Taxpayers Get Stuck With The Cost Of Watching Limbaugh’s Bust
I was highly surprised to learn that the teabaggers had temporarily abandoned their Bed Time for Bonzo Reagan fetish to place a bust of the leading conservative authority on recreational vicodin in the Missouri state capital next to Harry Truman, Mark Twain, Sacajawea, and Walt Disney. Unfortunately, it appears that not all Missourians love Rush the way he does so that all taxpayers will be forced to shoulder the cost of installing 24-hour surveillance cameras to protect his likeness from pagans, socialists, gays, and the countless other dark forces who spend all of their time plotting the destruction of Rush and by proxy, America.
Taxpayers Get Stuck With The Cost Of Watching Limbaugh’s Bust
I was highly surprised to learn that the teabaggers had temporarily abandoned their Bed Time for Bonzo Reagan fetish to place a bust of the leading conservative authority on recreational vicodin in the Missouri state capital next to Harry Truman, Mark Twain, Sacajawea, and Walt Disney. Unfortunately, it appears that not all Missourians love Rush the way he does so that all taxpayers will be forced to shoulder the cost of installing 24-hour surveillance cameras to protect his likeness from pagans, socialists, gays, and the countless other dark forces who spend all of their time plotting the destruction of Rush and by proxy, America.
Will President Obama Be Responsible For Marriage Equality In Maryland?
Some astonishing numbers out of Maryland showing a dramatic shift in African-American support of same-sex marriage:
Polls taken since President Obama expressed support for same-sex marriage have shown an astonishing shift in black support on marriage equality. The shift in Maryland is so dramatic that the state may become the first state to actually uphold same-marriage rights in a referendum.
Here’s the gist, from Public Policy Polling:
57% of Maryland voters say they’re likely to vote for the new marriage law this fall, compared to only 37% who are opposed. That 20 point margin of passage represents a 12 point shift from an identical PPP survey in early March, which found it ahead by a closer 52/44 margin.
The movement over the last two months can be explained almost entirely by a major shift in opinion about same-sex marriage among black voters. Previously 56% said they would vote against the new law with only 39% planning to uphold it. Those numbers have now almost completely flipped, with 55% of African Americans planning to vote for the law and only 36% now opposed.
These numbers are almost incredible, and if they hold up, they mean almost certain defeat for the National Organization for Marriage and the other conservative groups lining up to oppose same-sex marriage rights in Maryland. The Maryland legislature passed an equality bill earlier this year, but Maryland same-sex couples won’t been able to marry until after the referendum—and even then only if they win. I’m generally very skeptical of the power of the bully pulpit, but I can’t think of any other reason for this significant a shift than Obama’s decision to come out in support of same-sex couples getting married.
Understand that exploiting the divide between socially conservative but religiously liberal minority groups and social liberals was the linchpin of NOM’s strategy in Maryland, which is a very blue state with a large black population. NOM simply can’t win without winning black voters, and Obama may have made that impossible. Instead of black voters torpedoeing marriage equality in Maryland, as NOM had hoped, they now stand poised to secure it.
So much for the conventional wisdom that President Obama’s position on marriage equality would alienate one of his core constituencies.
Colin Powell Endorses Marriage Equality
Colin Powell recently endorsed marriage equality on CNN:
BLITZER: You were Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when you installed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the U.S. military that prevented gays from serving openly. I know you changed your attitude over these years, but what about gay marriage? Are you with the President in supporting gay marriage?
POWELL: I have no problem with it, and it was the Congress that imposed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, though it was certainly my position and my recommendation to get us out of an even worse outcome that could have occurred, as you’ll recall. But as I’ve thought about gay marriage, I know a lot of friends who are individually gay but are in partnerships with loved ones, and they are as stable a family as my family is, and they raise children. And so I don’t see any reason not to say that they should be able to get married.
This is an important, albeit very late, step for an individual who remains extremely influential despite bearing significant responsibility for selling Bush’s glorious adventure to export freedom fries to Iraq and protect America from a couple of metal tubes.
Pennsylvania Seeks to Defund Planned Parenthood
Pennsylvania is attempting to join the august company of Texas and Arizona by passing bill to defund Planned Parenthood. The bill, the Whole Woman’s Health Funding Priority Act, would put health care providers that offer abortion services at the bottom of the priority list.
Of course, the bill wasn’t written by a member of the state legislature but was drafted by the Susan B. Anthony list, an anti-abortion group. Now would be an ideal time to make a contribution to Planned Parenthood.
Republicans Lawmakers Propose Bill To Ban Anonymous Speech on New York Websites
The Party that espouses limited government is attempting to pass perhaps the most half-witted bill in recent memory. Yesterday, New York Republican Assemblyman Dean Murray and Sen. Thomas O’Mara introduced the Internet Protection Act (S06779) which would ban anonymous comments on all New York-based publication websites, including blogs and newspapers. Under this asinine proposal, a web site administrator would be required to “remove any comments posted upon request unless the poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”
First and foremost, such a bill is a clear violation of the First Amendment (Talley v. California). Assuming such a bill could pass constitutional muster, it would have prevented Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay from publishing the Federalist Papers since they used the collective pseudonym “Publius” rather than their own names. Lastly, if such an inane measure ever passed and survived a First Amendment challenge, the website owner would merely relocate their domain outside of New York and deprive the state of their taxable revenues.
Here is more information on the bill proposed by these two North Korean New York lawmakers:
Online commenters aren’t exactly known for their kind words, but lawmakers in New York want to hold their constituents to a higher standard. A few Empire State lawmakers want to address that problem by doing away with anonymous commenting.
Identical bills in the senate and assembly require anonymous posts to be deleted by administrators of New York-based websites, including “social networks, blog forums, message boards, or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”
The proposal has the tech and legal communities reeling – if not outright giggling. “There are lots of good reasons to ban anonymous comments, and also a lot of good reasons to have anonymous comments, and the state assembly weighing on the issue is strange and slightly ridiculous, slightly goofy,” Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia law school, told the Guardian. “It is hard to imagine the value of a law that would, for example, make Columbia’s course evaluation illegal. Not to mention it’s an obvious first amendment violation.”
If the bills pass, website administrators would be required to provide a contact number or email address for people to request anonymous comment removals. Upon receiving a complaint, the website would then be required to contact the original commenter and give them a 48-hour window to identify their posts. If the anonymous commenter chooses not to identify themselves by providing their IP address, legal name and home address within the 48-hour slot, the website must delete the comment.
Assemblyman Jim Conte, who co-sponsored the bill, says the bill is meant to combat cyber-bullying. Conte wrote:
With more and more people relying on social media and the internet to communicate and gather information, it is imperative that the legislature put into place some type of safeguard to prevent people from using the Internet’s cloak of anonymity to bully our children and make false accusations against local businesses and elected officials.
A variety of cases prosecuting anonymous commenters have arisen in the past few years, but this seems to be the first piece of statewide legislation.
In April, a Texas couple won a $13.8m defamation lawsuit against anonymous commenters who accused the couple of being sexual deviants, molesters and drug dealers on Topix, a local forum website. The offending commenters were discovered when Topix disclosed the commenters information, including IP addresses.
Federal prosecutor Sal Perricone resigned after a justice department investigation revealed that he posted over 600 anonymous comments on a New Orleans news site. Perricone was identified after one of his targets hired a linguist to analyze the comments.
Last year, the Indianapolis Star argued that shield laws, used to protect journalists, should also apply to the anonymous commenters on their site. The court rejected this argument, but did say in other cases, commenters could be considered sources, and therefore be protected by shield laws. They also adopted the Dendrite rule, which gives the commenters an opportunity to respond and demand a significant amount of evidence to prove the comments are illegal.
Unlike these cases, New York’s legislation places the responsibility on the website owners. Though, as David Kravets of Wired notes, “Oddly, the bill has no identification requirement for those who request the takedown of anonymous content.”
Anonymous comments are open and encouraged for this post.
Is The Sender Of A Text Message Liable For Injuries Caused By A Distracted Driver?
That is what is about to be decided in case of first impression in New Jersey:
The theory that the sender of texts to a driver may be liable for a crash that the driver then gets in is set to be tested this week in a state court in New Jersey. On Sept. 21st, 2009, David and Linda Kubert were riding their motorcycle when a truck Chevy truck crossed the center line and hit them head-on. According to CBS News, the Kuberts actually saw the driver “in the truck steering with his elbows, with his head down. And I could tell he was text messaging.” Both David and Linda Kubert lost a leg in the accident. The driver of the car, an 18-year-old male, pleaded guilty to charges including using a handheld device while driving.
In the New Jersey lawsuit, the Kuberts are now suing the driver who hit them as well as his girlfriend, who had been sending him text messages while he was driving. The Kuberts’ lawyer argues that the girlfriend was “electronically present” in the crash and “may have known” he was driving. Linda Kubert says that she believes that if the girlfriend “knew he was driving and answering her back with texts, that she’s partially responsible too.”
Lawyers representing the girlfriend reportedly argued in their briefs that the lawsuit against her is a “leap of logic” that must be dismissed. On Friday of this week, a New Jersey judge will determine if the case against the girlfriend can go forward.
As novel as this theory is, I’m going to go out on a short limb and predict that the Kuberts case as to the girlfriend will ultimately be dismissed. While most states have laws against texting while driving, neither New Jersey nor any other state in the US have laws prohibiting someone else from texting a person who is driving — even if they know the person is operating the vehicle at the time they hit “send”. At the end of the day, Kyle Best (the driver who struck the Kuberts) made the conscious decision to read and respond to Shannon Colonna’s (his girlfriend) text messages. While Ms. Colonna may feel some moral responsibility, under existing law, I simply cannot fathom how a judge could find her legally responsible. Beyond this case, talk about slippery slopes if the judge finds the Kuberts’ distracted driver theory viable. If the court would hold Ms. Colonna liable, would they also holding a jogger wearing provocative running clothes responsible for distracting a driver that led to an accident?
Hostage Recalls How Friendship With A Wild Pig Kept Him Sane For His Thirteen Years Of Captivity
Perhaps wild pigs will now give dogs a run for their money as man’s best friend:
A little wild pig named Josefo, abandoned by his mother, helped keep Sgt. Jose Libardo Forero sane.
For nearly 13 years, Forero was one of the “forgotten” hostages held by the leftist rebels known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. During that unending stretch of his life, spent chained to other prisoners round the clock or confined in barbed-wire pens, he found mental escape in bonding with jungle animals.
The career police sergeant tells of the tiny bit of happiness he found befriending monkeys, parrots and, finally, Josefo, whom he initially kept alive by feeding him milk with a syringe (and who later got hooked on coffee). He says he identified with the pig who had been left behind by his herd.
He felt like he’d been forsaken too, as his FARC captors slowly released all their other political and military hostages. Through it all, he said, one question kept hammering inside his head.
“What about us?”
His ordeal didn’t end until seven weeks ago, when he and nine other men became the last military hostages released by the FARC, bringing to a close a terrible chapter in this country’s long civil conflict.
Speaking this month at a police recreation facility where he is temporarily billeted as he undergoes psychological analysis and counseling, Forero seemed wound tight but in good spirits — and eager to joke in the English he learned from another hostage in the jungle camps.
“Josefo helped make up for the loss of my wife and family,” said Forero, 43, who at 5’2” is short but athletic. “We all need to give and receive affection, and having a little animal to take care of was a distraction from all the stress we lived under.”
But Forero also described the dark side of his time away, the “many humiliations” he suffered in FARC captivity, such as never being given toothpaste, insect repellent or decent clothing, and the 5-foot chain that bound him to a comrade on forced marches, in the latrines, in their bunks.
The rebels never beat him, he said, but their killing of fellow prisoner Edgar Byron Murcia in 2001 for trying to escape was all the intimidation he needed.
“I have more sympathy now for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust,” Forero said. “Before I was captured, I saw pictures of them looking out from behind the wires, of their suffering. Now I see myself in their faces.”
Most of all, he spoke of wanting to make up for time lost with his three children. He last saw one of them as an 8-year-old boy; now the son is himself the parent of a boy.
“That’s my purpose in life, to see them … advance, to become professionals, to travel abroad, to make the most of their lives,” Forero said.
Over the last 15 years, the FARC has taken about 500 military and political hostages. The practice of kidnapping for political ends gained the rebels little public sympathy, however, and served to discredit their movement in the eyes of many Colombians. The group still holds as many as 400 civilian hostages, according to the Free Country Foundation, a hostage advocacy group.Forero’s release in April came amid renewed hopes for a peace agreement between the government and the FARC, which have been at war since the mid-1960s. But as often happens here, optimism was soon eclipsed by terror. On May 15, former Interior Minister Fernando Londono was wounded and his driver and bodyguard killed by a bomb as he drove through a Bogota shopping district. Some officials are blaming the attack on the FARC.
Captured in July 1999 when rebels overran his base in the central state of Meta, Forero spent the first few years in a jungle prison camp with up to 60 other captives. For a time they included Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. defense contractors who were kidnapped in 2003 when their reconnaissance plane crashed.
In the latter years of captivity, he and his nine fellow prisoners were constantly on the move and taken on forced marches every few days, chained in pairs, as the FARC tried to elude detection and “smart” bombs funded by theU.S. militaryaid program known as Plan Colombia.
He and his comrades worried they had been forgotten as the higher-profile politicians, officers and the three Americans were released or rescued.
“It took four years for them to get to us after Operation Jaque,” Forero said with a smile, referring to the raid in which Colombian commandos posing as humanitarians rescued Betancourt and the Americans. “Maybe we were too far away, or too unimportant.”
The frustration finally drove him and a fellow prisoner, Sgt. Jorge Trujillo, to escape in late 2010. They spent a month on the lam, chained together like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in the film “The Defiant Ones,” trying to reach an army outpost before the rebels found them.
In the end, they were betrayed by peasants who alerted the rebels, but Forero says he feels no bitterness. “That was FARC territory, so they had no choice. The guerrillas would have killed them if they hadn’t given us up.”
Unlike in Murcia’s case, the FARC did not kill them for fleeing, for reasons Forero doesn’t understand.
As the years passed, Forero became adept at inventing ways of keeping his mind off the life and family he was missing. He made dozens of key rings and pendants from the fangs of jungle cats and claws of giant armadillos that the FARC hunted for food.
But no amount of mind games could take his mind completely off the misery of living in the open jungle, with no protection against the dozens of kinds of insects with bites that cause malaria, which Forero contracted several times; severe headaches; and leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating parasite transmitted by sand flies.
Forero became the prisoners’ unofficial tailor, taking apart their ragged clothes and sewing them back together to learn the craft. He read the Bible four times through and found God. Over and over, he imagined building a three-story house, block by block, in his native Villavicencio, where he, his wife, Norma, and their children and parents could live.
He stuck to a rigid routine that left little time for “thinking and thinking.” But depression would inevitably creep in. “We felt totally forgotten. The guerrillas didn’t bother to tape ‘proof of life’ videos, so my wife went six years with no news of me.”
But at least he had Josefo. Although the wild pigs, known as sainos, can be vicious and aggressive in herds, Josefo was Forero’s pet and the prisoners’ mascot for about six months. One of the rescue operation’s enduring images was that of Josefo trotting after Forero across the tarmac of Villavicencio airport after his release.
The animal learned all sorts of tricks, like fetching bars of soap from the guerrilla side of the compound, responding to voice commands and becoming a habitual coffee drinker. “He gnashed his teeth or nudged me with his snout when he wanted coffee,” Forero said.
At least until Forero finishes his counseling, Josefo now lives on the farm of Alan Jara, a onetime governor and FARC hostage who taught Forero English and Russian in captivity.
After years of rumors of impending freedom, Forero didn’t get his hopes up much when his captors told him in October that he soon would be released.
“We believed it only when we saw the helicopters coming to get us,” Forero said of the April 2 rescue led by Brazilian pilots and Red Cross officials.
Forero talked about his adjustment to modern life — and coming to grips with what he missed while in captivity.
“I walked from a totally savage world into a new century, ” Forero said. “What’s changed? There are a lot more cars on the streets and electronic gadgets I have to learn to use.”
Apart from a promotion in rank, a computer and medical treatment, Forero said he hasn’t received any special financial compensation from the government for his years as a prisoner. He said his goal now is to go abroad, perhaps as a military attache in a foreign embassy.
After all he’s been through, is he bitter? He says no, although flashes of rancor surface when the subject turns, of all things, to soccer and the Bogota team that during his years of torment never succeeded in winning a championship.
“In the end, I couldn’t waste my time feeling sorry for those losers,” he said, his voice suddenly rising. “I only cared about winners in the jungle. Otherwise I just became more desperate.”
No one owes him anything for his lost years, he said. It is he who owes his wife, for waiting for him, for educating his children on her own and “bringing them up as responsible persons.”
“You learn in captivity you can take anything difficult and turn it into something positive. Letting rancor build up, you become bitter and intolerant,” Forero said. “I learned from God I have to do more for my family. I used to drink too much and was unfaithful to my wife.
“Now, I’m looking for the road to responsibility.”
What a gut-wrenching story, albeit with a Hollywood ending. No doubt this will become a movie of the week and I’m sure everyone wishes Sgt. Forero, his family and Josefo the best after surviving such an ordeal.
Beam Me Up Scotty!
I have to confess that as a kid growing up in Miami in the ’70s, I feasted on reruns of Star Trek. While not a Trekkie, I was an avid fan of the show and marveled at what I thought was impossible, out-of-this world technology. Little did I know that the unfathomably advanced devices like communicators and tricorders would become commonplace today — and used by children. The only difference, they are called iPhones and iPads.
Today, James Doohan who played Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on Star Trek was beamed up into the final frontier. Not through a transporter, but with the help of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket:
The ashes of the actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on the 1960s television series “Star Trek,” were launched to space this morning (May 22) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The unmanned Falcon 9 blasted off at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT) from here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, carrying the Dragon capsule filled with cargo bound for the International Space Station. Also packed aboard the rocket was a secondary payload carrying remains from 308 people, including Doohan and Mercury program astronaut Gordon Cooper, according to ABC News and Reuters.
The ashes were flown under an agreement between the spacecraft’s builder, private rocket company SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif.) and Celestis, a company that books memorial spaceflights to “launch a symbolic portion of your loved one’s ashes into space,” according to its website. “We had a Celestis canister on the second stage, not on Dragon,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a news conference after the launch. “They’ve actually been a customer of ours since 2005 or 2006.”
Celestis charges $2,995 to launch 1 gram of a person’s ashes to Earth orbit. Deep space launches to the solar system start at $12,500, while suborbital flights that return to Earth begin at $995. The human remains payload was not officially announced by SpaceX before today, although news reports publicized the inclusion of the ashes onboard Falcon 9.
“So much for our ‘secret’ launch,” Charles Chafer, CEO of Celestis’ parent company, Space Services Inc., wrote on his Facebook page Sunday (May 20). However, the payload was apparently secret enough to fool SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk. “If they were onboard I didn’t actually know that,” Musk said after the liftoff. “I was focused on other things.”
UK: Older Women And Same-Sex Couples Should Be Offered Free IVF
Good news from across the pond:
Britain’s health advisory agency says the government should extend free fertility treatment to women up to age 42 and same-sex couples, according to draft guidelines.
The U.K. health system generally pays for up to three cycles of in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, for couples who have been trying to get pregnant for at least three years. Previously, women had to be under age 40 to qualify. Many government-funded clinics already treat gay and lesbian couples, but the recommendations now make that explicit, though they are not binding.
The draft guidelines issued Tuesday also say the government should pay for IVF in people with diseases like HIV who request it or patients facing cancer treatment, who want to preserve their fertility. About one in four IVF cycles results in a baby.
North Carolina Pastor Calls For Mass Genocide Of Homosexuals
Pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina, just called for the wholesale elimination of the entire LGBT community by suggesting that all gays and lesbians be put inside a giant fence and left to die:
I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers,” he says in his sermon, delivered on May 13. “Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there… Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out… And you know what, in a few years, they’ll die.”
This man of the cloth hatemonger is calling for the deliberate and systematic destruction of entire groups of people, which is nothing short of advocating genocide. I wonder how long it will take Mitt Romney to show up at his church to show his support.
Supreme Court: Twins Not Entitled To Social Security Benefits After Dad’s Death
The invaluable Julie Shapiro analyzes the impact of today’s unanimous SCOTUS ruling denying Social Security benefits to twins conceived and born after their biological father died:
Karen and Robert Capato were married. Sadly, he died just a few years into the marriage. Before he died, some of his sperm was frozen. Nine months or so after his death, Karen used the sperm to create twins who were born 18 months after his death. She sought social security benefits for the children.
Now some baseline background. If the children had been born before Phillip died there is no doubt that they would have qualified to receive benefits. There’s also no doubt that the children would be entitled to benefits if they had been conceived before Phillip’s death but born after it.
It’s only since the advent of the technology that allows for freezing of sperm that you can have posthumously conceived children. And it’s clear that when Congress enacted the existing statutes, it wasn’t thinking about that problem. (The statutes were enacted before the technology existed.)
Karen Capato contended that since the children were biologically related to Phillip, and since she and Phillip were married they were his children within the meaning of the act. Biology and marriage was all you needed. The Court rejected this view. Instead, it sided with the Social Security Administration. The SSA contended that it’s not enough to simply have a biological connection–whether the parents are married or not–the child must qualify as an heir under state intestacy provisions (provisions that govern distribution of an estate where a person dies without a will) or satisfy other statutorily identified alternatives to that requirement.
The Court sided with SSA in part because the agency is entitled to deference–it’s enough that its definition is a plausible one. That’s a technical point I won’t discuss further.
But it’s important to understand the meaning of this ruling. Given the SSA position, Karen Capato didn’t automatically lose. Instead, the question shifted to whether the twins would inherit under Florida law had there been no will. Florida law provided that the twins had to be conceived in their father’s lifetime in order to qualify for intestate succession. They weren’t and so they don’t and so they cannot get the social security benefits. If Florida changed its law or if a different state’s law applied, the outcome could be different.
That means this isn’t a general rule that posthumously conceived children will never get social security benefits. Other states do have laws different from Florida and might provide for intestate succession. In that case, the analysis would move on to another stage–one not addressed here. At that point it seems to me that entitlement will depend on the interpretation of a different provision of the statute–one that requires that the child to have been dependant on the insured at the time of the insured’s death. Just glancing at this you might think it is hard to see how a posthumously conceived child could satisfy this test, but the fact is, we’ll need to wait and see. This issue is not decided in the case.
I’m inclined to agree with the resolution reached by the Court. It’s true that Karen Capato’s argument is simple and straight-forward–she asserted that a child biologically related to both members of a married couple must necessarily be a child of that couple. But you can see that this argument privileges both marriage and genetics. Other children will have to jump through various hoops, but not those of the married, genetically related variety. And of course, I’m not a fan of either of those privileges.
Remember that this isn’t the end of the story–at least, not for posthumously conceived children generally. Two avenues for change are apparent. State law here is crucial and states revise their laws all the time. And the SSA could be persuaded to change its interpretation of the law.
Surrogate Mother Dies; Premature Baby Survives
One of the rare but heartwrenching risks of surrogacy:
The premature baby boy born to a surrogate mother who died from complications on Monday night has been taken off ventilator and is “doing all right,” according to doctors. Meanwhile, the American woman for whom the Premila Vaghela bore the child reached the city and had a look at the newborn on Thursday morning, doctors said. The identity of American woman was disclosed only by her first name Helen.
The deceased woman’s family members, who live in a small house in a congested lane at the Amraiwadi neighbourhood in Ahmedabad’s outskirts, refused to speak to the media. Her sister said simply, “She was precious to us. Now we cannot do anything about it. Please leave.” Vaghela’s husband Karsan is a daily-wage labourer and the couple have two children of their own.
The newborn weighs a healthy 1.740 kilograms and the hypoxia is subsiding, said Dr Ashish Mehta, consultant neonatologist at the Arpan Newborn Care Centre, where he is being looked after. “He was quite sick to begin with,” he said, adding Helen was alone when she came.
Dr Pravin Patel, director of the Nova Pulse IVF Clinic where Vaghela was being looked after, said she developed complications during a check-up at the clinic around 4 pm on Monday.
Doctors there conducted an emergency Caesarean but she did not recover. She was sent to another private hospital, but could not be saved.
Police had sent the body for post mortem on Tuesday but the report is still awaited.
I hope and pray provisions were made in the surrogacy agreement to provide for Ms. Vaghela’s family as she made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of her Intended Mother. While this will be small solace as nothing can replace a wife and mother, it at least will provide some financial security to Ms. Vaghela’s family as they struggle with their tragic loss.
Kansas Enlists In The Republican Jihad Against Women
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback just signed a law that allows pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that “may result in the termination of a pregnancy.” Naturally, the law fails to specify what drugs might be used to terminate a pregnancy, thereby empowering your average right-wing, God-fearing pharmacist to override specific medical decisions made with a physician based on his “conscience” - as dictated by the ayatollah from Colorado Springs James Dobson - to deny an individual birth control.
Republicans seem hellbent on proving that they love “big government” when used to tell women what they cannot do.
Marriage Equality: Progress In Rhode Island
The tide is turning:
Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee (I) has signed an executive order declaring that his state will provide legal recognition to same-sex couples married elsewhere.
Civil unions are permitted in Rhode Island, but gay marriage is not. The governor’s order ensures that same-sex couples married outside the state will be afforded the same rights and recognition as heterosexual marriages.
Chafee, who served Rhode Island in the Senate as a Republican until he was defeated in 2006, said that he will continue to make an appeal for full marriage equality in the state.
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