1. How many years do you consider to be a fair prison term for a woman who has an abortion?

2. How many years for a doctor who performs one?

3. Will the punishments be greater the second time around?

4. Where will the state get the money necessary to prosecute one-third of all American women for this crime?

5. Forty-two percent of women who have an abortion have incomes below 100 percent of the federal poverty level (that’s $10,830 for a single woman with no children, if you’re counting). When women are forced to have children they cannot afford to raise, will those children become wards of the state or simply new Medicaid recipients? Where will the state find the money necessary to support them?

6. Will you be willing to watch your wife die in front of you when her life is threatened by an unsafe pregnancy that no one is allowed to do anything about? Your daughter?

7. Will rapists have to pay child support to women who are forced to have their children?

8. Will the child of incest be in the custody of its rapist father or the father’s teenaged daughter, his mother? In fact, 18 percent of women who have an abortion in America are teenagers. Will they be required to drop out of high school to raise their children or will the state provide free childcare?

9. Will upper-class white women be prosecuted as vigorously as other women who have abortions?

10. You are aware that upper-class white women have abortions, aren’t you?

If you could add questions to this list, what would they be?

Here are a few of mine, that relate to one of my biggest beefs about anti-abortion laws in the first place:

11.  Would you agree that not everyone agrees on the answer to the question of when human life begins?

12 Would you also agree that how one answers this question stems from a matter of one’s faith, ultimately making it a moral issue?

13. How does wanting laws related to this faith-based, moral issue Not violate one of the founding cornerstones of our democracy–the separation of church and state?

Not only will there be huge social costs if abortion is ever made illegal, but to me, what people believe on this issue is so tied to their personal, moral and religious (and non-religious, e.g., atheist or agnostic) beliefs, that it should remain a matter of individual privacy.

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When Gillard was campaigning for Prime Minister, she got serious flack for being  “deliberately barren.” In this show, her sex life has been “fair game for satire”, as she is seen as having a “nooner” or the like, in her office during the work day.

I can’t help but think–would we see an episode like this if the Prime Minister (real and character) was a man? Maybe.  But what if Gillard was a mother and her character on the show was then a mother–would we see a segment like this? I would wager the answer is no.

I bet Larissa Behrendt, writer and professor of law at the University of Technology, Sydney, would agree.  In her piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, she writes that the portrayal of Gillard’s sex life “joins a list of cheap shots with a misogynistic overtone in political debate or satire.”

She refers to real life examples in addition to Senator Bill Heffernan describing her as “deliberately barren,” such as “the disgraceful slogans at the anti-carbon tax rally that referred to Gillard as a witch and ‘Bob Brown’s bitch’ ” (would a mother be called either of these things? ugh-no) and  Senator George Brandis calling her “one dimensional,” not so indirectly implying that because she does not have children she must not understand the problems of teenage girls and their parents.

Behrendt makes a great point that, “Of all the assumptions heaped on women in public life, none seems more intrusive or arrogant than these-”These” meaning her sex life and her reproductive life.

Now if Gillard was a mom, on this kind of a show there would still be satire, but would it go after motherhood and or her sex life in this way? I don’t think so. In real life Gillard continues to take heat for not being a mother, and the array of less than positive connotations seem to be bleeding through to supposed satirical comedy on television.

The good news: Viewers don’t seem to be amused. The show has been a fall in ratings and rise in complaints.  The bad news: more people seem to be upset by the “misuse” of the Australian flag than disrespect shown to Prime Minister Gillard.

Heavy sigh.

Do you think we would have seen a segment like this if Gillard was a mother? Why or why not?

It lays out a provocative theory about this problem and how to solve it:

The documentary’s educational premise revolves around the idea that ”Overpopulation is merely a symptom of an even larger problem – a “domination system” that for most of human history has glorified the domination of man over nature, man over child and man over woman. To break this pattern, the film demonstrates that we must change our conquering mindset into a nurturing one. And the first step is to raise the status of women worldwide.”

This premise sure seems to advocate taking on the social organization that has dominated just about every global society for hundreds of years - patriarchy.  That is one tall order. However, efforts to try and raise the status of women globally is a way to begin to chink away at the patriarchal armor.

The theories of Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, parallel the idea of raising women’s status to deal with the world’s escalating population– he advocates that ”only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth.”

And part of raising living standards is access to education.  As the documentary indicates, when women have more education, they have fewer children. In conjunction with education in general, other experts say that contraceptive education and access in poorer countries is they key to curbing the rapidly growing global population.

According to a recent United Nations report, the world’s population forecast is just above 9 billion by the year 2050. With numbers like this, I don’t see how anyone can believe there isn’t a population problem.

Hania Zlotnik, director of the U.N.’s population division, has indicated that to solve this problem, the world’s fastest-growing countries, and the wealthy Western nations that help to finance their development, “face a choice about whether to renew their emphasis on programs that encourage family planning” (I am sure StopAtTwo’s John Taves would advocate including the “stop at two” rule be part of these programs!).

Celia Dugger and Justin Gillis of the New York Times write that these programs were a major focus of development policy in the 1970s and 1980s, but they have since stagnated in many countries, because they have gotten ”caught up in ideological battles over abortion, sex education and the role of women in society.”

Seems this new documentary is an effort to educate society that it’s high time to move past ideological battles and have the wherewith-all to begin to take on the even larger “domination problem.” 

What do you think? Is this the strategy, and if so, is it globally possible to shift away from a “man domination” model?

How does it work? What are the pros? What issues does it raise? Check it out.

How it works

A woman can spend about $15,000 to be injected with hormones to stimulate the release of lots of eggs. The eggs are frozen with a flash-freezing process called vitrification, then put in a cryogenic vat until she wants to use them. When she does, she will go through the IVF process, but with younger eggs, thus enhancing the chances of getting pregnant.  

And it seems the odds are good. Recent studies indicate that the “birthrate in IVF procedure using frozen eggs extracted from women under the age of 36 is now close to 50 percent—comparable to  ‘fresh eggs’ from women that age.”

Pros

More women are waiting longer to start having kids, which often creates fertility problems. At age 40, more than half will not be able to conceive without help, and by 44 even with IVF, only about 5% end up being able to conceive. In a word, the eggs just get old. 

But freezing the eggs keeps them young, and when you use them in the IVF process, it creates better odds of conceiving.

The Issues

Some doctors worry that it may give women too much of a false sense of security.  It may take more than one hormone injecting cycle to produce enough eggs to be “reasonably sure” of a single pregnancy. And even when the woman uses them down the road, there is no guarantee they will be able to make viable embryos.

Say a woman chooses to freeze her eggs in her 20s, then goes to use them in her 40s. According to reproductive endocrinologist Samantha Pfeifer M.D., to date there is “no data on how long eggs can be frozen.”  Only preliminary studies indicate the eggs may last ten years.

But the biggest issue goes to a larger question.  If a woman has her younger eggs, and her uterus is able, she could start to have children not just in her 40s, but in her 50s. It’s also possible with hormone treatments that uteruses can be ready to carry a child even in postmenopausal women, so the age could be even higher—into a woman’s 60s!

Egg freezing making women able to have biological children at advanced ages begs the question: At what age does it become irresponsible to try and become a mother? Or said another way-How old is too old to become a mother? At what age is it “too late” when you think of the child first? A child, that could have, say a 65 year old mother at the age of 12?

Egg freezing may help women have better chances of conceiving if they wait until they are older to have children, but at what point is it a selfish act, one that will truly not be in the best interest of the child?

Egg freezing could take us into new realms of craziness when it comes to the lengths women will go to have their own biological children. And those kids’ lives could look crazy too, like having to tend to aged parents in high school, or finding a way to pay for nursing home care before they graduate college. 

How far will a pronatal society let “fertility preservation” go??

*first by Laura on technorati

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Not only does the House want to go after all funding for Planned Parenthood even though by law no government funds can be used for abortions services already, but… some state lawmakers are introducing some scary bills when it comes to women retaining control of their reproductive lives.

Take South Dakota. In March Governor Daugaard signed a law requiring women to have “dissuasive” counseling and have to wait three days before they can have an abortion—the longest of any state law. In Arizona, the Senate passed a bill that forbids a doctor to perform an abortion based on the race or sex of the fetus (several other states have similar bills). And in Florida, before a woman can have an abortion she’d have to have an ultrasound, and in some states with similar proposed bills, would also require her to look at the ultrasound before she had the abortion.

Other states want to go further when it comes to forcing a pro-life agenda onto women. Ohio has proposed a bill that would prohibit abortion if there was a detectable fetal heartbeat. And Georgia wants to make “prenatal murder” a felony punishable under homicide law.  Many legal experts believe if this kind of bill passes, it will open up a can of worms for making miscarriage a crime. 

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is proud to have passed six pro-life bills already and claims Mississippi is “the safest state in America for an unborn child.”  What he doesn’t say is that it is the unsafest state for a child once it is out of the womb: the state has the highest mortality rate for children. As Jon Stewart recently said, Mississippi can say it is the “proud home of the biggest discrepancy between pre and post natal health.”

Post natal problems aside, what’s scariest about these kinds of proposed bills? If states are successful in making it harder and harder for women to make what is a private, personal decision on their own terms, in effect it means that the pro-life agenda is in legal operation even with the existence of Roe v Wade. And more state laws like these will strengthen the pro-life agenda to ultimately go after Roe v Wade itself.

I know I have made my position clear here before but these kinds of bills deserve pause.  Why should the pro-choice position remain the legal position? Because it recognizes that our beliefs about when life begins is extremely personal, and is based on moral and religious beliefs for many people. For this reason alone, the political sphere attempting to control what is ultimately a religious belief violates the separation of church and state, and when you look at it this way, lawmakers really have no business trying to force these kinds of laws. The pro-choice position also allows each person to make the decisions about their reproductive lives themselves, as it is very personal, and should not be controlled by anyone but whose life it involves.

Why do conservative law makers insist on pushing their beliefs and butting into people’s personal lives? Because they are resolute that they are right. Like having to go to the mat about being about whose God is the “right” God, doing whatever it takes to be right about abortion will only divide us more than we already are, and lead to even more adamant fights on based on  moral righteousness. In this case, one side’s moral righteousness aims to control the lives of all women, and I for one will never accept that.