Elizabeth Smart Captor Sentenced

Wanda Barzee, the accomplice and wife of kidnapper Brian David Mitchell, received a 15-year sentence for her role in Elizabeth Smart's abduction in exchange for her testimony against her husband in an upcoming federal trial. Details in The Los Angeles Times.

For the full story of the kidnapping and recovery of Elizabeth, put together from many sources including Tom Smart's book "In Plain Sight", look at this article at TruTV.

Afghan Mullahs Ponder Birth Control

This story in the NYT reports one aspect of the amazing work UK's Marie Stopes International is doing in Afghanistan to help women get access to birth control. That country has the highest birth rate in Asia and the highest infant mortality and maternal mortality rates in the world.

One approach is to go up the power chain to the top, to the mullahs who control all aspects of life in Afghanistan. A noble effort, creative, yet at the same time sad and somewhat freaky - explaining to bearded old men why women need birth control. Here's a snippet:

"The mullahs were reluctant participants. Truth be told, they were paid to show up. But surprisingly, they seemed to emerge from the session invigorated.

'This was a useful and friendly discussion,' said Mullah Amruddin, a tall man in a dramatic turban. 'If you have too many children and you can’t control them, that’s bad for Islam.'"

Thanksgiving Day is a good time to remember the many people, both male and female, who are working around the world for organizations like Marie Stopes International, patiently chipping away at social structures that disempower and debase women.

What's the Best Vegetarian Turkey?

Happy Thanksgiving/ Harvest Festival/ Generic Holiday Season to one and all! Time to revisit this post from last year on turkey substitutes. There's a whole month of foody occasions to shop for and all kinds of people to please, so take a look at what's what in the imitation bird department.

Original Post: Slate's consumer reporter Julie Lapidos assembled friends to judge the Tofurky-type offerings available, and shares the results of the taste and texture critique in this article. If you've wanted to experiment, or if you have vegetarian friends you'd like to entertain along with the meat-eaters, here's the information you need to make a pick that pleases.

Mammograms, Pap Tests, and Evidence-Based Medicine

Personal Posts From Lyn
Among the most annoying features of living in the information age is that the information keeps changing, like those pesky terrorist alert color codes Homeland Security used to announce threat levels.

A close second are the periodic pronouncements from the medical/government establishment about our health and lifestyle habits. Remember when eating an egg was about the worst thing you could do to yourself? That's been reversed. We're getting fatter by the minute. That's still apparently true. Cancer, heart attacks, STDs, and teen pregnancy all have rates that go up and down with reasons assigned, and are different every time.

With that kind of pronouncement history, the latest word from on high that there is such a thing as too many mammograms and Pap smears not only smacks of a "yesterday yes, today no" flip, but it occurred in the midst of an atmosphere of health care change anxiety bordering on paranoia surging around the country for at least six months.

It didn't help one bit that the explanations for the change in recommendations (the fact that they were just recommendations quickly got lost) were rather lame and patronizing, claiming to spare women the anxiety and inconvenience of false positives, which women immediately picked up on and found less than impressive.

WNL would like encourage you in this Personal Post to look behind the lame and patronizing features of the recommendation changes at the profoundly important upgrade in medical attitudes and treatment which motivated them. This upgrade is the rise of evidence-based medicine wherein epidemiology and statistics join with huge amounts of data to find out what actually works.

What do we have now? We have small, hopefully well-designed clinical trials conducted by interested parties before treatments, devices, and procedures are widely adopted. And afterwards, NOTHING. Only if there are voluntarily submitted reports of dire consequences is there any review of things once they get "approved". The result is that flawed devices stay on the market, outdated surgeries continue to be performed, and, as in this case, marginally useful tests are widely purchased and repurchased by consumers who depend on their results.

This article from The LA Times will give you an understandable introduction to evidence-based medicine as it applies to the mammogram/Pap recommendations. Here's a peek:

"...it's easy to identify cancer survivors whose tumors were caught by screening, but it's nearly impossible to put a face on the woman or man who is hurt by over-screening.

Patients are also reluctant to give up on the idea that they can control their medical destiny through proactive measures, said Nancy Berlinger, a healthcare bioethicist at the Hastings Center, a research institute in Garrison, N.Y.

'Anything that suggests that early detection might not save lives is going to be deeply disturbing,' she said. 'It suggests that we can't do much to help ourselves.'

Evidence-based medicine looks at the whole forest, not just a few trees, and that point of view is the exact opposite what could be called the American POV, which focuses the individual. Americans don't tend to see themselves as 1 of 310 million, or 1 in billions, but as me, my family, and people I know.

Looking at the whole forest is going to produce some surprises, especially when things that seem so intuitively right, like measuring prostate specific antigen or performing mammograms, can be negative or even harmful to people. But we need to get both views of reality in order to improve our lives. We need the street view and the satellite view to find our way - thank you Google Maps for that analogy.

An excuse for rationing, you say. We already have rationing, and always have had rationing - it's just called "money talks." Statistics lie, you say. People do lie by moving numbers around whether it's on the stock market or in medical and social sciences. It's up to us to vet the people who are collecting and analyzing the statistics, just as we are responsible to count our change and balance our checkbooks.

For some perspective on how bad things aren't, take a look at what happens when corruption and degradation of public trust really do run rampant in society. This Washington Post article reports how the challenge of H1N1, both the virus and the vaccine, is currently causing a meltdown in Ukraine.

Sperm Donors - One More Thing Going Rogue

It used to be when you wanted to get pregnant using a sperm donor you went to a sperm bank or clinic where FDA regulations mandated that the sperm you were offered was genetically sound, disease-free, and had been quarantined for six months. Typically donors also passed psychological health checks and background checks.

How times have changed! Writing for DoubleX, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt explains you can just go online and get a donor. Cost, restrictions by clinics on who they will accept as donors and who they will accept as recipients (UK clinics will not inseminate a woman still in her 20s) have made a gray market in sperm not only inevitable, but booming.

WNL comments: Get a sperm donor online. What a great idea. What could possibly go wrong?

For an in-depth, slightly more traditional look at the subject, Karyn shares her insemination purchase experience in The NYT. She used a clinic, but also used online resources every step of the way. This long article by Jennifer Egan has other interviews and provides an interesting look at the whole subject of women becoming mothers by choice, not by accident or as a result of hooking up with a guy, with or without the marriage license.

"General Hospital" Most Violent Show on TV

Culture maven Willa Paskin takes on the venerable daytime soap "General Hospital" in this intelligent rant for doubleX. Here's the gist:

"...these two mobsters [Sonny Corinthos and Jason Morgan] are not the show’s villains, or even its anti-heroes: They are just its heroes. They are the most glamorous, admirable, lusted after, manly men in town. The show signals this by giving them some ameliorating qualities to balance out all the bloodshed. They refuse to deal drugs. Sonny has donated millions of dollars to the hospital. They ran a nice coffee shop until it burned to the ground. (Coffee is the “legitimate” front to their business.) Jason is really nice to all his girlfriends. (Even the one who lost her uterus because she was shot in his arms by a bullet intended for him.) In Port Charles, when there’s a hostage situation, a kidnapping or the outbreak of a deadly virus, you don’t call the cops, unless you want some ineffectual idiots to get in the way—you call Sonny and Jason.

GH has taken these morally complex, if not bankrupt, characters and insisted, over and over again, that they’re the good guys. It’s as if The Sopranos wanted you to know all of the terrible things that Tony did and not only be interested in him, but have exclusively warm fuzzy feelings for him."

If you aren't a daytime TV watcher you might have missed GH's transition over the past thirty years from torrid and often ridiculous visual equivalent of a romance novel to a show glorifying crime and violence - often with women as victims. Willa will bring you up to date and offer some trenchant observations along the way.

If you are a fan of GH and find this article unfair, offensive, biased or whatever, don't bother complaining to WNL. We're not taking sides here, just passing along a cool article written by a woman for women.

Mammogram Guideline Change - What?

There's going to be a lot of ink and chatter about the new official guidelines for breast cancer screening, but an initial survey pointed WNL to this outstanding entry by blogger jluther, writing at feministing.com's community site, who says not only"what?" but "WTF!"

What got her attention were the parts of the new guidelines that explained that unnecessary biopsies (those that turned out to be benign) were stressful for women, causing them anxiety and other psychosocial problems.

"What the hell is psychological harm? Are they seriously telling me that dealing with false positives and "unnecessary" bioposies is more detrimental to women than the cancer that could be growing in their breasts but go undetected?"

In addition to quoting large blocks of the new guidelines (rather than just a taste or tease as in the newscasts you probably heard), this post includes quotes and links from relevant experts like Dr. Susan Love and the American Cancer Society to give additional depth and a variety of points of view.

This may be one of those issues, like hormone replacement therapy, where you end up having to make up your own mind. WNL is betting you'll be in a better position to do just that after looking at jluther's article.

Why Not Raise Some Chickens?

Check out Susan Orlean giving us a tour of her modest city-girl raises chickens effort in conjunction with an article in The New Yorker on the same subject. In passing, she mentions that it was a documentary film which piqued her interest in the humble chicken in the first place.

After watching her charming video you might be a bit curious yourself. Mark Lewis' documentary "The Natural History of the Chicken" is available on Netflix and, by the way, gets 4 stars. It's already in my queue.

Intrauterine Insemination - Reasons Not To Do It.

The New York Times interviewed several highly respected fertility doctors to get the low-down on intrauterine insemination, the method of getting pregnant most women use before going to IVF because it's less invasive, cheaper, and more likely to be covered by insurance.

Bottom line: Intrauterine insemination is where all those multiple births come from, from twins to octuplets, and, contrary to prominent media-exposed examples, the results are scary. Why? Read the doctors' frank discussion of selective reduction, premature birth, heart failure in the mother, extended ICU stays, long-term disabilities, using up lifetime insurance benefits, and failure of parents to maintain their marriage because of the stress.

What Happens to Your Facebook Profile When You Die?

This is one of those questions you hopefully won't need to know about, and of course if it's YOU that dies you won't be caring what happens to your Facebook profile anyway. This Time Magazine article is actually for those who have lost somebody or want to memorialize them on Facebook - something which will probably become a widely accepted form of grieving and remembering, if it's not already.

What's Behind the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Wired Magazine's article "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All" covers a lot of ground in one place - which is why WNL singles it out, among all the vaccine yes/no conversations, as one worth your time.

Author Amy Wallace starts with an extended interview of pediatrician Paul Offit, codeveloper of the rotavirus vaccine, and one of the few experts in the field who has written and spoken out extensively as the antivaccination movement has gained traction in the culture with horror stories, warnings of an autism connection, and high-profile celebrity un-endorsements.

Why does avoidance of vaccinations impact the rest of us? Wallace references

"...a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in."

So when does this risk start disabling and killing children in the United States? It's already started -

"In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

"'I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,' Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. 'So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.'”

All You Need to Know About Methamphetamines

For a factual and myth-free source of information on all things methamphetamine, look to this site powered by The National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of The National Institutes of Health. Get your questions answered in Spanish as well as English, in formats suitable for children, teens, parents, teachers, researchers, and health professionals. You can even download pdf booklets, fliers, and videos - all in the public domain and free to use.

Hotels That Help You Cheat

This article by Sara Reistad-Long at The Daily Beast explains what you may have suspected, and all men seem to know instinctively, about hotels and restaurants - they spend a lot of time and energy covering for affairs, laisons, philandering, whatever you call it at your house.

Rihanna's Story Just Part of Domestic Violence

Major media outlets, including CNN, got to hear from Rihanna this week about the violence that brought both her and boyfriend Chris Brown into the headlines and ultimately into court. Like other celebrity domestic abuse, her experience, summarized in the following quote, raises awareness, but not necessarily reality.

"Rihanna told 'Good Morning America' that Brown was definitely her first love, but that the more in love they became, the more dangerous the relationship turned. It was a reality she was too embarrassed to admit.

'I didn't want people to think that I fell in love with that person,' she said. 'That's embarrassing that that's the type of person I fell so far in love with, so unconditionally, that I went back.' "

Here are two other articles that give the non-celebrity backstory on DV - if you don't have money, a new record coming out, and other social perks here are some issues you might find yourself dealing with:

LA Times: "Kathy Cleaves-Milan called police to report that her live-in boyfriend had brandished a gun and vowed to end both of their lives. Within days, her apartment managers served her with eviction papers for violating the terms of the lease, citing the criminal activity she had reported.

'I was punished for protecting myself and my daughter,' Cleaves-Milan, 36, said. Her attorneys filed a lawsuit this month arguing that her 2007 eviction was a form of sex discrimination."

McClatchy reports "Eight states and the District of Columbia don't have laws that specifically bar insurance companies from using domestic violence as a pre-existing condition to deny health coverage, according to a study from the National Women's Law Center."

Why No Women Umpires in Baseball?

Now that baseball season is over it's time to ask a rude question about women in baseball, like where are they? Samantha Henning, writing for doubleX, gets the answers from career umpire Perry Barber, who works high school, college, spring-training, and Independent League games, but can't move into the bigtime because, as she puts it,

"...They don’t want more than one woman at a time, because they know that singly and intermittently we don’t have any power; we don’t have any means of redress for our grievances; we don’t have any of the things that are natural and intrinsic to the boys and the men from the time they’re 6 years old. They grow up in the baseball culture. Women are deliberately excluded from that. Even girls who want to play baseball are directed to softball, because baseball is a game that boys play."

She continues: "Baseball sets itself up as embracing minorities and getting everybody into the fold: “Look, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, and now there are more Hispanics playing, and we get players from all stripes and backgrounds,” and blah blah blah ... and yet, what about women?"

Currently there is not a single woman umpire in professional baseball today—not in the majors, and not in the minors. WNL knows for a fact that there are a lot of women who love baseball passionately. How about making it clear to team owners that women want to see themselves on the field along with the guys?

(Photo, Perry umpiring a Mets spring training game.)

Finally, A Readable History of Feminism

The book is "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present" by NYT columnist Gail Collins, who answers questions and shares anecdotes about the old days in news and broadcasting with Leslie Stahl on WOWOWOW (The Women on the Web).

Among many fun anecdotes about the "old days" which no young woman today would believe ever happened -

"I can remember being on a flight and the pilot came on, and it was a woman, and a bunch of men stood up and walked off the flight. And I know stories about people going to doctors, and if the doctor was a woman they turned around and walked out. And this isn’t just men walking out either."

The Reader Comments and personal stories are just as good as the article. Enjoy, and appreciate for a moment how far we've come.

(Amazing papercut bra by Catherine Winkler. Use the link to see the magnified version.)

Latest Trends in Alimony

Jennifer Levitz takes a look for The Wall Street Journal at the current state of alimony laws around the US, and the moves to modify statutes that were established in the 1960s or 70s. The rationale for change is that times have changed, many more women work, and alimony should not be a lifetime entitlement but rather a temporary assist. The momentum is favoring changes which look to protect the alimony payer, whether male or female, rather than the recipient. Check out the article for details and plenty of real-life examples.

Blood Test Predicts MS Severity Up Front

One of the many frustrating things about multiple sclerosis is that a diagnosis doesn't tell patient or doctor anything about the possible course of the disease. This Times OnLine article describes the problem:

"After a first attack of MS-type symptoms, the disease can develop in several ways. A small proportion do not have more attacks, while most start with the relapsing-remitting form of MS, with attacks followed by periods of recovery. Most of these go on to develop secondary progressive MS within 10 to 15 years of diagnosis, in which symptoms worsen over time. About 10 to 15 per cent of patients have primary progressive MS, in which symptoms worsen steadily from the start, without periods of remission."

Researcher Rachel Farrell and her team at the Institute of Neurology at University College London think they may have found a way to make some predictions which would help determine how aggressively to treat MS right at the start. They are developing a simple blood test to look for antibodies to Epstein-Barr Virus, now believed to be associated in some yet unclear way with multiple sclerosis. The article does a great job of explaining how all this works and the reasoning behind this useful new tool.

Costco Now Accepts Food Stamps

Finally, after years of assuming that people who could afford a membership to Costco would not also be users of food stamps, Costco's management has changed their minds and their policies. The Seattle Times is one of many news sources reporting the good news.

"The rules are different today," CEO Jim Sinegal said. 'People who were in good shape financially all of the sudden are needing some assistance.' He expects Costco to accept food stamps in at least half its roughly 410 U.S. stores by Thanksgiving."

This is a very important benefit for cash-strapped shoppers. Costco has long provided excellent value and quality well worth the yearly fee, especially in the food aisles of its warehouse stores. Thank you, Costco!

The Obamas' Marriage

If you are interested in marriage - how it works and how it doesn't - you'll find this long NYT look at Michelle and Barack Obama's 17-year marriage a good read. They are uniquely self-aware and articulate for a political couple, and here they speak for themselves rather than being the subject of endless speculation and glossy surface interviews in women's magazines. Whether you find President Obama and his policies to your liking or not, WNL thinks this piece by Jodi Kantor has a lot to offer. Quote from Michelle:

“If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help young couples sort of realize that good marriages take work. . . .” Michelle Obama said a few minutes later in the interview. The image of a flawless relationship is “the last thing that we want to project,” she said. “It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair for young people who are trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn’t exist.”