Youngest person ever to testify before committee. I like it. So should everyone–it gives the voiceless a voice. It makes the invisible in our society visible. If we were talking about the homeless or people with disabilities or any other disenfranchaised group, everyone would be thrilled:

The video and heartbeat recording of a nine-week old foetus is expected to be used as ‘testimony’ today by a Christian pro-life group in support of an anti-abortion bill. The testimony will consist of projecting an ultrasound image of the pregnant woman’s uterus onto a screen in the Ohio courtroom. The image will also show the foetus’s heartbeat in colour.

It’s stories like this one that really drive it home for me. Maybe the sexual revolution wasn’t so great after all?

CHICAGO — Half of men in the general population may be infected with human papillomavirus or HPV, the human wart virus that causes cervical and other cancers, strengthening the case for vaccinating boys against HPV, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

U.S. vaccine advisers have been weighing whether boys and young men should be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, as they already recommend for girls and young women, but some worry the vaccine is too costly to justify its use.

HPV infection is best known as the primary cause of cervical cancer, the second most common cancer in women worldwide. But various strains of HPV also cause anal, penile, head and neck cancers. Vaccinating men and boys would prevent some of these cancers.

I was watching Book TV last night and saw the most amazing presentation. It was award-winning Alexander Tsiaras, creator of Anatomical Travelogue, giving a video presentation at Idea City ’03. He was talking about his company and their “travel” videos inside the human body. Tsiaras and his team collect massive amounts of data and imaging of the human body through all its stages, then “visualize” this data as computer images. His book, From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, is a celebration of the first stages of human life. It opens, “Is anything more fascinating or marvelous than the conception of a human life?” It was amazing to see someone, a scientist, a software developer, simply celebrating the beauty of conception without any perceivable agenda. The Idea City presentation was great, but this was even better:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4nm1AHugD4

I am a Bell customer. I am not surprised by this story:

A couple from Merritt, B.C. has been battling Bell Canada for months over enormous bills – which they call outrageous and unwarranted – for thousands of dollars in unexplained data charges on their smart phone. “They basically made us scared of our phone,” said Daniel Methot.”We just stopped using it. We shut it off,” added his wife, Kate.

However, Daniel said, he has already ruled out that possibility because the charges continue even when the phone is shut off. He said he’s spent countless hours talking with numerous Bell representatives trying to diagnose the problem. Each time, he said, he had to tell the whole story from the beginning.

I know this is quite off our usual beat but when I even think about needing to call Bell for any reason at all I want to shoot myself, so given that circumstance, I am morally obligated to post this information. And another link to this.

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Deborah adds: I’m going to go out get my very first ever Canadian cell phone today. It’s been hard convincing myself it’s a good idea since it is so incredibly more expensive than in the USA . . . voicemail and caller ID aren’t automatically included with every plan?? And . . . long distance and roaming? They practically don’t exist for cell phones in the US. So now I know what company NOT to choose (and my husband already vetoed Rogers)! Canada needs a revolution. A cell phone revolution!

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Jennifer adds: I think it’s an epidemic. I had problems with Rogers as well, so switched to Virgin. My first bill with Virgin said my smart phone was “online” more hours than are in the day! Their excuse? My phone was “looking for updates” because I hadn’t updated it correctly. The problem is fixed now, but I still ended up paying an extra $40 in fees that I didn’t cause. I basically took out the battery and threw the phone in a box until the problem was fixed. It made me want to claw my eyes out! Not to mention that I’ll never get back the hours spent on the phone with their reps. Awful… I think I’m getting post traumatic stress just thinking about it.

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Brigitte is doing what she can to help:

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…