ABORTION

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams charged Doctor Kermit Gosnell with first degree murder in the killing of seven viable babies born alive, among numerous other charges made on Wednesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama came under increasing pressure on Tuesday to publicly speak out against Beijing's harsh treatment of political and religious dissidents during a state visit this week by Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Marine Le Pen, the daughter of France’s extreme right-wing icon Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been chosen to lead the country’s National Front political party, succeeding her father who led the group for almost 40 years.

Jared Lee Loughner's interactions with instructors at his Tucson, Arizona community college were strained throughout 2010, with administrators and instructors reporting disturbing out of context comments, inappropriate expressions, and very hostile behavior which culminated in a suspension, according to school documents.

Arizona enacted a law on Tuesday that will forbid picketers to come within 300 feet of a funeral or burial service, a move meant to reduce the impact of planned protests of Arizona shooting victims by members of a Kansas-based church known for protesting the funerals of U.S. soldiers.

A group called “Manhattan Declaration” has written a letter to Steve Jobs to restore the “anti-gay” apps from the Apple store, the Manhattan Declaration blog said.

In Bangkok, on Sunday, a debate was brewing as scores of people gathered to condole the death of more than 2,000 young souls. They placed milk, baby clothes and toys at the morgue of a Buddhist temple where foetuses were found hidden in plastic bags last week. The morgue at the now detested Wat Phai Ngern, is to be demolished next week after a cleansing ritual. The traditionally orthodox Buddhist country, had ruled out abortion on morals grounds.

Deaths from complications during pregnancy and childbirth have fallen by a third in the past two decades but 1,000 women still die needlessly every day, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

More Polish women are traveling abroad to have an abortion to bypass strict laws outlawing the practice in their overwhelmingly Catholic country, a pro-choice group said on Thursday.

Health authorities reveal a worryingly high number of young girls in WA having abortions and some are as young as 12 years old.

Forty-four WA girls, some as young as 12, had an abortion last year, the state's health department reported on Sunday.

A new study says pregnancy six months after a miscarriage is less complicated than in women who wait more than half a year to conceive again after losing a newborn at birth.

A July 2008 survey conducted by a research firm indicated that majority of Australians support access to late abortion and did not support penalising doctors who performed late abortions.

Victorian health authorities have been contacted by more than 1,300 people concerned they may have been infected with hepatitis C by the suspended anaesthetist, Dr James Latham.

Australian health officers said an anesthetist at a Melbourne clinic might have deliberately infected at least 12 women who had abortions there with Hepatitis C.

A dozen House of Representatives Democrats opposed to abortion are willing to kill President Barack Obama's healthcare reform plan unless it satisfies their demand for language barring the procedure, Representative Bart Stupak said on Thursday.

The overall teen pregnancy rate was up 3 percent in 2006, with a 4 percent rise in the rate of births and a 1 percent rise in the rate of abortions, according to the report by the Guttmacher Institute.

One in 10 of the some 130 million births around the world each year is premature, the vast majority in poorer countries where chances of survival are low, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

Maternal deaths in developing countries could be slashed by 70 percent and newborn deaths cut by nearly half if investment in family planning and pregnancy care was doubled, the United Nations said Thursday.

With the help of their doctors, women planning to become pregnant should take an inventory of the medications they take, researchers from Canada advise.

The House of Representatives voted on Saturday to tighten a ban against using federal funds to finance abortions under the proposed Democratic healthcare reform legislation.