Most pharmacies are part of insurance networks, at least they are where I live. If this were me, and I'd received a note like this, I'd kick and scream all the way up the food chain at my health care insurance.

If I were a corporate bean-counter with Blue Cross or Cigna or Aetna or whoever, and discovered that one of my in-network pharmacies was refusing to serve my clients on religious grounds, I'd drop them from my network faster than you can say "breach of contract."

Just a thought.

Is universal free contraception and free access to safe abortion. All over the world. If only the republicans and the puritanistic americans could get thier heads out of their collective behinds on this one.

If women, men, and couples the world over could reliably control their own fertility, they would.

Abstinence is horsepucky, and we all know it. The urge to reproduce is as fundamental as the urge to breathe, and anyone who denies it has never spent much time in a public high school, a college, an office, a bar, a church, or really anywhere that human beings congregate. People like to have sex. It's fun, it feels great, and unfortunately it has all kinds of strings attached. However, those attached strings have NEVER reliably stopped it from happening in the whole history of humankind. NEVER. If you think otherwise, you're not being honest with yourself.

If Bill Clinton or anyone else is seriously concerned about world poverty, this is what they need to do. Too bad so many religions get their sticky little fingers involved in the issue... so many religions (like the Catholics) run by old men who have never had to change a diaper, let alone give birth to more children than they can feed.

We expect everything to be cheap and plentiful. The idea that we are the world's breadbasket, that one can drive across states like Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, and still we are importing GRAINS FER CHRISSAKES from China boggles the mind.

I'm sorry, I wouldn't trust the Chinese manufacturing practices any further than I could throw them. Yet we are inextricably tied to them in every aspect of our lives. Just try buying anything from a toothbrush to a computer without the Made in China label on the side. Our own manufacturing capacity is a shadow of its former self, all for the almighty dollar.

I don't have a problem with the meat byproducts--all the oddball stuff we don't want to eat. I'd rather feed them to cats and dogs (cooked to remove bacteria and whatnot) than throw them away, and as this article indicates, it doesn't cause problems.

The real problem is a country that is so fixated on price that we've lost track of quality. Does a houseful of cheap plastic crap and a bag of dog food that cost two dollars less really make us happy?

Great thread, fun to read.

When my kids were little and first started to ride bikes, I got bike flags for them. When I noticed how much they catch my eye, I bought one for myself. Big tall dorky-looking wavy fiberglass pole with an orange flag on top. I don't see them much on other bikes, but I'm just as religious about them now as I am about wearing a helmet. I made my husband put one on his bike too.

I don't ride after dark much, and I don't commute to work by bike, but I am trying to do local errands by bike when I can.

A flag doesn't solve every problem, it doesn't make bike lanes where there are none (I could carry on about that but so many other posters have already done that), but unless you're Lance Armstrong and trying to save every half-gram of weight, go get a flag and be visible. $9.99 from your local bike shop.

Does poverty affect women's health?

Does not being able to provide for a child affect women's health?

Does carrying a pregnancy to term and then giving a child up for adoption affect a woman's health?

Yes to all of these. Kee-rist, if another person comes by and says abortion is something women truly don't "understand" I'll barf. I really will. Women understand all too well what it means to bring an unwanted life into the world.

Best advice I ever got after a devastating breakup came from a dear friend who lost a parent to cancer.

Grieving for anything takes a lot of time. Imagine a really big pile of rice. I can't say how big it is, maybe even you can't, but it's big. Slowly, one by one, you will have to pick up every single grain and move it to somewhere else. There is no fast way to do this. You don't get a shovel, you don't even get to use handfuls. Just one grain at a time. Every memory, every thought, every shared experience, every dream about the future. One by one by one. Some days you'll turn away from the pile and ignore it for a while. That's OK. Some time, next month, next year, who knows when, you'll realize that the pile is a little smaller. Some times the grains of rice will demand to be moved when you least expect them, some memory in the grocery store or the gas station. Some day in the future, you'll have moved it all and realize that you are done.

The truth to take from this analogy is that there is no fast track. Everyone's grief is different... different size pile, different number of grains. But the process is the same, picking up one grain at a time, thinking about it, and moving it.

Good luck.