Rest in Peace, Maya Angelou

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou, 1928-2014

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Summer Movie Round Up

Ok, so the "summer movie season" started kind of early this year and I'm already late, but here is a round up of the movies I deem "baby sitter worthy" for the 2014 action/comic/geek movie season!

A note on my metric: now that we've spawned the biggest difference in terms of how we live our lives is that we just can't go out to a bar or to see a movie any more. These types of activities require baby sitting which needs to be scheduled in advance and gets pricey ($40+ for an evening with a teenager or costs in goodwill with GrandparentsBee). So, going to see a movie has become a much planned event, the bar for which is higher than pre-spawning.

No spoilers after the cut though I will discuss currently published reviews (and Hugh Jackman's rear end).

"Women's Issues"

While out and about recently, I saw a billboard that said "1 in 3 women has had an abortion" - a statistic that I've read before and that holds up against my personal experience with the women I know and love. I was just thinking about it and... why do we say "1 in 3 women" and not something like "1 in 6 people"? I mean, obviously, the stat is diluted by including roughly half the population who cannot possibly have an abortion even ... to use an oddly uncomfortable turn of phrase, even if they wanted to. But, men vote too and in a political  climate where control of fertility has become on of the most important battles, I worry that we have made abortion into a "women's issue" same thing with rape - men can be victims of rape and are also victimized unfairly by rape culture.

To continue this ramble, I continue to be alarmed that men are demonstrating in the streets for access to effective birth control measures that they have a say in - and dudes, anyone who thinks a condom is effective birth control better start decorating the nursery now (I hear safari animals are still in vogue!).

So, yeah... why are there "women's issues" separate from those that concern all of us? Why do we let "pro-business" men off the hook for voting in rape apologists who are more eager to control my uterus than tariffs?

I just think that I'm tired of being penned in, of not really getting a full choice, because I'm forced to vote for whichever idiot will at least grant me full personhood.

Motherhood in America: The Dystopian Future is Now

Save the Children, a non-profit that works internationally to raise money and advocate for children's health and educational opportunities, just came out with it's annual State of the World's Mothers Report. For those of us living in the United States, it looks pretty dismal.

In 2000, 2004, and once again in 2006, the U.S. was listed as one of the top 10 countries in which to be a mother in the world. We've slowly dropped in rank and are listed in the 2014 report at 31st. This rating is mainly a measure of something we in public health call "maternal mortality" which is the polite way of saying "how likely it is that any given woman will die while pregnant."

Seriously. Let's rewind a second and unpack that. In measuring how likely a woman is going to die during the 40weeks of pregnancy or immediately following birth. That could be because of an illegal or otherwise botched abortion. That could be due because she had an unluckily attached placenta that took over her uterus. That could be due to high blood pressure or blood clotting, both common in pregnancy. That could be due to infection, sexually transmitted or otherwise. It could be due to her violent partner. Any reason really.

Now that we're out of the Downton Abbey days of medical mystery, people rarely think about death when they see the two little pink lines on that home pregnancy test, but the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. has been rising. Back in 1990, it was around 12.4 women out of every 100,000 who would die. Today, it's 18.5 per 100,000.

To give you an idea of what those numbers look like, imagine the city of Chicago, which is approximately 2.7 million people. Assume that half are women, so that's 1.35 million people. The difference between a rate of 12.4 and 18.5 is 6.1  extra women dying per 100,000. In Chicago, that 82 women. 82 extra deaths. Now, because math, this does not mean that there were actually 250 maternal deaths in Chicago in 2014 because this is a statistic that looks at risk over life time, but I find that numbers make more sense when they are to scale. Each year, approximately 700 pregnant women die in the United States - seeing as how few women are pregnant at any given time (somewhere around 2% of women), that's a lot.

So why is this? Why when the U.S. outspends most of the world on health care do we have a maternal mortality rate that rivals Chile's? I have a theory.