Amnesty International – American Genocide In Health Care

The American Dr. Mengele in the form of the Republican Party is quite proud of killing American babies as part of resisting any move to come up with a Health Care System that actually works in America, In particular, that portion of the racist right fully supports, and promotes the genocide of minority children. This isn’t about Health Care…

It’s about killing black and brown babies.

Too Many Women Dying in U.S. While Having Babies

Child Victims of Nazi Health Care Under Dr. Mengele

Amnesty International may be best known to American audiences for bringing to light horror stories overseas such as the disappearance of political activists in Argentina or the abysmal conditions inside South African prisons under apartheid. But in a new report on pregnancy and childbirth care in the U.S., Amnesty details the maternal health care crisis in this country as part of a systemic violation of women’s rights.

The report, titled “Deadly Delivery,” notes that the likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth in the U.S. is five times greater than in Greece, four times greater than in Germany, and three times greater than in Spain. Every day in the U.S., more than two women die of pregnancy-related causes, with the maternal mortality ratio doubling from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006. (And as shocking as these figures are, Amnesty notes that the actual number of maternal deaths in the U.S. may be a lot higher since there are no federal requirements to report these outcomes and since data collection at the state and local levels needs to be improved.) “In the U.S., we spend more than any country on health care, yet American women are at greater risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes than in 40 other countries,” says Nan Strauss, the report’s co-author, who spent two years investigating the issue of maternal mortality worldwide. “We thought that was scandalous.”

According to Amnesty, which gathered data from many sources including the CDC, approximately half of the pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable, the result of systemic failures including barriers to accessing care; inadequate, neglectful, or discriminatory care; and overuse of risky interventions like inducing labor and delivering via cesarean section. “Women are not dying from complex, mysterious causes that we don’t know how to treat,” says Strauss. “Women are dying because it’s a fragmented system, and they are not getting the comprehensive services that they need.”

The report notes that black women in the U.S. are nearly four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, although they are no more likely to suffer certain complications like hemorrhage.

The Amnesty report comes on the heels of an investigation in California that found maternal deaths have tripled there in recent years as well as a maternal-mortality alert issued in January by the Joint Commission, a group that accredits hospitals and other medical organizations, which noted that common preventable errors included failure to control blood pressure in hypertensive women and failure to pay attention to vital signs following c-sections. And just this week, a panel of medical experts at a conference held by the National Institutes of Health recommended that physicians’ organizations revisit policies that prevent women from having vaginal births after having had a cesarean. Such policies, designed in part to protect against litigation, have contributed to the U.S. cesarean rate rising to nearly 32% in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available.

The New Jim Crow – Red Zone Genocide in Health Care

Rachel gets half the story here.

This is an electoral map of the 2008 election in the now familiar red and blue -

Red/Blue Electoral Map 2008

This is a map of the black population in the United States -

Distribution of Black Population in the US

Now quiz time… Which political party dominates each of those states with the worst health care records?

And who is being impacted?

Genocide?

You betcha.

more about “American Genocide in Health Care“, posted with vodpod

The New Jim Crow – Health Care

In May, 1918, a white plantation owner in Brooks County, Georgia, got into a quarrel with one of his colored tenants and the tenant killed him. A mob sought to avenge his death but could not find the suspected man. They therefore lynched another colored man named Hayes Turner. His wife, Mary Turner, threatened to have members of the mob arrested. The mob therefore started after her. She fled from home and was found there the next morning. She was in the eighth month of pregnancy but the mob of several hundred took her to a small stream, tied her ankles together and hung her on a tree head downwards. Gasoline was thrown on her clothes and she was set on fire. One of the members of the mob took a knife and split her abdomen open so that the unborn child fell from her womb to the ground and the child’s head was crushed under the heel of another member of the mob; Mary Turner’s body was finally riddled with bullets.

Today -

Non-Hispanic black women have the highest infant mortality rate in the United States in 2004 — 13.60 per 1,000 live births, compared to 5.66 per 1,000 births among non-Hispanic white women. For the three-year period from 2002 through 2004, there were significant differences in infant mortality rates by state, ranging from a rate of 10.32 in Mississippi to 4.68 in Vermont. For infants of non-Hispanic black mothers, rates ranged from 17.57 in Wisconsin to 8.75 in Minnesota. For infants of non-Hispanic white mothers, the infant mortality rate ranged from 7.67 in West Virginia to 3.80 in New Jersey, according to the report, titled Infant Mortality Statistics From the 2004 Period Linked Birth/Infant Death Data Set.

US Compared to Some Other Developed Nations With "Socialized" Medicine

In terms of the “average” Infant Mortality the US ranks 33rd in the World, considering black women only – the US would rank 83rd, behind Mexico, Romania, Syria, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands…

And Cuba. Indeed, if you are Puerto Rican in the US, you stand a almost 50% better chance of your baby surviving the first year…

By moving back to Puerto Rico.

Did a piece a while back entitled “The Deadliest Disease” based on a new book, “Medical Apartheid“, by Harriet A. Washington. The outcome of this book, and research studies in the last 10 years indicates that as many as 100,000 black and brown folks in America dies each year due to lack of, or less than adequate medical care.

So… What’s the difference between a Lynch Mob and their ideological descendants, the Tea Baggers?

Method.

Teen Pregnacy and STDs Rise During Bush Administration

Another in a long list of conservative failures -

A Time Magazine Cover from 1985 covering the epidemic in Teen Age pregnancy. After years of turning this around, it's on the rise again, along with the rate of deadly STDs among children because of policies of the Bush Administration.

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush’s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.

Sanctifying Genocide

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again – the “Pro-Life” movement is more accurately called the Pro-Genocide movement.

Why? Because their support of “life” is narrowly confined to abortion. The fact that 10,000 or more black babies die a year due to substandard prenatal healthcare, another 10,000 die in the first year – and another 50-80,000 black American die a year due to substandard health care – and when combined with the unnecessary deaths of Hispanic and other minorities results in a Rwanda sized genocide, right here in America every 4 years…

Isn’t something on the agenda.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT)Save the Dogs FEMA! They obviously are more valuable than black and brown folks dying as the flood waters rose in Katrina

The christian right is perfectly happy to aid and abet in the murder of tens of thousand of black and brown babies a year through their support of right-wing racism in the form of conservative politics – as long as the mother doesn’t choose to abort the baby.

And as usual, whether with the”coonservative” talking heads and writers whose specialty and stock in trade is excoriating “black depravity” -  the Pro-Genocide right tries to put a black face in front to convince some weak minded black folks that genocide is good for them…

Father John Raphael

Black priest says pro-life, African-American communities must unite

An African-American priest who graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1989 told the National Right to Life convention June 19 that he was “heartbroken” when he learned that Notre Dame planned to honor U.S. President Barack Obama at its 2009 commencement.