Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Rep. Giffords working with speech pathologist
Doctors upgraded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords' condition from "serious" to "good" on Wednesday after she was moved from a hospital intensive care unit to a rehab facility in Houston. NBC's Janet Shamlian reports.
When my car was the safest place to live
WEDNESDAY, JAN 26, 2011 20:30 ET
I fought my way back from being homeless. But I understand men like Ted Williams, who just can't seem to leave it
iStockphoto/wysokiniski
I still sleep in my van in a Walmart parking lot from time to time. It's one of the few things I miss about being homeless: the feeling of being anonymous, of being invisible to the demands of my life. I like to slip back inside when it rains, usually in the spring or fall, when it's not too hot or too cold. I snuggle into my sleeping bag at the back of the van, listen to the sound of rain hitting the roof and my dog snoring at my feet.
When Ted Williams, "the homeless man with the golden voice," fled rehab on Monday I wanted to get in the van and drive to Walmart to spend the night in the cold in solidarity. But I didn’t. It's bitterly cold here in Virginia. Crime is up. The van is drafty, and besides, I like my bathroom and the shower I now can call my own. But the lure of the streets is there, and I understand Williams' desire to run.
For those who haven't been homeless or addicted, Williams' flight from rehab is baffling. He more or less won the life lottery. So why did he blow it by walking away?
Well, it's not about the money. Thousands of alcoholics and addicts walk away from jobs, family, fortunes and seemingly stable lives every day. It is the nature of addiction. It is the nature of being human. Most addicts walk away from rehab, for that matter, or go through several cycles of rehab before being clean and sober finally sticks. What people don't realize about Ted is that he's not failing. He's right on track. He's just caught in the cycle of addiction: He believes the only way to alleviate the pain he's feeling is to use the drug that hurts him. And make no mistake: Withdrawal brings pain. Once the fog of drugs and booze clears, Williams has to face what he's lost: the years, the life, the relationships tossed, squandered or destroyed.
My pain was the death of my abusive father in February 2006. A month after he died from brain cancer I walked away from a new job making $50,000 a year as the editor of a small-town newspaper outside Steamboat Springs, Colo. My life was good. I was making more money than I ever had in my life. I loved where I was living. I loved the future. What I couldn't handle was the pain.
I'd been estranged from my father for 15 years when I learned he was terminally ill. We had a bittersweet reunion before he died; he finally told me for the first time in my life that he loved me. But when he died, the hurt was atomic. He was a man who had physically molested and beat me most of my life, a man who had emotionally devastated me. His death should have been a relief, but it wasn't. Not only was the monster I feared gone, so was the fantasy that he had changed, that he'd return and love me as a daughter. The fragile hope of a potentially healthy relationship that had just begun was crushed with his passing.
So I quit my job, bought a used van and took to the road to grieve and to escape. The only thing he ever regretted, he'd said, was that he never got to travel. So I would travel for him, for me. I wouldn't have that regret myself. And in being on the open road I'd feel closer to him. What began as an adventure turned into a nightmare. My freelance jobs ended and I took a series of minimum-wage jobs with a temp agency. I was living in the van, and by all accounts of the powers that be, I was homeless. For almost 18 months I sweated in 110 temps that baked the van, or single-digit temps that literally froze the tires to the pavement. I changed where I parked every night to avoid my biggest fear: hassles from the police. If I couldn't find an open bathroom at a gas station or a Walmart, I had a 5-gallon bucket filled with plastic bags that doubled as a toilet. I ate tuna and ramen when I had money, and drank lots of water when I didn't. I worked full-time, but money was spent on repairing the van and gas.
Like Williams', my luck turned around suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly. My salvation, and the thing that eventually got me off the streets and into an apartment, came from an online reality show I entered. The show asked viewers to write in and explain why they needed new electronics in their home. Most viewers asked for big-screen televisions. I asked for a laptop. They liked my pitch, selected my story, flew out from New York, shot the show and then gave me a laptop computer. They added a bonus, a smart cellphone with a year's worth of service. That laptop and phone would later prove instrumental to my getting off the streets and back into journalism. It didn't happen overnight. It wasn't easy. And even once I was off the streets I relapsed too, just like Williams.
It's not that the van was comfortable. It was an empty metal shell, painted six shades of green, that I promptly named "booger," for the obvious reason. I slept on a cot with a 1-inch foam mattress on top. A piece of plywood was the floor. It must be, I told myself, what the inside of an Easy-Bake oven feels like. The metal walls frosted in the winter, radiated heat in the summer. I covered the windows with adhesive shelf lining.
But there is safety in being invisible. No one expects anything. You're living the life you believe you deserve. No matter how you ended up on the street, a part of you believes you deserve it somehow. Stay on the street long enough and your self-esteem bottoms out. You begin to say you want out, but the reality is that the demands of a job, a schedule, are daunting. As hard as life on the streets becomes, a part of you enjoys the simplicity. Days become a blur and you become numb. And being numb from the pain is almost as much of a high as being numb from the bottle or the needle.
For some bizarre reason the kinder a stranger is to you, the more pain you feel. There is shame in feeling unworthy and in not measuring up to others' expectations. It's an awful dynamic: The greater the support of others, the more panicked you become. The more someone says, "You rock!" the more you feel like a fraud. The chasm between their reality of who you are and your distorted self-perception becomes too great. So the pain returns in force and so does the need to stop the pain in whatever way possible. I'm not surprised Williams left rehab. Rehab helps, but as odd as it sounds, the emotional pain is often sharper, deeper and darker when people care about us than when they don't. If you have never been loved for who you really are, you don't know what to do with that kind of love other than run from it.
I kept running, too. The next few years were a bumpy road back to life. I got another job in journalism and won a major journalism award. I moved back into an apartment. I won a contest for an all-expense-paid trip to England to TED Global. And out of that came an offer to submit a story to tell on the TED stage. After the excitement of the news, I began to freak out. Was I worthy? Surely there were others better than I. There must have been a mistake. Others had suffered more than I. Why was I chosen? The enormousness of it all was overwhelming. I started to choke.
I crawled into the back of my van, where I had since constructed a platform and had a real full-size mattress, insulated walls and a linoleum floor. Subtle or not, I was making the van a real home. I wrote my speech from there. I practiced, revised and wept over it there. And then when I returned from England I drove home from the airport and I stopped an hour out of D.C., pulled off on the side of the road, crawled into the back of the van and cried from the stress and the relief as the rain fell down. The van is my go-to place when I'm scared. The bottle is the go-to place for Williams. Other people run to shopping, to eating, to sex, to drugs.
But we all run. It's just part of our journey.
Reason.tv: School Choice and the Middle Class
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Q&A with Matthew Ladner of the Goldwater Institute: |
Rick Santorum just said what most antiabortion activists think
THURSDAY, JAN 20, 2011 15:15 ET
AP/Bruce Smith
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum successfully inserted himself into the news cycle today by saying something stupid and offensive about the president, race and abortion. The only thing most people remember about the two-term former senator from Pennsylvania is that Dan Savage turned his nameinto a filthy sex term, but he is still apparently running for president. And what better way to kick off the campaign than with a media firestorm over controversial comments?
On some sort of weird basement public access Christian talk show, Santorum said President Obama should support banning abortion because he is black.
"The question is -- and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer -- is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no," Santorum said in the interview, which was posted online Wednesday. "Well if that person, human life is not a person, then, I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.'"
If you're not familiar with antiabortion rhetoric, this is probably all kinds of weird to you. Why can't a black person have an opinion about the personhood of a fetus? But Rick was just paraphrasing a very common antiabortion argument, so clarity wasn't really an issue: All the viewers of "OTJ With That Guy" would've known what Santorum was talking about.
As Dave Weigel explains, antiabortion activists consider themselves the abolitionists of the 21st century. The fight for fetal personhood is the modern-day equivalent of the fight to free African-Americans from bondage.
That explains his statement, but you are still free to find it incredibly insulting. Santorum, of course, reiterated his point in another interviewwith some Christian news service.
Today other human beings, the unborn of all races, are also wrongly treated as property and denied the right to life for the same reason; because they are not considered persons under the constitution.
The great thing about this argument, to me, is that it means fetuses have the right to bear arms.
Abortion does not harm mental health, study says
WEDNESDAY, JAN 26, 2011 19:01 ET
A 12-year-long investigation shows that childbirth increases risk for mental illness but abortion does not
AP
Having an abortion does not increase the risk of mental health problems, but having a baby does, one of the largest studies to compare the aftermath of both decisions suggests.
The research by Danish scientists further debunks the notion that terminating a pregnancy can trigger mental illness and shows postpartum depression to be much more of a factor.
Abortion in Denmark has been legal since 1973 -- the same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, which established a right to abortion.
The Danish study included 365,550 teenagers and women who had an abortion or first-time delivery between 1995 and 2007. None had a history of psychiatric problems that required hospitalization. Through various national registries, researchers were able to track mental health counseling at a hospital or outpatient facility before and after an abortion or delivery.
During the study period, 84,620 had an abortion while 280,930 gave birth.
Researchers compared the rate of mental health treatment among women before and after a first abortion. Within the first year after an abortion, 15 per 1,000 women needed psychiatric counseling -- similar to the rate seeking help nine months before an abortion.
Researchers say women who seek abortions come from a demographic group more likely to have emotional problems to begin with. Statistics show that a large percentage struggle economically and they have above-average rates of unintended pregnancies.
While first-time mothers had a lower rate of mental problems overall, the proportion of those seeking help after giving birth was dramatically higher. About 7 per 1,000 women got mental health help within a year of giving birth compared with 4 per 1,000 women pre-delivery.
The most common problems among women in both the abortion and the delivery groups were debilitating anxiety, severe stress and depression.
"A woman should know that her risk of having a psychiatric episode is not increased" after an abortion, said Trine Munk-Olsen of Aarhus University, who led the study.
Results were published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. The study was funded by grants from the Danish Medical Research Council and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which supports abortion rights organizations and projects.
The study did not examine why a pregnancy was terminated. Researchers also only studied mental problems serious enough to warrant admission to a hospital or outpatient clinic and did not look into the role of mild depression and other lesser symptoms.
In a previous study, published in 2006, Munk-Olsen found new mothers faced increased risks for a host of mental problems, not just postpartum depression.
Changes in hormone levels, sleep deprivation and other demands associated with having a baby could trigger mental problems, experts say. By contrast, women who have an abortion don't experience similar changes.
"Anyone who's ever had a baby knows it's stressful. That stress doesn't go away in a week or two" after delivery, said Dr. Robert Blum, who heads the department of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The latest findings echo an extensive review by the American Psychological Association in 2008 that found no evidence that ending an unwanted pregnancy threatens women's mental health.
A separate review by Blum and his colleagues found that the most rigorous research on the topic did not find a relationship between abortion and long-term mental health problems. Previous studies that suggested such a connection were often poorly designed, had dropout rates or did not control for factors that could affect the conclusion.
Though the latest study was done in Denmark, Blum said it's comparable to the U.S. Access to abortion is similar in both countries though Denmark tends to be more conservative.
Abortion rates are lower in Denmark -- about 13 abortions per 1,000 women in 2008, compared to almost 20 per 1,000 U.S. women that same year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive-rights issues.
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Read more at the New England Journal of Medicine andAmerican Psychological Association
What we can learn from the horrific abortion doctor
FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2011 13:01 ET
The gut-wrenching story should become more than another divisive news event in the war over reproductive rights
AP/Philadelphia Police Department via Philadelphia District Attorney's Office
Dr. Kermit Gosnell
This post originally appeared on Mom-in-a-Million blog.
Warning: If you oppose legal abortion, please be aware that I do not share your position on this matter. However, please also be aware that I am using this post to illuminate common ground between the two poles of the abortion debate, and I am attempting to be respectful of all points of view in the process. Thoughtful debate is welcomed.
I was prepared to write about reproductive choices in light of the Roe v. Wade anniversary on Jan. 22. I even had some funny stuff lined up about the groups that come to my town every year to hold a march in opposition to the 1973 Supreme Court decision. But I can't write that kind of post because there was a news story about an abortion providerthat was so horrific that even I cannot find a positive to his decades-long practice. In summary, a doctor who was not an OB/GYN ran a clinic in Philadelphia that apparently is the last refuge for poor women who wish to end their pregnancies. The news reports indicate that it is unsanitary, staffed by untrained people -- including a teenager administering anesthesia -- used procedures that violate medical best practices, committed malpractice by lying about stage of pregnancy of patients, that viable babies were born alive and killed, and women died of complications. This is a nightmare. Nothing redeems this. Nothing.
I can't stop thinking about how desperate and scared women must have been to be willing to go to such a place. I can't stop thinking about how badly they were injured because they were so desperate that they had to seek the option of last resort. I can't stop thinking about all the crossroads in the months and years that led up to these moments of crisis where these women could have been better served by their communities, by the medical system, by society at large. This didn't have to happen.
There are those who oppose legal abortion who will likely hold this up as an example of the horrors of a society that allows abortion. I, respectfully and thoughtfully, beg to differ.
First, please know that I understand the idea that abortion ends a life. If you believe that, then I see how no argument will make you feel that there is any moral allowance for abortion. I understand. I disagree, but I understand. I believe that, up to a point, a pregnancy is not a life but the potential for life and that ending that potential is tragic, and a choice I wish no woman ever had to make, but I do not see it as murder. I also believe unshakably that reproductive choice does not begin or end with the abortion debate and we need to deal with the entire spectrum of reproductive health issues in order to prevent scenarios like the one in Philadelphia. The less available other reproductive choices are, the more likely women are to become desperate and the people who prey on their desperation are to run operations that are essentially black-market abortion factories.
We need to start with sex. People have sex. You may wish they wouldn't and many preach that, without benefit of marriage, people shouldn't, but people have sex. To give this some perspective, we should understand that the average age of completion of puberty in U.S. youth is 15-17 but the average age of marriage in the U.S. is 25-27. Asking people to be fully sexually mature but not act on that basic urge for a decade or more is a little bit like asking someone to hold in a fart for 10 years. It's not realistic for the majority of the population. People have sex, they have always had sex, they will always have sex. Societies over the course of human history have tried to put all kinds of different regulations and rules on sex but in the end, pretty much everybody does it. And you do not have the right to impose your personal sexual morals on anyone else. You don't. It's rude. So please don't try.
Since people have sex, we need to provide an infrastructure for people to access sexual and reproductive healthcare. I've said for years that if I were reforming the U.S. medical system, one of my top priorities would be to give all women a free visit with a reproductive healthcare practitioner once a year. The visit would be long enough to encompass a standard gynecological exam as well as a conversation about their sexuality, their contraception needs, preconception counseling, or support for decisions not to have sex. And, of course, prenatal care would be paramount for pregnant women. If every woman were getting good reproductive healthcare and good information … well, I don't know what the true outcome would be because I'm not a medical researcher or statistician but maybe it would prevent some crisis pregnancies.
You see, we have the technology to make unintended pregnancy incredibly rare. The many types of contraception are, relatively speaking, inexpensive and safe. The hormonal methods available to women are effective and safe. Condoms provide an added layer (pun intended) of protection from pregnancy and disease. Preventing disease protects long-term reproductive health and makes pregnancies safer and easier to achieve. Giving people access to good healthcare and good contraception is a major public good, and I don't understand why we don't embrace that policy.
You see, if women can get good care, preventive care, they won't have to seek crisis care. Right now the waters about sex, sexual health, contraception, pregnancy and abortion are so muddied with dogma and misinformation that it's a wonder anyone learns facts anymore. Telling young women that having sex makes them "bad" is a good way to totally undermine their self-esteem if they do have sex and lead them to make poor choices about it. Saying "condoms don't work" to try to promote abstinence among young people just makes them skip condoms. Waving a picture of a fetus at a woman entering a Planned Parenthood clinic doesn't make her any more prepared to have a baby she didn't intend to have -- or it might frighten her off if she's seeking contraception or general health screenings. Putting up barriers to information, to contraception, to reproductive healthcare, leads women to have sex without protection because they don't know it exists and don't think it works or just plain can't get to it. Whether those barriers be the shocking lack of access to care poor women face because of financial constraints or barriers established by those who think they have the right to police morality, the result is the same: crisis pregnancies.
And a woman who is determined to end a crisis pregnancy will. It's been true since the dawn of awareness of pregnancy. When there are safe, legal, accessible means to achieve abortion, women will use them. When there are not such means, women die in clinics like the one in Philadelphia.
We can do better by women in America. We can take reproductive healthcare seriously and make it a policy priority. We can ensure good sexual health information is taught by allowing those in medical fields to write health curricula rather than allowing arbiters of morality to inject opinion into the dialogue. (Morality and opinion are for parents to teach; the facts of biology are appropriate for schools to offer in my not-so-humble opinion.) We should make gynecologic care accessible even to the poorest of women and we should make the care inclusive of more than just a quick pap smear and a prescription for the pill or a handful of condoms with no further discussion of a woman's sexual health status. We should encourage women to choose knowledge and good health practices, we should teach women how to be guardians of their reproductive health. We should encourage good choices all along the spectrum of sexuality and reproduction so that fewer and fewer women need to seek the hard choices that come when a pregnancy is unintended and unwanted.
We should look at the story in Philadelphia and say, "It doesn't have to be like this. We can make it better. How can all of us, on all sides of the debates about sexuality and reproductive choices work, together to make it better?"
I think we can work together to make it better. Do you?
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