Mid-Week Post

 

 Happy Robbie Burns' Day.

The Shafia defense lawyer paints his clients as victims of a "Kafka-esque scenario":

A young man accused of killing his three sisters and the first of his father's two wives is only guilty of being "stupid" and "morally blameworthy," but neither he nor his co-accused parents deserve to be in this "Kafkaesque" scenario, court heard Wednesday.

Hamed Shafia, 21, and his parents Mohammad Shafia, 58, and Tooba Yahya, 42, are on trial for four counts each of first-degree murder, accused by the Crown of murdering their four female relatives in a so-called honour killing. They have pleaded not guilty.

Hamed's lawyer told the jury Wednesday in his closing statement that the only reasonable conclusion they can come to is that the deaths of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were a tragic accident witnessed by his client.

"Hamed is guilty of being stupid, morally blameworthy, but other than that, he was not responsible for the girls' death, nor were his parents and (it's) time to put an end to this Kafkaesque 2 1/2 years they've been going through since their arrest," Patrick McCann told the jury.

Really? The abused girls, who begged for help and were found with bruises on their corpses, just piled into a car and drowned themselves. Pieces of the Shafias' car headlight just happened to be at the crime scene.



Right....




This is why we peer-review science essays:

Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.

Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.

Experts say the findings, though not unexpected, contradict some state laws that suggest abortions are high-risk procedures.

The message is that getting an abortion and giving birth are both safe, said Dr. Anne Davis, who studies obstetrics and gynecology at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, and wasn't involved in the new study.

"We wouldn't tell people, 'Don't have a baby because it's safer to have an abortion' -- that's ridiculous," she told Reuters Health. "We're trying to help women who are having all reproductive experiences know what to expect."

An induced abortion -- like any other medical procedure -- requires getting informed consent from the woman, said Dr. Bryna Harwood, an ob-gyn from the University of Illinois in Chicago who also didn't participate in the new research.

That means women understand and acknowledge the risks of their different options.

What makes it complicated, Harwood added, is when the law interferes and requires doctors to state information that isn't always balanced or medically sound -- usually exaggerating the risk of abortion.

The researchers on the new study combined government data on live births and pregnancy- and abortion-related deaths with estimates on legal abortions performed in the U.S. from the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts sexual and reproductive health research and education.

Dr. Elizabeth Raymond from Gynuity Health Projects in New York City and Dr. David Grimes of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, found that between 1998 and 2005, one woman died during childbirth for every 11,000 or so babies born.

That compared to one woman of every 167,000 who died from a legal abortion.

The researchers also cited a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which found that, from 1998 to 2001, the most common complications associated with pregnancy -- including high blood pressure, urinary tract infections and mental health conditions -- happened more often in women who had a live birth than those who got an abortion.

In their report, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, Raymond and Grimes write that the findings aren't surprising given that women are pregnant for a lot longer when they decide to have a baby and so have more time to develop complications.

Harwood said previous studies have also shown the safety of legal abortions.

Most abortions have typically been done surgically, she told Reuters Health. But since the abortion drug mifepristone was approved for use in the United States in 2000, the number of medically-induced abortions has been on the rise.

Both methods are now considered equally safe, she said, with the main risk -- though very small -- coming from medication- and procedure-related infections.

Depending on the state, however, doctors legally must go over the risks of abortion in language that may be misleading, researchers said, with skewed lists of possible complications. Others require a 24-hour waiting period in between the counseling and the abortion itself.

Harwood said that laws regarding what's said between the doctor and a woman seeking an abortion often hamper doctors' attempts to inform patients in a balanced way.

"It is certainly an impediment to have the state dictate my informed consent process beyond the usual," Harwood told Reuters Health.

"Abortion care and pregnancy care should not really be any different than consenting people for any other procedure."

Davis agreed that state-mandated discussions have no place in abortion counseling. She said she was glad to see the new report, which helps dispel "misinformation" and "lies" about abortion risks included in some state laws -- such as the idea that abortion is linked to cancer.

Okay....

Let's first point out that Drs. Raymond and Grimes are both pro-abortion advocates. Let's get that out of the way right now.

From an evolutionary standpoint, why would the young-bearer just up and die after reproducing? Wouldn't we all be dead at some point?

What Raymond and Grimes skim over is the lack of comprehensive abortion statistics. I'll have to work with whatever abortion statistics I can find because even though some claim the debate is finished and abortion is so super safe and legal, some people go out of their way not to compile proper statistics on it. Keep in mind that in Canada, for example, many surveys on abortion have ceased, making comprehensive statistics reporting difficult. The Centre for Disease Control (or CDC) relies on whatever statistics or reports in can compile from available information, if reported:

For each year since 1969, CDC has compiled abortion data by state or area of occurrence. During 1973--1997, data were received from or estimated for 52 reporting areas in the United States: 50 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City. In 1998 and 1999, CDC compiled abortion data from 48 reporting areas. Alaska, California, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma did not report, and data for these states were not estimated. During 2000--2002, Oklahoma again reported these data, increasing the number of reporting areas to 49, and for 2003, Alaska again reported and West Virginia did not, maintaining the number of reporting areas at 49. 

In 2001 and 2002, forty deaths were identified as abortion-related. If abortion information is gathered infrequently, how then can Raymond and Grimes make so iron-clad a statement as abortion is fourteen times safer than childbirth, a statement that couldn't hold water from an evolutionary or statistics standpoint? Did they not factor in the reported fourteen deaths, fifty-eight ectopic pregnancies and two hundred and fifty-six infections caused by mifeprostone since its approval in 2000?  Did the under-reporting of four thousand abortion-related injuries and six deaths skip their notice? This blogsite here lists American abortions deaths spanning nearly a century. Did Raymond and Grimes take any of these into account, especially given how poorly regulated abortion is and the nature of the procedure itself? A sharpened (and sometimes not sterilised) object introduced to an organ normally three inches long and so close to other organs such as the bowel and the bladder can do quite a bit of damage. Did it not occur to them that black American women account for 7.50 deaths per million legal abortions?

Maternal mortality rates in the US:

Maternal deaths are those reported on the death certificate to be related to or aggravated by pregnancy or pregnancy management that occur within 42 days after the end of the pregnancy. The maternal mortality rate has declined dramatically since 1950 when the rate was 83.3 deaths per 100,000 live births; however, the maternal mortality rate in 2005 (15.1 per 100,000 live births) was 84 percent higher than the rate reported in 1990 (8.2 per 100,000). According to the National Center for Health Statistics, this increase may largely be due to changes in how pregnancy status is recorded on death certificates; beginning in 1999, the cause of death was coded according to International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10). Other methodological changes in reporting and data processing have been responsible for apparent increases in more recent years.¹

In 2005, there were a total of 623 maternal deaths. This does not include the 137 deaths of women due to complications during pregnancy or childbirth after 42 days postpartum or the deaths of pregnant women due to external causes such as unintentional injury, homicide, or suicide. In 2005, the maternal mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black women (39.2 per 100,000 live births) was more than 3 times the rate among non-Hispanic White women (11.7 per 100,000) and more than 4 times the rate among Hispanic women (9.6 per 100,000).

The risk of maternal death increases with age for women of all races and ethnicities. In 2005, the maternal mortality rate was highest among women aged 35 years and older (38.0 per 100,000 live births), compared to 7.4 per 100,000 live births to women under 20 years of age and 10.7 per 100,000 live births among women aged 20–24 years.

There were 4,138,349 births in 2005 in the US, with the total of maternal death rates for that year six hundred and twenty-three. Indeed, the maternal mortality rate from 1982 to 1996 was approximately 7.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Maternal mortality rates have dropped substantially from 1915 to 2003.

In Canada, one of the chief diagnoses of maternal mortality (excluding Quebec) for 2002/2003-2009/2010 was diseases of the circulatory system. 

Ireland and Poland have the lowest maternal mortality rates in Europe and have criminalised abortion.

Canada and the US are industrialised nations and (excepting Ireland and Poland) have some of the lowest mortality rates in the world. Whatever maternal deaths- though tragic- do occur are chiefly due to age or some other underlying cause. The hyperbolic claims of "life-threatening pregnancies" completely miss how diagnosed and treatable many conditions are- which is why maternal mortality rates in the West are so low.

These facts are readily researchable. One can speculate on why Raymond and Grimes did not refer to them.

Abortion-related injuries are well-known, from premature babies to infertility to infection to damage of internal organs.  For some reason, this was glossed over, as well.

 

I would throw this study in the junk science pile. 

Speaking of "above the pay-grade" debates, this video sums up the State of the Union (and how rotten it has become) address:

(gracias, El Barto)



Why is something as integral and -quite frankly- as clownishly overblown as the Northern Gateway pipeline reduced to a fifteen minute session? Is that why cameras were not allowed?




"You haven't heard the last of Kim Jong-Il! I will return!"  He sure did:

Paul Evans, Director of the Institute for Asian Research at University of British Columbia (UBC), seems to think that Canada stands alone in its critique of the “Dear Leader” in being one of the few countries to remind us of the tragic atrocities committed by Kim Jong Il’s regime. He must have overlooked the strong comments made by both the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle and the Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott calling out the human rights abuses under the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Il[ii].

He also claims that Harper “violates normal canons of protocol in reacting to the death of a leader of a country with which Canada has diplomatic relations”[iii]. Canada has had no formal diplomatic relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea since May 25, 2010 and has since moved its Pyongyang office to Seoul. This suspension of Canada-DPRK relations came in the wake of North Korean aggression in the sinking of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, which killed 46 people[iv].

More importantly, Paul Evans and a number of IAR staff at UBC are members and contributors to the North Korean propaganda website, CanKor[v]. Under the section “Is CanKor for you?”, the organization queries:  "Do you wish to discover the who, what, when, where, why and how that makes the DPRK the most popular whipping boy of the international community?” [vi]

The head of CanKor, Erich Weingartner, operates out of UBC’s Institute of Asian Research. He has openly admitted that he has direct ties with the upper echelons of the North Korean ruling elite and has published a set of interview dialogues with a North Korean patriotic citizen Mr. Pak, which he later admits is an alter ego of himself which he uses to express North Korean sympathies.[vii]

It’s also unclear whether UBC students’ tuitions or taxpayer dollars are sponsoring the six professors from Kim Il-Sung University who are completing MBA degrees at the University of British Columbia.[viii] In August 2011, UBC again hosted 10 North Korean scholars at a conference organized by Donald Baker, another braintrust member of CanKor.[ix] [x]

Let these admirers of the Kim dynasty starve with the masses there. I would gladly pay for a one-way trip.




(With plenty of thanks)




And now, furry feline fury at four thousand feet. Not really- it was an escaped cat on a plane.



A furry "Occupation".