by matttbastard
So much for small-government conservatism. Cementing his big-spending legacy, Bush delivered a $3.1 trillion (!) budget Monday–complete with the latest “supplemental” Iraq/Afghanistan spending allocation ($70 billion? Till early 2009? Balanced by ’12 my ass.) As DDay puts it, “[t]his is the equivalent of Led Zeppelin setting fire to the hotel by pouring whiskey all over it. Bush wants to leave by trashing the place.”
h/t FP Passport
by matttbastard
Via Jill @ Feministe: check out this speech given by Canadian abortion provider Garson Romalis, delivered on January 25th at the University of Toronto Law School’s Symposium to Mark the 20th Anniversary of R. vs. Morgentaler:
I have been an abortion provider since 1972. Why do I do abortions, and why do I continue to do abortions, despite two murder attempts? The first time I started to think about abortion was in 1960, when I was in secondyear medical school. I was assigned the case of a young woman who had died of a septic abortion. She had aborted herself using slippery elm bark.
I had never heard of slippery elm. A buddy and I went down to skid row, and without too much difficulty, purchased some slippery elm bark to use as a visual aid in our presentation. Slippery elm is not sterile, and frequently contains spores of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene. It is called slippery elm because, when it gets wet, it feels slippery. This makes it easier to slide slender pieces through the cervix where they absorb water, expand, dilate the cervix, produce infection and induce abortion. The young woman in our case developed an overwhelming infection. At autopsy she had multiple abscesses throughout her body, in her brain, lungs, liver and abdomen.
I have never forgotten that case.
After I graduated from University of British Columbia medical school in 1962, I went to Chicago, where I served my internship and Ob/Gyn residency at Cook County Hospital. At that time, Cook County had about 3,000 beds, and served a mainly indigent population. If you were really sick, or really poor, or both, Cook County was where you went.
The first month of my internship was spent on Ward 41, the septic obstetrics ward. Yes, it’s hard to believe now, but in those days, they had one ward dedicated exclusively to septic complications of pregnancy.
About 90% of the patients were there with complications of septic abortion. The ward had about 40 beds, in addition to extra beds which lined the halls. Each day we admitted between 10-30 septic abortion patients. We had about one death a month, usually from septic shock associated with hemorrhage.
I will never forget the 17-year-old girl lying on a stretcher with 6 feet of small bowel protruding from her vagina. She survived.
I will never forget the jaundiced woman in liver and kidney failure, in septic shock, with very severe anemia, whose life we were unable to save.
Today, in Canada and the U.S., septic shock from illegal abortion is virtually never seen. Like smallpox, it is a “disappeared disease.”
As they say, read the whole damn thing. Then read it again. The dedication to providing women with an essential service displayed by medical practitioners like Romalis and embattled Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, despite constantly facing legitimate threats to their lives, is truly heroic.
bastard.logic 