At that point, Watson interrupted Pence to quote the CBO’s assertion that over two-thirds of the cost of the bill would be offset by cost cutting and other measures and asked Pence if he was certain that the bill would raise money for health care reform with $1 trillion in new taxes.

Spence’s response: “Yes. I’m rounding up.”

The CBO report estimates that “new revenues” – i.e. taxes, fees and penalties – will account for $583 billion of the offset cost to the $1.04 trillion cost of the health care bill. Rep. Spence claims that the health care bill will be paid for with a $1 trillion tax increase. His figure is off by $459 billion – because he’s “rounding up”.

Most people think of rounding up as adding a few cents to the next whole dollar – that is, $1.98 might as well be $2. Rounding up $583 billion to $1 trillion is sorta like rounding up $50.01 and saying you have “about $100″. Technically, since it’s 1 cent over halfway to $100, it’s correct. Intellectually – not so much.

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Annual Gross Salary @ minimum wage: $15,080

Average Family Health Ins. Prem: $13,150

Total to live on for the year: $1,890

But hey, who needs to eat, right?

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photo credit: littleREDelf

You breastfed your baby because it was best for the baby, right? A new study suggests that you may have done yourself one heck of a favor at the same time. The New York Times reported that a new study, which will be published in the May issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, shows that women who breastfed children for as little as one month during the course of their lives have a reduced risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes after menopause. The benefit to mothers increased with longer lactation, with mothers who breastfed at least 12 months over the course of their lives showing the greatest amount of benefit. According to the Times report.

Women who reported a lifetime history of more than a year of breast-feeding were 20 percent less likely to have diabetes, 12 percent less likely to have hypertension, 19 percent less likely to have high cholesterol and 9 percent less likely to have had a heart attack or a stroke by the time they enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative.

According to other experts, the study doesn’t prove breastfeeding is responsible for the lower rates of diabetes, hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. It could be that women who choose to breastfeed make healthier lifestyle choices overall. More studies would have to examine the actual mechanics and figure out how breastfeeding affects the body in such a way that it reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease in later years. One possibility: oxytocin, the hormone that helps kick off labor, is part of the breastfeeding process — it causes the milk letdown and the far less pleasant uterine contractions that often accompany breastfeeding in the early weeks. Those contractions help breastfeeding mothers recover from childbirth more quickly – and it’s possible that the oxytocin aslo helps tone the walls of blood vessels so that they are more flexible and less prone to disease in later years.

The study involved 139,681 post-menopausal women enrolled in a women’s health care study.

The published study, Duration of Lactation and Risk Factors for Maternal Cardiovascular Disease is available free online.

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photo credit: ProgressOhio

Yesterday, the Canadian Institute for Health Information released their report on wait times for several common health procedures across Canada. You can find the wait times table at the CIHI web site. The report studied the length of time between the “booking time”, which was defined as the time that a doctor and patient agree that a procedure is necessary, and the start of the service. Among the procedures studied were cataract surgery, coronary bypass surgery, cancer radiation treatments and joint replacement. The results are eye-opening, if you buy into the myth that single-payer, nationalized health care invariably results in longer wait times for necessary health care.

To wit:

More than 75% of patients requiring cancer radiation treatment received that treatment within 28 days of being ready to treat. Let me give you a comparison here – my dad was diagnosed with melanoma in November. If he had been diagnosed in Canada, there is a better than 75% chance that treatment of that cancer would have started before Christmas. Here in the U.S., a guy with the kind of health insurance he has (read: excellent) should have been treated well within that time frame, right? His actual date of treatment: April 15. That’s right, here in the US, where we supposedly don’t have the nasty wait times brought on by nationalized health care, he waited four months longer for treatment than he would have waited in Canada.

How about cataract surgery? The Canadian benchmark for cataract surgery is 16 weeks – within 112 days of the “booking time”. The data shows that 50% of the patients referred for cataract surgery in Canada have that surgery within 38 to 78 days. Ninety percent have the procedure performed within 199 days. In five of the eight provinces reporting, more than 75% of those waiting for cataract surgery have it performed within the benchmark 112 days. It’s another place where I have some personal experience. My mother had cataract surgery on April 17. She was referred in early January for that surgery. In other words, if she lived in Saskatchewan, there’s a 50% chance that she would have had that surgery done and out of the way by Valentines Day. In fact, in almost every single one of the provinces, there’s a better than 75% chance that she would have had her cataracts removed sooner.

I don’t think my parents are the exception to the rule, either. I suspect that if we looked at things more closely, we’d find out that in fact, we ALREADY wait at least as long if not longer for most typical health care services as do those people covered by universal nationalized health care in other countries. In addition, nearly every report that I’ve seen points out that our health care, overall, is lower quality than the overall standard of health care in those other countries. And – we pay more. We pay for it out of pocket. We pay for it in health insurance premiums – and then we pay even more out of pocket in co-pays, exclusions and spend-downs.

So I guess the question is – why are we so invested in maintaining the fiction that health care reform results in substandard care and longer wait times, when all the evidence points to the exact opposite conclusion?

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That’s not all, though. You can also help out in a healthier (for you) way by eating Yoplait yogurt – but only the ones with pink lids. You’ll also need to send the lids in this month. Yoplait has guaranteed a minimum of $500,000 and will contribute up to $1.5 million based on the number of lids they receive. More info at www.yourlidmatters.com.

And between now and the end of the year, every time you buy a Lean Cuisine dinner, Lean Cuisine will make a contribution to the fund for the cure with a guarantee of at least $150,000. In addition, they’ll donate $5 for every $9.95 designer insulated lunch bag that they sell at www.LeanCuisine.com.

For more information about partnering with Susan G. Komen or to find out about other Pink Ribbon campaigns, visit Susan G. Komen for the Cure®.

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I won’t even talk about the ads for Federal Debt Relief System which charges “subscribers”, already heavily in debt, several hundred dollars a month for “legal services”. Those “legal services” are as shady as the site on which they’re advertised. They consist largely of telling the client to stop communicating immediately with any credit collection agency, and then write to the agency to demand that they cease and desist all collection attempts until they can prove that the creditor incurred a debt with that specific credit collection agency. It’s a sleazy, slimy trick that’s based on a discredited loophole, and it doesn’t work any longer because creditors were onto it.

Even better – oh, let me show you:

See that story about the cancer cure tagged with the flashing BREAKING NEWS arrow? It’s an affiliate ad that links to a sensationalist sales letter (ask me about sales letters – I’m an expert on them) offering a free e-newsletter delivered directly to your mailbox. It’s put out by the Health Sciences Institute of Maryland, a group of alternative health practitioners. Now, let me put in my disclaimer here – I am incredibly open-minded about alternative health theory. I believe in nutritional health, I believe that there are benefits to herbs and to massage and to yoga and to many other things that we don’t understand yet. I also believe that there are those who seriously exploit our credibility and the desperation of those who are seeking a cure for various ailments. What I found on the Health Sciences Institute site was a mission statement that sounds heroic, and links to special reports with names like Drive out toxins (colon cleansing at a special introductory rate of $19.95 – but of course, you need to keep using it so… ), Boost your immunity (a “special report” about ‘immunological defenses’ for $9.95), Goodbye to arthritis (glucosamine and chondroitin with another “special report” for $19.95)..

This “free press for a free people” is no more than a shill for the most reprehensible of affiliate marketing scum – the ones that prey on gullible, uneducated, desperate people to make money. It’s disgusting. And it’s no surprise that they support the right-wing and float the most ridiculous lies of the campaign.

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A nameless woman at a mall was somehow the one to find the insult that I could not toss onto the neat pile of words that would never hurt me. It did hurt. And, these attitudes toward breastfeeding are making our children sick, especially African American children, who are the least likely to get the benefit of mothers’ milk.

It is disheartening to me that 25 years after I faced down those same stares and comments, mothers who choose to feed their children naturally are still being subjected to the hateful, hurtful comments of other women. It floors me to hear my younger daughter’s friends lightly declare that they’re not going to breastfeed because ‘it will make my boobs sag’ or because ‘my boyfriend doesn’t want to share’. I’m boggled by pediatricians who shrug off questions about whether breast is best by handing over samples of formula. I’m fond of pointing out where ‘we’ve come a long way, baby’ – and this is one of those places. Unfortunately, we’ve come a long way BACKWARDS.

Maybe my experiences were unusual, or maybe I surrounded myself with supportive people to help me counter the societal non-support for my decision to breastfeed back then. These are some of my memories:

When Cara was a month old, we took her with us to Mass for the first time. Just as the priest began his sermon, she began to fuss and fidget, and rather than subject the congregation to her in full-fledged scream mode, I slipped out of the church to nurse her in the car. I returned in time for Communion, but hovered at the back of the church where I could nurse her more discreetly. After the service, Father approached me and asked why I’d left, so I explained, and added that I hadn’t wanted to offend anyone by nursing her in church. His response: “If anyone is offended, send them to me. I don’t believe the Lord wants any child to go hungry in His House.”

My mother had been discouraging about my decision to breastfeed. She kept asking why, and telling me how much more convenient and healthy it would be to feed with formula. I don’t know what changed her mind, but one of my fondest memories is of the day we went out to lunch and I excused myself to go nurse Cara in the rest room. She gave me this completely outraged look and said, “You will not feed my granddaughter in a filthy restroom. You sit right here and if anyone has a problem with it, they can deal with ME.” (and if you knew my mother, you’d understand what a potent threat THAT was). A year later, she shook her head in dismay as she reported that my sister-in-law was choosing formula over breast milk. “Doesn’t she know that breastfeeding is best for the baby? Maybe if you talk to her, Deb…”

During a family gathering, I retired to my mother-in-law’s bedroom out of consideration for the older members of the family who might be offended. My brother-in-law, assuming that I was changing the baby, wandered in after me and stopped dead in the doorway when he saw what I was doing. He then apologized, turned around – and proceeded to continue our conversation WITH HIS BACK TURNED TO ME. It was possibly one of the funniest moments ever – my brother-in-law standing there telling me how wonderful it was that I was nursing my daughter and how he’d wished his wife had – while he was unable to even look at me while I did it. I do know, though, that when his daughters became pregnant, he advocated for them to breastfeed his grandchildren.

Those were the people who gave me the strength to deal with women like the one on the bus who glared daggers at me while I nursed my daughter until I pointedly asked her if she’d rather listen to the baby scream for the next twenty minutes. It makes me sad and angry to know that 25 years later, women are still given misinformation about breastfeeding and their baby’s health, still being discouraged by society and culture and still being disparaged for choosing to feed their children the way that they are intended to be fed. And it makes me even angrier to know that Qaasim is dead on right when she puts her finger on the why:

America’s cultural obsession with the breast as a sexual object undermines the U.S Health and Human Services Department’s goal of having 50 percent of infants breastfed exclusively at 6 months of age.

If anything, we should be more disturbed as a society by the sight of breasts filled to bursting with silicone and perched unnaturally on collarbones than the sight of a woman breastfeeding a child.

As long as we, as a culture, objectify the perky, immature 18 year old breast as the ultimate sex object, we are not mature enough to recommend and support the best choices for our children. It’s important that we nurture and support and encourage mothers to make the best choices for their babies by presenting breastfeeding as the healthiest and most attractive choice rather than looking on the nursing mother as ‘disgusting’.

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So that means if a person hasn’t seen a range of women’s genitals in real life there’s no way s/he is going to know what real women’s genitals look like. Everyone then starts to think all genitals should look like the airbrushed ones – which are really just frauds, and not half so interesting or useful as the real ones we think.

Family Planning Health – Australia, in response to a young girl who asked if her vagina was ‘all messed up’.

This is the post my 18 year old daughter will disown me for writing. Yesterday afternoon, she came flying in the door in a panic and announced to me “You have to come into my room right now and talk to me. This is VERY important.” I half-expected her to announce to me that she was pregnant and was preparing my ‘whatever decision you make, you know I love you’ speech when she stepped up onto her bed, yanked down her pants and panties, spread to show pink and demanded – in a very worried tone – “Is THIS normal??”

THIS, it turns out, was those tiny little bumps under the skin that are more prominent in some women than in others – sebaceous glands, the exact same glands that secrete oil in your face and sometimes get a little clogged up. THIS was a perfectly normal vulva – but it took me half an hour to reassure her of that, and even longer to find pictures of an un-retouched, un-airbrushed normal vagina so that I could show her. When I finally did find a picture it was on a site for a health clinic in the UK. All I could find on major US sites were drawings of female genitalia and photos of genital abnormalities. But that’s not what really bothered me about the whole thing. This is.

While I was looking for non-pornographic images of a normal human vagina what I did run into were literally dozens of posts from girls and women on various medical forums and discussion groups asking frantically for information about ‘these funny little white bumps on my vagina”. In most cases, the description made it pretty clear that they were talking about this exact same thing – a variation of normal.

The answers that they got were answers that would have sent me in a panic to my midwife – it could be herpes, it could be genital warts, it could be this rare condition, you’ll probably need a biopsy to determine what they are. Even the medical folks that chimed in never once mentioned that ‘there’s a very good chance that what you’re describing is perfectly normal”. The closest that anyone came to that reassurance was the statement that “It’s hard to tell if this is something serious without examining the bumps personally, but it’s probably not one of these horrible things.”

Update: This was precisely the kind of information I was looking for. Thanks, Scarleteen! This one goes on the bloglist for sure.

Now, I came of age in the first heyday of Our Bodies Our Selves. I’m part of a generation of feminists that advised women to learn about their bodies, to sit down with a mirror and examine our genitals so that we would know where to find all the various bits and pieces. I’ve always been open and honest with both my daughters and sons about their bodies and their sexuality. So… how come my kid is freaking out and certain that there is something horribly wrong?

I’d like to say it’s because all she (and her boyfriend, who caused the panic) have ever seen are airbrushed pictures of vaginas that make everything look smooth and silky, but I think it’s deeper than that. I think it’s because she lives in a society where most of the female images she sees are airbrushed and the only abnormalities allowed are those that fit some standard of attractive. Media images and expectations have taught girls to be massively insecure about their bodies in general, and when it comes to something as hidden as the vagina, they don’t even dare ask what’s normal and what’s not. And if they DO dare, finally, in a panic believing that there’s something wrong, they have a hard time finding straight, honest answers.

I finally found something for my daughter to read at Our Bodies Our Selves but I had to go to a UK clinic site to find an unretouched picture of a normal vagina – and even there it was behind a link that said ’some may find this picture offensive’ – all of the explicit images of genitalia were labeled that way, though, so at least it wasn’t a comment on the photo itself. The whole experience made me think seriously about the things I have not discussed with my daughter, and about the way that leaves her open to getting her messages about womanhood and femininity and sexuality and her body and her rights about people who are even less informed about them than she is – but seem to know and understand it all. I’ll be ordering her a copy of the newest edition of Our Bodies Our Selves, which helped me make sense of it all 30 years ago and dropping a bookmark to Scarleteen in her browser favorites, for those things that she just can’t bring herself to ask me about.

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The group’s average weight loss was 13 pounds – but averages can be deceiving. Those not keeping a food diary lost about 9 pounds. Those who kept a food diary six or seven days a week lost about 18 pounds.

And you don’t have to go out and buy a leather-bound book for your diary. Dr. Keith Bachman, another of the researchers, says that it works just as well if you scribble down what you eat (including calorie counts) on a post-it note or send it to yourself in an email. The act of making a note and keeping track of calories helps you figure out where your extra calories are coming from and develop strategies to deal with them.

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photo credit: nagobe

Two young mothers were seated on the couch opposite me, each of them holding babies < one month old. They were discussing – as do all new mothers – their pregnancies and deliveries. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, really, but the conversation caught my ear when one said, “Well, HE wants a bunch more, and that would be okay if I could be sure that I’d have an ideal pregnancy and birth experience again.” Did you go natural? the other mother wondered. “It wasn’t what I planned, but I did. It was so easy..”

“But it isn’t always the way you expect,” the other mother said. “I almost died having this one. They had tubes down my throat and tubes in my nose and I didn’t even get to see him for hours afterward because they almost lost me…”

And yes, those things happen. And no, I don’t know details. And probably, I wouldn’t be writing this except for what the woman said a few sentences later – “I wasn’t going to have an epidural but it was like the worst pain and pressure you can imagine. It was an induction, because my doctor was going away for a few days and he might not have been around if I went into labor before he got back…”

Stop. Rewind. She was induced. Before her due date. As a matter of convenience. And I really wanted to ask her if anyone had thought to mention to her that induction carries some serious risks, both for the mother and the baby. If she knew that the adverse effects of induction include fetal distress, fetal heart rate abnormalities, failed induction and hypercontractility – a medical term meaning that labor becomes one long contraction that never quite lets go. If she knew that induction drastically increases the chances of needing an epidural, stalling delivery and needing assistance in the form of forceps delivery, and the chances of having an emergency cesarean.

When we talk about a woman’s right to choice in reproductive health, it most often conjures up Roe v. Wade and abortion, but there are other issues of reproductive health that are also routinely taken out of women’s hands – or are handed to them without the information necessary to make a real choice. Many of these issues and choices have serious repercussions for both mother and baby. Induction is one of those choices.

In many hospitals and practices, it is still routine to schedule an induction in any mother who goes 1 week or 2 weeks past due date – I know. Three of my five children were induced at the time that I was judged to be at 42 weeks gestation. No one told me any of the possible adverse reactions I might have to induction. No one suggested that labor might be more difficult, or that the calculations of my due date might be off and we might be forcing a child out of my womb before he was ready to deal with the world outside. They only told me that the procedure is routine. I’m not alone.

Nearing the end of the last trimester, exactly one week after a 40 week due date, I was told by my obstetrician that my baby was overdue, my baby was starving, weighed only five pounds, and that my placenta was aging. He also mentioned it was hospital policy to induce labor at 41 weeks gestation.

In a White Paper archived at the International Cesarean Awareness Network, Gail Dahl describes her own experience with an induced birth, and discusses the ramifications and adverse effects of premature induction. It’s must reading for any woman who is pregnant or who plans to be pregnant – and for their partners. Dahl recalls:

During the labor, I often felt as though my womb was being torn from within me, and I began to hemorrhage. It took months and months for the bleeding to stop entirely and the pain in my womb to subside. When my daughter emerged from my womb and was placed on my breast a refrain was whispered throughout the room, There is nothing wrong with this baby. As I gazed into her eyes, I began to feel the white-hot rage of betrayal. She had obvious signs of prematurity including a covering of soft down-lanugo and vernix. This was not an overdue baby, but a premature baby. Her medical records record her at barely 40 weeks. She could have easily been two or three weeks premature.

Later I realized we both experienced many side effects from an adverse reaction to the induction drug. I experienced bleeding during labor and prolonged bleeding for months after the birth, blood pressure problems, prolonged and severe postnatal depression, reduced immune function, and persistent pelvic pain. My daughter experienced reduced immune function, which contributed to eczema, asthma, allergies to foods and environmental substances, and brain seizures.

That was written in 2000, the year that the Alberta (Canada) Medical Association revised their guidelines to include informed consent guidelines for women offered induction. It was ten years after my own daughter was born with ‘a covering of soft down-lanugo and vernix’ – obviously not an overdue baby, but a premature one. This is eight years later. There are multiple studies that show no advantage to routine inductions at any gestational age, and many that point to the serious and long-lasting adverse effects. And I am willing to bet that not one medical professional had sat down with this woman and discussed those effects with her when they blithely suggested that she undergo an elective induction so that her regular obstetrician would be sure to be at the birth. And I am willing to bet that no one has told her since that it was very likely that induction that almost killed her.

I wish I could say that I talked to her about it so it wouldn’t happen again, but I honestly couldn’t find it in me to approach a stranger and suggest that her ordeal might have been avoidable, that her doctor had let his schedule put her life and her baby’s in danger. This is, unfortunately, just one more place where the rights of women are subjugated to the convenience of doctors and hospitals. It’s part of a medical (and social) paradigm that puts ‘convenience’ above women’s reproductive health at every turn. Women die because of it – and few voices are raised in protest.

We, as women, need to make conversations about all sorts of reproductive and women’s health choices part of the dialog about a woman’s right to choice – not just choice, but informed choice. These are our bodies. We have a right to know what’s being done to them.

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