Kansas Doctor's License Revoked for.... Not Forcing a Ten Year Old Rape Victim to Give Birth

I don't understand people.

I really don't.

A ten year old girl is brutally raped by her uncle. The girl is then apparently taken to a physician who performs an abortion. The physician is Dr. Ann Neuhaus, whose colleague was brutally shot to death while attending church for performing abortions.

The not-so-unbiased Kansas Medical Board is partially composed of members of Operation Rescue, a Conservative Christian organisation that has been tied to the murder of at least one medical doctor in the past and is labelled as a "domestic terror" group by many. In fact, the murder which Operation Rescue was tied to was of Dr. Neuhaus' colleague. I'm not kidding.

Not surprisingly, the Board has gone to great lengths to attack Dr. Neuhaus, including stripping her of her medical license.

Angry?  Want to do something about this? I'd recommend donating to Planned Parenthood.

For more information, you can read the articles at Addicting Info, care2, and RH Reality Check.

Show that Science is a Priority -- Sign the APS's Petition

This afternoon, I received an e-mail from the American Physical Society (APS) alerting me to some troubling events in Congress. The APS is concerned about a large number of budget cuts in the Federal government which are likely to negatively affect scientific research and has created a petition in protest. In the United States, scientific research is often funded, in part or full, by the Federal government. Corporations are unlikely to take the sorts of risks involved with certain kinds of R&D; nonetheless, this kind of research is beneficial to all of us.

The Federal funding of scientific research is largely motivated the same way that government maintenance of public parks and roads is motivated. As in the Tragedy of the Commons, single individuals cannot be expected to be motivated to maintain parks or roads even though it would be directly beneficial to all of us; corporations performing simple cost benefit analysis will often quickly find that it is cheaper for them to simply dump trash in the park, as opposed to cleaning it. Similarly, the kinds of pure scientific research that delivers insights into how the world works -- which historically have given us the computer, the atomic bomb, the Internet, transistors, radio technology, and so on -- are often very poor investments for corporations. Federal funding of scientific research, often performed at university laboratories, is crucial for our country's continued advancement.