Posts tagged "health"

New IL Rape Kit Law Signed Today

Lisa Madigan via HuffPoChi:

As a result, at the beginning of this year’s legislative session, we introduced a bill that would make Illinois the first state in the nation to mandate the testing of evidence collected in cases of sexual assault. This measure gained unanimous support in the General Assembly.

Under this new law, investigating law enforcement agencies are required to submit all evidence of sexual assault to the crime lab within 10 days of receiving it from a hospital. It also requires law enforcement agencies to provide the Illinois State Police an inventory of all untested kits in their possession to establish a timeline to complete their analyses.

Rape kits sitting on the shelves for years. The world is a far cry from Law & Order: SVU.

Domestic Violence – Be Smart. Be Well.

sexartandpolitics:

Huh. Blue Cross Blue Shield just sent me an email informing me of their domestic violence website.

It seems that “call the police or 911” as the #1 “habit to have” is a little naive in light of the recent depressing bullshit.

Emphasis added, that link goes to a great blog post at Tiger Beatdown.

Morehouse, Howard Medical School Graduates Most Likely To Work In nderserved Areas

This is pretty interesting because it involves race and class within prestigious professions cross-linked with community work and the health crisis we’ve got going on. It also shows how historically black colleges affect the medical community compared to other institutions.

The study in the Annals of Internal Medicine ranked medical schools based on the communities where their graduates worked and whether those doctors practiced primary care. The Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Howard University College of Medicine in the District and Meharry Medical College in Nashville ranked as the top three, in that order.

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville finished at the bottom of the 141 ranked schools, and the Northwestern University-Feinberg School of Medicine was 139. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore was ranked 122.

Dear Mr. President,

I lived in constant fear serving under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” I was always looking over my shoulder, censoring what I said and keeping as much physical distance as possible between my military life and my personal life.

Even with this vigilance, I was found out by some male “friends” at my first duty assignment. I was just 19 years old. The deal was simple: Perform sexual favors and my secret was safe.

I had a choice: report these men for “sexual harassment/cohesion” and end my military career or submit to their demands.

Respectfully yours,
Former Sgt. Tracey L. Cooper-Harris
United States Army

-Read the Entire Letter: Stories From the Frontlines via Racialicious

Birds and BP

Not posting a picture to spare you but Big Picture published several more heartbreaking wildlife images.

Nuns Dare Call it Treason

via newsweek:

Lisa Miller is really great in this story about the Catholic church’s war on American nuns:

Earlier this month, in something of a surprise, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix was excommunicated for approving a first-trimester abortion last year at that hospital to save the life of a critically ill patient. “An unborn child is not a disease,” said Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Phoenix diocese. “While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother’s life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child.” The irony here is thick: it has taken years, sometimes decades, to bring sex-abusing priests to justice, but this observant sister, Margaret McBride, was excommunicated in a matter of months for making a compassionate and impossible decision for one of her parishioners.

Oklahoma Will Not Be Outdouched, Arizona

Ooooooooklahoma. The state that gave you the law that made doctors post very specific details about a patient and her abortion for public records that toes the line on doctor-client privilege brings you another couple steps back in reproductive choice. You’ve probably heard by now that Oklahoma recently overrode a veto in order to make women considering abortion, in all cases including rape, get an ultrasound (one that makes the fetal image clearest, which is typically the invasive vaginal kind) before going through a legal choice about their own bodies. But in addition to that a second bill was passed to make sure anti-choice doctors can’t be sued if they withhold information or simply lie about fetal abnormalities if they felt like it would result in the woman making the legal choice to get an abortion.

And there’s much more to come, another bill expected to pass will seek to limit insurance coverage of this legal procedure.

This is usually what I think about when Michelle Obama gets up there and talks about childhood obesity. And while her campaign is all about making our children healthy and telling them to eat vegetables and to be active her husband is the head of a government that seems to have no problem continuing subsidizing meat, dairy and corn to the point that the groceries surrounding our kids are 90% filled with stuff that’s bad for them and made in really disgusting ways. Not to mention the negative impact all that has on the livelihood of people all around the world. She’d do more good just telling the country why Monsanto, Tyson, Purdue, etc should go fuck themselves. via Shakesville

This is usually what I think about when Michelle Obama gets up there and talks about childhood obesity. And while her campaign is all about making our children healthy and telling them to eat vegetables and to be active her husband is the head of a government that seems to have no problem continuing subsidizing meat, dairy and corn to the point that the groceries surrounding our kids are 90% filled with stuff that’s bad for them and made in really disgusting ways. Not to mention the negative impact all that has on the livelihood of people all around the world. She’d do more good just telling the country why Monsanto, Tyson, Purdue, etc should go fuck themselves. via Shakesville

Tweeting The Abortion Process

Angie the Anti-Theist, already a mother, is live-blogging/tweeting her process of abortion to demystify it for others. She is of course getting a lot of hate mail, which is scary because she’s not doing this anonymously.

“War erodes one’s regard for human life. Soldiers cause or witness so many deaths and disappearances that it becomes routine. It becomes an accepted part of existence. After a while, you can begin to lose regard for your own life as well. So many around you have already died, why should it matter if you go next? This is why so many soldiers self-destruct when they return from a deployment.”
Cpt. Shannon P. Meehan, NYT: Distant Wars, Constant Ghosts