Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

A SIGNIFICANT MAJORITY of Irish people want abortion legalised in cases of rape and fatal foetal abnormality but there is far less appetite for legalised abortion in all cases.

An IPSOS/MRBI poll published in today’s Irish Times quizzed people on their views on the Eighth Amendment ahead of the first meeting of the Citizens’ Assembly next week.

The assembly is due to consider a number of constitutional matters including the Eighth Amendment, which provides constitutional protection to the unborn.

Asked in the poll whether they supported a repeal of the Eighth Amendment, 55% were in favour of repeal in cases of rape and fatal foetal abnormality, 19% were in favour in all cases when requested by the woman (similar to the UK) and 18% were not in favour of a repeal.

Just 8% of people had no opinion on the issue.

The poll suggests that the vast majority of Irish people (74%) want Ireland’s abortion regime changed in some way.

The poll also found that men and women feel largely the same on the issue with women marginally more likely to favour keeping the Eighth Amendment.

In terms of political party allegiance, supporters of Fianna Fáil are the most likely (27%) to favour keeping the status quo.

Between 18-19% of supporters of the other three main parties, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and Labour, also want to keep the Eighth Amendment.

http://www.thejournal.ie/abortion-poll-3014214-Oct2016/

Source: The Journal

France has passed a sweeping gender equality lawthat eases current restrictions on abortion, encourages paternity leave and promotes gender parity at home and in the workplace.

Under the new law passed on Tuesday, women can obtain an abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy without any need to cite a reason. This amends France’s current law, passed in 1975, that gave women the legal right to terminate a pregnancy only if they were in a situation of “distress.” The new law also bans any attempt to prevent women from obtaining information about abortion services.

“At a time when women in many parts of the world, including in the United States and Spain, are seeing their rights restricted, violated, and disrespected, France has set an important example for the rest of the globe with its progressive stance toward reproductive health care,” Lilian Sepulveda, director of the Global Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement.

“Ensuring a woman’s right to control her fertility is fundamental to achieving gender equality. But passing today’s law is just the first step – we now look to French policymakers to ensure women see the benefits of this historic law implemented this year.”

In 2013, France adopted legislation requiring the government to pay for all legal abortions as well as contraception for adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 18.

The new law also addresses equality in the workplace, promotes paternity leave and the sharing of domestic duties at home, and provides measures to support women vulnerable to domestic abuse and poverty, according to a bulletin from Marie Claire.

Source: Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-women-idUSKBN0G61OO20140806

On Friday, a video was leaked to David Fahrenthold at the WashingtonPost, revealing Donald Trump crudely bragging of nonconsensual sexual advances on women. On Saturday, in a sudden and dramatic cleaving of the Republican Party, leaders including Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, condemned Trump’s behavior, while others withdrew their endorsements and called on him to leave the race.

The grisly culmination came on Sunday night, with a stomach-turning press conference in which Trump presented Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and other women with complaints about Hillary Clinton related mostly to her husband’s sexual behavior, and then a debate at which Trump sniffed and paced his way around a stage angrily. He shut down a woman who asked about Islamophobia with a curt answer decrying “political correctness” and glowered at Hillary, unable to hide his loathing for the woman who is, as of now, beating him, a woman he referred to during the debate as the “devil” and whom he threatened to jail if he wins the presidency.

As for the video itself, Trump stuck with his talking point that there is nothing unusual in his language about women, emphasizing it as just “locker-room talk” — part of an ordinary, shared male view of women as sexual prey. After the debate, his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tried to bolster this argument by telling Chris Matthews that when she was “younger and prettier,” some Republicans “on the list of people who won’t support Donald Trump because they all ride around on a high horse” were the same people “rubbing up against girls, sticking their tongues down women’s throats … uninvited.” This followed an apparent threat Trump had made earlier on Twitter, to the “many self-righteous hypocrites” abandoning his campaign. If Donald Trump is going down, he seems determined to do so in a blaze of revelation, in which he forever ties his own outsize loutishness to the everyday misogyny of members of the party that nominated him. That may be the one public service he performs in this election.

Saturday’s yowls of disapproval from Republicans reeked of disingenuity and desperation. Yes, the tape on which Trump is caught joking about grabbing women by the pussy seems to describe acts of sexual assault, but the language is not so far off from the scads of examples of Trump’s disparagement of women that everyone in his party has already heard. In Howard Stern appearances and interviews on television and in magazines, Trump has repeatedly and energetically referred to women as pigs and dogs and pieces of ass, has rated them on a scale of one to ten, described those who breastfeed and pee and gain weight as “disgusting,” bragged about not changing diapers, and suggested that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.”

The worldview that Trump has affirmed over and over and over again, during decades in the public eye, is one in which women are show horses, sexual trophies, and baby machines, and, therefore, their agency, consent, and participation don’t matter. Misogyny isn’t always contained within or proven by a single instance of crowing about nonconsensual kissing; it’s communicated via a far larger web of attitudes about women as subsidiary objects, as having solely erotic or aesthetic value, as existing only in relationship to men. How can anyone be shocked that a man who calls women pieces of ass also talks about grabbing them by the pussy?

Republicans are not shocked; they’re scared. Donald Trump is losing and they are beginning to understand that his loss is going to expose them, not simply to partisan defeat, but as a party that has been covert in its cohesion around the very biases that he makes coarse and plain.

Trump’s attitudes about women are not different from the attitudes that have been supported by the contemporary Republican Party via their legislative agenda. Many of the very politicians who led the stampede away from Trump this weekend — from House Speaker Paul Ryan and Utah representative Jason Chaffetz to former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence — have dedicated themselves in recent years to shutting down Planned Parenthood, thus preventing women from controlling their own reproduction. The 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who said he was “offended [and] dismayed” by the Trump tape, vetoed a Massachusetts bill that would have provided rape victims access to emergency contraception, told college students to hetero-marry early and opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. These are politicians who regularly vote against the Paycheck Fairness Act and oppose paid-family-leave legislation and the raising of the minimum wage that would make millions of women more economically stable. Chaffetz voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, while Pence, Ryan, and Chaffetz co-sponsored a bill that would have limited the definition of rape to include only “forcible” assaults; Pence signed an Indiana law that requires funerals or cremations for fetuses, tried to ban women from aborting because of fetal genetic abnormalities, suggested that legalizing gay marriage would lead to “societal collapse,” and in 1997 wrote a letter to the Indianapolis Stardecrying the harm done to children when mothers go to work and rely on day care.

Which is worse: Threatening to grab someone by the pussy or forcing someone to carry and give birth to a baby that is the result of rape? Which is worse: Popping a Tic Tac in preparation for forced extramarital kissing with a stranger or actively discouraging women’s full participation in the workforce? The answer is: None of these is worse; they are all of a kind. The view of women as yours to control via political power, star power, or simply patriarchal power, is what Republicans — not just Trump, but lots of Republicans — have been doing for years as they work to reduce reproductive-rights access and reinstall women in early marriage and traditional hetero homes where their competitive, independent, threatening power might be better contained.

In other words, the party’s policies are built on the same frame that Trump’s words and personal actions are: a fundamental lack of recognition of women as full human beings. If you doubt it, look no further than the words these guys used in their theatrical disavowals of Trump this weekend. “Women are to be championed and revered,” said Ryan, making women sound like quailing damsels or icy goddesses, but not actual humans. Mitch McConnell expressed his disapproval as “the father of three daughters,” while Pence said in a statement that he was offended “as a husband and a father” and Romney railed that Trump’s comments “demean our wives and daughters.” Here is their apprehension of women: They are discernible as worthy of respect only as extensions of male identity — as wives, daughters, their recognizable subsidiaries. Has none of these men ever had a female colleague or friend on whose behalf they might reasonably be offended? Are they not moved by the treatment of women even with whom they have had no personal interaction?

It is perhaps telling that this is the moment at which party leaders finally found it in themselves to scamper away from Trump. Somehow, the disapproving ire of his Republican allies wasn’t so harsh when Trump was building his political career on the fundamentally racist lie of Obama birtherism, or threatening to ban Muslims, or calling Mexicans rapists, or describing immigrants as especially criminal, or even when he went on a tear about the weight gain of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. At Slate, Jamelle Bouie argues that the pussy tape was the final straw because its object was a Republican constituency, white women, and that Republican tolerance for Trump until now has made clear how easily the party could, and to some degree already has, become a home for white nationalism.

Bouie’s conclusion about white nationalism is surely correct, but it’s also true that this is no moralistic, or strategic, line in the sand that Trump just crossed. He’s been directing a share of his ire at white women — including conservative favorite Megyn Kelly — from the start without getting this much blowback. No one in the Republican Party seems to have balked at the fact that Trump reportedly has been advised in his presidential bid by Roger Ailes, a man recently forced to step down from Fox News after being accused of the serial sexual harassment of dozens of white conservative women.

Of course that’s because Ailes and his powerful network helped to create, support, and empower the contemporary Republican Party and also Donald Trump. Republicans are not separate from Trump, and he is not distinct from Republican nature or motivation; he is its slightly more unruly twin. At the debate on Sunday, two days after being revealed talking about grabbing pussies, he claimed that “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.” And there it was: the giant Republican lie about an interest in gender equality exposed as pure snake oil by their front man.

Most disturbing, the voters in his base don’t seem to care. Trump’s voters, some of whom wear “Trump that Bitch!” and “Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica!” T-shirts, some of whom shout racist epithets about Barack Obama and Muslims and Mexicans, and some of whom march in parades withHillary-in-a-coffin floats, still like Donald Trump. Paul Ryan, who after months of tacitly endorsing Trump’s racism and sexism by failing to truly distance himself from it, at last made an aggressive move by disinviting Trump from a Wisconsin rally where they were to appear together. Ryan — the good-looking, purportedly reasonable Republican we are regularly told would be the salvation of the Republican Party if only he were the nominee instead of Donald Trump — was heckled by the crowd, some of whom shouted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Republicans’ efforts to disentangle themselves from the monster they created have revealed a base that is deeply invested in that monster.

And what of Hillary Clinton? As of Friday afternoon, before the tape was published, the first woman who’s ever gotten this close to the presidency was back up to a five-point lead in averaged national polls — and was predicted even by Eeyorish Nate Silver to have an 80 percent chance of electoral victory. Before the weekend was out, she would wind up on a stage in St. Louis, speaking in the careful, controlled tone of a woman who does not want to provoke the restless, snorting man looming menacingly over her shoulder, while enduring the embarrassment of her husband’s accusers looking down on her from the stands.

Her victory, if indeed she wins, will be attributed to Trump’s flameout. Little thought will be given to the horror of being a woman who, on her way to the White House, was forced to publicly confront the specter of her husband’s alleged sexual misdeeds. That’s not just about Trump. It’s about a country in which the first women to gain political offices have been the kind we can discern as valuable — wives and daughters, extensions of the men who have held those offices first, men who have had outsize power over women — making the very fraught circumstances of Clinton’s perch a grim historical inevitability. Her circumstances on Sunday night were an almost grotesque manifestation of the forces that have, until now, left us with 43 male presidents, 42 of them white.

The press conference Trump held before the debate was soul-scorching, a cartoonish vision of what it means, in the mind of a misogynist and his vindictive fans, to punish the woman who’s beating you: by sexualizing her, humiliating her. It wasn’t even the coherent feminist argument we’d been promised — Trump laying out some of the more plausible claims of assault that have been lodged against Bill Clinton and holding Hillary to feminist account for having stood by her husband. That complaint would require a comprehension of feminist thinking on these very thorny matters, an ability to parse sexual and political power dynamics within marriage and between women. Donald Trump has never spent a millisecond entertaining feminist thinking; he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the women he invited in front of cameras on Sunday night. He’s been on record in the past calling Clinton’s accusers “terrible people” and “an unattractive bunch.” And so Trump lodged no cogent critique; he simply tried to imply that if he was bad, Bill Clinton was worse, and embarrass and shame Hillary by saying the worst thing he can imagine saying about a woman — that she failed to hold her husband’s sexual attention.

Several critics, notably Trump’s former ghostwriter, have observed that Trump’s insults toward others are almost always projections of his own worst qualities. And so on Sunday when Trump said of Hillary that she “has tremendous hate in her heart,” it was a particularly clarifying moment, a signal of the hate he was harboring for Hillary — and perhaps also for the party that had made him and was now freaking out about what they had wrought. It was an echo of Trump’s statements back in 1989, when he was calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five — five black and Latino men who were convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park, later exonerated by DNA evidence, and whom Trump maintained on Friday, before the pussy tape broke, he still believed were guilty. In 1989, Trump told Larry King, “I hate these people and let’s all hate these people because maybe hate is what we need if we’re going to get something done.”

This is what was on display these last 72 hours: hate. The hate for the other that emanates from his scowling face and undergirds his words, and that has thrummed lightly beneath Republican policy goals for some time, now exposed for the world to see. Trump is channeling the hate of his supporters, inspiring hate in his detractors. This weekend, Donald Trump made America hate again.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/trumps-one-service-was-exposing-the-misogyny-of-the-gop.html

Source: NY Mag

It’s been four days since the debate between vice presidential candidates Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, and conservative Catholics are still irritated over what many liberal Catholics (and liberal non-Catholics) thought was one of Kaine’s finest moments.

Their indignation came in response to a question to both candidates about how they struggled to balance their personal religious faith and public policy.

Echoing the late Mario Cuomo in his famous speech at Notre Dame University in 1984, Kaine suggested that he could be personally opposed to abortion as a Catholic and still support Roe vs. Wade.

He then tried to turn the tables on Pence, who, he noted, had said he wanted to repeal the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

“Governor,” he asked Pence, “Why don’t you trust women to make this choice for themselves? We can encourage people to support life. Of course we can. But why don’t you trust women? Why doesn’t Donald Trump trust women to make this choice for themselves?

“That’s what we ought to be doing in public life: living our lives of faith or motivation with enthusiasm and excitement, convincing other[s], dialoguing with each other about important moral issues of the day.”

Catholic critics weren’t impressed.

The Rev. Thomas  Petri, dean of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., told the Catholic News Agency that Kaine, the Democratic nominee, took a “gravely immoral” position in saying he personally opposed abortion while taking a pro-choice stance in public office.

At Breitbart, Thomas D. Williams wrote: “While Kaine offers lip service to being ‘personally opposed’ to abortion ( la Mario Cuomo), his words ring hollow to those who understand abortion to be a social evil that destroys the most vulnerable members of society. Being personally opposed to abortion is like being personally opposed to racism or wife-beating.”

There’s a superficial appeal to the idea that it’s contradictory for a politician to believe that a fetus is a life deserving of protection — a belief not confined to Catholics, by the way — and at the same time to oppose laws against abortion.

But if Kaine is guilty of inconsistency, so are Pence and many other “pro-life” politicians who draw the line at advocating punishment for women who have abortions.

At the debate, Pence, the Republican candidate, was put on the defensive when Kaine noted that Trump had said earlier in the campaign that women who had abortions should be punished (a statement the GOP presidential nominee later retracted). Pence insisted that “Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy.”

But why not? If abortion is murder, why shouldn’t a woman be punished for complicity in that crime? As I wrote at the time of Trump’s original “gaffe”:

“It defies logic to suggest that a person who initiates criminal act ought to be immune to punishment for it. At the minimum, the woman who seeks an abortion is an accessory to murder — if you believe abortion is murder.”

Now, there may be what Catholics call a “prudential” reason not to punish the woman — namely that there are more effective ways to discourage abortion.

But once you concede that point, you’re not far from Kaine’s preferred strategy of forsaking legal prohibition for “dialoguing with each other about important moral issues of the day” in the hopes that women will see that abortion is the wrong choice. Or Hillary Clinton’s 2008 strategy (not emphasized this year) of trying to make abortions “safe, legal and rare.”

Kaine and Pence are trying to have it both ways on abortion. They’re just being inconsistent in different ways.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-kaine-abortion-20161007-snap-story.html

Source: LA Times

Oklahoma’s highest court on Tuesday struck down a law imposing restrictions on abortion providers, including a requirement that they take samples of fetal tissue from patients younger than 14 and preserve them for state investigators.

The law also set new criminal penalties for providers who violate abortion-related statutes as well as individuals who help a minor evade the requirement to obtain parental consent. In addition, the bill created a new, stricter inspection system for abortion clinics.

Legislators had said the fetal tissue section was aimed at capturing child rapists and that the law would protect women’s health. But the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, which challenged the law in court, said it unfairly targeted facilities that perform abortions.

In a unanimous opinion, the nine-member Oklahoma Supreme Court found the law violated the state constitution’s requirement that each legislative bill must address only “one subject.”

The rule, the court said, is designed to prevent legislators from including provisions that would not normally pass in otherwise popular bills. The state unsuccessfully asserted that each part of the law addressed a single subject: women’s reproductive health.

“We reject defendants’ arguments and find this legislation violates the single subject rule as each of these sections is so unrelated and misleading that a legislator voting on this matter could have been left with an unpalatable all-or-nothing choice,” Justice Joseph Watt wrote for the court.

In a concurring opinion, four judges said they also would have struck down the law as an unconstitutional burden on a woman’s right to have an abortion.

Lincoln Ferguson, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, called the decision “disappointing.”

“This law would have given law enforcement the ability to more easily prosecute sexual assaults of children that are discovered when a child under 14 has an abortion,” he said.

“The Attorney General’s Office remains committed to defending laws aimed at protecting the safety and well-being of Oklahoma women.”

In a statement, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northup said the law was “nothing but a cynical attack on women’s health and rights by unjustly targeting their trusted health care providers.”

Oklahoma’s Republican-dominated government has joined several socially conservative states in enacting abortion restrictions in recent years, drawing court challenges.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law imposing strict regulations on facilities that perform abortions. A similar law is on hold in Oklahoma while the state Supreme Court considers its legality.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Alan Crosby)

Source: Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oklahoma-abortion-idUSKCN12420G

Warsaw, October 6

Polish lawmakers voted overwhelmingly today to reject a proposal by an anti-abortion group that would have imposed a total ban on abortion, caving in to massive outrage by women who have been dressing in black and waging street protests across the country.

The mostly Catholic nation already has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, with abortion only allowed in rare cases, rape or incest, when the mother’s life is in danger or the fetus is badly damaged.

The proposal for further tightening the law came from a citizens’ initiative that gathered some 450,000 signatures in this nation of 38 million. It was supported by the Roman Catholic church. But it was highly unpopular with most Poles, with people balking at the idea that a teenage rape victim should be forced to have her baby, or that a woman whose health was badly compromised would be forced to carry to term. The proposal had also called for prison terms.

With abortion already illegal in most cases, many women said what frightened them the most in the proposal was that it could have led doctors to be afraid to perform prenatal tests or that women who suffered miscarriages could start to fall under criminal suspicion.

The outcome of the vote is a blow to the ruling party, which has a core of ultra-conservative Catholic voters that wanted to see further restrictions to the abortion law.  — AP

http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/polish-lawmakers-say-no-to-near-total-ban-on-abortion/306180.html

Source: The Tribune

A controversial proposal to ban abortion in Poland appears to have collapsed after senior politicians from the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) backed away from it after a parliamentary committee urged MPs to vote it down following mass protests.

The justice and human rights committee, which reviews proposed legislation, recommended that parliament reject the bill following a wave of protests earlier in the week that appear to have caught the rightwing government off guard.

In a humiliating climbdown, PiS members who had referred the legislation to the committee less than two weeks ago threw it out.

The Liberal MP and former prime minister Ewa Kopacz told reporters the PiS had “backtracked because it was scared by all the women who hit the streets in protest”.

Tens of thousands of people boycotted work and classes on Monday to protest against the proposals, which if enacted would impose a blanket ban on abortion, including in instances of pregnancy as a result of rape or incest.

About 30,000 people, many dressed in black, gathered in wretched weather in Warsaw’s Castle Square, chanting “We want doctors, not missionaries!” and carrying placards bearing messages such as “My Uterus, My Opinion” and “Women Just Want to Have FUN-damental Rights.”

Jarosław Gowin, the minister of science and higher education, said on Wednesday that the protests had “caused us to think and taught us humility”.

“The protest was bigger than anyone expected. People were astonished,” said Agnieszka Graff, a commentator and activist. “Warsaw was swarming with women in black. It was amazing to feel the energy and the anger, the emotional intensity was incredible.”

The so-called “black protests” appear to have shifted public opinion on the issue, with recent polls suggesting not only near-overwhelming opposition to the proposed ban, but increasing support for the liberalisation of existing laws.

Polls also suggest that support for the government has dropping to its lowest levels since elections last year.

Parliament will now have the opportunity to throw out the legislation altogether, or to refer it back to committee.

The Liberal broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza reported dramatic scenes from the Polish parliament on Wednesday evening. There were “screams and chaos” as PiS members submitted a request to reject the legislation, while pro-choice campaigners were prevented from entering the committee room and advocates of the ban complained that the session had been convoked illegally.

Among the PiS committee members to vote to reject the bill was Krystyna Pawłowicz, who before Monday’s protest denounced opponents of the abortion ban as “fans of killing babies” who should be ashamed of themselves.

PiS did not initiate the proposal. It was brought before parliament by a citizens’ initiative – a petition that has received at least 100,000 signatures – submitted by the hardline conservative advocacy group Ordo Iuris and the Stop Abortioncoalition.

Many, however, regard the ruling party as having taken ownership of the proposals once its MPs voted unanimously in favour of passing them to the next stage of the legislative process, scrutiny by a parliamentary committee. PiS MPs also voted down an alternative, liberalising measure proposed by the pro-choice Save Women coalition.

The prime minister, Beata Szydło, and the PiS leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, had signalled support for the Stop Abortion proposals, but the government appears to have reconsidered its position following the protests.

Szydło had said on Tuesday that the government “has not worked and is not working on any law amending the current legislation on abortion”. She also implied, however, that she had admonished the foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, for widely derided remarks on Monday in which he had said of the protesters: “Let them have their fun”, and stated that by “dressing up, screaming silly slogans and vulgarities”, they were “making a mockery of very important issues”.

The senate speaker, Stanisław Karczewski, said on Wednesday that Poland’s upper house would not initiate work on a bill to further restrict Poland’s law, which already outlaws abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, severe foetal abnormalities or the mother’s life being at risk. In practice, though, some doctors refuse to perform even legal abortions, citing moral objections.

Polish women seeking abortions typically go to Germany or other neighbouring countries or order abortion pills online.

Kaczyński has suggested that the government might accept a new compromise whereby terminations carried out because of a congenital foetal disorder would be banned, but those as a result of rape or incest would still be permitted.

Campaigners say that is unlikely to be acceptable, and that protests will continue. “In previous anti-government protests, it was our parents’ generation on the streets,” says Aleksandra Włodarczyk, 28, a bank administrator who participated in Monday’s protest. “But with this, they have managed to mobilise the young, and we are very angry.”

Source: The Guradian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/05/polish-government-performs-u-turn-on-total-abortion-ban?CMP=share_btn_tw

Widespread protests over a proposed abortion law in Poland have led to a shift in political opinion, and some conservative politicians now say they will no longer support the legislation.

Thousands of women, dressed in black, marched in the streets of Polish cities earlier this week, waving black flags and holding black umbrellas. They protested the proposed law, which would ban abortion in all cases, including incest, rape, or when birth risks a mother’s life. Current law, one of the strictest in Europe, makes exceptions for these cases.

Police estimated more than 17,000 women joined protests in Warsaw alone, and Reuters estimated it at 100,000 nationwide. On Wednesday, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Jarosław Gowin, said the massive demonstrations forced him and other conservative politicians to rethink the abortion regulation, and that protesters “taught us humility.”

The law, proposed by the ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party, would include a penalty of up to five years of jail for women who receive abortions and for the doctors who carry out the procedure.

Beata Szydlo, Poland’s prime minister and the leader of the Law and Justice Party, backed away from the proposed law after the protests Monday (she has previously said she supported the measure). On Tuesday, when Witold Waszczykowski, the foreign minister, called the protests a “mockery of important issues,” Szydlo said she disapproved of such comments and that not every member of her party backed the proposal. The party won strong support from women last year when it came to power, but after this week seemed to be at risk of losing female supporters. From Reuters:

Such criticism matters for PiS, whose appeal is based on a blend of Polish nationalism, Catholic piety and promises to help poorer Poles who have not benefited much from a decade of heady economic growth. Some 40 percent of women backed the party last year, compared to 38 percent of the wider population.

The Law and Justice Party won control of parliament last year. It is largely a nationalist, Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant party that is also staunchly pro-Catholic.

The Catholic Church has come out in favor of the law, which was inspired by a citizen-led petition that was taken up by parliament in September after it gathered more than 100,000 signatures. Newsweek Polska poll found 74 percentof citizens favor keeping Poland’s abortion laws as is.

http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/10/poland-abortion-ban/503012/?utm_source=atlgp

Source: The Atlantic

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s views on abortion rights are heavily influenced by his religion as aborn-again evangelical Catholic. During the first (and only) televised vice presidential debate of the 2016 election Tuesday night, he said, “For me, my faith informs my life.”

Though it may have been the first time watching Pence speak for some, many voters — particularly, many women — may already be familiar with Pence, who is one of the most extreme anti-abortion legislators in the country. “It all, for me, begins with cherishing the dignity, the worth, the value, of every human life,” he said.

Earlier this year, Pence signed a controversial anti-abortion law that would have banned abortions of fetuses sought over gender, race, ancestry, or diagnosis of a genetic disorder. The law also criminalized fetal tissue collection or transferring, a practice that is vital to life-saving fetal tissue donation and research (including for understanding the Zika virus), and required women to view the fetal ultrasound hours before receiving an abortion. The law was so far-reaching that women in Indiana began calling Pence’s office to tell him about their periods — you know, since he seems to care about women’s reproductive health so much. A federal judge blocked the law in June.

As a member of Congress and later as governor, Pence also gutted Planned Parenthood funding in his state, which resulted in the closure of multiple clinics. In 2015, this “inadvertently created” an HIV outbreak in one Indiana town, Media Matters reported, “by shutting down access to the only HIV testing centers available to many residents.”

Though there is little doubt how extreme Pence’s anti-abortion stance is, he made it explicitly clear on the campaign trail. “I’m pro-life and I don’t apologize for it,” he said during a town hall in July. Of a Trump/Pence administration, he said, “We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs.”

Pence also has a history of making homophobic comments. In 2006, he said that same-sex couples were a sign of “societal collapse,” and he voted against repealing the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. Last year, Pence signed a religious freedom bill that critics said enables anti-gay and other types of discrimination. According to the Huffington Post, the bill “would allow any individual or corporation to cite its religious beliefs as a defense when sued by a private party” — meaning that businesses that “don’t want to serve same-sex couples, for example, could now have legal protections to discriminate.” After the backlash from business leaders, Politico reports that Pence “backpedaled on language” in the bill that worried critics.

Oh, and for an extra kick in the pants: While in Congress, Pence voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — which calls for equal pay for women — three times.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mike-pences-positions-womens-rights-140821577.html

Source: Cosmopolitan