To ask pro-choice MNers to email your MPs? <this is not a request to vote on anything>

[EricNorthmansMistressOfPotions]

There is an article here about the proposed amendments to the health and social care bill which will force women to undergo 'independent' counselling before being allowed to choose to terminate a pregnancy. The assumption is that BPAS and the like have a financial investment in encouraging women to terminate and as such their counselling is biased. The stated goal is to reduce the number of terminations per year by forcing women to delay between seeking and receiving termination, and having to undergo additional counselling (political bias unknown, though easily guessed at) prior to the termination. ND hopes that woman will change their minds during this enforced extended waiting period.

If you think this is a shit idea you can email your MP by clicking this link

This is not a request to vote on anything at all

How do you know empusa? It's already been pointed out that there hasn't been a survey. In any case, even one woman who has been let down is one too many.

Oh, I don't dislike all the tories. I don't know Dorries, but I certainly don't like her blog and her amendment.

Dorries is a very clever, ambitious individual who reminds me a lot of Sarah Palin.

She describes herself as 'pro-choice, pro-women's rights' but all her writings show otherwise. She has written a DM article (DM is obv right up her street) using very emotional language, about her time as a nurse assisting in an abortion. She makes no secret of her ambitions in that area. She does indeed want to reduce the abortion time limit, she has already campaigned for it.

Thus I think it's quite reasonable to question her motives in this amendment - she is not looking to give women access to better counselling. She is looking to reduce the number of abortions by 60,000 per year (that's stated in her own literature). She has the means to do this very easily - plenty of pro-life counselling organisations already exist. It's just obtuse if to refuse to recognise a possible pro-life agenda here.

bumbley If it was standard not to offer then nobody would be coming on here and saying that they had been offered counselling. Quite straightforward logic really.

Of course poor goodnightmoon should have been offered counselling - us pro-choicers really aren't in the business of rail-roading vulnerable women into abortion you know. Since counselling is a service offered currently, I imagine that the failing was with her GP?

This campaign is about not rail-roading women seeking an abortion with pro-life propoganda - which already happens.

Like Michelle, she has had a bad experience - you were not equally sympathetic to michelle were you?

Not necessarily, this thread does not represent everyone who has has an abortion. By that reasoning you could assume I'm the only pro-lifer on MN and that isn't the case either - believe it or not! Anyway, even 'usually offered' isn't good enough. Surely it should always be offered even if it is declined?

EightiesChick - just seen that article -hurrah! That is excellent news.

I think a lot of health professionals involved with abortion have mixed feelings about it. It is an upsetting procedure. There was a very interesting story the other week in the NY Times Magazine about pregnancy reduction, where women carrying triplets or even twins choose to have the heart stopped on one of the embryoes. A lot of people (including doctors and nurses interviewed) seem to draw the line at reducing to twins, but find it upsetting to reduce from twin to single.
sorry - off topic but a real ethical dilemma for pro-choice advocates.

Of course it doesn't.
I was pointing out that "not offering" wasn't standard. Hence why people did get offered it. There is no flaw in that logic.

I was actually sympathetic to Michelle on a previous thread. Sympathetic to the point of outrage which somehow got turned back on me as an accusation of bullying because I was shocked by what she had been told when she was seeking advice and support. I chose not to make that mistake again on this thread.

Did I say that no one got offered it?

chandellina As far as I'm aware there are valid reasons for reducing from multiple births to not. As reducing has dangers it isn't a thing they are likely to do for the sheer hell of it.

Sure it's upsetting, but that doesn't make it wrong. If something is very risky, then it makes sense to try and reduce the risk.

Of course no one who goes into medicine wants to end lives or potential lives, but sometimes that is just how it has to be.

If the medical profession only did things that weren't hard and upsetting then there'd be a lot of people kept alive solely by machines, because it is too upsetting to give up.

bumbley. I am not twisting anything. You are the one who keeps describing abortion as 'medical' and birth as 'natural'.

What, therefore, are we meant to construe from your choice of words?

bumbley You could just reread the last page.

But here you go
I said - "goodnightmoon's experience is awful, and should never have happened. But it isn't the standard."
You said - "How do you know empusa?"

So I told you how I knew it wasn't standard.

And you said, "not necessarily".

Empusa - actually the story found a lot of people do it for sheer convenience of raising one child, or because they already have other children and only wanted one more.

it's a good article, not biased in any way IMO.

www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/the-two-minus-one-pregnancy.html?pagewanted=all

chandellina In which case I'm amazed they are able to go ahead with it, I'd have thought it would have risked the child they did want!

Only because birth usually does not necessarily require medical intervention (in the technical terms (not defined by me) ) whereas abortion always does. This, btw, is in relation to the discussion we were having about whether women considering abortion should be informed of risks of giving birth because they are informed of the risk of having the abortion. They are informed of the risk of giving birth if any medical interventions are involved just as they are informed of the risks of the abortion because medical intervention is involved.

Anyway, I thought we had got back to the original topic.

Oops delete either usually/necessarily in the first line.

I can't actually read that chandellina. It's too upsetting :(

Chandelina, that still doesn't make it 'wrong' imo - it is a woman's right to choose. It is upsetting and is not a decision I would make myself, but it is her choice. Not yours. Not Bumbleys.

Not mine, I meant to add.

mygoldfish- i'm not disputing the right to make the choice, though many of the women acknowledge it is hard to justify and they don't want anyone to know. It just goes to show that pregnancies are controlled/destroyed for all sorts of reasons and it is impossible for most people, even those fervently pro-choice, not to draw some conclusions on the morality or sense behind those reasons.

my point being that we shouldn't be pro-choice to the point where we have to fear any upset to the status quo, even if it might actually help some women. I know nothing about Dorries so maybe she really does just have an agenda. On its own merit i didn't think the idea of independent counselling was wrong though.

and another thing - the pregnancy reduction thing wouldn't be necessary in the US if IVF were regulated to prevent more than two embryoes being transferred. Here there are strict guidelines on multiples so we could never have "octo mom"

I think it's a pretty fine line to be honest. Even some pro-choicers draw the line where they feel that a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy is 'wrong' (usually around the 24 week mark) or when they think later term abortions are 'wrong' eg. Solely for a cleft palate. I don't think there's any shame in admitting that you think something is 'wrong' even if you don't intend to interfere with the person's decision to do it.

U-turn from the government:

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/31/downing-street-uturn-abortion-proposals