Life Imitating Art

This...



...reminds me of this (from around 5:03 to 5:38).

Prediction Fail

When the predictions of "experts" are confounded...


...you've gotta wonder: what other predictions that so-called experts are making now, or have made in the recent past, will likewise be proven horribly wrong in 20 or 30 years?

"Deplorable and Unsanitary Conditions"

Last week, authorities made a shocking discovery while investigating a West Philadelphia abortion clinic run by Kermit Gosnell where a woman died following an abortion in November 2009.

In Gosnell's office, they found two dozen frozen fetuses.

On Sunday, Gosnell's license was suspended, with the suspension order detailing "deplorable and unsanitary conditions" that made his practice "an immediate and clear danger to the public health and safety."

Today, on the pro-choice blog RH Reality Check, Rachel Larris has a post on Gosnell and the woman who died at his facility in November (the woman is identified by the Philadelphia Inquirer as Karnamaya Mongar).

Who does Larris blame for the woman's death?

Why, pro-lifers, of course.

It's About Time

About.com posts on the Abortion/Breast Cancer link

This Is *So* Not Surprising

The Bullwinkle Approach continues to yield astonishingly predictable results.

[HT: Mark Shea]

Previous

• A Punch in the Gut to the Condom Racket

FDA Puts the Brakes on Embryonic Stem Cell Research Trial

Earlier this year I wrote about the FDA's decision to approve a Geron Corporation embryonic stem cell trial in humans, for which I was interviewed by CBS2 News. (You can see the hopelessly biased story here.)

After the interview, off-camera, I remarked to the reporter that I hoped no spinal cord injury patients would end up getting hurt as a result of this trial, but given the tendency of embryonic stem cells to form tumors, I couldn't see much reason for optimism.

Now we find out that the trial is being "delayed". And, given Geron's history of snake oil salesmanship, the rapacious hucksters may never get their chance.

Meanwhile, advances in adult stem cell research continue apace.

EEOC to Catholic College: Drop Dead

I can't say as I'm surprised:

Feds Accuse Catholic Belmont Abbey College of Sexual Discrimination for Not Covering Contraception

So much for separation of church and state.

Thankfully, the BAC powers that be aren't backing down.

From the article:

"As a Roman Catholic institution, Belmont Abbey College is not able to and will not offer nor subsidize medical services that contradict the clear teaching of the Catholic Church," said Belmont Abbey President William Thierfelder. "There was no other course of action possible if we were to operate in fidelity to our mission and to our identity as a Catholic college."

After faculty members filed complaints with the EEOC and the North Carolina Department of Insurance, Belmont Abbey says the EEOC told the school in March 2009 that it would close the file on the discrimination charge, as it had not found the school's decision in violation of its statutes. But the agency later reversed itself, and issued a determination letter to the school on August 5 affirming that the ban amounted to gender discrimination, because it pertains only to women.

"By denying prescription contraception drugs, Respondent (the college) is discriminating based on gender because only females take oral prescription contraceptives," wrote Reuben Daniels Jr., the EEOC Charlotte District Office Director in the determination. [emphasis added]

Aside from presenting us with a clear example of bureaucracy run amok, Daniels' comment also provides with what could rightly be called a "teachable moment".

He noted that only women take oral contraceptives. This, of course, begs the question prompts the question: Why is there no contraceptive pill for men?

The redoubtable Dr. Janet Smith explains why in her talk "Contraception: Why Not":

There's a wonderful book out by Dr. Ellen Grant called The Bitter Pill. She was very much in on distributing contraceptives in the 60's in London, but she saw woman after woman coming in with different pathologies that she found were pill-related high blood pressure, blood clots, cysts in the breast, all sorts of things.

So, she said, "I'm not going to prescribe these anymore." She looked into this and she discovered, that when they were first testing for the pill, they were trying to find a male contraceptive and a female contraceptive pill.

And in the first study group of males, they found that there was some slight shrinkage of the testicles of one male, so they stopped all testing of the male contraceptive pill.

You might notice that there is no such thing in the first study group of females. Three females died and they just readjusted the dosage.

Let's read that again:

And in the first study group of males, they found that there was some slight shrinkage of the testicles of one male, so they stopped all testing of the male contraceptive pill.

And this:

You might notice that there is no such thing in the first study group of females. Three females died and they just readjusted the dosage. [!]

Smith continues:

Now, I don't know what that tells you, but it tells me that there's something sinister going on here. Women are still dying from the pill.

If you look at the insert in any set of pills, you can get this from a pharmacist if you can't find it elsewhere, it says such things as the pill will cause blood clots, high blood pressure, heart disease, greater increase of some kinds of cancer, infertility.

Now, these are very small percentages where this happens, but there are some sixteen million women in the United States on the pill. Sixteen million.

And even a very small percentage is still a very large number of women. Not to mention the day by day side effects. These always fascinate me.

Most women, in fact, 50% of women who start on the pill, stop within the first year because of unpleasant side effects. So, these side effects are really largely those of the sixteen million who continue, so you can imagine how bad they must be for the 50% who stop.

It's not Belmont Abbey College that's mistreating women.

It's the Pill.

It's for Reasons Like This I'm Cynical about the Medical Establishment

I linked to this post a few weeks ago on Facebook, and MWhelehan commented:

My own sister-in-law just had her fourth via Cesarean and the doctor asked her several times if she wanted her tubes tied. I thought that was even more invasive than the surgery. But the explanation was, "We've already got you open..."

From an insurance company's perspective, this is a no-brainer: fork over a few more thousand now, but think of the money we won't have to cough up in the future now that she's done having kids!

I particularly love the "We've already got you open" sales pitch. Imagine going to the dentist to get a filling, and he says to you, "How'd you like for me cut out your tongue? I mean, we've already got your open."

Absurd? Of course.

But it only serves to illustrate that which in reality is absurd: the fact that the medical establishment routinely tells women that they should consider having a side effect laden surgery performed on part of their body that is perfectly healthy and merely doing what it's supposed to be doing.

NEJM Op-Ed to Pro-Life Doctors: Drop Dead

Medicine needs to embrace a brand of professionalism that demands less self-interest, not more. Conscientious objection makes sense with conscription, but it is worrisome when professionals who freely chose their field parse care and withhold information that patients need. As the gatekeepers to medicine, physicians and other health care providers have an obligation to choose specialties that are not moral minefields for them. Qualms about abortion, sterilization, and birth control? Do not practice women's health.

Because, you know, it's all about "choice".

[HT: JivinJ]

Ka-ching for Planned Parenthood

When I see dreck like this:



...I can't decide whether to do this:



...or don sackcloth and ashes and recite the penitential psalms (followed, perhaps, by the imprecatory psalms).

I'm Shocked — Shocked, I Tell You

Who could have ever imagined that a maker of birth control pills would deceive women about their supposed health benefits?

This Is Interesting

Pill inventor slams ... pill

Key graphs:

Eighty five year old Carl Djerassi the Austrian chemist who helped invent the contraceptive pill now says that his co-creation has led to a "demographic catastrophe."

In an article published by the Vatican this week, the head of the world's Catholic doctors broadened the attack on the pill, claiming it had also brought "devastating ecological effects" by releasing into the environment "tonnes of hormones" that had impaired male fertility, The Taiwan Times says.

The assault began with a personal commentary in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard by Carl Djerassi. The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step toward the earliest oral contraceptive pill.

Djerassi outlined the "horror scenario" that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now "no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." He said: "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete."

He described families who had decided against reproduction as "wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it." ...

[Dr Jose Maria Simon Castellvi] also pointed to the "devastating ecological effects of the tons of hormones discarded into the environment each year. We have sufficient data to state that one of the causes of masculine infertility in the West is the environmental contamination caused by the products of the 'pill'." Castellvi noted as well that the International Agency for Research on Cancer reported in 2005 that the pill has carcinogenic effects.

It seems we have here yet another instance of Shea's Two Phases of History.

Phase One, you may recall, is:

What could it hurt?

Phase Two is:

How could we have known?

Now You See Him, Now You Don't

Mark Shea links to this story—"The disappearing male; Studies show rise in birth defects, infertility among men"— and comments thusly:

Five bucks say this has to do with birth control pills

Ten bucks says nobody will ever be told that.

I remember seeing an article about the highly abnormal sex ratio among the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community a few months ago, and I'm glad to see it continues to garner attention.

Considering what we already know about the bizarre effects that the estrogen-mimicking chemicals found in birth control pills are having on fish, it wouldn't be at all surprising if they're also a contributing factor to—among other things—skewed sex ratios among communities like the Aamjiwnaang First Nation.

It seems we have here yet another instance of Shea's Two Phases of History.

Phase One, you may recall, is:

What could it hurt?

Phase Two is:

How could we have known?

"Like turning a TV on and off with a remote control"

Somehow I missed this article when it first came out in January.

I just found it this morning linked to the latest email from Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards, who sang the praises of "new research" that "shows us just how far the tools of prevention and family planning have come":

Radio-controlled sperm 'tap' turns off vasectomies

A radio-controlled contraceptive implant that could control the flow of sperm from a man's testicles is being developed by scientists in Australia.

"It will be like turning a TV on and off with a remote control," added team founder Derek Abbott, "except that the remote will probably be locked away in your local doctor's office to safeguard against accidental pregnancy or potential misuse of the device."

To secure the device against accidental activation, the device works in a similar way to a car's remote key-fob. Each valve responds only to a radio-frequency signal with a unique code.

Gee, I don't see how that could lead to any problems.

Oh, wait:

One potential problem, however, is that after a while the valve may clog with protein and remain shut, rendering the man permanently infertile.

One wonders if the newfangled gadgetry carries it with the same increased risk of dementia—among others—as vasectomy does.

This Is Going to Get Worse Before It Gets Better

I was pleased to see this fine piece of investigative reporting on the front page of Thursday's Chicago Tribune about all the things you don't want in your drinking water but actually are in your drinking water.

In the article, the writers mentioned the increasingly obvious dangers to our water supply posed by, among others, estrogenic chemicals:

Other researchers are trying to figure out which drugs pose the greatest health risks. Some over-the-counter medications might be found in higher concentrations in drinking water, for instance, but small amounts of chemotherapy drugs and birth control pills could prove to be more toxic. Moreover, there are many drugs, pesticides, detergents and other chemicals that mimic human hormones. These substances, known collectively as endocrine disrupters, are seen as potential contributors to various types of cancer, birth defects and developmental problems.

"What we are seeing are the inconvenient consequences of a convenient lifestyle," said Conrad Volz, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who studies environmental hazards. "Given what we already know about many of these compounds, there is reason for concern."

The inconvenient consequences of a convenient lifestyle — indeed.

Clearly, it's good to see more MSM news outlets report on the serious dangers birth control pills pose to the environment (that is, to ourselves). I fear, however, that this problem is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

This is a classic application of Mark Shea's Two Phases of History. Phase One, you may recall, is:

What could it hurt?

Phase Two, which we are on the cusp of entering, is:

How could we have known?

Abortion As Art?

**UPDATE, 4/18, 4:55pm: A Yale spokesperson says Shvarts' project was a hoax. Shvarts disagrees.

There has already been a lot of reaction among pro-lifers to the news that a Yale student, Aliza Shvarts, plans to display for her senior art project "a documentation of a nine-month process" during which she repeatedly got pregnant and took drugs to induce abortions on herself.

An article in the Yale Daily News also reports:

[Shvarts] said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.

Kristan Hawkins, executive director of Students for Life of America, has issued a challenge to the major pro-abortion groups:

"I call on Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW and all other so-called pro-choice groups to condemn this. Abortion should never be trivialized as a matter of 'art.'"

It will be hard for them to do that, as these groups have been saying for decades that women should be able to have abortions for any reason at all.

A Punch in the Gut to the Condom Racket

There's a devastating critique of primarily condom-based AIDS prevention programs in Africa in the current issue of First Things ("AIDS and the Churches: Getting the Story Right").

It's also worth noting that one of the authors of said article, Edward Green, is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal who never went to college an anti-gay Bible-thumping preacher the director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies; the other author, Allison Herling Ruark, is a research fellow there.

Of particular note from the article:

Consider this fact: In every African country in which HIV infections have declined, this decline has been associated with a decrease in the proportion of men and women reporting more than one sex partner over the course of a year—which is exactly what fidelity programs promote. The same association with HIV decline cannot be said for condom use, coverage of HIV testing, treatment for curable sexually transmitted infections, provision of antiretroviral drugs, or any other intervention or behavior. The other behavior that has often been associated with a decline in HIV prevalence is a decrease in premarital sex among young people.

If AIDS prevention is to be based on evidence rather than ideology or bias, then fidelity and abstinence programs need to be at the center of programs for general populations. Outside Uganda, we have few good models of how to promote fidelity, since attempts to advocate deep changes in behavior have been almost entirely absent from programs supported by the major Western donors and by AIDS celebrities. Yet Christian churches—indeed, most faith communities—have a comparative advantage in promoting the needed types of behavior change, since these behaviors conform to their moral, ethical, and scriptural teachings. What the churches are inclined to do anyway turns out to be what works best in AIDS prevention.

And:

In fact, the mainstream HIV/AIDS community has continued to champion condom use as critical in all types of HIV epidemics, in spite of the evidence. While high rates of condom use have contributed to fewer infections in some high-risk populations (prostitutes in concentrated epidemics, for instance), the situation among Africa’s general populations remains much different. It has been clearly established that few people outside a handful of high-risk groups use condoms consistently, no matter how vigorously condoms are promoted. Inconsistent condom usage is ineffective—and actually associated with higher HIV infection rates due to “risk compensation,” the tendency to take more sexual risks out of a false sense of personal safety that comes with using condoms some of the time. A UNAIDS-commissioned 2004 review of evidence for condom use concluded, “There are no definite examples yet of generalized epidemics that have been turned back by prevention programs based primarily on ­condom promotion.” A 2000 article in The Lancet similarly stated, “Massive increases in condom use world-wide have not translated into demonstrably improved HIV control in the great majority of countries where they have occurred.”

And:

Thus far, research has produced no evidence that condom promotion—or indeed any of the range of risk-reduction interventions popular with donors—has had the desired impact on HIV-infection rates at a population level in high-prevalence generalized epidemics. This is true for treatment of sexually ­transmitted infections, voluntary counseling and ­testing, diaphragm use, use of experimental vaginal microbicides, safer-sex counseling, and even income-­generation projects. The interventions relying on these measures have failed to decrease HIV-infection rates, whether implemented singly or as a package. One recent randomized, controlled trial in Zimbabwe found that even possible synergies that might be achieved through “integrated implementation” of “control strategies” had no impact in slowing new infections at the population level. In fact, in this trial there was a somewhat higher rate of new infections in the intervention group compared to the control group.

And:

Meanwhile, the other interventions that have generally been called “best practices” simply do not seem to work in generalized epidemics, even though they are still applauded loudly at global AIDS conferences, while mention of fidelity and abstinence is received by booing, as Bill Gates discovered at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006. If we are to progress beyond science-by-popular-acclaim, we must accept that the evidence is much stronger for fidelity or partner reduction than for any of the standard-package HIV-prevention measures—in Africa at least—and so we need to rethink and reprogram AIDS-prevention interventions.

Admittedly, changing direction is hard when there has been massive investment in these “best practices.” It is not in the interest of a multibillion-dollar global AIDS industry to endorse interventions that are low-cost and homegrown and that rely on simple behavior change rather than medical products or services provided by outside experts. And so the major donors of AIDS programs continue to do the same things, expecting different results.

Ah, yes— the Bullwinkle approach.

Some people just never learn:

"Punished with a Baby"?

Word is slowly beginning to get around — mostly via the pro-life, conservative, and Christian communities within this thing we call the Internet — about a telling remark Barack Obama made at a campaign stop this Saturday in Johnstown, PA. (Although considering his support for live-birth abortion, it's not at all surprising.)

The junior senator from our fair corrupt state was asked, if he were elected president, how his administration would deal with HIV/AIDS and preventing STDs in young girls.

Obama responded [emphasis added]:

-- or we give them really expensive surgery and we don't spend money on the front end keeping people healthy in the first place. So when it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include -- which should include abstinence education and teaching the children -- teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include -- it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I've got two daughters, 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals.

But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information.

First, regarding this last part: If Obama really is interested in not withholding information from teenagers that will help them avoid getting an STD, what kind of information is he talking about?

"This Time for Sure!"

If you've ever seen The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, you'll probably recognize the recurring scene in which:

...Bullwinkle would attempt to pull a rabbit out of a top hat (to Rocky's dismissal: "Again?!" or "But that trick never works!", and Bullwinkle's [response], "Nothing up my sleeve...Presto!" or "This time, for sure! Presto!"), only to pull out something unexpected instead (such as a bear), and occasionally even Rocky himself.

It's funny, because it's a cartoon, and nobody ever got hurt due to the fact that Bullwinkle was a slow learner.

What's not at all funny, though, is that for the past several decades, our culture has taken this same Bullwinkle approach ("This time for sure!") to promoting so-called "safe sex" "safer sex".

Condoms, condoms, more condoms, and even more condoms are the answer to preventing STDs, right?

I'm Skeptical

...when I see a headline like this:

Flu shots urged to age 18

No doubt the champagne is being chilled in the posh offices of not a few pharmaceutical companies' CEOs right about now.

I've gotten exactly one flu shot in my life, when I was 16 (or so). In high school, I worked at a nursing home (in the dietary department), and all employees were given the opportunity to get a free flu shot. Not thinking much of it, I got one.

The following year, I decided — for reasons I can't recall — to forgo the shot. It's a good thing I did, as several of the employees who did get flu shots that year got the flu shortly thereafter.

Since then, when people have asked me if I'm interested in getting a flu shot, I say no, precisely because I don't want to get the flu.