So the Emergency Contraceptive Pill, also known as Plan B, should be widely available over the counter from pretty much any pharmacist in the country now. But here’s the question: with the current trend of pharmacists being allowed to claim the “moral right” to not do their jobs (can you imagine if firefighters or police officers claimed a “moral right” to not rescue someone from a burning building because they were of another religion? or if a killer were on a rampage but a police officer claimed a “moral right” to not stop them because they don’t like killing? I don’t oppose people not doing something because they have a moral conviction, but I also think they shouldn’t be in a line of work where that’s an issue.) it’s important to make it clear to the major pharmacy chains that we’re paying attention to what they’re doing and we’re making sure they’ll fulfill their obligation to the public by stocking, carrying, and dispensing Plan B appropriately and upon request.

Worried that your pharmacist or pharmacy chain is trying to buck the trend-and the law? Make your voice heard, and press the major pharmacy chains into drafting a national policy requiring their stores to stock Plan B:

[ Plan B: Where's Yours? (Petition) ]
Source: ProChoice Action (courtesy of Alternet)

What a little more info about Plan B? Click below the jump for info.

(more…)

In a presidential appointment that doesn’t require congressional approva, President Bush appointed Dr. Eric Keroack to the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Keroack has been known to say such things as birth control is “insulting” to women, which is odd for a man who’s just been appointed to the post that ensures that low-income women have access to birth control, and heads up the nations family planning initiative-making sure that every child is a wanted child and a sustainable child. Odd, considering his hard-right ideology.

That might be an odd fit for Keroack. He is medical director of five Boston-area “crisis pregnancy centers” that use ultrasounds to convince women not to have abortions. The centers, called A Woman’s Concern, also emphasize abstinence and are participating in a campaign for the “Sanctity of Human Life Month.” Keroack is also on the medical advisory council of the Abstinence Clearinghouse.

There apparently are just going to be more and more rats to run out of their holes when this admnistration turns over, apparently.

[ I Don't Have Any More Political Capital, And I Intend To Spend It ]
Source: MSNBC Talk Newsweek

PS – it looks like The National Organization for Women has started a petition to urge HHS Secretary Levitt to reconsider Keroack’s appointment:

[ Sign the Sack Keroack! Petition ]
Source: National Organization for Women

The voters of South Dakota proudly and honorably struck down the most prohibitive and intrusive ban on abortion in American history-the ban that showed no regard for the lives of women, men, children, or entire families, the ban that aimed only to legalize the morality of the minority and impose it on the majority. The people of South Dakota spoke loud and clear on the issue, and decided that the state government, regardless of their intentions, had no right to steer, control, and manage the lives of the citizens of South Dakota. It was a resounding defeat for Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals as well as conservatives not just in the state of South Dakota, but around the country-all of whom had been pouring money and resources into South Dakota in an effort to pull the wool over the eyes of the citizens there and influence their vote.

The people of South Dakota decided that not only did they deserve better, they knew better, and they spoke with their votes.

Progressives and pro-choice activists around the country, emboldened by the win, could take a lesson. This battle isn’t just for choice, isn’t just for women’s rights and reproductive rights, it’s also about human rights and the basic right of all people to decide when and how they’re going to have children and raise a family, it’s about keeping the meddling of the government out of the most private lives and decisions of individuals, it’s about the pinnacle of individual rights.

Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, has quite a few tips for future activists in their continued struggles against authoritarian control over individual rights around the country, and progressives would do well to sit up and take notice; pro-choice activists will have more battles to fight, because even with a significant victory in South Dakota, anti-choice fundamentalists will surely try to make inroads to our individual rights again.

[ Beyond South Dakota ]
Source: TomPaine.com

Alternet has revived a story that I find incredibly timely and was originally published in Newsday; a story about the real “homegrown terrorists” in America, the terrorists that don’t make it to the top of the FBI most wanted list, and that don’t wind up on the evening news. They’re anti-choice “activists” who, in the name of their own sense of twisted morality, threaten those who disagree with injury, bombings, even the murder of themselves or their family and friends. It seems that anti-choice thugs would be more than happy to kill doctors, nurses, and anyone else who might happen to get in their way in order to oppress entire communities and force their own theocratic morality on everyone-those who agree and those who don’t. It’s not a significant step from controlling bodies and minds and bringing their own sense of right and wrong into the consultation rooms of women and their doctors to total authoritarian control over people, so it’s not hard to see how these extremists and fundamentalists think.

Regardless, it’s still so difficult to watch this terrorist tragedy unfold here at home, especially when it gets so little public and media attention. For example, referring to the “holy war” that these Christian fundamentalists believe they’re fighting:

Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.

Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.

After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like: “You have been exposed to anthrax. … We are going to kill all of you.” They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled web pages for “Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith,” including minister Paul Hill, Michael Griffin and James Kopp, all convicted of murdering abortion providers, and a convicted clinic bomber, the Rev. Michael Bray. Another of their “martyrs,” Clayton Waagner, mailed anthrax letters while a fugitive on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list for anti-abortion related crimes.

“I am a terrorist,” Waagner declared on the Army of God’s web site. Boasting that God “freed me to make war on his enemy,” he claimed he knew where 42 Planned Parenthood workers lived. “It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a nurse, receptionist, bookkeeper, or janitor, if you work for the murderous abortionist, I’m going to kill you.”

That’s textbook terrorism, defined by the USA Patriot Act as dangerous criminal acts that “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.”

There’s a real terrorist threat out there that deserves our focus, and its not from some far away place where the people look differently and speak a different language-the threat is from here at home, people who proudly state their hatred from both the halls of government and from out front of medical clinics, and hide their hate behind the shield of their misinterpretation and perversion of Christianity. It’s about time that terrorist threat garnered some attention and resources.

[ The Terrorists Who Aren't in the News ]
Source: Newsday (courtesy of Alternet)

This article, written by Elizabeth Wardle, PhD, who was staunchly anti-abortion until she got to college, took a few Women’s Studies classes, and had the disease of ignorance cured by the treatment of education and knowledge, is the kind of experience that many people in America should have and are sadly deprived of. It fives me hope that more people, given the right information and facts on hand, could transcend the irrational and selectively moral to come to a position of understanding and empathy. Her words, excerpted from the book Abortion Under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice, edited by Krista Jacob, speak largely for themselves:

In the house and church I grew up in, there was no question about where I would stand on abortion. A fetus was a life. We opposed taking life. Case closed.

What conversation can be had when only one question is considered pertinent? I was a chaste, Christian, small-town, pro-life teenager from a happy home with two parents. My most exciting experiences were church camping trips. At sixteen, I had never even kissed a boy. Nothing had ever happened to me to suggest other questions were relevant in the abortion debate. I was sure of my views and sure my experiences provided enough information with which to make an informed decision about what was right for all women everywhere.

Thus, I goaded my girlfriends into attending protests and meetings and starting teenage pro-life groups. No one questioned me. Where we came from, my girlfriends were wrong not to have thought of going to the meetings before I did. They admired my staunch, unquestioning sense of what was right and wrong. Looking back, it’s clear I was pompous, self-righteous, and unbearably certain of myself. But I had the total peace of mind that only comes from a worldview with no shades of gray.

My certainty and peace of mind were not to last, however. College showed me that life is full of gray.

In college I discovered that some people have sex without feeling they have done something dirty, that women get pregnant who are in no position to take care of a child, and that one of the most frightening things in the world for an eighteen-year-old from a pro-life, Christian fundamentalist family would be telling her parents she was pregnant. If I had become pregnant and informed my parents, I knew exactly where I would have gone: straight to a home for pregnant teenage mothers, to be physically well-cared for and proselytized to for nine months, after which time my child would have been adopted by a good, white fundamentalist family dying for a healthy new (white) baby. I would have been shamed. My parents’ biggest concern would have been how to hide my pregnancy from their friends.

Problematic as this response would have been, it pales in comparison to what has actually happened to other Christian teenagers, who have been disowned, thrown out of their homes, and even physically harmed. It later came as no surprise that, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, one in five women seeking abortions is a born-again or an Evangelical Christian. Had I become pregnant as a teenager, I would have done all in my power–including consider an abortion–to avoid the shame I would have felt in the eyes of my Christian community.

I began to understand why parental consent laws might be a bad idea: they can raise the number of late-term abortions, as young women from conservative homes put off a decision or wait for parental or judicial consent. Some pregnant teens would even choose illegal abortions rather than face their parents’ wrath.

In my women’s studies classes I learned about poverty and racism, about misogyny, about the history of birth control (or rather, control of birth control). I learned that for many women there are several important questions that come before whether or not a fetus is a life–questions such as, “Will this pregnancy cost me my life? Who will feed this child? Where is one person who will provide me with some support if I have this child?” I learned that two out of three women who have abortions say they cannot afford a child and half do not have a dependable partner with earning potential.

Her entire piece is incredibly compelling, and I would urge anyone, on any side of the abortion debate, to read it. It’s amazing.

[ Reflections from a Former Anti-Abortion Activist ]
Source: Alternet

The line now is that apparently by taking away the right of the individual to make even the most basic fundamental choice-when and how to have a child or start a family, anti-choicers are somehow “protecting” women by forcing them to have the children of their rapists, abusive husbands or family members, or by forcing them to have children they can’t support, potentially can’t bear without losing their lives or risking both their lives and the life fo the fetus. “Protecting” them from what really, you say? Of course-protecting them from their own obviously incorrect morality by superimposing their own. The last time someone told a group of people that they needed to be “protected” from themselves, we earned ourselves prison camps at home, and found concentration camps abroad.

Let’s take a look at the “protective” argument from a historical perspective, eh? Sarah Blustain and Reva Siegel, writing for The American Prospect recount the history of the trend from hard-line anti-abortion and anti-choice speech to softer tones in an attempt to fool people into swallowing the poison pill.

The woman-protective rhetoric has rich antecedents in the 19th-century campaign to criminalize abortion and contraception. But in the last several decades, it has not been the dominant form of anti-abortion argument. When debate over whether to criminalize abortion erupted in the 1970s, the women’s movement was ascendant and opponents of abortion emphasized the need to protect the unborn, rather than to preserve traditional roles of women.

The woman-protective argument for restricting abortion appeared in the 1980s when a researcher began to analyze abortion responses on the model of post-traumatic syndrome. Powerfully placed anti-abortion activists resisted this shift in emphasis, hoping to keep the moral focus on the unborn. This fight over who was rightly the object of anti-abortion concern reached its height when some leaders of the anti-abortion movement urged President Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, to make official findings that abortion posed a public-health threat to women, on the model of his anti-smoking campaign. Koop, who was a prominent and passionate opponent of abortion, refused. He judged the new claim mistaken on the grounds that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to decide on abortion’s harm to women — and more: “Abortion was more a moral issue than a medical issue,” Koop reasoned in his 1991 book Koop: The Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor. “The pro-life movement had always focused — rightly, I thought — on the impact of abortion on the fetus. They lost their bearings when they approached the issue on the grounds of the health effects on the mother.”

But with the abortion debate deadlocked through the 1980s and 1990s, growing numbers of anti-abortion advocates began to recognize that they needed better ways to speak about the wrongs of abortion to the majority of Americans now concerned about women’s rights. And so anti-abortion advocates experimented with forms of woman-friendly argument that fused women’s rights talk and women’s roles talk into a case against abortion that could claim concern for a woman and her child at the same time. Recalling the genesis of this “new rhetorical strategy,” Frederica Mathewes-Green of Feminists for Life of America — founded in 1972 as an anti-abortion, pro-Equal Rights Amendment organization — recounts “Dr. Jack Willke’s early-nineties project to develop a concise response to the other side’s ‘Who decides?’ rhetoric (you may have seen ‘Love them both’ placards) and the trend of pregnancy care centers to shift focus, changing from storefronts that discourage abortion to full-fledged medical clinics or professional counseling centers.”

The political strategy behind all this is laid out in David Reardon’s 1996 book, Making Abortion Rare. (Reardon, whose research on “post-abortion syndrome” is extensively cited in the South Dakota report, writes regularly to advise the anti-abortion movement about how to vindicate its moral and religious convictions in politics and science.) As the title suggests, Reardon delights in flipping his opponents’ frames. The book explains to the anti-abortion movement the importance of addressing women’s interests to persuade “the middle majority [which] is paralyzed by competing feelings of compassion for both the unborn and for women.” In the early 1990s, Reardon and his allies advised the movement that it needed to “take back the terms ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘reproductive freedom’ … to emphasize the fact that we are the ones who are really defending the right of women to make an informed choice; we are the ones who are defending the freedom of women to reproduce without fear of being coerced into unwanted abortions.” When this rhetoric was added, Reardon reports one anti-abortion activist as saying, “‘[t]he result has been almost dramatic. … We are listened to once again.’” Today, such rhetoric is the cutting-edge argument for restricting abortion, and the rallying cry “abortion hurts women” may now be more prevalent in some political and counseling contexts than the claim that abortion is murder

“Protecting” seems to very often one way or the other turn into “subjugating,” which of course is clearly the goal of the anti-choice community-to superimpose and thrust their own morality and belief structure on not just everyone around them, but on entire communities, states, and ultimately all of us.

[ Anti-Choicers' Frightening New Tactic ]
Source: The American Prospect (courtesy of AlterNet)

The editors of Ms. Magazine have collaborated on a compelling piece about women who have had abortions, and look back at them knowing they made the right decision for themselves-regardless of whether the socially imposed sense of morality of the time gave them the liberty to make their own decisions or not. They share their stories of thinking for themselves, making their own hard decisions, and choosing their own path for themselves, regardless of what they’re told by legislators and politicians who want nothing more than to make the decision for them. They speak with honesty and integrity, and they stand for the kind of freedom and liberty and personal choice-the ability to guide the direction of one’s own life, that all pro-choice activists stand for and share.

In its 1972 debut issue, Ms. magazine ran a bold petition in which 53 well-known U.S. women declared that they had undergone abortions —despite state laws rendering the procedure illegal. These women were following the example of a 1971 manifesto signed by 343 prominent French women, who also had declared they had abortions.

Even then, to many it seemed absurd that the government could deny a woman sovereignty over her own body. It is even more absurd in 2006 to learn that an abortion ban has passed into law in South Dakota, although it has been stayed until an initiative to remove the ban is voted on this November. Whatever happens in South Dakota, 17 other states now have trigger laws or pre-Roe v.Wade laws that could automatically ban abortion if the Supreme Court were to reverse Roe. Experts believe that as many as 30 states could outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. A myriad of restrictions already limit access to abortion in the U.S. for poor women, young women and women in the military.

We know it is time again for women of conscience to stand up and speak truth to power.

And with that, Ms. Magazine begins its second round of petition, starting with the brave women who signed the petition the first time. An excellent idea, and for any women in the list, you can add your name to the petition at the Ms. Magazine website: [ http://www.msmagazine.com/ ] The full story is linked below.

[ We Had Abortions ]
Source: Alternet

I cheered when the Morning-After Pill went over the counter, like many people did. I thought it was a victory for everyone everywhere, women and men, who wanted to be able to exercise more control over their own private lives, that it meant that finally in situations where an emergency contraceptive is needed, people could finally get it without a hassle, or needing a prescription.

I was wrong. Never underestimate the sexists, the hatemongers, the evangelicals, and yes, dare I say it, the conservatives who would make sure that every action when it comes to sex is closely regulated, not just by their own self-prescribed higher authority, but by their own sensibilities. Nothing’s better than being in a bind and being told that someone else is going to have to tell you what’s best for you regardless of what you think and feel, and what’s even worse, someone else gets to judge you and ask you an array of personal questions to decide whether or not you’re acceptable to recieve medical care. In no other case aside from birth control and now, the morning after pill, are women grilled over their sexual behavior and lifestyle, no other case are they interrogated, usually by men or evangelical relgious types or the just plain inexcusably ignorant. And in no case whatsoever are men subject to the same torturous questioning.

It’s a damned shame, and the fact that you can’t just walk into a phramacy and purchase the pill from the counter and that you still have to get a pharmacist who doesn’t have “moral objections,” which are somehow acceptable an excuse to keep them from doing their job makes it even worse. I happened today upon one woman’s story when she, a woman in a relationship with three kids and practicing safe, responsible sex, happened to have a condom break, and her subsequent tale, ultimately ending in depressing failure, about how she tried to get the emergency contraceptive pill from several different locations only to find closed Planned Parenthoods (this is why we need to support Planned Parenthood), urgent care clinics where the nurses are so idiotic that they confuse the emergency contraceptive pill with the “abortion pill” (RU-486) and when corrected on it says “Well here we use the term interchangably,” ERs where the doctors grill you on every aspect of your sex life and ultimately turn you away if you’re not married or were raped, and more BS that sound more like a dystopian nightmare than 21st century America.

But then again, to these people, it’s not about you, me, this poor woman and her needs, or even providing adequate medical care, it’s about upholding their own ridiculous sense of morality, which would be fine if they applied it to themselves, but the killer is that it’s about oppressing others with it-forcing it on everyone around them, and occupying a position where people come to you for help and using it to serve their own conservative agenda and moral advantage.

Here’s an excerpt from her story:

Folks, the condom broke Friday night and I searched all weekend for someone who could prescribe me EC. It is now Monday and I have to report that I have been unable to find anyone who will write me a fucking prescription for EC. None of the hospitals in the surrounding counties would write it for me. I stopped my search at about 100 miles from my home because my telephone book wouldn’t take me out any further than that.

I have been asked about my sexual practices. Whether I’m ‘monogamous’ or ‘in a relationship’ if I’m married, if I have kids, how many kids I have, if I was raped or ‘traumatized’ but there wasn’t’ ONE question about my health. Not one. The few places that said that they had a doctor who would occasionally write prescriptions for EC told me that I had to ask for that doctor specifically and then they proceeded to tell me that I would be ‘interviewed’ to see if I meet that doctors ‘criteria’ and then they proceeded to ask me all the above questions before telling me that I should ‘try anyway’ and I ‘might be able to talk him into it’.

I can’t believe it myself, and I wish there were something that I could do aside from support progressive and pro-choice organizations and politicians, and remember how incredibly important it is to do so. The commenters have a great many excellent suggestions, many of them very very good, but the problem is that many of them that would likely work are somewhat disingenious, like getting a college student or someone else to get it for her, or lying and claiming she was raped to sate the moral-high-ground-ists, but the problem with all of those suggestions, as the author points out in a later comment, is that they’re all lying, and she’s not a liar, and besides, wasn’t the point of making it over the counter so you don’t HAVE to go through this nonsense? I completely agree.

My heart goes out to the author who had to suffer this kind of injustice, and it serves as a poignant reminder of exactly how much work there is left to be done, and how much seixsm, false morality, and inequality there still is out there to rile against.

[ Morality Clauses, EC, and Broken Condoms ]
Source: The Biting Beaver (via Feministing and BoingBoing)

Girls who feel more comfortable talking to their doctors than their parents, their friends of family than their parents, or even girls whose parents are abusive in any way, are about to get isolated and left even more alone than they already are, if Congress gets its way. Grandparents, Uncles, Aunts, all of those people, even if they’re still related, could be imprisoned if they aid or assist a girl under a certain age in obtaining and abortion without the consent of her parents.

So imagine this. A father rapes his daughter and she becomes pregnant. The girl is 15 years old. She tells her aunt, who vows to keep her away from the abusive father. The mother refuses to believe it happened, or is being abused herself. The 15-year old girl wants to get help, put her life back together, seek therapy, and now, thanks to conservatives in Congress, she’s been stripped of not only many chances to make those dreams reality, but also stripped of the opportunity to have decided on her own, for herself, when and how she wants to have a family, to have a child. Congress has essentially told her “sorry, that sucks, but if anyone helps you try and think for yourself, we’re locking them up.”

That’s the message we’re getting here, and it’s another fantastic example of how conservatives in congress are making more and more inroads into our personal and private lives, our relationships with our doctors and health care providers, and, quite purposefully, taking the active side of rapists, child abusers, and other sexual abusers over the side of victims who should be at least afforded the basic human right of deciding what they want to do, whatever that might be. Conservatives in our government is so interested in intruding into our lives and enforcing their own moral code that they worry that that little thing called “free will” might violate their sensibilities, so they don’t even want you to have the choice, regardless of what that choice might be.

Paul Rogat Loeb, the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, has this to say about the matter:

Do you remember the Fugitive Slave Act? It criminalized not only slaves who’d escaped to non-slave states, but also anyone who helped them flee. That law has troubling echoes in a new bill, passed by the Republican Senate and House, that will make it illegal to transport a girl from a state requiring parental consent to get an abortion in another one.

The Fugitive Slave Act forced individuals who did not believe in slavery to collaborate in maintaining it. In states that had banned slavery, it compelled law enforcement officials to return escaped slaves to their masters, and coerced ordinary citizens into supporting this process. It isolated slaves from outside assistance, by threatening to imprison anyone who would help them escape.

Isolation is also the goal of the benignly named Child Custody Protection Act, which will become law if the House and Senate work out their differences and if Democrats fail in efforts to block the bill with procedural maneuvers. It targets girls who already feel they cannot talk to their parents without risking disaster. It leaves them on their own, because those who might have tried to help them will face jail if they do. Whether a sister, an aunt, a grandmother, counselor, or friend, anyone could be imprisoned for intervening to help. Meanwhile, the same senators who backed it voted down an amendment that would have increased support for programs offering contraception and sex education—including abstinence education.

…

The House version goes further still, allowing parents to sue doctors who perform these out-of-state abortions. Both bills let the states with the harshest anti-abortion laws—and the least social support for women with children—to control the actions of citizens in states with fewer restraints. They trample core federalist traditions, letting states with the most draconian laws impose their will on others. They even raise the prospect of similar federal or state laws prohibiting adult women from traveling to overcome state abortion bans—like a bill now pending in the Ohio House that bans abortion without exception, while making it illegal to transport or help women of any age to receive abortions in other states. This would seem to violate numerous judicial decisions affirming the right to travel and prohibiting one state from unilaterally extending its laws to another. But with Bush’s recent court appointments, all sorts of longstanding precedents risk being subordinated to a hard-right ideology.

Loeb goes on to point out that this is the kind of thing that leads to back-alley abortions, you know, the kind that the anti-choice activists shuffle under the rug along with the bloody bodies of the women who performed them out of desperation and a desire for a life of their own making or no life at all, and then pretend that they never happened; and also tells our children that we can’t handle truthful discussions about sex, sexuality, pregnancy, and their futures, so instead we opt to shut our ears and shut them down, and what’s worse, criminalize the very discussion and make criminals of those who would be the purveyors of real, truthful, helpful information.

[ The Fugitive Girl Act ]
Source: TomPaine.com

And in related news, her stepfather, who raped the 11 year old girl is still going to heaven, because the Catholic Church doesn’t have anything to say about rape.

This is the kind of reason why the founding fathers wanted the state to not, in any way, shape or form, be a sponsor of any religion. This is why there is a separation of “church and state” in America. This particular case didn’t take place in America, thankfully enough, it took place in Colombia, but sadly since Colombia is a mostly Catholic nation, the medical team who performed the abortion did so knowing the danger and now the Church is planning to excommunicate them-one of the Church’s highest punishments, if not the worst they can do to a practicing and abiding Catholic.

So essentially, Colombia’s first legal abortion, performed under duress because of questions that the 11 year old girl wouldn’t be able to carry the child to term safely, and when both her life and the life of the fetus were in danger, is such a massive offense that the people who came to this poor girl’s aid, the people who gave her a chance at a healthy and stable life and a future, are punished for doing probably the most loving and Christian thing they could possibly have done-but that’s not important apparently to the Catholic theocracy at the Vatican; they’re not interested in the very life of the girl of the long-term quality of it, they’re only interested in making her an example while crying about her immortal soul. Something tells me her immortal soul is in better hands than the buffons at the Vatican.

Carlos Lemus, the director of Simon Bolivar hospital where the abortion was performed, said he respected the church’s decision but did not share its view.

“We acted within the constitutional framework,” Dr Lemus said. “We were faced with the petition of a girl who wanted to go back to playing with her toys.”

He said Cardinal Trujillo “calls the doctors and nurses ‘evildoers’. I think the person who raped her is the evildoer”.

A senator, Gina Parody, said: “The Vatican has the right to excommunicate whomever they choose. But I would hope that they also excommunicate priests when they rape boys or girls.

An excellent point. The priests guilty of and accused of raping children here in America were simply transferred from place to place, hidden and allowed to keep their horrible secret from justice. Apparently a priest who molested dozens of boys is more worthy of the grace of God than this poor girl or the doctors who came to her aid. Chalk up another inconsistency to the Vatican-not like we really needed more.

Wake me when the Catholic Church has something to say to her stepfather.

[ Church Condemns Abortion Performed on Raped 11 Year Old Girl ]
Source: The Guardian UK