Virginia Ultrasound Law Guide for Women and Doctors

Governor Bob McDonnell, also known as ‘Governor Ultrasound’, has recently signed a bill into law that would require an ultrasound for nearly all women seeking an abortion procedure in the state of Virginia.

To simplify things for women and doctors who want to know how Governor Ultrasound’s bill effects them, I’ve created a flowchart diagram, which I’ve entitled, ‘Virginia Ultrasound Law Guide for Women and Doctors’.  I hope that you find it helpful.

Virginia Ultrasound Law Guide for Women and Doctors Flowchart Diagram .pdf format (higher quality)

Brief history on the bill:

• The original bill required a transvaginal ultrasound (involves invasive vaginal penetration) to determine the age of the fetus
• Determining the age of the fetus is not medically necessary
• To determine the most accurate age of the fetus, a transvaginal ultrasound must be performed
• Public outrage ensued, and Governor McDonnell was dubbed ‘Governor Ultrasound’
• The old bill was scrapped before it was signed into law, and a new bill was issued.

A revised bill was then issued.  Some features of the revised bill:

• Transvaginal ultrasound is no longer required, instead transabdominal is required
• The woman still must pay for her ultrasound, regardless of whether or not she has the funds to
• The doctors opinion on the medical necessity of the ultrasound is irrelevant
• The woman’s objection to the ultrasound is irrelevant
• There are exceptions for medical emergencies where an abortion is necessary to prevent death or irreversible impairment to the woman
• If the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, there is no exception, unless the woman reported it to law enforcement (most rapes and incest cases go unreported)

Here is the full text of the Virginia Ultrasound bill, signed into law by Governor Ultrasound.

Please contact me at pokerjosher@gmail.com or leave a message in the comments for a Visio file of the flowchart.

Remember Christopher Hitchens’ Quotes

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”

“[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

“The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”

“Religious exhortation and telling people, telling children, that if they don’t do the right thing, they’ll go to terrifying punishments or unbelievable rewards, that’s making a living out of lying to children. That’s what the priesthood do. And if all they did was lie to the children, it would be bad enough. But they rape them and torture them and then hope we’ll call it ‘abuse’.”

“[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”

“I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.” 

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”

Facebook Scrabble is not Scrabble

Facebook Scrabble is terrible, and doesn’t really resemble Scrabble at its core essence. Scrabble excellence required a skilled trilogy of (1) strategy, (2) special Scrabble vocabulary (special 2 letter words and Z, X, Q, J words), and (3) regular vocabulary.

The terrible Facebook Scrabble and its awful built-in dictionary

The dictionary built into the game on FB has eliminated the last 2 and totally taken the vocabulary (and my edge) out of the game. Now it’s just a contest to see who has the most patience to enter unlikely word after unlikely word into the built-in dictionary to get that perfect play. That’s not skill, that’s data entry.

In regular Scrabble, if you played a word that wasn’t a word, I could challenge you and you would lose your turn. If I was wrong, I’d lose MY turn. Challenges added another level of skill that is now gone.

And now rereading this, I think this might make me an old man. Bastage, bring me their heads!

Introspective Psychoanalysis

This post was originally written as an ‘About Me’ post in 2009. 

Me

I am an analyst residing in Sarasota, FL.   I am single, never married, with no children.

Goals

My current aspirations are to land a decent job in  Sarasota, and immediately start an ecommerce website following the business model of Gold Star Games, but selling entirely different products.   Within 5 years of starting the site, I expect it will be large enough to work for myself exclusively.  Luckily for me, one of my close friends is one of the owners of Gold Star Games, and he has taught me virtually everything he knows about running a successful estore, from Search Engine Optimization (ranking high on Google for products to get free, unadvertised sales), to telephone sales techniques and training sessions.

Purpose of the Blog

Once I am financially stable with the web site store, I plan on doing a lot of writing, including short stories, articles, a nonfiction book about growing up in a faith healing cult, and culminating in at least one fiction book to test my skills and the market for them.  I expect that this blog will be a great place to practice said writing.

Background, Influences, and Views

Faith Healing Cult

I was born and raised in a faith healing cult from birth to age 15.  Members of the cult, Faith Assembly (not affiliated with Faith Assembly of God), led by Hobart E. Freeman believed and practiced the following:

• No doctors, dentists or medical care (pray to God for healing)
• Belief that if no healing occurred, your faith  was too weak (a sin)
• No television
• No holiday celebrations (not even Christmas or Easter)
• No involvement in school sports or clubs (“Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers”)
• Frequent exorcisms as a common cure all remedy (especially for the mentally ill)
• No voting in political elections
• Home schooling of children highly recommended, but not mandatory
• No dating from within the church, and especially not outside of it
• Minimization of contact with the outside world, including cutting off contact with ‘non-believing’ family and friends

I was “saved” or “born again” at age 3 and baptized.  I was raised and brain washed by my parents and the church.   I first felt the twinge of  skepticism in third grade, when more than anything I wanted to play on the basketball team.  But I was forbidden to play by my parents and the church.  Even though II Corinthians 6:14 said, “Be ye not unequally yoked to unbelievers,” I felt discomfort because I wanted to play on the basketball team, further discomfort for my “sin” of desiring to disobey my parents in that regard, but most importantly, a very vague logical discomfort that something did not add up rationally.

The skepticism grew as I grew physically and mentally, and probably peaked some time around age 14, when I became an all-out rebel.  During this time period, although my parents did not vote in political elections, I was raised with very typical conservative Republican political values, which I wholeheartedly embraced.

Educationally, I excelled with little effort at public schools.  I am very grateful that I was one of the lucky children in the cult that was allowed to attend public schools, and I received a top notch public school education.  Socially, I was somewhat of an outcast, as contact any contact with kids at school that did not take place at school was strictly forbidden.

Three Year Hate

At age 17 my parents left the church and started to normalize their life a bit.  In the five years that followed, I entered what I will refer to as the Three Year Hate, where I rejected my parents views, and all I had been taught.  In this stage, I believed that what I had been programmed to believe was probably correct, and I felt the corresponding guilt for my sins, but the built up hatred I had for the whole world won the day.

Curiously, I retained my wholehearted conservative Republican political views, and proudly voted for Bob Dole in my first presidential election in 1996, at the age of 21.

Although I had a lot of general upbringing reasons to naturally hate, one of the key specific drivers of the Three Year Hate was my belief that had I been allowed to play basketball from third grade upwards, I would have developed the skills to play for a small college, given my athletic ability, vertical jump, intelligence, and my competitive nature.  Whether this belief held any merit is debatable, but that was my strong view at at the time, and it intensified my anger.

The Three Year Hate included a few of my college years, during which I was quite immature for my age.   After being accepted to the Indiana University Honors Program without even applying, I earned a 0.98 GPA my first semester, but I did get to play pickup basketball in the HPER gym about 4 hours a day.  Initally after that semester, I wanted to quit school, but my parents convinced me to continue at IUPUI (IU’s Indianapolis capus), and get the grades up.

I did get my grades up at IUPUI, then returned to Indiana’s Bloomington campus where I aggressively cut class, avoided studying, and finally finished again at IUPUI with a double major in Finance and Accounting and a minor in Economics.  My overall effort in college was about a 3 out of 10, and I was very lucky to end up with a 2.9 GPA.

Intellectual Curiosity

During college, the hate started to wear off a bit, and I entered the Intellectually Curious stage.  I started to mingle with intellectual friends, and we had great conversations exploring religion, beliefs, how the world worked, what was wrong with it, and what was right.

During the Three Year Hate, I rejected virtually all that I was taught growing up, so in many ways, I was starting the Intellectually Curious stage with a clean slate.  The slate was not clean with authority figures, and I had a tendency to forgo respect for authority figures until they proved that they deserved it.

(more perhaps coming if I muster up the energy and focus)

Alcohol

(unwritten)

Religious Guilt

(unwritten)

Liberal

(unwritten)

Agnostic

(unwritten)

Guiltless Aetheist – Freedom from Condemnation

(unwritten)

Psychology

(unwritten)

Max Blumenthal’s Republican Gomorrah

(unwritten)

1/1/2010 update here:  http://innertubes.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/update-to-goals-etc/