Finished:
Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rating: B+. An interesting look into life as a woman in various Islamic countries. Still not sure what I think of her politics though. Fighting for women's rights, good. Blaming absolutely everything on Islam... um, no...
Ongoing:
Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars, by Cynthia Gorney. A look into how abortion was legalized in the United States in the 60s and 70s. I'm particularly intrigued by the key roles of ministers in the fight to legalize. An excerpt:
[Abortion] was a problem because illegal abortion made a lot of women sick. It was a problem because there were urban public hospitals, like Philadelphia General and Los Angeles County, in which entire wards had been ceded to patients trying to recover from illegal abortion; at Los Angeles County, on any given afternoon during the late 1950s and early 1960s, fifty to one hundred patients at a time were separated off into what the doctors referred to as Infected OB.
Every one of these wards, over the years leading into the mid-1960s, produced physicians whose personal encounters with criminal abortion complications were to haunt them for many years afterward. ... "It looked like a set of intensive-care units, all full of abortion patients. If you can imagine walking into a room where there's anywhere from five to ten patients all attached to tubes or whatever—many times they were jaundiced from infections. You've got foul-smelling stuff coming from their uteruses. You've got shock. And in some cases you'd have patients in congestive heart failure. They'd die, in congestive heart failure, foaming at the mouth."
Gail Anderson walked the Infected OB ward every working day of his tenure at County's obstetrical and gynecological service, and when he took over the hospital's emergency medicine department and people wondered how an ob/gyn man could switch so seamlessly to trauma, he would always say: Well, if you had been where I have for the last thirteen years, you wouldn't need to ask.
Abortion is
not a complicated procedure. It is dangerous when it's done by people who don't know what they're doing, but not when done by actual doctors. Women seek abortions whether they are legal or not, and if they are illegal and done by people who don't know (or care) how to do it safely, these women get sick and sometimes die. This is a very simple point, and I'm not sure how people miss it.
Articles of Faith is quite well-written. I find that my opinion shifts from chapter to chapter, because she presents both sides of the argument so well. But I think my opinion on legalization will always be determined by the excerpt I just quoted. We cannot put women's health in the hands of outlaws and call it a moral stand.
Anyways, I redesigned this site again, inspired by a beautiful day yesterday:
Labels: abortion, books, faith, redesign
