A Supreme Court ruling on 18 April 2007, upheld a law banning late-term abortion with no provision for the health of the mother. In addition, the law is so broadly written that many legal experts believe it leaves the door wide open for individual states to further restrict abortion. Many already have by making life so dangerous for physicians who performed abortions that there is no clinic or hospital within hundreds of miles that will do it. You may think, because old women are past child-bearing age, that this is not an elder issue. You would be wrong because:

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a story about a remarkably good book about long-term care: It Should Be This Way: The Failure of Long-Term Care. One of it's authors, Dr. Robert L. Kane, agreed to take questions from readers. I also posted the story on my blog, Time Goes By. Here are his answers:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification. Lost in the brouhaha last week in the matter of Kathy Sierra, was an announcement that federal and state lawmakers are launching a new drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment proposed in 1972. What a blast from the past.

My issue, my main interest, my reason to be in the blogosphere is the topic of aging. If I can’t relate a post to aging, I don’t write it – at least not for Time Goes By and BlogHer. But a second strong interest, as a member of fairly long standing, is blogging itself and I try to keep up. It was on Monday that I first learned of the Kathy Sierra issue from a listserv at BlogHer. That evening there were few opinions, just links to Kathy’s post wherein she explains her reasons for canceling a speaking engagement and dropping out of the blogosphere: “I've been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that's not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs...” There have since been what must be a millions of words from bloggers with, I have no doubt, at least an equal amount in the works (including this post). Most I have read are in support of Kathy, rightly deploring the atmosphere of fear, hate and misogyny the threats create. But before the commentary buries the original issue, I’d like to explain my initial reaction to Kathy’s post.

If you haven’t already, it is not unlikely that you will one day find yourself caring for an aging, sick relative. Once upon a time, this kind of caregiving was done at home and indeed, when I was a child, many of my friends and playmates helped with that care. “I can’t go to swimming today, Ronni,” they would say. “I have to take care of gramps while mom goes shopping.” Today, for a variety of reasons, home care is frequently impossible, or impractical, so you will need some form of professional long-term care. And it will not be easy: “[Long-term care] is the country’s best-kept embarrassing secret. Almost every adult in this country will either enter a nursing home or have to deal with a parent or other relative who does. Few people, however…are prepared to deal with a system that is seriously flawed.”