February 10, 2019

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Health February 10, 2019

Doctor Weighs In On Supreme Court's Decision To Block Louisiana Abortion Law

NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Dr. Willie Parker about the recent Supreme Court decision regarding abortion access in Louisiana.



MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-to-4 last week to temporarily block Louisiana from enforcing a law that would have required physicians providing abortion services to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of wherever the procedure was performed. Supporters of the law say it’s intended to safeguard the health of women. Opponents say it’s yet another attempt to make abortions difficult, if not impossible, for women to obtain.

We wanted to look both at the current science and state of medical practice when it comes to abortion, so we’ve called Dr. Willie Parker. He is a board-certified OB-GYN, the chair of the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health. And he also supervises abortion care for women in Alabama at a clinic that draws patients from some five states. Dr. Parker, thanks so much for talking with us.

WILLIE PARKER: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: So, first, can I just get your thoughts about the Supreme Court decision?

PARKER: Well, while I celebrate the fact that women in Louisiana will still have access to care because of the action of the Supreme Court, it was a temporary fix. What really needs to happen is the Supreme Court needs to hear the merits of that case and weigh, definitively, because these laws – when they create barriers to women, they deny them access to very necessary care.

MARTIN: Planned Parenthood has repeatedly called requirements like this a popular tactic to restrict or eliminate access using technicalities, but the technicalities are really where the battle is being fought right now.

MARTIN: So, first of all, I want to ask you a basic question which many people may not know, which – what are admitting privileges?

PARKER: Well, admitting privileges are arrangements that hospitals have with individual physicians, saying that we will vet your credentials, and we will say that you can bring your patients here. So if I do outpatient care, like an abortion procedure, where complications are extremely rare, I would never admit enough patients to the hospital to keep those privileges. And so hospital admitting privileges are not an acknowledgement of the quality of a physician’s services. It’s merely a contractual arrangement with the hospital that certain physicians, who’ve been vetted by that hospital, can admit their patients there.

MARTIN: Let’s also talk about the issue that is very much under discussion in the conservative media right now, which is matters that are being debated in New York and Virginia – or, at least, were being because they’ve been taken off the table in Virginia – that would have made it easier for women to obtain an abortion later in pregnancy. As you know, certainly, critics are calling this opening the door to infanticide. Is it?

PARKER: The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but nobody’s entitled to their own facts. And the facts are, Michel, where abortion remains legal in this country, those laws that were under consideration in Virginia and the ones that were passed in New York don’t open the door to any services that women don’t already have access to. For example, in New York, it made it clear that no one can have an abortion beyond 24 weeks unless the fetus is nonviable. And so all the laws did were just clarify what was already on the books.

In Virginia, they were taking away barriers that have delayed women from getting necessary care in later stages of pregnancy. So neither of these laws would ever create the misrepresentation that the president stated in the State of the Union, where a pregnancy can be terminated minutes or days before the due date.

MARTIN: Why does this issue remain such a difficult one for this society to come to an understanding about?

PARKER: The fact that we’ve politicized this very important health care and we’ve made it, also, into a moral issue – it means that people are wrestling with subjective understandings, like morality and politics, and projecting them onto totally objective needed care, like abortion care.

MARTIN: That is Dr. Willie Parker. He’s a board-certified OB-GYN. Dr. Parker, thanks so much for talking to us.

PARKER: Thanks for having me.

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Sports February 10, 2019

Lindsey Vonn Retires As The Winningest Female Skier In History

Lindsey Vonn competes during the FIS World Ski Championships Women’s Downhill on Sunday in Are, Sweden.

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Lindsey Vonn is retiring as the winningest female ski racer in the world and one of the most decorated alpine skiers in U.S. history, ending a career in which she refused to let terrible injuries slow her down. In her final race Sunday, Vonn sped down the mountain to loud cheers, taking bronze in the downhill at the world championships in Are, Sweden.

Sunday’s medal makes Vonn the first female skier to win medals at six different world championships, and it also marks the fifth time she has won a medal in the downhill at a world championship.

“I laid it all on the line. That’s all I wanted to do today,” Vonn said. “I have to admit I was a little bit nervous, probably the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life. I wanted to finish strong so badly.”

Race organizers shortened the course in the morning due to fog and wind, which served Vonn well, as it reduced the pressure on her surgically repaired knees. Vonn recently announced she would retire early due to her injuries. She was originally set to end her career in December.

“After many sleepless nights, I have finally accepted that I cannot continue ski racing,” Vonn said last week of her decision to retire.

Vonn, 34, is the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the downhill. Her 82 World Cup victories are the most of any female skier — and she is stepping away from racing just four wins short of the all-time record held by Ingemar Stenmark. Vonn has also won seven World Championship medals, including twin golds in 2009.

Lindsey Vonn had her most successful Olympics in 2010, when she won gold in the downhill and bronze in the super-G at the Vancouver Games.

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“I have always pushed the limits of ski racing and it has allowed me to have amazing success but also dramatic crashes,” Vonn said in an Instagram post about her retirement, efficiently summarizing a career marked both by her daring and her resilience in coping with debilitating injury.

Vonn famously recovered from a crash that devastated her knee in 2013, and she has bounced back from broken bones and other injuries over her 18-year career. But she said recent problems with her knees forced her to make this week’s FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, in Are, Sweden, her last event.

One year ago, Vonn was winning races and seemed poised to break Stenmark’s World Cup record. She won a bronze medal in the downhill at the Pyeongchang Olympics.

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In March of 2018, Vonn won a gold medal in the downhill at Are, and took a bronze in the Super-G. The strong showing capped a season that also included wins in Germany, Italy, and France.

Her final alpine racing season has been rough for Vonn, starting in November, when she suffered a heavy and awkward crash during a training run at Copper Mountain, Colo.

At the time, Vonn said she had a bone bruise and a sprained lateral collateral ligament in her knee. But she recently said the injuries were more serious than she had revealed, including a ligament tear and three fractures. Vonn said she withheld that information, and the news that she had surgery last spring, because “I have never wanted the storyline of my career to be about injuries.”

But it was the accumulating effects of injuries, she said, that led her to stop racing.

“My body is broken beyond repair and it isn’t letting me have the final season I dreamed of,” Vonn said before traveling to the world championships in Sweden. “My body is screaming at me to STOP and it’s time for me to listen.”

Vonn was a dominant force on the FIS World Cup circuit, where she won four World Cup overall championships. She’s seen here kissing the crystal globe trophy after winning a Super-G race in Meribel, France, in 2015.

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Days after she announced her decision to retire, Vonn crashed in her final Super-G race, in a dramatic fall that left fans and fellow skiers cringing. Vonn went airborne as she neared a gate, sending her through the center of the panel rather than around it.

With her skis tangled, Vonn sprawled across the snow and into the netting. Seconds before, she had been rushing down the hill at speeds of around 60 mph, drawing roars from the crowd.

A red medical sled was brought to take Vonn down the mountain. But instead of using it, the four-time Olympian stood up, took stock of herself, and clipped back into her skis. After a few minutes, she skied through the rest of the course, waving to acknowledge the crowd.

“I’m too old to be crashing that hard,” Vonn said in an interview with NBC at the bottom of the run. “Oh man. It’s just time to be done. It’s like my body is not doing what my mind is telling it to anymore, and I can’t be taking these kinds of risks anymore, and crashing that hard.”

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She later added via Twitter, ” If adversity makes you stronger I think I’m the Hulk at this point….”

Vonn, who suffered a black eye and sore ribs from the crash, said the light had shifted on the race course, making it hard for her to judge the terrain through the goggles she was wearing. Up to that point, Vonn’s many fans, including rival skiers, had been cheering her on as she tried to carve time out of the course.

“I was charging,” Vonn said afterwards. “I wanted to lay it all out on the line.”

It was vintage Vonn, and proof that she wasn’t content to drift quietly into retirement. In being aggressive at the last world championships of her career, Vonn did what she has always done: pushing herself to be faster and attacking the course. And if she fell, she always got back up.

Vonn, the daughter of Alan and Linda Kildow, took up skiing at age 2. She grew up in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota — allowing her to develop her technical skills at the famous Buck Hill program run by ski-racing guru Erich Sailer in Burnsville. At age 12, Vonn moved to Vail, Colo., allowing her to train on larger mountains. Five years later, she made her Olympics debut in 2002.

Injuries are often blamed for taking away Vonn’s chances for more Olympic medals. But she was a dominant force on the world ski circuit, earning widespread respect for her athletic ability and tenacity. Her success, combined with the sense of personality she brought to her sport, helped Vonn win lucrative endorsement deals with brands from Head and Under Armour to Red Bull and Rolex.

Vonn got her start in skiing at an early age, and bolstered her talents with intensive slalom training under racing guru Erich Sailer’s Buck Hill program. She then moved on to dominate speed events, like the downhill.

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As she continued to win, Vonn became the face of American skiing. Her image was on magazine covers from Sports Illustrated to Glamour. Her resilience and bravery set an example for younger skiers to follow. And Vonn’s celebrity hit a new peak when she and another elite athlete, golfer Tiger Woods, dated for three years. Along the way, she boosted the visibility of alpine skiing and raised expectations for Team USA on the international level.

As Vonn steps away from her sport, her U.S. teammate Mikaela Shiffrin seems ready and able to dominate women’s skiing for years to come. Fittingly, it was Shiffrin who won the Super-G race in which Vonn crashed on Tuesday, with the former slalom specialist securing her first world title in that speed discipline. At just 23, Shiffrin has won 56 races on the World Cup circuit — already putting her third on the women’s win list.

But on Sunday, it was all about Vonn, as one of the greatest skiers in the world said farewell to the sport that repeatedly broke her body — but whose thrills kept her coming back for more.

“I’ll miss that wonderful sensation of speed that you can get only by racing down a hill on a pair of skis,” Vonn said at a news conference in Sweden this week. “I don’t know yet how I will compensate for that, because I won’t be able to do it skiing privately without my ski pass being taken away from me.”

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Business February 10, 2019

Why We Can't Break Up With Big Tech

Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill tried to disconnect from all Amazon products, including smart speakers, as part of a bigger experiment in living without the major tech players.

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Kashmir Hill wanted Amazon out of her life, completely.

It was the first week of a six-week experiment in living without tech giants. She had a virtual private network, or VPN, that would keep her devices walled off from any Amazon product. She would avoid Whole Foods and power down her Kindles.

But she had a problem. A small, chipper problem.

Alexa.

She couldn’t connect her Amazon Echo to the VPN. But if she just unplugged the smart speaker, someone, like her husband, might forget and plug it back in.

Then a colleague suggested that she hide it. Say, in a drawer.

Hill was so used to Alexa’s constant presence, the convenient timers and music on demand, that she hadn’t even considered putting the device away.

“We’ve only had it for two years, and it already has the level of prominence where I couldn’t have imagined just taking it off the counter,” she told NPR’s Weekend Edition. “I just can’t believe that, especially since I’m a privacy reporter.”

Hill, a reporter and editor at Gizmodo, has tackled extreme tech experiments before, like living in a smart home and spending only Bitcoin for a week.

Last fall, she decided to try cutting off Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple — each for a week, and then all at once. She wrote about her attempt for Gizmodo.

The experiment was inspired, she said, by the condemnations of tech behemoths. Critics say the companies are monetizing our attention, mishandling our data and profiting from our children. They’ve concentrated too much economic power. They’re shaping our society in ways we don’t fully understand yet.

“People will say, if you don’t like the company, just stop using their products,” Hill said. “I wanted to find out if that was possible, and, spoiler, it’s not possible.”

Beyond a surface level boycott, like deleting her Facebook account, Hill tried to sever any ties that usually funnel her data, money and attention to the five companies. Each publishes a list of IP addresses they control, so technologist Dhruv Mehrotra built her a VPN that essentially blacklisted those addresses.

Armed with that VPN and unmitigated determination, Hill put Alexa in a drawer and started her Amazon week. And it was as though a vast tract of the web blinked out.

“When I started pulling stats about Amazon, I was shocked,” she said. The company reportedly controls nearly half of all online commerce. But the company’s most profitable business is Amazon Web Services, or AWS, its cloud-computing arm that hosts apps and websites.

“They basically control kind of the backbone of Internet infrastructure,” she said. “They’re not just shipping packages out all over America. They’re also shipping a ton of data to people’s computers.”

Netflix, HBO Go and AirBnB are among the many websites hosted by AWS, and therefore were off-limits to Hill during her Amazon week (though she would have been free to browse NPR.org). Work tools were also forbidden: AWS hosts Gizmodo’s website, as well as the messaging platform Slack. At one point, her daughter cried over the digital entertainment blockade.

Other companies presented unexpected challenges. Blocking Google meant she couldn’t use Lyft or Uber, which rely on Google Maps. Going into any given coffee shop put her at risk of coming into contact with Microsoft, if the shop used Windows to operate its payment system. Cutting off Facebook left her feeling strangely isolated, pining for connection even at the cost of pervasive data surveillance.

And there were slip-ups, like when she ordered an item off eBay instead of Amazon, only to have it show up at her door in an instantly recognizable package. The seller had used Amazon to fulfill the order.

“The big thing I learned is that it’s not possible to navigate the modern world without coming into contact with these companies,” she said. “It made me certainly sympathetic to some of the critics who are saying these companies are too dominant in their spaces.”

The exception? Apple. Hill says when she gave up her iPhone and stepped out of Apple’s “walled garden,” she had no trouble staying away from the company — and it wasn’t collecting data on her.

But giving up her iPhone posed another challenge when she tried to block all five companies at once in the experiment’s final week.

“Google and Apple have a duopoly on the smartphone market,” she said. “So when I went out trying to find a smartphone that was not made or touched by either tech giant, it wasn’t possible.”

After searching in vain, she settled on a “dumb phone.” She chose the Nokia 3310, an orange brick with T9 texting that has spawned countless memes — and perhaps even ensured its own continued existence — by being essentially indestructible.

“I went back to the ’90s!” Hill said, laughing. “This experiment was a time machine.”

A time machine, and a lesson, too. Before the experiment, the first thing she would do every morning, before touching her husband or talking to her daughter, was stare at a screen.

“I would grab my iPhone and just start scrolling,” she admitted. “It’s how I started the day, every day.”

There was nothing worth scrolling through on the Nokia 3310, so she didn’t bother. The smartphone fast broke her habit. Now she turns her phone off each evening, and she doesn’t turn it on in the morning until she needs it.

“I got out of some bad tech habits,” she said. “And I’m just kind of looking at screens less. So, if nothing else, I’m glad I did this experiment in terms of becoming a healthier tech user.”

Editor’s Note: Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are financial sponsors of NPR.

NPR’s Emily Abshire contributed to this report.

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