If you do nothing else today, the Jewish New Year, the Christian day of rest, read this article in the Los Angeles Times: "Chinese babies stolen by officials for adoption fees."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-china-adopt20-2009sep20,0,401407.story
Many of those daughters supposedly placed for adoption because of China's strict laws against having more than one child were actually stolen for the $3,000 adoption fee paid to "orphanages."
Read the story and weep--and know that each dollar you spend, whether for clothes or food or adoption, has effects that reverberate through the world community.
As a mother of three daughters, my heart aches for mothers whose daughter was stolen.
Even in remote villages, parents live in fear of child abduction.
"Each town has a family planning office, usually staffed by loyal Communist Party cadres who have broad powers to order abortions and sterilizations. People who have additional babies can be fined up to six times their annual income... an important source of revenue for local government in rural areas."
Illiterate parents who break the birth control rules don't understand that they still have a right to keep their children--intimidated and told they have to pay fines equal to their annual income, they lose their babies.
It's all about choice--whether the issue is forced abortions and baby-napping there or legal access to abortion here.
And it's about money and education--if you have them and you live here, you have choice.
If you have neither and an unplanned pregnancy in China, your baby may be "legally" kidnapped.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
After the Acid Attack
Thanks to Diane Steelsmith for alerting me to this follow-up story by NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins about the courage of young women survivors of an acid attack ten months ago, November 12, 2008.
Though the Mirwais Mena School for Girls in Kandahar, Afghanistan, closed for a week after the attack, it reopened and negotiations are now underway to provide facial surgery for the most severely injured girls.
Read the story on the website of the Center for Global Leadership:
http://centerforgloballeadership.wordpress.com/2009/08/22/a-school-bus-for-shamsia/
Though the Mirwais Mena School for Girls in Kandahar, Afghanistan, closed for a week after the attack, it reopened and negotiations are now underway to provide facial surgery for the most severely injured girls.
Read the story on the website of the Center for Global Leadership:
http://centerforgloballeadership.wordpress.com/2009/08/22/a-school-bus-for-shamsia/
Friday, September 11, 2009
Reasons not to reform health care ;)
Thank you to Betsy Hess for forwarding this anonymous email to me.
Why we should not "reform" health care:
1. Although efforts have been made to reform the healthcare industry since 1912, we should not be too hasty in enacting change.
2. The federal government has no business interfering in people's healthcare decisions, unless a woman is trying to terminate a pregnancy, or the patient’s last name is Schiavo.
3. The government is incapable of running anything efficiently, and if allowed to offer a healthcare option, will run it so efficiently that it will put private insurers out of business.
4. We are a Christian nation, and we don’t believe in helping the least among us. Some people just don’t deserve healthcare. Getting sick is God's punishment for doing something wrong.
5. The current system, with 47,000,000 uninsured, a million medical
bankruptcies annually, and 18,000 deaths annually due to lack of insurance, is working just fine. In fact, we have the best health care system in the world!
6. Even though many older couples are forced to divorce in order to avoid catastrophic financial losses due to medical expenses, it’s the homosexuals who are destroying families.
7. A conversation with your doctor about end-of-life issues is an opportunity for your doctor to convince you to kill yourself.
8. We can afford to spend more on our military than all other nations combined, but we can’t afford universal health care.
9. Single-payer, government-run healthcare is good enough for our men and women in uniform, but to offer the same to the general public would be socialism.
10. Pooling our resources to provide roads, schools, clean water, military, police, and fire protection for each other is not socialism. Pooling our resources to provide each other health care is socialism.
11. Socialism is bad. Very bad. Bad!
12. Health care is an issue best handled by individual states, like slavery.
13. We can afford to subsidize Israel , Iraq , and Afghanistan , all of whom have universal healthcare, but we can’t afford it ourselves.
14. Money and corporate profits are more important than peoples’ health. Sure, reforming the insurance companies would save thousands of lives, but shareholders’ portfolios might be damaged.
15. Freeing people from holding on to their dead-end jobs for the insurance and allowing them to become entrepreneurs would bankrupt our country.
16. Someone like physicist Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die under the British healthcare system. Oh, he’s British? And alive? Never mind.
17. We already have universal health care: it’s called the Emergency Room. Uninsured people can go there for all their health needs (checkups, cancer pre-screening, chemotherapy, etc.), and it only costs the taxpayers a few thousand dollars per visit.
18. The Obama healthcare initiative is part of the liberal-communist-Nazi-socialist-Islamofascist-gay-atheist-zombie-transsexual-cannibal sociopath-evolutionist agenda to take away your
freedom! If this plan is passed, abortions will be mandatory,
schoolchildren will be raped by their teachers, and Negroes will
murder your Grandma with her pillow!
Yes, please do share this with everyone you know. It's important that we
keep spreading the truth about healthcare reform.
Sent by <gralawle@COMCAST.NET>
To: <INTEGRITY-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU>
Why we should not "reform" health care:
1. Although efforts have been made to reform the healthcare industry since 1912, we should not be too hasty in enacting change.
2. The federal government has no business interfering in people's healthcare decisions, unless a woman is trying to terminate a pregnancy, or the patient’s last name is Schiavo.
3. The government is incapable of running anything efficiently, and if allowed to offer a healthcare option, will run it so efficiently that it will put private insurers out of business.
4. We are a Christian nation, and we don’t believe in helping the least among us. Some people just don’t deserve healthcare. Getting sick is God's punishment for doing something wrong.
5. The current system, with 47,000,000 uninsured, a million medical
bankruptcies annually, and 18,000 deaths annually due to lack of insurance, is working just fine. In fact, we have the best health care system in the world!
6. Even though many older couples are forced to divorce in order to avoid catastrophic financial losses due to medical expenses, it’s the homosexuals who are destroying families.
7. A conversation with your doctor about end-of-life issues is an opportunity for your doctor to convince you to kill yourself.
8. We can afford to spend more on our military than all other nations combined, but we can’t afford universal health care.
9. Single-payer, government-run healthcare is good enough for our men and women in uniform, but to offer the same to the general public would be socialism.
10. Pooling our resources to provide roads, schools, clean water, military, police, and fire protection for each other is not socialism. Pooling our resources to provide each other health care is socialism.
11. Socialism is bad. Very bad. Bad!
12. Health care is an issue best handled by individual states, like slavery.
13. We can afford to subsidize Israel , Iraq , and Afghanistan , all of whom have universal healthcare, but we can’t afford it ourselves.
14. Money and corporate profits are more important than peoples’ health. Sure, reforming the insurance companies would save thousands of lives, but shareholders’ portfolios might be damaged.
15. Freeing people from holding on to their dead-end jobs for the insurance and allowing them to become entrepreneurs would bankrupt our country.
16. Someone like physicist Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die under the British healthcare system. Oh, he’s British? And alive? Never mind.
17. We already have universal health care: it’s called the Emergency Room. Uninsured people can go there for all their health needs (checkups, cancer pre-screening, chemotherapy, etc.), and it only costs the taxpayers a few thousand dollars per visit.
18. The Obama healthcare initiative is part of the liberal-communist-Nazi-socialist-Islamofascist-gay-atheist-zombie-transsexual-cannibal sociopath-evolutionist agenda to take away your
freedom! If this plan is passed, abortions will be mandatory,
schoolchildren will be raped by their teachers, and Negroes will
murder your Grandma with her pillow!
Yes, please do share this with everyone you know. It's important that we
keep spreading the truth about healthcare reform.
Sent by <gralawle@COMCAST.NET>
To: <INTEGRITY-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU>
Wake Up Call
They're pouring sand into the gears as the wheels of justice grind slowly on this fall.
People opposed to everything are trying to halt the momentum for health care reform--and they're using abortion to do it. See this report in today's LA Times.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-abortion11-2009sep11,0,7378033.story
I've been watching the health care debate but not doing anything until I read this article today. My assumption was that a fair exchange of ideas was occurring and that some form of health care legislation would be approved.
Now I realize that I need to speak up, email my representatives, etc.--I'm not entirely sure what is the best form of action--because red herrings are being brought in to swing the debate off point.
In my youth I watched the Equal Rights Amendment lose to right-wing voices that said it would cause unisex bathrooms (oh no!) and put women into military combat.
Now we're in danger of seeing health care reform efforts fail because they might have some remote connection to abortion.
Here's how the argument goes: Someone who doesn't currently have access to health care would gain access and then perhaps have an abortion "on taxpayer money." Even if the health plan doesn't pay for abortion and she pays for the abortion with her own money, the presence of "taxpayer money" in her budget would mean that someone opposed to legal abortion might have paid taxes that might have paid for some of her health care, thus enabling her to buy an abortion. Sheesh!
It's clear to me that this strained logic is just another way to halt health care--which some see as Communism with a capital C.
I can't carry on with my life and expect President Obama and my legislators to fight this battle alone. I have to find out what I can do to help health care reform--and do it.
People opposed to everything are trying to halt the momentum for health care reform--and they're using abortion to do it. See this report in today's LA Times.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-abortion11-2009sep11,0,7378033.story
I've been watching the health care debate but not doing anything until I read this article today. My assumption was that a fair exchange of ideas was occurring and that some form of health care legislation would be approved.
Now I realize that I need to speak up, email my representatives, etc.--I'm not entirely sure what is the best form of action--because red herrings are being brought in to swing the debate off point.
In my youth I watched the Equal Rights Amendment lose to right-wing voices that said it would cause unisex bathrooms (oh no!) and put women into military combat.
Now we're in danger of seeing health care reform efforts fail because they might have some remote connection to abortion.
Here's how the argument goes: Someone who doesn't currently have access to health care would gain access and then perhaps have an abortion "on taxpayer money." Even if the health plan doesn't pay for abortion and she pays for the abortion with her own money, the presence of "taxpayer money" in her budget would mean that someone opposed to legal abortion might have paid taxes that might have paid for some of her health care, thus enabling her to buy an abortion. Sheesh!
It's clear to me that this strained logic is just another way to halt health care--which some see as Communism with a capital C.
I can't carry on with my life and expect President Obama and my legislators to fight this battle alone. I have to find out what I can do to help health care reform--and do it.
Add your name
Here's one quick, easy way to show your support for health care reform.
Go to this site and fill in your name as a supporter.
http://www.healthreform.gov/support.html
This hugely important national debate is happening as I carry on with my daily list of duties and errands... but I'm vowing to find time to do my part, rather than sit on the sidelines.
Go to this site and fill in your name as a supporter.
http://www.healthreform.gov/support.html
This hugely important national debate is happening as I carry on with my daily list of duties and errands... but I'm vowing to find time to do my part, rather than sit on the sidelines.
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