Chile Study Exposes Lie of "Safe" Abortion

Recent research from Chile shows that when therapeutic abortion was banned in 1989 after a long period when it had been legal in that country, there was no increase in maternal mortality. None at all. 

On the contrary, maternal deaths continued to decline. Chile today has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world (16 per 100,000 live births), outstripping the United States (18) and, within the Americas, second only to Canada (9). 

Rather than the rogue violator of women’s reproductive health that the UN makes it out to be, Chile is looking this week like a model for countries that really want to save the lives of mothers.

Figure 1. Trend for maternal mortality ratio, Chile 1957–2007.

It’s important to note here what the study, Women's Education Level, Maternal Health Facilities, Abortion Legislation and Maternal Deaths: A Natural Experiment in Chile from 1957 to 2007, does not claim. It does not say that making abortion illegal caused a decline in maternal deaths. But it shows, importantly, that the 1989 law did not increase mortality. It continued to decline substantially, although other factors were at work in the decline -- notably, the education of women and their ability to shape their own reproductive behaviour. (The latter does not mean quite what birth control fundamentalists mean, as we shall see.)

The study, published in the open access online journal PLoS One, is the work of Chilean and American researchers led by Dr Elard Koch, epidemiologist and a professor at the University of Chile and Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción (UCSC).

Read more here.

Help for Chile

CHILE EARTHQUAKE: £3930.00 now raised.


The University of Ohio has announced that the city of Concepción, near the epicentre has moved 3.9 metres into the Pacific. Santiago has moved 27.7 cms to the west, and even Buenos Aires is between 2 and 3 cms further west than it was before the earthquake. So South America continues to distance itself from Africa!

The list of fatalities is now 479. There has been tremendous relief at finding groups of people in the hills fearing tsunamis, or in shelters and refuges unknown to family and friends. The lack of communications did not help. The list is about half of what was first feared.

One and a quarter million pounds worth of stolen goods has been returned or abandoned. Either the thieves had the grace to repent, or found they were unable to resell. In any case condemnation of the looting and pillage has been very vocal.

The Ministry of Education plans 3 shifts of children in some schools as a temporary measure while repairs and rebuilding take place. The school where Margaret teaches has 9 classrooms out of action. In Talcahuano, near the epicentre, a secondary school has a trawler sitting in its playground, deposited there by the tsunami.

Read it all here.

South American Glaciers Growing

Two South American glaciers are displaying strange behavior for the times: They're growing.

Most of the 50 massive glaciers draped over the spine of the Patagonian Andes are shrinking in response to a global warming, said Andrés Rivera, a glaciologist at the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile. (Related: "Mountain Glaciers Melting Faster Than Ever, Expert Says.")

But the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina and Pio XI glacier in Chile are taking on ice, instead of shedding it.

"What is happening … is not well understood," Rivera said.

Theories center on the geography and topography of the glaciers; the depth and temperature of the waters where the glaciers end; and how quickly, or slowly, they react to changes in the climate.

Yet overall, "if you account for the gains and losses of all of Patagonia's glaciers, they are [still] losing huge amounts of ice," Rivera pointed out.


Climate Insensitivity?

One hypothesis for the 3-mile-wide (5 kilometer-wide) Perito Moreno's advance is the glacier's apparent insensitivity to changes in what glaciologists call the equilibrium line on glaciers, Rivera said.

Roughly equivalent to the snow line, the equilibrium line is the elevation above which the glacier is growing, due to snow accumulation, and below which the glacier is melting.

When this line moves higher up a hill or a mountain due to rising temperatures, for example, more of the glacier is situated in the melting zone, and the glacier retreats.

But because Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier is so steep in the area where the equilibrium line falls, climate shifts don't impact the line's movement much, at least as it relates to the height of the mountain, Rivera noted.

As a result, the amount of of ice lost or gained is minimal.

Read it all here.