Waco, indeed… [my body, your choice]

Just read a terrible story in The New York Time Magazine about a pregnant Texan teenager with absentee parents being denied abortion (in the Roe vs. Wade past era) by a Waco judge on the basis that “she was not mature enough to make that decision”… Leading to the irrational conclusion that she was deemed to be mature enough to raise children since she was to continue her pregnancy till delivery. Unsurprisingly, the story does not end up well.

“The question of “maturity” is open to wildly different interpretations, particularly when assessed by a judge who answers to voters (…)The maturity test was not about a teenager’s ability to weigh the benefits and risks of her medical choice.”

 

systemic realities?!

While the US Supreme Court has all but abolished Roe v. Wade, by allowing Texas to keep banning abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, The New York Times continues to publish opinion pieces from anti-abortion editors. Like this one this weekend from an Anglican priest who can make preachifying statements like Roe v. Wade creating “realities where abortion becomes the easier choice for women who have unintended pregnancies” or where “pressure from the medical community to abort is common”… Or yet stating that “many European countries have far more restrictive abortion laws and lower abortion rates than the United States without curtailing the advancement of women.” As analysed in another NYT article,  this is also an argument made by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., ill-boding for the future of the law. This is when solely considering the cutoff of Roe v. Wade, rather than the access to abortion which proves much more inaccessible in most US States than Western Europe countries (with the exceptions of Northern Ireland, the Faroe Islands, and Malta, plus Poland), from local regulations to financial hurdles, to inexistent offer. (And I wonder at the repeated use of realities in the tribune. There is one reality and it is pretty harsh on women seeking abortion. Unless one prefers alternative facts…)

and it only gets worse

“The law, known as Senate Bill 8, amounts to a nearly complete ban on abortion in Texas, one that will further fuel legal and political battles over the future of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. The law makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape.” NYT, Sept. 1

“The [Supreme] Court’s order is stunning,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.” NYT, Sept. 2

“A judge in Ohio ordered a hospital to treat a Covid-19 patient with ivermectin, despite warnings from experts that the anti-parasitic drug has not proved effective against the virus and can be dangerous in large doses.” The Guardian, Aug. 31

“More than half of the world’s people have no social protections, the United Nations has warned, even after the pandemic pushed many governments to offer services to their populations.” The Guardian, Sept. 1

integral theorems for Monte Carlo

Nhat Ho and Stephen G. Walker have just arXived a paper on the use of (Fourier) integral theorems for Monte Carlo estimators, following the earlier entry of Parzen: namely that for any integrable function,

which can be turned into an estimator of a density m based on a sample from m. This identity can be rewritten as

and the paper generalises this identity to all cyclic functions. Even though it establishes that sin is the optimal choice. After reading this neat result, I however remain uncertain on how this could help with Monte Carlo integration.

the rise of the vigilantes

I was reading the New York Times about the explosion of anti-abortion legislations in the US, with more restrictions voted in the first six months than in any previous year since 1973. Besides laws that create always more burdens and constraints for women seeking an abortion, Mississippi set a 15 week ban and Texas just moved even further with a 6 week ban, which is essentially banning abortion in the State.  Which is unconstitutional (at the moment), except that Texas went a vicious step further, in making people rather than the State in charge of enforcing the law, ie of potentially suing anyone involved in an abortion performed after six weeks! Which makes the defence by abortion providers and pro-choice organisations almost impossible. And sounds like a perversion of justice, since anyone without any connection whatsoever with an abortion case and obviously irresponsible of the destiny of children born under such legislations, can sue. Just because irrational beliefs and self-righteousness make them entitled to irremediably impact others’ choices and live. Just like taliban.