The charity that we volunteer for isn't particularly political. Its main stated goal is to provide consumers with information about their options when they're having a baby. It's expected, of course, that the people who are willing to volunteer for the organization will be more radical than the rank-and-file, so in practice the organization is a hotbed of midwifery activists. As I said, we're not particularly political, but when we are, our big political hobbyhorse is provincially funded midwifery care.
About a year ago, the head of political activity quit because of burnout. She'd been promoting the idea of funded midwifery care around the legislature for the last ten years or so, sitting on committees, organizing letter-writing campaigns, and finally she just burned out. About six months later a new volunteer joined who's very hot on the political side, and she can't believe how passive and uninvolved we are. It is to laugh.
It resulted in a bit of a back-and-forth smackdown between these two, carried out serially in the pages of our quarterly publication. The best point came from the old hand: three English-speaking provinces have funded midwifery today (Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia), and each one of them got it under a New Democrat provincial government. So if you want funded midwifery care, work to change the provincial government.
I always have a hard time figuring out the NDP. I think they must be something like California's old Peace and Freedom Party before they merged with the Greens in '96 or '00. A forty-hour work week at thirty hours' pay was the P&F plank that I remember best; they came across as crypto-Communists with an image problem. But NDP is a real political force here -- if not here in Alberta, at least in other provinces, or federally.
The problem with funding midwifery care in Alberta is that there are currently about 400 midwife-attended births per annum for which a fee in the neighborhood of $2,500 is paid to the midwife. Those are 400 births that basically never touch the provincial health-care system and are therefore not part of the provincial health-care budget.
If midwifery care were funded, the province would be paying $1,000,000 more a year for health care than it does now. And that's a million in compensation only, not in administrative costs. Call it two million a year total.
Now, even though it's true that midwifery care is cheaper on the whole than obstetrical care, it's only slightly cheaper. And you only start to see savings after the hard core of midwifery consumers have their care paid for. There would need to be a lot of switching in order to recoup two million a year.
Which is why midwifery care is only funded when fiscally irresponsible parties are in power.
Three weeks ago I wrote about my trip to Human Resources Development Canada to get a SIN card.
Yesterday it arrived in the mail, with a new SIN for me. My original SIN is no longer valid, and a new one issued by the Canadian Government.
Separation of church and state? Wha'?
It's only to be expected, now that Colby Cosh has a column in the National Post (congratulations are in order) that he's degenerated into publishing half-truths. But don't take them personally.
Colby writes, on the subject of Canadian-American differences:
One of these institutions, of course, being tolerance of the laws and habits of the French enclave within Canada--a tolerance that was Intolerable to the American founders.
It's true that when Parliament passed the Quebec Act, hard on the heels of the punishment package known to England as the Coercive Acts (passed in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party), the Quebec Act was not intended as a punishment. Rather, the Quebec Act addressed the British difficulties in ruling the territory of Quebec won in the French and Indian War (1753-1763). And it's true that, notwithstanding Parliament's intention, the Quebec Act considered "Intolerable" by Americans.
But this was not because the Americans were small-minded boors opposed to the broad-minded tolerance shown by the British masters of Quebec. At least, not merely because of that.
It may have had something to do with the land grab, where Parliament defined Quebec as everything extending south to the Ohio River. That would include the territory of present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, land which was part of claims by several American colonies.
It may have had something to do with the imposition on Quebec of a governing and legislative council appointed by the crown.
It may even have had something to do with the queer religion of the majority of Quebec residents. The Quebec Act guaranteed
free Exercise of the Religion of the Church of Rome, subject to the King's Supremacy, declared and established by an Act made in the First Year of the Reign of Queen Elizabethwhich is to say, subject to a declaration of loyalty to the crown. I presume that this was consistent with then-current law in Maryland, the American colony founded by Catholics.
It's telling to note that two of the things those intolerant Americans did when writing their Constitution were first, to prohibit religious tests (Article VI Section 3: but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States) and second, to extend the right to bear arms even to non-Protestants. (Compare the English Bill of Rights, 1689: That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law)
We went to our second pre-natal class last night, and we did the ice thing. This is where you clutch a piece of ice in your hand for 60 seconds to simulate a contraction, and then practice coping with the pain in various ways. You have to hold onto the ice quite hard to get a good pain sensation.
Apparently all those karate classes have some positive benefit, even years after the last one. I'm better at pain coping than I expected.
Today we had a midwife appointment (35 wks 2 days) and I had a nasty shock when, as we arrived, our midwife asked if it would be okay if a nursing student sat in for the clinical part of the visit. I know this can happen with normal medical care, but I somehow expected that it wouldn't happen since we'd opted for midwifery care. We compromised -- my wife, the midwife, and the nursing student did part of the visit, and then we kicked out the student and had the rest of the visit.
I should emphasize that I was the only one who had a problem with it; it didn't bother my wife at all. But to me it felt like a betrayal of trust, somehow. In a sense it's a good preparation for labor, or rather, for the kind of labor we hope to avoid by having the baby at home: a person you have decided to trust comes up to you and asks you to make a snap decision on a subject you haven't considered.
Now what?
I remember the first time I saw them ready for harvesting. It was in Finland, in 1991. Surprisingly the season is about the same in Southern Finland as in Delaware: early September.
Here's a good summary of the current situation on handgun permits:
Two states--Vermont and Alaska--do not require a permit to carry a concealed handgun in most cases. Thirty-six states, now including Missouri, issue licenses according to objective criteria, and licenses are not denied merely because a police chief or sheriff does not want people to have guns. Of the 36 "shall issue" states, Missouri's law is among the very most restrictive, and substantially more restrictive than a "shall issue" referendum which voters narrowly rejected in 1999. (Technically, Alabama, Connecticut, and Iowa are "may issue" states, but in practice, licenses are usually issued fairly and without unreasonable denials.)Of the remaining states, about half--such as New York and California--are "may issue" states, in which sheriffs and police chiefs have nearly unlimited discretion in issuing permits. The other half, including Kansas and Ohio, have no procedure for issue concealed handgun permits.
This came up in conversation recently. Apparently Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is one of the lucky Californians who has a concealed-carry permit.
The question remains: how difficult is it to get a hangun permit in California? I've never tried. It probably helps to be a Senator, though...
I went down to the HRDC office nearest my house this morning to file a form.
About five years ago, I worked in Canada for the summer. As a non-resident foreigner, I should not have been paying Canadian employment taxes -- Canada Pension, for example, and Canadian unemployment "insurance" (called "Employment Insurance" here). But these taxes were withheld from my salary.
I discovered this the next year while filing my U.S. income taxes. I tried to get the payments refunded by the government of Canada, but they wouldn't talk to me unless I had a Social Insurance Number. I applied for an SIN, but was told that I couldn't get one since I didn't have a currently valid work authorization.
So I filed my U.S. taxes and claimed the Canadian taxes as a foreign tax credit. You can't normally claim a tax credit on refundable payments, but my rationale (which the IRS accepted) was that at present I didn't believe I could get the money back from the Canadians. If they ever gave me the money back, I told the IRS, I would amend my return.
After another year or so of corresponding with Revenue Canada, they sent me some tax forms that they had filed for me and a check refunding the tax payments, with a little interest. I adjusted my old 1040 and paid a little extra tax, and a little interest. I came out ahead on the whole deal -- about $100, I think.
But the important thing was that Revenue Canada had assigned me a Social Insurance Number when they sent me the check. When we moved up here in August '01, I used that SIN on bank forms, income tax forms, credit checks, everything that requires an SIN. People were weird about it, because it starts with a 0, but it checksums correctly.
Today I was told that it's not a valid SIN and it will take three weeks to assign me a new one.
This article from the News-Press (a Florida newspaper) warns about the dangers of caffeine pills which might contain as much as 180 mg of caffeine -- as much as is found in one cup of strong coffee.
Caffeine is not regulated by the FDA. It's classified as GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe), although numerous studies have attempted to link caffeine with some malady or illness. It's even okay in pregnancy, though as ever, pregnant women are advised to see their doctor before ingesting anything that might have caffeine in it.
Now FDA is pushing for more stringent rules on labeling of caffeine-containing food products. And as we all know, it's only a short step from there to totality...
The blogosphere will be all over this like white on rice: Moore alters "Bowling" DVD in response to criticism
In the original film, Moore added a subtitle to the "Willie Horton" commercial that read "Willie Horton released. Then kills again.". Apparently Michael Moore changed the subtitle to read "Willie Horton released. Then rapes a woman.", consistent with the facts of Horton's case.
The mind-boggling thing for me is not the lies but the stupidity of them. This is like Moore's removal of his predictions of a Republican defeat in the 2002 (the "Payback Tuesday" website).
It's much worse to try to cover up your mistakes than to simply admit that you're wrong. To just change your published work without comment is ... I want to say Orwellian but that doesn't quite fit. It's behaving as badly as the New York Times.
A man could go crazy worrying about stuff like this, but I was reading a brief history of the controversial Abortion pages on Wikipedia, and skimming the pages themselves, when I found this:
Should first-trimester abortions continue to be legal? In the United States, this is tantamount to asking, "Should Roe v. Wade continue to be supported?"
There is a widespread belief that if Roe were overturned, abortion would no longer be legal. Actually, that's not true. Roe is a sufficient condition for legal first-trimester abortion not a necessary one.
If Roe were overturned today, first-trimester abortion would remain legal in every state where it was not explicitly prohibited by existing state law: which is to say, every state where it was legal in 1973, when Roe was decided. That's New York, Alaska, Washington, Hawaii (repealed) and California (invalidated by state supreme court).
Any state whose legislature has bothered to legalize abortion while Roe was in effect (Why, since such a prohibition is a dead letter under Roe? Legislators do the darndest things.) would also continue to have legal abortion if Roe were dropped today. (I know of no state that fits into this category.)
Finally, some states would not enforce and would probably move to repeal the previously dead provisions of their state laws that outlawed abortion. Massachusetts is probably in this category; there would probably be others. But Roe is not the only thing keeping abortion legal in the U.S. -- it's just the only thing keeping abortion legal in Nebraska, or anywhere else it's opposed by the majority of state residents.
Some useful data can be found in the infamous Levitt paper on abortion and crime rates.