Editorial Excerpts, December 2024

… Far from following the sacred Hippocratic oath of “do no harm” to the human bodies in a doctor’s care, too many elected officials follow the cynical mantra of “do no harm to my reelection prospects.” Nor are most of these politicians women, let alone women of childbearing age who might be subject to a draconian abortion law that can threaten her life. In some states, voters can more easily decide such issues directly through a ballot measure; not in Texas.

And so it is that we Texas voters, 80% of whom believe that abortion should be available in some form, have come to live in a state where a 28-year-old Houston mother undergoing a miscarriage in a hospital close to Bush Intercontinental Airport is forced to wait 40 hours, bleeding and suffering as bacteria grows inside the baseball-sized opening of her cervix where the fetus is bearing down, before doctors will act to save her. …

[Josseli] Barnica was discharged Sept. 5, 2021, from HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest after the miscarriage but was readmitted days later with continued bleeding. The autopsy report that ProPublica obtained said she died of sepsis. It listed the manner of death as “natural.”

There’s nothing natural about a death that was preventable, and in all likelihood, would have been prevented if it occurred in a state where abortion care is legal. …

Houston Chronicle, October 31, 2024

… One study found that only 8% of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world currently have air-conditioned homes. …

The idea of ubiquitous climate control might strike some in the environmental movement as immoral …

But extreme heat stunts development. …

Heat also kills. Heat-related deaths jumped 68% over the past two decades. Today, heat waves cause 12,000 deaths a year. For billions of people in poorer, hotter countries … AC will be a necessity, not a luxury. …

Other than the cost of deployment, the challenge is that all this AC will use a lot of energy, boosting the carbon dioxide emissions that are warming the planet in the first place. Researchers project emissions from residential cooling alone will warm the world by 0.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Today, AC consumes about 7% of the world’s power. …

The project to combat climate change cannot condemn billions to broil. The moral response to the challenges confronting the world — including climate change, but also poverty and inequality — must include expanding access to lifesaving air-conditioning technology to billions of people who currently lack it. …

The Washington Post, October 5, 2024