I promise I won't foam at the mouth.

Not one word about Alito. I swear. Just go read PinkoFeministHellcat on the subject that's attracting the most attention. Oft thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

And please, please don't get me started on civil rights, disability rights and access, and gender equality.

We all knew Miers would be a sacrificial lamb, and that once she withdrew or failed to be confirmed, Bush would come out with his *real* candidate. Now he has, and now things will get interesting.

A word on judicial bypass

The state in which I live requires parental notification for minors seeking abortions. In the years I worked in women's health, I only saw a handful of cases in which young women who had to notify their parents were unwilling to do so, for very good reason.

One case involved a young woman whose father and stepmother had looked the other way while she was raped repeatedly by a cousin. Another involved a girl whose father would've killed her, literally, for bringing shame on his family. Those were the two worst; there were four or five more that, while not as horrible, certainly presented food for thought and caused me to call the equal-access folks for help.

Now, then. Judicial bypass is an option for young women in this state...but there is not one judge in my county who will hear a judicial-bypass request. Not one. They've all decided that judicial bypass takes the rights of parents away. Unfortunately, it's difficult to get a bypass ruling from a judge not in one's home county, even with competent legal help.

It's accepted that parents have a certain amount of dominion over their minor children; that's how parental consent and notification laws have passed in so many states. The spousal notification and consent laws that have been struck down assume that men have the same dominion over their spouses.

Which is a silly assumption, especially considering it doesn't go both ways.

Imagine what it would be like to be living in a county with no judicial bypass option, as a married woman with an abusive spouse, or one who's simply disappeared, or one who's locked up somewhere, and trying, as an adult woman, to get basic, common health care.

Imagine how it feels to be told this: even if you're in a good relationship, even if you and your spouse have made the decision not to continue a pregnancy together, you still don't have the ability to make that decision on your own, simply because you are the one carrying the pregnancy.

This is just like pharmacists refusing to dispense the morning-after pill, people. The onus falls on women in every case. When you show me the cases involving pharmacists refusing to dispense Lipitor or Levadopa to men, or the cases in which men are required to notify their wives before undergoing a radical prostatectomy, then I will believe that all this is about moral repugnance or equalizing voices within a relationship.

Until and unless that happens, I will continue to think that perhaps, just maybe, just a little bit, these sorts of things are about not allowing women full power over their bodies and their lives.

In other news

I got the closest thing yet to an invitation for a date the other night from a resident. Bless his heart, he got all kerfuffled when I started laughing hysterically, right in his face.

Nurses don't date residents. Not, at least, residents that they have to work with. They're residents, after all, and the work-with-this-person-for-years angle doesn't make it any more attractive.

We still have two screamers on the floor. I'm too tired to even consider writing about their latest antics.

The scary nursing student has been booted, not because she's gum on anybody's shoe or because she refused to do maid work, but because she ignored a tonic-clonic seizure one of her patients had and failed to inform the nurse about it.

And that's all the news for now.