Did anyone know that the real cause of the nursing shortage in the U.S. is legalized abortion? Yep, according to the former golden boy of the Republican Party Tom Delay (isn’t that guy in prison yet?). At a talk he gave to recent national convention of College Republicans, a 250,000-member organization that promotes GOP policies and candidates, this was his Biblical pronouncement:

I contend [abortion] affects you in immigration. If we had those 40 million children that were killed over the last 30 years, we wouldn’t need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today. Think about it.

Yes, he really said it. And to think, this man was just two heartbeats away from being president. Well, to his credit, at least he wasn’t arrested in a public toilet, unlike some of his cronies.

But according to maestro Delay, the U.S. is suffering from an acute labor shortage, thanks to legalized abortion. And that’s the reason why poor Mexicans are streaming across our border. You see, if all of those fetuses hadn’t been aborted, Mexico would be able to support their entire population in luxury. The government wouldn’t have any corruption, there would be no inequality, and they wouldn’t feel the need to cross the border in the dead of night, or swim the Rio Grande.

Does it make sense to you? I didn’t think so. Makes no sense to me, but then, we’re talking about Tom Delay.

But according to Delay, what if? What if all them li’l old fetuses had been allowed to grow the full nine months and been born….

According to Tom, most of those little un-aborted babies would grow up and willingly rush out to the fields picking strawberries, cotton, peaches…they could clean houses, pluck chickens, work in factories….yup, all the things the poor illegals do now. And these un-aborted people would be more than willing to do the work for below minimum wage.

Well, surely at least some of them would have become nurses. Right? The ones who didn’t see a future in breathing in pesticides and baking in the hot fields. Or grilling burgers in greasy diner or washing dishes. The ones who didn’t want to scrub toilets and polish silver for the missus…

Leave it to Tom Delay to come up with the answer to the nursing shortage. You figure out of 40 million abortions, maybe we could have squeezed about 5 million nurses out of it.

Now, I really don’t want to get into the politics of abortion–this post was only to highlight one of the dumbest quotes I’ve yet to read in my lifetime, and to point how this explains the nursing shortage.

But just in case anyone has forgotten how truly sleazy this man is, and what a disgrace he was (and still is) to our country, we should be reminded of how he really feels about abortion. This is from Snagwire, in reference to this infamous quote:

Of course, you know quite a bit about unfair labor, Mr. DeLay. Your rich lawyer friend, Mr. Jack Abramoff, represented a sweat shop in the North Mariana Islands that forced it’s pregnant female workers to get abortions (the islands are US Territory, but not subject to US labor laws). When a bill was introduced to make this practice illegal, you made sure it never made the Congressional schedule. After that, the Senate passed a worker-reform bill to extend US labor laws to people on the islands. You stopped the House from bringing it into consideration. Then when Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), a fellow Republican, planned a fact-finding mission to the islands, you threatened to strip him of his subcommittee chairmanship. Mr. DeLay, you may not be very smart on the subject of illegal immigration, but you clearly care quite a bit about labor.

This is a website that is certain to put a number of people of the nurse persuasion into a tizzy–especially those suffering from the supernurse syndrome, who think that physicians are worthless and should be ground up in a Vita-Mix and used for compost.

Kevin Perez, MD, appears to be the owner of this website, and he very bravely tackled the subject of nurse/doctor relationships by posting segments of emails that he received from nurses who returned to school to become MDs–yes, how sacrilegious. According to the nurse police, that never happens. Anyway, these emails are very interesting, and I think quite true, based on my own experience.

This is one of them:

I was a nurse for ten years before I became a doctor. While I was a nurse, I often thought I knew just as much as the doctors, and so did many of the nurses I worked with. Then I went to medical school. Let me tell you, it was hard . . . REALLY hard. If I’d known as much as I thought I did, I guess it wouldn’t have been such a challenge, right? Having been both a nurse and a doc, I know what nurses know, and I know what doctors know — and I know there’s a world of difference between them. So, Pez, I have to say I agree with you that doctors do know more. In retrospect, it’s amazing that anyone would doubt something so obvious. This probably won’t set too well with your readers who are nurses, but I have one thing to say to them: go to medical school, and THEN tell me you really think nurses know as much as docs.

In some instances, I really do think that the nurse may know more about a particular patient than the physician. Nurses spend more time with the patient, especially if it is someone in a long term care facility or a home health patient. The physician may become alarmed, for instance, if he thinks a patient (who he has never seen before) is breathing too hard. However, the nurse who has been caring for this patient for the past 2 months can point out that this is a dramatic improvement (you shoulda seen the guy last month!).

But some nurses I’ve seen “know” what is wrong with the patient, they “know” what the patient needs–even if they haven’t a clue. I’ve seen both very bad doctors, who would do well to spend the rest of their careers planting potatoes in the middle of Siberia, and some very bad nurses who would do well to spend the rest of their careers nursing fruit flies in biology labs.

Anyway, Doc Kevin looks like he has an interesting website. I’ll have to check it out more thoroughly one of these days.