There have been several abortion-related threads on the Medicine sub-forum for flaired users only (meaning that they only allow verified doctors & professional HCWs to participate) where the docs et al are discussing the quicksand they will all now face because abortion bill language such as "medically necessary" or "to save a mother's life" is not defined. And even if (by some miracle) those terms become defined (by people who understand nothing about reproduction or birth, mind you), PG & childbirth cases that necessitate a medically necessary abortion will always be subject to some right-wing "expert" doctor swooping in after the fact to claim that it wasn't (we all saw what happened with Covid...this will be much worse). Then - bingo - doctor will be up for prosecution and/or being sued. There were several comments about ob/gyns leaving red states, just to avoid the added nightmare of being legally second-judged & facing the hassle of a court case (even if won) should they need to do something to save the life of their patient. In the thread, they describe instances where a woman's life being endangered by pregnancy but it's not enough to kill her - at that point in time. However, by the time the situation has progressed to where the pregnancy situation is enough to kill her - it's too late. This is exactly what led to the death of the pregnant woman in Ireland (& Poland), & it's why the woman recently had to fly from Malta to Spain, and it is only a matter of time before it happens here. Probably in multiple states. So, yeah, I don't blame those people.

The response is always crickets. Just like it is when I ask for reasons why every other developed country has successfully established national health care and paid maternity & paternity leave (including uber-conservative Poland & Hungary) and the US hasn't? The ugly truth is that there is a wide streak of cruelty and hard-heartedness in the US, along with a toxic individualism that views the poor as deserving of their status and the rich as deserving of theirs (or, at least, the foibles and money-wasting of the rich are overlooked much more easily) . All accompanied by NEVER-ENDING bitching about whatever token amount of governmental help is given out to the poor.

The vast majority of people coming here are impoverished people from countries with greatly disrupted economic &/or social systems, because having any job is better than no job, even if you're still living in poverty. People from developed countries are not immigrating here, as the last President once semi-famously bemoaned. Their lives are better in the countries where they are already living.

My entire point is that paid (& mandated unpaid) leave is a societal value and considered a basic human right in every developed (& many even many semi-developed) country(ies) in the world. Except the US. Supporting mothers/families with the most urgently needed & best form of parental support - financial help so they can spend time with new children without going into debt or eating through savings & ensuring that they have a job to which to return - is not a priority here. Who pays? No one, ever. That's the entire f*cking point. It's not a value to the majority of the people here. They'd rather throw up a few web sites & crow about "resources". And there is nothing about providing basic social support for families that discourages saving.

I just looked it up. Less than 900,000 women work for the federal gov't. There are nearly 72 million working women in the US. So ~ 1.25% of working women work for the federal gov't. Which, I'm glad for them. But it doesn't change the reality for the other nearly 99% of women in the US.. I haven't double-checked every country on the map, but here is a Pew Research survey confirming much the same: Among 41 countries, only US lacks paid parental leave.

As a percentage, it's a tiny amount of women. And, if you read the above posts by FraidyCat, your statements about Canada are incorrect.

What percentage of women in the US work for the federal government?

Yeah, when you're not sure that you can jump through all the hoops to get a medical exception in time to save your own life, it dampens the willingness to assume the risk.

Yes, the labor shortage is very real, as are it's effects. I'd like to add, though (& this isn't really directed at you, more of a general statement), that many other countries are also facing the same labor shortages and their employers have the same coverage issues....and yet, somehow, they make paid parental leave - or even guaranteed unpaid parental leave - work. The US is literally the worst nation in the developed world for this. Every time some policy is proposed (or even discussed) that would improve the lives of US citizens, it is commonly (&, usually, instantly) deflected as, "too expensive", "too burdensome", "socialism", "you'll bring down the economy", etc. And, yet these same policies are implemented - and working - in every other developed country on earth. "No way to make this happen" says the one country on the planet where 'it' (whatever it is) isn't happening. It has far more to do with values than logistics.

The map demonstrates paid leave either provided or guaranteed (through employment law) by the country in which a woman gives birth. People on the thread have also added in the employment guarantees they have (in other countries) for infant and child care, so that may be where you are getting confused. Whatever benefit you received was either provided by your employer, or the state in which you lived at the time. It certainly is not something that is either provided or guaranteed for women in general in the US.

No-shit story: daughter of a friend of mine had to return to work 8 days after her C-section. She (the daughter) works for a small employer (exempt from FMLA) and makes an hourly wage. With no federal, state, or company pay, and no guaranteed leave, she had to work. The US gave up on being a civilized country a while back.

What a joke. And, yes, I know a FEW states provide paid maternal leave. But not the US.

I don't have much time to write, so this will be brief. IME, a lot of hsers have adopted the philosophies of: "Anything is better than public school" and/or "kids are learning all the time anyway" and/or "studies show how well hsers do on standardized tests!" and/or "don't worry about LDs - kids learn on their own time" or similar other things.....and then proceed to live out a life of low academics and low expectations, esp if their state does not require any yearly testing for hsers. This has been my overwhelming experience & observation, other than very small handfuls of religious classical hsers. There have been threads about it on the board over the years, so I know I'm not alone in this experience(s). Re: the article..I don't have time to detail it, but the article focused only on the positives of hsing, and not a single negative. It paints the picture of an idealized hs world, one the I certainly never experienced ("experts" teaching a coop class that "works out beautifully"....every coop I've been in was sometimes/usually good for socialization but was a joke academically). Etc. Just ME. YMMV.

I dunno. I put both of my kids in public school for high school because the local homeschool community/ies was/were actively pulling my kids down. And parts of public school have definitely sucked, but with one graduated and the other headed into the junior year, I can definitely say it was the right choice. Fox is known for pushing a conservative agenda, and this is a pro-homeschooling article. It does not reflect my experience of homeschoolers in general (in two states in different areas of the country). For the record, I'd definitely still hs K-8 again. I don't think there's much that's healthy for kids in public school now, esp in middle school. But there are large swaths of homeschooling that have hit the skids the last 20 years and I'm so tired of the pretense that it hasn't.

For the record, I've previously stated that the US, with it's 15+ years of relentlessly removing any & obstacles to anyone getting & carrying a gun, has created a situation that will be nearly impossible to solve. It is entirely possible to utterly f*ck a situation & society up so badly that it will take decades to unravel it and I totally think we're there. So on the surface it might seem I agree with you. Despite my beliefs, I refuse to adopt the stance of refusing to try anything because I'm "a realist". We. Must. Try. Children are being repeatedly mowed down in their schools. They are being executed in ways prohibited by the Geneva Convention as well as by any organized society anywhere, 'civilized' or not. Some of them undoubtedly suffered immeasurably. Their families will never recover. So if you don't find the proposals to be worthwhile....what then do you propose? Because the only proposals I see from the pro-gun crowd are mumblings about lack of Jesus and fathers and Bibles in schools and an excess of videos games. Which, BTW, nearly every other Western developed country also has.....but they don't have mass shootings.

I'm really not sure this is pandemic-related. A friend of mine is the director at a large preschool, and she hasn't reported experiencing anything nearly as extreme as what you're describing, which makes me wonder if this might be spectrum disorders, or family issues? For the short run, however, Zoom is worth a try. It certainly won't hurt.

So the story on the shooter is that he had major back surgery in late May, blamed Dr. Phillips (the surgeon) for the pain and, less than 10 days after surgery, murdered him (& several others). Bought the semi-automatic rifle the same day he shot & killed 4 people. Brought to you by the gun whores who insist that no one, ever, should have to wait even 10 minutes to purchase whatever gun they like. ETA: To say I'm seething right now doesn't even describe it. Oh - my doctor friend on a private Reddit forum says one of the trending topics the last few days has been US physicians looking to emigrate to other countries. Usually a stream-lined process for physicians, since they are in short supply nearly everywhere.

@Corraleno Any reliable recent stats on the effect (or lack thereof) of boosters w/ regard to risk of long Covid? (that was a bad sentence, but hopefully you get what I mean) @Grace & Prairie (& others). I'm not a HCW but have several (including hospital-based ones), all in different states, in my contacts. Nearly all describe hospital-based care as largely being in a state of near-collapse.....lights are on, bodies are still going through the motions, from a surface level procedures seem to be being followed, but....it is a *very* broken system, and the quality of care is really in the toilet. So many people have left that decades of experience, institutional knowledge, and communication skill are just.....gone. Teamwork has also been really broken, as many coworkers barely know each other, and every place is massively short staffed. It sounds really awful. I have no doubt that people are dying because of it...they're just hidden.

Yes, and I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will make a big deal out of the fact that an elementary school teacher propped open her classroom door on a warm day that also happened to be the last day of school. This country sucks. It just does. Maybe it won't always, but I don't know if I have much hope for things improving. A significant part of this country are a bunch of selfish, childish a$$holes, and another significant part can't be bothered to involve themselves in anything (which is another form of being a selfish, childish a$$%hole).

Don't know, but I know teachers in my school (where I taught) used to prop doors open all the time to improve air flow on hot days. HVAC systems in schools notoriously suck, and that may be all there is to it.

I remember reading an editorial written by an ER physician who was debunking the "well, anything can be a weapon!" bullsh*t argument by relating his 25+ years of experience in an inner city hospital....he'd treated thousands of both knife wounds/attacks and thousands of shooting victims, and the statistics were clear...it's a LOT easier to survive most knife attacks. *Especially* if there are multiple people in the room who can participate in the defense.

The ironic thing is that the nobody more tightly regulates firearms than the US military. Dh is retired military. Every. Single. Gun. is carefully accounted for on a base, gets signed in, gets signed out. Extremely stringent restrictions on who can carry on base. And these are trained soldiers. It's all so effing ridiculous.

And if my spouse was a teacher, I'd be so pissed right now that I'd be tempted to want him armed, so I do have empathy for the poster above. However, the risk that he might kill a child in a shoot-out wouldn't even be worth his self-defense, not to him. He wouldn't want to live after something like that. And it could so easily happen. That we are even talking about a f*cking public school teacher having to make such choices is...beyond insane.

The problem is not that teachers are not armed. The problem is that the US has allowed so many hideously ugly problems & attitudes to multiply to the point where now a number of our leaders (& populace) believe that teachers actively shooting guns in their classrooms is the solution. If that doesn't define a failed (or failing) society, I don't know what does.

The good guy with a gun narrative is just that....a narrative. Very few every day citizens want to be prepared to drop everything for a direct shoot-out AT A MOMENT'S NOTICE, at literally any place, at any time (day or night)...and yet just a thing would be required for the "good guy with a gun" narrative to work. Everyone prepared to start shooting, at a moment's notice, with perfect aim, and perfect judgment/assessment of the situation (what if someone is just showing his gun to a friend, or carrying a rifle down the street - perfect legal?). It is an unbelievable fantasy to all but the gun nuts, of which the US has many. And yet many people have bought into that narrative. More guns in more people's hands! That'll make us safe! Some days, I really thing we are seriously the stupidest f*cking people on the planet.