Merger Watch is on it.

The MergerWatch Project

We believe that in medical care, the patient’s rights must come first.

Across the United States, community hospitals are merging with other hospitals or health systems to relieve financial stress. When the merger is with a religiously-sponsored health system that uses doctrine to restrict care, the consequences can be serious for patients.

That’s for damn sure.

What they do is repair work though. I want to work on the “this is totally unacceptable” part. I want to get religion the fuck out of health care, period.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sigh. Another win for being mean.

A gay man was arrested this week at a Missouri hospital after refusing to the leave bedside of his sick partner.

Roger Gorley went to Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo., on Tuesday to visit Allen, his partner of five years. But when he got there, a member of Allen’s family asked him to leave, according to Kansas City Fox station WDAF. When Gorley refused, hospital security allegedly handcuffed him and forcefully removed him from the premises. Now he cannot visit Allen at all because of a restraining order filed against him.

Whoever that member of Allen’s family was – boooo to you. That’s horribly mean. Don’t do that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Pausing for a touch of levity…a postmodernist plagiarist reactionary chief rabbi. That’s what I call covering all the bases!

The chief rabbi of France has resigned after admitting to plagiarism in two books and to deception about his academic credentials.

The Paris Central Consistory, the top Jewish religious organisation in France, announced Gilles Bernheim’s resignation but gave no further details.

Bernheim, 60, a modern Orthodox Jew who was elected to the seven-year post in 2008, was respected by other religious leaders as an active participant in interfaith dialogue. His booklet opposing the government’s plan to legalise same-sex marriage won praise from the former pope Benedict.

Ahhh isn’t that sweet – an interfaith dude who opposes same-sex marriage and gets praise from Ratzinger. And plagiarizes.

Last month a blogger accused him of copying a 1996 text by the late French post-modernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard for use in his book Forty Jewish Meditations, published in 2011. After initially denying the report, Bernheim later admitted that Lyotard had written the disputed passage.

I deny it! I say the passage was written by Derrida.

Last week another blogger accused Bernheim of plagiarism in an earlier book, published in 2002, and L’Express magazine revealed that Bernheim had not earned the prestigious title of philosophy professor that was often attached to his name.

Ok but he really authentically does oppose same-sex marriage.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

To repeat: it can happen here. Already, now. We don’t have to wait for “personhood” laws; it can happen now.

If it is determined that nothing can be done that would allow the woman to continue her pregnancy, the established standard of care for unstable patients who are miscarrying is an immediate surgical uterine evacuation. In the case of such a patient, immediate uterine evacuation reduces the patient’s risk of complications, including blood loss, hemorrhage, infection, and the loss of future fertility. A delay in treatment may subject a woman to unnecessary blood transfusions, risk of infection, hysterectomy or even death.

That’s clear enough, I think.

Some Catholic hospitals, contrary to the opinion of leading Catholic ethicists and theologians, apply the Directives to prohibit doctors from providing any treatment to a woman having a miscarriage if there are still fetal heart tones, even when a doctor has determined that nothing can be done to save the pregnancy and the woman’s health is placed at risk by delaying immediate treatment.

And so is that.

This is now. It’s not the future, it’s not hypothetical; it’s now, and it happens.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s good that someone is paying attention. The European Court of Human Rights is.

A  report from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Committee of Ministers published yesterday has called on the [Irish] Government to implement legislation to deal with abortion.

So that women won’t be refused medically indicated abortions because doctors and hospitals are afraid of prosecution.

In its sixth annual report, Supervision of theExecution of Judgments and Decisions of the ECHR, the committee of ministers urged the Government to “expedite” the implementation of the A, B and C judgment on abortion, delivered by the ECHR in 2010.

The judgment is included in a list of cases requiring “enhanced supervision” to ensure implementation.

The A, B and C judgment found the absence of any implementing legislative or regulatory regime which provided an “accessible and effective procedure” to establish the “possibilities for a lawful abortion where there is a risk to the mother’s life” was in breach of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Let’s hope Ireland’s government is listening.

The committee said “the general prohibition on abortion in criminal law constitutes a significant chilling factor for women and doctors due to the risk of criminal conviction and imprisonment”. It “invited the Irish authorities to take all necessary measures”, to implement the judgment.

As Dr Astbury has just been confirming.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sofia Ahmed of “Muslimah Pride” does not like Femen. She has reasons.

What Femen are doing is highly counterproductive and detrimental to Muslim women across the world.  For me and hundreds of other women who have got in touch with me over the past few days, their tactics are a part of the ideological war that is going on between neo-colonial elements in the West and Islamic societies. Their aim is not to emancipate us from our presumed slavery, but instead reinforce Western imperialism and generate consent for the ongoing wars against Muslim countries.

That “for me and hundreds of other women” is interesting, since it’s followed by a factual claim as opposed to an interpretation. “For me,” she says, the aim of Femen is to reinforce Western imperialism and generate consent for the ongoing wars against Muslim countries.”

You know what? I don’t believe a word of that. I don’t believe that is Femen’s aim.

It seemed that many other Muslim women across the world agreed with my stance and what followed was a defiant and vocal rejection of Femen’s invitation. Instead of ‘getting naked’ Muslim women from across the world tweeted and uploaded pictures of themselves to Facebook in their hijabs, niqabs, and western attire. They held up signs telling the world why they were proud of their identities and did not need racist Islamophobic women to dictate to them on how they should dress.

Instead they needed a made-up god and a long-dead “prophet” and a bunch of male clerics to dictate to them on how they should dress. Is that it?

Oh, is that racist Islamophobic of me? No, it fucking isn’t. I don’t despise all these bullying rules about women and veils and bags and tents, haram and halal and go back inside, because they’re racial, I despise them because they’re bad in themselves.

In our open letter to Femen we referred to them as ‘colonial feminists’ to describe Femen’s activities.  I believe it is the most apt term to describe their particular brand of feminism. From Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, to the pretext of female liberation surrounding the invasion of Afghanistan, women have always been used as pawns by men as an excuse to wage war. Femen are just the latest chapter in the long history of gender imperialists that manufacture consent and provide ideological foregrounding to justify going to war. By dismissing the role of western countries in the oppression of Muslim women and focusing solely on Muslim men they are only working to demonise Islam, not liberate Muslim women.

That’s pathetic. She would have at least a semblance of a case if she said Femen are playing into the hands of people who want to justify going to war (but who the hell is keen to go to war right now?), but to say they’re doing that themselves? Please.

She’s swallowed a keg of jargon and that’s all she’s got – the familiar phrases come out one after the other.

Femen’s reliance on the overused media tropes of the modern western values versus traditional Muslim values is creating a dichotomous representation of the ‘self’ (West) and ‘other’ (Muslims)…Frantz Fanon…The hyper-sexualisation of Femen’s campaign and the insistence on Muslim women to strip naked as a gesture of emancipation is  a tell-tale symptom of Orientalist fantasies…Femen’s universal imposition of the neocolonial agenda… Femen have continued to display a flagrant disregard for our agency and have consistently tried to downplay the legitimacy of our collective voices. Femen have tried to dismiss our campaign using conspiracy and conjecture…

Conspiracy and conjecture! Look again at your first paragraph before you accuse other people of that.

The Ex-Muslims forum on Twitter are arguing with Muslimah Pride a good deal.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Via Ex-Muslims Forum on Twitter @CEMB_forum

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More on Jackie Nanyonjo and what was done to her.

Jackie was a fighter for herself and for others: a lesbian who escaped from anti-gay persecution and a brutal forced marriage, and a member of the Movement for Justice. In Britain she had been able for the first time to live and love openly as a lesbian; she was much-loved by a wide circle of friends who kept in touch with her after she was deported and who miss her deeply.

I suppose I should say trigger warning at this point. What happened to her is not comfortable reading.

With all the limited avenues of Britain’s racist immigration laws closed to her and facing deportation to a country where it is a crime to be gay and where the political and religious leaders have whipped up a murderous anti-gay witch-hunt, Jackie’s only option was physical resistance. On 10th January, on Qatar Airways Flight QR76, Jackie fought bravely for her freedom with all the strength she could gather against four Reliance guards. She continued fighting when the guards drew curtains round their end of the plane to hide their crimes. She struggled for as long as she could until, beaten up, half strangled and bent double, she was overcome by the pain in her chest and neck and was unable to breathe.

When Jackie arrived at Entebbe Airport the ‘escort’ party handed her over to the Ugandan authorities, who held her for many more hours without any medical attention. When family members finally met her, long after the flight had landed, Jackie was in terrible pain and vomiting blood; they rushed her to a clinic, but in a country with widespread poverty and limited medical facilities they were unable to get the medical attention Jackie needed. Since Jackie was in hiding as a known lesbian, protected by relatives, every trip to a doctor or hospital involved a risk to her life and to the safety of her family. They were condemned to watch the agonising decline of Jackie’s health and strength over the next two months.

I’m not an expert on asylum, but deporting gay people to Uganda does seem like an unfortunate policy…

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’ve said this before, but it needs saying often. People don’t realize that it’s not just Ireland. It can happen here too, and it does. The National Women’s Law Center did a report on it two years ago.

A serious but little known problem is putting women’s health and lives at risk: because of their religious beliefs, certain health care providers do not give appropriate treatment to women experiencing serious pregnancy complications. A recent study by Ibis Reproductive Health entitled “Assessing hospital polices & practices regarding ectopic pregnancy & miscarriage management”  [1]  adds to the growing evidence that the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services have been applied to deny women experiencing both ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages the treatment and information to which they are legally entitled.

Like Savita, you see. Not just Ireland, you see.

Catholic-affiliated hospitals are governed by the Directives, which provide guidance. Most individuals and even many health providers presume that the Directives’ prohibition on the provision of a range of abortion services applies only to non-emergency pregnancy terminations of otherwise viable pregnancies. But the Study is consistent with anecdotal accounts that provide strong evidence that some hospitals and health care providers have interpreted the Directives to prohibit prompt, medically-indicated treatment of miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy, placing women’s lives and health at additional and unnecessary risk, and violating the laws intended to protect patients from such serious lapses in care.

And oh look – how very familiar.

In some of the miscarriage cases described in the Ibis Study, the standard of care requires immediate treatment. Yet doctors practicing at Catholic-affiliated hospitals were forced to delay treatment while performing medically unnecessary tests. Even though these miscarriages were inevitable and no medical treatment was available to save the fetus, some patients were transferred because doctors could still detect a fetal heartbeat or required to wait until there was no longer a fetal heartbeat to provide the needed medical care.

You see? That’s Savita. It’s that simple. It happens here, too.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mo is annoyed about the western colonial feminists.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Paul Krugman thinks it’s not particularly reasonable to make comments on the internet while pretending to be Paul Krugman.

I do think that it’s kind of curious that I’ve had repeated incidents in which people pretend to be me, usually in an attempt to make trouble. Is my real output so hard to criticize that people looking for a way to discredit me have to make stuff up?

And for that matter doesn’t making stuff up kind of defeat the purpose?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This is a terrible thing.

Very sad news tonight that a member of Movement for Justice, Jackie Nanyonjo, has died in Uganda last friday due to injuries she sustained during deportation from Yarl’s Wood 2 months ago.

This is another one of those stories that are under the radar.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Dr Jen Gunter has weighed in; I was hoping she would. She was informative and passionate about it last fall.

Savita Halappanavar was admitted at on a Sunday to Galway hospital at 17 weeks into her pregnancy with ruptured membranes, a dilated cervix, and an elevated white blood cell count (a marker of infection). It is clear that her diagnosis was chorioamnionitis, an infection of the fetal membranes. When left untreated the bacteria of chorioamnionitis march across the umbilical cord into both the maternal and fetal circulation. Left untreated, the outcome is maternal death.

Just walking through the door with ruptured membranes at 17 weeks Ms. Halappanavar baseline risk of chorioamnionitis was 30-40%. Her presentation should not have posed a diagnostic dilemma, not even for an intern. She was a perfect set up.

In Canada and the United States, once chorioamnionitis is diagnosed the treatment is antibiotics and delivery. An “expeditious delivery…regardless of gestational age,” according to the guidelines of the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG). If the fetus is not viable there is no waiting for the fetal lungs to mature or waiting for the fetus to succumb. The recommendation is delivery. This is because chorioamnionitis kills women and if a fetus is on the cusp of viability it has a far greater chance of survival without an infection than with one. The infection helps no one, neither the mother nor the fetus.

What I want to know is, what are OB_GYNs taught in Irish medical schools? What are they taught is the treatment for chorioamnionitis? Are they really taught it’s to delay unless the fetal heart has stopped?

Savita Halappanavar’s medical team tells a different story. The testimony of the consultant obstetrician was that Ms. Halappanavar was not sick enough to be allowed a termination on Tuesday according to the Irish legal position. However, there is clear evidence that she was rapidly deteriorating on the Tuesday evening. Ms. Halappanavar’s heart rate was 110 beats/minute and her widower reports that she was shivering and her teeth were “chattering.” Tachycardia (a rapid heart rate) and shaking chills and clear clinical signs that she was gravely ill.

And yet they dawdled. Still.

What is the treatment for chorioamnionitis?

If the answer is delivery then the delay must be explained. One obvious explanation is the swiss cheese effect, where several things are missed culminating in a very bad outcome. It shouldn’t happen, but it does.  This problem can be fixed with better staffing, education, and specific protocols.

If the answer is, as the consultant obstetrician suggests, that Ms. Halappanavar was simply not sick enough to warrant delivery then it appears that the current “legal position” in Ireland is that a woman must be left brewing her infection until the stench is bad enough that Death himself gets a whiff and comes calling.

That’s not the legal position here in the US, but it is the de facto position in many Catholic hospitals.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

That Al-Jazeera report on the “Muslimah pride” reaction to Amina and Femen -

It has some odd stuff.

• 

  Sofia Ahmed

  This event is open to ALL muslim women, Hijaabi’s Nikaabis and women who choose not to wear it. Muslimah pride is about connecting with your Muslim identity and reclaiming our collective voice. Most importantly it is about diversity and showing that muslim women are not just one homogenous group. We come in all shapes and sizes, all races and cultural backgrounds. Whether we choose to wear hijaabs or not is nobodies business but ours. So please get clicking, get creative, get loud and proud. #Muslimapride

That’s incoherent. It wants everything. It wants to combine all the incompatibles. It wants identity and diversity. Well guess what: there are tensions there!

Look, if you decide to make a big thing about “Muslimah pride” and “connecting with your Muslim identity” then you are relinquishing certain kinds of diversity. Real diversity is much more attainable with secularism than it is with a religious “identity,” especially when the religion is as demanding and all-pervading as Islam (or as Quiverfull-type Christianity, for another example).

It’s reminiscent of advertising campaigns that invoke hipster attitudes and postures as a way to sell things. It works, but it’s full of tensions. No doubt this “Muslimah pride” thing also works, in some sense, but it reeks of bullshit. It’s just dishonest to brandish “your Muslim identity” while at the same time promising diversity. (It would be less dishonest if “Muslim” really were just an identity, as opposed to membership in a strict and demanding religion. But it isn’t.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)