Back to the Coat Hanger or Not?

By: Rich Polley

In Mississippi, Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the only clinic proving abortions and is facing potential foreclosure.

Mississippi House Bill 1390 requires that all physicians who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a local hospital and be board certified in obstetrics and gynecology. Current physicians have no problem being board certified in obstetrics and gynecology, because they all are. The piece of missing rail road is that only one physician has admitting privileges at local hospitals.

To increase the problem these local hospitals have the right to refuse admitting privileges to physicians and to top it off two hospitals in Jackson Mississippi have Christian affiliations. So I don’t think anything including the subject of abortion will be very supportive in the hospitals.

Many fear the return of basement or back-alley abortions with the dreaded coat hanger. “I find it terrifying when I see politicians like Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant working to cut off women's access to abortion by shutting down the health centers that safely provide them to women,” wrote Tamara Tuine, writer for the Root. 

State Ordered Rape

By: Rich Polley

7 states mandate that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound procedure in which a probe is inserted into her vagina. Each woman seeking an abortion is required by the provider to offer the woman the opportunity to view the image.

Alabama state senator Linda Coleman said, "If you look up the term rape, that’s what it is: the penetration of the vagina without the women’s consent." Which is exactly what the state is doing.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett dished out a solution for women who were going to be forced by the government to undergo a completely unnecessary ultrasound against their wills, "You can't make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes."  This doesn’t stop the fact that it’s still considered rape. Even if you changed the term of rape, the lone star state of Texas requires that each abortion provider must display and describe the image of the ultra sound.

Several Steps Back: Body Image - The Devil Came Back

In 2010 a study was done by Marika Tiggemann and Jessica Miller titled "The Internet and Adolescent Girls’ Weight Satisfaction and Drive for Thinness."

The title is self-explanatory. The study sampled 156 adolescent students from Australia, having them complete a questionnaire on their exposure to the internet and their perceptions on female beauty and body image. The results were disheartening. To quote the study: "Regression analyses indicated that the effects of magazines and Internet exposure were mediated by internalization and appearance comparison. It was concluded that the Internet represents a powerful sociocultural influence on young women’s lives."

In other words: the plague of body dysmorphic disorder, an issue that was only recently crusaded against in the realms of old media and magazines, has infected the internet as well.

The trouble here is not that body dysmorphia caused by media exposure is a persisting issue. It's fairly common knowledge that an obsession with body-aesthetics is an intimate part of today's media-infused culture. The danger is the new source of weight obsession: the internet.

Viewing mass media is a much more passive experience than web browsing. The negative influences of ads, magazines, and television can be countered by placing positive media right along-side it. But when it comes to the internet, the web surfer is a very active information consumer. An adolescent may expose him or herself to whatever negative imagery of misinformation they wish, and can even circumvent any attempts at informing or countering the negative stimuli entirely. In Tiggemann and Miller's study, there was found to be a correlation between negative body image and internet exposure, but not television viewing.

What is clear, then, is that this issue of body image isn't simply a case of the dead coming back. This is an entirely new abomination. To counter this new insurgence of anorexic culture, awareness organizations and support groups will have to establish a sharp presence on the internet. But the thin-ideal culture has already settled in, and its exorcism will be a very long, difficult process.