I nearly always find questions of degree helpful in breaking down reductive arguments, and Dr. Gunter does it very well in this article on the woman who died last month in Ireland when doctors refused her an abortion.
While a full analysis of the tragic case of Savita Halappanavar’s death from sepsis at 17 weeks in her pregnancy is not possible without access to her medical records, there is a key piece of information provided by her husband that supports his claim that a termination was not allowed or was delayed because of the law. It is the fact that the medical staff were checking fetal heart tones. Not just once a day as is sometimes done during a previable induction so the mother knows which day her baby died, but several times a day.
Fetal heart tones are not checked with any medical purpose in mind until viability (around 23-24 weeks). The presence of fetal heart tones was irrelevant because survival of a baby at 17 weeks with ruptured membranes and/or advanced cervical dilation is impossible. Ms. Halappanavar was not 22 weeks pregnant where there…
View original post 408 more words
A couple of years ago I wrote that I wanted to move on from the remembering our dead and feeling like I was always mourning as a transgender person. I wasn’t attempting to ignore death or suffering, or our collective pain, but I wondered aloud about the consequences of having our most notable event be our public grief. There are specific deaths that haunt me, like the violent ends of Tyra Hunter in Washington, DC, and Gwen Araujo in California, where my sadness crops up again and again whenever I start thinking about the ease with which people murder my trans sisters. Perhaps however it’s the aggregate of shortened lives, the headlines in alternative media that declare that in 2012, 
If only writing were just about writing. If only the time we could dedicate to delicious production would fall into our laps and procreate making oodles of more writing time that we could carry around like a jar of marbles. But barriers to our own prolificacy are real, and grotesque, and numerous. They’re sneaky buggers, shutting us down even when we’ve established a groove, or are in mad love with our story, or if this is the only day of the week where we can carve a new canal into the manuscript. There be monsters here, in the world, with the best of intentions of a writer’s project their preferred fare. To defend oneself I have cobbled a list of such wickedness in the hopes that we all can identify them more quickly and banish them back to their lairs.
National Novel Writing Month is upon us, and whether or not we’re keeping up with our word count, we probably keep hearing the advice to put all edits aside and just lay down the first draft. This is good advice, because 50,000 words is impossible to achieve if the writer is focusing on perfecting the first 2,500. And yet people may not know what we mean by revisions or edits. How will we know when to start editing? More importantly, how will we know when to stop?
While there are several House races and ballot initiatives still being counted, the big news today is that President Obama was reelected in a decisive victory over Mitt Romney last night. (Note to self: Always have a concession speech on hand so people don’t think you’re a spoiled jackass.) In addition to the troubling developments that came out of this election cycle, there were many highlights and exciting moments that will affect us as an electorate for some time. Again, in no particular order:
8:15a.m., Pacific Standard Time on November 6, and it feels like this election started two decades ago. Finally we’re arrived at Election Day. Tomorrow we won’t have to sit through more attack ads blowing up our enjoyment of The Walking Dead or Leverage. I will deeply appreciate Wednesday for that, even if the country isn’t in agreement on who won or if the news cycle leads with which candidates are suing which other candidates for a recount. The dust won’t have settled on much of what Americans will vote for today, but even now, with the polls open and people queuing up for their moment with a ballot, there are a few issues brought up by the 2012 election. And some of them are disturbing. In no particular order:
The zombie apocalypse–I mean, Hurricane Sandy–in unfolding on the East Coast as of this writing. Although it is still a Category 1 storm, its barometric pressure usually supports a Category 4 rating, and it’s about to merge with another weather system the likes of which have only been seen in the clunker film The Day After Tomorrow. When I was a small child, the very concept of hurricanes terrified me, what with all of their moisture and millibars and torrential winds and flying palm trees. Hurricanes on vacation were especially nuisance-some because no tropical postcard or tourist ad ever depicts a rainstorm. I’ve been on the school bus during Hurricane Gloria, ridden out hurricanes and tropical storms while at the beach in South Carolina and Delaware, survived a night in a tent during a tornado in south Jersey, and dug through two feet of snow after blizzards in Syracuse, New York.
NOTE: This post is about sexual assault and pregnancy and stupid, stupid remarks from men.
Trans/plant/portation 