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I quote from the latest news update released by the Guttmacher Institute.
“One-third of U.S. pregnancies occur within 18 months of a previous birth, according to “Short Interpregnancy Intervals in the United States,” by Laura Lindberg of the Guttmacher Institute et al., while 50% occurred within 18–59 months, and 16% occurred at 60 or more months. Short birth spacing, which was measured as 18 months or less, was found to be strongly linked to unintended pregnancies, and being between 15 and 19 years old at the time of conception.
Previous research has shown that short spacing between pregnancies can lead to harmful outcomes for mothers, such as preeclampsia, and for newborns, such as being born preterm or with low birth weight. Additionally, the federal Healthy People 2020 initiative aims to reduce by 10% the number of pregnancies that occur within 18 months of a previous birth. Lindberg explains that preventing this short spacing is thus a public health priority in the United States, and estimates that reducing unintended pregnancies could reduce shortly spaced births from 35% to 23%, a feat that would benefit the health of both the mother and the newborn.
“Pregnancy intervals of more than 18 months are considered optimal birth spacing, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and others,” said Lindberg. “Helping women plan and space their pregnancies through greater contraceptive access can lead to better outcomes for both mother and infant.” The researchers identify long-acting reversible contraceptives, such as IUDs, as particularly well-suited to increasing the space between pregnancies.”
Look what happens when science and social science intersect. Better outcomes for women and children – why? Because women can choose when and when not be pregnant. This is what the point so many forced birth advocates miss – the person who is pregnant knows what is best for her and her family and, given proper access to reproductive services, can plan for the best possible conditions for herself and her children.
Contrast this with the christian business uproar over providing contraceptives for sluts! women and how tragically unfair it is to their jebus-based-bullshite.
Religion continues to poison everything it touches, but we already knew that.
Brain Trauma inducing thought of the day: By trusting women and giving them control of their reproductive future, less unplanned pregnancies and less abortions will occur. [tick tick tick….head asplodes….]
I know, how crazy is that? Women…you know the ones that have children…are in the best position to decide whether the conditions are right to have a child. (whoops, that’s two brain frying statements in the same post – apologies).
Offering women affordable healthcare (really, it should be universal and free; come join the rest of the civilized world America) makes for a more egalitarian, healthier, happier society. Making it easier for people to access reproductive health services? What is this sorcery? The Guttmacher Institute summarizes the case nicely.
[read the whole report from the Guttmacher Institute here]
“A recent national survey of publicly funded facilities that provide family planning services found that facilities with a reproductive health focus were better able to meet the contraceptive needs of their younger clients—by incorporating youth-friendly service delivery, being accessible and ensuring confidentiality—than were primary care-focused facilities. Additionally, facilities with more youth-friendly services offered more long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), including the IUD and implant.”
[…]
“These juxtaposed concerns highlight the importance of offering women of all ages a broad range of contraceptive methods to choose from in the context of comprehensive, patient-focused counseling. The authors suggest that counselors manage expectations around LARC methods, highlighting both the reversible nature of these methods and that they are “set and forget,” making them highly effective. They also suggest that misconceptions about LARC methods that persist among both providers and patients be addressed through better education and counseling. Additionally, improved training on LARC methods for staff at all levels, not just clinical staff, will help facilities move toward a more comprehensive package of contraceptive services for young women, integrating IUDs and implants into the range of methods offered, which will ultimately help young women avoid unintended pregnancy and meet their reproductive goals. However, all of this requires financial support.
“Expanding insurance coverage that includes the full range of contraceptive methods is key to giving women access to the most highly effective—and often most expensive—methods,” said Adam Sonfield, senior policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute. “Implementation of the Affordable Care Act may go a long way toward easing cost issues related to LARC methods for U.S. women. In particular, it will make it easier for providers to offer these highly effective methods to younger clients, and provide the counseling they need to understand their options and choose the method that best meets their needs.”
Remember who was/is throwing a craptacular shit fit over healthcare? Oh ya, the republicans and the church. Women should keep that tidy little non-coincidence in mind.
Need fetus porn and bullshit arguments? Look up your local, if you’re unlucky, pro-life chapter. This video illustrates the basic lie that hovers below the surface of much of pro-life land. Being pro-life is *not* about preserving life it is about removing choice from women, thus in reality anti-choice is a much more appropriate moniker for this particular subset of deluded people.
An estimated 40 million abortions will take place in the developing world in 2012. Most of these procedures will be clandestine and unsafe, taking a terrible toll on women’s lives. Reducing the number of unsafe abortions is essential for improving public health. And it’s the basic right of every woman to decide whether and when to have a child—without having to put her health or life at risk.
Facts and science be damned! We have Jebus on our side... (and there was rejoicing).
Well, at least the anti-woman crowd still has icky-graphical signs to wave around because they have lost yet another scientific leg to stand on. Thanks to the Guttmacher institute for advancing the rights of women, but also the rigorous application of the scientific method. What follows is the deconstruction of a poorly constructed study, a small win but the flawed studies destructive effects reach far beyond just bad science. Anti-female forces latch onto any study that will help strip women of their basic bodily autonomy and they ran with this one. Mandatory counselling with dubious medical facts is just one of the downsides, as the article mentions, of this poor science.
“A study purporting to show a causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems has fundamental analytical errors that render its conclusions invalid, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Guttmacher Institute. This conclusion has been confirmed by the editor of the journal in which the study appeared. Most egregiously, the study, by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues, did not distinguish between mental health outcomes that occurred before abortions and those that occurred afterward, but still claimed to show a causal link between abortion and mental disorders.
The study by Coleman and colleagues was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2009. A letter to the editor by UCSF’s Julia Steinberg and Guttmacher’s Lawrence Finer in the March 2012 issue of the same journal details the study’s serious methodological errors. Significantly, the journal’s editor and the director of the data set used in the study conclude in an accompanying commentary that “the Steinberg-Finer critique has considerable merit,” that the Coleman paper utilized a “flawed” methodology and that “the Coleman et al. (2009) analysis does not support [the authors’] assertions.”
Steinberg and Finer initially published an analysis in 2010 in the peer-reviewed journal Social Science and Medicine showing that the findings of the 2009 Coleman study were not replicable. The JPR editor’s commentary now supports that conclusion. (The full sequence of events is detailed below.)
“This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data,” says Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.”
The errors are especially problematic because Coleman later cited her own study in a meta-analysis of studies looking at abortion and mental health. The meta-analysis, which was populated primarily by Coleman’s own work, has been sharply criticized by the scientific community for not evaluating the quality of the included studies and for violating well-established guidelines for conducting such analyses.
“Studies claiming to find a causal association between abortion and subsequent mental health problems often suffer from serious methodological limitations that invalidate their conclusions,” says Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “In thorough reviews, the highest-quality studies have found no causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems.”
Even when identified, spurious research can have far-reaching consequences. Mandatory counseling laws in a number of states require women seeking an abortion to receive information, purportedly medically accurate, that has no basis in fact. Among other things, mandatory counseling can require that a woman be told that having an abortion increases her risk of breast cancer, infertility and mental illness. In reality, none of these claims are medically accurate. These laws not only represent a gross intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, they serve to propagate misinformation, intentionally misinforming the patient on important medical matters.”
I follow the news at the Guttmacher Institute. I have reprinted many of their articles here at DWR because of they are factual, easy to comprehend and generally reflect my views about the reproductive rights of women and their bodies. They recently produced a video about abortion in the US, take careful note about what they identify as the root cause of many of the problems women in the US face today, they identify,correctly, inequality as the culprit. Address that and so many of societies problems are lessened or even solved. The first step, of course, is making taxation progressive so we all contribute our fair share toward the overall benefit of society.
I cringe a little on the inside when I put up abortion posts because it is a dog whistle for all sorts for the anti-choice cranks who seem to regard the female as a secondary player in the reproductive process. C’est la vie. :)
Considering the superheated stupid that regularly ejaculates from the rusty brainpan of this this individual should we be surprised when he comes out against female autonomy? The Guttamacher Institute summarizes his vapidly brainsick musings succinctly in a recent press release.
“Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) asserted earlier this week that Social Security’s future solvency is in jeopardy because of what he termed the U.S. “abortion culture.” Santorum is quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying, “Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion.”
Did he just scrape his brain out of a mint jelly jar? It is not fair to mint jelly, but Mr.Santorum might as well be saying we should ban cars because some 32,000 (2010) people die every year because of car accidents.
“More importantly, however, there are two main reasons why it is simply wrong to assume that every abortion reduces the U.S. population by one person: One, most women obtaining abortions are younger than 30 and are postponing childbearing. They typically want to wait to have children, or already have one child and don’t want another at that time. In either case, the abortion delays a birth, it does not eliminate it—and there is no impact on the overall population. Second, some abortions terminate pregnancies that would have ended in miscarriage, so again one cannot assume that every abortion would have otherwise resulted in a live birth.”
Enter the factual analysis of what is actually going on, Women planning their childbearing so they can best accommodate having and raising a child. Holy-responsible planning Batman! Forced birth advocates rarely seem to acknowledge that women *may* have a good idea when they are ready to accept the dangerous responsibility of giving birth and then the commitment needed to raise a child. It’s like their lady-brains are actually capable of evaluating when the time is right for us to do what we want for our selves and our bodies. Some pretty heavy radical shit, I know.
“But where Santorum really misses his mark is his failure to grasp a very simple idea: Most Americans want two children, and they try to time childbearing and space their births so that they have those children when they feel best capable of taking care of them. Overwhelmingly, this is accomplished through contraceptive use. When faced with an unwanted or mistimed pregnancy, some women decide to obtain an abortion. But the key point is that whatever demographic challenges Social Security may be facing, they are not due to abortion, but rather to the fact that most Americans desire—and generally achieve—small families.”
Interesting. Rick’s assertions really have no basis in reality then. The issue of course is those damn women and the rights they think they have to their bodies.
“The natural extension of Santorum’s purported solution for bolstering Social Security would be to require American women and couples to have more children than they want. Any possible scenario for achieving such a goal would be deeply disturbing—for example, banning both contraception and abortion, or trying to institute some form of mandatory three- or four-child policy through tax penalties or other punishments for those not complying.”
George W. Bush’s flatulence has more credibility than this turgid woman hating vomit stain of a human being. The next legislation from Mr.Santorum will be the banning of shoes from women so they can assume their rightful place in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant until they die in childbirth or hit menopause.
“In essence, what underpins Santorum’s argument is a lack of support for the ability of women and their partners to decide for themselves when to have children and how many children to have.”
You know that Mr.Santorum is a huge free-market supporter and will trot out arguments for how great the market is because of choice people have while out of the other corner of his lick-spittle mouth will talk about stripping away bodily autonomy and reproductive choices for women. The best part of this is that this individual was actually elected to public office by people with the same sort of cracked world-view that he routinely barfs into the public arena.
Considering the usual abuse of logic and science on the behest of the fetus – fetish crowd, it is really quite unsurprising that on yet another of their talking points – The majority of women who have abortions are emotionally scarred for life – is bunk. The Guttmacher Institute sent this little gem out via email.
“An authoritative new study from researchers in Denmark, noteworthy for its exceptionally strong methodology, confirms what the best scientific evidence has long shown—that there is no causal link between abortion and mental health problems. The new study, “Induced First-Trimester Abortion and Risk of Mental Disorder,” by Trine Munk-Olsen and colleagues, was published in the January 27, 2011, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.”
The study succeeds in addressing several critical limitations that have afflicted some other studies that purport to show causation between abortion and subsequent mental health problems. It can be viewed as unusually rigorous for this type of research for several reasons.”
Wow, correlation does not equal causation. The review of the study continues:
• The sample was very large, comprising 84,620 women who had first-time, first-trimester abortions between 1995 and 2007.
• It did not rely on retrospective self-reports from women, who typically underreport abortions. Instead, it was based on complete patient medical registries, which include virtually all mental health disorders, births and abortions experienced by the Danish population: the Danish Psychiatric Central Register and the Danish National Register of Patients.
• The study has strong controls for women’s mental health prior to abortion, a critical factor that many other studies do not control for sufficiently, if at all.
The study found no higher rate of mental health problems among Danish women in the 12 months following an abortion than in the nine months prior to the procedure.
So, yet another talking point dispatched. Score another for science and truth.
“Not all studies on the mental health impact of abortion are created equal. In fact, according to the American Psychological Association, methodological flaws are “pervasive in the literature on abortion and mental health.” Antiabortion activists often attempt to capitalize on the fact that the public and many policymakers cannot distinguish between studies that allow legitimate conclusions to be drawn about the effects of abortion and those that show only associations between abortion and mental health outcomes.”
The forced birthers not being academically or scientifically honest? Admittedly, there are not many other options to take considering the frail house of cards most anti-choice positions are built on.
“Antiabortion activists have relied on questionable science in their efforts to push inclusion of the concept of “postabortion syndrome” in both clinical practice and law. This latest study strongly confirms the existing body of methodologically sound evidence in clearly refuting the idea that abortion causes harm to women’s mental health. The body of evidence is now so robust that researchers should consider shifting their focus to related issues that might be more valuable to explore, such as the factors that cause women to experience mental health problems in the first place.
Of course, the anti-choicers won’t, as the health and welfare of women are secondary to their mendaciously insipid assault on women’s rights.
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