have an abortion was never a question. It was just a question of how soon I could get one. I have never had maternal instincts. I was also broke. I was proud to have clawed my way to that elite station in life represented by having a room that no one walks through to on the way to the bathroom. I slept on a mattress on the floor, and worked as a naked model for amateur photographers—a job that, at the best of times, I often suspected would get me murdered. I was in school training to be an artist.

A baby meant the destruction of everything I might become. Being pregnant made me understand how and why women, pre-Roe v. Wade, stabbed knitting needles into their cervixes. Abstract debate meant nothing while I was throwing up every hour, just wanting to be how I had been before.

Continue

(via utnereader)

The couple had two frozen embryos left from in-vitro fertilization, and for a $22,000 (U.S.) fee, Kelley, a mother of two, would try to carry one of them to term. It worked: Kelley got pregnant. And then everything fell apart. At five months, an ultrasound revealed the fetus wasn’t developing properly; the baby had a cleft palate, a cyst in her brain and serious heart defects, CNN reports. Doctors told the parents and Kelley that the baby would need major surgeries after she was born, and even then had a 25 per cent chance of a “normal life.” (via CNN, Why this couple offered their surrogate $10,000 to abort their baby - The Globe and Mail)

• The biological parents wanted Kelley to have an abortion, and they had a contract in which she had agreed to this step if abnormalities were identified. But Kelley, saying she was opposed to abortion on moral and religious grounds, said she wanted the baby to have a chance, and she refused. Communication between Kelley and the couple collapsed. In the back and forth that happened next through third parties, the biological parents said they wouldn’t be the legal parents of the baby, and they were about to cut off her surrogacy support, which Kelley needed to take care of her own family. They offered Kelley $10,000 to have an abortion; in a “weak moment,” Kelley told CNN, she said to tell them she would do it for $15,000, and then changed her mind. She wouldn’t have the abortion under any terms.
• In Connecticut, the biological parents take legal precedence over the surrogate, so the couple then declared that they would take custody of the child and give her up to be a ward of the state. Kelley’s solution: have the baby in another state, where surrogacy contracts are not recognized.
• But as the CNN story points out, what about the decision Kelley made? Is she “a saint who fought at great personal sacrifice for an unborn child whose parents who didn’t want her to live?” Or, did she “recklessly abscond” with someone else’s child after legally agreeing to give them decision-making power over its future, and make a decision that wasn’t hers to make?