Definitely NOT a Couple of Farm Boys

I just watched this again. Cracked me up just as much as when I first saw it this morning.

Pay attention to the guy on the left around the 2:30 mark.





If it's faked, these guys are genius actors.

Thanks to our very funny Twitter pal, SherryBGood.

Death by Childbirth

Northern Ireland is struggling towards ensuring that women have choice with respect to their reproductive potential. However it does have something to offer pregnant women that is enviable and admirable.

According to the United Nations, a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth in the United States is 1 in 4,800. In Ireland, which has the best rate in the world, it is 1 in 48,000. In Sierra Leone, it is 1 in 8.

One in eight. Think of eight women you know that are pregnant or who have recently given birth. Name each one out loud. Imagine one of them dying while giving birth. Perhaps a friend, a relative, a neighbour or someone very close to you almost died, but with the intervention of prompt, efficient professional health care workers, she survived and so did her infant.

Fatmata Jalloh’s body lay on a rusting metal gurney in a damp hospital ward, a scrap of paper with her name and “R.I.P.” taped to her stomach. In the soft light of a single candle — the power was out again in one of Africa’s poorest cities — Jalloh looked like a sleeping teenager. Dead just 15 minutes, the 18-year-old’s face was round and serene, with freckles around her closed eyes and her full lips frozen in a sad pucker. …

More than 500,000 women a year — about one every minute — die in childbirth across the globe, almost exclusively in the developing world, and almost always from causes preventable with basic medical care. The planet’s worst rates are in this startlingly poor nation on West Africa’s Atlantic coast, where a decade of civil war that ended in 2002 deepened chronic deprivation.

The women die from bleeding, infection, obstructed labor and preeclampsia or pregnancy-induced high blood pressure. But often the underlying cause is simply life in poor countries: Governments don’t provide enough decent hospitals or doctors; families can’t afford medications.

The above was first posted at Birth Pangs in 2008.

More recent figures on maternal mortality are available in the World Economic Forum's recently released Global Gender Gap Report which measures the size of the gender inequality gap in four critical areas:

1) Economic participation and opportunity – outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment

2) Educational attainment – outcomes on access to basic and higher level education

3) Political empowerment – outcomes on representation in decision-making structures

4) Health and survival – outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio.

Antonia Zerbisias scrutinizes the Catholic Family and Fetal Rights Institute's distortion of the World Economic Forum report and exposes C-FAM's twisted logic and fallacious premise here. She does an excellent job of deconstructing the Institute's partial fact selection about medical care provided to women of child-bearing age, its use of false equivalency and its MASSIVE obfuscations and lies.

She demonstrates how The Fetus©™ fetishists do not value the lives of those they view only as Gestational Support Units, better known to non-zealots as women who are mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, friends and lovers.

A laborious work of non-fiction.

Reality is often more bizarre than fiction. If four years ago, a satirist had written a novel about the travails of a US right-wing political party and a turbulent election campaign that featured a political ‘marriage of convenience’ between an ersatz war hero and a ditzy moose-hunting governor, critics might have found it over the top.

Thus literary embellishment is applied to the gritty re-telling of 24 real-life stories of childbirth.

Zsuzsi Gartner reviews Great Expectations:

The cover belies the bloody, Gothic comedy of childbirth. An infant sleeps serenely, small spidery fingers curved to cheeks, efficiently wrapped in a cone of white blanket like a little amuse gueule - or a Communion wafer - ready to be plucked up and savoured. But inside Great Expectations there is blood aplenty (and copious other fluids, including tears), thundering pain, death and near-death experiences. The final month of pregnancy is Waiting for Godot, then suddenly the curtain rises on Act IV, Scene III of Macbeth. Editors Dede Crane and Lisa Moore have assembled a hot pot of two dozen Canadian fiction writers and journalists, women and men, to reflect on the childbirth experience from the trenches.

Trench?!? Ha! That’s a new one, I’ve never heard the

va-jay-jay called that.