April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

health care

The Handmaids Tale Dystopia Meets Reality

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This story is both a horrific example of the human trafficking going on in the world and a warning as to what could happen to women should the womb police get their way.

Anyone familiar with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale will recognize this type of scenario;

In its promotional material, the Asia-based operation makes pregnancy sound like an illness. Its symptoms include “loss of intimacy,” growing “out of shape” and, of course, “birth pangs.”

The solution? Fertilize a foreign stranger who will be fed nutritious meals, housed in a Bangkok suburb, monitored around the clock and kept to a precise sleep-wake schedule. “It is quite suitable,” says the agency’s broken-English pitch, “for the women who desire to have kids but no time for pregnancy.”

Sadly this lives not in the pages of a dystopian warning but is a profitable business in Asia. Recent developments of the GOP war on women in the States has many bloggers and tweeters asking if the GOP and their supporters see women as breeding stock, anti abortionists have even caused women to be investigated and arrested simply for thinking about abortion. Some lawmakers are considering investigating women for miscarriages. How long before laws are enforced that require pregnant or pre-pregnant women to adhere to specific types of behaviour very much like this;

This high degree of scrutiny is actually promoted by the company on the Chinese-language portion of its site. Surrogates are “accompanied by hand” while walking around the community, according to the site, which also promises they’ll be woken at 7 a.m., fed at specific times each day and put to bed at 10 p.m.

Health Care – Or How I Spent The Year

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It’s been an interesting year for me health wise. There was a possibility of ovarian cancer and as I have a family history of ovarian cancer and watched my mom go through painful chemo treatments for 5 extra years of life, I was not in a good place emotionally.

In August I went in for a total hysterectomy. Even with a possibility of cancer my surgery was scheduled for March of 2011, however, my doc put me on a cancellation list. The pre surgery process was great, everything explained. every effort taken to put me at ease.

The morning of the surgery I was in a room where you change, the IV is put in your arm and you have a chance to try to relax. Then you walk down to the OR waiting room. At this point those involved in your surgery come and talk to you, doctor, anesthesiologist, interns in this case as also as it was a teaching hospital. Again every effort was taken to make me feel at ease. Everyone in the OR was great. It was the first time I was laughing even as I was being put under sedition

The floor experience was not as good. Not any fault of the nurses, most of them are wonderful, caring people who really try to do their best with the system they have been given. I recovered well from the hysterectomy, got sprung sooner than expected and followed all the admonitions not to lift, push, pull, do housework (woohoo!). A few days later I got my staples out and that night my incision opened, completely… all the way down to the fascia (holds your insides in) which also had a hole in it. Really not a good thing. Got a cab to the ER and spent about 36 hours there because there were no beds on the ward.

Sept. 2nd I had my second surgery. This time I was not sewn up as the tissues were not healthy enough. This left me with an opening approx. 8 inches long, 4 inches wide and 5-6 inches deep which required being packed with a special gauze everyday. This was to enable the wound to heal from the bottom up. Needless to say I was not able to do much of anything and required a lot of care and nutrition. Both of which were sadly lacking.

There are far too few nurses and they just can’t tend to everyone and do all the admin work they are required to do. So patient care suffers. Meals come in microwave trays and for the most part are inedible. I went 3 days without eating anything as the food made me gag just from the smell. A far cry from the days when hospitals employed cooks who made each meal and nutritious soups and well-rounded main courses were available providing for the nutrient needs of those whose bodies were trying to heal.

After release from my second surgery I required, and still do, daily nursing care at home. The nurses have been great, but again overworked with high patient loads.

I am very, very happy that I am not dealing with chemo treatments, but I am getting tired of a having wound in my stomach and not being able to do anything. I can’t shower because of the risk of infection so only bird baths. Who knew I would one day long for the luxury of a shower!

At first not being able to do housework is pretty cool but it gets old quickly. The latest estimate of when things might be healed up is christmas but even then I will still have 4-6 weeks of healing.

Anyway that is why AR has been silent for so long. I hope to be up and running again soon.

Tasers Can Kill! Shocking!

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Taser, concerned for liability issues for police officers [note not for the company..] is recommending officers avoid the chest area;

Taser International advised them to stop aiming at the chest because of a slight risk of cardiac arrest when the electrified darts hit there.

The company has advised the police to instead aim for the belly or the back of the legs.

Taser International has always assured police officers that the stun gun can never cause problems with the heart, no matter how many times it is used on someone.

This is apparently resulting in some officers leaving the weapon in their lockers. We can only hope this is the beginning of the end of these devices.

Source

Myth Busters – Health Care Edition

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Andre Maddison a master’s student in Community Health and Epidemiology is one of two winners of the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation’s 2009 Mythbusters Award. He received the award based on his research into whether or not primary care or non-urgent patients are really causing overcrowding and long wait times in Emergency rooms. Turns out while there is some impact it is not the primary cause.

“I started with the view that due to a shortage of family doctors, people are going to emergency departments and overcrowding them,” explains Mr. Maddison, a native of Sarnia, Ont. “But in reality, why EDs are overcrowded wasn’t known.”

While 40 to 50 per cent of cases in the ER are non-urgent patients, after extensive literature research and speaking with physicians, Mr. Maddison found that primary care patients were not overly burdensome. His research illustrated that patients in urgent need of acute-care, admitting beds, extended stay, specialists and other high demand care needs actually have a greater impact on overcrowding. “We can’t discount the affect of so many non-urgent patients, but they are certainly not the main part of the problem.”

Mr. Maddison believes it’s a system level problem, not isolated to the ED. “Emergency department overcrowding is a national problem with potentially devastating effects,” he says. “It is rooted in insufficient physical and human resources and poor integration within and between hospitals.” He went on to say that to best care for both urgent and non-urgent patients effectively, we must determine the purpose of EDs in order to best serve the patients, health care professionals, communities and the country.

Another political talking point shot down in flames.

SOURCE

Pro-lie=Pro-death Now & Then

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In this op-ed in the NYT By KATE MANNING we see that the Pro-Lie crowd have always been hypocrites claming a reverence for life to hide their obsession for foetuses.
She tells the story of Ann Lohman;

Lohman, who called herself Madame Restell, was an immigrant from Gloucestershire, England, who started out selling “female pills” to “regulate” women. The medicines — mostly herbs, perhaps some opium — promised relief from an “obstructed womb” and “suppressed” menstruation. “Not to be used when *******,” declared one of the many coy ads she placed, “as miscarriage may occur.”

In the event that the pills did not, in fact, induce miscarriage, Lohman offered a procedure in her offices, charging $20 for poor women, and as much as $100 for her increasingly wealthy clientele. She also boarded pregnant ladies, delivered babies, placed infants for adoption and conducted sex education classes.

Reminiscent of the rhetoric of today used against such doctors as Tiller and Morgantaler, invectives were also uttered against Lohman

In a riot organized in 1846 by the newspaper publisher George Dixon, a mob surrounded Lohman’s house and chanted, “Hanging’s too good for her!” and “This house is built on babies’ skulls.”

Even their underhanded methods have not changed

As a special agent of the United States Post Office, Comstock entrapped Lohman by posing as a husband seeking abortion services for a lady. When she provided him with some tablets, he returned and arrested her — accompanied by two reporters. She faced years in jail.

and finally neither has their disregard for born life;

“A bloody ending to a bloody life,” Comstock commented upon hearing of her death.

Dr. Warren Hern too knows of their disregard for life and children.

Even early on in his practice, Hern did not shy away from confrontation. When people protested outside his office, he stood in the parking lot and wrote down their license plates. When they shouted during his speeches, he shouted louder. When a protester hurled a rock through a clinic window, Hern hung up a sign: “This window was broken by those who hate freedom.”

But his fear grew along with his defiance. When people called his mountain home with death threats, he started keeping a rifle by the bed. “You think, ‘Is it OK to go for a hike? What about walking my son to school? What about going skiing?’ ” he said.

In 1988, a gunman fired five shots into his clinic’s waiting room, prompting Hern to install four layers of bulletproof glass and an electronic security system. That year, Hern and his wife of six years divorced, a breakup Hern attributed in part to the stress of his work.

The ever-present threats made it hard to develop relationships, Hern testified at a 1999 trial in which he and other doctors sued an antiabortion group for placing their names and personal information on a “Deadly Dozen” list. “It has made me feel a great sense of personal isolation, and that has been the most painful part of this experience,” Hern said, according to the Associated Press.

Dr. Hern has endured all this because of his commitment to women’s health

As he studied medicine, Hern said he encountered women ill from botched illegal abortions. In the early 1970s, Hern — who had planned to become an epidemiologist — became convinced that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to legalize abortion would mean nothing if doctors would not perform them.

“I felt doing abortions was the most important thing I could do with my life,” he said.

When Hern performed his first abortion, on a 17-year-old girl, he later wrote, he cried with a sense of relief because he had made a difference in her future.

The Pro-Lie’rs claim that there is no counselling that abortion are forced on women and that doctors take the money anyway yet this story shows the truth, note that he found the forcing of an abortion “disturbing”;

Hern recalled a disturbing situation his staff encountered 15 years ago during the counseling phase. The parents of a 14-year-old girl wanted her to terminate her pregnancy. The girl did not. As she was filling out a form, she wrote, “I think you should all be killed.”

The clinic manager called in Hern and, after more discussion, the doctor refused to perform the abortion. He has no idea what the family decided to do

There is no middle ground, no debate, no discourse that could be had with people whose blatant disregard for both life and truth is so deeply embedded that it has persisted across decades and nearly centuries.

“Give her a Pill”

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This is why I didn’t not blog on IWD. I wanted to. I felt I was letting people down by not blogging. That I was not showing solidarity. And yet there comes a point when one is so satruated with all injustice, ridiculousness and governmental opposition to equality it just seems too big. Unfortunately it isn’t getting any smaller.

of the 9 year old impregnanted by her step father the church proclaims

The accused stepfather is not being excommunicated from the Church. Said ArchbishopJose Cardoso Sobrinho, although the man allegedly committed “a heinous crime … the abortion – the elimination of an innocent life – was more serious.”

Shorter church; stealing a young girls innocence YAWN, saving her life criminal

This disgust and hatred of all things female is not something in which only the catholic church indulges. Our government is pretty good at it too.

I print this in it’s entirety

On March 9th, 2009, the President of the Treasury Board, Vic Toews, mocked me in the House of Commons during question period stating that I was “whining and whining and yelling” while he was answering a question on pay equity.

I was in fact objecting to a statement that the Conservative government’s pay equity legislation reflects the recommendations of the Liberal Task Force report when, in fact, there is absolutely no resemblance between the two.

Later in that same question period, Minister Toews looked directly at my colleague and seatmate, Dr. Hedy Fry, MP, and said “Please give her a pill.”

This kind of chauvinist attitude should not be accepted anywhere in our society, let alone, where we debate the laws of this country. The fact that this was done only one day after International Women’s Day shows this government’s lack of respect for women and women Parliamentarians.

I watched as the entire front bench of the Conservative government could not control their laughter as the Minister told me to take a pill.

The Minister went on to say, “I do not know what the problem is. Maybe someone with other expertise might be able to determine what the problem is.”

Attempting to hold the government to account should not be reason for degrading another Member of Parliament and saying that she is only whining and that she should take a pill.

Over and over again, women MPs have had to listen as this Conservative government has shown a complete lack of respect. I say enough is enough. Why would more women want to be Members of Parliament if this is the kind of behaviour waiting for them in the House of Commons.

I say to this Conservative government, argue policies against policies – do not insult Members of Parliament simply because they are doing their job and holding you to account.

The Minister’s behaviour showed no respect for Parliament or for women.

Hon. Maria Minna, P.C., M.P.
Beaches-East York
Official Opposition Critic for Labour
Chair, National Liberal Women’s Caucus

I urge everyone to contact Vic Toews, Harper and their member of Parliament and demand an apology not only to Ms. Minna and Ms. Fry but also to the women of Canada.

Parliament once erupted in laughter over the issue of violence against women. It appears those sorry days may be returning.