Seems to me a public lawsuit against your college for failing to help you find a job would do it. (My job fresh out of university was very boring. I just never realized I could sue for that.)
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Brigitte tsk-tsks: Andrea, Andrea, Andrea. You can sue for anything. Want to help me launch a class-action suit against Al Gore for allowing us to think the weather was going to get warmer?
Perhaps not the best item for the childless girl in the crowd to comment on, but I tend to agree with this:
We need to celebrate birth as a normal event, not a surgical condition in waiting,” he says. “We need to give pregnant women the care and the support that they rightly deserve in this country.”
I’m not saying we should go back to home deliveries. But I don’t think we treat pregnancy like a normal event these days, either. By wanting to control absolutely everything, do we actually make it harder for everyone?
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Véronique adds: Being allowed to give birth at home is not considered “going back” in any way. In fact, when I moved from Quebec to Ontario and was able to give birth at home with a qualified midwife – as opposed to the “self-taught” midwife my Quebec friend had to use. Call me over-regulated but “self-taught” is not something I want to see on any of my healthcare professionals’ resume – I saw it as progress in healthcare. I had three children at home and three in hospital (one baby with a family doc, one with an Ob-Gyn and one with a midwife). Each experience was unique but the home births were by far the most beautiful and empowering experiences of my life.
In any case, I find it interesting that we are now talking about giving women freedom of movement during childbirth to reduce our ridiculously high c-section rate. My oldest daughter has seen the birth of two of her siblings: one at home with no medical interventions and one in hospital with induction and constant fetal monitoring. The attending obstetrician, when it was all over, asked her what she thought of witnessing the birth of her baby sister. Without missing a beat she said: “It looked a lot easier when she wasn’t lying on her back!” She told me recently that when she saw the hospital bed her first thought was: “How is she supposed to move around on a bed that small?”
So basically it makes perfect sense to a 13-year-old girl with no medical training but gynecologists are still wondering…
As a child, I read and re-read that series, starting with Little House in the Big Woods and moving on from there in circular succession. I couldn’t get enough of it. I learned how to smoke meat, to make candy in the snow, to use all parts of a pig when slaughtered. (These are skills I have yet to put to use–but imagine my delight when I saw for the first time here in Ottawa that they too, as part of Winterlude, pour maple syrup taffee on snow and then you can eat it. Amazing.)
An article here, about the women behind the books.
In an attempt to shed some light on Obama’s intended Health Care Plan, ABC’s John Stossel uses mainly examples from Canada. About three and a half minutes in, Shirley Healy’s story:
Healy had a blocked artery that kept her from digesting her food. She was starving to death. She’d lost 50 pounds. [In Washington State]… she saw an American doctor. (Healy:)”The doctor said that would have only had a very few weeks to live.” But the Canadian government calls her surgery elective. “The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live.”
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9GMKK_fWKg]
There are 6 month waiting lists for MRI’s. Surgery for life-threatening conditions are considered elective. Seeing as this is a pro-life blog, I think we all know where I’m going with this.