Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

It’s getting down to the wire with the twins.  They’re due December 7th and we’re hoping Janis makes it that far.  But we’re on tenterhooks.  We just came back from the OB and her blood pressure is hovering in the high 80s (anything 90 or above and they start looking for symptoms of preeclampsia and sentence you to the hospital).  Thank God, we’re not there yet.

Janis is on "almost strict" bed rest.  She can move around the house, but needs to strictly limit going up and down stairs.  She, of course, can only leave the house to go to the doctor’s office.  Dr. Levine says that every spare ounce of energy she can preserve (by not moving) helps the babies to grow stronger.

At our last visit, the babies gave us a bit of a scare though not a big one.  The girl had grown 8 oz and this was good.  But the boy had grown only 2 ounces and slipped from the 46th percentile (2 weeks prior) to the 10th.  Now, the 10th percentile still isn’t grounds for fear, but it is grounds for concern.  With a single pregnancy, when the baby gets to the 5th percentile or below, the OB begins to consider immediate delivery.  With twins, everything is smaller so the standards on which you base such a decision are different.  But if they stop growing when we do the next ultrasound (around Thanksgiving), then we might do an immediate delivery.

We’re now just over 35 weeks.  As 38 is considered full term for twins and 36 guarantees full lung development, we’re in a pretty good space.  But I’d love Janis to get close to 38 weeks.  We’ll see how it goes.  We’re a little rattled.  But in a year’s time I’ll look back on this post and see it as irrelevant (I hope).  But now, it feels like crunch time.

We’re doing all those things you do when you’re getting ready for a baby.  The room where the twins will live is getting cleaned out and painted this week.  I went out last week and…get this…bought a Nissan Quest mini-van.  Yes, the things we do that we’ve never before contemplated!  I definitely never thought myself mini-van material.  But things change.  We bought a Volvo V-70 station wagon in March.  Janis got pregnant in April.  If only I’d waited to buy that Volvo a few weeks, I wouldn’t now be stuck with a mini-van and a station wagon as my two cars.  I long for the day when the Volvo lease ends and I can buy the tiniest car available–perhaps a Toyota hybrid.

I just bought a Canon digital camera online so I can get lots of shots of the newcomers.  Now, lets hope the camera arrives before the little ones do!

Thanks to all those readers who’ve wished us well on reading my previous baby posts.  We’ll sure need all the love and good wishes we can get over the next year.

I haven’t blogged here in a while.  Which leads me to my next subject.  I can see that the frequency of my posting is going to have to go down.  When you’ve got three babies under four, something’s gotta give; and I guess it’s gotta be my blog.  I dearly love this blog and I’m gonna miss blogging.  But I’m not giving it up entirely.  I can just see that the frequency of my posting is going to decline and there may even be periods with nothing from me.

I’m looking forward to the day I can get back to this.  But it may take a while.

There are times in writing a blog about politics when it seems like all you do is right about the latest outrages, moral depredations and bankrupt ideas spewing forth from the Moral Majority.  Today is no exception.  My brother sent me the following article which really opens one’s eyes as to how far backward this country can go in reneging on women’s rights and how quickly.

But first a preface: my mother is a bitter, rather withdrawn woman.  She rarely, if ever shares her deepest personal feelings, even with those close to her.  So it was with infinite surprise I heard this story.  In the early 1950s, she was a new wife living in Washington Heights (New York City).  She went into the local pharmacy and asked for condoms.  The pharmacist replied that he couldn’t sell women condoms.  She doubtless felt terribly ashamed to be rejected in such a way.

Now, fifty years have gone by and women are still subject to such humiliation and it’s a crying shame.  But today, women don’t have to take such insults lying down as my mother did.

With George Bush’s re-election the Moral Majority is on the rise again.  Beating back gay marriage, abortion rights, and even contraception are high on the agenda of religious fundamentalists.  USA Today ran an eye-opening article, Druggists refuse to give out pill, describing an incipient movement by some of the nation’s pharmacists to refuse to sell contraceptives to women.  Strangely, the pharmacists’ professional association and impending state laws allow such outrageous behavior.

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills. Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist to fill.

…States from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.

I say, if you want to be a pharmacist you must sell the standard inventory of what customers want to buy.  If you don’t want to sell such items for whatever reason, well, you shouldn’t be a pharmacist.  Pick another profession that doesn’t involve making moral judgments about your customers.

The most outrageous behavior concerns the pharmacists who not only refuse to sell contraceptives, but actually confiscate the prescription form and refuse to return it.  This in turn forces the customer to return to the doctor to get a new one.

In Madison, Wis., a pharmacist faces possible disciplinary action by the state pharmacy board for refusing to transfer a woman’s prescription for birth-control pills to another druggist or to give the slip back to her. He would not refill it because of his religious views.

I say sue their ass.  Demonstrate as the courageous women in the accompanying photo have done.  Let the company which owns the pharmacy know that not only will this specific pharmacy be boycotted, but their entire chain might face a national boycott.  When this kind of outrageous morally aggressive behavior becomes the norm, there’s only one recourse–fight back!