Despite repeated requests from religious leaders and anti-abortion activists, city officials in Philadelphia plan to cremate and bury the 47 bodies from abortion provider Kermit Gosnell's case.

In May, Gosnell was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder. He waived his rights to appeal but has 30 days to reconsider his decision.

Once the appeal period is over on Saturday, the city will follow its normal procedures by conducting cremation and burial, city spokesman Mark McDonald said. McDonald did not have information on when it would take place.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Religion & Culture • Urban/City Life and Issues • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

New studies on peer pressure suggest that teens—who often seem to follow each other like lemmings—may do so because their brains derive more pleasure from social acceptance than adult brains, and not because teens are less capable of making rational decisions.

And scientists say facing the influence of friends represents an important developmental step for teens on their way to becoming independent-thinking adults.

Peer pressure is often seen as a negative, and indeed it can coax kids into unhealthy behavior like smoking or speeding. But it can also lead to engagement in more useful social behaviors. If peers value doing well in school or excelling at sports, for instance, it might encourage kids to study or train harder. And both peer pressure and learning to resist it are important developmental steps to self-reliance, experts say.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Teens / Youth

Walk into any American high school and nearly one in five boys in the hallways will have a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, 11% of all American children ages 4 to 17—over six million—have ADHD, a 16% increase since 2007. When you consider that in Britain roughly 3% of children have been similarly diagnosed, the figure is even more startling. Now comes worse news: In the U.S., being told that you have ADHD—and thus receiving some variety of amphetamine to treat it—has become more likely.

Last month, the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the bible of mental health—and this latest version, known as DSM-5, outlines a new diagnostic paradigm for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Symptoms of ADHD remain the same in the new edition: "overlooks details," "has difficulty remaining focused during lengthy reading," "often fidgets with or taps hands" and so on. The difference is that in the previous version of the manual, the first symptoms of ADHD needed to be evident by age 7 for a diagnosis to be made. In DSM-5, if the symptoms turn up anytime before age 12, the ADHD diagnosis can be made.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Drugs/Drug Addiction • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Teens / Youth • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

Almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruled that human genes could not be patented, several laboratories announced they, too, would begin offering genetic testing for breast cancer risk, making it likely that that test and others could become more affordable and more widely available.

The ruling in effect ends a nearly two-decade monopoly by Myriad Genetics, the company at the center of the case.

“It levels the playing field; we can all go out and compete,” said Sherri Bale, managing director of GeneDx, a testing company, which plans to offer a test for breast cancer risk. “This is going to make a lot more genetic tests available, especially for rare diseases.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

The price of the Charleston Crab House’s $26.99 “World Famous Crab House Crab Pot” could go up next year, but not because of the price of crabs or a potential seafood shortage. It’s about health care.

John Keener, who owns both Charleston Crab House locations, on James Island and on Meeting Street, is one of many Charleston restaurateurs trying to make sense of the federal Affordable Care Act and how his business will be affected.

Two things are certain: Keener will need to offer his employees health insurance starting in 2014, and he will likely pass the associated costs of that coverage onto his customers.

Read it all from the local paper.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • * South Carolina

The city of Philadelphia has rejected overtures made by Archbishop Charles Chaput and others to give the babies killed by notorious “House of Horrors” abortionist Kermit Gosnell a fitting burial.

For now, the unclaimed fetal remains of Gosnell’s victims, once stored in the abortionist’s freezer, will have their final resting place at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office.

At the close of the trial that resulted in Gosnell’s conviction on three charges of first-degree murder, Archbishop Chaput renewed the archdiocese’s request made back in 2011 to gain custody of the bodies of Gosnell’s fetal victims and bury them.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Religion & Culture • Urban/City Life and Issues • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

Oh boy, he’s having a baby.

It’s hard to ignore these images of teenage boys sporting “pregnant” bellies and that’s exactly the intent of Chicago’s new eye-catching teen pregnancy prevention campaign.

Launched last month, it aims to “spark conversations among adolescents and adults on the issue of teen pregnancy and to make the case that teen parenthood is more than just a girl’s responsibility,” according to the Chicago Department of Public Health....

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The US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that human genes and the information they contain cannot be patented by medical researchers, a holding that is expected to make it easier to engage in genetic research and cheaper for medical patients to obtain genetic testing.

The unanimous decision came in a case involving patents protecting genes with certain genetic mutations that scientists say can signal a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer in women.

The genetic testing issue has been in the news recently with the disclosure that actress Angelina Jolie consented to a double mastectomy after undergoing a genetic test from the same company involved in the Supreme Court case that showed she had a high risk of ovarian and breast cancer.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Science & Technology • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

Dan Selec, whose son was diagnosed with autism, had a big idea: to train and then hire autistic students to work with technology. In 2008 he founded his nonprofit, the nonPareil Institute, which teaches software skills to those with autism and then hires many of them. Now, these workers are increasingly finding themselves in demand for the skills they've learned.

Watch the whole wonderful video report.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Men • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Today, three to 25 volunteers from local churches show up to serve nearly 350 hot dogs most weekday evenings.

As more volunteers came, [Nathan] Mansell took time to talk with the people gathered, to learn their stories, to know them as more than masses at the ketchup line.

All signs warned him to stay away from [Mikell] Felder.

“Nobody wanted to talk to him because he was so mean to everybody,” Mansell recalls. “But for some reason, I felt called or led to help him.”

Mansell struck up some small talk and showed his concern.

“I’ve been an angry person. I would fight with you in a heartbeat,” Felder admits. “But he showed me love and cared about me.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Poverty • Religion & Culture • * South Carolina

[Justin] Welby, the people’s primate, takes the bus to meetings, tweets about shoe shopping and admits he is tempted to nod off during particularly dull after-lunch synod debates. Only last month, he gave an interview in which he let slip that one of the greatest frustrations of moving to London is that takeaway delivery men get confused when he orders. They have never had to drop off a chicken tikka masala at Lambeth Palace before.

His love of pounding the streets has been welcomed by several followers, not least Graham Daniels, a former Cambridge United left back and now general director of Christians in Sport. “It proves he is fit for purpose, not just theological but physically, too. There are 150,000 sports clubs in the country with 10 million members, so it is great to see that he can relate to all those people.”

It should not be such a surprise that the Archbishop exercises. He is, to use the marvellous Victorian idiom, a “muscular Christian”, which has never been a wholly metaphorical turn of phrase.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • --Justin Welby • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Ministry of the Ordained • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

"The church was really quite judgmental in the early part of HIV and AIDS," [the Rev. Pukuta] Mwanza explained. "It was the source of stigma and discrimination because without sufficient information about HIV and AIDS, initially it was perceived as being solely linked to promiscuity, sinful behavior and so on."

By the late 1980s, though, the church started to change its message and become "a very strong contributor to preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS – caring for the people who had AIDS and for orphans," Mwanza said. "In fact, some of the best practices that have been used in this country are those that the church has been able to adopt, such as home-based care system.

"The church," he added, "...(is) now much more caring, more loving."

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[this U-shaped pod]... is part of MUSC’s emergency department.
There are no locks on doors. The lone bathroom is the only suicide-proof room.
There is no shower for patients here; nobody is supposed to stay long enough to need one. Yet increasingly, they do.
Psychiatric “boarders,” as they’re called, often dominate this pod intended for short-term, acutely ill patients. At times fully half of MUSC’s ER, among the region’s busiest, has been filled with psychiatric boarders.
These are folks at imminent risk of harming themselves or others and need emergency inpatient psychiatric treatment.
Yet there are not enough beds for them all.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Mental Illness • * South Carolina

I am thankful and grateful for Mr Bill Cross, and his surgical team at St James’ Hospital Leeds, who today operated on me for a locally advanced cancer of the prostate. I am also grateful to the nursing staff who are caring for me.

I am thankful, too, for all of you who regularly pray for me and support me, especially my staff at Bishopthorpe Palace.

I will be out of action for some time, and will continue to value your prayers. I look forward to resuming my ministry as soon as possible....

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of York John Sentamu • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

I am progressing, but it is a challenging process to be sure. I made it home from the hospital at the end of the day after surgery and have since had two home health physical therapy sessions. The swelling is going down, the pain is less each day, and the mobility is increasing. My therapist says I am doing well, and so does my wife. There are a series of exercises I am required to go through thrice daily. I confess that the novelty has worn off and I sometimes find patience an issue, but I am not getting this far only to peter out. As far as motion is concerned, I have moved from a walker to a cane. I appreciate your understanding and prayers--KSH.

Filed under: * By Kendall • Harmon Family • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

Both of Jenn McNary’s sons suffer a deadly disease known as Duschene muscular dystrophy. But while one son qualified for a drug that has given him new life, the other didn’t – and his condition is slowly deteriorating. NBC’s Janet Shamlian reports.

Watch it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family

Warrior and Warhorse from The Seventh Movement on Vimeo.

Saratoga Springs, N.Y., famous for its historic racetrack, is among the most idyllic places in America. But on a recent fall weekend, not far from the track, horses were serving a different mission: retired thoroughbreds were recruited to help returning veterans at Song Hill Farm. A group from the US Army 2nd Battalion, 135th infantry, united in grief over the death of a fellow solider, gathered for the first time in five years to be part of Saratoga Warhorse, a three-day program that pairs veterans with horses. Tom Rinaldi reports the emotional story of the veterans, paired with their horses, undergoing a rebirth of trust and taking a first step toward healing.

Watch it all, and, yes, you will likely need kleenex--KSH.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Stress • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • * General Interest • Animals

Our language about sexuality is dominated by public health, with its talk of risk, “protection,” health, choice, and rights. In so doing we scoff at babies—the crowning glory of human creativity—and where they come from.

For all of their intelligence, sophistication, and cosmopolitan ways, Westerners are increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from.

I realize it’s a humorous and ironic claim to suggest that moderns—who dwell in an over-sexed, over-sensualized world—might actually be uncomfortable with the subject matter of sex. But I’m serious. They’re growing increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Men • Psychology • Sexuality • Women • * Theology • Anthropology

I am pleased to say that I returned home last evening. I am finding the whole process a challenge, especially the physical therapy and pain management. I sincerely appreciate the support and prayers--KSH.

Filed under: * By Kendall • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

The surgeon had informed us that if he thought a partial knee replacement was appropriate this is what he would do. We had prepared for a total knee with the hopes of being surprised by a partial ... and by God's grace ... a partial is what he needed! Kendall is out of surgery, in the recovery room with expectations of being discharged tomorrow. Thank you for all your prayers. Elizabeth Harmon

Filed under: * By Kendall • Harmon Family • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

Tomorrow is knee replacement surgery for yours truly, which means blogging will be impacted. Having not been through this before, it is not worth guessing how it may be impacted because recovery and therapy is different in each case. But it will shift for sure.

The procedure itself takes place early tomorrow morning.

I/we appreciate your prayers--KSH.

Filed under: * By Kendall • * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Health & Medicine

Watch the whole episode and then read it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Religion & Culture • Sexuality • --Civil Unions & Partnerships • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Evangelicals • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Theology: Scripture

Even before rogue abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted in Philadelphia May 13 of delivering and then killing late-term infants, abortion opponents were convinced they had a case that could reshape an abortion debate that has remained static over the years.

After the verdict, they were even more confident.

“Dr. Gosnell is only the front man; and the real trial has only just begun. The defendant is the abortion license in America,” Robert P. George, a Princeton law professor and leading conservative activist, wrote after a jury convicted Gosnell of three counts of first-degree murder for snipping the spines of babies after botched abortions.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General

On average, men aren't as healthy as women.

Men don't live as long, and they're more likely to engage in risky behaviors, like smoking and drinking.

But in the past decade, global health funding has focused heavily on women.

Programs and policies for men have been "notably absent," says Sarah Hawkes from the University of London's Institute of Global Health.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Men • Women

Filed under: * By Kendall • Harmon Family • * Culture-Watch • Education • Health & Medicine

Of the crises facing American troops today, suicide ranks among the most emotionally wrenching — and baffling. Over the course of nearly 12 years and two wars, suicide among active-duty troops has risen steadily, hitting a record of 350 in 2012. That total was twice as many as a decade before and surpassed not only the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan but also the number who died in transportation accidents last year.

Even with the withdrawal from Iraq and the pullback in Afghanistan, the rate of suicide within the military has continued to rise significantly faster than within the general population, where it is also rising. In 2002, the military’s suicide rate was 10.3 per 100,000 troops, well below the comparable civilian rate. But today the rates are nearly the same, above 18 per 100,000 people.

And according to some experts, the military may be undercounting the problem because of the way it calculates its suicide rate.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Suicide • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • Iraq War • War in Afghanistan

It is a striking idea that one of the keys to good health may turn out to involve managing our internal fermentation. Having recently learned to manage several external fermentations — of bread and kimchi and beer — I know a little about the vagaries of that process. You depend on the microbes, and you do your best to align their interests with yours, mainly by feeding them the kinds of things they like to eat — good “substrate.” But absolute control of the process is too much to hope for. It’s a lot more like gardening than governing.

The successful gardener has always known you don’t need to master the science of the soil, which is yet another hotbed of microbial fermentation, in order to nourish and nurture it. You just need to know what it likes to eat — basically, organic matter — and how, in a general way, to align your interests with the interests of the microbes and the plants. The gardener also discovers that, when pathogens or pests appear, chemical interventions “work,” that is, solve the immediate problem, but at a cost to the long-term health of the soil and the whole garden. The drive for absolute control leads to unanticipated forms of disorder.

This, it seems to me, is pretty much where we stand today with respect to our microbiomes — our teeming, quasi-wilderness. We don’t know a lot, but we probably know enough to begin taking better care of it. We have a pretty good idea of what it likes to eat, and what strong chemicals do to it. We know all we need to know, in other words, to begin, with modesty, to tend the unruly garden within.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Science & Technology

Sandra Duck thinks she’s the victim of an undeclared Medicaid boycott. And she’s probably right.

When her artificial right hip became infected with the superbug MRSA in late 2009, Dr. Dale Mitchum, a general surgeon, drained, cleaned and closed the infected area. But when the infection returned in early 2010, Mitchum knew Duck needed another hip replacement surgery, which he couldn’t perform. He tried to find an orthopedic surgeon who would operate. More than a year later, he’s still trying.

“I cannot find a living soul that will touch her,” he said recently. “And I’ve tried everywhere, from Tallahassee to Pensacola.”

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Personal Finance • The U.S. Government • Medicaid • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

A Philadelphia abortion doctor convicted of killing three babies who were born alive in his grimy clinic agreed Tuesday to give up his right to an appeal and faces life in prison but will be spared a death sentence.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, was convicted Monday of first-degree murder in the deaths of the babies who were delivered alive and killed with scissors.

In a case that became a flashpoint in the nation's abortion debate, former clinic employees testified that Gosnell routinely performed illegal abortions past Pennsylvania's 24-week limit, that he delivered babies who were still moving, whimpering or breathing, and that he and his assistants dispatched the newborns by "snipping" their spines, as he referred to it.

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A Philadelphia doctor has been convicted of the first-degree murders of three babies delivered and killed with scissors in late-term abortions.

Dr Kermit Gosnell, 72, was acquitted on another charge of killing a fourth baby, who let out a whimper before he cut its neck, prosecutors said.

He was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter of an adult patient who died of an overdose.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Charities/Non-Profit Organizations • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

The former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, will present a bill to the House of Lords next week which would introduce a system similar to that in place in the US state of Oregon.

It would allow doctors to provide a fatal dose of drugs to patients judged to have less than six months to live....The bill, which will be tabled on May 15, is based on the conclusions of Lord Falconer’s Commission on Assisted Dying, a group of peers and academics which held hearings in the style of a royal commission.

The Commission was dismissed by critics, including the Church of England, as a “self appointed” group of euthanasia supporters.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Psychology • Suicide • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Hospitals around the Lowcountry are billing Medicare at vastly different prices for the exact same procedures, according to data published Wednesday by the federal government.

For example, in 2011, Trident Medical Center billed Medicare an average $98,352 to insert a permanent pacemaker, while the Medical University of South Carolina billed $38,902 for the same surgery.

Read it all from the local paper.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • The U.S. Government • Medicare • * South Carolina

We now approach quite a challenging period for the family--two graduations and one knee replacement surgery for yours truly over the next few weeks. We head this afternoon to Vanderbilt for Nathaniel's graduation, then Elizabeth graduates from MUSC (Medical University of South Carolina, a doctorate in the nursing practice [ie D.N.P.]) next week, and then (ugh!) I have surgery on Tuesday the 21st. We would be grateful for your understanding and prayers especially in this time, thanks--KSH.

Filed under: * By Kendall • Harmon Family • * Christian Life / Church Life • Spirituality/Prayer • * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family

Watch it all. It will brighten your day.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Psychology • * General Interest • Animals

When the news broke that her father was about to be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Katharine Welby found herself in floods of tears.

“I ended up crying and crying,” she says, but not because she didn’t want her dad to get the job....

Her weeping was caused by depression. The illness is “a constant struggle” in her life and creates moments of crisis in which she wants to “run away and hide in a hole”. In the past, it has brought her to the brink of suicide.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Stress • Suicide • Religion & Culture • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

An antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea—now considered a superbug—has some analysts saying that the bacteria's effects could match those of AIDS.

"This might be a lot worse than AIDS in the short run because the bacteria is more aggressive and will affect more people quickly," said Alan Christianson, a doctor of naturopathic medicine.
Even though nearly 30 million people have died from AIDS related causes worldwide, Christianson believes the effect of the gonorrhea bacteria is more direct.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

Research published as part of David Cameron’s plan to measure the nation’s “happiness” indicates that almost seven million members of the baby-boomer generation and above admit feeling lonely.

Among people over 80, the proportion rises to almost half, including a large minority who admit they feel lonely much of the time.

But campaign groups warned that the study suggests that the generation now approaching retirement will prove to be a “loneliness time bomb”.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Middle Age • Psychology • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

While the fight to preserve life is often centered on abortion and capital punishment, the future Pope Francis also warned against a more subtle form of disregard for human dignity: what he called "covert euthanasia."

"In this consumerist, hedonist and narcissistic society, we are accustomed to the idea that there are people that are disposable," among them, the elderly, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio said in a recently published book.

Citing examples of intentional neglect, the future pope said: "I believe that today there is covert euthanasia: Our social security pays up until a certain amount of treatment and then says 'May God help you.'"

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Books • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Francis • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

A new poll finds overwhelming support for assisted suicide for the terminally ill among Anglicans, Catholics, Hindus, Sikhs and Jews in Britain, with Baptists and Muslims the only groups that oppose changes to British law, which currently prohibits assisted suicide.

But Britons are debating the topic intensely.

More than seven in 10 (72 percent) members of the established Church of England and 56 percent of Roman Catholics support assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the survey shows.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Life Ethics • Psychology • Suicide • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Many part-timers are facing a double whammy from President Obama's Affordable Care Act.

The law requires large employers offering health insurance to include part-time employees working 30 hours a week or more. But rather than provide healthcare to more workers, a growing number of employers are cutting back employee hours instead.

The result: Not only will these workers earn less money, but they'll also miss out on health insurance at work.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • Personal Finance • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

In the context of a widespread prevailing medical and social praxis that endanger that value of life perennially defended by the Catholic Church, it can be useful to offer some reflections on end-of-life issues, specifically on the difference between refusing extraordinary measures and suicide (both doctor-assisted and ‘autonomous’).

A convention held recently at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome on bioethics and end-of-life issues highlighted a number of fields where the Catholic perspective is in sharp conflict with either current medical practice, and trends threatening to go beyond de facto practice silently occurring between doctor, patient, and relatives in hospitals across the world, to become legislated practices, endorsed by law. One such field merits perhaps special attention, due to the likelihood that a given individual is to come across such a situation in the course of his or her life: the moral question regarding the refusal of possibly life-extending treatment, and the ensuing questions of whether this constitutes suicide, or differs moreover from the refusal of food and water.

In the issue of end-of-life practices, Fr. Maurizio Faggioni, O.F.M., professor of moral theology and bioethics at the Pontifical University “Antonianum” in Rome, affirmed that currently there is a distinction that needs to be made between assisted suicide and a refusing life-extending therapeutic measures.

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While [Dr. Gregory] McGriff says he is forced to do things most other doctors wouldn't necessarily do, he also notes that the disparity — while seeming unfair — has served up a bit of sweet irony: It has helped make him a better doctor. At a time when cost-cutting and understaffing place pressure on physicians to move swiftly through their rounds, McGriff adopted a bedside manner to earn a patient's trust that has now become his signature at Rutherford Regional hospital.

"I make a point to do something that many of my partners don't do — most physicians don't do anymore. I sit," McGriff says. "I sit in the room, and I ask the patient to tell me their story. I'm really interested in these stories, by the way, and every client I meet has a very interesting story.

Read or listen to it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • History • Race/Race Relations • Rural/Town Life • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

Listen to it all (about 20 minutes). Those of you who are preachers, please note: this is a model of how to tell a story. It is heartwarming, hilarious, and oh so wonderful because it is true--you could not make this up if you tried--KSH (Hat tip: EDH).

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • History • Religion & Culture • Travel • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • India

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of Nigeria • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings that left three dead and more than 260 injured, perhaps none face more significant adjustments or a longer road ahead than the 14 amputees who lost a limb.

For these victims, the path forward involves relearning almost everything, from getting out of bed to getting in a car. Whether they go on to lead satisfying lives depends largely on how they handle the spiritual challenges at hand, according to amputees and researchers.

Losing a limb is like losing a family member: It involves grief and mourning, according to Jack Richmond, a Chattanooga, Tenn., amputee who leads education efforts for the Manassas, Va.-based Amputee Coalition. When one’s body and abilities are radically changed, questions of meaning are suddenly urgent: Why did this happen? Why am I here?

Read it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Spirituality/Prayer • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Sports • Urban/City Life and Issues • Violence • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism • * South Carolina • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology • Theodicy

This week, legislators here will consider excise and sales taxes on marijuana of up to 30 percent combined. The proposal emerged from a task force of health officials, representatives of the state’s rapidly developing marijuana industry and others that was commissioned last year to help develop rules for marijuana.

The goal, task force members and lawmakers say, is to set taxes high enough to finance the administration of new laws, but not so high that customers are driven back to the black market.

“We should see a financial benefit as a state that can help pay for enforcement and other fundamental issues,” said Christian Sederberg, a Denver lawyer on the panel whose firm helped draft Amendment 64, the measure legalizing recreational marijuana. “The other side is that if you tax something too high, then you simply crowd out the regulated market. We’re confident we’ll find the right balance.”

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Drugs/Drug Addiction • Health & Medicine • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Taxes • Politics in General • State Government

Nearly 200 church leaders and medics will gather in Birmingham, England, this week to plan new initiatives in health care. Against the backdrop of rising chronic illness in the UK, churches and Christian general medical practitioners (GPs) will outline their initiatives to reverse this trend.

Conference convener, and coordinator of the Anglican Health Network, Revd Paul Holley, said, ‘Whilst the UK’s National Health Service delivers medical services, people’s mental and physical health depends far more on their lifestyles. Poor diets, lack of exercise and relentless stress are taking their toll. More people live alone and lack the support of intimate and community relationships to promote wellbeing’.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

These and other appalling details of the Gosnell trial elicit reactions that might be called revulsion or disgust or horror. The word that eminent bioethicist and physician Leon Kass prefers is “repugnance.” This intense human reaction reflects a sort of deep moral intuition, he says, and it is one that deserves much more serious consideration than our too-sophisticated culture allows.

“As pain is to the body so repugnance is to the soul,” Dr. Kass says as we sit down for an interview in his book-lined office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is the Madden-Jewett Scholar. “So too with anger and compassion. Repugnance is some kind of wake-up call that there is something untoward going on and attention must be paid. These passions are not simply irrational. They contain within them the germ of insight. You cannot give proper verbal account of the horror of evil, yet a culture that couldn’t be absolutely horrified by such things is dead.”

The observation may not sound controversial, yet Dr. Kass, who was the chairman of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, has often found himself in a minority among bioethicists when it comes to abortion, euthanasia, embryonic research, cloning and other right-to-life questions. Dr. Kass's emphasis on what he calls "the wisdom of repugnance," for example, has been assailed by liberal thinkers.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

My read of the evidence is that the Affordable Care Act will have a much tougher first year than was initially anticipated but it won’t be the catastrophe that Republicans hope. The exceptions will be a handful of states where Republican governors have purposefully made it a catastrophe, but that’s likely to make the Republican governors look bad, particularly if the law is working smoothly in states that have tried to make it a success.

Conservative commentary on the law, with its continuous predictions of explosive premium hikes (and continuous omissions of the offsetting subsidies) and gleeful celebration anytime anything looks to be going wrong, is risking the mistake that the Obama administration made early on with the sequester. When the predictions of pain and chaos didn’t instantly come true, the whole narrative shifted in an instant.

Republicans have done a very good job prepping the country for the pain of Obamacare. They’ve not done a good job prepping the country for the people who will be helped by Obamacare.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • Personal Finance • The U.S. Government • Medicare • Politics in General • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Read it all from the Independent. There are two pieces, one for and one against.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Life Ethics • Religion & Culture • Science & Technology • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Anthropology • Eschatology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, one of the health reform law's chief authors, says he’s worried about a “huge train wreck coming down” if the Obama administration doesn’t improve its public outreach about the legislation.

Baucus, a Montana Democrat who is up for reelection in 2014, sharply criticized the administration’s outreach efforts in a budget hearing on Wednesday. He told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that people and businesses “have no idea what to do, what to expect” from the law.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Personal Finance • The U.S. Government • Medicare • Politics in General • Senate • State Government • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

There is a great graphic here and some comment there.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • Middle Age • Teens / Youth • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Personal Finance • Taxes • The U.S. Government • Budget • Medicare • Social Security • The National Deficit • Politics in General • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

The US Supreme Court is scheduled on Monday to take up a case with widespread implications for scientific innovation and health care in the US. The question: Are human genes patentable?

The issue arises in a challenge to patents held by Myriad Genetics, a Utah-based diagnostic testing and research firm that developed a way to detect genetic mutations (called BRCA1 and BRCA2) that scientists associate with a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

The process is described by the company’s lawyers as akin to locating a particular grain of sand in a space the size of the Empire State Building. The tests have helped over a million patients identify risks and develop treatment strategies....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Army Pvt. John Jeffery stumbled into Kyle Boswell's barracks room at Ft. Bliss before dawn one day in February, his eyes glassy.

"I've done something," Jeffery mumbled to his buddy. "I can't tell anyone. It's going to happen."

He had just learned his girlfriend was cheating on him. The Army had decided to kick him out for using heroin. Now the 21-year-old veteran of Afghanistan had downed more than two bottles of Vicodin and Oxycodone, powerful prescription painkillers. Boswell rushed him to the emergency room, and he remains in the hospital psychiatric ward.

The case is a success of sorts — a soldier treated, a suicide prevented — and it reflects an encouraging shift at Ft. Bliss....

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Stress • Suicide • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

While much of the world’s attention has been focussed on one famous person who died this week, I’d like to reflect on another, Professor Sir Robert Edwards, who died two days ago. Edwards was the pioneer of in vitro fertilisation, of what, slightly inaccurately, came to be called “test tube babies.” It took immense dedication: ten years from the first breakthrough, a fertilised embryo created in the laboratory, to the first child born from the technique, Louise Brown in 1978.

And though towards the end of his life Edwards received the recognition of a Nobel Prize, he had to face a barrage of criticism at the time. People conjured up fears of Aldous Huxley’s brave new world and the manufacture of human beings as if they were machines. There were also some religious groups who saw him as trespassing into the sacred mystery of life itself, of “playing God.”

As Jews we saw things differently. We didn’t see it as the sin of playing God. To the contrary we saw it as responding to God’s invitation to become, in the ancient rabbinic phrase, “God’s partners in the work of creation” and in a particularly moving way.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Science & Technology • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

(Please be advised that the specifics of the subject matter in this trail may not be appropriate for some blog readers--KSH).

The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy....

[Yet]...this isn't solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story. Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn't make national headlines?

But it isn't even solely a story of a rogue clinic that's awful in all sorts of sensational ways either. Multiple local and state agencies are implicated in an oversight failure that is epic in proportions! If I were a city editor for any Philadelphia newspaper the grand jury report would suggest a dozen major investigative projects I could undertake if I had the staff to support them.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • Science & Technology • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

[Tracy] Wilder, who arrived at St. John's Ruskin campus in 2001, experienced an abrupt and unexpected role reversal in September. The man who spent his life caring for others learned he had leukemia. Enduring months of intensive chemotherapy, he became reliant on nurses and doctors, on the love of his wife and the kindness of parishioners.

Though hopeful his cancer may go into remission, Wilder, 67, announced in March he is retiring from St. John.

"It's no fun," he said. "There is a terrible sense of loss. It's painful. But I can look back on the last 12 years and feel good about a lot of things."

Read it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Ministry of the Ordained • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

If Dr Karl Deisseroth were an architect, he might be replacing stone or brick walls with floor-to-ceiling glass to build transparent houses. But since he is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, he has done the biological equivalent: invented a technique to make brains transparent, a breakthrough that should give researchers a truer picture of the pathways underlying both normal mental function and neurological illnesses from autism to Alzheimer's. In fact, the first human brain the scientists clarified came from someone with autism.

Deisseroth and his colleagues reported in the online edition of the journal Nature on Wednesday that they had developed a way to replace the opaque tissue in brains (harvested from lab mice or donated by people for research) with "hydrogel," a substance similar to that used for contact lenses.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Science & Technology

The Leclaire boys share a cheerfully cluttered bedroom in their family’s modest ranch located in a rural village about 20 miles north of Brattleboro. A pair of twin beds line up against one wall and sky-blue curtains printed with planets frame the windows. Pet turtles, crabs and lizards inhabit a row of cages and stuffed animals and art projects fill corners.

The brothers have the same thatch of copper-brown hair, deep green eyes, freckled fair skin and they also share something else. Both Austin, 14, and Max, 11, have a rare genetic disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), a fatal condition characterized by progressive muscle degeneration and weakness due to lack of dystrophin, a protein that helps preserve muscle cells. There is no cure for DMD and standard treatments like steroids, heart medication and surgery only manage the symptoms. Typically, people with DMD die by their mid-20s.

There is, however, a new drug in trial that shows promise in stabilizing the disease and possibly even allowing some health improvement. The catch is that this is something the Leclaire brothers cannot share; only Max qualified for the trial, and though he has experienced significant health gains during the past 18 months, his older brother can only look on from his wheelchair as his physical condition continues to deteriorate.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Science & Technology

The unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration's disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.

Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.

Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Middle Age • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • The U.S. Government • Medicare • Social Security • * Theology

Yummy Mummy, a little boutique on New York's Upper East Side, has suddenly become a health care provider/online superstore. The company has been hiring like crazy, and just opened an online call center and a warehouse in Illinois. Yummy Mummy even hired somebody to talk to customers' health insurance companies.

And new moms now seem more likely to splurge on fancy new breast pumps. Caroline Shany, a Yummy Mummy customer, spent her own money to buy a breast pump for her first baby. She may buy another one now because insurance will pick up the tab.

"Why not?" she says.

Read or much better listen to it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Philosophy • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • Personal Finance • Politics in General

You can find the the basic information about this there. But make sure, too, to watch this whole excerpt and then find it and try to absorb the whole thing--just an incredible story all the way through.

Update: The official trailer may be watched there.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • History • Marriage & Family • Sports

A new fight is brewing over health insurance companies letting millions of Americans renew their current coverage for another year — and thereby avoid changes under the federal healthcare law.

That may offer a short-term benefit for certain consumers and shield some of those individual policyholders from potentially steep rate increases. But critics say this maneuver could undermine government efforts to remake the insurance market next year and keep premiums affordable overall.

At issue is a little-known loophole in President Obama's landmark legislation that enables health insurers to extend existing policies for nearly all of 2014. This runs contrary to the widespread belief that all health insurance must immediately comply with new federal rules starting Jan. 1, when most provisions of the law take effect.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • The U.S. Government • Politics in General • State Government

Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees — a major selling point for the health care legislation.

The law calls for a new insurance marketplace specifically for small businesses, starting next year. But in most states, employers will not be able to get what Congress intended: the option to provide workers with a choice of health plans. They will instead be limited to a single plan.

This choice option, already available to many big businesses, was supposed to become available to small employers in January. But administration officials said they would delay it to 2015 in the 33 states where the federal government will be running insurance markets known as exchanges. And they will delay the requirement for other states as well.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • Politics in General

As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We're averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don't even question how much we're doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. In that way, I've come to see that sitting is the smoking of our generation.
........
So four years ago, I made a simple change...

Read it all

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

In the season of Lent 2013, the Titusonenine blog needs to shift in terms of its focus and character.

There are a number of reasons for this, but let me cite several.

First, I have had a significant change in my personal circumstances. My father, as a number of you know, came down to South Carolina suddenly in 2012, in need of skilled nursing care. Since getting him an original place to be looked after, we wanted to move him closer to ourselves here in Summerville if possible, and recently a spot has opened up at the Presbyterian Home here (they now call themselves “The Village at Summerville”).

Dad has just moved to this new facility in early 2013. He is 80, and neither of us is getting any younger. My wife and I would like to see him more often, and this is a wonderful opportunity.

Also, my right knee has been a continuing and worsening problem. A number of years back I had surgery for a torn meniscus. Then a couple of years ago the pain began to inch up to the point of being more and more of a distraction and obstacle. It was time to go to the doctor (yuck). I have now been to two specialists, both of whom say I need a knee replacement. When this was first proposed, I nearly screamed (by the way I am not getting older and not in denial either [g]). Now that both of them and my wife and my co-worker at the parish where I serve have said it is time, the jig is up. It looks like the procedure will be in the late spring. I need to get ready.

Second, the situation in the diocese is demanding. The conflict with the national Episcopal Church is a real mess and it is not only personally and emotionally draining, it is spiritually challenging. True, is also an opportunity, but I need to retool the engines so to speak in order to live into that possibility.

Thirdly, the parish where I serve is headed into a new Lenten series entitled “into the wilderness.” The more I wrestled and prayed with the theme the more appropriate I sensed it would be for me to be more in the wilderness also in terms of a blog break.

Finally, although I can scarcely believe it, this blog has been in operation for ten years as of next month. Somehow that timing, also, makes this choice appropriate.

In any event, with the exception of some Anglican and South Carolina news and developments, blog posts will focus on theological and devotional topics as well as open threads on edifying discussion topics, and I will be posting occasionally with help from others.

I wish all of you a blessed lent 2013, and ask your prayers for myself, my family and the diocese of South Carolina. Thank you for your readership, participation, and support—KSH.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Conflicts • TEC Conflicts: South Carolina • * By Kendall • Harmon Family • * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Lent • * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Health & Medicine • * Theology • Pastoral Theology

One month after the Coalition’s ‘mid-term review’ sidestepped a pledge to cap social care funding, it appears the Government are finally willing to show their hand.
Today's announcement will impose a limit of £75,000 on the amount that individuals will have to pay towards their own care – after which point, the state will cover further costs.
Demos analysis shows a cap set at that level is miserly, helping only 16% of older people.
However, there remains another significant problem - one that risks further alienating the kind of middle class families already reeling from having their child benefit cut and marriage tax break postponed. The scheme contains a hidden penalty for couples, and for their children.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Science & Technology • * Theology • Anthropology

Nearly 70 years later, Chaney is among the dwindling number of South Carolinians who fought in World War II. And at 87, he may be among the oldest to receive post-traumatic stress disorder benefits for it.

After decades of nightmares and sessions with doctors, Chaney last year was approved based on his World War II experiences that, according to some of the paperwork involved, included much more than spanning Europe’s rivers and streams.

“My unit was involved in the release of prisoners of war at the Buchenwald concentration camp,” he said in one account his family provided to the Department of Veterans Affairs. “The prisoners looked like walking skeletons and some died while I was there. We used big earth moving machines to dig massive graves.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

The local diocese of the Anglican Church has gone to Federal Court in a bid to reverse the federal health-care cuts to the refugee program.

In a hearing Wednesday in Federal Court in Winnipeg, the Rupert's Land Diocese made an application for judicial review, effectively asking the court to rule the Harper government cuts are a breach of contract with sponsoring organizations and order the government to keep them in place.

"All we want is a declaration of a breach (of contract)," lawyer David Matas told Federal Court Judge James O'Reilly during a two-hour hearing.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Canada • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Canada

On Jan. 30, the Obama administration unveiled a long list of exemptions from the ObamaCare insurance mandate. Flaws and contradictions in the law will cause millions of people to be uninsured. The administration also estimated that the cheapest family plan will cost $20,000 by 2016. This new information indicates that the Affordable Care Act is failing in both goals: making insurance affordable and covering the uninsured.

Children are the biggest victims. The hastily drafted law, passed before it was read, overlooked them.

The law says that beginning in 2014, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer coverage or pay a penalty. The law's sloppy drafting left it unclear whether that meant worker's coverage or family coverage.

Read it all from IBD.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • The U.S. Government • Politics in General • House of Representatives • Office of the President • Senate

...the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.

Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • Personal Finance • Pensions • The Credit Freeze Crisis of Fall 2008/The Recession of 2007-- • The U.S. Government • Medicare • Social Security • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

As the Duchess of Cambridge emerges from the ordeal of pregnancy sickness and displays her discreet bump to the world’s press, it is sobering to remember that more than one in five women becoming pregnant in the UK choose not to give birth, but to have an abortion. The latest available figures show that only 1 per cent of these are carried out because the baby would be born handicapped. Another 98 per cent are on the grounds that the continuation of the pregnancy would carry a risk to the woman’s mental health.

All told, more than 190,000 abortions are carried out each year on this basis – yet Professor Clare Gerada, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, has admitted that the risk is not objectively tested. “What we have is what the woman tells us,” she says. “It isn’t for me to judge her or be moralistic. It’s for me to explore potential other options but to take her at face value.” In other words, if a woman asks for an abortion, she will almost certainly get one.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Thus far, courts have avoided the issue of a corporation's religious rights, Friedman says. In some cases, judges have ruled that plaintiffs have not demonstrated "substantial burden," simply because it's easier than weighing in on the First Amendment and RFRA rights of companies, he said.

If one or more of the cases against the employer contraceptive mandate is successfully appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, justices will face a tricky set of intertwined issues: whether or not a corporation can practice religion; whether or not a corporation has the same religious freedom as its owners; and whether or not being required to cover contraceptives violates a corporation's—or its owners'—religious freedom.

"It's one of the most difficult legal questions I've seen, in terms of all the issues that are intertwined," said Friedman, who runs the Religion Clause blog and wrote about the issue last month. "There really haven't been any [courts] that have said corporations themselves have religious rights. They've either avoided the issue [by finding no substantial burden] or said the corporation can assert the owners' rights."

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life

...unlike other holdups, this robber isn’t after cash. He wants painkillers, primarily oxycodone, and the pharmacist is the only one who can access it.

Unprepared for such a threatening scenario, the pharmacist complies, and the robber flees with hundreds, if not thousands, of pills.

This scenario happened at least 13 times at Lowcountry pharmacies in 2012, up from about four in 2011. It’s a trend that’s been spreading across the country over the past few years, and it’s indicative of just how addictive these drugs can be and the profits thieves stand to make by stealing them.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Drugs/Drug Addiction • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Police/Fire • * South Carolina

Elizabeth and I finally got to this and it was simply lovely in every sense. Touching, moving, well acted and produced--it has all the hallmarks of a true story, based as it is on the diaries of one who worked as a midwife as it is--KSH.

Filed under: * By Kendall • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • History • Movies & Television • Women • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

The Holy Orthodox Christian Faith is unabashedly pro-life. The Lord Jesus Christ was recognized and worshipped in His mother’s womb while yet unborn by the Holy Forerunner who was also still in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:44); St. Basil the Great (4th Century), one of the universal teachers of the faith, dared to call murderers those who terminate the life of the fetus. The Church has consistently held that children developing in the womb should be afforded every protection given to those outside the womb. There is no moral, religious or scientific rationale which can justify making a distinction between the humanity of the newly-conceived and that of the newly-born.

Abortion on demand not only ends the life of a child, but also injures the mother of that child, often resulting in spiritual, psychological and physical harm. Christians should bring the comfort of the Gospel to women who have had abortions, that our loving God may heal them. The Orthodox Church calls on her children, and indeed all of society, to provide help to pregnant mothers who need assistance brining their children safely into the world and providing these children loving homes.

On the occasion of this sorrowful anniversary, and as we mourn the violence we all too often visit upon one another, as exemplified by the recent mass killings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut, we pray for an end to the violence of abortion. Surely the many ways in which we as a people diminish the reverence and respect for human life underlie much of this violence. The disrespect for human life in the womb is no small part of this. Let us offer to Almighty God our repentance for the evil of abortion on demand and extend our hearts and hands to embrace life.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • Philosophy • Psychology • Religion & Culture • Science & Technology • Violence • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Orthodox Church • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Every day more than 1.5 million Ohioans, nearly 14 percent of our population, wake up without health insurance coverage. As a result, many of them go without treatment until their condition becomes more severe and more costly to address. Often when they do seek treatment, it is in the most expensive way possible: through emergency rooms and hospitals. The cost of caring for the uninsured falls to everyone. Those with health coverage pay more in treatment costs, and we all pay more in taxes to support local and state public health programs.

This budget cycle the Governor and legislature have an opportunity to control health care costs for the benefit of all Ohioans by expanding our Medicaid program, as provided for in the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA). To do so is consistent with Gov. Kasich's efforts over the last two years to transform Medicaid in Ohio - reducing costs and improving the program's efficiency.
As Christian leaders, we hear the call of Jesus to reach out to the poor and those on the margins of society. We believe that Medicaid Expansion will help stabilize health care to the poor and marginalized among us. We are leaders of a faith community that believes all are equal in the sight of God.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • * Economics, Politics • Economy • The U.S. Government • Budget • Medicare

I looked it up and found that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, learning problems, attention-deficit disorders, autism and related disorders, and developmental delays increased about 17 percent between 1997 and 2008. One in six American children was reported as having a developmental disability between 2006 and 2008. That’s about 1.8 million more children than a decade earlier.

Soon, I learned that medical researchers, sociologists, and demographers were more worried about the proliferation of older parents than my friends and I were. They talked to me at length about a vicious cycle of declining fertility, especially in the industrialized world, and also about the damage caused by assisted-reproductive technologies (ART) that are commonly used on people past their peak childbearing years. This past May, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 8.3 percent of children born with the help of ART had defects, whereas, of those born without it, only 5.8 percent had defects.

A phrase I heard repeatedly during these conversations was “natural experiment.” As in, we’re conducting a vast empirical study upon an unthinkably large population...

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Men • Science & Technology • Women • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

“We the People” have not and will not ratify the lethal logic of Roe v. Wade. That notorious decision of 1973 is the most consequential moral and political event of the last half century of our nation’s history. It has produced a dramatic realignment of moral and political forces, led by evangelicals and Catholics together, and joined by citizens beyond numbering who know that how we respond to this horror defines who we are as individuals and as a people. Our opponents, once so confident, are now on the defensive. Having lost the argument with the American people, they desperately cling to the dictates of the courts. No longer able to present themselves as the wave of the future, they watch in dismay as a younger generation recoils in horror from the bloodletting of an abortion industry so arrogantly imposed by judges beyond the rule of law.

We do not know, we do not need to know, how the battle for the dignity of the human person will be resolved. God knows, and that is enough. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta and saints beyond numbering have taught us, our task is not to be successful but to be faithful. Yet in that faithfulness is the lively hope of success. We are the stronger because we are unburdened by delusions. We know that in a sinful world, far short of the promised Kingdom of God, there will always be great evils. The principalities and powers will continue to rage, but they will not prevail.

In the midst of the encroaching darkness of the culture of death, we have heard the voice of him who said, “In the world you will have trouble. But fear not, I have overcome the world.” Because he has overcome, we shall overcome. We do not know when; we do not know how. God knows, and that is enough.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • History • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Theology: Scripture

We agree with Obama that it will take a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to put the government's fiscal house in order. Republicans swallowed hard and accepted an increase in tax rates for the highest incomes to start the year. It's the Democrats' turn to recognize that federal benefit programs, and particularly healthcare entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid, are on an unsustainable path despite the savings from the 2010 healthcare law.

Obama should lead a Democratic push for reforms that preserve these programs for those who need them, while also reducing the deficit and stopping the federal debt from growing faster than the economy. He's in the best position to lead on this issue, able to provide political cover for Democrats concerned that their constituents won't put up with changes to the status quo, while showing Republicans that there are ways to save money without abandoning the government's commitment to the elderly and poor. To create an opening for the rest of his agenda, he needs to step up to that role.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • * Economics, Politics • Economy • The U.S. Government • Budget • Medicare • Social Security • The National Deficit • Politics in General • House of Representatives • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • Senate • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

For more than 50 years, Bishop David Ball has visited the sick and dying in local hospitals, offering them healing prayers, a gentle touch and often a funny story to cheer them up.

Now, after a fall in July that broke the 86-year-old Episcopal prelate's neck but not his spirit, he finds himself in the unaccustomed position of being on the receiving end of so much proffered grace.

"I'm grateful and amazed by the kindness and skill of the care I'm receiving here," Ball said Friday afternoon at Albany Medical Center Hospital during a pause in a physical therapy session

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine

Texas churches are taking precautions to try to help congregants avoid the flu — keeping hand sanitizer at the ready, telling them they can skip the shared communion chalice, and encouraging a bow, nod or even fist bump instead of shaking hands.

As people left a morning Mass on Sunday at St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas, many stopped at a table in the vestibule to bathe their hands in hand sanitizer. Church leaders also are advising parishioners that they can take just bread for Holy Communion and skip the wine, which is sipped from a shared cup. During the sign of peace when parishioners greet each other, they can nod or bow instead of shaking hands.

"There's a lot of head bowing or nodding toward your neighbor," said the Rev. Edwin Leonard.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Religion & Culture

The Abortion Statistics for England and Wales in 2010 were published in May 2011...tell us (Table 9) that in 2010 there were only 482 abortions for Down's syndrome, 164 for Edwards syndrome and 51 for Patau’s syndrome. Together these made up 30% of the 2,290 abortions carried out for congenital abnormalities (ground E) in that year. But the total with one of these three conditions is only 697.

The disparities are astounding. 740 babies aborted with one of the three trisomy conditions, or 51.5% of the NDSCR’s total of 1,437, were apparently not reported by the Department of Health. For Down's syndrome 460 out of 942, or 49%, were not reported.

If the NDSCR statistics are accurate, and there is no reason to doubt them, then this means that the Department of Health is being notified about less than half of the abortions carried out for trisomy 13, 18 or 21.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • --Wales • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product was around 38 percent in 1965. It is around 74 percent now. Debt could approach a ruinous 90 percent of G.D.P. in a decade and a cataclysmic 247 percent of G.D.P. 30 years from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office and JPMorgan.

By 2025, entitlement spending and debt payments are projected to suck up all federal revenue. Obligations to the elderly are already squeezing programs for the young and the needy. Those obligations will lead to gigantic living standard declines for future generations. According to the International Monetary Fund, meeting America’s long-term obligations will require an immediate and permanent 35 percent increase in all taxes and a 35 percent cut in all benefits....

[The final 'solution didn't] involve a single hard decision. It did little to control spending. It abandoned all of the entitlement reform ideas that have been thrown around.

Whom should we blame for this? Again, we should not blame Obama and Boehner. In their different ways, they and a number of other people in the Congress are trying to find a politically palatable way to deal with these hard issues. They got what conditions allowed.

Ultimately, we should blame the American voters. The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money. Many voters have decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren. They have decided they like borrowing up to $1 trillion a year for tax credits, disability payments, defense contracts and the rest. They have found that the original Keynesian rationale for these deficits provides a perfect cover for permanent deficit-living. They have made it clear that they will destroy any politician who tries to stop them from cost-shifting in this way.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • History • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Taxes • The U.S. Government • Medicare • Social Security • Politics in General • House of Representatives • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • Senate • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

The personal and the pastoral...both inform Ms. [Rita] Brock’s work. She writes about her father in her recent book “Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War.” Her co-author, Gabriella Lettini, is a theologian whose extended family includes veterans emotionally damaged by wartime experience. In the Soul Repair Center, Ms. Brock collaborates with the Rev. Herman Keizer Jr., who was an Army chaplain for 40 years.

Over the past three years, Ms. Brock and Ms. Lettini have spoken about moral injury and soul repair at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting and at denominational gatherings of Presbyterians and Unitarian Universalists.

Now, with a $650,000 two-year grant from the Lilly Endowment and the formal support of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Soul Repair Center is beginning to teach congregational leaders how to address moral injury in veterans. The first such training session will take place in early February.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Violence • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

Nancy Kehoe, a Sacred Heart sister and clinical psychologist, is the author of Wrestling With our Inner Angels: Faith, Mental Illness, and the Journey to Wholeness. When she began working with people with mental illness 30 years ago, faith issues were ignored because mental health professionals were not trained to respond adequately when a patient spoke about spirituality, she said.

“It was really unheard of in 1981 to have anyone suggest that it would be worthwhile to have a conversation with people with serious mental illness about religion because up until then, it was really just seen as part of their symptoms or a defense,” she said. “Either people pathologized [faith] or they ignored it.”

Contrary to the prevailing belief that faith was a part of a patient’s mental illness, Sister Nancy soon discovered that it was often part of an individual’s inner strength.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Mental Illness • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • * Theology • Anthropology • Pastoral Theology

So it was that a few weeks later, two first-year nursing students, Cindy Santiago, 26, and Michelle Elliot, 52, arrived at Ms. Keochareon’s tiny house, a few miles from the college. She was bedbound, cared for by a loyal band of relatives, hospice nurses and aides. Both students were anxious.

“Sit on my bed and talk to me,” Ms. Keochareon said. The students hesitated, saying they had been taught not to do that, to prevent transmission of germs. What they knew of nursing in hospitals — “I’m here to take your vitals, give you your medicine, O.K., bye,” as Ms. Santiago put it — was different, after all....

For Ms. Keochareon, this was a chance to teach something about the profession she had found late and embraced — she became a nurse at 40, after raising her daughter and working for years on a factory floor.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Education • Health & Medicine • Young Adults • * Theology • Anthropology • Eschatology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Drugs/Drug Addiction • Health & Medicine • History • Psychology • Suicide • Science & Technology • Teens / Youth • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Personal Finance • The U.S. Government

There are two major reasons for Medicare’s rising costs. The first is the program’s design, often tweaked but left fundamentally intact since its creation in 1965, which basically pays doctors and hospitals fixed fees for whatever they do. At a time of rapid (and often beneficial) medical innovation, the dominant incentive has been to provide more, and more expensive, care. Hence the House Ways and Means Committee’s 1965 estimate that Medicare hospital insurance would cost $9 billion by 1990 fell short by $58 billion. The second reason costs keep going up, of course, is the rising number of elderly eligible for Medicare, which is inevitable; the 50 million beneficiaries today will be 78 million in 2030.

The ultimate solution is structural: to limit growth in expenditures per beneficiary. Easier said than done. Liberals would empower the Independent Payments Advisory Board (IPAB) to stop payment for treatments it deems not cost-effective. The idea hasn’t gotten very far, partly because Republicans denounce it as “rationing.” Conservatives favor “premium support,” which would subsidize seniors to shop among competing insurance plans, but Democrats, the president included, have tarred that idea as a skimpy “voucher.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • * Economics, Politics • Economy • The U.S. Government • Medicare • Politics in General • House of Representatives • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • Senate

Prosecutors are investigating an organ donor scandal in the east German city of Leipzig in which doctors allegedly manipulated an organ waiting list.

Three doctors have been suspended at the Leipzig University Clinic's organ transplant centre.

German media report that 38 patients with liver problems were falsely listed as dialysis cases in order to shorten their wait for a transplant.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Science & Technology • * International News & Commentary • Europe • Germany • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

A year ago, Lloyd Hale drove past the four-story building once called the S.C. Lunatic Asylum, now a hulking souvenir to a bygone day when thousands of the state’s most severely mentally ill were locked up on this campus in Columbia.

He passed a string of ghostly vacant buildings and slowed. He stopped at the final building, the one in whose wards he spent 18 months of his young life, the months when the real Lloyd Hale surfaced from delusions that had claimed his reality, his family, his freedom — and another man’s life.

Hale parked his state-issued work vehicle at the building.

In the silence and privacy of his car, he cried, sobbing for his younger self, the one so nearly lost to the delusional grip of schizophrenia. And he cried for the real Lloyd Hale, the one who was rescued, the one who now helps others tangled in mental illness.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Mental Illness • * South Carolina

...social care is in crisis. There are now around 800,000 older people who desperately need social care but who get no help at all.

It is of deep concern to me that pensioners who have more than £23,500 have to pay for their social care costs in full. Many older people who have saved hard, but are by no means wealthy, see their hard earned savings disappear in a matter of months.
Each year around 20,000 older people have to sell their homes to pay for care, one in two people have to pay £20,000 in care costs. One in ten people pay more than £100,000. That is a national scandal. We should all have the peace of mind that that we will be cared for in the right way when our bodies start to fail.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • Archbishop of York John Sentamu • * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

Ellen Wright Clayton, a specialist in law and genetics at Vanderbilt University, says there aren't many possibilities. "The only thing they can be looking for here is to see whether the killer had certain genetic variants that may predispose to mental illness or to violence," she says.

Scientists have spent decades studying these genetic variants. But can a person's genes reveal why they commit mass murder?

"Absolutely not," Clayton says. "Genetic variants do not explain criminal behavior."

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Science & Technology • Violence • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Know your enemy, we tell ourselves; knowledge is power. Laurie Hunter wanted to know what disease was attacking her daughter Amanda, who by the age of 2 months was not developing normally. Her muscle tone was low. She wasn't lifting her head. She was slow to talk, and she didn't walk until she was 2.

"As a mother, you know that everything that happens to your child is not your fault, yet you still feel responsible," says Hunter, 42, a high school English teacher who lives in Jackson, N.J. "We turned to genetic testing because I wanted answers." The first tests, done at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) when Amanda was 4, came back normal. So did another round when she was 9. Doctors could not figure out what was making Amanda weak--even as she got weaker and slower and stopped being able even to blow her nose. "It's like her muscles are getting tighter and not moving in the way they should," Hunter said. But the doctors held out hope. Genetic testing grows more sophisticated every day, they said, allowing researchers to explore a child's health down to every last typo on a chromosome.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Science & Technology • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

For the first time ever in Denmark, a survey has shown how many foetuses show signs of life following a late term termination, according to Kristeligt Dagblad.

Previously, conventional wisdom has suggested that 10 per cent of foetuses gasped or showed other signs of life following a late term abortion between the 12th and 22nd week of pregnancy.

But statistics from Denmark’s second largest maternity clinic at the Aarhus University Hospital Skejby show that out of 70 late terminations between August 2011 and November 2012, 11 – or 16 per cent - showed signs of life.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Life Ethics • Science & Technology • * International News & Commentary • Europe • Denmark • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

For young people exposed to gun trauma — like the students of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — the road to recovery can be long and torturous, marked by anxiety, nightmares, school trouble and even substance abuse. Witnessing lethal violence ruptures a child’s sense of security, psychiatrists say, leaving behind an array of emotional and social challenges that are not easily resolved.

But the good news is that most of these children will probably heal.

“Most kids, even of this age, are resilient,” said Dr. Glenn Saxe, chairman of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. “The data shows that the majority of people after a trauma, including a school assault, will end up doing O.K.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • History • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Stress • Violence • Young Adults • * Theology • Anthropology • Pastoral Theology

It is time, instead, to address one aspect of American exceptionalism of which I am not proud. We are the only advanced nation where medical bankruptcies are routine - as are deaths due to lack of access to proper health care.

And the worst part of the latter is the fact that mental health care is particularly unavailable to anyone who is not wealthy, or lucky enough to have mental health coverage through her or his insurance.

Persons with mental health problems need to be identified and helped....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Personal Finance • The U.S. Government • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

An anniversary slipped by this year that cannot - and must not - go unremarked. It is a decade since Virginia Haussegger's pivotal ''The sins of our feminist mothers'' was published on this page. Haussegger's opinion piece articulated the anger and frustration of a generation of women left childless as a result of their feminist mothers promoting the myth of ''having it all'': the career, the husband and the babies. The article hit a collective nerve. A book followed recording Haussegger's personal account of feminism, career, relationships, health, and, ultimately biological childlessness.

The messages resonated with women of Haussegger's generation and with mine. Wonder Woman: The Myth of Having It All was the talk of every woman in town.

Thanks to brave women like Haussegger, my generation received the message loud and clear to look after their reproductive health; to not delay pregnancy too long. We have been successfully reprogrammed to hear the biological clock ticking. Unfortunately, this is not a gentle while-away-the-hours-type ticking. Rather, it is a nuclear-bomb-is-about-to-explode-so-PANIC-NOW-style ticking. I sometimes wonder if this has done more harm than good; if, in fact, it would be better not to know.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Women • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • * International News & Commentary • Australia / NZ