So says the byline of an article in The Economist from last week.  It makes the case that for those of us who desire to see abortion numbers drop (I think we're pretty much all in that category), legislation is not a tool that anyone should expect to be effective for achieving that outcome:

[According to] the largest global study of abortion ever...Restricting abortions...has little effect on the number of pregnancies terminated. Rather, it drives women to seek illegal, often unsafe backstreet abortions leading to an estimated 67,000 deaths a year. A further 5m women require hospital treatment as a result of botched procedures.

In Africa and Asia, where abortion is generally either illegal or restricted, the abortion rate in 2003 (the latest year for which figures are available) was 29 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. This is almost identical to the rate in Europe—28—where legal abortions are widely available. Latin America, which has some of the world's most restrictive abortion laws, is the region with the highest abortion rate (31), while western Europe, which has some of the most liberal laws, has the lowest (12).

Between 1995 and 2005, 17 nations liberalised abortion legislation, while three tightened restrictions. The number of induced abortions nevertheless declined from nearly 46m in 1995 to 42m in 2003, resulting in a fall in the worldwide abortion rate from 35 to 29. The most dramatic drop—from 90 to 44—was in former communist Eastern Europe, where abortion is generally legal, safe and cheap. This coincided with a big increase in contraceptive use in the region which still has the world's highest abortion rate, with more terminations than live births.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This kind of thing doesn't usually bother me too much, but even I'm wondering if the smoking ban coming to Belmont, California, goes too far...off-balance in the tension between your right to make decisions for yourself and my right not to be harmed by your decisions.

From "Smoking ban looms for Belmont apartment dwellers" by Steve Rubenstein in the SF Chronicle:

Belmont apartment dwellers who like to light up in their homes have 14 months to kick the habit, work out a compromise with their nonsmoking neighbors or get out of town.

Under the city's new smoking ban, among the toughest in the nation, apartment residents whose secondhand smoke invades their neighbors' units will be subject to fines of as much as $1,000.

The measure, which the City Council enacted Tuesday on a 3-2 vote, bans smoking in multiunit dwellings as well as in parks, outdoor restaurants and other public places. The apartment provision takes effect around New Year's 2009, while lighting up elsewhere is banned as soon as the law officially takes effect in about a month.

Hardly a loophole exists for Belmont denizens hooked on the weed. For example, the new law allows an actor to smoke onstage during the performance of a play - but only if smoking is an "integral part of the story."

The city says the tenant smoking ban will be enforced only if neighbors complain. It's believed to be the first such law in the country.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An article of the same title in today's NY Times by Kim Severson places the blame for your kids picky-eating habits:

Researchers examined the eating habits of 5,390 pairs of twins between 8 and 11 years old and found children’s aversions to trying new foods are mostly inherited.

The message to parents: It’s not your cooking, it’s your genes.

According to the report, 78 percent is genetic and the other 22 percent environmental.

Most children eat a wide variety of foods until they are around 2, when they suddenly stop. The phase can last until the child is 4 or 5. It’s an evolutionary response, researchers believe. Toddlers’ taste buds shut down at about the time they start walking, giving them more control over what they eat. “If we just went running out of the cave as little cave babies and stuck anything in our mouths, that would have been potentially very dangerous,” Dr. Cooke said.

One of the most interesting aspects of the article is the trickery that Jerry Seinfeld's wife uses with their kids:

Mrs. Seinfeld, the wife of the actor Jerry Seinfeld and the mother of three young children, became fed up with trying to get her children to eat fruits and vegetables. The oldest, Sascha, who is 6, is so picky she used to dictate what the rest of the family ate.

Her new book, “Deceptively Delicious” (Harper Collins), outlines a series of recipes based on fruit and vegetable purées that are blended into food in a way that she says children won’t notice. Half a cup of butternut squash disappears into pasta coated with milk and margarine. Pancakes turn pink with beets. Avocado hides in chocolate pudding and spinach in brownies.

Some experts don’t buy the method...hiding foods doesn’t help a child learn to appreciate new tastes...

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've known that cough medicine isn't recommended for very young kids, but an article last weekend in the NY Times by Gardiner Harris reports that they may soon be banned for kids under 6:

Safety experts for the Food and Drug Administration urged the agency on Friday to consider an outright ban on over-the-counter, multisymptom cough and cold medicines for children under 6.

The reviewers wrote that there is little evidence that these medicines are effective in young children, and there are increasing fears that they may be dangerous. From 1969 to 2006, at least 54 children died after taking decongestants, and 69 died after taking antihistamines, the report said. And it added that since adverse drug reactions are reported voluntarily and fitfully, the numbers were likely to significantly understate the medicines’ true toll.

In the case of pediatric over-the-counter medicines, the agency decided decades ago that drug makers could market the medicines for children even though they had only been tested in adults. Back then, it was assumed that children’s bodies were simply smaller versions of adult ones. That assumption has proven untrue. Indeed, a growing number of studies suggest that cough and cold medicines work no better in children than placebos.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever been riding in a car and tilted back the front seat for a snooze?  I certainly have.  Turns out this is quite dangerous, but for some reason the government and automakers are hesitant to make this fact abundantly clear.   The danger isn't much of a surprise if you think about it...but that's the point.  We often do things like this without thinking about...assuming that "if you can recline the seat, it must be safe to do so."

Emily Bazelon has the scoop on Slate: link

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not that I'm a policy wonk.  I haven't studied the issue, but the possibility of universal health care is certainly intriguing.  One of the most common criticisms seems to be something like this (e.g, from wizbang politics):

Health care services are not unlimited, so offering "universal coverage" necessarily requires price controls and rationing.

The expected reaction to this argument is, I guess, "price controls and rationing?!?  Heck no!  Homey don't play dat!"  But the idea of universal healthcare is not unlimited universal healthcare.  It is healthcare that is available universally at a certain minimum level.  Those of us with the means, of course, will have options beyond that minimum.  And as far as rationing goes, if rationing is really what is required to make the minimum available to all, then I'm for it.  Rationing is what compassionate people with an interest in the common good do when there isn't enough to go around.  We take a little less for ourselves so that all can at least have some.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This story of the same title from The Week magazine is to me emblematic of a sickness in our government and society in general. On the advice of the lawyers, FEMA failed to investigate claims that fumes in trailers provided to Katrina survivors were making them sick. Rather than "undermine the agency's position in any court proceedings," FEMA leaves them to the formaldehyde fumes.

FEMA officials covered up concerns that trailers provided to survivors of Hurricane Katrina contained toxic levels of formaldehyde, congressional investigators said last week. Agency e-mails unearthed by a House committee show that FEMA lawyers vetoed a proposal to test the trailers for formaldehyde, a carcinogen. Some 120,000 people displaced by the 2005 hurricane lived in FEMA-supplied trailers, and hundreds have reported health problems such as nosebleeds and shortness of breath. Following the death of one hurricane victim who had complained of fumes in his trailer, agency lawyers advised against an investigation, saying it “could seriously undermine the agency’s position” in any court proceedings. FEMA officials this week apologized and said they were testing the 66,000 trailers still in use.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article of the same title from last month in the NY Times, Michael Pollan answers the question:

how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

...why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.”

The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives.

Americans may tell themselves they don’t have a national land-use policy, that the market by and large decides what happens on private property in America, but that’s not exactly true. The smorgasbord of incentives and disincentives built into the farm bill helps decide what happens on nearly half of the private land in America: whether it will be farmed or left wild, whether it will be managed to maximize productivity (and therefore doused with chemicals) or to promote environmental stewardship.

...the “farm bill” is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of eaters placed first. Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food — to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse. At a minimum, these eaters want a bill that aligns agricultural policy with our public-health and environmental values, one with incentives to produce food cleanly, sustainably and humanely. Eaters want a bill that makes the most healthful calories in the supermarket competitive with the least healthful ones. Eaters want a bill that feeds schoolchildren fresh food from local farms rather than processed surplus commodities from far away. Enlightened eaters also recognize their dependence on farmers, which is why they would support a bill that guarantees the people who raise our food not subsidies but fair prices. Why? Because they prefer to live in a country that can still produce its own food and doesn’t hurt the world’s farmers by dumping its surplus crops on their markets.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From The Week magazine for the week of May 6, 2007:

Mexico City’s legislative assembly last week passed a bill legalizing abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, a first in Mexico. Women’s health advocates say the law, which applies only within Mexico City limits, could serve as a template for the rest of the country, whose population of 107 million is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Government officials say about 200,000 illegal abortions are performed in Mexico every year, and complications from illegal abortions are the third leading cause of death for pregnant women in the capital city. The law bars doctors from refusing to perform abortions on moral grounds. But Roman Catholic Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City warned Catholic medical personnel that they faced excommunication if they took part in the procedure.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From an article of the same title by Fiona MacRae in the Daily Mail:

The world's largest study of weight loss has shown that diets do not work for the vast majority of slimmers and may even put lives at risk.

More than two-thirds pile the pounds straight back on, raising the danger of heart attack, stroke and diabetes.

Indeed most dieters end up heavier than they did to start with, the researchers found.

They warn this type of yo-yo behaviour is linked to a host of health problems. And they say the strain that repeated weight loss and gain places on the body means most people would have been better off not dieting at all.

Research has shown the repeated rapid weight gain and loss associated with dieting can double the risk of death from heart disease, including heart attacks, and the risk of premature death in general.

Such yo-yo weight loss has also been linked to stroke and diabetes and shown to suppress the immune system, making the body more vulnerable to infection.

Dr Mann said: "We decided to dig up and analyse every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all.

"Their weight would have been pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back.

"The benefits of dieting are simply too small and the potential harms of dieting are too large for it to be recommended as a safe and effective treatment for obesity."

The psychologist, who advises would-be slimmers to swap calorie-controlled diets for a balanced diet coupled with regular exercise, added: "Exercise may well be the key factor leading to sustained weight loss.

Studies consistently find that people who report the most exercise also have the most weight loss."

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)