Florida Girls Lift Weights, and Gold Medals

From New York Times

No other state has officially adopted weightlifting for girls, as the Florida High School Athletic Association did in 1997, a sign that the perception endures of weightlifting as a sport for he-men and the occasional bodybuilding queen who slathers her preternaturally bulging biceps with baby oil.

“I find it very surprising,” said Jackie Metcalf, the weightlifting coach at Sarasota High School. “because it’s a great way to get girls involved for gender equity. You don’t have to be a skilled athlete to do this.”

The presence on many teams of cheerleaders — who become better jumpers and fliers after lifting — has helped remove the stigma from the sport, several girls said. Many wear bows in their hair at competitions, and at a recent meet, one wore pearls with her singlet. They share weight rooms with boys who admiringly call them “beast.” T-shirts emblazoned with “Silly Boys, Weights Are For Girls” and the like are de rigueur.

Extracurricular club programs for girls have sprung up around the country since women’s weightlifting became an Olympic sport in 2000. But Florida, with 170 high school teams that have produced two Olympians and several dozen world team members, has “set the gold standard” for the sport, said Rodger DeGarmo, director of high performance and coaching for USA Weightlifting in Colorado Springs, the governing body that oversees Olympic lifting.

“I think it’s awesome for this group of girls because there’s so many times you have to be tall, slender,” said Judy Miller, Jessica’s foster mother. “With this, you can be any size.”

Some chugged bottles of honey before they lifted — the sugar high helps, they said — while others sat silently in a corner of the gym, summoning their strength. They ranged from 93.6 pounds to 379.1, from featherweight cheerleaders to hulking softball players and even girls who never before dabbled in sports.

“It doesn’t matter how much you lift,” said Jessica, a senior at Booker High School in Sarasota, after collecting her gold medal. “It just matters that you’re trying to make yourself better.”

Some coaches have to recruit aggressively to build a team, correcting misperceptions along the way.

“A lot of girls think if you do it you’re going to get all beefy,” said Alexa DeCristofaro, a senior at New Smyrna Beach High School who won first place in the 199-pound weight class. “Well, you really don’t. If you do it, you get toned, which is different from getting totally muscular.”

In the decade since high schools here began offering girls’ weightlifting, certain towns — Port Orange (near Daytona Beach), Port Charlotte (near Sarasota), Fort Walton Beach (near Pensacola) — have become known for their girl weightlifters. Tom Bennett, a coach at Spruce Creek High, said one of his former lifters won a slot at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and others are bent on joining her.

“The girls are very, very competitive — in some cases more than the boys,” said Mr. Bennett, whose team of 30 girls has won every state weightlifting championship since they began in 2004.

The sport is far more popular in North Florida than in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties, possibly because South Florida has more wealth and its young athletes gravitate toward “upper class” sports like tennis and golf, Mr. Bennett said. Altha, a speck of a town in the Panhandle, sent six girls to this year’s state finals, while Miami sent none.

Mr. Bennett’s team practices at least 12 hours a week. Like other coaches around the state, he recruits from the school softball, soccer, cheerleading and basketball teams, with the promise that weightlifting will improve athletic performance in general.

“It definitely makes them faster, more explosive, more flexible, stronger,” said Richard Lansky, a member of the board of USA Weightlifting who runs an extracurricular club in Sarasota.

Divvying up the cake

March 19, 2007
From The Economist print edition

TONY BLAIR'S most famous pronouncements on wealth aim at opposite ends of the income distribution. The prime minister once declared that Labour would abolish child poverty within a generation. He also said he had no burning ambition to make sure that David Beckham, a commodity with a sideline in football, earns any less. In putting these two thoughts together, Mr Blair was sticking to a consensus that has held for the past 20 years. Broadly, this says that the rich can get as rich as they like, so long as the poor are getting better-off too.

However, new figures out this week suggest that the bargain isn't working. The number of poor children, as defined by the government, has grown by 100,000 in the past year. Furthermore, overall income inequality has grown too (see chart), despite hefty redistribution under Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer.

The failure of this part of the bargain is starting to call into question the other part. Using tax data going back a century, Tony Atkinson, an economist, has calculated that the incomes of the richest 1% have followed a U-shape for the past 60 years, and are now back to the level they were at just after the second world war, when Britain was still a place of great estates and silver soup tureens. Yet ever since Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, this rise has been tolerated, on three conditions: that average incomes are rising too, that there is enough income mobility to prevent the place from feeling too oligarchic, and that those at the bottom are getting less poor.

These terms may be breaking down now, presenting a problem not just for Mr Blair but for his successor—almost certainly Mr Brown—and also for the other main parties. The Conservatives are also keen to reduce child poverty. In a deliberately provocative speech, David Cameron, the Tory leader, adopted the metaphor of a caravan crossing the desert to highlight the importance of making sure that the income growth of the poorest keeps pace with the rest. The provocation was all the greater since the phrase had been coined by Polly Toynbee, who writes for the Guardian and is an unabashed soaker of the rich.

The trouble is that all three of the conditions have taken a turn for the worse. Average incomes have now grown slowly for the past four years. The last time they slowed to this extent was in the mid-1990s, when there was greater appetite for bringing the rich low. Admittedly, part of this pique was owing to the fact that some of them were running utility companies that had been privatised. But the current recipients of windfalls—private-equity partners and money managers—are not much more loved. Getting rich by starting a company is one thing; getting rich by moving money around is another.

As a result of these movements at the top end, Britain “now has a more American pattern of income distribution”, according to Oliver Letwin, the Conservative Party's philosopher-in-chief. But, Mr Letwin notes, there is not yet an American-style culture of giving back to society in return for success. Nor is there a British version of the idea that anyone can make it if they apply themselves, even though Britain has a slightly more fluid society than America's. Instead, people worry that the great shift in social mobility that came with the expansion of higher education and of white-collar work has come to an end, leaving the people who did not benefit from it more stuck than ever. The view that freedom might increase inequality but would promote more social mobility has turned out to be false, says David Laws, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on work and pensions.

Meanwhile, this week's figures suggest that the incomes of those at the bottom are stalling. On March 28th the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think-tank, noted that Labour's good record on child poverty—over half a million children have been lifted out of poverty since 1998—is less impressive when the focus is shifted to very poor children. If the poverty line is drawn at 40% of median household income rather than 60%—the government's definition—there has been no improvement since 1997. Adults without children have fared even worse: there are more of them living in relative poverty now than since records began in 1961.

Frank Field, a former Labour welfare minister, thinks these things, together with worries about unaffordable housing, are shifting the consensus on levels of taxation that has remained intact for decades. After Mr Brown's tax-cutting budget, new levies on the rich still look unlikely. But the 20-year-old settlement that Mr Blair so eloquently summed up is now looking increasingly shaky.

Millions face drought in SW China

More than 5.5 million people are short of drinking water because of an acute drought in south-western China, state media reports.

Low rainfall in the province of Sichuan has forced officials to deliver clean water to the worst-hit areas.

Six million livestock and half a million hectares of land are affected, Sichuan's governor said.

Many areas of China are regularly hit by water shortages or droughts, with some blaming climate change.

Most of Sichuan received no major rain in February, and no significant rain predicted before the end of March.

Stunted crops

Lack of rainfall and unusually warm temperatures are to blame for the drought that has hit farmers in Sichuan province, causing losses of nearly 300 million yuan ($38m, £19m), the official Xinhua news agency said.

Last year, much of Sichuan and neighbouring Chongqing were hit by a severe drought which severely stunted crop growths in many areas.

Other parts of China have experienced abnormal weather conditions recently.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the north-west of the country needed emergency water supplies earlier this year because of low rainfall in Shaanxi province.

Digital lock's rights and wrongs

When a piece of music is purchased you might assume you can listen to it in on any number of different devices: at home, in the car or on a portable music player. But, in the UK at least, you would be wrong.

"You can't copy any form of music or film without the copyright owner's consent," explained copyright lawyer Hamish Porter.

"So if you buy a CD from a record shop, even copying that CD onto your iPod is unlawful unless you have the copyright owner's consent."

In practice, stopping consumers making CD backups has proved impossible to enforce. But our habits are changing; around 10% of purchased music is now downloaded. This raises different issues.

"When you download an electronic copy of a musical work or a film from a website," said Mr Porter, "the copyright owner, as part of the contract under which you have downloaded it, has allowed you to copy that file onto a laptop or an iPod or onto a hard disc.

The problem, some believe, is that the music labels have made these contracts pretty restrictive by using something called Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Flaws

David Roundtree, the drummer with Blur told us: "The idea is that DRM is supposed to allow you to control the copying of your music.
"That's the point of it all. You're supposed to be able to sell something to somebody and restrict what they do with it after that."

Software is embedded in downloaded music, restricting which devices it can be used with and how many copies can be made.

Many in the recording industry claim DRM is necessary to fight music piracy.

"The problem that we really face at the moment is unfettered filesharing, free copying of MP3s," explained Richard Gooch from the International Federation of Phonographic Industry which represents all the major record labels.

"MP3 is fine, but what is not fine is taking artists' work and then swapping it with a large number of people over the internet for free."

DRM is the solution, the music industry says.

But Simon Wheeler, the Director of Digital Beggars Banquet Records, disagrees.

"DRM can allow copyright holders to protect their intellectual property but considering that over 90% of the music sold in the music market today is on a non-DRM format called the CD, then that's not necessarily an answer."

David Roundtree also has misgivings: "I think the fundamental problem with it is that it doesn't work. If it did work we would be having a rather different conversation.
"It's best summed up by the old computer security maxim: whatever you can do in software, you can undo in software. In the case of music, whatever complicated system you have in place, the music has to come out of two wires that you have plugged into a loud speaker.
"I can just as easily plug those into a recording device as a loud speaker, so the whole concept is fundamentally flawed."

Incompatible

There are two main kinds of DRM. One is based on Microsoft code and is used by most of the major download services.
But the one store which dominates the market, Apple's iTunes, uses a completely different and incompatible DRM system called FairPlay.
FairPlay allows music downloaded from the iTunes store to be played on computers running iTunes that have been authorised by the consumer and only one portable device, iPods.

Users can copy downloaded songs to a CD and then copy the disc back on to the computer so that the songs can then be moved to other portable devices - but the quality of the music is affected.

"I think the problem that we've got with DRM at the moment is the most popular music player on the market, the iPod," said Mr Wheeler.
"If you buy digital music outside of iTunes or an MP3 based service then you're not going to be able to put the music on your iPod. I think that confuses consumers more than anything else."

The fight back against DRM has already begun. In Europe, Apple's system is under fire for being anti-competitive and is facing legal action in various European countries.

Consumers are also making their voices heard through various organisations which oppose DRM, which they term Digital Restrictions Management.

While the major labels are still largely behind DRM, the independent sector prefers a different approach. Sites like E-Music and Audio Lunchbox sell DRM-free tracks, all of which come from Indie labels.

"I believe that if music was sold without DRM there would be less confusion for the consumer," said Mr Wheeler. "They wouldn't have to worry whether the track they brought from service X would play on player Y."

"They could buy with confidence knowing that they could take their music with them on whatever portable device they wanted.

"I think this growth in confidence for the consumers would lead to market growth and I think that's a real benefit for the industry."

DRM-free or otherwise, at least some more imaginative approaches to music services have been appearing. Spiralfrog promises ad-supported downloads - when or if it eventually launches.

Aime Street has launched. Here, the price of each track is decided by its popularity. Less popular or new tracks are free, rising to a maximum of 98 cents if their popularity increases. At the moment it deals almost exclusively in independent music.

Silent orchestration

From The Economist print edition

LAST month Ian Gillan, lead singer with Deep Purple, an elderly heavy-metal band, made an angry attack on the group's record label, Sony BMG. His tirade against the company's “opportunistic fat cats” was provoked by the CD release of a 1993 live performance, which the rock star claimed was the band's “worst gig ever”. On March 1st, two days after Mr Gillan's outburst, the European Commission announced its own re-release, saying it would look again at the merger that created Sony BMG in 2004. Europe's anti-trust authorities have until July 2nd to decide whether the merger should now be picked apart.

Before the merger, there were five record “majors”—Universal, Sony, Bertelsmann, Warner and EMI—which together accounted for 80-85% of recorded music sales in western Europe. Once Sony and Bertelsmann fused their record subsidiaries into Sony BMG, the merged entity had an average 20-25% share in national markets. This is not enough clout on its own to trouble the trustbusters: in fact Sony BMG has a smaller European presence than Universal, the leading record company. At issue is whether the four majors together might now reach an unspoken understanding about prices.

The evidence is not yet in. But what about the theory? Cartels—in which pacts among companies are formally agreed—are notoriously difficult to sustain, not to mention illegal in most instances. Witness the tensions that dog OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries. A tacit understanding faces even bigger challenges. Suppliers must co-ordinate without negotiation on a mutually profitable price, then stop anybody undercutting it. In principle, industry consolidation makes it easier for firms to synchronise their actions. A merger that turns five big firms into four, for example, cuts their bilateral links from ten to six.

Co-ordinating a price is one thing; sticking to it is another. Companies face the same dilemma that has undone countless hypothetical prisoners in economics textbooks. There is an incentive to collude with other suppliers to boost prices, just as two prisoners have good reason to keep mum about their crime. But there is also a temptation to renege to gain sales, much as one prisoner might end up ratting on another.

Yet in the right circumstances a tacit understanding can endure. Those among equal partners have the best chance of lasting. A rough parity in market shares should mean that the benefits of high prices are split evenly, minimising the risk that one firm breaks ranks. Firms with similar costs and capacity will also share a common view of what the “right” price is. If, on the other hand, one firm has lots of spare capacity or lower costs than its competitors, it will find undercutting them hard to resist.

Symmetry helps, but the temptation to cheat will be too great if rival firms cannot monitor each other's behaviour and respond quickly if one of them reneges. The obvious riposte to cheating is to abandon price co-ordination altogether. But a cleverer response is to suspend it temporarily—introducing “promotional” prices on selected goods, for example—as a prelude to a bloodier price war should the treachery continue. If the short-term gains from cheating are small relative to the long-term losses from lower industry prices, the threat of prompt retaliation may be enough to sustain tacit collusion.

Markets in fast-moving and relatively cheap goods are easiest to police. Where transactions are “lumpy”, as in the commercial aircraft industry, the short-term profits from undercutting rivals are too big to resist.

Even if an understanding can be co-ordinated and policed, it could still be broken by outside forces, such as smaller competitors or new entrants. That is why the consolidation of Europe's package-holiday industry might not ring too many alarm bells in Brussels. The number of big firms is shrinking from four to two, but unless the commission is convinced that one of them could dominate the market on its own, it is likely to tread carefully.

In 1999 the commission blocked a merger between two of the four big British tour operators, Airtours (now MyTravel) and First Choice, only to see the decision annulled by the courts. It had argued that the big firms might arrive at an implicit understanding to restrict industry supply. The courts disagreed, ruling that it is difficult to collude tacitly on something as complex and opaque as tourism capacity, harder still to discipline cheating, and impossible to prevent smaller competitors or new entrants from expanding supply and spoiling the incumbents' game.

It's hard to sing in harmony

What about the record industry? Wholesale record prices are highly visible—a few prices in company catalogues account for the bulk of sales—which suggests that firms could plausibly co-ordinate on an agreed tariff. Sales turnover is rapid, which means a cheat cannot make much money before its rivals have a chance to retaliate. The main suppliers also interact in a variety of markets and on joint ventures like compilations, so there are ample opportunities to dole out selective punishment.

But tacit collusion may still be beyond them. For one thing, the prices they publish are not always the ones they are paid. Record companies offer retailers targeted discounts in return for shelf space and marketing resources. And although one CD looks much like another, music is a gloriously “differentiated” product, so firms cannot infer what their rivals are doing from their own sales data. If, say, EMI's market share slumps, is it because a competitor is cutting prices or because the new album from its biggest star is no good?

The commission initially cleared the Sony-Bertelsmann merger on the basis that prices were not fully observable. It was forced by the courts to look at it again. Sony BMG has already lost one battle, forced to recall the offending Deep Purple album. It won't want to lose another.

Latin America migrant money tops aid

By Duncan Kennedy

BBC News, Mexico City

The amount of money sent home by Latin American migrant workers to their families has reached more than $62bn.

This figure now exceeds the combined total of all direct foreign investment and foreign aid to Latin America.

According to the Inter-American Investment Bank, the figure could reach $100bn in four years' time.

The biggest share of money, $23bn, was sent back to Mexico, mostly from workers living in the United States remitting small sums each month.

Foreign remittances now rank along with oil and tourism as Mexico's biggest foreign currency earner.

The Inter-American Development Bank, which supports the region with aid and other help, says the remittances will increase by about 15% a year during the next four years.

The bank describes the money as a very effective poverty reduction programme because it keeps between 8m and 10m families above the poverty line.

But it says it also means the economies of the region are not generating enough jobs to keep workers from leaving in the first place.

Another problem is that much of the money is sent back in small amounts and so it is difficult to track.

The average is between $100 and $150 a month.

That in turn makes it an unpredictable source of revenue for governments to tap into.

The bank says it wants people to get away from what it calls cash to cash flows and into account to account transfers but the bank says the recent crackdown on illegal immigrants by the US authorities could hinder efforts to get migrants to use banks.

When Less Is Best

By RORY STEWART.

Why are we in Afghanistan? Vice President Cheney talks terror, Britain focuses on narcotics. The European Union talks 'state-building,' others gender. On a different day, the positions seem interchangeable. Five years ago, we had a clear goal. Now we seem to be pursuing a bundle of objectives, from counterinsurgency to democratization and development, which are presented as uniform but which are in fact logically distinct and sometimes contradictory.

Finance officers in Kabul and shepherds in Kandahar want to know what we did with the $10 billion we spent in the last four years. So do any number of commentators on Afghan TV and radio. And when Helmand villagers see soldiers from countries thousands of miles away carrying guns and claiming to be only building schools, they don't believe them.

I have noticed that many Afghans now simply assume we are engaged in a grand conspiracy. Nothing else in their minds can explain the surreal gap between our language and performance. The United States needs to be honest about what it wants from Afghanistan and what it can achieve.

We should remember that we came first to protect ourselves against terrorist attack. Afghans can understand this and help. But counterterrorism is not the same as counterinsurgency. Counterterrorism requires good intelligence and Special Forces operations, of the sort the U.S. was doing in 2002 and 2003. Recently, however, NATO has become involved in a much wider counterinsurgency campaign, involving tens of thousands of troops. The objective now is to wrest rural areas from Taliban forces.

But many of the people we are fighting have no fixed political manifesto. Almost none have links to Al Qaeda or an interest in attacking U.S. soil. We will never have the troop numbers to hold these areas, and we are creating unnecessary enemies. A more considered approach to tribal communities would give us better intelligence on our real enemies. It is clear that we do not have the resources, the stomach, or the long-term commitment for a 20-year counterinsurgency campaign. And the Afghan Army is not going to take over this mission.

Our second priority should be to not lose the support of the disillusioned population in the central and western part of the country. We have spent billions on programs that have alleviated extreme poverty and supported governance but have not caught the imagination of Afghans. Afghans are bored with foreign consultants and conferences and are saying, 'Bring back the Russians: at least they built dams and roads.'' To win them over we should focus on large, highly visible infrastructure to which Afghans will be able to point in 50 years -- just as they point to the great dam built by the United States in the 1960s. The garbage is still seven feet deep and buildings are collapsing in Kabul. We can deal with these things and leave a permanent symbol of generosity.

Once we are clear about our own interests, we can think more clearly about the third priority, which is to improve Afghan lives through development projects. There are excellent models, from U.N. Habitat to the Aga Khan network, which has restored historic buildings, run rural health projects, and established a five-star hotel and Afghanistan's mobile telephone network. The soap business that the American Sarah Chayes has developed with Afghan women has been more successful than larger and wealthier business associations. Such projects should be separated from our defense and political objectives.

Sometimes it is better for us to do less. Dutch forces in the province of Uruzgan have found that, when left alone, the Taliban alienate communities by living parasitically, lecturing puritanically and failing to deliver. But when the British tried to aggressively dominate the South last summer, they alienated a dangerous proportion of the local population and had to withdraw. Pacifying the tribal areas is a task for Afghans, working with Pakistan and Iran. It will involve moving from the overcentralized state and developing formal but flexible relationships with councils in all their varied village forms.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that we squandered an opportunity in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, being distracted by Iraq and not bringing enough troops or resources. But my experience in Afghanistan has led me to believe that the original strategy of limiting our role was correct.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: March 20, 2007

France backs extradition to China

France has signed an extradition treaty with China despite concerns expressed by human rights groups over Beijing's use of the death penalty.

France's justice minister said a suspect would be extradited in cases punishable by death only if China guaranteed they would not be executed.

Pascal Clement also said the treaty excluded offences judged to be political or military.

France is the third EU country after Spain and Portugal to sign such a pact.

"This treaty explicitly anticipates the rejection of extradition requests based on offences viewed as political offences or military offences," said Mr Clement at the signing ceremony.

A further guarantee was that the arrest warrants issued by a police authority also had to be "validated by a judicial authority", he said.

Human rights groups have urged the French parliament - which must ratify the treaty - to block its adoption because of what they say are continuing serious human rights violations in China.

Amnesty International France said there was "no certainty that a Chinese citizen extradited one day with the clearest guarantees will not be sentenced to death at a later date on a different charge".

Outgoing French President Jacques Chirac, who made an official visit to China in October aimed at strengthening economic ties, is a staunch advocate of engagement with Beijing, correspondents say.

Abortion Plan in Mexico City Shakes a Heavily Catholic Land

Dominated by liberals, Mexico City’s legislature is expected to legalize abortion in a few weeks. The bill would make this city one of the largest entities in Latin America to break with a long tradition of women resorting to illegal clinics and midwives to end unwanted pregnancies.
But the measure has stirred a vicious debate and shaken this heavily Roman Catholic country to its roots.
The contours of the debate are familiar to veterans of similar battles in the United States. But Mexico City’s law would be groundbreaking in Latin America, where most countries allow abortion only under strict conditions, like when the life of the mother is in danger or when she is a victim of rape or incest. Only in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guyana can women have abortions on demand during the first trimester. Three countries — Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador — ban it without exception.
The Mexico City bill would make it legal to have an abortion during the first trimester for any reason. The procedure would be free at city health facilities. Private hospitals would be required to provide an abortion to any woman who asks for one, though doctors with religious or ethical objections would not be required to perform abortions.
Catholic leaders and church officials have denounced the proponents as “baby killers” and have warned that the law could provoke violence against doctors who agree to provide the service. A group of Catholic lawyers are pushing for a citywide referendum on the issue, hoping to avert the vote in the city Legislative Assembly.
“Women are dying, above all poor women, because of unsafe abortions,” said María Consuelo Mejía, the director of Catholics for the Right to Decide. “What we would like is that these women never have to confront the necessity of an abortion, but in this society it’s impossible right now. There is no access to information, to contraceptives. Nor do most women have the power to negotiate the use of contraceptives with their partners.”
Conservatives respond that abortion is tantamount to murder. “This law is a law that will cost many lives,” said Jorge Serrano Limón, the head of Provida, an anti-abortion group. “If it is signed, it will spill a lot of blood, the blood of babies just conceived in the maternal womb.”
Mr. Serrano Limón and other opponents also dispute that the law will end illegal abortions. The procedure carries such a stigma here, they say, that whether legal or not, many women will seek out underground clinics to keep their condition secret from their friends and families anyway.
“People are talking about abortion openly for the first time in Mexico,” said Lilian Sepúlveda, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights who tracks the issue in Latin America. “It is historic.”
“They say that it’s a problem of a woman’s rights over her body, but they ignore the right over their bodies that all the aborted girls and boys have,” he said later in his homily. “They deny them the fundamental right, which is the right to life.”
Many women here are watching the political battle with a mix of trepidation and hope. Like many laws in Mexico, the abortion law is honored as much in its breach as its observance.
Government officials estimate at least 110,000 women a year seek illegal abortions in Mexico, and many abortion rights groups say the number is much higher. At least 88 women died in 2006 from botched abortions, the Health Ministry says, though it is far from clear that all cases were reported.
For the poor, unwanted pregnancies often mean finding a midwife or an underground clinic, abortion rights advocates say. Some young women also resort to huge doses of drugs for arthritis and gastritis, available over the counter, that can cause miscarriages. Others use teas made from traditional herbs to cause miscarriages. All of these methods carry dangers.