While I sit here waiting for garage sale clothes to wash and dry and be folded by the Magic Garage Sale Fairy (hah!), I thought I'd put up a few articles that caught my attention recently.
Birth: Elective C-sections have three times the infant mortality rate that vaginal birth do. Of course, not having seen the original study, I can't say how badly the reporters have mashed it up, but the rundown in the story is that the researchers looked at only C-sections that were done for women at "no medical risk" at the time of the C-section for more than 5.8 million births, and still saw this much higher risk of infant mortality. This seems, in my quick glance, a pretty valid study (not one of those studies done on a handful of people). The risk factor seems pretty hefty, too (not a 3-percentage-point difference, but an actually 300% difference).
Astronomy: Take a look at the night sky in North America some evening after October 15th, and you may see a new star as bright as Venus, moving across the sky. What is it? The international space station. It seems that the unfurling of its solar sails is likely to make the space station quite bright at night.
Blogs: The first woman space tourist (Anousheh Ansari) is going to be blogging about her experience on the international space station. She comes across as a frighteningly competent woman in this article: she's a venture capitalist who has backed the XPrize for private spaceflight, the XPrize for genomics, and is looking to fund suborbital spaceships for tourism.
Feminism: Homesick Home has a conversation with Linda Hirshman, the feminist who excoriates women with more than one child who buy into the patriarchal glass ceiling.
Art: OmegaGranny stumbles across Jurassic yard art and has the pics to prove it!
Blogger seems to be having a problem with its feeds; or else Bloglines is having a problem with Blogger feeds. Bah.
It's time to put OmegaDotter to bed, then continue washing and drying and folding. The garage sale is being put on by our tiny little local Families With Children From China group to benefit Love Without Boundaries. Later, gators!
Technorati: Roundup, c-sections, international space station, space blog, nerds, art
2 Comments:
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At 9/17/2006 01:30:00 PM,
L. said… -
At 9/20/2006 11:01:00 PM,
Kate said…L.--A buddy sent me the Medline abstract, and it really does seem pretty cut-and-dried, though you're probably right and there's a whole slew of medical risk factors that can't be quantified because they're not on the questionnaire, say. One way of getting around that would be looking for C-sections where the thing was scheduled ahead of time, in addition to there being no risk factors. That would seem to indicate a totally non-medical reason for the CS.
Thanks for the link! I like to imagine that my converstaion with Linda Hirshman was all in my head -- but alas, it was all too real.
The c-section study is fascinating. I scheduled a repeat c-secton, against my doctor`s implied advice to attempt a VBAC. My reasoning was that a c-section would have fewer risks for the baby than a VBAC.
I think perhaps the answer to the statistical question lies here: tghe study measured births with what it calls "'no indicated risk' for a C-section, meaning the infant was a singleton, full-term, in a head-down position, and no other medical risk factors or delivery complications were indicated on the child's birth certificate."
I`d be willing to bet there are lots of risk factors that went undocumented and therefore couldn`t be measured.