Abortion Rights in NB: I'm tired of being angry. Heather Mallick joins the club.

I have written more entries on women's health in NB than any other topic. And nothing is changing in that area. Now Heather Mallick has written an article for CBC about our emergency situation, and hopefully will draw much needed national attention to the issue (see below).

To date, I have sent letters to Brad Green (when he was minster of health), Bernard Lord (when he was premier), Michael Murphy (current min of health), Shawn Graham (current premier), and Tony Clement (Fed Minister of Health) on this issue. I have received one reply, from Minister Clement.

This is what he had to say, in response to my plea for him to FORCE New Brunswick to uphold the Canada Health Act, as is his duty:

"As Minister of Health, I have the mandate to ensure that the principles of the Canada Health Act are upheld. [Yes, Tony, this is why I'm writing to you] Under the Act, the provincial and territorial health insurance plans are required to provide coverage to their residents for all medically necessary hospital and physician services. Abortion services have been determined to be medically necessary by the provincial and territorial health insurance plans, in consultation with their respective physician colleges or groups, and are insured by every province and territory in Canada. [Thanks for the review. Let's get to work then!]

You may be aware that a court action has been launched against the province of New Brunswick seeking to have declared unconstitutional an amendment to the provincial Medical Services Payment Act to exclude public funding for abortions performed outside an approved hospital facility. [Yessir, very aware. It's not going very well]. The Government of Canada is not involved in this court case. [I am asking you to be]. Prime Minister Harper has made it clear that the Government will not initiate or support any legislation to regulate abortion." That's the whole letter.

Did your jaw just drop? Clement (or an aid) seems to have taken a policy statement about abortion in NB, then slapped on ONE SENTENCE in which he washes his hands of the whole affair. Fully admitting, in the one sentence, that Harper has a policy to be willfully in contravention of the Canada Health Act, and that he himself is not going to lift a finger for anyone on this issue. [Letter was received dec 16, 2006]

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Abortion rights and abortion fights
Heather Mallick
April 20, 2007

Canada's abortion battle legally ended in 1988 when the Supreme Court ruled that women had dominion over their own bodies. Abortion became a woman's choice.

But ever since, the provincial anti-abortionists have continued their mean, small-time work by targeting working-class women. Thus, the problem for Canadian women is not abortion rights, it is access to abortion. And New Brunswick has become a tragedy in this respect.

Fredericton is an attractive capital city of just over 50,000 on the shores of the St. John River. The well-kept, beautifully painted big clapboard houses along the shore with their wraparound decks and intricate woodwork make the place seem healthy, wealthy and immensely appealing. The University of New Brunswick has a campus here and the presence of so many young people gives the city its energy.

But in 1989, the New Brunswick government, furious that women couldn't be denied abortions, made sure that women could not get timely access to publicly funded abortions and that poverty-stricken women couldn't get abortions at all. They set up regulations (thus bypassing the legislature and voters) saying hospital abortions had to be performed by a gynecologist, although the procedure is easily performed by a non-specialist. The abortion had to be approved by the gynecologist and one other doctor. Abortions in clinics would not be covered by Canadian health care (this is illegal).

Since almost no New Brunswick hospitals perform abortions anyway, women must discover their pregnancy very early, find a local doctor who'll refer them (difficult), and travel to a city to find another doctor to sign for them (expensive), and then book the operation (sometimes cancelled and impossible to rebook).

She must then go to the Morgentaler Clinic and pay for her abortion. Anti-abortionists bought the house next to the Fredericton clinic, where they try to lure women to change their minds, terrifying them with misleading photographs and false information.

When she escapes these people, she will get her abortion and then make her way home, often shamed and traumatized for what is a perfectly simple procedure elsewhere in Canada (except in P.E.I., where abortions are unavailable).

The obstacle course
Fredericton citizens often see Liberal Premier Shawn Graham around town. He is 38, but he looks 16. This is the man who has followed his predecessors in maintaining the obstacle course for pregnant women. Note that because these abortion rules are minor regulations passed by cabinet, they aren't approved by the legislature. Voters have no say. This is just a little act of cruelty by a cabal, and it could end next week if New Brunswickers made enough of a fuss.

They are starting to. This month, I spoke at a gathering sponsored by the Faculty of Law at the University of New Brunswick, Law Students for Choice, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and other groups. Law school dean Philip Bryden, a distinguished lawyer, moderated a panel where a nurse, a law professor and a physician all spoke passionately about the mistreatment of women seeking abortions.

I had expected 25 students to show up. Instead there were 290 people, not all of them students, and they overflowed into other rooms as the discussion went on. It was wonderful to hear Prof. Marilyn Merritt-Gray from the Faculty of Nursing, because medical matters are usually left to god-like doctors, not mere nurses. It was illuminating to hear law professor Jula Hughes remark how often one hears the word "shame" in anti-abortion circles. Women are shamed for their fertility, for their sexuality. It hadn't struck me before. I wonder how many girls and women internalize this "shame" that can turn to self-loathing.

A Frederictonian in the audience, who introduced himself to me later as Eric Wright, stood and addressed himself to anti-choice males: "If you guys are so opposed to abortions, don't have one."

I had to laugh. It really is that simple. It's not your business.

Morgentaler steps forward
The Morgentaler Clinic has sued the provincial government, and its court case will begin May 16. At the moment, the young premier's lawyers are arguing that since Henry Morgentaler is not a woman, he should have no standing in the case. It's difficult to find a local woman willing to go to court, so Dr. Morgentaler, 84-year-old former prisoner of both the Nazis and the Canadian government, has stepped forward once again.

The problem has spread across Canada. Since 2003, the percentage of hospitals offering abortions has decreased from 17.8 per cent to 15.9 per cent. That means you only have the opportunity to obtain an abortion at one in every six hospitals.

Read the rest, but avoid the comment section (too painful).

Mass Murderers and Women: What We're Still not Getting About VTech

Worth Repeating, from Mother Jones:

Of all the lessons contained in the horror at Virginia Tech, the one least likely to be learned has to do with the deadly danger posed by the dismissive way we still view violence against women.

The first person killed by Cho Seung-Ho, a freshman named Emily Hilscher, was initially rumored to be Cho's current or former girlfriend – the subject of his obsession or jealous rage. It now appears that she never had a relationship with Cho, but the rumors were spread quickly, especially by blogs and by the international tabloid press. The UK's Daily Mail headlined the "Massacre Gunman's Deadly Infatuation with Emily," while Australia's Daily Telegraph published a photo of a smiling Hilscher with the line "THIS is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in US history." (The page is still up.) Some accounts stooped to suggesting, with zero evidence, that the victim had jilted Cho, cheated on him, or led him on.

More significantly, local police and university administrators appear to have initially bought this motive, and acted accordingly. In the two hours between the murders of Hilscher and her dorm neighbor Ryan Clark, and Cho's mass killings at another university building, they chose not to cancel classes or lock down the campus. (They did choose to do so, however, in August 2006, when a man shot a security guard and a sheriff's deputy and escaped from a hospital two miles away.) Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed the first shooting was a "domestic dispute" and thought the gunman had fled the campus, so "We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur." The assumption, apparently, is that men who kill their cheating girlfriends are criminals, but they are not crazy, not psychopaths, and not a danger to anyone other than the woman in question. (Or, as one reader commented at Feministe sarcastically, "Like killing your girlfriend is no big deal.")

In fact, these attitudes ignore past evidence of both "domestic disputes" and a more generalized misogyny as motives in mass killings. Multiple murders in homes and workplaces often begin with a man killing his wife or girlfriend. Mark Barton, who in 1999 shot nine people in an Atlanta office building, began the day by bludgeoning to death his children and his wife; six years earlier he had been a suspect in the death of his first wife and her mother, who were also beaten to death. In another high-profile case, the December 1989 mass shooting at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, Marc Lepine was after women, whom he hated, and had a list of feminists he wanted to kill. He murdered four men and 14 women, and wounded 10 more women. In September 2006, Duane Roger Morrison walked into Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., and took six female students hostage, killing one. And last October, Charles Carl Roberts IV took over an Amish schoolhouse, let the boys go, and killed five girls.

One warning sign in such cases is a history of stalking and harassment of women. At Virginia Tech, in September 2005, poet Nikki Giovanni had Cho removed from her class at Virginia Tech after female students complained that he was using his cell phone to take pictures of their legs underneath the desks; some refused to come to class while Cho was there. In November and December of that year, two female students reported receiving threatening messages from Cho, and one said he was stalking her. But charges were never filed, and police and university officials didn't seem especially worried about the women. Yet, as Arlen Specter pointed out in comments on the VT shooting made during the Gonzalez hearings Thursday, Cho had been accused of a "crime against the state as well as against the students," and the local DA could have taken up the case.

According to the Stalking Resource Center, one million women are stalked in the U.S. every year. In two-thirds of the cases where a female victim asks for a police protective order, that order is violated. Earlier this month, Rebecca Griego, a researcher at the University of Washington, was murdered in her office by her ex-boyfriend after she had reported his threats to the university police and Seattle police, changed her phone number, moved out of her apartment, distributed photos and descriptions of her stalker, and sought an order for protection.

One third of female murder victims are killed by an intimate partner (as opposed to about 3 percent of male victims). Of these, 76 percent had been stalked by the partner in the year prior to their murder. Murder ranks second (after accidents) as the leading cause of death among young women. And if the Supreme Court and abortion opponents really want to protect the lives of fetuses, they might consider this: Murder is the number one cause of death of pregnant women in the United States.

At least there is some recognition of such statistics in legislation called the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, sponsored by Senators Kennedy and Gordon Smith. If passed (unlike earlier versions, which were blocked by House Republican leadership), this law would finally classify as hate crimes certain violent, criminal acts that are motivated by the victim's gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.

"Whatever helped bring on the Virginia Tech shootings, it certainly wasn't guns." That's the point gun advocates are scrambling to make; if anything, they argue, the shootings prove that we need more gun access. And President Bush fell in behind them after visiting the memorial service at Virginia (a state that is historically Republican turf, lost in the last two years to a Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, and a Democratic senator, James Webb). Bush didn't get into the gun control issue, saying it wasn't the time or place, but an aide made his position clear to reporters afterward. And Senator John McCain, whose imploding campaign has been seeking to recast him as a Bush lookalike, offered, "We have to look at what happened here, but it doesn't change my views on the second amendment except to make sure that these kinds of weapons don't fall into the hands of bad people."

Having been committed to a mental health facility for being a danger to himself and others presented no obstacle for Cho Seung-Hui, who bought one gun at a Blacksburg pawnshop and another—a Glock 9—at a Roanoke gun store. Here's a bare-bones list of state gun rules.

- No limits on assault weapons
- State and federal criminal background checks
- No restrictions on concealed weapons-even snub nosed handguns
- Gun owners are held responsible for leaving weapons around children, but no safety lock requirements exist.
- Cities can't hold gun makers liable for gun violence.
- Can't give kids under 18 handguns or assault weapons, but kids can possess rifles and shotguns.
- Can't sell handguns to kids under 18, but any kid over 12 can buy shotguns, older rifles, and assault weapons, all without parental consent.
- You don't need a license to buy a handgun.
- There are no requirements that gun buyers register. The cops have no idea how many guns there are in the state.

Lax gun laws like these combined with precious little awareness of the role violence against women plays in psychopathic behavior have led to tragic results. Will they again?

James Ridgeway is the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Mother Jones.

Ontario Bill to add gender to list of protected groups under Criminal Code of hate crimes

A Private Member's Bill has been introduced that will allow attacks on women to be treated as hate crimes under the Criminal Code. I am confused here though, are they asking to add gender to the list of protected groups, or to add women? :

On January 17, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), (a coalition of trustees, principals, teachers, students, parents, and police) made a public appeal to the Federal Minister of Justice to amend the Criminal Code public incitement of hatred laws to conform to Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, thereby granting protection to girls and women.

On Thursday, April 19, 2007, Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj (Etobicoke Centre) will re-introduce a motion in the House of Commons requesting all party support for Bill C-254, his Private Member’s Bill that adds gender to the identifiable groups protected under the Criminal Code law on public incitement of hatred. Currently, the law protects those groups identified by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.

In commenting on Bill C-254, Ken Coran, president of OSSTF said, “As an active member of the media violence coalition and as educators, we understand that prevention is key to stopping the effects of media violence but we also believe that leaving women out of the current law on public incitement of hatred is just plain wrong.”

Adding, “OSSTF is proud to add its name to the long list of individuals and organizations that have been calling for this change. We believe that leaving women and girls off the list compromises their safety and this amendment is long overdue.


From OSSTF website

Small Towns in Canada Making Huge Environmental Changes!

Leaf Rapids Manitoba is the first municipality in Canada to ban plastic shopping bags! This is exciting, but there are only 550 residents in this town.... If only Toronto could take this on as an issue, perhaps with the help and advice of the Mayor of San Francisco, who announced just last month it will be banning shopping bags. Toronto recently joined San Fran's Digital City Network, which seeks to connect municipal government's in various hubs in matters of networking, media, film and economic exchange. Perhaps Miller could tap into San Fransico's already in place infrastrucutre for dealing with the plastic bag problem.

Wolfville Nova Scotia announced today it is Canada's first Fair Trade Town. It's a move that will have economic benefits for the town, and I imagine it will significantly reduce it's ecological footprint.
Importantly for the Atlantic provinces, this will mean that more money will be put back into the local economy instead of being invested in importing goods from other provinces or countries.
Mayor Bob Stead says "it's almost impossible to talk about fair trade without in this instance talking about buying local and fair price for local produce as well." When the community was considering supporting fair trade farmers in other countries, it realized it should also be supporting local farmers who are suffering major losses.
And of course, the less goods that are transported across Canada and imported form other countries, the less fuel that is used. Win win.

Good read: John Jacobs on the problem of "Atlantica" (trading scheme between Maritimes and New England).

Virginia Tech: no one is terrified

An American news article about the murders at Virgina Tech yesterday, which resulted in 32 deaths (including the gunman) and 22 injuries, ended with this statement:

"FBI spokesman Richard Kolko in Washington said there was no evidence to suggest it was a terrorist attack, "but all avenues will be explored."

That is fascinating. The word terrorism is a brand name relating only to anti-US, anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist actions. Apparently, a Man on a violent rampage who shoots 54 people while hunting for his estranged girlfriend is NOT considered an to be comitting an act of terrorism! What shall we call it then?
Old hat?

Liberals will not run candidate in Elizabeth May's riding!

Dion will not run a Liberal candidate against Green party Leader Elizabeth May in the next federal election. May, who does not have a seat, has chosen to run in the Nova Scotia riding of Central Nova, currently held by Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay.

This is a very surprising move, and perhaps ill fated as that riding has long been a Conservative stronghold--can May really unseat MacKay? The move demonstrates how strong Dion's commitment is to environmental issues that he is willing to forgo putting forward his own candidate. (May is widely respected for her lobbying about climate change--though I have doubts about how left of centre she actually is given her surprising and disappointing comments about abortion).

The two leaders will hold a joint press conference Friday, and will stress the importance of action on climate change.

For full news see CBC article

Diabetic blogger challenges Apple to design a medical device (glucose monitor)

Amy Tenderich, who writes an extensive blog about living with diabetes called Diabetes Mine, has written an open letter to Steve Jobs at Apple. Following the news that Apple has sold their 100 millionth iPod, she's hoping the company can devote some of their technological finesse to designing a sleeker, more effecient, more portable medical device for diabetics. What a great idea!


"Dear Steve Jobs,

I’m writing to you on behalf of millions of people who walk around wired to little tech devices and won’t leave the house without them. No, I’m not talking about the iPod — and that’s the point. While your brilliant product line enhances the lifestyle of (100) millions, I’m talking about the little devices that keep us alive, the people with chronic conditions.

Let's talk about diabetes, the disease that affects 20 million Americans, and I'm one of them.

Whether blood glucose monitor or insulin pump, thanks to the achievements of medical device companies, we can now live a normal life by constantly monitoring and adjusting our blood sugar levels.

But have you seen these things? They make a Philips GoGear Jukebox HDD1630 MP3 Player look pretty! And it’s not only that: most of these devices are clunky, make weird alarm sounds, are more or less hard to use, and burn quickly through batteries. In other words: their design doesn’t hold a candle to the iPod.

Most people on this planet can't agree on much, but most do agree that Apple knows how to design outstanding high-tech devices. It’s your core expertise. It’s your brand. It’s you and Jonathan Ive.

We are, of course, deeply grateful to the medical device industry for keeping us alive. Where would we be without them? But while they’re still struggling with shrinking complex technologies down to a scale where we can attach them, hard-wired, to our bodies, design kinda becomes an afterthought.

This is where the world needs your help, Steve. We’re people first and patients second. We’re children, we’re adults, we’re elderly. We’re women, we’re men. We’re athletes, we’re lovers.

If insulin pumps or continuous monitors had the form of an iPod Nano, people wouldn’t have to wonder why we wear our “pagers” to our own weddings, or puzzle over that strange bulge under our clothes. If these devices wouldn’t start suddenly and incessantly beeping, strangers wouldn’t lecture us to turn off our "cell phones" at the movie theater.

In short, medical device manufacturers are stuck in a bygone era; they continue to design these products in an engineering-driven, physician-centered bubble. They have not yet grasped the concept that medical devices are also life devices, and therefore need to feel good and look good for the patients using them 24/7, in addition to keeping us alive.

Clearly, we need a visionary to champion this disconnect. We need an organization on the cutting edge of consumer design to get vocal about this issue. Ideally, we need a “gadget guru” like Jonathan Ive to show the medical device industry what is possible.

What we need here is a sweeping change in industry-wide mentality — achievable only if some respected Thought Leader tackles the medical device design topic in a public forum. We therefore implore you, Mr. Jobs, to be that Thought Leader.

We have begun by brainstorming a number of actions that you and/or Apple could take to jumpstart this discussion:

* Sponsor a contest by Apple Inc. for best-designed med device from an independent party, and the winning item will receive a makeover from Jonathan Ive himself

* Conduct a “Med Model Challenge”: the Apple design team takes several existing medical devices and demonstrates how to “pimp” them to be more useful and cool

* Establish Apple Med Design School – offer a course on consumer design concepts to selected engineers from leading pharma companies

We need a creative mind like yours to help change the world, again. We, the undersigned, call upon you to take action now.

Yours Truly,

DDD (Digital Device Dependent)"

Faye Turner: one of these things is not like the other...

Iranian President Ahmadinejad released the trespassing British sailors today on account of it being Mohammad's birthday, as well as the celebration of Jesus the Christ's passing in the West. How very clever.
This picture shows them leaving his presidential palace, waving happily to the media. Don't they look dashing in their shiny suits! Hmmmmmm.

Now, the Iranian public has been quite vocal about wanting to let "the woman" go home up to this point. It was reported that the public felt a woman and mother shouldn't be held as a prisoner, and that really she shouldn't be a sailor in general.
In President Ahmadinejad's speech, he says "How can you justify seeing a mother away from her home, her children? Why don't they respect family values in the West?"
Despite the fact that she is, indeed, a sailor, we can see from the photo that she has not been provided with professional clothing like her male counterparts for her meeting with the President.
Really? Deny her profession, deny her professional attire?
I think the photo says it all.

No one deserves that much money

According to a recent article by Naomi Klein, Conrad Black's lawyers had a hard time finding a jury that did not resent a filthy rich man who represented corporate America. The idea that all corporations and big businesses serve only themselves and line their pockets from the labour of underpaid workers is commonly held by, well, the common folk.

"Black has come face to face with the casualties of the boom's collapse and of the ideological revolution he so aggressively globalized.

As the judge questioned a pool of 140 prospective jurors in order to whittle the group down to 12, plus eight alternates, she found men and women who had "lost every dime" in the WorldCom collapse, whose pensions had evaporated on the stock market, who had been fired thanks to outsourcing and who'd had their finances ravaged by identity theft.

Asked what they thought of executives who earn tens of millions of dollars, prospective jurors answered almost uniformly in the negative. "Who could possibly do that much work or be that capable?" one asked.

A union mechanic's apprentice pointed out that no matter how much he works, "I'm barely getting by as it is, living at home." No one said, "More power to you."

Many appeared to regard North America's ultra-rich the way Russians see their oligarchs: even if the way they amassed their fortunes was legal, it shouldn't have been. "I just don't think anyone should get that amount of money from any company, example Enron and WorldCom," one prospective juror wrote.

Others said, "I feel that there is corruption everywhere"; anyone paid as much as Black "probably stole it"; "I am sure this goes on all the time and I hope they get caught." John Tien, an accountant at Boeing, launched into such an elaborate lecture about the accounting scams endemic in corporate America that Black's lawyers asked the judge to question him in private to prevent his views from influencing the other potential jurors.

Regardless of what else happens in the Black saga, the jury selection process has already provided an extraordinary window onto the way regular Americans, randomly selected, view their elites not as heroes, but as thieves.

As far as Black is concerned, this is all terribly unfair. He is being "thrown to the mobs" because of rage at the system and because, unlike American billionaires, he doesn't "dress in corduroy trousers" or donate his fortune to AIDS charities. Black's lawyers even argued (unsuccessfully) that their client could not get a fair trial because the average Chicagoan 'does not reside in more than one residence, employ servants or a chauffeur, enjoy lavish furniture or host expensive parties'".

Nope, the only way Black can got off on this one is if he is tried by his peers, that is, a group of elitest wealthy business people who know about the hardships of getting caught.