A Bit More Detail

• Anthro{dendum}'s Adam Fish looks at the phenomenon of permissionless innovation as part of a call for better regulation.


• James Bow shares excerpts from his latest book, The Cloud Riders.


• Bruce Dorminey notes how data from Voyager 1's cosmic ray detectors has been used to study dark matter.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money begins a dissection of what Roe vs Wade meant, and means, for abortion in the United States, and what its overturn might do.


• Ilan Stavans, writing for Lingua Franca at the Chronicle, considers the languages of the World Cup. The prominence of Spanish in the United States is particularly notable.


• The LRB Blog gathers together articles referencing the now-departed Boris Johnson. What a man.


• The Map Room Blog reports/u> on Matthew Blackett's remarkably intricate transit map of Canada.


• Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution links to a study from Nature exploring how shifts in the definition of concepts like racism and sexism means that, even as many of the grossest forms disappear, racism and sexism continue to be recognized if in more minute form.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at how a Japanese experiment aimed at measuring proton decay ended up inaugurating the era of neutrino astronomy, thanks to SN1987A.


• Window on Eurasia reports on how a Russian proposal to resettle Afrikaner farmers from South Africa to the North Caucasus (!) is, unsurprisingly, meeting with resistance from local populations, including non-Russian ones.


• Linguist Arnold Zwicky takes a look at how, exactly, one learns to use the F word.

• Antipope's Charlie Stross wonders if the politics of Trump might mean an end to the British nuclear deterrent.


• Centauri Dreams shares Andrew LePage's evaluation of the TRAPPIST-1 system, where he concludes that there are in fact three plausible candidates for habitable status there.


• Dangerous Minds shares the gender-bending photographs of Norwegian photographers Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States.


• The Extremo Files looks at the human microbiome.


• Language Hat links to an article on Dakhani, a south Indian Urdu dialect.


• The LRB Blog looks at policing in London.


• The Map Room Blog notes that 90% of the hundred thousand lakes of Manitoba are officially unnamed.


• Marginal Revolution looks at the remarkable Akshardham Temple of New Delhi.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes how citizen scientists detected changes in Rosetta's comet.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer provides a visual guide for New Yorkers at the size of the proposed border wall.


• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper taking a look at the history of abortion in 20th century France.


• Torontoist looks at the 1840s influx of Irish refugees to Toronto.


• Understanding Society takes a look at the research that went into the discovery of the nucleus of the atom.


• Window on Eurasia reports on Belarus.


• Arnold Zwicky shares photos and commentary on the stars and plot of Oscar-winning film Midnight.

Q: Did you face protesters on Tuesday?

A: No. There were protests after the centre was announced last year. We’ve had peaceful protest in Halifax. Protesters aren’t allowed on hospital property; they have to be on the sidewalk, so there’s a parking lot in between. In Ontario, there is a “bubble zone” law so protestors can’t protest at clinic doors.

The support the government has given to this clinic is great; they’ve put together a great group of people to organize and plan. It’s not an abortion clinic, it’s a women’s health and wellness clinic. I like that they put it in that context.

Q: Why is that important?

A: Women who get abortions are also women who are mothers and women who have gall bladder problems and women who need contraception. It’s important not to separate that. And I think a lot of the anti-abortion people say: “Well, we like mothers, but we don’t like women who have abortions,” and actually it’s the same people. We still have these false divisions about women being “good or bad”—the virgin or the prostitute. That discourse is so simplistic. So women might need abortions, they might need to get contraception, they might need STD screening.

Abortion and women's access to abortion are often contested issues within the United States. A recent poll by Pew Research found that 51% of Americans think that abortions should be legal in all or most cases. Yet, 49% of Americans polled think having an abortion is morally wrong. How does this difference in legality and morality impact legal decisions?

Have you heard about the Texas abortion regulations case? In 2013, the Texas solicitor general passed an omnibus abortion bill (HB2) that places additional restrictions on abortion providers. Regulations include requiring doctors to obtain hospital admitting privileges within 30 miles from the clinic where they perform abortions, and requiring abortion clinics to be retrofitted to comply with building regulations that would make them ambulatory surgical centers.

The impact of these bills on women's health has been immediate. Since the passing of HB2, 900,000 women now live farther than 150 miles from an abortion provider and 750,000 live farther than 200 miles; 11 of 33 abortion clinics closed; and wait times have increased. In addition, according to researchers at the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), the number of physicians who provide abortions across the state fell from 48 to 28.

The restriction of a woman's right to access either reproductive health and/or abortion care exacerbates issues of spatial inequality and isolation. In Texas, women are faced with potentially long travel times, barriers to finding a culturally competent doctor and/or a doctor that speaks the patient's language, and increased costs (time off work, transportation, childcare, healthcare and prescriptions) to accessing reproductive healthcare. This is particularly onerous for impoverished women, women of color, immigrant women, and those who reside in more rural areas.

[Premier Wade MacLauchlan] noted that the government was unlikely to win the lawsuit launched by Abortion Access Now PEI Inc. That suit contended that the government’s policy contravened the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that its purpose “is to advance a particular conception of morality and to restrict access to abortion as a socially undesirable or immoral practice.” The pro-choice group filed a notice of litigation in January that required a response from the government within 90 days.

The government’s decision to provide abortions on PEI will do more than ensure timely and safe access to this health service; it will reduce the stigma associated with abortion on the island, says Ann Wheatley, cochair of Abortion Access Now PEI. “The policy of the government not to allow abortions to be performed in the province has for the past 30 years conveyed a message that there was something wrong, even sinister, about the procedure. It had the effect of stigmatizing abortion, and causing women to feel ashamed and fearful.”

No abortions have been performed in PEI since 1982. They are offered out of province at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a referral from a PEI physician, or at the Moncton Hospital in New Brunswick, where no referral is necessary. The latter option is relatively new. MacLauchlan made arrangements with the Moncton facility shortly after he was elected in May 2015. Women do not have to pay for the cost of out-of-province abortion services, but they must pay for their own travel, accommodation and other related expenses.

• Anthropology.net reports on a study suggesting that ritual human sacrifice paved the way for complex societies.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling shares an essay skeptical about the idea of a sharing economy.


• D-Brief and The Dragon's Tales reports on a study of some South American mummies suggesting that the vast majority of populations in the pre-Columbian Americas did not survive the conquest.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining conditions on 55 Cancri e.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers how access to abortion can be limited by simply making it difficult to access.


• Marginal Revolution wonders how bad the effects of the upcoming shutdown of the D.C. Metro will be.


• Noel Maurer continues to look at the prospects of a Venezuelan default, looking at oil exports.


• Spacing Toronto explores the history of the Toronto Sculpture Garden.


• Torontoist explains inclusionary zoning to its readers.

With no vaccine, no cure, and without even a reliable diagnosis, doctors are at a loss for how to protect their patients from the Zika virus. In the past year, the mosquito-borne disease has spread throughout Latin America, sparking panic because of a possible link to microcephaly—babies born with abnormally small brains. Without more information, medical advice so far has boiled down to this: Don’t get pregnant. So say official guidelines from Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras. El Salvador has gone so far as to recommend women do not get pregnant until 2018.

But most of these Latin American countries are also Catholic, so access to birth control is often poor and abortion is flat-out banned. “This kind of recommendation that women should avoid pregnancy is not realistic,” says Beatriz Galli, a Brazil-based policy advisor for the reproductive health organization Ipas. “How can they put all the burden of this situation on the women?”

In Brazil, where Zika has hit the hardest, birth control is available—though poor and rural women can still get left out. One report estimates that unplanned pregnancies make up over half of all births in the country. And abortion is illegal, except in cases of rape and certain medical conditions. A raft of impending legislation in Brazil’s conservative-held congress may make it harder to get abortions even in those exempted cases.

Now throw Zika into that. Scientists still haven’t confirmed the link to microcephaly, but Brazilian researchers have confirmed the virus can jump through the placenta from mother to fetus. Circumstantially, the number of of microcephaly cases has gone up 20 fold since Zika first reached Brazil. In the face of fear and incomplete information, women will have to figure out how to protect themselves and their children.

• blogTO notes a big retail shift in the Junction and looks at new expensive condos on Dupont Street.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper suggesting the light curve of KIC 8462852 can be plausibly explained by a large comet family, notes another simulating what Saturn would look like as an exoplanet, and found a third suggesting that the Fomalhaut system's configuration is likely temporary.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a report on silicon chips for supercomputers.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Ireland has passed legislation protecting all teachers, including those employed by Catholic schools, from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.


• Language Log notes an odd Chinese typo for the name of Obama.


• Marginal Revolution starts a discussion on the fragility of complex civilizations.


• Torontoist features an essay by a lesbian Ontarian who talks about how the current sex ed curriculum would have helped her.


• From Tumblr, vagarh notes medieval texts and laws on abortion.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the impact of the Russia-Turkey crisis on the Orthodox Church, suggests Russian project their own shortcomings on the west, and looks at patriotism among Ukrainian Muslims.

A University of Missouri doctoral student plans to continue research for her dissertation on the effects of the state’s recently imposed 72-hour waiting period for abortions, despite a state legislator’s push to block the research, the student told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.

“I stand by my research project,” Lindsay Ruhr said Wednesday. “I feel that my research is objective, and that the whole point of my research is to understand how this policy affects women. Whether this policy is having a harmful or beneficial effect, we don’t know.”

State Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Columbia, Missouri, who chairs the Missouri state senate’s interim Committee on the Sanctity of Life, sent a letter in late October to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood — one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars,” according to a copy of the letter posted to HuffingtonPost.com. Schaefer called for the university to hand over documents regarding the project's approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions. Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.

"We are still in the process of responding to Sen. Schaefer's request for documents," Mary Jenkins, public relations manager for University of Missouri Health, said Wednesday in an email. Schaefer did not respond to Al Jazeera's multiple interview requests.

Missouri in September 2014 enacted a 72-hour wait for abortions, becoming one of several states that have restricted access to the procedure — moves that reproductive rights advocates have called legal attempts to chip away at the rights established by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Other legal restrictions, passed in Missouri and some other states, have required that women seeking an abortion undergo an ultrasound scan and receive informational material that abortion rights advocates say aims to dissuade women from undergoing the procedure.

Pregnant women from New Brunswick are travelling to Maine and Montreal to obtain abortions after the province’s only private abortion clinic shut down last summer, angering pro-choice advocates who say the government is moving too slowly in removing barriers to the service.

Staff at abortion clinics in Augusta and Bangor in Maine said they have seen a spike in the number of telephone inquiries and visits from women from New Brunswick since the summer when the Morgentaler clinic in Fredericton closed, citing a lack of government funding.

Ruth Lockhart of the Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Centre in Bangor said the independent clinic used to see one or two women from the province over six months. There are now women from New Brunswick at every weekly clinic, sometimes with five or six at a time, she said.

“My concern is with the women who can’t do that — who can’t get time off from work, who can’t find childcare, who can’t afford the fees or don’t have a passport,” she said in an interview.

“To have to leave your country? I don’t know, that doesn’t seem right to me. None of that is fair to women.”

When the Toronto Women’s Bookstore needed space to expand from its Kensington Market home in 1975, it settled upon the ground floor of a three-storey semi-detached former residence on Harbord Street. As one of the first feminist bookstores in Canada, the collective-run business quickly became a supplier to libraries, schools, and women’s centres who drew on stock the emphasized works by Canadian authors on topics ranging from health to non-sexist kid-lit. During its first few months on Harbord, store staff estimated that around 25 per cent of its clientele were men who were either curious about the concept or deeply committed to feminist issues.

During the spring of 1983, the bookstore learned it would have a new upstairs neighbour. Following a search delayed by threats of prosecution from the provincial government, Dr. Henry Morgentaler (who passed away last week), announced he would open his first Toronto abortion clinic on the upper two floors of 85 Harbord on June 15. The press was shown a freshly renovated space filled with plants and wicker furniture that Morgentaler hoped would create “a soothing atmosphere” for patients.

The clinic’s move-in wasn’t a peaceful one. Ontario Attorney-General Roy McMurtry expected police to charge in if any abortions were performed; at the time, the only legal option required the consent of abortion committees offered by some hospitals. Anti-abortion groups promised plenty of protests. When opening day arrived, a man wielding garden shears attacked Morgentaler. Repeatedly yelling “bad people, bad people,” Augusto Da Silva was intercepted by pro-choice supporters (led by clinic spokesperson Judy Rebick) before Morgentaler was seriously harmed. Da Silva then waved his shears in the air, told the crowd to move back, then ran from the scene. (He was soon arrested.)

The inevitable police raid came on July 5, 1983. After a pair of undercover Metro Toronto Police officers arranged an abortion, other officers swept in and removed equipment during a three-and-a-half hour blitz. Morgentaler, who was vacationing in California, surrendered to police upon his return to Toronto two days later. The raid set off years of legal battles that culminated in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to strike down federal abortion law in January 1988.

85 Harbord became a battleground in the divide over women’s choice and a target for extreme anti-abortionists. Around 3:15 a.m. on July 29, 1983, a man who failed to break into the clinic managed to get into the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. He set bags of paper afire under the stairwell, which ironically was near the pregnancy and childbirth section. A note left behind read “If your mother had taken your life away, you would not be living it up, Morgentaler.”