Archives for February 2011

Interesting article, if depressing, about current sexual mores:

When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just isn’t so bad. This isn’t to say that all men direct the course of their relationships. Plenty don’t. But what many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day.

If you’d like to hear more from the author himself, consider coming to the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada conference on May 5.

(h/t)

The parents of Joseph Maraachli could be told any day now that they no longer have power of attorney over their son. The London Health Sciences Centre, currently treating baby Joseph with life support, would then undoubtedly remove his breathing tube without his parents’ consent.

The medical opinion was that “ongoing life support and extension of treatment with tracheostomy is not in JM’s best interest given his current condition and ultimate prognosis,” according to the Consent and Capacity Board’s summary of the hearing.

“A tracheotomy would likely provide for a longer period of life, however, in our view would not result in improvement of well-being and could reduce quality of life,” Fraser told the board.

[…]

But as the family’s plight hit the media, strangers jumped in with offers of help. One of them was Alex Schadenberg, the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, who helped the couple retain Mark Handelman, a Toronto lawyer who was once a vice-chairman of the Consent and Capacity Board.

[…]

Handelman hasn’t ruled out another legal appeal and is still trying to reach a compromise with the London Health Sciences Centre, keeping in mind that the hospital has contacted the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee, which could come back with a decision on Joseph’s fate any day.

When people say a child is or would be an “excessive burden” to the health care system, my stomach turns and I quietly wait for them to finish. When the government says it, it’s time for all of us to speak up.

To federal officials, it’s the cost of admitting an immigrant family whose daughter has cerebral palsy: $5,259 a year.

To a father, it’s an unfair and unfeeling calculation.

“It’s really tough to hear your daughter reduced to a number and described as an excessive burden,” said David Barlagne yesterday after lawyers and immigration officials argued before a Federal Court judge on the fate of the Barlagne family.

Persuaded to immigrate here from France and establish a business, the Barlagnes may now have to return because of the “excessive burden” of $5,259 a year in extra education costs that their 7-year-old daughter Rachel’s cerebral palsy would impose on the public.

The family’s level of income and savings makes her “medically inadmissible” to permanently live in Canada, court was told.

[…]

But lawyer Stéphane Minson said the system discriminates against disabled children, and the law must change.

“A child should not be reduced to a financial figure,” Mr. Minson said. “But it’s clear this is becoming a political debate, and it’s less a question of law than morality.”

To me, $5,259 a year for education costs actually isn’t that big of a number, not when you compare sometimes astronomically high private school tuition. But parents pay for that themselves, right?

Private school costs may surprise you, in some cases. Quite a number of schools that list with us have tuition starting under $4,000 per year for elementary levels. Independent private schools in provinces that provide some government funding may even have yearly tuition rates below $1000.

Oh look, government funding to private schools! So why can’t we fund the relatively inexpensive cost to meet Rachel’s needs? You can sign the petition to keep Rachel and her family in Canada here.

‘Abortion is safer than having a baby, doctors say’

The draft guidance from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is for all doctors, nurses and counsellors advising women contemplating terminations.

Its first recommendation on “what women need to know” instructs health professionals: “Women should be advised that abortion is generally safer than continuing a pregnancy to term.”

The guidance also says that women who are deciding whether to have an abortion must be told that most do not suffer any psychological harm. Until now, their advice has been that while rates of psychiatric illness and self-harm in women are higher among those who had an abortion, there was no evidence that termination itself was likely to trigger psychological problems.

While few dispute that terminations carry fewer physical risks to a woman than those of pregnancy, the impact of abortions on psychological health is highly contentious.

Never before has official advice to doctors and nurses in Britain instructed them to use such comparisons to help pregnant women decide whether to keep a child.

How does a doctor initially determine whether or not a women is abortion minded? Is it her financial situation? Her marriage status? Her age? Her race? Because without a direct statement of intent, I can see a lot of women, both the abortion vulnerable and those not even considering it, being told by their doctor “Abortion is safer than pregnancy” and being fairly outraged by it. Not to mention the inaccuracy of the statement.

Speaking in a personal capacity, Prof Patricia Casey, a consultant psychiatrist and fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “The message this sends out is very worrying. There are more than 30 studies showing an association between psychological trauma and abortion.”

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Brigitte adds hard medical fact to the debate: Usually, when an abortion is successful, a baby dies. We should make sure to mention that, too.

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Andrea adds: It is my strong feeling (read Giving Sorrow Words) that many women are looking not for a reason to abort but rather a reason not to. After all, in the UK and Canada everyone knows how to go off and get an abortion. It’s not altogether easy to envision doing the opposite in the early stages of an unwanted pregnancy.

This is so ridiculous:

Breast milk ice cream is London’s latest food double dare: the breast-milk-infused flavour “Baby Gaga,” is now available at the Icecreamists restaurant in London’s Covent Garden.

Icecreamists founder Matt O’Connor is confident that his take on the “miracle of motherhood” will catch on, even at at £14 pounds, or $22 a serving. “The Baby Gaga tastes creamy and rich,” he told the Daily Mail. “No-one’s done anything interesting with ice cream in the last hundred years. We’ve came up with a method of infusing ice-cream with breast milk. We wanted to completely reinvent it. And by using breast milk we’ve definitely given it a one hundred percent makeover. It’s just one of a dozen radical new flavours we’ve invented. We want to change the way people think about ice cream’.

“A costumed Baby Gaga waitress serves the ice cream in a martini glass filled with the breast milk ice cream mix. Liquid nitrogen is then poured into the glass through a syringe,” reports the Daily Mail. And the restaurant will serve the  the concoction with whisky and other cocktails as well, making it a bit more of an adult-oriented treat.

[…]

The breast milk was provided by mothers who answered an advertisement on online mothers’ forum Mumsnet. Victoria Hiley, 35, was one of 15 women who sold milk to the restaurant.

“It wasn’t intrusive at all to donate – just a simple blood test. What could be more natural than fresh, free-range mothers milk in an ice cream?” she said.

When Ms. Hiley first saw the advertisement she thought it might be a joke, but when she found out it wasn’t, she provided the first 30 fluid ounces of milk, enough to make the first 50 servings. Women get paid £15 for every ten ounces of milk.

“Some people will hear about it and go, ‘yuck’ but actually it’s pure, organic, free-range and totally natural,” said Mr. O’Connor. “I had a Baby Gaga just this morning and I feel great.”

Well, it’s certainly a small step in the right direction:

Antiabortion activists scored a major victory in Virginia as the state’s General Assembly agreed Thursday that clinics where most of the state’s early-term abortions are performed should be regulated as hospitals instead of as doctors’ offices.

I’m not sure why the abortion rights advocates are complaining. If they were interested in women’s health I’d think they’d support this measure. Places in which only 50% of patients who go in get to come back out SHOULD have high standards… at least if they’re going to keep it at “only” 50% (a number which is questionable in and of itself).

The article compares the regulation to offices where colonoscopies are performed, a regulation which has been in place since the 80s. Is someone going to try to tell me that my rights to a colonoscopy are being denied just because those offices must also have high standards? I certainly haven’t heard my parents make that complaint…

Euthanasia brings many issues to the surface. One of these is the presumption of a person’s desire for it in the first place. Even under so called “voluntary” consent, the possibility for a person in no condition to understand a consent form let alone willingly “choose” euthanasia is vast.

Seeing the room for error even in this situation, we cannot, especially without prior discussion or consent, simply assume someone would want to be euthanized.

Stephan Bolton of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, is seeking confirmation from some authority that euthanizing his wife without her consent was the right thing to do:

Bolton drove the few minutes to the Queens RCMP detachment on the other side of Liverpool to tell police he had played a role in his terminally ill wife’s death last month.

But before he did that, Bolton telephoned The Chronicle Herald to explain that he wanted to go public to spur much-needed public debate about the issue of euthanasia.

“I don’t have an agenda. I have a guilty conscience,” he said.

And then he told this newspaper what he said he did.

It was Jan. 22.

His wife, 59, was suffering with Stage 4 breast cancer and in palliative care, with Bolton her primary caregiver.

One Liverpool resident who asked not to be named said it was well known in the community that Barbara was very ill and in great distress.

Stephan Bolton said his wife had, at most, a couple of months to live.

While she wasn’t in terrible pain, Bolton told The Herald his wife was very depressed. He said he gave her a lethal injection of two medications — morphine and Nozinan — and was taking the drugs to the detachment with him.

They had not discussed the possibility of euthanasia, he said, or did he ask Barbara if she wanted the lethal injections.

This fine blogger asks:

Why is trolling for apparently healthy depressed people and urging them to kill themselves a crime, but when Kevorkian did this to sick depressed people, he was a folk hero? I guess sick people aren’t as valuable as healthy ones, so they’re not entitled to treatment for their depression.

The story that prompted her question is here.

A beautiful column by Father De Souza about Bernard Nathanson’s conversion first to life, and then to Roman Catholicism:

Nathanson was an atheist Jew. Yet after reading deeply in philosophy and theology, and after witnessing the sacrifices of pro-life activists for “a constituency that is (and always will be) mute and invisible,” he began to entertain the idea of God.

I really like this:

At the threshold of eternity, one trusts that now Bernard Nathanson sees not the terrifying vision of the damned, but rather, as Dante concludes the Inferno, the “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” That Love moves not only the immensity of the universe; it moves too the tiny baby in the womb.

This billboard is causing a stir in New York. It’s meant to highlight the high abortion rate among African Americans:

Mr. Faulkner said that he hoped the billboard would provoke a visceral reaction, like the one he said he had felt when he saw the abortion statistics. “It should be an offense,” he said. “This is not targeting black women. This is targeting the practice, and saying to black women, ‘If you find yourself in this crisis of an unexpected, unwanted pregnancy, there are alternatives.’

Now the mother of the girl in the photo, who signed a stock photo release, says she too is offended. I’d say that’s one billboard that is earning the publicity it wanted to achieve.

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Brigitte loves it!!

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Update: And it’s down.