i just don't understand...

Abortion ban killing women

By Lance Lattig and Angela Heimburger

Published in Miami Herald

MANAGUA -- A year after elections in Nicaragua returned Daniel Ortega to power, scores of pregnant women have died, many as a consequence of a new law that prohibits doctors from providing lifesaving treatment.

Over Their Dead Bodies: Denial of Access to Emergency Obstetric Care and Therapeutic Abortion in Nicaragua
Report, October 2, 2007

Women's Rights: Abortion

In the run-up to the hotly contested elections last November, Sandinistas in the National Assembly helped to overturn a legal provision that had permitted lifesaving abortions since 1893. Nicaragua thus joined the handful of countries in which abortion is a crime punishable by prison for both a woman and her doctor -- even in cases of rape, incest or when a woman's life is at risk.

During the past year, the new law has had a devastating impact on women in Nicaragua.

* Pregnant women suffering from illnesses such as kidney failure have died because they were not allowed to interrupt their pregnancies to treat their conditions.

* A poor, single mother died of a heart attack after doctors refused to treat her severe hemorrhaging because the fetus was still alive. Neither the fetus nor the woman survived, and her 3-year-old son now lives with his indigent grandmother in precarious conditions.

Human-rights organizations have come under fire for addressing the issue of abortion, but many critics have simply missed the point. The issue isn't abortion per se but the human-rights violations that occur when access to safe and legal abortion is restricted. Freedom of religion is a basic right, but the Nicaraguan government should not use religious doctrine as a pretext for violating women's fundamental rights to life and health.

Untreated ectopic pregnancy

In many other countries, even Catholic hospitals perform therapeutic abortions necessary to save a woman's life. Although Nicaragua's health ministry issued protocols on emergency obstetric care, it has since failed to follow up by clarifying what other procedures could be considered therapeutic abortion.
Even according to the government's own figures, maternal mortality has shot up by 100 percent in the past year. One woman died in April from an untreated ectopic pregnancy -- that is, when a fertilized egg is implanted outside the uterus and has no chance of survival. Normally, doctors around the world intervene as soon as the ectopic pregnancy is detected. But Nicaraguan doctors are now reluctant to act out of fear that their interventions might be considered criminal.
Another reason women are dying in Nicaragua is that they are afraid to seek medical help. Women seeking abortions fear mistreatment and discrimination by medical personnel, as well as the threat of prosecution by the authorities. Human Rights Watch interviewed several women who were able to obtain safe but illegal abortions. None of them was able to obtain the procedure in the public sector, however, despite the medically certified risks to their health posed by their pregnancies.

Here, traffic intersections feature giant posters of Ortega with the slogan, ''Arise ye poor of the world!'' Under Ortega's government, however, the sad irony is that richer, better-informed women can fly to Miami or seek a costly and illegal abortion in Managua, while poor women often die preventable deaths after they are rejected from public health services or denied emergency obstetric care.
Ortega has made many promises to end the misery of the disenfranchised in Nicaragua. A good place to start would be to guarantee the state's obligation to ensure the health and lives of Nicaraguan women. The Sandinista government should inform women about their right to procure emergency obstetric care in the public-health sector and remind doctors of their obligation to treat them.
Nicaragua has a long history of struggle for social justice. But the total ban on abortion denies equality and protection to women in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of Nicaraguan society.

Ha

I love it when people think we're christian rock.

*zachtipton*

this is for people who don't realize there are other things going on in this world.

WAKE UP

THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING

Since early 2003, Sudanese government soldiers and their proxy militia, known as the Janjaweed, have fought rebel groups in the western region of Darfur. Initially, the government strategy largely involved systematic assaults against civilians from the same ethnic groups as the rebel forces. The targeted victims have been mostly from the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masaalit ethnic groups.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died from violence, disease, and starvation, and thousands of women have been raped. More than 2.5 million civilians have been driven from their homes, their villages torched and property stolen. Thousands of villages have been systematically destroyed and more than 230,000 people have fled to neighboring Chad. But most of those displaced are trapped inside Darfur. Although large-scale government attacks against civilians have declined since 2005, millions remain at risk. Most of the displaced are not returning home for fear that their villages will be attacked again. The Sudanese government still bears primary responsibility for the danger to civilians, but the increasing fragmentation of the rebel groups and their use of violence have contributed to the high level of insecurity.

Darfur is home to more than 30 ethnic groups, all of which are Muslim. The Janjaweed militias—recruited, armed, trained, and supported by the Sudanese government—are drawn from several of the groups in Darfur who identify themselves as Arab. They have used racial slurs while attacking and raping the targeted groups, who are considered non-Arab. The ethnic and perceived racial basis of the violence has been well documented by the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, independent human rights organizations, and international journalists.

The Khartoum-based government's use of ethnically and racially targeted violence in Darfur resembles similar actions in southern Sudan before a tenuous 2005 peace agreement ended conflict there. Government-sponsored actions in both regions have included:
INFLAMING ethnic conflict

IMPEDING international humanitarian access, resulting in deadly conditions of life for displaced civilians

BOMBING civilians from aircraft

MURDERING and RAPING civilians

Because of substantial evidence that "acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity were occurring or immediately threatened," in 2004 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared a Genocide Emergency for Darfur. That same year, the U.S. government determined that genocide had been committed in Darfur. In January 2005, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that "crimes against humanity and war crimes have been committed in Darfur and may be no less serious and heinous then genocide."

(our record doesn't really seem important anymore.)

~zach

Wow

the new album comes out tomorrow. It seems like just yesterday when the last one came out....

*zachtipton*

Another new song is up

on the myspace.
Check it out.

*zachtipton*