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Air Pollution Harm To Unborn Babies May Be Global Health Catastrophe, Warn Doctors (theguardian.com)
Air pollution significantly increases the risk of low birth weight in babies, leading to lifelong damage to health, according to a large new study. From a report: The research was conducted in London, UK, but its implications for many millions of women in cities around the world with far worse air pollution are "something approaching a public health catastrophe," the doctors involved said. Globally, two billion children -- 90% of all children -- are exposed to air pollution above World Health Organization guidelines. A Unicef study also published on Wednesday found that 17 million babies suffer air six times more toxic than the guidelines. The team said that there are no reliable ways for women in cities to avoid chronic exposure to air pollution during pregnancy and called for urgent action from governments to cut pollution from vehicles and other sources.
If it were truly a catastrophe, there should be many large cities where whole generations should have perished. In the US, prior to EPA reforms, many cities had far worse air pollution, yet the maternity wards in their hospitals weren't empty.
I don't believe a blastocyst or unformed fetus is a child. It's a triviality to me: personhood laws are ludicrous, insurance should cover birth control, and HSAs and FSAs should cover condoms (to control the spread of STDs).
What's a travesty is that so many children face neglect and abuse in our over-populated foster home system, and in families who didn't want and can't support a child. We treat children like chickens: fight to have them birthed whenever we get a hint that some breeder hen might have found a rooster, and then roll them through the factory farm with no real care toward their emotional needs. A piece of skin scraping which happens to have DNA distinct from those in the human population isn't a person, nor is it a concern; it takes a good while before it starts to change into something more.
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"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." - from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
These were very cold words from a very cold character that has come to epitomize callousness and indifference in the popular mind. Ebenezer Scrooge the money-lending, usury-gouging skinflint stands for everything that is wrong with your kind of comment, but there it is modded up to +3. Shame, Slashdot, shame. If endorsing the villian of a Dickens book doesn't grab you as shameful, rest assured that the "decrease the surplus population" comment is today most frequently applied to Republicans.
"Are there no prisons? Are there no work farms?"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We just offshored all the manufacturing industries to China and closed them down in the USA and Europe. Problem solved, once and for all.
But we all share the same pl-
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
#DeleteFacebook
Air pollution in 1st world cities is much, much, much less of a problem than it used to be 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. The main reason is the switch from wood and coal to electricity and gas for cooking and heating (something that hasn't happened in many 3rd world cities, and still a major contributor to pollution there). The decline in power generation from coal has also helped.
As for cars, modern vehicles emit a lot less particulates than old ones. Despite an increase in car ownership and usage, cars aren't even the number one contributor to particulates anymore in many places. If you want to improve air quality, in most cases it isn't cars that should be addressed first. The problem is not flat earthers denying the impact their vehicles have, but environmentalists tilting at the same old windmills instead of tackling actual major sources of air pollution. Though to be fair, in certain cities, older cars and especially 2 stroke mopeds certainly are part of the problem. And I'm speaking of particulate and carcinogenic emissions only of course, not greenhouse gases.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I keep wondering when I read things like this: is it really so much worse than it was in the 1970s? OK, some places where economic growth has exploded recently may be much much dirtier now than they were then. But I went to London a few times in the late 1980s, and back then the city stank of exhaust fumes. Nowadays that is not the case anymore. I live in the Netherlands and I saw the big rivers getting cleaner, sensitive animals like salmon and beaver being reintroduced successfully, and the air in Amsterdam definitely improved. So I wonder: how come we hear more and more warnings like this? I can think of a few causes: fearmongery, increased knowledge about the impact of exhaust gases on your health, or maybe the planet as a whole really got a lot dirtier. But what is it really?
-- Cheers!
A premature birth is only viable because it contains not only fully-formed organs, but a fully self-supporting system. That system may be insufficient and, depending on who you ask, viability may include viability if hooked up to a support machine rather than just viability to survive without care.
this is a blastocyst.
Generally, abortions occur prior to 9 weeks. Beyond 9 weeks, you need surgical abortion; up to that point, you can have a drug-induced abortion. At about 9 weeks, the heart finishes dividing into chambers; internal organs are roughed-out, but nowhere near developed. Even the neural tube has only just curled up to take the place of the brain and started differentiating into scaffolding, not yet becoming an actual brain.
Viability is generally agreed upon at 24 weeks, although the low-point number is 20 weeks. Interestingly enough, premature infants seem to not have active default-mode neural networks (basic brain function) until around 30 weeks. In simple terms, a fetus isn't capable of being aware until around 25-30 weeks, although we think they can respond to (but possibly not experience) pain around 20-24.
The 20-24 week delineation avoids the upper end of the extreme, landing before the brain is capable of maybe being aware. The 9-week medical abortion limit is well before brain formation.
Remember as well: you're a person, being a sum of your experiences and your ability to think, reason, and engage in self-preservation responses. A fetus doesn't have a stress response and so no display of self-preservation behavior. It's rather conservative to consider an infant a "person" even at birth; yet we have this wonderful option to identify a missed menstrual cycle (at 4 weeks), test for pregnancy, and perform a drug-induced abortion (by 9 weeks), far before one would seriously begin to wonder if it's perhaps a living being and not just a blob of tissue. 24-week abortions may be legal in many places, but they're horrendously-stressful on the mother (surgery) and generally-unpleasant, so it's easy to encourage people to make that decision early.
Depending on your mood, one lump of cells could either be dumpster fodder or a human child we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save.
Surprisingly, my parents were vocally against abortion until my mom got pregnant again--then they had an abortion a few weeks later. They seem to have forgotten this since then. Mood seems to vary.
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In the past year, Iâ(TM)ve read stories about while towns in China getting cancer due to pollution, toxic foam floating around in India, and serious birth defects in humans and animals in both of those countries. The problem is orders of magnitude larger there than in the US. Because of this, China and India are great test beds for human evolution because those are the places with the highest levels of environmental pressures. We could see species adaptions there that donâ(TM)t exist anywhere else.