Tag Archives: pregnancy

Sweltering heat means 25,000 more babies are born early every year

View article – 

Sweltering heat means 25,000 more babies are born early every year

Posted in Eureka, FF, GE, ONA, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sweltering heat means 25,000 more babies are born early every year

6 Must-Try Green Subscription Box Services

Shares

More subscription box service firms specializing in green and natural living are opening up (pardon the pun). If you’re looking to switch to more eco-friendly products, it’s a great way to try new products without a huge investment. Most of these services offer a monthly box, and give discounts for long-term subscriptions.

Here is a list of six must-try subscription box services for discovering great green and natural brands.

Ecocentric Mom

Ecocentric Mom mom box. Image: Ecocentric Mom

Ecocentric Mom offers four different box options: Pregnancy, Mom and Baby (0 and 18 months), Mom and Toddler (18 months to 4 years), and Mom/Woman Only, so you can choose the one that’s right for you. Each box comes with five full-size items, including personal care products, cosmetics, natural remedies, snacks and more. The monthly box runs $27.99, and recent boxes have included everything from lip conditioner and body balm to baby milestone stickers and onesies.

Homegrown Collective

Homegrown Collective is a subscription box service that delivers a “homegrown” experience to your doorstep every month for $34 to $39 per month (plus $9 shipping). Rather than products for you to sample, Homegrown Collective’s Greenbox includes items to teach you a way to live more sustainably and become more self-sufficient. Past boxes have included everything you need to create your own detox products, home remedies, beauty products, household cleaners, kombucha and more! Even the packaging is designed to create less waste.

Natural Herbal Living Herb Box

Do you want to learn more about herbs? The Natural Herbal Living Herb Box is designed to help you learn about herbs on both an intellectual and physical level. Each month, the herb box includes ingredients to make several recipes shared in Natural Herbal Living Magazine (subscription included). These items may include the herb of the month, essential oil, flower essence, additional herbs, oils, beeswax, vinegar, honey and other herbal goodies necessary to make the recipes of the month. Mini boxes are available for $24, while full-size boxes are $48.

UrthBox

Each month, UrthBox delivers a package of sustainable, non-GMO snack foods that they hand-pick from brands that care for the earth. Choose from Classic, Gluten-Free, Vegan and Diet options in four different sizes, from six  to 25-plus snacks ($19.99 to $49.99). Shipping is free in the U.S., $6.95 to Canada and $14.95 worldwide.

Green Kid Crafts

There’s a green subscription box service for kids, too! Created by a mom, Green Kid Crafts delivers monthly boxes that include hands-on, award-winning and eco-friendly STEAM-themed kits (that’s science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics). There are boxes available for ages 2 to 10-plus, each with various projects, step-by-step instructions, an activity magazine and achievement badges. It’s a great way to give your kids a creative outlet and support a green company. Rates start at $17.95 per month.

Kloverbox

Kloverbox is a subscription box service that helps you discover organic, natural and cruelty-free beauty, health, nutrition and household brands. For $25 per month, you will receive six to eight deluxe or full-size products from pure and sustainable brands that you can use for an at-home spa day.

Do you have a favorite subscription box service? Share your thoughts with us below.

Feature image courtesy of VFS Digital Design

6 Must-Try Green Subscription Box Services

More subscription box service firms specializing in green and natural …Chrystal JohnsonOctober 31, 2017

2017’s Greenest Cities in the U.S.

Anchorage, Alaska, has more green space than any city in …Earth911October 30, 2017

The Real Value of the World’s Most Famous Statues

Although it’s impossible to put a price on the world’s …Earth911October 27, 2017

earth911

Follow this link: 

6 Must-Try Green Subscription Box Services

Posted in Anchor, eco-friendly, FF, GE, ONA, organic, PUR, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 6 Must-Try Green Subscription Box Services

Health Care Vote Likely to Happen on Thursday

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s been literally hours since I last updated you on the Republican health care bill, so let’s catch up. Twitter is our friend:

What’s the rush?

Roger that. TrumpCare 1.0 arguably failed because of that hideous CBO score saying that 24 million people would lose coverage—a truly remarkable achievement since Obamacare only covers 20 million people in the first place. TrumpCare 3.0 is even worse, so God only knows what the CBO would say about it. Anyway, how bad can it be? I mean really?

Urk. Pretty bad. Even the AMA gets it:

Good for them. What’s remarkable, though, is how lonely their position is:

I don’t really get this either. Maybe they’ve just given up? Maybe they figure that as part of the hated establishment, their opposition is just more likely to make Republicans vote yes? Beats me.

This bill needs to be decisively put out of its misery. Yes, I suppose Democrats might benefit by forcing vulnerable House members to vote for it, and then killing it in the Senate, but that’s not worth the risk that, somehow, it might actually pass if it gets through the House. You never know. Best to make it crystal clear that there’s simply no needle Republicans can thread on this subject.

Then we get to wait and see if President Trump kills Obamacare anyway in a fit of pique by cutting off the CSR subsidies. This is really shaping up to be a great year.

Original link – 

Health Care Vote Likely to Happen on Thursday

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Health Care Vote Likely to Happen on Thursday

A Judge Struck Down the "Cocaine Mom" Law That Put Pregnant Women in Jail

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Friday, a Wisconsin district court struck down a decades-old state law that criminalizes pregnant women with histories of drug use by labeling them as child abusers and letting juvenile courts appoint guardians and lawyers to represent the interests of their fetuses.

The law, called the Unborn Child Protection Act, was passed in 1997 and made the state responsible for protecting fetuses at all stages of pregnancy. Known as the “cocaine mom” law, it gave juvenile courts jurisdiction over the “expectant mother”—no matter what her age—and allowed the courts to force pregnant women into drug treatment if she had any history of drug use, and into jail if she refused treatment.

Public health groups opposed the law at the time, arguing it would scare women away from prenatal care. “A criminal justice approach to maternal and child health is not the best alternative,” said Milwaukee’s Health Department at the time. “Readily available drug and alcohol treatment for expectant mothers would be preferable to threatening mothers with incarceration and loss of paternal sic rights.”

Tamara Loertscher, whose case was decided on Friday, was incarcerated and held in solitary confinement while pregnant as a result of the law. In 2014, Loertscher, 29, sought care at a hospital in Wisconsin after finding out she was pregnant. At the hospital, she told medical staff that she had a history of methamphetamine and marijuana use, but that she’d stopped using when she realized she was going to have a baby.

That’s when the courts and child services got involved. Loertscher was subject to several juvenile court hearings, and when she refused to participate in an in-treatment drug program, she was jailed for contempt of court. A lawyer was appointed by the state to represent Loertscher’s 14- week fetus, but Loertscher herself was not given legal counsel. She spent almost three weeks incarcerated in a Taylor County jail, including several days in solitary confinement. During this time, Loertscher received no prenatal care, nor treatment for a thyroid condition.

Eventually, Loertscher agreed to comply with the state’s recommended treatment and weekly drug testing. But nonetheless, the county department of human services concluded that she had committed child maltreatment because of her previous drug use (it eventually withdrew the finding). All of her drug tests were negative, and in 2015, Loertscher delivered a healthy baby boy.

That year, Loertscher sued Wisconsin and Taylor County in federal court for violating her civil rights. And on Friday, a Wisconsin federal court ruled that the law is too vague and thus unconstitutional, but the court denied her request for damages as part of the ruling on Friday.

The law “purported to protect ‘unborn children,'” says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which represented Loertscher in her case against the state, “but in fact subverted maternal and child health and deprived adult women who became pregnant of fundamental constitutional rights.”

Loertscher was not the only woman arrested under the Wisconsin law. According to Paltrow, Wisconsin state documents show that since 2006, child protective services looked into more than 3400 cases of “unborn child abuse” and nearly 470 women were found to have committed such abuse.

Link: 

A Judge Struck Down the "Cocaine Mom" Law That Put Pregnant Women in Jail

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Judge Struck Down the "Cocaine Mom" Law That Put Pregnant Women in Jail

This Brilliant Memoir Will Challenge What You Think You Know About Loss and Pregnancy

Mother Jones

For most of her life, Ariel Levy’s disregard for rules and expectations has mostly paid off. As a child, she preferred adventurous make-believe to playing house. As a young adult, she was determined to write at New York magazine when she was a lowly editorial assistant and became an accomplished magazine writer for such publications as the New York Times, Vogue, and the New Yorker. She fell in love and got the girl, even though the girl was in a relationship with someone else when they met. Eventually, they married. She’s boarded airplanes to places like South Africa in search of characters and returned with stories about gender and athleticism and ways that ignorance and stereotypes can cripple.

But life isn’t simple, and as she moved from her 20s into her late 30s, the rules began to feel a little less negotiable—an experience she records in her riveting new memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply.

“Every morning I wake up, and for a few seconds I’m disoriented, confused as to why I feel grief seeping into my body, and then I remember what has become of my life,” Levy writes in the preface. “I am thunderstruck by feeling at odd times, and then I find myself gripping the kitchen counter, a subway pole, a friend’s body, so I won’t fall over.” Over the course of only a few months when she was 38 years old, Levy lost her spouse and her house to divorce, and her son to a miscarriage. In 2013, Levy wrote about her miscarriage in a powerful New Yorker personal essay called “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” It’s impossible to read that essay—and the book—without experiencing some of her anguish, as if you’ve stepped outside of your body and into hers. It’s the sort of writing that is vulnerable and vivid, and makes the reader feel brave and desperate in quick succession. “All of my conjuring had led to ruin and death,” she writes in her memoir. “Now I was a wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone…The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing.”

Mother Jones caught up with Levy to talk about writing through grief, the politics of miscarriage, and what it means to be an animal woman.

Mother Jones: Let’s talk about “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” How did you decide to write about that experience in the first place?

Ariel Levy: It wasn’t really a decision. It just sort of came out of my fingers, you know? There were fewer choices involved than in anything I’ve ever written before—it just kind of happened. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever had a piece like that before in my life where there was not a lot of effort; there were not a lot of choices; there was not a lot of moving things around. It just came out of my fingers. I just said what I had to say, basically. It’s not usually like that. Usually it’s a lot of work. Usually it’s a pain in the drain. It just happened.

MJ: So it just felt like something you needed to write about?

AL: Yeah. I guess I needed to, because it wasn’t a conscious choice. The book is a different matter—the book is a conscious choice, and the book was work. It did involve making lots and lots of decisions, and doing lots and lots of revisions. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” was not like that. I felt like I had said exactly what I meant to say. It’s not usually like that for me. Normally, it’s kind of what I want to say, you know, it’s sort of what I want to say, but it’s never quite everything I hoped. With that piece, I didn’t have any hope. I was like, “Yeah, I mean every word of that.” Unfortunately, it only happened once in 20 years. I’m not going to get too used to it. The book was, in many ways, a pleasurable process. It was a normal writing experience that involved decision-making and revision, and some struggle, like anything. Much, much easier than my first book, which was like a total uphill slog.

MJ: I’m sort of surprised to hear you say that—the writing comes across as such raw emotion.

AL: Well, the fact of the matter is, I was doing that anyway. That process of looking at what has happened and what I had done in various ways was difficult, but writing about it wasn’t painful. Feeling suffering is painful, obviously, but writing about suffering, I did not find unpleasant. Usually I don’t write about myself; I write about other people. When you’re reporting, you’re trying to put together the truth based on what lots of different people tell you. Maybe you’re there for some of it because you’re reporting scenes, but at the end of the day, you’re trying to piece together reality from various sources. It’s not like I know the ultimate truth, but I know what was true to me. I found the exercise of trying to express that as precisely as possible sort of thrilling.

MJ: So how did you decide to write the story of your miscarriage as a book?

AL: I don’t know. If this was someone else’s story, I would have wanted to tell it. I would have thought, “Well first of all, that’s a good story, and second of all, it involves lots of stuff that I’m interested in.” Why is it disqualified just because it’s my story, and I know every single thing about it? That shouldn’t be a mark against it. Maybe that should be a mark for it, is what I ultimately decided. Obviously personal life is complicated, but I decided to do it anyway.

MJ: I’m glad you did.

AL: Thanks, I’m glad I did too.

MJ: So does that mean you’re feeling good about the book coming out?

AL: I feel partly good about it, let’s say.

MJ: How did the people in your life react to the idea of your memoir?

AL: Really generously. My former spouse is the first person who read it before I turned it in. I was like, “Okay, if there’s anything you can’t live with, let me know and I’ll take it out.” She’s more important to me than any book. Characteristically generous, she was like, “You know what? I’m not going to censor you. This is your story—you tell it how you want to tell it.”

Which is incredible, but also not surprising if you know her. She was the only one I was concerned about. My parents, you know, that’s ancient history.

MJ: Miscarriage is sometimes regarded as this personal, private thing. When women come forward and speak about it, it becomes political. Do you see yourself normalizing the spectrum of pregnancy outcomes by writing about your experience?

AL: Certainly hearing from lots and lots of women who had lost babies, lost pregnancies, and also some women who’d lost children, made me feel good about writing about some of these issues. I feel that the dramatic experience of being a human female animal hasn’t really been a major subject for art and literature. Why shouldn’t it be? It affects half the population. Not that every woman is going to get pregnant or have a child or lose a child, but at some point in her life every woman will have some drama around menstruation, pregnancy, childbearing, childbirth, menopause, something to do with that animal fear.

MJ: Do you feel like there’s a stigma of blame around miscarriage?

AL: Well it’s also a biological experience, right? When you lose a pregnancy like that—especially if you are late term, as I was—you’re going through an enormous let down of all these hormones. If things go well, you’ve got a baby to take care of, so that serves as this counterbalance to this enormous physical, hormonal shitshow. If the baby dies, then you’re in a pretty dark place. Sure it’s cultural, but it’s not just cultural. It’s also physical. It’s pretty hard not to blame yourself and feel terrible in 800 ways when you’re going through that physical experience. Your body’s producing milk for a baby who’s not there. I don’t see a way that you’d avoid going to a pretty dark place in that condition.

MJ: The book is, in some ways, a meditation on womanhood and what it means to have the power to reproduce. Can you talk a little bit about what that has meant to you and then how it has evolved since your pregnancy?

AL: Before I had that experience, I wouldn’t have understood what it entailed. I think if someone said to me, “Oh, this person had a late-term miscarriage, this person went into premature labor,” I would’ve had no sense of what that meant. I think sometimes people will assume women will know what this is all about. I don’t even think it’s fair to ask women to know what it’s about if they haven’t experienced that. I certainly didn’t understand the emotional experience of pregnancy and birth. It just wouldn’t have resonated for me.

MJ: What advice would you give someone who is dealing with this kind of loss?

AL: Just to know that eventually, grief moves. It changes shape. If you’re fortunate, it moves from something you live in to something that lives in you. What I mean is, there’s always going to be something. I’m never going to be like, “Oh yeah, that was fine that that happened.” It’s always going to be a really painful reality for me. I’m always going to wish that my son had lived. Now, that’s something that lives in me. I don’t walk around in a tunnel of that experience. It’s just something that lives in my heart.

Original link – 

This Brilliant Memoir Will Challenge What You Think You Know About Loss and Pregnancy

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Brilliant Memoir Will Challenge What You Think You Know About Loss and Pregnancy

The Oklahoma Supreme Court Gave a Bizarre Explanation for Restricting the Abortion Pill

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld restrictions on the abortion pill, but the justices also noted that “by the state’s own evidentiary materials, more restrictions on abortions result in higher complication rates and in decreased women’s safety.”

Since the Food and Drug Administration gave its approval to mifepristone—a.k.a. the abortion pill—in 2000, more than 2 million women have ended their pregnancies using medication alone. The law in question, which went into effect in 2014, requires physicians to abide by a decade-old FDA protocol when administering abortion medication. That protocol includes high dosages of abortion drugs (mifepristone is one of two drugs used) and three visits to the doctor’s office—requirements that medical experts describe as unnecessary, as well as less effective and more expensive than the off-label use of these drugs. The FDA protocol also makes the medication harder to tolerate—failure rates more than double compared with those from off-label use, and almost every woman experiences at least one severe side effect like nausea, vomiting, or cramps.

That’s why, when prescribing abortion medication, over 80 percent of physicians follow an off-label method, developed by medical organizations such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and supported by the World Health Organization. That regimen has fewer side effects and a lower failure rate than the FDA method. And it can be used later in pregnancy: Physicians typically prescribe abortion drugs until the ninth week of pregnancy, while the FDA regimen can only be used until the seventh week.

Abortion rights groups, including the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice, sued Oklahoma in 2014, arguing that the law ignores medical evidence and harms women.

The court on Tuesday ultimately upheld the law and ruled that it doesn’t violate the constitution, even though it’s bad public health. And one justice, Douglas Combs, wrote an opinion in which he concurred with the court but questioned the law.

“Once again, those who do not practice medicine have determined to insert themselves between physicians and their patients, with the insistence they know what is best when it comes to the standard of care,” wrote Combs. “The medical community should take heed: now that the Legislature has declared itself willing to dictate medical protocol and practice within this limited context, what areas of the practice of medicine are next?”

Read article here:

The Oklahoma Supreme Court Gave a Bizarre Explanation for Restricting the Abortion Pill

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Oklahoma Supreme Court Gave a Bizarre Explanation for Restricting the Abortion Pill

The Solution to Getting More Omega-3s in Our Diet

The age-old adage that you get what you pay for is definitely true when it comes to organic meat and milk. A studythe largest of its kindpublished this week in the British Journal of Nutrition analyzed data from around the world and found 50 percent more beneficial omega-3 fatty acids in organic meat and milk than in their conventional, non-organic counterparts. The research team also discovered that organic meat and milk boasts more essential minerals and antioxidants.

The research teamnoted that since Western European diets are low in both beneficial omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants, a switch from conventional meat and milk to organic would help increase community uptake of these important dietary components without increasing calories. One of the researchers, Chris Seal, a professor of Food and Human Nutrition at Newcastle University explained why:

“Omega-3s are linked to reductions in cardiovascular disease, improved neurological development and function, and better immune function.”Western European diets are recognized as being too low in these fatty acids and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) recommends we should double our intake. But getting enough in our diet is difficult. Our study suggests that switching to organic would go some way towards improving intakes of these important nutrients.”

For example, a half-liter of organic full-fat milk provides 39mg or 16 percent of the recommended daily intake of omega-3, while non-organic milk of the same quantity only provides 25 mg or 11 percent.

In addition to the omega-3 fatty acids, higher levels of vitamin E and carotenoids were also observed in organic milk.

These healthier nutritional profiles were closely linked to outdoor grazing as prescribed by organic farming standards.

In addition to this study, two other recent studies, showed that when a nursing mother drinks organic milk and other dairy products, her child has a reduced risk of certain diseases and disorders, such as childhood eczema.

All of these conclusions dovetail with the team’s previous meta-analysis involving experts from across Europe that investigated the nutritional profiles of organic versus conventionally-grown crops. Just as in the meat and milk studies, organic crops boasted higher antioxidants than conventionally-grown crops and contained less of the toxic metal cadmium.

Professor Carlo Leifert, also at Newcastle University, who led the mother-child studies, commented that “we have shown without doubt there are composition differences between organic and conventional food. Taken together, the three studies on crops, meat and milk suggest that a switch to organic fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products would provide significantly higher amounts of dietary antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids.”

Altogether, these landmark meta studies show that the way we produce our food has real consequences on human health. So, the next time you are temped to pay less for conventional meat, dairy and produce know that not all apples nor all milk nor all pork chops are the same, and you do, in fact, get what you pay for.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Follow this link – 

The Solution to Getting More Omega-3s in Our Diet

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, Omega, ONA, organic, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Solution to Getting More Omega-3s in Our Diet

It’s 2015 and a Woman is Being Charged with Attempted Murder for Using a Coathanger for an Abortion

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Anna Yocca, who made national headlines last week for trying to self-induce a miscarriage with a coat hanger and being arrested for attempted murder, pled “not guilty” today to charges of first-degree murder.

A little more than a dozen abortion rights advocates showed up to the Rutherford County courthouse in support of Yocca, holding signs and chanting, “Free Anna Yocca!” Yocca pled via video conference and she was appointed a public defender.

Yocca, 31, was arrested nearly two weeks ago, but she attempted the abortion in her bathtub last September. She was 24 weeks pregnant at the time. When she began to bleed uncontrollably, her boyfriend drove her to the hospital. Physicians delivered a 1.5 pound boy, who remains in the hospital with severe medical problems resulting both from the premature delivery and the attempted termination of her pregnancy.

Yocca is being held at Rutherford County Detention Center on a $200,000 bail.

Tennessee has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, and the state legislature plans to propose more. In 2014, an amendment to the state constitution clarified that it would not protect a woman’s right to an abortion, and prohibited public funding for abortion—despite that fact that state and federal dollars cannot legally be used to fund abortion. The average cost of an abortion in the state has been calculated to be $475-$680.

The amendment, which was one of the most expensive ballot measures in the state’s history, gave state lawmakers more power to restrict abortion access. A law implementing a 48-hour waiting period was enacted in July. The state also has a “fetal homicide law,” meaning prosecutors can charge women for any behavior, such as taking drugs, that might harm or kill a fetus. So far, Yocca is not being charged under this law. Because she is being charged with manslaughter, the case could open the state up to a constitutional challenge.

Yocca faces a possible life sentence if she is convicted of attempted murder. So far, a hearing date has not been set.

View the original here:

It’s 2015 and a Woman is Being Charged with Attempted Murder for Using a Coathanger for an Abortion

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It’s 2015 and a Woman is Being Charged with Attempted Murder for Using a Coathanger for an Abortion

This Study Will Add Fuel to the Abortion Wars

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday, the New York Times carried a front-page story reporting new research that could have a profound impact on the nation’s abortion debate: a study concluding that a small number of premature infants born at 22 weeks can survive with intensive treatment.

The study, which appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, followed 5,000 infants born between 22 and 27 weeks of gestation. Seventy-eight of those infants were born at 22 weeks and given treatment to increase their chances of survival; 18 of them survived. Of the 18, which the researchers followed up on as toddlers, 6 experienced severe impairments, from blindness to debilitating cerebral palsy, and 7 were relatively healthy.

The news has huge implications for the the medical community, where there has been debate about how much treatment to provide to babies born at this stage of gestation. But it could also have sweeping consequences for the fight against abortion rights—giving abortion opponents new support for a popular abortion ban, while possibly undermining their quest to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a right to abortion.

In the immediate future, the news is most likely to impact the coming congressional debate over House Republicans’ proposed 20-week abortion ban, which many see as a direct challenge to Roe. In that ruling, the justices forbid the states from banning abortion before a fetus was viable outside the womb. A 20-week ban, mainstream medical groups have argued, bars abortion before viability.

But abortion foes may use this new study to argue that 20 weeks is indeed within the range of viability, and a ban on procedures after 20 weeks is legal. (When abortion opponents talk about 20-week bans, technically, they mean 22-week bans. Click here to read a full explanation.)

Viability, however, is not a bright red line. And this new research is less of a breakthrough and more of a rigorous confirmation of what smaller, less systematic studies have already observed. One such study found that 85 percent of infants born at 22 weeks (or 20 weeks, in political parlance) die within 12 hours. Another study found that 98 percent of 22-week-old infants are born with major health issues such as brain hemorrhaging, and 93 percent die within a year. (The University of California-San Francisco Medical Center, by contrast, states that no infants born earlier than 23 weeks have survived.) Some major medical groups have been debating whether to move average viability to 23 weeks from 24 weeks. But there are no signs that the study will cause medical organizations to set 22 weeks as the new average viability.

Abortion foes have always had dual motives for pushing 20-week abortion bans. (About 2 percent of all abortions would be affected by a 20-week abortion ban. About 13,000 women sought these abortions in 2011, the most recent year for which there is reliable data.) In public, they insist that these bans are only preventing abortions of viable infants. The majority of the medical community wouldn’t agree, but there is broad public support for the idea of banning abortion on viable pregnancies.

At the same time, as I reported earlier this year, 20-week bans are designed to bring a challenge to Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court. In Roe, the justices ruled that states could not set a specific date for viability. (That determination was left up to doctors.) The legal wing of the abortion rights movement is fighting some 20-week bans, which have been passed in 10 states, on the grounds that they violate Roe. If one of those cases were to make it to the Supreme Court, it could be an opportunity for the justices to overturn Roe‘s viability standard altogether.

Here’s Samuel Lee, a former lobbyist for Missouri Citizens for Life, explaining how a measure he wrote, requiring doctors to perform viability tests before providing abortions to women who appeared to be at least 20 weeks pregnant, was designed to overturn Roe:

The 20 weeks gestational age was chosen to push the envelope on when the state’s interest in protecting the life of the unborn child could take place. It was designed as an opportunity to attack the Roe trimester framework, while still giving the Court some wriggle room (the statute required a determination of viability, not a prohibition of abortion after viability). It was an opportunity for the Court to discuss an interest by the state in protecting unborn human life earlier than the viability line of demarcation permitted…It was chosen because it was earlier than the earliest limits of viability at the time, but not so early that the unborn child could never be viable.

The Supreme Court upheld Lee’s provision in 1989. Later, Justice Thurgood Marshall’s papers revealed that the conservative majority in Webster had come within one vote of using the 20-week provision to strike down Roe entirely.

If the average age of viability were to inch backward toward 22 weeks—with this study being the first step—then 20-week abortion bans would cease to pose a broad constitutional challenge to Roe. At the time of its ruling, after all, the Supreme Court majority noted that average viability began at 28 weeks (the start of the third trimester), but it was possible that fetuses would someday be viable as early at 24 weeks.

In other words, the medical advances behind this new research don’t automatically undermine Roe—especially when it comes to something as nebulous as viability. But they may fuel the drive for a national 20-week abortion ban.

*Abortion opponents typically count the weeks of pregnancy from the date of fertilization, while the medical community uses the more rigorous method of counting the weeks of pregnancy from the start of a woman’s last menstrual period. In medical terms, then, the House Republicans’ 20-week abortion ban is actually a 22-week abortion ban. Unless we’re talking about the bans, this article uses the medical method of dating a pregnancy.

View original article:

This Study Will Add Fuel to the Abortion Wars

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Study Will Add Fuel to the Abortion Wars

Another Reason To Ditch Soda: Cancer

Originally posted here:

Another Reason To Ditch Soda: Cancer

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Another Reason To Ditch Soda: Cancer