The lies bishops tell

The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, archbishop Joseph Kurtz, issued a statement on the ACLU lawsuit on Friday. It’s the predictable pack of lies from the episcopal sack of shit. Yes that’s harsh language but the sack of shit is lying in defense of his vile organization’s insistence on forcing women to die of miscarriages in all hospitals that his vile theocratic organization controls. Think about that. This man of god, this priest at the pinnacle of the catholic organizational tree, is issuing official lies to defend the church’s policy of forcing hospitals to stand by while women die of miscarriages in the miserable way Savita Hallappanavar did.

It is important to note at the outset that the death of any unborn child is tragic, and we feel deeply for any mother who suffers such pain and loss.

No it isn’t. Nobody cares what you think is tragic, or how deeply or shallowly you feel. Nobody wants your distractions; the issue isn’t the death of the fetus, the issue is the life of the mother. [Read more…]

The HIQA report does mention failure to terminate

Now I’m reading the relevant section of the full report [pdf]. That does mention abortion, though not (so far) under that name. It has a detailed timeline of events. She was admitted Sunday afternoon, and

Spontaneous rupture of membranes occurred at 00:30hrs.

At 8:30 that morning, she was reviewed by the consultant obstetrician in charge of her care.

Savita Halappanavar’s plan of care, following this consultant ward round, was that a fetal ultrasound scan would be taken with instructions to – ‘Await events’✝

That ✝goes to a footnote:

Await events refers to the conservative (expectant) management of miscarriage as opposed to the surgical or medical management of miscarriage.

So there it is. It’s somewhat obscured and secretive, but it’s there. They opted for expectant management instead of surgical or medical management – a surgical abortion or medical induction of labor.

Updated to add:

Then on the Wednesday morning, two days later, when her condition had deteriorated badly, a junior consulting doctor ordered IV antibiotics, but

however, at this time the evidence shows that her treatment plan was not changed.

Which, given what has gone before, means it was not changed from expectant to surgical or medical management. They went on watching instead of terminating the pregnancy.

At 13:00 that day

Diagnosis of septic shock, most likely secondary to chorioamnionitis was made.

A couple of hours later she delivered, but it was far too late.

It’s interesting – and disturbing – that the summary of the report omits the part about surgical or medical management as the alternative to expectant management.

Doctors in such circumstances

There’s the New York Times editorial on the Michigan case for instance. That takes it for granted.

The suit was brought on behalf of a Michigan woman, Tamesha Means, who says she was subjected to substandard care at a Catholic hospital — the only hospital in her county — after her water broke at 18 weeks of pregnancy. Doctors in such circumstances typically induce labor or surgically remove the fetus to reduce the woman’s chances of infection. But according to the complaint, doctors acting in accordance with the bishops’ directives did not inform Ms. Means that her fetus had virtually no chance of surviving or that terminating her pregnancy was the safest treatment option.

But the summary of the HIQA report doesn’t take it for granted at all; it doesn’t even mention it. It ignores the fact that doctors in such circumstances typically induce labor or surgically remove the fetus to reduce the woman’s chances of infection, and simply talks about managing the infection.

That is fucked up.

Don’t look behind the curtain

I’ve been arguing with someone on Atheist Ireland’s Facebook page, on a thread I started with a post about the ACLU/Means lawsuit against the bishops. My arguee has been claiming Savita Halappanavar’s death had nothing to do with abortion, and I’ve been saying it did too so. Her latest reply pointed out that “that was not a finding of the HIQA report or the Coroner’s report.” I hadn’t heard of the HIQA report, that I recall, so I looked it up. It came out on October 7th.

I skimmed the executive summary [pdf], and read the parts that addressed the medical treatment of SH. My arguee is right, assuming the summary accurately reflects the full report: it doesn’t spell out that the failure to induce delivery is the probable reason SH developed sepsis. It says the sepsis was badly managed, but not how or why it got started in the first place. It seems to me to be strikingly evasive in that way. [Read more…]

Charlotte Church would like you to imagine

Charlotte Church on women in the music business, in this year’s BBC Radio 6 Music John Peel Lecture at the Radio Academy Radio Festival in Salford in October. (Salford! I’ve been to Salford. Kind of. I crossed a bridge into it, then crossed back.) She pulls no punches.

– I’d like you to imagine a world in which male musicians are routinely expected to act as submissive sex objects.

Picture Beyonce’s husband Jay Z stripped down to a T-back bikini thong, sex-kittening his way through a boulevard of suited and booted women for their pleasure.

Or Britney Spears’s Ex Justin Timberlake, in buttock-clenching denim hot pants, writhing on the bonnet of a pink chevy, explaining to his audience how he’d like to be their teenage dream. [Read more…]

For the sake of dignity

David Robert Grimes wrote a piece in the Irish Times a few days ago saying why marriage equality is a good idea, starting with why homosexuality shouldn’t rumple anyone’s mind.

From the perspective of traditional Catholic doctrine, homosexuality is “ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil”, and is considered a deeply unnatural state of being –peccatum contra naturam.

Not only is this a classic example of the naturalistic fallacy, it also spectacularly fails to stand up if one takes even a cursory glance at the natural world; homosexual behaviour is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and has been documented in more than 1,500 species, from giraffes to elephants to dolphins and our primate cousins.

Peccatum contra naturam is such a worthless category. I’ve said it before but what the hell…it never fails to entertain me, noting all the ways bishops and posts sin against nature. [Read more…]

Guest post by doubtthat: on being too cool for everything

Originally a comment on The book that continues to inspire college sophomores.

The functional difference between glibertarianism and nihilism is close to zero.

I was just speaking with a fellow attorney who is a big Ron/Rand Paul supporter and a self-professed libertarian.  The funny thing is that we agree on Step 1 of many issues:

-government spying is an absurd violation of our rights -bank bailouts just served to enable the unethical and likely criminal behavior that played a huge role in the collapse -we shouldn’t be engaged in silly foreign wars -the drug war is stupid…etc.

On all of those issues, we’re basically in agreement that our government handled and continues to handle those issue poorly.  The difficulty comes immediately when he tried to explain how to correct these things. [Read more…]

Whooping around the clock

From last month, an article by Julia Joffe in the New Republic about the joys of having whooping cough, with thanks to Jenny McCarthy. Non-sincere thanks to Jenny McCarthy.

At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

There’s more, a lot more. About all that while at work, all that while eating at a restaurant, all that while going on tv to discuss world events, all that while interviewing a subject. And about children with all that. [Read more…]

Just because

Michelle Goldberg also recently wrote about homeschooling as a way to shield child abuse. In the Daily Beast:

On September 9, the parents of Hana Williams, an Ethiopian teenager living in the state of Washington, were convicted of killing her. During the last year of her life, court documents show, she had lost almost 30 pounds as she was beaten, denied food, forced to sleep in a barn, and given cold outdoor showers with a garden hose. Much of the time she was kept barefoot, although she was allowed shoes if there was snow on the ground. Sometimes she was given nothing but a towel to wear. If Williams had been in school, someone might have noticed that she was underdressed and emaciated. But she was homeschooled, and so her parents, fundamentalist Christians in thrall to a harsh disciplinary philosophy, had complete privacy to punish her as they saw fit. She died naked, face down in the mud in their backyard.

Like so many things, privacy is a double-edged sword. We all want it and depend on it; we consider it a right; but god damn it can be abused. Domestic violence wouldn’t exist without privacy; “domestic” and “private” are much the same thing. [Read more…]