How the world sees Greece
The president of Greece's largest children's charity has told Sky News his organisation is running out of money because of the economic crisis. Kostas Giannopoulous said refuge homes in Athens might need to close within months because people and companies can no longer afford to give money to charities. Some of Greece's children are abandoned because their parents cannot afford to raise them.
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The average age of American women having their first child reached a record high of 26 years old in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Vital Statistics Report. The average age of first-time mothers is increasing because more women are waiting until their 30s and 40s to start having kids and fewer women are having their first kids in their teens and 20s, the CDC report says. The majority of all births are still to women under 35 (about 85% of the total), but rates for all births, not just of a first child, to women over 35 have been rising over the past 20 years, while birth rates for younger women are stable or declining. That trend is no small matter. It's already changing families, lives, and economies, and as having kids later becomes more common, those changes will become more widespread. We're only beginning to adjust, but make no mistake: Older parents are not going away, and the impact of this shift is huge. What's driving the shift? It's a general trend that as more women get an education and enter the workforce, they marry and start having kids later in life, Stephanie Coontz, co-chair and Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, told Business Insider. Social and cultural factors also drive the trend. When "a country ... does not enable women to combine work and family well and has strong motherhood penalties, [the trend] is going to be exacerbated by that," Coontz, who is also a professor at The Evergreen State College, told Business Insider. If a woman has to choose between pursuing her career and starting a family rather than doing both at the same time, putting off having kids becomes more likely, in other words. That choice is less trying in countries with better childcare systems and more generous maternity and paternity leaves. Even if it were easier to combine a career and having kids, there are personal reasons a woman might decide to wait to start a family, Elizabeth Gregory writes in "Ready: Why Women are Embracing the New Later Motherhood." Women may want to accomplish specific goals, to have certain experiences, to be in a relationship with the right partner, to be financially and emotionally stable, or any combination of these factors. The availability of reliable contraception offers the means to delay having kids, Gregory writes. "Use of the pill (in tandem with more reliable versions of other forms of birth control) makes contemporary women different from all the generations of women before us," Gregory writes. With both incentive (pursuing education, careers, or other experiences) and means (birth control) to wait to have kids, more women are going that route, and some of the risks and benefits are coming into focus. Pros and cons The drawbacks of waiting to start a family are relatively intuitive. Because a woman's fertility begins to decrease at age 32 and decreases more sharply after age 37, it will likely be more difficult for her to conceive at 40 than it would have been when she was 30, though every woman will have a different experience. And contrary to what it may seem, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is not a cure-all for fertility decreasing with age. The percentage of IVF cycles that result in a baby declines from about 40% for women aged 32 and younger, to about 20% for 40-year-old women, to less than 5% for women 44 and older who use their own eggs. If women use donated eggs, the percentage of IVF cycles that result in a baby does not decrease for older women, but the fact remains that IVF is nowhere near 100% successful. Miscarriages and a number of complications to pregnancy, including gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, are more common for women over 35. Even if a woman is able to have a healthy child at 40, she may not be able to have as many children as she would like, as her fertility continues to decline. In addition to increasing infertility with age, the risks of older parenthood also include the parents having less energy and the grandparents having less involvement in the children's lives, Gregory says in her book. Still, Gregory writes, waiting to have kids has plenty of benefits to weigh against the potential risks. Gregory presents an analysis of US Census data from 2000 that shows women who waited to have kids had significantly higher salaries than women of the same age, with the same level of education, who had kids earlier. For women between ages 40-45 with professional degrees and full-time jobs, those who gave birth to their first child at age 35 made more than $50,000 more per year than women who had their first child at 20, on average. Even waiting to start a family just five more years, at 35 instead of 30, made a difference of $16,000 per year, on average. Besides higher salaries, women who wait until they're at least 35 to have kids generally have accrued experience and clout at work that helps them create what Gregory calls a "shadow benefits system" to supplement official benefits for parents (or lack thereof). They may have lots of stored up vacation time, or may be able to negotiate more flexible work schedules or the ability to work from home, when more junior colleagues might not. In the absence of official benefits to make it easy for women to have a family while continuing to work, putting off having kids can become less like a preference and more like a necessity. "If the world finds the new later motherhood solution problematic, then we, as a society, need to offer other good options for combining family and career," Gregory writes. Why it's a big deal Whether more women waiting to have kids is exactly a problem or not, changing the typical timeline for having kids has implications — for families, countries, and the world — that can't be ignored. Age-related decline in fertility and the increased likelihood of miscarriages and pregnancy complications with age mean that waiting to have kids can put extra physical stress on a woman's body and her baby's — not a negligible effect. But a woman's choice to wait to have kids offers important benefits to society, too. When women establish themselves in their careers before having kids, it can have long-term positive implications for their kids and their employees, Gregory writes in her book. Getting an education and making more money raises a woman's socioeconomic status, so a working class mother can potentially raise middle class kids if she waits to start a family. Besides increasing their own families' upward social mobility, women who delay having kids and advance to positions of authority at work then have the power to set policies they and their female employees would benefit from, like offering paid maternity and paternity leave or allowing flexible work schedules. This "feeds a gradual transformation of the culture of work that can lead in the long run to more equitable HR policies for everybody," Gregory writes. At the level of countries, when many women wait until they're older to start having kids it can have implications for the general fertility rate, because they have fewer fertile years left in which they can have more kids. Data from the World Bank show the seven countries where the average age of women giving birth to their first child is above 30 (Greece, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, according to the CIA World Factbook) all have general fertility rates below what's called the replacement rate. That means the generation currently having kids isn't having enough to replace itself. Countries with low fertility rates have populations that are aging and set to shrink, meaning fewer people of working age have to support more older dependents. The decision to wait to have kids begins as a personal choice with personal effects, but the trend of older first-time parents is already reshaping our world in big ways.UP NEXT: Celebrities have given women the totally unrealistic idea that they can have kids at any age SEE ALSO: American women are waiting longer than ever to become mothers Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: A psychologist reveals how to get rid of negative thoughts
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Despite the fact that the financial crisis has led to a significant reduction in abortions within the country’s borders, Greece still remains in the first ranks among European countries, with 80,000 abortions per year (the same amount as births). However, the fact that 50% of abortions in Greece are performed on underage girls, is worrying. The statistic data, released after a British study conducted by the Obstetric-Gynecological Clinics of University of London, reflect Greece’s tragic situation in regards to young girls’ education on contraception. Only 3% of Greek women prefer to go on the pill, while in Turkey 9% and in Europe one in two women choose the same method. In an interview with the Greek newspaper Eleftheros Typos, obstetrician-gynecologist Stefanos Chandakas University of Athens PhD and Curator of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Princess Royal University Hospital in London, noted that abortions are painful on a physical and psychological level, especially in teenage girls. “The girls are stigmatized (physically and mentally), since many of the consequences follow them for the rest of their lives. The physical effects of abortion may be temporary such as contamination, thromboembolism, bleeding, perforation of the uterus, bowel injury, cervix the rupture and ureter injuries, while 5% of women who get abortions, are permanently infertile. Furthermore, American studies suggest that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer,” he said. Another factor that indicates the lack of young women’s education is that 27% of young women in Greece resort to the morning after pill (emergency contraception) to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. Last year, pharmacies sold around two million morning after pills. The study also showed an increase in the use of condoms (75% of Greek couples, compared to 30% in the past).
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Despite the fact that the financial crisis has led to a significant reduction in abortions within the country’s borders, Greece still remains in the first ranks among European countries, with 80,000 abortions per year (the same amount as births). However, the fact that 50% of abortions in Greece are performed on underage girls, is worrying. The statistic data, released after a British study conducted by the Obstetric-Gynecological Clinics of University of London, reflect Greece’s tragic situation in regards to young girls’ education on contraception. Only 3% of Greek women prefer to go on the pill, while in Turkey 9% and in Europe one in two women choose the same method. In an interview with the Greek newspaper Eleftheros Typos, obstetrician-gynecologist Stefanos Chandakas University of Athens PhD and Curator of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Princess Royal University Hospital in London, noted that abortions are painful on a physical and psychological level, especially in teenage girls. “The girls are stigmatized (physically and mentally), since many of the consequences follow them for the rest of their lives. The physical effects of abortion may be temporary such as contamination, thromboembolism, bleeding, perforation of the uterus, bowel injury, cervix the rupture and ureter injuries, while 5% of women who get abortions, are permanently infertile. Furthermore, American studies suggest that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer,” he said. Another factor that indicates the lack of young women’s education is that 27% of young women in Greece resort to the morning after pill (emergency contraception) to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. Last year, pharmacies sold around two million morning after pills. The study also showed an increase in the use of condoms (75% of Greek couples, compared to 30% in the past).
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Crazy as it sounds, people born in some months are more likely to experience certain illnesses. The idea that the position of the Earth in relation to the stars when you were born has any relationship to your health seems absurd — after all, the scientific consensus is clear that astrology is nothing more than pseudoscience. Yet physicians, going back 2,500 years to Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, have observed some connection between the seasons and health. "For knowing the changes of the seasons ... how each of them takes place, he [the clinician] will be able to know beforehand what sort of a year is going to ensue," the ancient Greek healer wrote. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association confirms a relationship between the month you are born in and your susceptibility to disease, though they don't link it to the position of the stars. Instead, the researchers attribute the changes in disease risk to the presence of certain risk factors during some seasons (like an abundance of dust mites and other allergens in certain months). They also think that seasonal variations in vitamin D (which people are more likely to be deficient in during winter) have effects that show up throughout a person's life if they suffer those deficiencies when they are born. "The risk is not that great that you should worry about when your baby is going to be born or when you might have been born," says Nicholas Tatonetti, the principal investigator who explains the work in a YouTube video. "There's lots of other variables that account for disease incidence." Still, the researchers looked at a huge amount of data and turned up some interesting associations. The study The data scientists behind the study analyzed 1.75 million electronic medical records for people treated at Columbia University Medical Center between 1985 and 2013, and found 55 diseases with seasonal links (out of 1,688 diseases they looked at), including asthma, ADHD, reproductive issues, cardiovascular illnesses, and neurological problems. Being born in some months had a stronger overall effect than others: Being born in September, October, or November was associated with a higher disease risk, while people born in February, March, April, May and July were less likely to develop illnesses. Being born in May, June, August, January, and December didn't provide an "overall advantage or disadvantage," according to the study. Other researchers have investigated this question. In 1983, we found that the likelihood someone would have asthma was strongly connected to birth month, for example. But this new big data approach turned up connections to diseases that no one had ever found before — and ruled out some possible connections that had been suspected in the past. Drilling down The researchers broke down the connections between diseases and certain months more specifically too. In the charts below, the striped bars show an increased disease risk, while the solid bars represent a decrease in disease risk. As you can see, people born in October are more likely to develop respiratory illnesses but less likely to develop cardiovascular disease. Because researchers think that environmental factors like sunlight (because of vitamin D) are responsible for most of the variation in risk, these risk profiles would look different in places with different environmental conditions. Conditions related to vitamin D, for example, might have a mostly reversed profile below the Equator. These particular charts are probably fairly specific to New York, though the researchers say this work should help them identify environmental factors that increase or decrease disease risk everywhere. Tatonetti, one of the researchers, explains the study in more detail in the video below. SEE ALSO: The history of medicine will seem blunt and random compared with what's coming next Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Should we kill off one of the most dangerous creatures in the world?
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An 11-year old girl gave birth at the General University Hospital of Heraklion on the island of Crete, Greece, yesterday. Doctors say it is the first time they have seen a girl under 14 giving birth. According to Radio Crete, the girl, who is of Romanian origin, did not know she was pregnant. She visited the hospital with her mother for a routine check up. Doctors were shocked when they discovered that the girl was seven months pregnant. The doctors had to perform a caesarean section and the underage girl became a mother at the age of 11. After the delivery, the mother and the baby girl are in very good health. Dr. Constantinos Relakis who performed the C-section said that this is the first time he helped such a young person deliver a baby. Speaking to Radio Crete he said that in his 30 years as a doctor, the youngest girl he saw giving birth was 14 years old, and that young pregnancies are not a usual occurence in Greece. Dr. Relakis also said that a C-section is necessary for pregnant women under 15 because their body is not fully developed to give natural birth. Greek Police and social services were notified about the incident and the young mother is still in shock and unable to speak to anyone, but is now receiving counseling.
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Three baby boys feeding on the same placenta were born on the island of Crete in Greece early this morning, prompting doctors to comment on the rarity of the case. According to doctors, it is rare to have triplets in three different amniotic sacs, feeding on the same placenta. They claim that this happens once in every 100,000 pregnancy cases. The 33-year-old mother gave birth to the triplets early this morning. All three are healthy and they weigh between 1,200 and 1,400 grams. According to creteplus, the woman was hospitalized in the Iraklio University Hospital and doctors were monitoring her case, fearing that there might be complications. Obstetrician Stavros Sifakis, who was responsible for monitoring the woman’s pregnancy, said that he was there to monitor the possibility that one of the fetuses was “stealing” placenta blood from the others. He said that in many such cases, one fetus feeds more and the others are not developing as they should, thus generating serious pregnancy complications and most likely miscarriage. Dr. Sifakis said that it is a rare case of a “monozygotic, monochorionic, triamnionic pregnancy.” The woman’s gynaecologist and the clinic director delivered the babies via caesarean section even though the pregnancy was 30 weeks along. The triplets were born prematurely but are healthy, the doctors said.
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How the elderly are regarded varies in different parts of the world. Here are seven very cool things about how the elderly are seen and treated in other countries: 1. Japan has a national holiday called Respect For The Aged Day. The third Monday of every September in Japan is a national holiday designated to honor and show appreciation for the elderly. It's a paid holiday from work and traditionally, gifts are given to grandparents after sharing a festive meal with them. Respect for the Aged Day is a far more serious event than, say, Grandparents Day in the U.S. Neighborhood volunteers distribute free obento boxed lunches to elderly people. In some small villages, younger people and school children dance and provide entertainment. There's a "no-elderly-left-behind" attitude about it so even the lonely get some attention. 2. Honoring your mother and father is now the law in China and elsewhere. Elderly parents in China can sue their grown children for both financial and emotional support. Filial piety is the law in China, India, France and the Ukraine. In Singapore, adult children who do not give their parents an allowance can face up to six months in jail. And in China, it's not just financial support; more than 1,000 parents have sued because their adult children don't visit them regularly. Companies are required to give workers time off to see their parents too, although that part of the law is apparently hard to enforce. China is projected to have 636 million people over age 50 by 2050, or nearly 49 percent of the population -- up from 25 percent in 2010, according to a report in USA Today. And somebody needs to care for them, goes the government thinking. 3. In Scotland, they actually listen to the elderly. Scotland's "Reshaping Care for Older People" program sets out with this vision: "Older people are valued as an asset, their voices are heard and they are supported to enjoy full and positive lives in their own home or in a homely setting." One of the things that irks the elderly is to be frozen out of the discussions about them. Ever take your Mom to the doctor only to have him speak about her directly to you, as if she wasn't even there? In Scotland, they've pledged to hear the elderly. The cultural thinking -- and the money -- has shifted away from hospitals and toward preventative care. The emphasis is on adapting homes so that people can age and stay in them. The elderly spoke and someone listened big-time. Nearly 90 percent of Americans told AARP that they wanted to stay in their homes as they aged. 4. Who are you calling "old?" "Old man" isn't a slur in Greece; in fact, it is quite the opposite. As Arianna Huffington discussed in her book On Becoming Fearless: "Ten years ago I visited the monastery of Tharri on the island of Rhodes with my children. There, as in all of Greece, abbots are addressed by everyone as 'Geronda,' which means 'old man.' Abbesses are called 'Gerondissa.' Not exactly terms of endearment in my adopted home. The idea of honoring old age, indeed identifying it with wisdom and closeness to God, is in startling contrast to the way we treat aging in America." 5. "Respect your elders" has real meaning in Vietnamese society. Elders are considered the carriers of tradition, knowledge, and wisdom in Vietnam and in Vietnamese communities in the diaspora. Elderly grandparents and parents live with the family for support and care. They contribute by preparing the meals and caring for the grandkids if both the parents work. Elders are the head of the family and their advice is often sought. They are the decision-makers. Being old is considered an asset, not a liability. 6. Turning 60 is a big deal in Korea. Because 60 years is considered a full cycle in the Asian Zodiac, a large birthday celebration is held for those who reach this milestone birthday. Traditionally, it is also the age when a man can retire and let his sons support him. 7. A nursing home for elderly pets. When pet-owners age and reach the point that they can no longer care for their beloved pets, what happens to those animals? The re-homing rate is low for senior dogs and cats turned into animal shelters. In Japan, a nursing home for older pets has opened to meet the needs of the aging population. Many seniors adopt pets out of loneliness but then realize the commitment to their care may be unmanageable. While the Aeon nursing home for dogs isn't inexpensive, it does serve to fulfill a need, a company spokesman told The Telegraph.
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For the 5th year in a row, Greek mothers in 52 cities across the country, gather to publicly breastfeed their babies in celebration of World Breastfeeding week. The synchronized initiative — taking place from November 1-7 — is aimed to raise awareness among young mothers and Greek society. Numerous studies show that there are great benefits in breastfeeding, not only for babies, but for mothers as well. “A newborn baby needs only three things: Warmth from the mother, food from her breasts, and security with her presence. Breastfeeding can cover all three,” says an announcement of the institution, noting that the event of public breastfeeding aims to raise awareness of young mothers and the Greek society in general, on breastfeeding, not only as words off of a brochure or in a speech, but in practice, as an image and presence, “from mother to mother.” Infants who are breastfed for 12 months have a 50 percent lower risk of diabetes, as well as significantly lowering the possibility of being hospitalized during the first year of life. Mothers, who breastfeed reduce the risk of breast cancer, endometrial cancer and osteoporosis. Above all, breastfeeding creates a strong bond between mothers and children. Breastfeeding in Greece is not very popular, however, the Greek state is making an effort to promote breastfeeding practices. This week, the Ministry of Health announced a number of measures that will be taken for the promotion of breastfeeding. Among the changes includes incorporating special breastfeeding areas in public services and workplaces. “Breastfeeding is a human right, and its promotion is a very good investment for Public Health,” stated deputy Minister of Health Katerina Papakosta. According to Health Ministry data, only 41 percent of new mothers in Greece breastfed their babies in the maternity hospital, while after the first six months this percentage dropped. By the end of the first year, only 6.4 percent continued to breastfeed. A new public space for breastfeeding is now open in central Athens, located at the “Athens Heart” shopping mall, on Pireos Street. More such places are soon to be announced.
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The Town of Greece Community and Senior Center is a collection center for the Monroe County Coats for Seniors Program. Donations of new or ...
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Greece is currently ideal for infant trade, with traffickers charging between 7,000 and 20,000 euros to secure a baby for couples who have failed to have a child of their own. Many factors determine the price of an infant – the speed of delivery, for instance, or the race of the infant. If a baby has brown hair its price drops. Fair-skinned babies with blonde hair tend to be more expensive. If a baby is “available for purchase” it is more expensive. Another important factor is the age of the infant. Most babies are sold three to five days after birth. They cannot be sold after they are more than one month old. Infant traffickers charge more if the couple demands being able to select their newborn out of a group. Traffickers also try not to let the couple meet the birth mother, especially if she is a Roma or comes from countries such as Bulgaria. In fact, in several cases traffickers have presented a woman from Russia as the birthmother, so that perspective buyers have the impression that the child will grow up to be tall and blonde. In addition, the deliveries usually take place outside of private clinics so that buyers are under the impression that the newborn belongs to a wealthy family and will therefore be healthy. Most circuits are controlled by Bulgarian nationals, who find pregnant women in their country of origin and transfer them to Greece for childbirth. In fact, they usually convince women to become pregnant and sell the infant for at least 3,000 euros. Many Greek lawyers and notaries work as accomplices to these circuits and manage their paperwork. The birthmother signs a form to authorize a lawyer to attend court in her place in order to ratify the adoption. Consensual adoption is legal provided that there is no money involved. Otherwise it is prosecuted as a felony.
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A decline in birth rates and an aging population have emerged as further side effects of Greece’s ongoing economic crisis. For the past six years, Greece has also suffered a significant increase in abortions. According to the daily newspaper “Efimerida ton Syntakton,” 4 out of 10 women in Greece will give birth to one less child than they were planning. Some will never have children. According to Aikaterini Stypsanelli, a doctor at Alexandra Hospital, the crisis has reduced births by 30%. “There are women that, even though they desire to have children, are forced to undergo an abortion because they simply can not afford to have a baby. Growing up children looks like a mountain in their eyes,” he said. Even an abortion’s cost is unbearable for many of them; as a result, women turn to risky medicines in order to disrupt the pregnancy. As a result of their unavailability to create their own families, many Greek women experience depression and a growing sense of guilt. Katerina, 35, was working in the public sector but now, she says, she faces the daily risk of unemployment. “Since I was a little kid I wanted to have many children. Even without a husband I believe I could make it, if only the situation was different. Now I cannot even cover my own basic needs. Every month I leave a bill unpaid and I have completely limited my entertainment. I only spend money on the necessary,” she says, adding that she lives a lonely life. “There are nights when I remember what my life used to be like before the crisis in order to fall asleep. When I am tired of crying, I am dreaming of the day that all these will be gone. Yet, in 5 years I will be 40. Am I going to make it?” she wonders. Giannis Mouzalas, a gynecologist working for Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde), explains the new reality in Greece: “Currently we have 3 million uninsured people and 10 million insecure, meaning that none of them knows if he next month will find them unemployed or at least unpaid.”
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Abortion. We need to talk about it. I know, sometimes it seems as if we talk of little else, so perhaps I should say we need to talk about it differently. Not as something we all agree is a bad thing about which we shake our heads sadly and then debate its precise degree of badness, preening ourselves on our judiciousness and moral seriousness as we argue about this or that restriction on this or that kind of woman. We need to talk about ending a pregnancy as a common, even normal, event in the reproductive lives of women -- and not just modern American women either, but women throughout history and all over the world, from ancient Egypt to medieval Catholic Europe, from today's sprawling cities to rural villages barely touched by modern ideas about women's roles and rights. Abortion takes place in Canada and Greece and France, where it is legal, performed by medical professionals, and covered by national health insurance, and also in Kenya, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, where it is a crime and a woman who terminates a pregnancy takes her life in her hands. According to anthropologists, abortion is found in virtually every society, going back at least 4,000 years. American women had great numbers of abortions throughout our history, when it was legal and when it was not. Consider this: At the beginning of the nineteenth century effective birth control barely existed and in the 1870s it was criminalized -- even mailing an informational pamphlet about contraceptive devices was against the law and remained so until 1936. Yet the average number of births per woman declined from around 7 in 1800 to around 3.5 in 1900 to just over 2 in 1930. How do you think that happened? We need to see abortion as an urgent practical decision that is just as moral as the decision to have a child -- indeed, sometimes more moral. Pro-choicers often say no one is "pro-abortion," but what is so virtuous about adding another child to the ones you're already overwhelmed by? Why do we make young women feel guilty for wanting to feel ready for motherhood before they have a baby? Isn't it a good thing that women think carefully about what it means to bring a child into this world -- what, for example, it means to the children she already has? We tend to think of abortion as anti-child and anti- motherhood. In media iconography, it's the fetus versus the coat hanger: that is, abortion kills an "unborn baby," but banning it makes women injure themselves. Actually, abortion is part of being a mother and of caring for children, because part of caring for children is knowing when it's not a good idea to bring them into the world. We need to put abortion back into its context, which is the lives and bodies of women, but also the lives of men, and families, and the children those women already have or will have. Since nearly 1 in 5 American women end their childbearing years without having borne a child (compared with 1 in 10 in the 1970s), we need to acknowledge that motherhood is not for everyone; there are other ways of living a useful, happy life. We need to talk about abortion in its full human setting: sex and sexuality, love, violence, privilege, class, race, school and work, men, the scarcity of excellent, respectful reproductive health care, and of realistic, accurate information about sex and reproduction. We need to talk about why there are so many unplanned and unwanted pregnancies -- which means we need to talk about birth control, but also about so much more than that: about poverty and violence and family troubles, about sexual shyness and shame and ignorance and the lack of power so many women experience in bed and in their relationships with men. Why is it such a huge big deal to ask a man to wear a condom? Or for a man to do so without being asked? Why do so many women not realize they are pregnant until they are fifteen or twenty or even twenty-five weeks along, and what does that say about the extraordinary degree of vigilance we demand women exercise over their reproductive systems? And speaking of that vigilance, what about the fact that some 16 percent of women, according to a Brown University study, have experienced reproductive coercion in at least one relationship -- a male partner who used threats or violence to control a woman's contraception or pregnancy outcomes -- with a remarkable 9 percent experiencing "birth control sabotage," a male partner who disposed of her pills, poked holes in condoms, or pre- vented her from getting contraception. One-third of the women reporting reproductive coercion also reported partner abuse in the same relationship.4 Behind America's high rate of unintended pregnancy -- almost half of all pregnancies -- and high rates of abortion lies a world of hurt. We need to talk about the scarcity of resources for single mothers and even for two-parent families, and the extraordinary, contradictory demands we make upon young girls to be simultaneously sexually alluring and withholding: hot virgins. We need to talk about blood and mess and periods and pregnancy and childbirth and what women go through to bring new life into the world and whether deep in our hearts we believe that those bodies mean women were put on Earth to serve and sacrifice and suffer in a way that men are not. Because when we talk about abortion as a bad thing, and worry that there's too much of it, sometimes we mean there's too much unwanted pregnancy and that women and men need more and better sex education and birth control, and sometimes we mean there's too much poverty, especially for children and their mothers, but a lot of the time we mean a woman should have a good cry, and then do the right thing and have the baby. She can always put it up for adoption, can't she, like Juno in the movie? And that is close to saying that a woman can have no needs, desires, purpose, or calling so compelling and so important that she should not set it aside in an instant, because of a stray sperm. Abortion has been legal across the United States for more than four decades. More than a million abortions are per- formed every year -- some 55 million since 1973, when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. A few facts: By menopause, 3 in 10 American women will have terminated at least one pregnancy; about half of all US women who have an abortion have already had a prior abortion; excluding miscarriages, 21 percent of pregnancies end in abortion. Contrary to the popular stereotype of abortion-seeking women as promiscuous teen- agers or child-hating professionals, around 6 in 10 women who have abortions are already mothers. And 7 in 10 are poor or low-income. Abortion, in other words, is part of the fabric of American life, and yet it is arguably more stigmatized than it was when Roe was decided. Excerpted from "Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights" by Katha Pollitt. Pro copyright © 2014 by Katha Pollitt. Published October 14, 2014, by Picador USA. All rights reserved. www.picadorusa.com/pro To buy a copy of Pollitt's book head over to Amazon.
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The Church of Greece’s Holy Synod said Thursday that it supports couples having IVF treatment but is against mothers aborting their babies, regardless of whether the children have been diagnosed as having physical or mental problems. Bishop Nikolaos of Me... ...
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Despite gradual signs of economic recovery and monthly negotiations with the troika, significant social ills continue to torment Greek society. Child protection centers often face serious problems in the midst of economic crises; in the case of Greece, serious obstacles are hindering the care of neglected newborns. The majority of Greek children now “trapped” in hospitals have mothers or caretakers who are simply incapable of tending to them. In some cases, mothers have altogether abandoned their infants in the hospital. “These children are ‘trapped’ in hospitals,” notes Athena Charalambous, head of the Social Service Department of Alexandra Hospital. “The hosting conditions are bad compared to their actual needs. We are not an orphanage, we are a Neo-natal Care Unit.” The longer they stay in the hospital, the greater the chances these children struggle with neglect and abuse. There is no proper accommodation for children older than six months, while sick and healthy infants are forced to share hospital rooms. “We need to find a solution. We are working with the ministry to find suitable intermediate, non-hospital units to host these children.” The cruelest indication of Greece’s lingering economic fallout can be found in hospital wards filled with these abandoned children. On the one hand, welfare institutions have shrunk their capacity due to lack of finances; on the other hand, serious social problems faced by families devastated by the crisis have led to “an explosion” in the number of abandoned infants in maternity wards. The crisis has seen a widespread increase in the the use of narcotic substances. For every nine women who leave their child in Alexandra Hospital, four are carriers of HIV, adds Charalambous. Social Services are in charge of informing mothers about their choices. Frequently, the prosecutor decides to reconnect mother and child if the mother starts attending drug treatment programs, such as OKANA.
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| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT greece.greekreporter.com |
Greece’s population shrank by 17,660 people last year as deaths outpaced births, according to the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT). There were a total of 94,134 births in Greece last year, which was 6.2 percent down on 2012. Almost 86 percent of th... ...
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| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.ekathimerini.com |
The town of Greece is holding a Spanish Festival for Seniors at 11 a.m. Sept. 18 at the Community and Senior Center, 3 Vince Tofany Blvd. The lunch ...
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| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.democratandchronicle.com |