If I worked for Hillary Clinton 2016, I would force her to spend the next six months in Berlin rather than Iowa. I make fun of Angela Merkel, but she's in charge without going all boomer royalty every six minutes.
I have a longer post in my head of advice for Hillary. Maybe later.
These people have lost their minds, because apparently if the baby inside you is already dead, that is NO EXCUSE.
Pro-Life Wisconsin is attacking the state funding of University of Wisconsin Medical School for teaching to medical students, procedures that are necessary in the case of what is called "fetal demise," where an unborn infant has died in utero.
Robin Marty (Warning: the author of this article has a uterus.)
When I had my miscarriage, I had to go in to have a D&C performed in order to remove the fetus, which had died weeks earlier. Many women find themselves in the same situation either due to missed miscarriages, or incomplete miscarriages where they have retained bits of the products of conception.
If doctors no longer learn how to perform a D&C, what exactly are women in that situation to do?
Well, nothing, if Pro-Life Wisconsin has its way. They are currently filing a lawsuit demanding that the University of Wisconsin's medical department stop teaching its med students how to perform "abortions," claiming it violates a funding ban on state dollars going to abortion. The school currently sends students on a rotation through the local Planned Parenthood in order to not be accused of performing abortions on site.
Their problem is, if you know how to remove an ALREADY DEAD fetus from a woman's body, you also know how to perform an abortion. Better to blindfold every gynecologist in Wisconsin to the procedure rather than allow them the knowledge that, gasp, MIGHT lead to an abortion. Nevermind that it might also lead to maternal death.
By the way, I had several "D&C"s as part of my attempt to GET pregnant. It is a common procedure in infertility treatment. God forbid taxpayer dollars should be spent HELPING a woman carry a baby to term, save her own life, or simply teaching an obstetrician how to do his or her JOB.
“There are medically indicated pregnancy terminations, and physicians need to have skills to do that,” says [Doctor] Broekhuizen. He notes that even physicians who do not work in abortion clinics may well need to perform an abortion.
“There are situations where patients have fetal death in utero at 16 to 18 weeks of gestation,” he says. “The mode of delivery in the case of a dead fetus is exactly the same procedure as an abortion procedure. So learning these techniques is an essential part of what an ob/gyn needs to know in order to provide comprehensive care to women, regardless of where they choose to practice.”
And this is why, he says, the accreditation organization for ob/gyn programs requires that training in abortion services be offered.
The hatred of women in the anti-abortion ranks is once again unmasked.
We know FOR A FACT that Vice President Cheney made 7.75 million dollars in Halliburton stock options during ONE YEAR as Vice President. What are David Gregory's holdings? David Brooks? How much of its own stock does GE hold, and how much does GE make when corporate welfare benefits their war machinery business?
...wear orange day. In solidarity with those who have been held by our country for six years without charge and without trial. The ACLU has kindly provided us all with a sample blog post but frankly I don't think anyone around here needs that either for writing or reading.
Some of you know that when The Bastille was stormed, there were very few prisoners inside, and that The Bastille was kind of the country club prison of Paris. Most of the seven prisoners freed that day were of a higher social class than their liberators. But the Bastille was symbolic of everything, absolutely everything, that was wrong with the government of France in 1789.
Guantanamo is not a country club prison, and the prisoners there are unnumbered and unnamed to the public. For our safety.
But it is a symbol. And it needs to be stormed, electronically and politically but we revolutionaries use what we've got. Shut down Guantanamo means live up to the Consitution of the United States as you swore to when you were inaugurated...aw fuck it. He won't. But we will continue to fight him and use the symbols at our disposal to show the wider world how wrong this whole country is right now.
Played "Bastille Day" by Rush while writing this and it's a good soundtrack for outrage.
My name is Alex. I guess an introduction is in order but I don't really know who I am. Actually Alex isn't really my legal name so even in my first words this starts to get a bit complicated.
I am a student, and if you ask any of my classmates who I am, you will probably hear that I am a 19-20 year old boy, well-read for my age, openly gay and that I am someone almost everybody likes but nobody knows. If you ask my mother, the picture may be somewhat different. I believe that she will tell you that I am a 27-year-old married mother of three.
Read the rest. Like all good writing it will tell you about the writer and you and humans and sorrow and joy and life and make you feel that you know more about all of that because you spent five minutes in front of a computer screen, just reading.
On the fiction front I loved the Wired essay by Lore Sjöberg, Resting in Pieces. Not sci-fi, not mere alternative history, it's more a musing on roads not taken from the standpoint of someone we would not care about, had it not been written just this way. I loved the moments I spent reading it.
And then I read a comment on another blog. I won't link though the blog deserves it aw hell it's Drifty, I'll link after all since the subsequent comments are grand and respond without troll-feeding. The commenter quoted below imho does not need encouragement. The commenter called us bloggers
"wounded birds, and the psychotically and physically maimed who need to pound it out at the keys, for some relief.
Does ANYONE who blogs not have some great personal psycho/sexual/gender adversity to overcome that I don't have to hear about?
Is there NO one out there, that's just normal?
Why sure there is, commenter, and you can find them by doing a google blog search for "kittens," "my cute baby nephew," or "cookie recipe."
One can write well about those things, but really: hold up any novel or memoir or political tract worth reading and there on the title page is a word "by" followed by the name of a wounded bird. And there in the pages is, we hope and pray, a bit of great personal psycho/sexual/gender adversity.
See, you can be an artist, hell you can be the blogosphere's Pablo Picasso. Or you can be a commenter who is looking for "normal" where staring at you through your screen is something so much better. Your choice.
I've posted this song before but it just seems so, well, apropos:
Picasso, Woman with a Mirror, 
