Darkoshi

some good local news

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 06:22:47 GMT

SC’s 6-week abortion ban is unconstitutional, state Supreme Court rules
The South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling 3-2 that it violated the state’s constitutional right to privacy.
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The abortion ban, signed into law in 2021, had been temporarily suspended as the S.C. Supreme Court mulled its constitutionality. It means the state’s previous ban at about 20 weeks stays in place for now.

South Carolina Supreme Court rules abortion protected under state constitution

Federal Court Rules South Carolina's Congressional Map Is Gerrymandered
A federal court today ordered South Carolina to redraw its 2021 enacted congressional map, ruling that a district anchored in Charleston County is a racial gerrymander.

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ashes and smoke

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:24:47 GMT

In other news, the SC state legislature is getting ready to completely outlaw abortion here. I am so disgusted. I have started contemplating the possibility of moving somewhere else.

For various reasons, California came to mind. But with all those wildfires, and what else was it? Weren't there some other big disasters there lately, why can't I remember...

And then also the cost of living. While I'm rather well off here, I might not even be able to afford it over there.

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Bans Off Our Bodies / Abortion Rights rally

Sun, 15 May 2022 07:24:30 GMT

I woke up earlier than planned today, so I made myself a sign for the rally after all.

I made it a sandwich-board style sign, with 2 pieces of cardboard (cut from a box) linked on their top corners with a cord. I printed* my simple message, "Keep Abortion Legal" on 2 pieces of paper and taped them to the front and back cardboard pieces. This sandwich style sign was comfortable and conveniently left my hands free. (One minor issue was that I didn't link the sign bottoms with cords, so when the wind blew, a couple of times the back sign twisted around a bit.)

[*I manually printed the letter outlines with a pencil to get the words spaced well across the sheet. Then I filled in the letters with a black marker. But the the letters still weren't as dark as I wanted. So I scanned the page onto my computer and edited the image to make the letters solid black (using IrfanView's "Replace Color" feature). Then I printed that image out twice, onto 2 pieces of paper. ]

There were quite a lot of people at the rally. I'd estimate several hundred. Many people in cars driving past waved and honked their horns in support. I didn't notice any counter-protesters.

Wearing my signs really helped me feel a part of the event. Without the signs I would have felt awkward, but with them I felt like I fit right in with everyone else. I didn't see anyone else with sandwich-style signs like mine; most people were holding signs up in their hands. I did see one person with a single large sign hanging from a cord around her neck.

Wearing my face mask, which conceals my mouth, I didn't even feel very self-conscious that I wasn't joining in on most of the chanting. Many other people on the side I was on weren't doing the chants either. We were mostly waving back at people in the passing cars; whenever a car honked, many people would yell back "WOOOOOOO!!"

The rally went on for about an hour and a half after I arrived. Towards the end, the crowd moved back from the street and towards the steps of the capitol as some speeches were given.

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a bad week

Sat, 14 May 2022 07:06:45 GMT

My sweet Zorro-puppy died on Monday, at 12 years of age. May she rest in peace. We had to put her to sleep. I was in tears for three days but have started feeling more normal again. I wrote a lot of thoughts down to help process my emotions, and will put some of them into a longer post.

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Early Monday morning, after midnight (when Zorro still seemed fine!), we had a 3.3 earthquake nearby, while I was still up and awake to notice it. I was looking at the TV, and it shook or bounced or something, and there was a big rumbling sound. But nothing fell down. At the time, I wondered if it could have been a bomb or an explosion in the distance.

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I have signed up to attend a Planned Parenthood / Abortion Rights rally downtown tomorrow. I wonder how many people will attend; I don't really expect a large crowd. I don't have any sign to hold, and it is too late now to think of making one. I'm no good at chanting or yelling. I'm sure I will feel quite awkward there. I hope I will at least find the other participants in order to join with them. I hope it won't be like the other time I went downtown for a protest where I felt like I was just someone on the sidelines, not really a part of it. I am not good at joining in on things. But I feel like maybe just being an extra body there will make some kind of tiny tiny difference.

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contraception availability vs abortion rates

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:11:00 GMT

How to drive Planned Parenthood out of the abortion business - (not what you might think)

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interesting articles related to birth control

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 06:49:53 GMT

How the inventor of the pill changed the world for women - about Carl Djerassi, one of the inventors of the Pill.

[regarding a male birth control pill] The first question a man would ask is: would it affect my potency? There have been clinical trials – it has no effect on potency. The second question is erection.

I can't figure out what the word "potency" means in that context. A male BC pill would obviously affect fertility, as that is the point of a BC pill. So potency doesn't seem to mean fertility. And it doesn't seem to mean the ability to get an erection, since that is the 2nd question, not the first. What does it mean?

"How many acts of sexual intercourse would you guess occur every 24 hours?" he asks. "I often do this with my students, and they say a billion. I say: 'No, no, no, you're dreaming. There are six billion people. Well, you need two for sexual intercourse, so there are only three billion. And some of them are five years old, so they're out.' So then they say a million. Well, now you're underestimating, because you're sitting here and you're not having sex. It's actually 100m, every 24 hours. And they produce about a million conceptions, about half of which are unexpected. Of the 500,000, half of them are unwanted. As a result, every 24 hours, 150,000 abortions occur; of these, over 50,000 are illegal."

Interview with Carl Djerassi

Some parts of this don't make sense to me. Having a male BC pill doesn't take away a woman's control over her fertility, it rather gives a man more control over his. But the comment about the female BC pill making men less willing to use condoms is intriguing.

Djerassi suggests that in the future we will freeze our sperm and eggs, get sterilised and check out our sperm and eggs from the bank when we want them later. 'Then you might as well forget about contraception'.

Interesting idea. Maybe the actual eggs and sperm won't even need to be stored in the future. Maybe their DNA sequences will be scanned and saved as data, and maybe it will be possible to re-create an egg or sperm using that data. It wouldn't even really be necessary to extract and scan actual eggs and sperm... one could take the person's DNA and have a computer randomly select half the chromosomes to make virtual gametes. It will surely be possible to check the DNA for hereditary diseases, and to make corrections to prevent those diseases.

Once all that is possible, it would theoretically be possible for people to decide that they want to have a child using someone else's DNA (a celebrity, for instance), rather than their own. Or using a combination of multiple people's DNA. I wonder how much legal control people will have over their own DNA... will it be similar to copyright, and after a certain length of time after a person dies, will other people will be able to use that person's DNA? Or will only people directly descended from that person be allowed to use it? Will you be able to sell your DNA sequence for specific uses?

Response - I never blamed the pill for the fall in family size ... I didn't know that the birth control pill wasn't legal in Japan until 1999.

Birth control in Japan - mostly via condoms.

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