Ultrasound: Fill & Download for Free

This may be a fact little known in the Quora community.In China, C-section requires the permission of family members before a woman can undergo the operation.In other words, the woman does not have the power to decide on her own in terms of childbirth, even though she is the one to bear the excruciating pain and the possible complications.In 2017, a 26-year-old pregnant woman chose to take her life by jumping from the 5th floor of the hospital, after her family refused permission for a C-section. [1]The 26-year-old Rongrong Ma was 42 weeks pregnant when she was pushed into the maternity ward at a local hospital. An ultrasound indicated that the fetus's head was too large for a natural birth, so the doctors strongly recommended a C-section operation.However, her family refused to give consent.Ma pled with her family at least three times, even falling on her knees, to allow her to have a C-section so that her excruciating labor pain could be somewhat alleviated. Her family firmly denied her request again and again, until the point where the doctors decided that she was far into labor to safely start a C-section operation.Two hours later, when the medical staff were busy tending to other pregnant women in the ward, Ma slipped into an empty ward on the fifth floor and jumped from the window. Both she and the unborn child were killed.Her family denied her request for C-section for unspecified reasons. Some say that they refused to give consent to the operation because a natural birth would be beneficial to the baby and make the second pregnancy easier, while some say that the family was concerned about the cost of the operation.Ma and her husband came from one of the most poverty-stricken regions in China. Thus, ideas linked to childbirth are much less progressive.After this news hit the national headline, Ma's family attempted to tell a different version of the story in which they granted Ma's request for a C-section, but the hospital had no record of their permission.I was born by C-section. I knew first-hand that in less progressive times people encourage natural birth at all cost. They want their baby to be absolutely perfect, since one-child policy limits the number of children per household.For the past two decades, I've heard numerous people saying that babies born by C-section tend to be less intelligent because “their head wasn't pressured in the birth canal”. As a child I believed what adults said, so I blamed C-section for my poor academic performance at school.Today, I still don't know whether such rumors about the downside of C-section are true, but I believe the life of the pregnant woman matters more than the unborn baby.Footnotes[1] Between birth and death |

Almost 100 years ago, the newly formed USSR became the first country in modern times to explicitly legalize abortion-on-demand [1]throughout pregnancy.The total number of abortions increased sharply. By the mid-1920s, hospitals were so severely strained that separate facilities had to be set up for abortion patients, so that people who were genuinely sick or injured could receive needed treatment.By the late 1920s, some restrictions on abortion were implemented, including confining most of them to the first trimester.Sadly, many modern-day abortion supporters see the Bolshevik's 1920 abortion-legalization in a "positive" light, willfully ignoring what they don't want to acknowledge.First, abortion was legalized before modern contraception became available, and the barrier methods that did exist at the time were very hard to come by. That meant that many women were using abortion as regular "birth control".By the time that modern contraception DID come to most developed countries, it was still scarce in the USSR.One has to wonder if Russia's reliance on routine feticide was a major reason that the Bolsheviks saw no urgency in introducing women to the humane and safer means of controlling their family sizes that other developed nations had.The USSR's massive resort to surgical killing also came at a time before the discovery of antibiotics (and ultrasounds) which means that even the "safest" abortions for the mother must have been very risky.How risky?Unless one is able to find accurate stats from USSR hospitals of the era, one can only guess how many women were killed and seriously injured through legal abortions.It is also noteworthy that inspite of the maternal deaths/injuries that resulted from legal abortions, the crime of illegal abortion continued to occur. That indicates that abortion legalization in the USSR did not rid the country of even "less safe" abortions.The first part of the Quora question of "What it was like to undergo an abortion in the Soviet Union" is graphically addressed in this Secular Pro-life article titled "Two family conversations about abortion". [2]I will give a long excerpt here--"It will come as no surprise to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with pro-life feminist theory that this policy had horrific consequences.Raised by a hard-lipped, single father in a tiny apartment, she overcame her poor health, getting top grades in school and eventually moving to Moscow, where she earned a chemistry degree at university. Shortly after, she met my grandfather—a kind-hearted film nerd who ran the Moscow Film Festival—and gave birth to my mother at age 24. My grandmother had her second child at 35; in the span of the 11 years in between, she had the majority of her abortions.At the time, Soviet citizens were all too familiar with a particular catchphrase: "There is no sex in the Soviet Union." According to my grandma, sex was seen as taboo and positioned as a distraction for citizens who were supposed to be spending their time fulfilling their duties as good, hardworking Communists.Taboo or not, Soviets still had sex, and the state was there to take advantage. The Soviet abortion regime was incredibly misogynistic:"For most women, waiting for an abortion felt like being on a conveyor belt. On any given morning, there'd be ten women in line at the hospital to get an abortion," she said. "So, whenever I needed one, I made sure to go out of my way to ask around and track down a person within the state-run hospital system whom I could pay extra for better treatment."According to my grandma, paying extra guaranteed you more humane treatment than you'd get from a typical state-funded abortion. When I asked her what the doctors performing subsidized abortions at state-run hospitals were like, sharp anger entered her voice. "They wouldn't be sympathetic or encouraging," she said. "They'd laugh at you and tell you to shut up and stop crying. These people were heartless and felt nothing for the women getting abortions."She goes on to recount that publicly funded abortions were done with no anesthesia. In fact, many women of her time passed on "safe and legal" abortions and went the back-alley, paid route in an attempt to avoid abortionists' cruelty. (The back-alley abortionists turned out to be no better.) As for the fathers, they were nowhere to be found; discussions about sexual consent and health were lacking even between husbands and wives, so when women became pregnant, men had little role to play beyond driving them to and from the hospital for an abortion.The "conveyor belt" abortion model is not unique to Soviet Russia, of course. But to see it in action from the very beginning of the legal abortion movement is certainly enlightening."The "average number of abortions" that were performed in the former USSR is alluded to in this survey [3] of 650 15-to-67-year-old women.A few highlights.Shockingly, only 14% of respondents hadn't undergone an abortion.A small number of women had killed their unborn children over 20 times!In addition to legal abortions, almost a third of those surveyed had admitted to "self-aborting" one or more times.At the time of this survey, there was only one live birth for every two that were killed in the womb.Both the persistent unavailability of contraception and the "abortion culture" that pervaded their lives had calloused them into "routinely" killing their own offspring.Despite how "acceptable" abortions became, 83% of women felt that the abortions they had committed had damaged their health.One of the health problems that Russian women faced was future infertility. According to a Washington Post article from 2003, "About 13 percent of Russian married couples are infertile,” [4] and doctors report that diagnoses of infertility are on the rise. In nearly three out of four cases, infertility is attributed to the woman, typically because of complications from one or more abortions, according to [Vladimir] Serov and other health experts."Abortion--especially repeated abortions--have also been linked to future miscarriages and pre-term births [5] in the US. Premature births are also a known risk factor for disabilities. [6]It is noteworthy that both Russia (with its formerly very high abortion rates) and two of its former satellite countries which also had high abortion rates (Latvia and Lithuania) have much higher than average suicide rates. [7]That suggests that high rates of prenatal slaughter don't solve individual or societal problems, and likely makes them worse.A final fact. Today--in 2019--Canada and EIGHT US states/territories have ZERO gestational limits on totally elective abortions. Only three other nations [8] in the world allow this.One is China, which is notorious for human and animal abuse.The other is North Korea, which needs NO description.The third is Vietnam.This fact should be appalling to anyone with a conscience![1] Wikipedia--Abortion in Russia[2]Secular pro-life two family conversations about abortion[3] Russian City Surveyed on Contraception[4] Abortion in Russia Leads to Widespread Infertility[5] Abortion and Preterm Birth[6] March of dimes--Long-term Health Effects of Premature Birth[7] USnews--Countries With the Highest Suicide Rates[8] Gestational Limits on Abortion in US Compared to International Norms

I notice that most of the replies have focussed on specific countries, those of the author of each reply. I am going to do the same for my own reply. I am going to focus in my reply to your question on the country in which I reside, the United Kingdom. I am going to give you four relatively brief examples of laws unfairly different for women and men. I hope you find these examples interesting. Rape laws: This is something that not many people know about. In the UK, women are, by law, exempt from prosecution for the crime of rape. British women cannot be charged with rape. This includes rape of other women, men and children. In the UK, only men, by law, can be charged with rape. Rape laws, in the UK, are derived from the Sexual Offences Act 2003. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/pdfs(more)