Selima,

you and GUEST are of a piece. You assume that the people you are talking to don't know the issues. I assure you, many of us do.

believe me, I am sympathetic to the cause of midwives. That is not the issue here.

The issue is whether Edwards and the doctors who want to force women into subservience are on the same side or on opposite sides of the issue. Edwards, it seems to me, is on the opposite side. He did not sue midwives and claim that they should have sent women to doctors. He sued doctors who had delivered babies with birth defects.

The question of cerebral palsy and c-section is an interesting one. You are correct that increased c-section rates do not improve cp rates. But this is not the same thing as saying that a cesarian cannot, in certain circumstances, prevent CP. Currently, medical thinking supports the notion that some small number of CP cases are caused by asphyxia during birth, which can be prevented by c-section. Simply increasing the numbers of c-sections across the nation in a clumsy way is not likely to catch many of these cases. Even if it did, it is not clear whether the saved babies would make much of a statistical dent in the rate of CP. But that doesn't mean that, when confronted by such a case, a doctor shouldn't give the woman a c-section.

Edwards had to prove before a jury, that in each case the doctor was dealing with one of these rare cases. Two things are salient here. One is that he quite possibly believed that each case WAS one of these rare cases (he did not in fact try many cases directly involving c-section for CP). The second is that even if he wasn't convinced, his job was still to convince the jury. To get mad at Edwards is like saying a prosecutor is contemptible because sometimes he prosecutes an innocent person, and a defense attorney is contemptible because sometimes he defends a guilty one. It's inevitable in the legal profession, and you might as well just condemn all trial lawyers, which is exactly what Bush and Co. are trying to do in their ads.

Finally, Edwards never argued that doctors should simply give c-sections in all cases. This is the medical profession's ham-fisted way of trying to prevent people like Edwards from calling them on their mistakes.

It's like if I were an auditor of a big corporation that was illegally reporting false earnings to pump up their stock values. I discover this discrepancy and prepare to release my report. The word gets to the executives that my testimony will bring the stock values down. They freeze the investments of their employees' retirement funds a la Enron, while they loot the company. They walk away with millions, the employees get screwed, the company goes down.

Who does Selima blame? Me.

Where is the sense in that?