Why should it be a "difficult decision", I would imagine that for most 14/15 year old girls who find themselves pregnant it's a fairly easy decision between throwing their lives away on a child they don't want or putting it behind them and getting on with life.

People who think it's wrong always want to turn it into some kind of soap opera, with much wailing and weeping, so that it can be seen as a punishment for perceived immoral behaviour.

One of the reasons that the abortion rate is creeping up among the under-20s is because the government decided, seven years ago, to tackle the very high rate of teenage motherhood in the UK by setting up the Teenage Pregnancy Unit.

The decision was made, (in common with other European countries), to focus on helping teenagers cope with sex and its consequences rather than trying to make them abstain from it.   more »

As Michael Moore’s Sicko hits theaters, the simmering health care crisis appears headed for a boil.

The number of Americans without coverage has soared from 40 million in 2000 to upwards of 50 million today.

In other words, for every member of the U.S. Senate enjoying full government-administered health coverage, nearly 1 million Americans go entirely without.

Plus, researchers estimate that a further one-fifth of those who are insured don’t have the coverage they need for a chronic condition or catastrophic illness.   more »

Four years after the emergence of the first signs of a serious insurgency in Iraq, Bush finds himself beset with major crises stretching from Palestine to Pakistan.

With U.S.-backed Fatah forces routed by Hamas in Gaza this week, Bush's five-year-old vision of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict now looks more remote than ever, while a new Pentagon report in Iraq suggests that his four-month-old "surge" strategy is failing in its primary objective of reducing the violence there.

Meanwhile, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, to whom Washington has provided virtually unconditional support since al Qaeda's 9/11 attack, faces a growing popular revolt, while much of the country's tribal border regions have come under the control of forces allied with Afghanistan's Taliban.

And Iran, which senior U.S. officials this week accused of arming the Taliban, as well as Shi'a militias in Iraq, has continued to defy Washington's demands that it halt its nuclear enrichment programme.   more »

Biofuels also are not as environmentally friendly as one might think.

According to University of Minnesota researchers David Tilman and Jason Hill, "Only about 20 percent of each gallon is ‘new’ energy.

That is because it takes a lot of ‘old’ fossil energy to make it: diesel to run tractors, natural gas to make fertilizer, and of course, fuel to run the refineries that convert corn to ethanol.

"For this reason, if every one of the 70 million acres on which corn was grown in 2006 was used for ethanol, the amount produced would displace only 12 percent of the U.S. gasoline market."   more »

America's mass corporate media are capitalist-run. But, then, so is the state. Therefore, we are indoctrinated by the 'State' media, where concentrated economic and political power set the outer parameters of permissible discourse

It's appalling how narrow the spectrum of acceptable political debate and ideological argument is in the United States.

One stark example of this is the way in which the State media cover the deaths of 'our boys and girls' and deaths 'on the other side'.

At issue here is the State media’s powerful, opinion-shaping unwillingness and/or inability to acknowledge the victimization of people on the wrong side of our imperial guns. This is part of a broader devaluation of non-North American and non-white lives in U.S. culture.   more »