facts

to counter some of the lies i was told earlier this week, here are the stats on abortion safety straight from the guttmcaher institute (www.guttmacher.org), all backed by scientific evidence:

The risk of abortion complications is minimal; less than 1% of all abortion patients experience a major complication.[23]

There is no evidence of childbearing problems among women who have had a vacuum aspiration abortion, the most common procedure, within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.[24]

The risk of death associated with abortion increases with the length of pregnancy, from 1 death for every one million abortions at 8 or fewer weeks to 1 per 29,000 at 16-20 weeks and 1 per 11,000 at 21 or more weeks.[25]

The risk of death associated with childbirth is about 11 times as high as that associated with abortion.[26]

Almost half of the women having abortions beyond 15 weeks of gestation say they were delayed because of problems in affording, finding or getting to abortion services.[27]

Teens are more likely than older women to delay having an abortion until after 15 weeks of pregnancy, when medical risks associated with abortion increase significantly.[28]

credit to heymanclothing for the cute graphic.

how the other side sees it

tonight i endured a lecture called 'women's health after abortion' at MAC, usually known as the home of evidenced-based medicine and medical excellence, period. the speaker spun a tale of how abortion leads to male anger and therefore spousal abuse. she claims it leads to depersonalization and lack of maternal attachment (to future offspring, although she didn't clarify that) and child abuse too, which she then said leads to learning disorders. a family physician, she explained she abandons her patients when they request abortions, and threw guilt like a big black cloak over all of us willing to think patient autonomy in medical decision-making actually extends to pregnant patients as well.

whilst i was being so tortured by corrupted epidemiology, i thought of how there might be correlations between apple juice consumption as a toddler and a preference for pink shoes in later life, and the obvious connection of that to sprained ankles. i mean it is just so blazingly obvious.

this doctor has won awards for community education from the royal college of physicians! she sits on a bioethics board! she is PUBLISHED!

this just in?

NDP health critic Jean Crowder is asking industry-supported members of Health Canada's scientific advisory panel on breast implant safety to step down. The Canadian Women's Health Network had publicized this conflict of interest one week PRIOR to the panel sitting. Crowder's reaction is about seven weeks overdue, but check it out all the same:
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/173/10/1144

animal house

that old classic frat story is supposedly, based on mcmaster!

but no...this oft-used metaphor is my descriptor for another show at the MAC gallery, titled by its curator as 'the beast not found in verse'.

they have a half-dozen big and peculiarly photographed drawings by leesa streifler of bunny silhouettes occupied by lascivious fantasy. black and white and brooding all over they are. i thought of how the playboy bunny suit was recently redesigned in coutour leather. and i thought of the new telus ads on television, bunnies covering their eyes with their floppy ears as they watch cellular sports moments. see no evil and hear no evil, either. (and we all know bunnies don't talk). i felt the same fear and astonishment as when i was woken by a half-friend early in the morning during the evolve music festival in antigonish a year or so ago. he pushed a broken bunny against the screen window of my tent. these bunnies will not be infantilized!

once i was babysitting, i cannot recall the city or the time, and the child was sleeping and i found an old book of canonical feminism in the living room and read of gloria steinem's adventures as a playboy bunny. What an inquisitive little anthropologist she was! but i was so confused. it is all so confusing. it is confusing to want what you don't put on a face to want, it is confusing to not put on the face of what you want, too.

family disaster

just dark evening on the mcmaster campus, all the little fine art freshmen are awake in their muffin-top jeans, dark winking creases of their november-tanned bums as they walk up the gallery stairs in front of me. they wear not-ironic trucker caps and have learned to paint using their faces as canvas. plus there are a few boys trying out serpico.

rochelle rubinstein greets us up there, long wavy hair half-way down her back, regal nose and cheeks like plums. her wrists clink with silver and gold. her skirt hem is uneven in an elphin way and colour.

she stands before her work all grouped up for a group show called 'unnatural disasters'. she had three offerings. one is a book of linocuts reworking, rewording a hebrew book of lamentations. it is more sophisticated than the image i found above (from her days at women's studio workshop in NY), but the message is similar: men are born into power and are worshipped until the crown slips; perhaps in a moment of violence.

another piece is a nine-dych of silken printed quilts, maybe one foot square each. they are texture memories of auschwitz and 911 and the tsunami and katrina.

with what regularity we hurt each other.

the last is a line up of silk and organza characters she calls the village. each is as tall and wide as a person. one is pregnant and one is hurling a grenade.

missing rights in mississipi

a few nights ago PBS aired a special called "the last abortion clinic". endure the shoddy online quality and WATCH IT and never feel the same. thank f?&@ i don't live in mississipi. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/clinic/view/ .

its very timely because not only is abortion access eroding everywhere all the time in the US, the newly appointed supreme court justices (namely Roberts and Alito) will have their chance to prove their conservative might in less than a month: on Nov. 30 the supreme court hears Ayote vs. New Hampshire, a case about the constitutionality of requiring that the parents of pregnant minors be informed of their abortions.

between here and there

yesterday we went to see 'heaven and earth unveiled: European treasures from the Tanenbaum collection'. i am democratic about exhibitions, and even though the title screams old dead white men painting old dead white men, i went along. you never know what you might find. i found very little...i remarked on how in the 19th century, orientalism consisted of grand, colourful, violent, sexy images of harems and nomads and religious devotion. now orientalism consists of world vision commercials and what's left of war footage after the embedded stuff is edited. how post-colonial.

thinking about heaven and earth i would rather think of gathie falk. she, known for 'private world' ceramics (she prefers the seductive 'private' over the betty crocker 'domestic' when describing her very feminine feminist work) has lately been found painting the heavens. falk was there before...her turned-to-stone, uninhabited but full-bodied ceramic summer dresses captured that moment when the soul disappears. her recent paintings are on the same cusp, about to be death, full of air and light and the passage. she is getting old and more sensitive but straightforward about her comment that we are here to be here and in a flash of stars it is over and what is left are clothes hardened by sweat from living and an unknown soft gauze of heaven.

hanging garden

evening on locke street, one of steeltown's two gentrified blocks, and we are walking to the public library at dusk. turn the corner and there it is, a noose tied in orange rope, her plush black body hung from a tree. the homes in this neighbourhood are brick and stately, but this one is always a bit overgrown, and the fence is wrought iron. her torso and drooping breasts, long nipples, are lycra and shiny in this low light. her head is deflated; not as well-stuffed as the drooping breasts. her skirt is also black, a stiff taffetta, gathered at the waist. she is the size of a woman. the craftsmanship is excellent. i am a very scared crow.