White House blasts 'radical' Republican abortion bans

The White House on Friday blasted the latest set of "radical" abortion restrictions in four more states run by Republicans, signaling President Joe Biden's determination to lean on the issue ahead of tight November congressional elections.

There are now full-scale abortion bans in 12 Republican-controlled states, which had prepared so-called trigger laws ready to be activated when the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision ensuring automatic rights to abortion access nationwide.

"Today marks the latest attack against the fundamental rights of Americans as new abortion bans go into effect in Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas," Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

"These near-total abortion bans are part of a growing effort by Republican legislators to roll back the freedoms Americans have relied on for nearly half a century. Today's radical steps take away women's reproductive rights and put personal health care decisions in the hands of politicians instead of women and their doctors," she said.

The Supreme Court ruling two months ago put jurisdiction over abortion access in the hands of individual state legislatures, immediately turning swaths of the country into areas where getting the procedure has become all but impossible.

Jean-Pierre echoed Biden's frequent demand for Congress to pass a new law enshrining nationwide abortion rights and urged "people across the country to make their voices heard" ahead of the November midterm elections, which will decide whether Democrats retain their narrow hold on the legislature.

Republicans have fought for decades to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and finally achieved their goal in a Supreme Court that tilted sharply to conservative interpretations of the constitution after Donald Trump filled three vacancies during his one-term presidency.

Polls show the court's ruling was unpopular with a majority of Americans, however, and Democrats hope the issue will help them fend off a previously predicted sweep by Republicans in the midterms. 

"I think the American people realize this is just beyond the pale, it goes too far," Biden told reporters at the White House.

Meanwhile, the White House is trying to help women who want to circumvent the bans by supporting their travel to states that do allow abortions.

The health department on Friday announced increased federal funding for states where the authorities want to help such women.

"We have seen the gut-wrenching stories of women suffering and not getting the care they need because of newly-enacted laws that restrict abortion care," Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said.

The new federal assistance will "protect women's access to reproductive care, including abortion," he said.

Agence France-Presse

Trump says 'Pro-Life' but favors exceptions for rape, incest

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump on Saturday declared himself "strongly Pro-Life" but in favor of exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, after several US states passed tough new restrictions on abortions.

The US president spelled out his position on abortion, set to be a hot-button issue at next year's election, days after Alabama's governor signed the country's most restrictive law — enacting a near-total prohibition even in cases of rape and incest.

"As most people know, and for those who would like to know, I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions — Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother — the same position taken by Ronald Reagan," tweeted Trump.

Trump, a bombastic, twice-divorced billionaire, won over the evangelical vote during his 2016 campaign by promising to appoint anti-abortion justices at the Supreme Court.

He has since brought two conservative appointees to the highest court in the land — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — shifting the balance of the nine-person bench.

American evangelicals now have high hopes that the court will chip away at its historic 1973 US decision to legalize abortion.

In addition to Alabama, the Missouri legislature this week made abortions illegal from eight weeks of pregnancy.

Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa and North Dakota have enacted laws banning abortion from the moment a fetal heartbeat is detected.

The bans are expected to be blocked in court, but supporters plan to appeal such decisions until they reach the Supreme Court, in hopes this will lead to the long-sought conservative goal of overturning the abortion ruling, known as Roe v Wade.

Roe v Wade guarantees women's rights to abortion as long as the fetus is not viable

source: philstar.com

US abortion rates plummet with free birth control

CHICAGO - Providing free birth control to women and teens in Missouri at high risk of unplanned pregnancies led to a drastic drop in abortion rates and teenage mothers, a study published Thursday found.

If the same results were replicated across the United States, free birth control could prevent 1,060,370 unplanned pregnancies and 873,250 abortions a year.

"The impact of providing no-cost birth control was far greater than we expected in terms of unintended pregnancies," said lead author Jeff Peipert of the Washington University School of Medicine.

A lack of access to reliable birth control is a major factor behind the three million unplanned pregnancies in the United States every year.

Previous studies have found that 49 percent of US pregnancies are unintended. Half result from a failure to use birth control while the other half are due to inconsistent or incorrect use of birth control and contraceptive failure.

President Barack Obama's landmark health reform expanded access by requiring insurance companies to eliminate 'co-pays' on birth control and other health services beginning in August.

But millions of women without insurance still have to pay for their birth control out of pocket.

The Contraceptive CHOICE Project, which was funded by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, provided counseling and free birth control to 9,256 teenage girls and women in the St. Louis area from 2007 until 2011.

Abortion rates among those women were less than half the regional and national averages: just six per 1,000 participants compared with 20 per 1,000 women nationwide.

The rate of teenage birth among study participants was just 6.3 per 1,000 compared to 34.1 per 1,000 teenagers nationwide.

One reason for the significant improvement is because 75 percent of the women chose to use long-acting methods such as implants and intrauterine devices (IUDs), Peipert said.

These methods are more than 20 times more effective than birth control pills, patches or rings but have a significantly higher up-front cost.

Some doctors are also "overly restrictive," Peipert said, and will not provide IUDs or implants to young women or women who plan to have children at a later date.

The study found women who chose the long acting methods were happier and much more likely to stick with them.

Some 85 percent of the women who chose long acting methods were still using them a year later, while only 55 percent of the study participants who chose birth control pills did so.

"Contraception only works when you keep using it," Peipert told AFP. "There are gaps in people's contraceptive use and that's when they get pregnant."

Expanding the program to provide free birth control nationwide would be costly, but Peipert said it would cost far less than dealing with the consequences.

"We're already paying for unintended pregnancies," he said, noting that US taxpayers pay about $11 billion in costs associated with one million unplanned births every year.

The study was published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

It comes a couple weeks after the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued new guidelines recommending that doctors offer implants and IUDs to sexually active teenagers.

"These long-acting methods eliminate the problem of inconsistent use common with other contraceptives that can lead to unintended pregnancy," the college said, noting that complications from IUDs and implants are rare.

source: interaksyon.com

Sen. Pia spells it out for RH critics: 'Abortion is a crime'

MANILA, Philippines - To accommodate Senate Majority Floor Leader Vicente Sotto III's misgivings about the Reproductive Health (RH) bill, Senator Pia Cayetano on Thursday amended the bill to include a specific provision that declares that abortion is a crime.

“To put the issue to rest and allay fears that the RH bill will promote abortion,” the sponsor of the bill introduced subsection (j) in Section 3: “Abortion is a criminal act in accordance with existing laws.”

The line came along with 12 other amendments introduced by Cayetano.

Cayetano's list of amendments followed on the heels of an earlier set of suggestions from Sen. Ralph Recto, who interpellated Sotto after the last part of his turno en contra speech Wednesday night. Among others, Recto wanted amended the penal provisions on LGU chiefs deemed "violators," noting that local governments already have a grave financial burden in terms of basic health care, without having to worry about the new fiscal impositions from enforcing the RH bill, let alone jail terms. Recto's wife, Vilma Santos, is governor Batangas province.

Addressing concerns that the bill promotes population control, especially of the poor, Cayetano renamed the bill from “An act providing for a national policy on reproductive health and population and development” to “An act providing for a national policy on reproductive health and responsible parenthood.”

In response to Sotto’s opposition of having contraceptives categorized as “essential medicines,” Cayetano deleted the objected phrase and introduced the concept of the Philippine National Drug Formulary System. The title of Section 9 thus now reads: The Philippine National Drug Formulary System (PNDFS) and Family Planning Supplies. The list of contraceptives in the section were not removed but the tasks of PNDFS was defined to include “selecting drugs, including family planning supplies, that will be included or removed from the essential drugs list (EDL) in accordance with existing practice.”

On the issue of public awareness, which is now Section 15 (previously Section 16) of the bill, Cayetano expanded its coverage to include maternal health and nutrition, as well as “family planning information and services, adolescent and youth reproductive health, guidance and counseling and other elements of reproductive health case under Section 4 (o).” It also specifies periodic review of material for public dissemination.

Cayetano also changed the title of Section 6, from Provision of Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care to Health Care Facilities, and ensured healthcare service to isolated and depressed areas with the addition of the phrase “through house-to-house visits or mobile health care clinics as needed.”

To reflect that Filipinos are kind and empathetic, and that Filipino tradition tend to “reach out and extend genuine care and concern for our countrymen in need, (and) more so for women who are pregnant and in need of special care,” Cayetano re-introduced subsection (l) in Section 3: “All complications arising from pregnancy, labor, and delivery shall be treated in a humane and compassionate manner.”

Cayetano also deleted the entire subsection (i) of Section 4 (The definition of terms) defining an “indigent.”

The other amendments concerned minor changes like the year, NGOs instead of non-government organizations, and punctuation marks.

source: interaksyon.com