Mauna Kea is unique as an astronomical observing site. The atmosphere above the mountain is extremely dry -- which is important in measuring infrared and submillimeter radiation from celestial sources - and cloud-free, so that the proportion of clear nights is among the highest in the world. The exceptional stability of the atmosphere above Mauna Kea permits more detailed studies than are possible elsewhere, while its distance from city lights and a strong island-wide lighting ordinance ensure an extremely dark sky, allowing observation of the faintest galaxies that lie at the very edge of the observable Universe. A tropical inversion cloud layer about 600 meters (2,000 ft) thick, well below the summit, isolates the upper atmosphere from the lower moist maritime air and ensures that the summit skies are pure, dry, and free from atmospheric pollutants.
Some literary linguistics and various vocabulary for you all! Etymology of protagonist and antagonist are a bonus.
Fun facts! The words “deuteragonist” and “tritagonist” represent the second- and third-most important characters in a story, often the hero’s sidekick and the villain, respectively. I’d always assumed the “pro” in “protagonist” was from the usage in “pros and cons”, in which it means “for” - the protagonist was on the side of the story, they were for it, and the antagonist was against it. Pros and cons is Latin, though; Protagonist is Greek, as is antagonist. HOWEVER.
Protagonist and Antagonist have different roots. Protagonist stems from the Greek words for “First in importance” and “Actor”. Antagonist stems from the Greek (and later French and English) words for “Struggle against”. It’s more closely related to “antagonize” than to “protagonist”.
Medical personnel have some amazing slang and acronyms
Most people who will appreciate this probably won't need explanations, but they're included just in case. None of these are official, and I do not professionally condone their usage.
PCTTJ - Patient Care Transferred To Jesus (death after personnel on-scene)
FDGB- Fall Down Go Boom (when the cause of injury is a fall)
FDSS - Found Dead Stayed Same (dead on arrival)
MAGGOT- Medically Able to Go Get Other Transportation (patient called ambulance unnecessarily)
Toilet Paper My Ass - Tricuspid , Pulmonic, Mitral and Aortic (the four areas to listen to with a stethoscope)
One-Delta-Ten-Tango - Idiot (number 1 for I, Delta from NATO alphabet for D, number 10 for IO, Tango from NATO alphabet for T)
Normasaline- Normal saline (administered in place of pain medication when patient requests it unnecessarily)
TNTC - Too Numerous To Count (used as the chief complaint when the patient has an extensive, probably fictional list of complaints)
Incarceritis - Using medical problem to delay incarceration (refers to fairly common practice of subjects under arrest to report a usually fictional chest pain/other conditions)
GVG- Granny versus Gravity (refers to tendency of seniors, especially women, to require EMS attention after falling)
Let's talk about common law and feticide (and feticide's relative, abortion, plus prenatal development, and even some bioethics for good measure)
April Fool's Day is drawing to a close, and I thought it could use some cold, hard information. Enter: Andrew's early morning (like halfway done at 0400 hours early) introductory escapades to all sorts of things related to the legal status of human fetuses, spawned mainly from the question "What is feticide?". As pieces written just before the sun rises tend to suffer in their technical aspects, please let me know any typos or other clarifications so I can implement them! I did a quick proof read, but I make no promises.
I was doing some legal research and found my way to the Wikipedia page for murder (no, I'm not providing my own legal counsel, it's for a literary creation of mine). A small section of the page covered feticide, which I for some reason took interest in, and figured I'd pass my leanings on to you. Naturally if you don't like talking about bad things happening to fetuses or embryos, this might not the place for you to be, but I encourage you to look anyways. I encourage people to examine new materials and challenge their beliefs; while it is certainly challenging (I am all too familiar with it), and there it not always a right answer, the world can't improve if people don't stop and think about their opinions instead of yanking them from their parents or their favorite media outlet. I've got a decent amount of text behind the Read More for the curious, unsure, or vaguely interested, and I am happy to field questions regarding clarifications or further information for as long as this blog exists. And before anyone asks, no, none of this is fictitious, satirical, or some kind of prank (if you look back a post or two, you'll see that I'm well aware of the date). The information in this post is accurate to the best of my knowledge, and I welcome corrections (I can even cite you at the bottom of the post if you want).
I will begin with a quick explanation since it doesn't fit nicely below:
Common law is a type of legal system which evolves through the decisions of judges in courts (this is what the term precedent refers to). Common law has formed the basis of the United Kingdom's judicial system for roughly one thousand years, and was utilized in designing the American judicial system during the country's creation. In comparison, most of mainland Europe and South America uses an alternative law system called "civil law". But I won't get into that, if you know it that's great and if you don't, maybe I'll do a more in depth compare/contrast post. When America laid out the Bill of Rights and other founding principles, they reshaped the existing principles of common law, removing certain permissions it granted (like general search warrants) but retaining the main idea of basing verdicts in precedent, along with a wide array of other ideals which manifested themselves in various laws, or lack thereof. During mid to late 19th century, the United States began to move further away from the traditional regulations of common law. This was due to American courts developing their own principles instead of relying on British precedent.
Now on to the fun part you've all been waiting for. Between this period of change in legal process and the decision of Roe v. Wade (1973), if a woman's unborn child became a victim of feticide due to a violent crime such as Assault and Battery, the defendant would be charged essentially with giving the woman an abortion, instead of the common law standard. During this period, abortion was considered a felony in as many as 30 US states, and available upon request in only 4 (WA, AK, HI, NY) in the years leading up to Roe, and considered legal in the case of certain restrictions in several others, much like how contemporary state abortion laws vary.
Alternatively to this American-born method of dealing with feticide, the statutes and precedents of common law which the US moved away from provided no feticide protections to unborn humans (this dates back to 1115 CE) - it required that for true "homicide" to have occurred, the being must have breathed on it's own. While common law mandated that abortion was illegal any time after the movement of the fetus is first felt felt by the mother, like feticide it was not considered murder. Feticide, and by extension abortion, was viewed as not-quite-murder and punished accordingly; people charged with it were traditionally punished with 10 years' penance (essentially the convicted would pray for forgiveness from God for 10 years), a fraction of the punishment handed out for "true" or "full" homicides. The not-quite-murder idea stems from the concept that in order to be a murder victim, one must have been "a reasonable creature, in rerum natura, and in the King's peace". This simply means a being which could be reasoned with, or was capable of critical thought (assumed to be exclusively a human, or I suppose it could be some unknown creature of equal intelligence) which exists in the natural, physical world we live in (rerum natura) and interact with daily who was on good terms with the King. As interpreted in the 1500s, for something to be considered part of the natural world, it must be "completely expelled" from the mother's womb. As for the King's peace, that just means killing criminals or other enemies of the state would not count as murder, since the King didn't protect them. But now let's look at the state of feticide...
Currently in 2014, 21 states unconditionally recognize the "unborn child", or fetus, as a homicide victim in non-abortion fetal death, and 25 states recognize that fatal injury to a fetus may be punishable no matter the stage of prenatal development. 12 states have policy that varies based on the age of the fetus, and some states like California treat feticide as homicide, but allow the destruction of human embryos; this distinction is hugely important to the still-growing embryonic stem-cell industry, though in California it was not a result of their direct action (People v. Davis 1994).
As far as I can tell, these laws do not qualify legally induced abortions as feticide, as there are many states which both punish the murder of a fetus like they would any other kind of homicide and also allow requested abortions (there are some states which outlaw both, however, and may utilize dual-functioning laws which outlaw abortion on the premise of it being a form of feticide). In 2004, President Bush signed and brought into effect the only federal law which specifically recognizes any unborn human child, regardless of development stage, as a possible victim of 68 different federally recognized violent crimes, including charges of terrorism and violence within the military or other federal jurisdictions.
An important distinction I would like to make is the difference between an embryo and a fetus. Fetal stage is generally recognized around the 11th gestational week, which is about nine weeks after fertilization. Beyond humans, in order to apply the word fetus to prenatal development, the species must be a type of viviparous vertebrate, or animals which have spinal cords and carry an embryo to term and give live birth instead of laying eggs. These are typically a kind of mammal, but a handful of other species which don't use placental development qualify as well. These are the technical factors that define a "fetus", however; biologically, there is just as much of a transition between embryo and fetus as there is from your 30th to 31st birthday. While it's easy to spot differences that occurred before and will occur after, there is not a recognized demarcation line in the physical development of the embryo into a fetus, scientific or otherwise, of which I am aware. The term "fetus" typically suggests that the embryo has progressed to a point where it's species is recognizable (if you don't understand this, I have a video for you), but this is still fairly subjective and can vary. Also, in my readings I found a general consensus - while a fetus has the potential to survive outside the womb with artificial aid, an embryo would perish even with the best of modern medicine aiding it in just a transplant, never mind any extended time spent developing. Understanding the difference between the a fetus and embryo is important in any discussion involving one or the other, be it about embryonic stem cell research or the abortion at different prenatal development stages. Brain activity has been observed in embryos around six weeks after fertilization, and this activity is typically accompanied by the embryo's first detectable heartbeats. Among other developments that progress to what I would call the "definitive fetal stage", classically hallmarked by the mother's surprise when she first feels the baby "kick", these are key concepts in the philosophical and ethical controversy of determining when exactly the former zygote deserves full human rights. The stage I skip, which Wikipedia claims is a fetal stage, involves the beginning development of neural pathways, evidenced by "uncontrolled movements and twitches" as those pathways create new connections between the brain and various developing muscle groups. Does the heartbeat show life? There was a time when human's pronounced death when no heartbeat could be found; however, we now know that it takes 20-40 seconds for brain activity to cease. Both of these definitions can potentially be related and require further debate and study, and hopefully you can take what I've shared with you (I tried to be non-bias, I think) and form your OWN opinion, maybe even with some further research. Once you have that, read my more personal thoughts below:
In an effort to ground things a bit, my home state of New Hampshire does not criminalize fetal homicide. It is punishable through the charge of criminal assault on the mother, assuming she incurred some sort of trauma. I have some incredibly mixed feelings about this, as I am a strong pro-choice supporter. A story published by the Union Leader (a popular New Hampshire newspaper) in December 2013 explains how a state Representative is planning to sponsor a bill criminalizing the death of a fetus as a result of a criminal act (thus leaving abortions out of it). Most of me wants to support this bill. I am pro-choice; I think a woman should not have to endure pregnancy and childbirth if she doesn't want to, and it's no one else's place to tell her what to do. Even in 2014, having a kid is risky business health-wise, which can be reason enough to abort especially unplanned pregnancies. Another plausible reason would be if the mother doesn't think she will be able to support the child - she may not wish to carry the baby to term just to give it up for adoption. But if she is planning on expanding her family and suddenly has those plans wrenched from her grasp, this fetus is now something which is intended to become part of rerum natura. A common issue presented in cases of determining if the unborn child can be considered possessing human rights is the idea of "viability" - if removed from the womb, can the child be kept alive through artificial means? As I mentioned, embryos are not viable, as they must remain in utero to survive. However, as technology becomes more advanced and we are able to provide life support to babies which are more and more premature, perhaps viability should be determined based on more factors including a mother's intention to carry the baby to term? I'll let you answer that question, too.
