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How one woman decided to have an abortion… then another… then another

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Dina said me this astonishing article from the UK Daily Mail, which shows one case where a woman chose abortion over and over.

Excerpt:

Her first abortion came when she was 17, following a bitterly regretted drunken encounter with a colleague at an office party. 

[…]Her bold decision to speak out about her abortions comes after it was revealed that the NHS spends more than £50  million a year on repeat terminations.

One third of the 189,000 abortions carried out in England and Wales in 2010 involved women who’d had at least one before. In some cases, a staggering seven abortions had previously been carried out on the same woman.

Abortion one:

The first one… was when she… got pregnant when she ended up in bed with a  22-year-old colleague called Brian.

‘Although I knew I could get pregnant, we didn’t use contraception. I just didn’t think it would happen to me…

[…]Michelle visited her GP and found out she was entitled to a free NHS abortion at her local hospital. 

Abortion two:

[S]he met John, 35, an Irish soldier stationed at barracks near her home, and they embarked on a three-week fling. It left her with another unplanned, and unwanted, pregnancy. 

[…]Michelle was once again granted an NHS abortion at nine weeks — this time at a private London clinic, in July 2000.

Abortion three:

Then, a year later, she met her current partner, Paul, at a local pub.

[…]Michelle says she was open about her abortions, and told Paul, 36 — who is an estates manager — that she didn’t want any more children.

[…][I]n July, Michelle was going through a rocky period with Paul when she discovered she was pregnant again.

She says: ‘At the time we were barely speaking, as we were both so stressed out. We hadn’t been intimate for months, but one night relations thawed and we had sex.

‘Until then, we’d been using condoms but this time we didn’t. Although I thought about getting the morning-after pill, I ended up leaving it to chance.’

[…]At nine weeks, Michelle was granted a third NHS abortion, at another London clinic.

Three taxpayer-funded abortions for three pregnancies brought on by this woman’s own free decisions.

In the UK, abortions, IVF and single motherhood are all taxpayer-funded. If women had to pay for their own abortions, their own IVF, their own out-of-wedlock births, then maybe they would not be making decisions like this woman has. When you pay people to do something, you mustn’t be surprised when they do that thing more. Lowering the cost of anything means that more people will buy it. And making it free makes even more people do it.

The first step to ending abortion is that society needs to understand that virtually every woman who has one is at least partly responsible for her own decision-making.  Very often, when it comes to abortion, we seem to place blame on men and assume that women can do no wrong – that they are victims of men. But clearly that is not always true. We seem to have a real problem in this society holding women accountable for making poor decisions. Maybe that needs to change? Pregnancy does not happen by accident – both the man and the woman have to make a choice to have recreational sex when they aren’t ready to welcome a baby into the world. We have to stop looking at people who have recreational sex as victims and expect more from them.

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IRS exchanged confidential taxpayer information with White House

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ECM sent me this article from The Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

Top Internal Revenue Service Obamacare official Sarah Hall Ingram discussed confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and provided to The Daily Caller.

Lois Lerner, then head of the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations division, also received an email alongside White House officials that contained confidential information.

Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials — including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew — contained confidential taxpayer information, according to Oversight.

[…]Federal employees who illegally disclose confidential taxpayer information could face five years in prison.

[…]Ingram appeared before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee Wednesday and claimed she could not recall a document that contained confidential taxpayer information.

[…]Issa has requested unredacted copies of the emails, citing a prohibition from misusing Section 6103 “for the purpose of concealing information from a congressional inquiry.”

Ingram headed the scandal-ridden IRS office responsible for overseeing tax-exempt nonprofit groups before leaving to head the agency’s office in charge of Obamacare implementation.

I am not confident that any of the people responsible will face justice. Unless the Republicans are elected, all of this is going to be swept under the rug. Certainly, the media has no interest in holding the government accountable.

 

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New study: NHS patients are 45 percent more likely to die than US health care patients

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Wes sent me this article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Patients are 45% more likely to die in NHS hospitals than in US ones, according to figures revealing how badly England’s health service compares with those of other countries.

Previously unpublished data collated by Professor Sir Brian Jarman over more than 10 years found NHS mortality rates were among the worst of those in seven developed countries.

A patient in England was five times as likely to die of pneumonia and twice as likely to die of septicaemia compared to similar patients in the US, the leading country in the study, the data suggested.

The elderly were found to be particularly at risk in English hospitals compared with those in the other countries.

The figures showed that the situation had improved since 2004, when the death rate in English hospitals was 58% higher than that in the best performing country.

But NHS institutions still lagged behind in the most recent data, from 2012, despite reforms of the health service and increased funding.

Of the other six countries studied, only the US was named because of the sensitivity of the data.

Prof Sir Brian, who adjusted the data to take account of differences in the countries’ health services, did not initially release his figures because he was so shocked by them he at first assumed there must be a flaw in his methodology.

There was, however, “no means of denying the results,” he said.

“I expected us to do well and was very surprised when we didn’t,” the Imperial College London medic told Channel 4 News.

“If you go to the States, doctors can talk about problems, nurses can raise problems and listen to patient complaints.

“We have a system whereby for written hospital complaints only one in 375 is actually formally investigated. That is absolutely appalling.”

Previously, I had posted a summary of a book by Scott Atlas, a medical doctor at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. In that article, he laid out the reasons why the U.S. healthcare system was the best in the world.

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