IGX

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:If we didnt have the repressive fundies opposing sex education and birth control, then abortion would decrease.

I'd Hit It wrote:When this story first broke it was huge in the pro-choice movement as an example of what happens when women do not get access to sex education, birth control, and family planning services because of the de-funding of legitimate clinics. This asshole preyed on poor, uneducated, desperate women who did not believe they had options elsewhere, were afraid to speak with their families, and had no legal recourse for pursing action against him.

• In FY 2010, the federal government and Pennsylvania together spent $11.7 million on family planning client services under the state’s Medicaid family planning expansion. That amounts to 16% of the state’s total Medicaid family planning expenditures

Terry B. wrote:

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:If we didnt have the repressive fundies opposing sex education and birth control, then abortion would decrease.

But, if kids learn about sex in school they will simply want to have sex and then the birthrate will explode.

Please think these things through before you post.

BucketHead wrote:The obvious answer to me is to get little guns in the hands of those fetuses

BucketHead wrote:The obvious answer to me is to get little guns in the hands of those fetuses

Shafpocalypse Now wrote:Odin: I only said that about the political diatribe Chesser went into, not about the ability of someone to have an opinion of it

Blaidd Drwg wrote:I blames 5/3/1 for Chesser's outbursts.

baffled wrote:
I blame his excessive spending on shitty exercise programs. And kettlebells.

Ed Zachary wrote:

baffled wrote:
I blame his excessive spending on shitty exercise programs. And kettlebells.

Obama's fault. It is obviously.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:I blame you all for persecuting him for his beliefs.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs">YouTube Link</a>

odin wrote:what a vile story. Shame it gets appropriated by pro-life or pro-abortion people really.

Pinky wrote:Sentence him to the wood chipper.

Turdacious wrote:

odin wrote:what a vile story. Shame it gets appropriated by pro-life or pro-abortion people really.

Apparently there is a Roe v Wade connection.

This whole thing is all kinds of messed up.

It was called the Mother's Day Massacre—the brainchild of Harvey Karman, an eccentric California man without medical training who had served 2½ years in prison for performing illegal abortions in the 1950s. Karman teamed with a young Philadelphia doctor who offered to perform abortions on 15 impoverished women, each between four and six months pregnant, who were bused to the Philadelphia clinic from Chicago on Mother's Day 1972.

What the women didn't know was that they were guinea pigs for a device Karman had invented, which he called the "super coil." He had tested it only on wartime rape victims in Bangladesh, where he had traveled under the sponsorship of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Complication rates were high, and little wonder. A colleague of Karman's Philadelphia collaborator described the contraption as "basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball. . . . They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman's uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, . . . the gel would melt and these . . . things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus."...The following year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. It would be 37 more years before the Philadelphia doctor who carried out the Mother's Day Massacre would go out of business. His name was Kermit Gosnell.

Harvey Karman, a California psychologist who ran an underground abortion service in the 1950s, wanted to make abortion simpler, cheaper, and less painful. He succeeded by inventing a soft, flexible tube, the Karman cannula, that is still used in early-stage abortions.

Then he "set out to revolutionize second-trimester abortion" with a plastic spiral, "the super coil," that could be inserted into the uterus to trigger an abortion, according to Tunc.

At the invitation of the Bangladeshi government, Karman tested the device on hundreds of women there who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers. He claimed there were no complications.

On Mother's Day weekend in 1972, Karman, other activists, and 15 women in their second trimester of pregnancy boarded a bus in Chicago and headed for Philadelphia, where Gosnell had agreed to give them super-coil abortions at his clinic, then at 133 S. 36th St. The women, who were poor, had been unable to get abortions in Chicago or New York.

Gosnell's super-coil abortions - filmed and later shown on a New York City educational-TV program, thanks to Karman - turned out badly.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health subsequently did an investigation that detailed serious complications suffered by nine of the 15 women, including one who needed a hysterectomy.

The complications included a punctured uterus, hemorrhage, infections, and retained fetal remains.

The CDC researchers recommended strict controls on any future testing of the device - the beginning of "increasing regulations on the development of reproductive technologies," Tunc wrote.

Karman spent two years in court battles in Philadelphia. He was convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but a Common Pleas Court judge overturned the conviction in 1974, saying then-District Attorney Arlen Specter had failed to show which women Karman had treated.