Year: 2016
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Trumped
Trumped It has taken several days of listening to and reading a lot of useless verbiage about Trump, but I finally found a blog by Adam Shatz that expresses what I think has actually happened, and says some of what needs to be said about it. All the hand-wringing seems so self-dramatising. I don’t understand why some…
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A call for consensus and cooperation to resolve differing estimates of abortion-related deaths
This article, in press, is about the difference between estimates of maternal deaths from unsafe abortion from the World Health Organization and those from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), USA, both published in 2014 in two different Lancet journals. The article, co-authored by Iqbal Shah, Carla AbouZahr and me, is in the International Journal of Gynecology &…
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Lessons from the case in Spain
Yesterday, I shared a feature article I wrote for the newsletter of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion on this blog. I think there are a lot of lessons to draw from this case, but for me, at this moment, the two I would emphasise are the crucial importance of solidarity on all our…
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The Case of Dr Carlos Morín, Barcelona, Spain – “Hasta el final”
The history of the persecution of Dr Carlos Morín, former director of the Ginemedex clinic in Barcelona, Spain, the staff of his clinic and the thousands of women who had abortions there began in Britain in 2004 and reached its climax, at least for the moment, on 17 June 2016, in the Regional Court of…
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Prof Homa Hoodfar imprisoned in Iran: call for her release (Note: Homa was finally released)
Homa Hoodfar, a respected Canadian-Iranian professor of anthropology of the Middle East in Canada, has been arrested in Tehran, Iran, and is being held in Evin prison without access to her lawyer, family members or to needed medical care. Full information about her and the campaign in support of her release can be found at: www.homahoodfar.org.…
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Interview for Amnesty, 22 August 2015
The following are my answers (with some additions) to questions in an interview with Saphia Crowther of Amnesty International via email, for publication by them last year: What drives you to campaign for sexual and reproductive rights? Was there one person, incident or news story that inspired you to become an activist? I became active in my mid-20s…
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IN MEMORIAM Rosa Tunberg
It is with great sadness that I wish to inform everyone who knew her that Rosa Tunberg, who worked for Reproductive Health Matters from October 1999 to August 2007, died from cancer on 10 January 2015 in California. Rosa was born on 5 February 1939, in Santiago, Chile, the middle of three sisters. Her father…
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“Just because abortion is easy doesn’t mean it’s right” : do you agree?
During a day of excellent presentations on the question of “How can a state control swallowing?” on medical abortion and the law, organised by Prof Sally Sheldon of Kent University Law School, an unexpected question was asked from the floor, during the session I chaired: “Just because it [abortion] is easy doesn’t mean it’s right:…
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Opposing the criminalisation of self-use of abortion pills
More officials in European governments seem to have discovered that women are buying MA pills over the internet and are having abortions outside their health systems. The immediate response to this is that these abortions are or should be “illegal”; indeed, they are illegal under the law in Ireland, the UK and Italy, if not…
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Quinacrine: the non-surgical sterilisation method that refuses to die
A response to all the articles on so-called “permanent contraception” in Contraception 2015;92(2):89-176) It is with a deep sigh, after more than 10 years, that I sit down to respond to your articles on “permanent contraception”, particularly the one by Jack Lippes pushing quinacrine sterilisation, that dead letter, to the fore once again, in your…