the APA task force on mental health and abortion found that there was

“no evidence sufficient to support the claim that an observed association between abortion history and mental health was caused by the abortion per se, as opposed to other factors.”

but try telling that to these people, who can’t even interpret this study properly.

here’s an amusing question, though, from freakonomics: does depression lower abortion rates? (note: i think their attempt to draw correlations between the two things are misguided, at best - if anything, depression would lower abortion rates because so many antidepressants have nasty sexual side effects.¹ and not “nasty” in a good way.)
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¹ which is unfortunate, as some studies suggest depressed people have more sex than their non-depressed counterparts. although the argument may be made that they’re not having good sex, they’re having desperate sex.

this morning’s random bits:

• it’s apparently difficult to get rid of all the personal data on an iphone.
• xkcd introduces geohashing. geekier geocaching for the investment-inclined.
• sometimes i think people would be easier to understand if their speech had html markups.
• nick has photos from istanbul up - quite neat, even if he didn’t take his SLR. apparently his main site is down, tho. is this the end of defenestrate.org?
• bad political news: kennedy’s malignant glioma. good political news: va’s abortion law gets overturned. again.
• and a quasi-art project.

that is all for now.

to hear my dad tell it, back in the day (say, 25 years ago), a country would get a good family planning program going, only to have it derailed by a visit from pope jp2.

ffwd to today: on the heels of pope rat’s visit to brasil, lula launches a program to provide heavily subsidized birth control pills through ten thousand pharmacies nationwide.

sounds like they’ve stopped buying what the vatican’s selling.

in other news, an ottawa appeals court decided that a five-year-old boy has three legal parents: the lesbian couple who made the decision to have a child, and the friend who agreed to father the child. it was the legal status of the biological mother’s partner that was in question.

on sunday while eating breakfast, i was watching the bird feeder on the deck. squirrels had been raiding it, and they had finally ripped its sides to shreds (i’ll include a smallish photo a bit later). it lay forlornly on its side, the remaining birdseed scattered.

a squirrel jumped up on the deck to investigate. as it circled the feeder sniffing for something more appetizing than millet (or perhaps it was sampling the millet - i really don’t know what goes on in the brains of squirrels), it wound up facing away from me, on all fours. that’s when i saw it.

it was a male squirrel. it had enormous balls.

now, i know rodents have big balls in relation to their body size (housemate james suggested it had to do with their quick sprint to sexual maturity), but i had never noticed a squirrel’s balls before. they were furry. they dragged on the deck.

and now i can’t unsee them.

every time i see a squirrel - and there is a sizeable population in these parts - i see squirrel balls.

is this evidence of some sort of gender selection among squirrel parents? have girl squirrels fallen out of favor? or am i becoming obsessed with their gonads (gonads and strife!) and seeing them even where they don’t exist? i don’t know!!!

on a completely unrelated note¹, wapo reports that “Legal experts familiar with the 4th Circuit said yesterday that the court is likely — but not certain — to reverse its earlier ruling and allow Virginia’s ban [on ‘partial birth infanticide’] to take effect.” looks like more reading for me.
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¹ i always have the urge to write “an” before i use the html tag to italicize text, even when the text being italicized begins with a consonant. food for thought.

i’m wading through the decision. i’m sure i’ll have more cohesive thoughts to post soon. for now, i’m mostly struggling with this:

a federal law bans D&X. it allows D&E. a bare majority of justices find this constitutional because the law a) is not overly vague as to the description of the banned procedure; b) does not unduly burden a woman’s ability to get an abortion in the 2nd trimester; and c) because congress decided that a D&X is never necessary to preserve the health of the mother, the lack of a health exception doesn’t create a constitutional conundrum.

okay.

now riddle me this: why did congress decide to ban the D&X? is it somehow a less gruesome procedure than the D&E? reading the reams of graphic descriptions of both, i can’t see how it is. is there medical consensus that a D&X is never the better option than a D&E? nope. the precautionary principle put forward in earlier decisions - namely that where lack of medical consensus exists, the law should err on the side of the patient and doctor - gets merrily tossed out the window.

this is how the court describes a D&E: (below the fold, for those who do not wish to read of such things) (more…)