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My office has gone "Breathable Atmosphere Optional" again this morning.
Even taking into account that I woke up feeling decidedly odd - as if I'd come down with a sudden middle-ear infection - the stinging eyes, uncontrollable yawning and general feeling of malaise I'm suffering would be more in tune with 3 pm on a Friday afternoon and not 10 on a Monday morning (when I actually went to bed the night before instead of waiting up for the Battlestar Galactica torrent). Needless to say, I'm finding it difficult to concentrate.
Wrote 500 words of Great Canadian Werewolf Adventure last night - got myself out of the conversation between 'Annie' and her court-appointed shrink that had turned interminable on me (that and I really have to decide on a motivation for 'Annie' and stick with it) - but felt too borderline this morning to sit and write before work. I felt a bit "gah, just see if you can get to work without throwing up - you promised the Boss that you wouldn't take any more sick days until April - worry about writing later." I do want to get at least 500 words in sometime today and I have a few things I need to work on in my journal about character and motivation.
Note to self:
I need to finish Christopher Hibbert's The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici tonight so I can take it back to the library tomorrow
Going through and returning one of the England guides wouldn't hurt either.
I think today is the 34th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade in the 'States. I read a column from Friday's San Francisco Chronicle that stated that American legislatures consider more than 600 abortion-related bills each year. No figures were supplied on the number of bills debated on universal healthcare, family or maternity leave policy or restoring federal funding to clinics that provide abortion or birth control (regardless of what other health services they might offer, like say, prenatal care for low-income women?).
Eileen Goodman, in Friday's Boston Globe, estimates that there are 3 million unplanned pregnancies in the US each year, about half of which end in abortion. I find this statistic appalling. Almost as appalling is the personal history of the man selected by the Bush Administration to tackle the problem - as head of the "Office of Population Affairs" (distopian much?) - a doctor who used to run network of faith-based "crisis pregnancy centers" that 'regards birth control as "demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness."'
Because, as we all know, there's nothing demeaning or adverse to health and happiness about finding yourself pregnant with a child you neither want nor can care for.
Leaving aside the nonsense and voodoo science - unfortunately typical of the Bush Administration - how about the fact for all the hysteria in US politics today about limiting access to abortions and restricting women's reproduction rights, the US abortion rate remains one of the highest in the world - higer, at 20.8 abortions per 100 live births than Canada's (15.4/100), the UK's (16.6/100) and even those uber-liberated and free-loving Swedes (18.8/100)**. In addition, there are signs that the two-decade-old decline in the American abortion rate is about to plateau, or worse, begin to rise again as the rate of unintended pregnancy among poor US women jumped 29 per cent in 2003.
The irony is self-evident: the best way to reduce the number of abortions in the US would be to provide widely-available access not only to birth control and sexual healthcare for young women (although that would be a start) but also, if not universal healthcare, then at least state-sponsored healthcare for pregnant mothers and young children; and, finally, the social services necessary to ensure that women, and low-income women in particular, have the support necessary to birth and rear their children.
Of course, all this costs money, money which the US Congress and the White House seems unwilling to spend - because, after all, the abortion debate in the US isn't really about preventing abortion. It's about ideology and any compromise would be seen by the screaming zealots on both sides of the debate as giving in to defeat.
So the tug-of-war continues with scared women and their children stuck in the middle - something Canadians should keep in mind the next time someone suggests we need to address our lack of abortion legislation.
**Stats courtesy of Stats Can, the BBC, Statistics New Zealand (oddly enough they had Sweden's abortion rate) and the Guttmacher Institute
Even taking into account that I woke up feeling decidedly odd - as if I'd come down with a sudden middle-ear infection - the stinging eyes, uncontrollable yawning and general feeling of malaise I'm suffering would be more in tune with 3 pm on a Friday afternoon and not 10 on a Monday morning (when I actually went to bed the night before instead of waiting up for the Battlestar Galactica torrent). Needless to say, I'm finding it difficult to concentrate.
Wrote 500 words of Great Canadian Werewolf Adventure last night - got myself out of the conversation between 'Annie' and her court-appointed shrink that had turned interminable on me (that and I really have to decide on a motivation for 'Annie' and stick with it) - but felt too borderline this morning to sit and write before work. I felt a bit "gah, just see if you can get to work without throwing up - you promised the Boss that you wouldn't take any more sick days until April - worry about writing later." I do want to get at least 500 words in sometime today and I have a few things I need to work on in my journal about character and motivation.
Note to self:
I think today is the 34th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade in the 'States. I read a column from Friday's San Francisco Chronicle that stated that American legislatures consider more than 600 abortion-related bills each year. No figures were supplied on the number of bills debated on universal healthcare, family or maternity leave policy or restoring federal funding to clinics that provide abortion or birth control (regardless of what other health services they might offer, like say, prenatal care for low-income women?).
Eileen Goodman, in Friday's Boston Globe, estimates that there are 3 million unplanned pregnancies in the US each year, about half of which end in abortion. I find this statistic appalling. Almost as appalling is the personal history of the man selected by the Bush Administration to tackle the problem - as head of the "Office of Population Affairs" (distopian much?) - a doctor who used to run network of faith-based "crisis pregnancy centers" that 'regards birth control as "demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness."'
Because, as we all know, there's nothing demeaning or adverse to health and happiness about finding yourself pregnant with a child you neither want nor can care for.
Leaving aside the nonsense and voodoo science - unfortunately typical of the Bush Administration - how about the fact for all the hysteria in US politics today about limiting access to abortions and restricting women's reproduction rights, the US abortion rate remains one of the highest in the world - higer, at 20.8 abortions per 100 live births than Canada's (15.4/100), the UK's (16.6/100) and even those uber-liberated and free-loving Swedes (18.8/100)**. In addition, there are signs that the two-decade-old decline in the American abortion rate is about to plateau, or worse, begin to rise again as the rate of unintended pregnancy among poor US women jumped 29 per cent in 2003.
The irony is self-evident: the best way to reduce the number of abortions in the US would be to provide widely-available access not only to birth control and sexual healthcare for young women (although that would be a start) but also, if not universal healthcare, then at least state-sponsored healthcare for pregnant mothers and young children; and, finally, the social services necessary to ensure that women, and low-income women in particular, have the support necessary to birth and rear their children.
Of course, all this costs money, money which the US Congress and the White House seems unwilling to spend - because, after all, the abortion debate in the US isn't really about preventing abortion. It's about ideology and any compromise would be seen by the screaming zealots on both sides of the debate as giving in to defeat.
So the tug-of-war continues with scared women and their children stuck in the middle - something Canadians should keep in mind the next time someone suggests we need to address our lack of abortion legislation.
**Stats courtesy of Stats Can, the BBC, Statistics New Zealand (oddly enough they had Sweden's abortion rate) and the Guttmacher Institute
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