Monday, July 22, 2013

ABORTION RESTRICTIONS = BLACK MARKET INCREASES

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/11/new-abortion-restrictions-drive-women-ba


New Abortion Restrictions Drive Women Back to the Black Market

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CytotecGuineapigmomTexas isn't the only state where lawmakers are pushing to tighten restrictions on abortions. The American Civil Liberties Union calls 2013 "one of the most the most regressive years yet when it comes to taking away access to safe, legal abortion services." Not everybody agrees with that assessment, of course. Americans have a range of opinions when it comes to terminating pregnancies, and those tending toward a more restrictive stance may look in favor on new laws they see as protecting life. But as "Hatpin Dolly," Frank Sinatra's mother and a provider of illicit abortions, demonstrated decades ago, when there's demand for an illicit or tightly regulated medical service, underground suppliers will arise. Tight new laws around the country may be bringing back the black market for abortions.
At an open-air flea market outside McAllen, Texas (BEESTX), near the Mexican border, shoppers can buy a goat and get their car windows tinted. Tables with handwritten signs touting Viagra (MDPSVIAG) are stocked with herbal remedies promising to burn fat and boost breast size. You can also find pills to end a pregnancy.
Bazaars like this have become home to a thriving black market, where women too poor to afford an abortion at a clinic or deterred by state mandates such as a 24-hour waiting period can buy drugs to induce a miscarriage on their own, a dozen area residents and doctors said in interviews.
Hundreds of miles north in Austin, the capital, lawmakers may inadvertently increase this illegal trade. Rules set to pass as soon as this week might result in the closing of most, if not all, abortion facilities in the state. If the law -- promoted as a way to improve women’s health -- makes legal abortion unavailable in Texas, more women may turn to markets such as the one near McAllen and risk their lives.
“You’d be amazed at how many people, young people, are taking those pills,” said Erlinda Dasquez, a 29-year-old mother of four who has done so herself. "I probably know 12 to 20 people who have done this. My cousin just went to the flea market a few months ago."
The specific medication available at the flea market for terminating pregnancies is Cytotec, which is available in Mexico without a prescription for treating stomach ulcers, and smuggled from there to the United States for other purposes. WebMD provides the following warning for Cytotec:
Do not take this medication if you think that you may be pregnant. It may cause abortion, premature birth, or birth defects. In rare cases, serious complications (e.g., uterine rupture) have occurred when misoprostol was used to start labor or when used in combination with another drug to cause abortion after the eighth week of pregnancy. These complications have resulted in harm to the unborn baby and mother.
Not surprisingly, the Bloomberg article goes on to detail misuses and medical complications that comes from using black market abortifacients according to instructions handed along a not-so-reliable grapevine.
And yet the demand for terminating pregnancies exists, as it always has, for a variety of reasons, personal and economic. As tighter restrictions force legal abortion providers that don't meet stringent new requirements to close (the two serving the Lower Rio Grande Valley near the flea market in the Bloomberg piece are expected to have to close their doors), the demand for black market alternatives can only grow.
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Sunday, July 7, 2013

PUBLICLY FUNDED FAMILY PLANNING CLINICS PREVENT 1.4 MILLION UNINTENDED PREGNANCIES EACH YEAR, SAVE $4.3 BILLION IN PUBLIC FUNDS

Advancing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
 
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Thursday, July 31, 2008

PUBLICLY FUNDED FAMILY PLANNING CLINICS PREVENT 1.4 MILLION UNINTENDED PREGNANCIES EACH YEAR, SAVE $4.3 BILLION IN PUBLIC FUNDS

Publicly funded family planning clinics provide contraceptive services to approximately seven million women each year. Without these services, the annual number of unintended pregnancies and abortions in the United States would be almost 50% higher. In other words, 1.4 million unintended pregnancies and 600,000 abortions are averted each year because of these services, according to a new Guttmacher Institute analysis.
Twenty percent of the pregnancies averted would occur among teenagers. In the absence of publicly funded services, there would be nearly 50% more teen pregnancies (or 290,000 more); these additional pregnancies would result in about 150,000 unplanned births and 100,000 abortions.
In addition to the clear benefits for individual women and their families in helping them avoid the pregnancies they do not want and plan the pregnancies they do, the analysis finds that these services save $4.3 billion in public funds. Nationally, for every $1.00 spent to provide services in the nationwide network of publicly funded family planning clinics, $4.02 in Medicaid expenses on births are averted.
“These new data add to the growing body of evidence that investing in publicly funded contraceptive services can make an enormous impact on helping women reduce unintended pregnancies, abortions and unplanned births, all while saving money,” says study coauthor Dr. Lawrence Finer. “Investing in a prevention strategy is more important now than ever, as the number of women who need publicly funded contraceptive services has increased by more than one million since 2000.”
Guttmacher research from 2006 found that each $20 million increment in new funding under the Title X family planning services program alone would help women avoid another 17,200 unintended pregnancies, including 7,000 that would end in abortion. Pending legislation to expand eligibility for Medicaid-covered family planning services nationwide to the same income eligibility levels used for pregnant women would yield even greater results, further reducing unintended pregnancy and abortion by 15%, while achieving an additional $1.5 billion in net savings annually.
“The Impact of Publicly Funded Family Planning Clinic Services on Unintended Pregnancies and Government Cost Savings,” by Jennifer Frost et al., appears in the August issue of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.

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Texas Abortion Ban Limits More Than Abortions

ABC News

Texas Abortion Ban Limits More Than Abortions

A Bill That Would Limit Abortion Clinics Could Limit Other Healthcare Options

By EMILY DERUY

July 1, 2013—

Republican lawmakers in Texas are hell-bent on passing a bill that will eliminate nearly every abortion clinic in the state.
They're probably going to succeed. The filibuster tactic that thwarted their June attempt at the last minute is unlikely to work in July's special legislative session, because lawmakers have another month to pass the law -- and this time around, they've placed it at the top of their agenda.
So what does that mean, exactly?
A lot more than the loss of abortion options for the women of Texas. Republican Gov. Rick Perry says he's fighting to protect the lives of unborn children, but he stands to hurt living, breathing Texans in the process.
Both men and women, particularly low-income minorities who are more likely to lack health insurance and medical-care options, rely on the "abortion clinics" for services like contraception, STD testing and even cancer screenings. One in four women in the state are uninsured.
"That is part of the concern that's getting drowned out in the abortions versus pro-life soundbite," Texas Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer (D) said during a Monday phone interview.
Right now, Texas has more than 40 clinics that not only perform abortions but also offer birth control and condoms. All but a handful will be prohibited from operating under the proposed bill. Those that could remain open are in a few urban areas, which would leave rural women with few options.
The restrictions "would represent a significant step backward for the health status of Texas women," Dr. Lisa Hollier, chairwoman of the Texas District American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote in testimony before the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.
Lawmakers in the Lone Star state barred Planned Parenthood from the state's Women's Health Program several years ago because the organization funds abortion clinics. The organization estimates that 130,000 women in Texas now go without preventive health care due to the state's 2011 cuts to women's health care funding.
Abortions make up just three percent of Planned Parenthood services in Texas, according to a spokeswoman for the organization. Thousands of women visit the organization's clinics all over the state to receive STD treatments and other services. The organization also runs education programs to teach men and women how to avoid HIV and unwanted pregnancies.
Clinics not affiliated with Planned Parenthood provide similar services. The proposed law could force them to shutter their doors: In addition to banning abortions later than 20 weeks into a pregnancy, the bill requires abortion clinics to meet unusually high surgical standards and mandates that doctors who perform abortions must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic.
Many of the clinics don't currently meet such standards and would have to either remodel, relocate, or shut down if they perform more than several dozen abortions in a year. This is despite the fact that few people suffer complications from abortions in current clinics.
Those who do update their clinics may need to charge more for abortions to compensate.
Closures could raise the number of women who suffer unplanned pregnancies, by severely limiting their access not only to abortions but to birth control, contraceptives and education, as well.

Kathryn Hearn has been with the Planned Parenthood in Hidalgo County, along Texas' southern border, for more than 20 years. Nearly all of the people who visit the clinic - about 90 percent - live at or below the poverty line, and many have no other source of health care.
The clinics might be able to stay open as health care providers if the law passes and they eliminate their abortion practices, but Hearn maintains that abortion care is a vital part of an overall healthcare system. That should not change, she said. But it's going to make staying open very difficult, because complying with the law will be expensive and complicated.
Martinez-Fischer said the clinics run like any other business, and it's highly unusual for commerce-friendly legislators in Texas to tell business owners what services they can offer - except in this case. "It's meddling beyond the privacy of a woman's health care choice and getting into industry practices," he said. "I don't think that's where we need to be."
Hearn is worried that as clinics close their doors, women in some parts of Texas will see no other option but to travel south of the Mexican border to receive abortions.
"They're not legal there," she said, "but they're certainly available."
The Hidalgo clinic already sees women who have had under-the-table procedures in Mexico, as well as women who have taken suspicious herbal "abortion pills" they picked up down south. They suffer infections and other complications.
"The first thing they said, when our clinicians heard about the bill, is that more women are going to go to Mexico," Hearn said. "It's not safe."

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Montana GOP Proposes Family Planning Cuts That Would Increase Unintended Pregnancies By 62 Percent


By Tara Culp-Ressler on Apr 1, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Even though the majority of Americansdon’t agree with Republicans’ quest to defund Planned Parenthood, abortion opponents across the country continue to find ways to target the women’s health organization — even at the expense of their own constituents. Republican lawmakers in Montana seem to be intent on joining the national trend, advancing a state budget that would strip over $4 million in Title X funding from Planned Parenthood and other community health clinics.
The state lawmakers leading the charge claim they want to prevent taxpayer money from going to Planned Parenthood because that funding will indirectly subsidize abortions. Of course, if Republicans are hoping to prevent abortions, eliminating family planning resources will have exactly the opposite effect. The state’s health department is warningthat if the new budget goes into effect, it will lead to a 62 percent increase in unintended pregnancies and a 114 percent rise in abortions:
the Montana House unanimously passed a state budget that excludes these funds — some $4.5 million — accounting for 30 percent of the budgets for 20 community clinics and five Planned Parenthood Clinics in the state.
These clinics rely on Title X funding for reproductive and preventative health services, including cancer and sexually transmitted disease screening, STD treatment, contraception and health counseling. [...]
Without family planning services provided by Title X-funded clinics, the number of abortions in Montana would go up by 114 percent, while the number of unintended pregnancies will rise by 62 percent, according to the Montana Department of Health and Human Services.
The same situation is currently unfolding in Texas — where cuts to family planning services are projected to lead to an additional 24,000 unplanned births between 2014 and 2015, costing taxpayers an estimated $273 million in medical expenses and Medicaid coverage. Those numbers have convinced some of Texas’ GOP lawmakers to reconsider their push to eliminate preventative health resources, and Republicans may attempt to restore some of the funding this session.
The lawmakers in Montana may have a similar wake-up call. Although the state budget has already passed the House, there’s been a massive outcry to try to pressure the state Senate to reinstate the family planning funds in the final version of the legislation. According to the Associated Press, State Sen. David Wanzenreid (D) has already received more than 800 emails from constituents demanding that the Title X funding be reinstated.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time the Montana GOP has pushed to undermine preventative health services that could actually help prevent unintended pregnancies and abortions. Republicans are also attempting to place limits on sex education policies that “they believe are teaching bad morals” in public schools.
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States with Highest Teen Pregnancy Rate, Largely Adopts Abstinence-Only Sex Education

July 7, 2013

HUFFPOST EDUCATION

Mississippi Schools, With America's Highest Teen Pregnancy Rate, Largely Adopts Abstinence-Only Sex Education


Reuters  |  Posted:  Updated: 08/27/2012 9:33 am

* State has nation's highest teen birth rate

* New law allows abstinence plus sex-ed teaching

* Studies show sex-ed works to prevent teen pregnancy

By Emily Le Coz

TUPELO, Miss., Aug 26 (Reuters) - Artasia Bobo, a 16-year-old Mississippi high school sophomore, was only 12 when she got pregnant and doesn't recall receiving much in the way of sex education.

Holding her 3-year-old daughter, Annsley, after cheerleading practice recently, the honor-roll student said she's now an advocate for comprehensive sex education offered as soon as possible.

"What I went through is nothing any girl would want to go through," she said. "It changed my life. I love my daughter, but if I could go back in time, my life would be a whole lot different."

Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state, has the nation's highest teen pregnancy rate. Yet until this year, the state allowed schools to forgo sex education entirely.

That changed with a state law passed last year that mandated school districts adopt either abstinence-only or abstinence-plus sex education policies. Before the new law, any district that did teach sex education had to teach abstinence-only.

Under the new law, a majority of Mississippi's public school districts this year adopted abstinence-only policies that avoid or downplay the issue of contraceptives.

Twenty other U.S. states and the District of Columbia also require sex education, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based non-profit organization focusing on sexual and reproductive rights.

After the law took effect at the beginning of July, 81 districts chose abstinence-only and 71 chose abstinence-plus, the state Department of Education reported. Mississippi kept no record of how many districts taught abstinence-only under the old law, department spokesman Jon Kalahar said.


"SERIOUS PROBLEM"

Mississippi reported 55 births per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2010 - more than 60 percent above the U.S. average, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in April.

The state also has one of the nation's highest infant mortality rates and among the highest rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea infections among teens and young adults, according to the Mississippi Department of Health.

"It was obvious we had a serious problem in the state," said Democratic state Representative Cecil Brown, who chaired the committee that championed the bill. "You can't stick your head in the sand."

Abstinence-only allows districts to teach about the benefits of avoiding sex until marriage, the consequences of bearing children out of wedlock and how to reject sexual advances. Such programs also teach that abstinence is the only certain way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Although a discussion of condoms or contraceptives is allowed under this policy, it cannot include demonstrations of use and must present the risks and failure rates of such devices, the law states.

Abstinence-plus must include all those topics and can also teach about the causes and effects of sexually transmitted diseases and how to prevent them, according to the law.

"Before this year, not a single school district had adopted any policy on sex education," said Jamie Holcomb Bardwell, director of programs for Women's Fund of Mississippi. "The fact that 71 adopted abstinence-plus is one of the biggest victories for young people in Mississippi this year."

Bardwell said she's encouraged that many of the districts with the highest teen pregnancy rates adopted not only abstinence-plus policies, but also implemented sex education programs proven effective for changing teen behavior.


COMPREHENSIVE SEX EDUCATION

"Research shows that when young people have access to a curriculum that's not abstinence-only ... when it includes medically accurate information, they're more likely to have lower pregnancy rates and lower sexually transmitted infection rates," she said.

Studies published this year by the Guttmacher Institute show teens who received comprehensive sex education, including instruction on birth control, waited longer to have sex and had lower rates of pregnancy.

That might have been the case for Bobo, but such a course wasn't offered when she got pregnant. Nor will it be offered this year, since her district chose an abstinence-only policy.

A statewide survey conducted in 2011 by the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University found most parents support comprehensive sex education in schools.

Among them is 40-year-old Renee Bobo, Artasia's mother.

"They're getting it from TV and from friends, anyway," said Bobo, who works nights so she can care for her granddaughter while Artasia attends school. "They should get the straight facts from an informed instructor."

The Lee County School District in northeast Mississippi adopted an abstinence-only program for the first time this year. Superintendent Jimmy Weeks said health classes had previously touched on the subject but this will be the district's first dedicated sex-education class.

The school board picked abstinence-only because "we don't want to come across as saying, 'Hey, premarital sex is OK, let us show us how you do it without getting a disease,'" Weeks said.

Sixteen percent of Lee County births in 2010 were to teens, according to the Mississippi Department of Health. In Itawamba County, where Artasia attends school, the rate was 16.5 percent.

Coahoma County in the Mississippi delta, which at 23 percent had one of the state's highest rates of births to teens, recently adopted an abstinence-plus program after four years of teaching abstinence-only, said Superintendent Pauline Rhodes.

"I've seen first-hand the devastation of children having children, and I have seen students on their way to a promising career have to drop out," Rhodes said. "I've always felt that until we can get a handle on teen pregnancies, we will not be able to get a handle on juvenile delinquencies." (Editing by David Adams and Jim Loney)




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Legalized abortion reduces crime

Legalized abortion and crime effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The effect of legalized abortion on crime (sometimes referred to as the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis) is the theory that legal abortion reduces crime. Proponents of the theory generally argue that since unwanted children are more likely to become criminals and that an inverse correlation is observed between the availability of abortion and subsequent crime. Moreover, children born under these conditions are usually less fortunate as enough preparation was not put in place for their birth and upbringing. In particular, it is argued that the legalization of abortion in the United States, largely due to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, has reduced crime in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Opponents generally reject these statistics, and argue that abortion has negative effects on society or decrease in crime is brought about in other ways.

Contents

1972 Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future

The 1972 Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future is one of the better known early versions of this claim, although it was not the first.[1] The Commission cited research purporting that the children of women denied an abortion “turned out to have been registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more antisocial and criminal behavior, and have been more dependent on public assistance.” A 1966 study by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe was cited by the Rockefeller Commission and is probably the first serious empirical research on this topic. They studied the children of 188 women who were denied abortions from 1939 to 1941 at the hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. They compared these unwanted children to another group – the next child born after each of the unwanted children at the hospital. The unwanted children were more likely to grow up in adverse conditions, such as having divorced parents or being raised in foster homes and were more likely to become delinquents and engaged in crime.[2] Supreme Court Justice Blackmun opinion in Roe v. Wade also referenced the social and private problems "of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it."[3]

Donohue and Levitt study

Main article: The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University revived discussion of this claim with their 2001 paper "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime". Donohue and Levitt point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children.
The authors argue that states that had abortion legalized earlier and more widespread should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon and Washingtonexperienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. Further, states with a high abortion rate have experienced a greater reduction in crime, when corrected for factors like average income.[4] Finally, studies in Canada and Australia purport to have established a correlation between legalized abortion and overall crime reduction.[4]
The study was criticized by various authors, including a 2001 article by John Lott and John Whitley where they argued that Donohue and Levitt assume that states which completely legalized abortion had higher abortion rates than states where abortion was only legal under certain conditions (many states allowed abortion only under certain conditions prior to Roe) and that CDC statistics do not substantiate this claim. In addition, if abortion rates cause crime rates to fall, crime rates should start to fall among the youngest people first and then gradually be seen lowering the crime rate for older and older people. In fact, they argue, the murder rates first start to fall among the oldest criminals and then the next oldest criminals and so on until it last falls among the youngest individuals. Lott and Whitley argue that if Donohue and Levitt are right that 80 percent of the drop in murder rates during the 1990s is due solely to the legalization of abortion, their results should be seen in these graphs without anything being controlled for, and that in fact the opposite is true. In addition, Lott and Whitley pointed out that using arrest rate data to proxy crime rates is flawed because arrest for murder can take place many months or even years after the crime occurred. Lott and Whitley show that using the Supplemental Homicide Report, which links murder data for when the crime occurred with later arrest rate data, reverses Donohue and Levitt's regression results.[5]
In 2005 Levitt published rebuttal to these criticisms in which he re-ran his numbers to address the shortcomings and variables missing from the original study. The new results are nearly identical to those of the original study. Levitt posits that any reasonable use of the data available reinforces the results of the original 2001 paper.[6]
Later in 2005, Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz claimed that a computer error in Levitt and Donahue's statistical analysis lead to an artificially inflated relationship between legalized abortion and crime reduction. Once other crime-associated factors were properly controlled for, the effect of abortion on arrests was reduced by about half. Foote and Goetz also criticize Levitt and Donahue's use of arrest totals rather than arrests per capita, which takes population size into account. Using Census Bureau population estimates, Foote and Goetz repeated the analysis using arrest rates in place of simple arrest totals, and found that the effect of abortion disappeared entirely.[7]
Donohue and Levitt subsequently published a response to the Foote and Goetz paper.[8]The response acknowledged the mistake, but showed that with different methodology, the effect still existed.

See also

References

  1. ^ Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future
  2. ^ Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe, "One hundred and twenty children born after application for therapeutic abortion refused," Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 1966, 71–78
  3. ^ Roe v. Wade (No. 70-18) 314 F.Supp. 1217
  4. ^ a b Freakonomics, Chapter 4, Where Did All the Criminals Go?
  5. ^ John R. Lott Jr. and John E. Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births", (2001) SSRN Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 254 working paper and Economic Inquiry, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 304-324, April 2007 published article.
  6. ^ Abortion and crime: who should you believe?
  7. ^ Oops-onomics
  8. ^ "Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz (2005)", Donohue and Levitt, 2006

Further reading

  • Charles, Kerwin Ko., and Melvin Stephens, Jr. 2002. "Abortion Legalization and Adolescent Substance Abuse." NBER Working paper No. 9193.
  • Leigh, Andrew, and Justin Wolfers, "Abortion and Crime," AQ: Journal of Contemporary Analysis 2000, 72(4), pp. 28–30.
  • Pop-Eleches, Christian. 2003. "The Impact of an Abortion Ban on Socio-Economic Outcomes of Children: Evidence from Romania." Harvard University Department of Economics. Unpublished.
  • Sen, Anindya. 2002. "Does Increased Abortion Lead to Lower Crime? Evaluating the Relationship between Crime, Abortion, and Fertility." University of Waterloo Department of Economics. Unpublished.
  • Sorenson, Susan, Douglas Wiebe, and Richard Berk, "Legalized Abortion and the Homicide of Young Children: An Empirical Investigation," Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 2002, 2(1), pp. 239–56.

External links

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