"The number of teenage abortions in Finland fell by 66% between 2000 and 2023, its public health institute THL said on Monday, attributing the reduction to the offer of free contraception to adolescents and compulsory sex education in schools.
Finland also passed a law in 2022 liberalising abortion, at a time of deep divisions over abortion rights in Europe and court rulings in the U.S. that restricted access to terminations of unwanted pregnancies for millions of people there.
The number of abortions among women under 20 rose during the 1990s in Finland, which led the Nordic country to respond at the start of the 2000s by making morning-after pills available without prescription from 15 years of age and sexual education compulsory in all schools.
"We can assume that sexual education plays a significant role," THL's research professor Mika Gissler told Reuters, adding that increased access to contraception from a young age was another factor behind the change.
The number of abortions fell 66% to 722 in 2023 from 2,144 in 2000 among all teenagers aged 19 or younger in Finland, while the drop was even steeper at 78% among those under 18 in the same period, THL's statistics showed.
"Since the latter half of the 2010s, the decline in the number of young people's abortions has also been influenced by the introduction of free contraception in many welfare regions," THL wrote in a report...
Under the 2022 liberalisation, Finland from September 2023 stopped requiring women to give a reason for having an abortion, making it available upon a pregnant person's request during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
[Note: That's actually not a very long window for abortion! Many conservative states in the US have actually instituted 12-week bans, and it's caused terrible upheaval and limits to medical services. Sounds like Finland should liberalize further, imho! Still, important progress!]
THL said it was too early to conclude whether the legislative change, which took effect last year, will have an impact on the number of abortions."
-via Reuters, June 3, 2024
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Is this fanfic friendly? I feel like an outlier.
I guess this is my sign it's time to throw together a FAQ post to link to lol.
Yes, every event for this blog is fanfic friendly :D
Though as I mentioned on my Ominous October post, for events that include multiple short stories, I encourage everyone to flex their creativity and take one of their planned short story fanfics, and at least *attempt* to turn one of them into something entirely original; rebuilding a character and story from the ground up to stand on its own two legs is no easy feat, and that is what makes it so fun!
It really gets your creative gears turning, to make an "au of an existing material" to be something entirely original, and you can be pleasantly surprised about the things you come up with!
As a few people say, its not just a matter of "filing the serial numbers off" -- you have to add in just as much *or more* as what you take out when you are turning a fanfiction into something that is original and completely divorced from its original source material / inspiration, and that is a hard, but very rewarding challenge!
Obviously, this is not a requirement (there's no hard requirements for any of the challenges, other than no cheating, including no using AI),
but if you would like an extra challenge for the short story events and you're planning on doing entirely fan-fiction, I highly recommend trying it out at least once, and seeing where it leads you--
you may find yourself pleasantly surprised by what you find down that rabbit hole!
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happy Labor Day! just a reminder that it was leftists who got us the weekend. it's leftists who give us unions & keep them strong.
the federal minimum wage hasn't risen from $7.25 in well over a decade. the main culprit? Republicans of course, & too many people that are in a union are Republican.
Republicans HATE unions nowadays. rich people are so far up their asses they've become living meat puppets for them. rich people don't care about a happy population; they want to get rich at our expense. people blame the president for the high cost of living, such as groceries, when this is actually a global issue & companies have openly stated they were the ones who were price gouging.
it's rich people behind the scenes & they're a massive reason why Project 2025 is a real threat. they want to take away 40 hour work weeks & turn them into 160 hours work months. they will take away the right to get paid for working overtime (page 592). they want to ban unions for public service workers (page 82), make it easier for private companies to decertify unions (page 603), & allow states to opt out of federal labor laws (page 605).
a SCOTUS justice (Thomas) has expressed they he thinks OSHA needs to go. some states like Arkansas have allowed child labor with limited safety & legal measures. they want to take away so many workers' rights that have been so hard fought for & earned. OSHA became a thing because of so much bloodshed. people are going to die from these but it's okay because these rich people who do so much for us will be getting paid more while not being required to even pretend we are human beings.
are you gonna be like the rednecks of old? who gave such a shit for their fellow workers that they literally fought to protect them all? do you really believe rich people are good for us? they don't care at all. they need us more then we need them. even with their power, they're scared in the back of their pathetic little greedy minds. they exhaust us on purpose. Project 2025 is going to make so many aspects of our lives hell & they will not only do nothing about the conditions now to improve our way of life but they fully intend to make it WORSE.
they will force people to stay married & make babies they can't afford while offering no help whatsoever. they want working conditions to be lethal again. they want us to be wage slaves. how can anyone want this? you think it's horrible now? why risk this??
please don't stop talking about Project 2025 or Agenda 47. they're the same plan & the reason why trump doesn't talk about policy is because Project 2025 IS his policy. he's only in this to stay out of prison. he doesn't give a shit what kind of evil, insane people will be doing in the background to fuck us all over. the rest of the world is watching us nervously, hoping he won't be president again. it won't ve good on a domestic OR international level. this is a dangerous time.
please check your registration status often & vote early if you can. encourage friends & family. make a day of it! don't wait until three last minute but be careful out there, too. if it's not voting issues they'll cause people might get violent. ladies, if you're with a Republican partner but you're scared to vote for Harris... please know that your vote is private & you can pretend you're doing something else in order to get it done. stay registered Republican just to be safe. we got this 💙
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Men continue to having trouble grasping it's not kids most women object to, it's having kids with men who want the benefits of having a family but leave the downside to the mothers
By Nesrine Malik Mon 2 Sep 2024
JD Vance’s comments on Kamala Harris reflect a stubborn debate in supposedly progressive societies
A woman without biological children is running for high political office, and so naturally that quality will at some point be used against her. Kamala Harris has, in the short period since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for US president, been scrutinised over her lack of children. The conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be president” – apparently, she doesn’t have “skin in the game”. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, called Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives”.
It’s a particularly virulent tendency in the US, with a rightwing movement that is fixated on women’s reproduction. But who can forget (and if you have, I am happy to remind you of a low point that still sticks in my craw) Andrea Leadsom, during the 2016 Conservative party leadership election, saying that Theresa May might have nieces and nephews, but “I have children who are going to have children … who will be a part of what happens next”. “Genuinely,” she added, as if the message were not clear enough, “I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”
It’s an argument about political capability that dresses up a visceral revulsion at the idea that a woman who does not have a child should be vested with any sort of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that “so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me”. He appears so fixated on this that it is almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on a complex.
But his “disorientation and disturbance” is a political tendency that persists and endures. It constantly asks the question of women who don’t have children, in subtle and explicit ways, especially the higher they rise in the professional sphere: “What’s up with that? What’s the deal?” The public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a sort of group plea to be left the hell alone, in their painstaking examinations of how they arrived at the decision not to have kids, or why they in fact celebrate not having kids, or deliberations on ambivalence about having kids.
Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering. But one reason this traditionalism persists in ostensibly modern and progressive places is that women withdrawing from mothering in capitalist societies – with their poorly resourced public amenities and parental support – forces questions about our inequitable, unacknowledged economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay home and provide unremunerated care. She is less likely to be held in the domestic zone and extend her caregiving to elderly relatives or the children of others. She cannot be a resource that undergirds a male partner’s career, frailties, time limitations and social demands.
2:29Oprah Winfrey takes a swipe at JD Vance during surprise Democratic convention speech – video
“Motherhood,” writes the author Helen Charman in her new book Mother State, “is a political state. Nurture, care, the creation of human life – all immediate associations with mothering – have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources … than we like to admit. For raising children is the foundational work of society, and, from gestation onward, it is unequally shared.”
Motherhood, in other words, becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on declining birthrates draws comment from Elon Musk (“extremely concerning!!”) . Not having children is reduced to entirely personal motivations – selfishness, beguilement with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: of the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible working arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood frequently brings, therefore creating bondage to partners. To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return. Assuming motherhood happens without such context, Charman tells me, is a “useful fantasy”.
It is a binary public discourse, obscuring the often thin veil between biological and social actualisation. Women who don’t have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship with maternity: a number have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and periods. A number have entered liminal stages of motherhood that don’t conform to the single definition from which they are excluded. A number extend mothering to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don’t count, just as May’s nieces and nephews didn’t). A number have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into a blissful club. They experience regret, depression and navigate unsettlement that does not conform to the image of uncomplicated validation of your purpose in life.
But the privilege of those truths cannot be bestowed on creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unfair contract. Women with children are handed social acceptance for their vital investment in “the future”, in exchange for unrewarded, unsupported labour that props up and stabilises the economic and social status quo. All while still suffering sneeriness about the value of their work in comparison with the serious graft of the men who win the bread.
On top of that, women have to navigate all that motherhood – or not – entails, all the deeply personal, bewildering, isolating and unacknowledged realities of both, while being subject to relentless suffocating, infantilising and violating public theories and notions that trespass on their private spaces. With that comes a sense of self-doubt and shame in making the wrong decision, or not being as content with those decisions as they are expected to be. It is a constant, prodding vivisection. That, more than anything clinical observers feel, is the truly disorienting and disturbing experience.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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