With the football draft slated to start 
in his spare time. Profootballtalk.com has developed a reputation as one of the top, if not THE top, independent football websites.Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words "EAT ME" were beautifully marked in currants. "Well, I'll eat it," said Alice, "and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!"She writes, "More than you ever wanted to know about placentas and related curiosities from the Mommy Blawger, who explores the topic in near-excruciating (only so because of the topic) detail." You think that's excruciating? Just wait until my piece on umbillical cords. That will be excruciating.
While I have always promoted breastfeeding in my own personal way, I never wanted to become a lactation activist. Read on to learn why I am now the Reluctant Lactivist.
Sheriff's deputies are shackling some female inmates to the bed during childbirth at Magee-Womens Hospital, officials there said, and the practice has prompted an outcry from advocacy groups.
Sheriff Pete DeFazio said he had no knowledge of any shackling during labor. "That's crazy. It's hard for me to believe. To tell you the truth, I don't believe it."
But Trish Nelson, the hospital's unit director for labor and delivery, said of the 15 to 20 inmates from Allegheny County Jail who give birth every year, about half are restrained by one wrist to the sideboard of the bed by a deputy.
Witold J. Walczak, legal director of the Pittsburgh ACLU, which decries the shackling of women in labor, said many of the women in the county jail are awaiting trial, and don't pose a flight risk. "Most of them are not convicted of anything," he said. Why should they have tighter security than women sentenced to state prisons in various states across the country, he asked.
But the procedural manual in the sheriff's office stipulates that any prisoner admitted to the hospital or medical facility must be shackled by leg restraints.
"There are NO EXCEPTIONS to this rule," the manual says.
Sheriff DeFazio lashed out:
"You have to use your brain," Sheriff DeFazio said. "If you don't have a brain, you shouldn't have the job to begin with. You have to use common sense. These people want to be spoon fed. Even a lay person would know why you wouldn't shackle someone in labor. Where is she going to go? If someone is going to escape, she is going to do more injury to the fetus and herself than anyone else. It's crazy. "They are trying to say, 'That is the rule. We have to do it.' But that is stupid. ... They just want to shackle them so they don't have to worry about it, so they can sneak out and have a cigarette."
Hee hee, I like this guy!
From 1996 to 2003, hospitals throughout Oregon, Washington and California quietly collected the placentas of as many as 700 women who suffered difficult births. They sent the placental tissue to a Portland institute underwritten by the insurance industry. The institute, called Cascadia Placenta Registry, was separate from the hospital's own pathology labs; it existed in large part to help doctors sued for malpractice.
This marshaling of evidence often happened without patients' knowledge or direct consent. One of the patients, Angela Desbiens, didn't know her placenta had been squirreled away as evidence until after she sued Providence St. Vincent Medical Center for failing to prevent fetal distress.
In the process, Desbiens learned that Cascadia had sliced her placenta into chunks, making it harder for other pathologists to analyze. She also discovered that Cascadia used incorrect information about the birth, as well as genetic data from some other patient, to draw its unsurprising conclusion that the hospital wasn't to blame for her child's brain damage.
Hat tip to the American Journal of Bioethics Blog.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) this week signed a bill (SB 2419) that requires child-care facilities to designate a suitable place for women to breast-feed their infants or use a breast pump, the AP/Biloxi Sun Herald reports. Under the law, the location -- which cannot be a bathroom stall -- must have a comfortable chair, an electrical outlet and access to running water. Day care centers also are required to provide a refrigerator for women to store their pumped milk and must train employees how to handle it correctly, the law says. In addition, the law says that breast-feeding in a public place cannot be considered indecent exposure or disorderly conduct.
It also allows any woman who is nursing an infant younger than age one to be exempt from jury duty and requires employers to allow a woman to use her lunch break or other designated break times to pump milk.Looks like Mississippi did it all in one bill, instead of most states which needed to use four separate pieces of legislation to get the same effect.
"Because there is no regulatory law now, if someone is saying they are a midwife when they don't have all the training, the only thing the state can do is go into court," [Katie Prown of the Wisconsin Guild of Midwives] said.With regulation, you also get peer review, administrative hearings, and civil litigation. When a baby dies in a hospital, is the doctor ever arrested? Of course not. It would make no sense. If the doctor is incompetent or acted with negligence or worse (and sometimes when she hasn't) she gets sued, investigated by the state licensing board, and so forth. The criminal justice system is just no place to deal with a birth gone awry.
"You have to wait for something bad to happen. Investigating health care practices through the court system is expensive. It makes much more sense to bring things under a regulatory structure," Prown said.
Although the legislation was introduced in the Assembly before the baby's birth and death during delivery, it gained momentum after the death. The prosecution, meanwhile, is something seldom seen anywhere in the country.I wanted to point out that midwives in illegal or "alegal" states have a real dillema when it comes to carying pitocin, oxygen, and other drugs and medical equipment. On the one hand, these supplies can save lives in an emergency. However, they open the midwife up to more charges such as "unauthorized delivery of a prescription drug." A midwife could go to jail for saving the life of her client.
Helen E. Dentice, 51, of Milwaukee has been charged in a criminal complaint with second-degree reckless endangerment, unauthorized delivery of a prescription drug and practicing medicine without a license.
The charges were filed in Waukesha County Circuit Court last month after a lengthy review of the circumstances of the Nov. 28 stillbirth at the rural Vernon home of Brian and Bridget Stoiber.
Today I donated my wedding dress (pictured, though that is not me wearing it :) to the Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation. Just placed it in a box along with my shoes, my veil, some undergarments, my mom's mother-of-the-bride dress, and her veil, circa 1970.
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