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The birth rate among American teenagers, at crisis levels in the 1990s, has fallen to an all-time low, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The decline of the past decade has occurred in all regions in the country and among all races. But the most radical changes have been among Hispanic and black teens, whose birth rates have dropped nearly 50 percent since 2006.

Theories on the reasons for the dramatic shift include everything from new approaches to sex education to the widespread availability of broadband Internet. But most experts agree on the two major causes.

The first is the most important and may be obvious: Today’s teens enjoy better access to contraception and more convenient contraception than their predecessors, and more of them are taking advantage of innovations like long-acting injectable and implantable methods that can last years over a daily birth control pill. But the second cause is something that goes against the conventional wisdom. It’s that teens — despite their portrayal in popular TV and movies as uninhibited and acting only on hormones — are having less sex.

“There has been a change in social norms that has happened in the past 20 years, and the idea of not having sex or delaying sex is now something that can be okay,” said Bill Albert, chief program officer for the National Campaign To Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Veronica Gomez-Lobo, director of pediatric gynecology at Children’s National Medical Center, said the trend of abstinence has been mostly among younger teens rather than older ones. While there’s not good data on why this is happening, she thinks of it as a “contagion” factor. So many teens are waiting to have sex, she suggests, that the peer pressure goes the opposite way than it might have in the past.

“We think this is a very healthy trend,” Gomez-Lobo said.

The decline in birth rates has been going on for most of the past decade but appears to be accelerating. The issue has been important to President Obama, who in 2010 launched a $110 million initiative to scientifically validate prevention programs that work and to replicate them throughout the country.

The nation’s teen birth rate peaked in 1991, a time when posters of sad, pregnant girls were plastered on buses and subway stations and popular culture was filled with references to “babies having babies.” The alarm was backed by evidence showing that having unplanned children at a young age carries numerous negative health and social consequences.

Over the next 23 years, the birth rate plummeted 60 percent from 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991 to 24.2 births per 1,000 in 2014 — the lowest rate on record. Yet even with the dramatic improvement, studies still estimate that teen births cost taxpayers an estimated $9 billion each year.

It’s impossible to talk about unwanted teen pregnancies without the subject of abortion coming up. While the new CDC report did not address this issue, research by the Guttmacher Institute shows that the decline in births is likely to be unrelated to more terminated pregnancies.

Researcher Isaac Maddow-Zimet said Thursday that teen pregnancies have been declining for 40 years, which by itself could explain the falling birth rates. Likewise, an analysis of 2011 abortion numbers, which represent the most recent and comprehensive data set available, shows that abortion rates in every state but Vermont decreased or remained the same from the previous year.

“Historically, abortion rates and birth rates have not always moved in parallel, but in recent years they have been doing so more,” Maddow-Zimet said.

Various surveys and studies have tried to quantify the impact of different interventions in helping reduce teen pregnancies and birth rates.

One of the most interesting possibilities has been the popularity of MTV’s hit reality show “16 and Pregnant.” The struggles of the young moms in the show – who were often shown in tears-may have served as cautionary tales to millions of viewers their age. A study that came out in 2014 estimated that teen births dropped 6 percent in the 18 months following the show’s first broadcasts.

Another intriguing study looked at the impact of the Internet and concluded that at least 13 percent of the total decline between 1999 and 2007 might be explained by the increasing availability of broadband Internet. Researchers theorized that being online could help provide teens other means of exploring relationships and finding advice about effective forms of contraception, in addition to obtaining information about options for ending unwanted pregnancies.

Sex education programs have also changed a lot over the years. While many programs still use the traditional bananas and condoms that lead to so many giggles and red faces, new curriculums also incorporate lessons on financial responsibility or focus more on overall development of a child’s character — which some research has shown may be more effective.

Albert and other experts think the economic downturn that started around 2006-2007 may have played a role, too. “They are not checking their stock portfolio before they hop in the sack, but teens are keen observers of the world around them, and if their own family had to do more with less it may have fostered less risk-taking and a more cautious attitude about sex,” he said.

But while the overall national trend is positive, the CDC analysis of teens ages 15 to 19 shows that large racial and ethnic, regional and socioeconomic disparities remain. The birth rates for Hispanic and black teens, though lower than in the past, still are twice as high as that of white teens. In some states, the difference is even greater. In New Jersey, for example, the birth rate among white teens was 4.8 births per 1,000, which is well below the national rate of 18 for that group. But the birth rate among New Jersey’s black teens was 27.4 and among its Hispanic teens 31.3 – an almost seven-fold difference.

In addition, some counties still have pockets of high birth rates — even in states with overall low birth rates — and many of them are clustered in the south and southwest. The CDC also noted that the places with the highest birth rates tend to have higher unemployment, lower income and less education. Teen birth rates in 2013-2014 at the county level ranged from 3.1 to 119 per 1,000.

“The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing both teen pregnancy and racial and ethnic differences,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said, “but the reality is, too many American teens are still having babies.”

Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-teen-birth-rate-all-time-low-20160428-story.html

Source: Chicago Tribune

The leading contender for France’s centre-right presidential nomination, Francois Fillon, is facing tough questions over his stance on abortion and sex discrimination.

His rival, fellow Republican Alain Juppe, has urged him to “clarify his position” on abortion.

Meanwhile, a party colleague restated claims he denied her a ministerial post because she was pregnant.

Supporters will choose between Mr Fillon and Mr Juppe on Sunday.

It is the first time the centre right in France has used a US-style primary contest to select a candidate, ahead of the presidential election in April and May.

In the first round of voting for the Republican nomination on Sunday, Mr Fillon took a clear lead with 44.1% while Bordeaux Mayor Mr Juppe received 28.5%. Five other contestants were knocked out.

As the campaign for the second round gathered pace on Tuesday, the candidates exchanged barbs over Mr Fillon’s stance on abortion.

Mr Juppe claimed his rival had gone back on a previous statement affirming that abortion was a “fundamental human right”.

Mr Fillon, who is personally opposed to abortion but against revisiting its legal status, reacted with fury, saying: “I would never have thought my friend could stoop so low.”

Another former colleague and defeated primary contestant Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet – who now backs Mr Juppe – has also renewed claims that Mr Fillon denied her a ministerial post because she was pregnant.

Ms Kosciusko-Morizet’s remarks were first reported in 2013 in a profile by US network NBC, when she said she had twice been turned down for ministerial posts when she was pregnant. During her second pregnancy, in September 2009, Mr Fillon was prime minister.

“It’s true,” Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told Franceinfo TV. But she said it was a matter from the past, for which Mr Fillon had since expressed regret and which many woman would recognise as a wider problem in French society.

Several French commentators have also made the point that Ms Kosciusko-Morizet was not prevented from taking up a succession of posts in Mr Fillon’s government:

Despite repeated attempts, Mr Fillon’s team could not be reached for comment.

Mr Fillon was also criticised by centrist leader Francois Bayrou for his proposed liberal economic reforms, which include cutting half a million public sector jobs and scrapping the 35-hour work week.

Mr Bayrou called them “dangerous”.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said Mr Putin had “rather good relations” with Mr Fillon, and that Moscow was closely watching the outcome of the primary.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38063622

Source: BBC

Imagine being so desperate to end a pregnancy that you sit in a bathtub, gird yourself, and stick a wire hanger up your vagina and into your uterus. You don’t have anesthesia, but you do it anyway. You start to bleed, badly. After you go to the hospital for help, you don’t get sympathy – you get arrested.

I don’t describe this horrific scenario to remind you of a time when abortion was illegal and how bad it was for women. Because this didn’t happen in the 1950s; it happened last year.

Just a few months before Donald Trump said women who have abortions should be “punished”, a woman in Tennessee was arrested for trying to end her pregnancy with a hanger. And on Tuesday, a week after Trump was elected to be the next president of the United States, this woman was charged by a grand jury with aggravated assault with a weapon, attempted procurement of a miscarriage, and attempted criminal abortion.

Jessica González-Rojas, executive director at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, said: “These new charges seek to punish her even more severely and are an affront to justice and basic human dignity.

“No woman should fear arrest or jail time because she ends her pregnancy or seeks medical help in this situation.”

This is not an isolated case. Before her conviction was overturned, Purvi Patel in Indiana was sentenced to 20 years in prison for inducing an abortion. Bei Bei Shuai, also in Indiana, was charged with murder after a suicide attempt resulted in her pregnancy ending. So let’s be clear: women, especially women of color, are already being punished for abortion.

This Handmaid’s Tale nightmare will only get worse once Trump takes office. Whatever his personal beliefs on abortion – like everything else, this is a topic he’s flip-flopped on over the years – he has vowed to appoint supreme court justices that will overturn Roe v Wade, leaving the issue up to the states. When questioned about this, he callously remarked that women who live in states where abortion is illegal could just travel to a different state.

Mike Pence, the incoming vice-president, signed one of the most restrictiveabortion laws in the country as governor of Indiana, and has said he wants to see Roe “consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs”.

These are not men who are thinking about – or who even understand – the consequences of banning abortion.

The woman in Tennessee, who has already been in jail for nearly a year, is one of countless American women who try to self-abort. I say “countless” because we literally do not know the number of people who attempt their own abortions. We just know that it’s a lot.

One study found that in Texas alone, more than100,000 women had tried to end their own pregnancies. You will not be shocked to find out that abortion is extremely difficult to access in Texas. The same is true in Tennessee, where 96% of counties have no abortion provider.

Not all women induce their own abortion because of a lack of access. Some simply want to forgo seeing a doctor, and would prefer home abortions. Last year, Daniel Grossman, an obstetrician-gynecologist and vice-president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health, told me that some women self-induce because they’re “the kind [of person] who like to do herbal treatments or take vitamins for their healthcare in general”.

If reproductive rights were not in such imminent danger, now might have been a good time to start expanding options for women who don’t want clinic care but instead want to end their pregnancies at home. But now it’s hard to imagine that pro-choice organizations will be doing anything other than protecting rights already won.

In fact, women across America are preparing for the worst. The news of Trump’s win sparked an increase in the number of women seeking long-term birth control measures such as IUDs, fearing that their insurance coverage for contraception would soon be a thing of the past.

The defensive crouch right now is a smart strategy. Women and reproductive rights organizations should be doing all they can to steel themselves for the battles to come – not just on a policy level, but in terms of everyday needs. Those of who can afford to do so, for example, might consider buying large quantities of Plan B while it’s still available over the counter – stockpiling the medicine in the event that it becomes inaccessible and other women need it. And if it were not illegal, I might encourage doctors and nurses to start putting aside misoprostol (the drug used in medication abortions) in the event that abortion is banned in their state or others.

Someone who wants an abortion will find a way to get one, no matter what the law is. So let’s make sure they can do that safely, no matter who the president is.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2016/nov/22/abortion-rights-under-siege-roe-v-wade-womens-rights

Source: The Guardian

Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon says she would consider funding abortions for women from Northern Island in the event of split from the UK.

The remarks come after the opening of a Supreme Court case involving a Northern Irish woman who had to pay for an abortion when she travelled to the UK.

Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament that “women should have the right to choose, within the limits that are currently set down in law”, and that she is “happy to explore with the NHS what the situation is now in terms of the ability of women from Northern Ireland to access safe and legal abortion in NHS Scotland and whether any improvements can be made.”

Abortion is currently illegal in Northern Island, and attempts to liberalise the law have encountered strong resistance.

An estimated 2,000 women a year have to raise the money to travel to private English clinics and hospitals from Northern Ireland to have terminations.

The case currently before the Supreme Court has already been rejected by the High Court and the Court of Appeals; while sympathetic to the woman involved, the courts found that there was no grounds for the claim of discrimination because Northern Island was not covered in the UK’s 1967 Abortion Act.

http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/scotland-could-offer-northern-irish-women-free-abortions/12093

Source: BioEdge

A grassroots idea to donate to Planned Parenthood in Vice President-Elect Mike Pence‘s name has spread since the election. The social media campaign encourages citizens to show their support for women’s rights by donating “in honor” of the Indiana governor, who has infamously tried to defund the non-profit organization. For each donation, he receives a thank-you certificate.

Planned Parenthood confirmed that it has received 20,000 contributions in Pence’s name since the election. According to the Indianapolis Star, there have been 160,000 donations to Planned Parenthood in the last week — 12.5 percent in the name of Pence.

While a member of Congress in 2007, Pence was the first to introduce a bill calling for an end to Planned Parenthood funding. Although the bill did not pass, he has continued to fight the non-profit throughout his political career.

“If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions,” Pence told Politico in 2011. “As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.”

Several celebrities donated to Planned Parenthood in the seven days since the election, including Katy Perry(who gave $10,000), and Amy Schumer and Amber Tamblyn, who said they donated in Pence’s name.

Planned Parenthood thanked everyone for their support on Saturday.

“Thank you so much! We’ve been blown away by the support we’ve received. Many people are donating in Clinton or Pence’s name. #WeWontGoBack,” the organization tweeted.

http://motto.time.com/4573956/planned-parenthood-mike-pence-donations/

Source: Motto

A woman is facing three felony charges after nearly bleeding out from an attempted coat hanger abortion at 24 weeks. Anna Yocca, 32, was arrested in December for attempting to terminate her pregnancy in Tennessee, a state with only seven abortion clinics.

Yocca, of Murfreesboro, has been charged with aggravated assault with a weapon, attempted procurement of a miscarriage and attempted criminal abortion after trying to self-induce an abortion using a coat hanger last September. She was charged after being rushed to the hospital by her boyfriend, who found her experiencing severe blood loss, Slate reported.

When she arrived at the hospital, doctors worked to save the fetus. She gave birth to a 1.5-lb boy who now lives with an adopted family.

She originally faced charges of attempted murder, but the charges were later reduced to aggravated assault. On Thursday, she was indicted on three felony charges.

Yocca is being held at the Rutherford County Adult Detention Center on $200,000 bond. Prior to her arrest, she worked at an Amazon fulfilment center in Lebanon, Tennessee. While wages for that particular location are unavailable, Glassdoor found that Amazon Chattanooga Fulfilment Associates earn $11 to $12 an hour, roughly $24,871 annually.

Yocca was 24 weeks pregnant at the time of her attempted abortion. While 24 weeks is beyond the cutoff for an abortion in most states, 96 percent of counties in Tennessee do not have abortion clinics, and 63 percent of the state’s women live in these counties, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In addition, Tennessee’s abortion restrictions require that women receive state-directed counseling and wait 48 hours before the procedure is provided.

The closest clinic to Yocca seemed to be some 30 miles away from Murfreesboro, coming out to a 40 minute drive or a two-hour bus ride, about the same distance as from her home to her workplace.

Tennessee prohibits insurance companies in the state’s health exchange from covering abortions. Furthermore, funding is only available for abortion in the extreme cases of life endangerment, rape or incest. At the closest center to Yocca, an abortion starts at $625 and ranges up to $1,050.

The closest abortion clinic to Yocca’s hometown operates on a standard 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekday schedule, with Saturday hours of 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. While the state allows women to have abortions up to viability (on average about 24 weeks), no clinic in the state was found to offer the procedure past 16 weeks, according to the Tennessean.

Abortion remains a hot button issue in the US, particularly with Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election. The president-elect made a splash when he said he would seek to punish women who had undergone abortions, but later walked back his words and claimed he meant he would punish abortion providers.

President-elect Trump most recently told “60 Minutes” that he would appoint a pro-life justice to the US Supreme Court. He explained that if the 1973 landmark case of Roe v. Wade “were overturned, [abortion rights] would go back to the states.” He acknowledged the burden that this would place on women seeking the service, saying, “they’ll perhaps have to go – they’ll have to go to another state.”

Yocca’s case could be a sign of a sea change coming to America, as states such as Indiana and Pennsylvania look to increase abortion restrictions, such as Indiana’s attempts to criminalize abortion per State Rep. Curt Nisly (R-Goshen), who would also seek to have an infant’s life prioritized over a mother’s if the pregnancy put the mother at risk, the Indianapolis Star reported.

As abortion laws are gradually eroded, the rate of self-induced abortion increases. Last year, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project examined the rates of self-induced abortions within their state following the passage of some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. The study found that women who were the most likely to induce abortions on their own were Latinas living near the Mexican border, where abortion drugs can be procured without a prescription.

The study also determined that women who “found it difficult to obtain reproductive health services like birth control or Pap smears” were the next most likely group to self-induce. The study concluded that “legal restrictions on abortion tend to increase unsafe abortion, but do not reduce the overall incidence of abortion.”

Yocca will stand trial November 28.

https://www.rt.com/usa/367330-tennessee-abortion-woman-coat-hanger/

Source: RT