Well here's my usual Christmas post...
It's a little later then usual since Christmas was last week, but better late then never.
Hope everyone had a lovely holiday!!!
Mother: Most Beautiful Word in the WORLD
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Mum's the word, says the world Mother was most loved, while father was absent, Mother is the most beautiful word in the English language, according to a survey of non-English speakers.
More than 40,000 people in 102 countries were polled by the British Council to mark its 70th anniversary. Mother, passion, smile, love and eternity were the top five choices - but father did not even make it into the list of 70 words.
But some unusual choices did make the list, such as peekaboo, flabbergasted, hen night and oi.
SOME OF THE TOP WORDS 1. Mother 2. Passion 3. Smile 4. Love 5. Eternity 48. Peekaboo 50. Kangaroo 61. Oi 63. Hiccup 70. Hen night Fantastic, destiny, freedom, liberty and tranquillity rounded out the top 10.
The British Council promotes the learning of English around the world and teaches the language to more than 500,000 people each year. Chris Wade, director of communications at the council, said the most favoured choices in the list were all strong, positive words. He said: "All of us have a mother and have a reasonable idea of who that person is, it's one piece of certainty we can have and it's also a very powerful word in a variety of cultures. "But I wonder if we would have had the same result if we had done the survey in the UK." He said the list showed the diversity of the English language: "There are words denoting concepts that people aspire to, like freedom; words that sounded fun like peekaboo and others that aren't really words at all but they convey real meaning, like oi."
Other words to make the top 70 included serendipity, loquacious, kangaroo and zing. There were also words imported from other languages, such as renaissance and aqua. Presumably, a maternal kangaroo would be highly rated indeed." We'll grab anything we can take. Lots of words have been stolen over the years," Mr Wade said. " But while other languages may be reluctant to use our words, [this has provided] a real richness in the English has evolved."
He said one English word to have gained widespread usage recently was flip-flop, which came 59th in the survey. Failed US presidential candidate John Kerry was accused by the Republicans of having "flip-flopped" - or changed his stance - on a number of policy areas. "Flip-flop was used a lot during coverage of the US election. If the survey had been done a year ago it probably would not be in the list," said Mr Wade.
Michael Quinion, whose recent book Port Out, Starboard Home examines some of the quirks of the English language, said it was a very "eclectic" list. He said: "These non-English speakers certainly have wonderful English vocabularies. "There seems to be a curious mixture of the formal and the colloquial. Oi is not a word that I would've thought turned up in English manuals all that often." The list also included what Mr Quinion said was his own favourite English word - serendipity, which came 24th. "It's so mellifluous but it's such a nice concept too."
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Monday, December 29, 2008
Saturday, November 08, 2008
New President, New Policies
Well I haven't posted in a while...
My grand daughter, all of 13 years old, is now living with me while she finishes junior high school. AND she came with her dog (a 6 month old puppy); so, needless to say I've been pretty busy.
I did want to comment on the recent election of Barack Obama. I think this could morph into a good things for mothers and children. First of all, his wife is a stay-at-home mother, not one of these crazed gender neutral feminists, who spends all of her time at work ignoring her children AND more importantly expects every other woman to validate her decision by doing the exact same thing. Michelle Obama appeared to have her priorites correctly aligned, as we can see from her comment about her role in the White House: she sees her main task as working to make life as normal as possible for her children and husband (in that order).
LOL!!!!
That's right.
I had to laugh to myself as I imagined Hillary Clinton and the NOW crowd hearing that comment from Michelle Obama last week.
The reality is that these crazed gender neutral feminists are never happy unless every mother is dumping her kids into a daycare center for 10 hours a day, while they trudge off to work from dawn to dusk. Any mothers staying at home are viewed as a personal insult to their ilk and they'll do anything to shoot them down. But they're too politically correct to trash the First Lady of the First African American President of the United States. So they'll have to suck it up for the next four (or eight) years and pretend to admire Michelle Obama while inside they are seething...
It's rich...
Thus, this situation has the potential to morph into more public policies being passed that favor MOTHERS especially stay-at-home mothers and that's the way it should be; at least if a society wishes to survive, never mind thrive.
So those are my thoughts on the election.
Peace Out!!!!
My grand daughter, all of 13 years old, is now living with me while she finishes junior high school. AND she came with her dog (a 6 month old puppy); so, needless to say I've been pretty busy.
I did want to comment on the recent election of Barack Obama. I think this could morph into a good things for mothers and children. First of all, his wife is a stay-at-home mother, not one of these crazed gender neutral feminists, who spends all of her time at work ignoring her children AND more importantly expects every other woman to validate her decision by doing the exact same thing. Michelle Obama appeared to have her priorites correctly aligned, as we can see from her comment about her role in the White House: she sees her main task as working to make life as normal as possible for her children and husband (in that order).
LOL!!!!
That's right.
I had to laugh to myself as I imagined Hillary Clinton and the NOW crowd hearing that comment from Michelle Obama last week.
The reality is that these crazed gender neutral feminists are never happy unless every mother is dumping her kids into a daycare center for 10 hours a day, while they trudge off to work from dawn to dusk. Any mothers staying at home are viewed as a personal insult to their ilk and they'll do anything to shoot them down. But they're too politically correct to trash the First Lady of the First African American President of the United States. So they'll have to suck it up for the next four (or eight) years and pretend to admire Michelle Obama while inside they are seething...
It's rich...
Thus, this situation has the potential to morph into more public policies being passed that favor MOTHERS especially stay-at-home mothers and that's the way it should be; at least if a society wishes to survive, never mind thrive.
So those are my thoughts on the election.
Peace Out!!!!
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Family and Medical Leave Act Seeks to Undermine Mother's Rights
I discussed this issue before on this blog: how men have been attempting to undermine women’s unique contribution and bond with their infants in order to reward men with time off from work and many other benefits. These benefits rightfully belong to the person who has contributed, risked, suffered and simply invested the most in the birth of a child and that person is called a ‘mother’. This benefits our society overall, as well as the individual mother and any children SHE alone bears, as it ensures women get good health care and nutrition prior, during and for some time after pregnancy.
The article below is a good example of the sort of political correctness that has been creeping into public policy over the last few decades or so. I first noticed it when Bill Clinton issued an executive order to his cabinet-level officers that ALL governmental programs begin enforcing strict gender neutral participation. Even programs such as Women Infant Children (WIC) were expected to ensure exact 50/50 representation of men and women.
Can someone please tell me WHY men should be getting free milk, eggs, cheese, etc., paid for by our government?
Do they carry life within their bodies that draws calcium and other minerals from them?
Do they breast feed?
Do they suffer any pain, discomfort or disfigurement during the 9 months pregnancy or actual birth process?
I think we all know the answer to that already, a resounding NO.
Yet they wish to give themselves benefits on a par with women when they contribute little or nothing to the entire process of bringing life forth…
I can tell you where this is heading if women do NOT start taking a strong stand on this issue and soon. One, custody battles taking place BEFORE birth just to decide who has the right to take the maternity leave. That’s one thing.
Secondly, this business of trying to make the gender neutral Family Leave paid and substitute it for Maternity Leave can have a decidely negative impact on mothers and children. As what’s to stop any family member from fighting to use your baby in order to stay home for an entire year WITH PAY?
Absolutely nothing!!!
Women are slowly but surely handing over our naturally bestowed rights as mother to the legal system, a system invented by men for their OWN benefit…Remember we don’t need to sit around with hat in hand waiting for a Judge to tell us we can be home with our babies. That’s our right, not something we get as a gift from men for being ‘good girls’.
Giving Birth to a Good Policy
Here's what to consider in drafting a sound maternity-leave plan for faculty members
By JOSEPH UNTENER
Search the Web and you'll find no shortage of articles on the need for sound policies to help faculty members balance family life with career issues. Why, then, is there such a dearth of solid maternity-leave policies for faculty members?
At the University of Dayton, where I am an associate provost, several years passed between the clear need for a campuswide maternity-leave policy and its going into effect, and even now we continue to refine it.
What took so long? As Beth Schwartz, a benefits manager at our university, points out, many human-resource policies — for example, those governing conflicts of interest — can be developed almost independently of other policies and have a high degree of transferability from one campus to the next. But "a faculty maternity-leave policy," she says, "is much more of a challenge. Its interdependence with so many other policies, and the need for an institution-specific solution, requires substantial effort to properly draft."
If your institution is looking to adopt a campuswide policy — or update an inadequate one — you can find some guidance online. For starters, read the American Association of University Professors' "Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work" and check out the Web site of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (http://www.cupahr.org.
But as you start down the path to a new or more-consistent policy, be prepared to face both legal and political considerations. It is a difficult process, one with many baby steps and hurdles along the way.
Members of the committee writing the policy will need guidance and support. An institution committed to adopting a sound maternity-leave policy must set the right foundation for that panel from the outset:
Acknowledge the difficulties ahead. Serious discussions on maternity leave lead to sensitive topics, like people's views about family and their understanding of women's issues. A maternity-leave policy has a price tag — not only in terms of financial costs, but also faculty time and course-coverage needs, both of which are constraints at all institutions.
The breadth of the policy means it very likely will have to go through a lengthy and repetitive approval process, requiring votes from bodies as diverse as faculty senates, benefits committees, and boards of trustees.
Unless the committee understands those difficulties and is supported through all of the political impediments, frustration will result from a seeming lack of progress, which can result in a loss of momentum, which in turn can leave the institution with no policy or bad policy.
A good policy is detailed, but not too. Settling for a policy that lacks any real substance and essentially says "maternity leaves will be accommodated within departments working through deans" is unacceptable, but, regrettably, all too common.
A lack of detail in written policy is not helpful to faculty members trying to make plans, nor to those involved in administering the details. Remember that professors will look at the policy well ahead of making family-planning decisions. Even if all cases are, ultimately, handled well under a vague policy, a mother making family decisions deserves to be able to predict the way her case will be handed within some reasonable range of outcomes. The negative effects of having to "negotiate" a maternity leave are well documented but often underestimated.
On the other hand, if the group responsible for drafting a policy begins with an implicit assumption that the policy will completely remove the need to apply judgment, the committee is headed for much frustration and, probably, failure. The myriad due dates, teaching schedules, contracts, and childbirth experiences simply preclude an exact formulaic answer for all scenarios.
A committee must push hard for a real policy, with some specificity of details, that is helpful to faculty members who may be starting families and to department heads who must respond to pregnancy announcements. At the same time, both parties should recognize that no policy will answer every question.
Be clear about the premise. Setting the committee into motion without an explicit statement of the premise for the policy can lead to wasted time and frustration. That may seem like a small detail, but it is actually a difficult step that is necessary and primary in the timeline of the work. A policy that is geared to provide time and support for child rearing will be quite different from one that is viewed as a special case of medical leave, for example.
A group that begins with divergent views on the premise will not agree on paternity, adoption, paid or unpaid leave, or other crucial components. A clear charge will direct the approach, scale, and nature of the policy.
Imperfect policy can be good policy. The initial outcome of a committee's work may be a policy with a few faults, but with the stipulation that it will be revisited at set intervals. Too often good policy is never put into effect, because of the lack of focus that results from waiting for perfect policy. Acknowledging that the policy might have a few kinks to work out can lead to approval on a provisional basis and permit progress to be made, while the institution gains experience and identifies potential refinements and improvements.
With those provisos, your committee is ready to begin work. So, what are the fundamental features of a sound maternity-leave policy for faculty members? What types of issues will the group have to consider? Here are some questions that policy writers will need to weigh.
Does the policy match our institution? The transferability of maternity-leave policy from institution to institution is limited, and for good reason. Financial capacity, availability of part-time faculty replacements, policies on medical and family leaves, and many other issues are critical, requiring a tailored policy that is appropriate for your institution.
Is the policy legal? You may be surprised to learn that many maternity-leave policies do not meet that standard. A fair-minded policy is a great start, but consistency with the Family and Medical Leave Act is a requirement, not an option. Also, if female faculty members receive substantially more benefit than their male counterparts — for example, in terms of time off to spend raising children — then the institution is open to legal challenges. They can be avoided by involving campus lawyers as the policy takes shape.
Are students well served by the policy? Discontinuity or poor planning can disrupt the educational process for students. It is imperative that maternity-leave policies be looked at from the perspective not only of faculty members and their department heads but also of our students, who deserve full course offerings, qualified faculty members, and uninterrupted courses.
Does the policy mention the tenure clock? Faculty leaves can have serious implications in terms of tenure. Maternity leaves, in particular, tend to be taken more by junior faculty members than by senior ones, making this a crucial issue for tenure. Many senior female professors made family-planning decisions based on the tenure clock. Junior faculty members often sense a stigma associated with a request to temporarily stop the tenure clock for maternity leave. The best practice is probably to delay the tenure clock by default, unless otherwise requested. At a minimum, a sound policy must explicitly address the tenure-clock question.
Have we considered the related issues? All sorts of ancillary topics crop up in the drafting of a maternity-leave policy. Paternity, adoption-policy, and faculty-replacement issues are likely to arise, to name just a few. The key to success may be to keep an inventory of those issues and be deliberate about which ones should be a part of the maternity-leave policy as it is developed, and which should be kept separate so as not to impede its approval and use.
My institution is a Roman Catholic, doctoral-intensive university of about 10,000 students in Ohio. Like most institutions, we operated without an explicit policy for many years. The majority of leave requests that came before we had a policy seemed to have been addressed reasonably, but our initial attempts to codify the practices were not successful.
In 2002 the Academic Senate developed a progressive policy, which automatically delayed the tenure clock by a year for faculty members who qualified for FMLA leave, whether they took the leave or not. The idea was that, even if a faculty member was unable to take the leave, the institution recognized the potential delay in research or other work required for tenure.
That policy was a natural starting point for our Faculty Maternity Leave Policy, and a small group took on that issue specifically. A clear, fair, legal, and yet imperfect policy was passed by the Academic Senate in late 2004.
Built into the policy, however, was a stipulation that it be reviewed after a certain point and then continued, improved, or rescinded.
"It's important to look at the policy after a couple of years and get a sense of how it is used and how it can be improved," says Lisa Rismiller, director of the university's Women's Center, who is leading that review process. "There are some adjustments that we'll make as a result of our experience. Some of the points of contention during initial implementation didn't turn out to be a problem, but some that we did not foresee now need to be addressed."
Among those issues are better coverage for faculty members whose due dates fall in the summer, when they are not working under contract; inclusion of additional coverage for adoptive parents; and the possibility of a standing panel to review new maternity-leave provisions and ensure consistency and clear communication.
Developing an effective policy is a challenging goal. But it's also an attainable one, and the positive results will come in many ways, including supporting families, recruiting and retaining faculty members, and serving the educational process.
Joseph Untener is associate provost for faculty and administrative affairs at the University of Dayton.
________________________________________
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Academic Workplace
Volume 54, Issue 45, Page B30
The article below is a good example of the sort of political correctness that has been creeping into public policy over the last few decades or so. I first noticed it when Bill Clinton issued an executive order to his cabinet-level officers that ALL governmental programs begin enforcing strict gender neutral participation. Even programs such as Women Infant Children (WIC) were expected to ensure exact 50/50 representation of men and women.
Can someone please tell me WHY men should be getting free milk, eggs, cheese, etc., paid for by our government?
Do they carry life within their bodies that draws calcium and other minerals from them?
Do they breast feed?
Do they suffer any pain, discomfort or disfigurement during the 9 months pregnancy or actual birth process?
I think we all know the answer to that already, a resounding NO.
Yet they wish to give themselves benefits on a par with women when they contribute little or nothing to the entire process of bringing life forth…
I can tell you where this is heading if women do NOT start taking a strong stand on this issue and soon. One, custody battles taking place BEFORE birth just to decide who has the right to take the maternity leave. That’s one thing.
Secondly, this business of trying to make the gender neutral Family Leave paid and substitute it for Maternity Leave can have a decidely negative impact on mothers and children. As what’s to stop any family member from fighting to use your baby in order to stay home for an entire year WITH PAY?
Absolutely nothing!!!
Women are slowly but surely handing over our naturally bestowed rights as mother to the legal system, a system invented by men for their OWN benefit…Remember we don’t need to sit around with hat in hand waiting for a Judge to tell us we can be home with our babies. That’s our right, not something we get as a gift from men for being ‘good girls’.
Giving Birth to a Good Policy
Here's what to consider in drafting a sound maternity-leave plan for faculty members
By JOSEPH UNTENER
Search the Web and you'll find no shortage of articles on the need for sound policies to help faculty members balance family life with career issues. Why, then, is there such a dearth of solid maternity-leave policies for faculty members?
At the University of Dayton, where I am an associate provost, several years passed between the clear need for a campuswide maternity-leave policy and its going into effect, and even now we continue to refine it.
What took so long? As Beth Schwartz, a benefits manager at our university, points out, many human-resource policies — for example, those governing conflicts of interest — can be developed almost independently of other policies and have a high degree of transferability from one campus to the next. But "a faculty maternity-leave policy," she says, "is much more of a challenge. Its interdependence with so many other policies, and the need for an institution-specific solution, requires substantial effort to properly draft."
If your institution is looking to adopt a campuswide policy — or update an inadequate one — you can find some guidance online. For starters, read the American Association of University Professors' "Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work" and check out the Web site of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (http://www.cupahr.org.
But as you start down the path to a new or more-consistent policy, be prepared to face both legal and political considerations. It is a difficult process, one with many baby steps and hurdles along the way.
Members of the committee writing the policy will need guidance and support. An institution committed to adopting a sound maternity-leave policy must set the right foundation for that panel from the outset:
Acknowledge the difficulties ahead. Serious discussions on maternity leave lead to sensitive topics, like people's views about family and their understanding of women's issues. A maternity-leave policy has a price tag — not only in terms of financial costs, but also faculty time and course-coverage needs, both of which are constraints at all institutions.
The breadth of the policy means it very likely will have to go through a lengthy and repetitive approval process, requiring votes from bodies as diverse as faculty senates, benefits committees, and boards of trustees.
Unless the committee understands those difficulties and is supported through all of the political impediments, frustration will result from a seeming lack of progress, which can result in a loss of momentum, which in turn can leave the institution with no policy or bad policy.
A good policy is detailed, but not too. Settling for a policy that lacks any real substance and essentially says "maternity leaves will be accommodated within departments working through deans" is unacceptable, but, regrettably, all too common.
A lack of detail in written policy is not helpful to faculty members trying to make plans, nor to those involved in administering the details. Remember that professors will look at the policy well ahead of making family-planning decisions. Even if all cases are, ultimately, handled well under a vague policy, a mother making family decisions deserves to be able to predict the way her case will be handed within some reasonable range of outcomes. The negative effects of having to "negotiate" a maternity leave are well documented but often underestimated.
On the other hand, if the group responsible for drafting a policy begins with an implicit assumption that the policy will completely remove the need to apply judgment, the committee is headed for much frustration and, probably, failure. The myriad due dates, teaching schedules, contracts, and childbirth experiences simply preclude an exact formulaic answer for all scenarios.
A committee must push hard for a real policy, with some specificity of details, that is helpful to faculty members who may be starting families and to department heads who must respond to pregnancy announcements. At the same time, both parties should recognize that no policy will answer every question.
Be clear about the premise. Setting the committee into motion without an explicit statement of the premise for the policy can lead to wasted time and frustration. That may seem like a small detail, but it is actually a difficult step that is necessary and primary in the timeline of the work. A policy that is geared to provide time and support for child rearing will be quite different from one that is viewed as a special case of medical leave, for example.
A group that begins with divergent views on the premise will not agree on paternity, adoption, paid or unpaid leave, or other crucial components. A clear charge will direct the approach, scale, and nature of the policy.
Imperfect policy can be good policy. The initial outcome of a committee's work may be a policy with a few faults, but with the stipulation that it will be revisited at set intervals. Too often good policy is never put into effect, because of the lack of focus that results from waiting for perfect policy. Acknowledging that the policy might have a few kinks to work out can lead to approval on a provisional basis and permit progress to be made, while the institution gains experience and identifies potential refinements and improvements.
With those provisos, your committee is ready to begin work. So, what are the fundamental features of a sound maternity-leave policy for faculty members? What types of issues will the group have to consider? Here are some questions that policy writers will need to weigh.
Does the policy match our institution? The transferability of maternity-leave policy from institution to institution is limited, and for good reason. Financial capacity, availability of part-time faculty replacements, policies on medical and family leaves, and many other issues are critical, requiring a tailored policy that is appropriate for your institution.
Is the policy legal? You may be surprised to learn that many maternity-leave policies do not meet that standard. A fair-minded policy is a great start, but consistency with the Family and Medical Leave Act is a requirement, not an option. Also, if female faculty members receive substantially more benefit than their male counterparts — for example, in terms of time off to spend raising children — then the institution is open to legal challenges. They can be avoided by involving campus lawyers as the policy takes shape.
Are students well served by the policy? Discontinuity or poor planning can disrupt the educational process for students. It is imperative that maternity-leave policies be looked at from the perspective not only of faculty members and their department heads but also of our students, who deserve full course offerings, qualified faculty members, and uninterrupted courses.
Does the policy mention the tenure clock? Faculty leaves can have serious implications in terms of tenure. Maternity leaves, in particular, tend to be taken more by junior faculty members than by senior ones, making this a crucial issue for tenure. Many senior female professors made family-planning decisions based on the tenure clock. Junior faculty members often sense a stigma associated with a request to temporarily stop the tenure clock for maternity leave. The best practice is probably to delay the tenure clock by default, unless otherwise requested. At a minimum, a sound policy must explicitly address the tenure-clock question.
Have we considered the related issues? All sorts of ancillary topics crop up in the drafting of a maternity-leave policy. Paternity, adoption-policy, and faculty-replacement issues are likely to arise, to name just a few. The key to success may be to keep an inventory of those issues and be deliberate about which ones should be a part of the maternity-leave policy as it is developed, and which should be kept separate so as not to impede its approval and use.
My institution is a Roman Catholic, doctoral-intensive university of about 10,000 students in Ohio. Like most institutions, we operated without an explicit policy for many years. The majority of leave requests that came before we had a policy seemed to have been addressed reasonably, but our initial attempts to codify the practices were not successful.
In 2002 the Academic Senate developed a progressive policy, which automatically delayed the tenure clock by a year for faculty members who qualified for FMLA leave, whether they took the leave or not. The idea was that, even if a faculty member was unable to take the leave, the institution recognized the potential delay in research or other work required for tenure.
That policy was a natural starting point for our Faculty Maternity Leave Policy, and a small group took on that issue specifically. A clear, fair, legal, and yet imperfect policy was passed by the Academic Senate in late 2004.
Built into the policy, however, was a stipulation that it be reviewed after a certain point and then continued, improved, or rescinded.
"It's important to look at the policy after a couple of years and get a sense of how it is used and how it can be improved," says Lisa Rismiller, director of the university's Women's Center, who is leading that review process. "There are some adjustments that we'll make as a result of our experience. Some of the points of contention during initial implementation didn't turn out to be a problem, but some that we did not foresee now need to be addressed."
Among those issues are better coverage for faculty members whose due dates fall in the summer, when they are not working under contract; inclusion of additional coverage for adoptive parents; and the possibility of a standing panel to review new maternity-leave provisions and ensure consistency and clear communication.
Developing an effective policy is a challenging goal. But it's also an attainable one, and the positive results will come in many ways, including supporting families, recruiting and retaining faculty members, and serving the educational process.
Joseph Untener is associate provost for faculty and administrative affairs at the University of Dayton.
________________________________________
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Academic Workplace
Volume 54, Issue 45, Page B30
Monday, July 21, 2008
Interesting Re-post I thought Readers Might Enjoy
I decided to re-post this article since someone posted a new comment on it and after re-reading the whole thing, I found it interesting as all-hell. Actually sometimes the comments are better then the post...
So it's my blog, I can do what I want with it, so I'm re-posting this with comments included.
Hope people enjoy re-reading it as much as I did...
Regarding people who don't like Caesar Millan, for whatever politically correct reasons, well I have no use for them. This man has done more good for dogs then any single individual I can think of offhand. It's this kind of politically correct thinking that has lead to our current custody crisis...
Again, I have no use for it and it's my blog so don't bother posting any politically correct crap on it.
***********************************************************************************
Sunday, September 10, 2006
More Attempts to Distort and/or Steal the Statistics of African-Americans
You know it’s interesting the tendency lately from feminists as well as mens rights advocates to compare themselves to black people…these sad, sick, silly and insane attempts to ‘steal’ the statistics of these poor people is nothing but an attempt to get more attention for feminist’s or MRA’s own pet causes (mostly themselves).
It reminds me of a few months ago when MRAs were running all over the internet with the phoney crisis of boys doing poorly in school. It turns out that the real crisis was one for black and hispanic boys ONLY and MRAs were trying to manipulate the statistics and make them applicable to all boys. It appeared to be another of their ongoing attempts to paint themselves as victims of discrimination and to get public policies changes made in schools based upon misleading the public.
Sigh…
Yet they continue trying to claim they are not the flip side of gender neutralized feminism with the use of phoney statistics.
Another similarity I’ve noticed with the two groups is the way they BOTH continue denigrating nursing mothers. There is this sick obsession with comparing a mother nursing her child with a man peeing somewhere in public.
Hello idiots, a mother nursing her child in public is not in any way, shape or form the same as a man deciding to expose himself and urinate in the bushes. He NEEDS to use the mens’ bathroom, yet a nursing mother should NOT be forced into the restroom to feed her kid.
Following the link below to see what I’m talking about.
Sigh…
http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=370
Reclusive Leftist
feminism, politics, and random pedantry with your host, Dr. Violet Socks
September 2nd, 2006
The difference between sexism and racism
One is acceptable; the other isn’t.
Imagine if the host of a popular TV show on dog training had made the following remarks:
“Black people are the only species that is wired different from the rest. They always apply affection before discipline. White people apply discipline then affection, so we’re more psychological than emotional. All animals follow dominant leaders; they don’t follow lovable leaders.”
He would probably be fired, don’t you think? But professional dog-trainer/fucktard Cesar Millan made precisely these remarks about women — substitute “woman” for “black people” in the paragraph above, re-conjugate the verbs as necessary, and voilá: the Cesar Millan Theory of Gender. Somehow I don’t think he’s going to lose his job. He’s just a crazy colorful Latino, right?
And before any of you rush to inform me that the random remarks of some dog handler don’t amount to a hill of beans in this godforsaken world, dig it: I know. Well aware. I’m not going to start a petition to have Cesar Millan censored, fired, or placed in a choke collar and firmly brought to heel. Actually, the damage he’s doing to dogs is of far more concern to me than his asinine views on gender. I just think little drive-by examples of sexism are interesting precisely because they illustrate so well what we take for granted. In this case, that it’s still basically okay to announce in public that women are an inferior “species” who are more emotional than men.
30. will says:
Violet:
The difficulty is one of self-identification and of identifying your self-interest.
But I want to go back to your starting point:
He identified women as being more inclined to start with affection.
You identified that as a weak trait, not him.
Are you suggesting that men and women are the same?
Are there any gender differences?
If so, is it acceptable to point them out?
Hasn’t this very blog identified actions that are inherently male?
September 4th, 2006 at 2:36 pm EST
31. Violet says:
You identified that as a weak trait, not him.
1. I’m basing my reading on the NYTimes article on Millan’s remarks. He apparently thinks women are weak, emotional, whatever.
The only sexual differences I think we can be absolutely sure of are the obvious biological ones: women give birth and suckle, men can pee standing up. Other than that, everything is potentially cultural. Nature versus nurture, and so far everything we’ve traditionally considered nature has turned out to be nurture. Even greater aggressiveness in males, which it’s tempting to think of as innate given its almost ubiquitous manifestation, may not be: controlled testing hasn’t supported a difference between males and females in this regard, and there are in fact some cultures where men are considered intrinsically more gentle than women. Whenever I refer to men’s general behavior, the assumption is always that we’re talking about socially conditioned norms, not intrinsic traits.
September 4th, 2006 at 2:46 pm EST
*************************************************
“Actually, the damage he’s doing to dogs is of far more concern to me than his asinine views on gender.”
BTW, Cesar Millan has probably SAVED more dogs from being put to sleep by modifying their behavior then any other human being alive. As people will give a dog away to a shelter (where they'll generally have three days for adoption before being killed) for barking too much, fighting with other dogs, biting people in their house, etc.,
"Even greater aggressiveness in males, which it’s tempting to think of as innate given its almost ubiquitous manifestation, may not be: controlled testing hasn’t supported a difference between males and females in this regard, and there are in fact some cultures where men are considered intrinsically more gentle than women."
If such a culture ever existed I've never heard of it...in the human OR the animal world. The male is the larger, stronger and more aggressive in every species, as well as our own. AND please nobody email me about some spider, fish or other off the edge of the bell-shaped curve creature they read about in National Geographic where the female is bigger then the male. As I don't care about these odd creatures. I'm talking about the vast middle of the curve where most living beings reside, not some freak example that gender neutralized feminists or MRAs tout everytime they are trying to make a misleading point.
Anyway, this is more of the gender neutralized bullcrap that has led to many women getting killed in Iraq, for instance. When by law, they were not supposed to be there in the first place.
Back in the 90s, Les Aspin barred all women from the front lines and ALL Special Forces units after research was done that demonstrated how even the best women with Special Forces training could not beat in combat the average man with no special training. The most women could do was hold their own for some limited period of time, while not suffering any life-threatening injury...these were women, as I said above, given Special Forces training. YET they still were no match for the average man in combat. They were not even able to beat the below-average man which is generally the men that the armed forces is trying to screen out...
Those who want to know more about this should read the online article "What Kind of Nation Sends Women into Combat" by syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood who served on the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. April 16, 2003. Or better yet find a link to the Presidential Commission's own report and then post a link to it here so I can read it...
Anyway gender-neutralized feminists are the reason many women are still in Iraq today. As Congress wanted to bring those women home but the Pentagon along with Kim Gandy of NOW convinced Congress to ignore their own law. The Pentagon was facing a shortage of men enlisting since the Iraq War had started; so even though they were the main proponents of the front line ban of women instituted by Les Aspin, they short-sightedly changed their minds due to this temporary enlistment shortage of men they were facing.
The blood of those women, who were not equipped to handle combat, is directly on the hands of the Pentagon and especially on the hands of feminists who forced those women to remain in Iraq to move forward on their gender-neutral agenda.
Thus as I've been saying for a while now, gender-neutralized feminists have forfeited the right to claim they speak for women and should have no more attention paid to their claims of advocacy then any other group.
All in all, the angry comments directed to Dr. Violet Socks by those enraged at her false analogy were totally justified. As not only was she attempting to minimize the real historic suffering of black people in this country by this trite comparison of hers, but feminists like her have contributed to the real-world suffering right now of this very same group. As sadly I believe many of the service women forced to remain in Iraq (due to the attempts at social engineering by gender-neutralized feminists) are African-Americans as well...
Thus she must accept responsibility for her error of judgment, apologize and work to get back into the good graces of the various individuals and groups of people she publicly tried to denigrate through her thoughtless posting.
posted by NYMOM | Sunday, September 10, 2006
13 Comments:
silverside said...
I'm baffled by these women who seem to feel miffed if women aren't as BAD as the boys. It's like they feel ashamed, as if we're wimps of something.
I was looking at a website on capital punishment recently, and it appears that since the 1600s at least, women have never made up more than 10% of those arrested for murder. Sometimes less, but never more. Sure, gender expectations can change over time. It's more acceptable to become a doctor today than it was 100 years ago. But when you see that certain characteristics just don't budge much over 400 years or more, it doesn't make sense to argue that people are just "the same." Interesting, because some have argued that women are given special preference in terms of the death penalty. Not really. If you look at those times when the treatment was more "equal," it was because women were being executed for such "major" capital crimes as slave revolts, concealing a birth (?), adultery, etc. Some FRA's have argued that women were never caught because poisonings weren't detected. If this were true, we should be finding lots of women getting caught through modern forensic science. And though not all women are non-criminal, the numbers continually and chronically fall short compared to men. Sexist conditioning? I don't think so. Our numbers in the professions, the arts, the sciences, etc. are always improving (even if we don't get to the top because of family conflicts and general lack of support)but AS A GROUP--with individual exceptions of course, we just don't act out violently.
9:43 AM
NYMOM said...
Oh, of course.
It's ridiculous for people to keep arguing that women are just as violent as men...they keep claiming that chivalry keeps the statistics for western women low; but how does that explain that in every other society the numbers reflect the same differentials?
Ten to one in western societies and 20 to one in others.
Men outnumber women in violent crimes and other aggressive behaviors by 10 to one in the west and 20 to one in other societies.
If you read "Taking Sex Differences Seriously" the author Steven Rhodes has outlined all of these statistics.
This is more nonsense from MRAs and gender neutralized feminists.
4:27 PM
NYMOM said...
The name of the author is Steven E. Rhoads...
I always mispell this guy's name.
I don't know why.
6:24 PM
NYMOM said...
BTW, looking at Rhoads statistics it appears men are statistically more violent, anti-social and prone to break the rules in other societies...not less...
So if these MRAs were correct about chivalrious Judges and courts in the west being the ONLY reason statistically more men then women are arrested and charged with more crime here, wouldn't our numbers reflect just the opposite of what they do now...we would have fewer women reflected in our statistics, not more then other societies, the way we have now...as this so-called chivalrious effect would be at work...
I mean looking at the numbers aren't western womens' stats on violence worse...as men only outnumber us by 10 to 1 in violent statistics; whereas in other places men outnumber women by 20 to 1...
So what does this mean?
That places like Pakistan, Iran or China let's say are MORE CHIVALRIOUS towards women on crime then western society.
I don't think so...
Actually I think they are WORSE...
6:45 PM
bloggernoggin said...
Actually nymom you have your facts wrong. In a 1999 study, it was found that women are 2 times likely as men to poison someone. Overall the incidence of murder is about equal to both sexes, but men are more likely to get caught for thier actions. Actuall women are more likely to kill someone close to them(lover or relative) and women do it more for money and men more for love. You might want to check your facts a little closer nest time.
12:23 AM
NYMOM said...
No. It's you who have your facts wrong. I mean if women don't get "caught" how do you know a murder has been committed...
Quite obviously the percentage of people who are "caught" ie., convicted of a murder (or any crime) are what we base statistics on...
Following your logic or lack thereof, we could make up any number for x and just say well x commits more murders then y but x never gets caught...
So what sense does that make????
Even the fact that women use poison more as a 'weapon' tells me nothing about the murder rate as how many people die of poison versus getting shot to death or stabbed???a heck of a lot more people get stabbed or shot to death I'll wager...
I'm going to listen to the statistics of a man like Steven Rhoads or even the FBI before listening to what you just sprouted. As it's totally meaningless drivel...
2:42 AM
silverside said...
Bloggernoggin is an idiot.
Assume for the same of argument that he is right, that women do tend to poison more often. With modern forensic science they should be getting caught, right? So the numbers of female murderers should be approaching 50%, right? Nope. It's still far lower than men. Women are far more likely to kill someone close to them, but more women than men are still killed by intimates. And given that very few women in the history of crime have preyed on strangers--spree killings, mass killings, drive-by shootings, sexually-motivated violence--you are still left with a preponderance of murderers that are male.(I swear that every woman who ever did anything resembling a spree killing has been written about to death. Every single one has been named, that's how rare and unusually interesting they are to people who take an interest in such things. And even then, it's not always clear how much they were the clueless, more-or-less passive accomplice of a male killer, just going along for the ride vs. an equal participant.)
Unfortunately, it seems that MRA's don't like this. And also some women, who fervently want to believe that we can really be "bad to the bone" too, like it's some kind of honor. Well, you can find bad individuals of any gender, any background. Still doesn't change the fact that over centuries in every culture, men have dominated aggressive, violent crime.
9:59 AM
NYMOM said...
The bigger idiot however is that Warren Farrell. He's the one who came up with that ridiculous idea that women are skilled with special poisons that we use to secretly murder people...
It's the stupidest thing I ever heard of...I can't really take someone seriously who would even suggest that as a reason for the lower rate of female murderers...
When they say women usually murder someone they know, they are generally referring to children...as just in the wild there are deviant mothers who abandon or kill their young...it doesn't mean that we should hand over all cubs, fawns, babies, etc., to the male of any species to raise. In most species they'd be eaten for lunch by males. It just shows that sometimes mothers are deviant...
Additionally the statistics that Steven Rhoads uses are not just for murder. He uses domestic as well as international statistics on all sorts of crimes...as murder is not the only way to measure deviance.
AND men do more of that stuff too...From drug running to terrorism they predominate in all these areas. Except for prostitution I would say and let's face it most of these prostitution rings are run by men although women are the ones working in them...of course selling themselves to men as well...
Also crimes committed by strangers are the most frightening to most people...as they are random and there is nothing you can do to protect against them. You can live a good life, not hang around in bars or drive drunk, have good friends, pay your taxes and go to church every Sunday YET some jerk off you don't even know can come out of left field and assault or even murder you...
So those are the random crimes of violence that MOST people are most afraid of...and those sorts of crimes are mainly committed by men...
I mean yes, it's horrible that mothers like Susan Smith or Andrea Yates exist YET more people are afraid of some jerk running up to them in the parking lot and robbing them or carjacking them at a red light...
1:20 PM
NYMOM said...
I've actually read somewhere recently that even in those early so-called 'matriarchal' societies that it's come to light that the remains of some of the earliest inhabitants had different eating habits.
The males it appears ate more meat, while the females mostly grain/veg products...they analyzed the bones...
So it shows that even in societies that they claim women were so powerful, we were still getting the shaft (or the chaff)...
Remember these weren't placs where farming had even taken off yet, so there was no rice, wheat or cereal crops grown yet...so you really had to hunt around to find enough roots and berry, nuts, etc., to keep a human body going...no wonder men evolved bigger then us...they were eating all the high protein food and leaving women with the chaff (or should I say the shaft) again...
LOL...
1:30 PM
bloggernoggin said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
2:04 PM
NYMOM said...
Goodbye bloggernoggin, you poor sick, sad, degenerated idiot.
I'm deleting all your posts going forward...
5:54 PM
bloggernoggin said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
5:13 PM
UpwardsDigger said...
NYMOM said, "That places like Pakistan, Iran or China let's say are MORE CHIVALRIOUS towards women on crime then western society."
Please don't group China in with Pakistan and Iran. China is a very different country from these conservative Muslim countries. Very different. Despite the common misconception that the Chinese kill all their daugthers, the women in China do actually have opportunities much on the same scale as women in the Western world.
Furthermore -- and this isn't directed at NYMOM in particular -- I find Cesar Millan's comments upsetting not because he's saying women aren't as "bad" as men, but because I take his comments to mean that women aren't as good as men. He says that women are emotional (ie not intellectual). I, on other hand, know we can be both smart and strong, but sometimes some of us opt not to be. Just like some men (Cesar Millan) opt not to be very smart when making comments.
So it's my blog, I can do what I want with it, so I'm re-posting this with comments included.
Hope people enjoy re-reading it as much as I did...
Regarding people who don't like Caesar Millan, for whatever politically correct reasons, well I have no use for them. This man has done more good for dogs then any single individual I can think of offhand. It's this kind of politically correct thinking that has lead to our current custody crisis...
Again, I have no use for it and it's my blog so don't bother posting any politically correct crap on it.
***********************************************************************************
Sunday, September 10, 2006
More Attempts to Distort and/or Steal the Statistics of African-Americans
You know it’s interesting the tendency lately from feminists as well as mens rights advocates to compare themselves to black people…these sad, sick, silly and insane attempts to ‘steal’ the statistics of these poor people is nothing but an attempt to get more attention for feminist’s or MRA’s own pet causes (mostly themselves).
It reminds me of a few months ago when MRAs were running all over the internet with the phoney crisis of boys doing poorly in school. It turns out that the real crisis was one for black and hispanic boys ONLY and MRAs were trying to manipulate the statistics and make them applicable to all boys. It appeared to be another of their ongoing attempts to paint themselves as victims of discrimination and to get public policies changes made in schools based upon misleading the public.
Sigh…
Yet they continue trying to claim they are not the flip side of gender neutralized feminism with the use of phoney statistics.
Another similarity I’ve noticed with the two groups is the way they BOTH continue denigrating nursing mothers. There is this sick obsession with comparing a mother nursing her child with a man peeing somewhere in public.
Hello idiots, a mother nursing her child in public is not in any way, shape or form the same as a man deciding to expose himself and urinate in the bushes. He NEEDS to use the mens’ bathroom, yet a nursing mother should NOT be forced into the restroom to feed her kid.
Following the link below to see what I’m talking about.
Sigh…
http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=370
Reclusive Leftist
feminism, politics, and random pedantry with your host, Dr. Violet Socks
September 2nd, 2006
The difference between sexism and racism
One is acceptable; the other isn’t.
Imagine if the host of a popular TV show on dog training had made the following remarks:
“Black people are the only species that is wired different from the rest. They always apply affection before discipline. White people apply discipline then affection, so we’re more psychological than emotional. All animals follow dominant leaders; they don’t follow lovable leaders.”
He would probably be fired, don’t you think? But professional dog-trainer/fucktard Cesar Millan made precisely these remarks about women — substitute “woman” for “black people” in the paragraph above, re-conjugate the verbs as necessary, and voilá: the Cesar Millan Theory of Gender. Somehow I don’t think he’s going to lose his job. He’s just a crazy colorful Latino, right?
And before any of you rush to inform me that the random remarks of some dog handler don’t amount to a hill of beans in this godforsaken world, dig it: I know. Well aware. I’m not going to start a petition to have Cesar Millan censored, fired, or placed in a choke collar and firmly brought to heel. Actually, the damage he’s doing to dogs is of far more concern to me than his asinine views on gender. I just think little drive-by examples of sexism are interesting precisely because they illustrate so well what we take for granted. In this case, that it’s still basically okay to announce in public that women are an inferior “species” who are more emotional than men.
30. will says:
Violet:
The difficulty is one of self-identification and of identifying your self-interest.
But I want to go back to your starting point:
He identified women as being more inclined to start with affection.
You identified that as a weak trait, not him.
Are you suggesting that men and women are the same?
Are there any gender differences?
If so, is it acceptable to point them out?
Hasn’t this very blog identified actions that are inherently male?
September 4th, 2006 at 2:36 pm EST
31. Violet says:
You identified that as a weak trait, not him.
1. I’m basing my reading on the NYTimes article on Millan’s remarks. He apparently thinks women are weak, emotional, whatever.
The only sexual differences I think we can be absolutely sure of are the obvious biological ones: women give birth and suckle, men can pee standing up. Other than that, everything is potentially cultural. Nature versus nurture, and so far everything we’ve traditionally considered nature has turned out to be nurture. Even greater aggressiveness in males, which it’s tempting to think of as innate given its almost ubiquitous manifestation, may not be: controlled testing hasn’t supported a difference between males and females in this regard, and there are in fact some cultures where men are considered intrinsically more gentle than women. Whenever I refer to men’s general behavior, the assumption is always that we’re talking about socially conditioned norms, not intrinsic traits.
September 4th, 2006 at 2:46 pm EST
*************************************************
“Actually, the damage he’s doing to dogs is of far more concern to me than his asinine views on gender.”
BTW, Cesar Millan has probably SAVED more dogs from being put to sleep by modifying their behavior then any other human being alive. As people will give a dog away to a shelter (where they'll generally have three days for adoption before being killed) for barking too much, fighting with other dogs, biting people in their house, etc.,
"Even greater aggressiveness in males, which it’s tempting to think of as innate given its almost ubiquitous manifestation, may not be: controlled testing hasn’t supported a difference between males and females in this regard, and there are in fact some cultures where men are considered intrinsically more gentle than women."
If such a culture ever existed I've never heard of it...in the human OR the animal world. The male is the larger, stronger and more aggressive in every species, as well as our own. AND please nobody email me about some spider, fish or other off the edge of the bell-shaped curve creature they read about in National Geographic where the female is bigger then the male. As I don't care about these odd creatures. I'm talking about the vast middle of the curve where most living beings reside, not some freak example that gender neutralized feminists or MRAs tout everytime they are trying to make a misleading point.
Anyway, this is more of the gender neutralized bullcrap that has led to many women getting killed in Iraq, for instance. When by law, they were not supposed to be there in the first place.
Back in the 90s, Les Aspin barred all women from the front lines and ALL Special Forces units after research was done that demonstrated how even the best women with Special Forces training could not beat in combat the average man with no special training. The most women could do was hold their own for some limited period of time, while not suffering any life-threatening injury...these were women, as I said above, given Special Forces training. YET they still were no match for the average man in combat. They were not even able to beat the below-average man which is generally the men that the armed forces is trying to screen out...
Those who want to know more about this should read the online article "What Kind of Nation Sends Women into Combat" by syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood who served on the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. April 16, 2003. Or better yet find a link to the Presidential Commission's own report and then post a link to it here so I can read it...
Anyway gender-neutralized feminists are the reason many women are still in Iraq today. As Congress wanted to bring those women home but the Pentagon along with Kim Gandy of NOW convinced Congress to ignore their own law. The Pentagon was facing a shortage of men enlisting since the Iraq War had started; so even though they were the main proponents of the front line ban of women instituted by Les Aspin, they short-sightedly changed their minds due to this temporary enlistment shortage of men they were facing.
The blood of those women, who were not equipped to handle combat, is directly on the hands of the Pentagon and especially on the hands of feminists who forced those women to remain in Iraq to move forward on their gender-neutral agenda.
Thus as I've been saying for a while now, gender-neutralized feminists have forfeited the right to claim they speak for women and should have no more attention paid to their claims of advocacy then any other group.
All in all, the angry comments directed to Dr. Violet Socks by those enraged at her false analogy were totally justified. As not only was she attempting to minimize the real historic suffering of black people in this country by this trite comparison of hers, but feminists like her have contributed to the real-world suffering right now of this very same group. As sadly I believe many of the service women forced to remain in Iraq (due to the attempts at social engineering by gender-neutralized feminists) are African-Americans as well...
Thus she must accept responsibility for her error of judgment, apologize and work to get back into the good graces of the various individuals and groups of people she publicly tried to denigrate through her thoughtless posting.
posted by NYMOM | Sunday, September 10, 2006
13 Comments:
silverside said...
I'm baffled by these women who seem to feel miffed if women aren't as BAD as the boys. It's like they feel ashamed, as if we're wimps of something.
I was looking at a website on capital punishment recently, and it appears that since the 1600s at least, women have never made up more than 10% of those arrested for murder. Sometimes less, but never more. Sure, gender expectations can change over time. It's more acceptable to become a doctor today than it was 100 years ago. But when you see that certain characteristics just don't budge much over 400 years or more, it doesn't make sense to argue that people are just "the same." Interesting, because some have argued that women are given special preference in terms of the death penalty. Not really. If you look at those times when the treatment was more "equal," it was because women were being executed for such "major" capital crimes as slave revolts, concealing a birth (?), adultery, etc. Some FRA's have argued that women were never caught because poisonings weren't detected. If this were true, we should be finding lots of women getting caught through modern forensic science. And though not all women are non-criminal, the numbers continually and chronically fall short compared to men. Sexist conditioning? I don't think so. Our numbers in the professions, the arts, the sciences, etc. are always improving (even if we don't get to the top because of family conflicts and general lack of support)but AS A GROUP--with individual exceptions of course, we just don't act out violently.
9:43 AM
NYMOM said...
Oh, of course.
It's ridiculous for people to keep arguing that women are just as violent as men...they keep claiming that chivalry keeps the statistics for western women low; but how does that explain that in every other society the numbers reflect the same differentials?
Ten to one in western societies and 20 to one in others.
Men outnumber women in violent crimes and other aggressive behaviors by 10 to one in the west and 20 to one in other societies.
If you read "Taking Sex Differences Seriously" the author Steven Rhodes has outlined all of these statistics.
This is more nonsense from MRAs and gender neutralized feminists.
4:27 PM
NYMOM said...
The name of the author is Steven E. Rhoads...
I always mispell this guy's name.
I don't know why.
6:24 PM
NYMOM said...
BTW, looking at Rhoads statistics it appears men are statistically more violent, anti-social and prone to break the rules in other societies...not less...
So if these MRAs were correct about chivalrious Judges and courts in the west being the ONLY reason statistically more men then women are arrested and charged with more crime here, wouldn't our numbers reflect just the opposite of what they do now...we would have fewer women reflected in our statistics, not more then other societies, the way we have now...as this so-called chivalrious effect would be at work...
I mean looking at the numbers aren't western womens' stats on violence worse...as men only outnumber us by 10 to 1 in violent statistics; whereas in other places men outnumber women by 20 to 1...
So what does this mean?
That places like Pakistan, Iran or China let's say are MORE CHIVALRIOUS towards women on crime then western society.
I don't think so...
Actually I think they are WORSE...
6:45 PM
bloggernoggin said...
Actually nymom you have your facts wrong. In a 1999 study, it was found that women are 2 times likely as men to poison someone. Overall the incidence of murder is about equal to both sexes, but men are more likely to get caught for thier actions. Actuall women are more likely to kill someone close to them(lover or relative) and women do it more for money and men more for love. You might want to check your facts a little closer nest time.
12:23 AM
NYMOM said...
No. It's you who have your facts wrong. I mean if women don't get "caught" how do you know a murder has been committed...
Quite obviously the percentage of people who are "caught" ie., convicted of a murder (or any crime) are what we base statistics on...
Following your logic or lack thereof, we could make up any number for x and just say well x commits more murders then y but x never gets caught...
So what sense does that make????
Even the fact that women use poison more as a 'weapon' tells me nothing about the murder rate as how many people die of poison versus getting shot to death or stabbed???a heck of a lot more people get stabbed or shot to death I'll wager...
I'm going to listen to the statistics of a man like Steven Rhoads or even the FBI before listening to what you just sprouted. As it's totally meaningless drivel...
2:42 AM
silverside said...
Bloggernoggin is an idiot.
Assume for the same of argument that he is right, that women do tend to poison more often. With modern forensic science they should be getting caught, right? So the numbers of female murderers should be approaching 50%, right? Nope. It's still far lower than men. Women are far more likely to kill someone close to them, but more women than men are still killed by intimates. And given that very few women in the history of crime have preyed on strangers--spree killings, mass killings, drive-by shootings, sexually-motivated violence--you are still left with a preponderance of murderers that are male.(I swear that every woman who ever did anything resembling a spree killing has been written about to death. Every single one has been named, that's how rare and unusually interesting they are to people who take an interest in such things. And even then, it's not always clear how much they were the clueless, more-or-less passive accomplice of a male killer, just going along for the ride vs. an equal participant.)
Unfortunately, it seems that MRA's don't like this. And also some women, who fervently want to believe that we can really be "bad to the bone" too, like it's some kind of honor. Well, you can find bad individuals of any gender, any background. Still doesn't change the fact that over centuries in every culture, men have dominated aggressive, violent crime.
9:59 AM
NYMOM said...
The bigger idiot however is that Warren Farrell. He's the one who came up with that ridiculous idea that women are skilled with special poisons that we use to secretly murder people...
It's the stupidest thing I ever heard of...I can't really take someone seriously who would even suggest that as a reason for the lower rate of female murderers...
When they say women usually murder someone they know, they are generally referring to children...as just in the wild there are deviant mothers who abandon or kill their young...it doesn't mean that we should hand over all cubs, fawns, babies, etc., to the male of any species to raise. In most species they'd be eaten for lunch by males. It just shows that sometimes mothers are deviant...
Additionally the statistics that Steven Rhoads uses are not just for murder. He uses domestic as well as international statistics on all sorts of crimes...as murder is not the only way to measure deviance.
AND men do more of that stuff too...From drug running to terrorism they predominate in all these areas. Except for prostitution I would say and let's face it most of these prostitution rings are run by men although women are the ones working in them...of course selling themselves to men as well...
Also crimes committed by strangers are the most frightening to most people...as they are random and there is nothing you can do to protect against them. You can live a good life, not hang around in bars or drive drunk, have good friends, pay your taxes and go to church every Sunday YET some jerk off you don't even know can come out of left field and assault or even murder you...
So those are the random crimes of violence that MOST people are most afraid of...and those sorts of crimes are mainly committed by men...
I mean yes, it's horrible that mothers like Susan Smith or Andrea Yates exist YET more people are afraid of some jerk running up to them in the parking lot and robbing them or carjacking them at a red light...
1:20 PM
NYMOM said...
I've actually read somewhere recently that even in those early so-called 'matriarchal' societies that it's come to light that the remains of some of the earliest inhabitants had different eating habits.
The males it appears ate more meat, while the females mostly grain/veg products...they analyzed the bones...
So it shows that even in societies that they claim women were so powerful, we were still getting the shaft (or the chaff)...
Remember these weren't placs where farming had even taken off yet, so there was no rice, wheat or cereal crops grown yet...so you really had to hunt around to find enough roots and berry, nuts, etc., to keep a human body going...no wonder men evolved bigger then us...they were eating all the high protein food and leaving women with the chaff (or should I say the shaft) again...
LOL...
1:30 PM
bloggernoggin said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
2:04 PM
NYMOM said...
Goodbye bloggernoggin, you poor sick, sad, degenerated idiot.
I'm deleting all your posts going forward...
5:54 PM
bloggernoggin said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
5:13 PM
UpwardsDigger said...
NYMOM said, "That places like Pakistan, Iran or China let's say are MORE CHIVALRIOUS towards women on crime then western society."
Please don't group China in with Pakistan and Iran. China is a very different country from these conservative Muslim countries. Very different. Despite the common misconception that the Chinese kill all their daugthers, the women in China do actually have opportunities much on the same scale as women in the Western world.
Furthermore -- and this isn't directed at NYMOM in particular -- I find Cesar Millan's comments upsetting not because he's saying women aren't as "bad" as men, but because I take his comments to mean that women aren't as good as men. He says that women are emotional (ie not intellectual). I, on other hand, know we can be both smart and strong, but sometimes some of us opt not to be. Just like some men (Cesar Millan) opt not to be very smart when making comments.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
101 Ways to Interfere with a Nursing Mother and Infant
London , May 11 (ANI): Babies fed with cow milk may be at a greater risk of developing type 1 diabetes in later life, says a new study.
A 1993 study conducted by Finish researchers had revealed that consuming dairy products early was linked to diabetes risk.
This is because beta-lactoglobulin, a protein in cow’s stimulate babies to make antibodies that also attack glycodelin, a protein vital for training the immune system.
This in turn disturbs immune system, thereby misguidedly destroying insulin-producing pancreatic cells, leading to type 1 diabetes.
Supporting the previous findings, Marcia Goldfarb of the company Anatek-EP in Portland , Maine , also discovered five children with type 1 diabetes, who were fed cow’s-milk formula and all had antibodies to beta lactoglobulin.
“It’s fascinating, but needs more back-up data,” New Scientist quoted Mikael Knip of the Hospital for Children and Adolescents in Helsinki , Finland , as saying. He is conducting further study, TRIGR, to test whether children fed formula have a lower risk of disease than those fed with hydrolysed version, where the milk proteins have been broken down.
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/early-consumption-of-cows-milk-may-boost-diabetes-risk-re-issue_10047549.html
I found this particular article extremely interesting since I, myself, have recently developed Type II diabetes as have a good number of my siblings; and, there is some evidence coming out now that even Type II diabetes could be related to early nutrition. Many of us baby boomers were probably the first experimental generation with so many formula-fed babies. Frequently cereals were introduced into our bottles at any early age. This was a common way of feeding babies then, in order to fill them up and help them sleep more. It appears breast milk is more easily digested by infants; and, thus babies must wake up more often when they are breast fed in order to be fed more.
So giving a bottle with a little baby cereal mixed in it was seen as a harmless method of providing a more filling early diet to infants and giving them a sounder sleep.
Additionally in an old Joslin Diabetes Center newsletter from December 1, 2004, which I only read about a year or so ago, there was a reprint of a New York Times article claiming that early introduction of cereals into an infant’s diet could also be responsible for the vast increase of diabetes in the west. A study in Germany and another follow-up one in the United States appears to show some “correlation between diabetes and early introduction of cereals and other foods into the diet of infants at genetic risk of the disease”.
Regarding all these allergies young children appear to be suffering from today, I have also seen another study claiming that early introduction of cereals could be a contributing factor in that as well. Especially these horrible peanut allergies since many cereals have some extract of peanuts introduced into them, either peanut oil or some other peanut additive.
Last but not least, a medical alert from the John Hopkins Medical Center is warning how plastic containers or bottles holding foods or liquids can leech into the contents when heated up or frozen (as in freezing plastic water bottles or microwaving foods in plastic containers). This is becoming noticable now with so many veterans of the Iraq war beginning to turn up with immune disorders after eating those ready-to-eat meals served in plastic and heated up in microwaves for them over in Iraq. Probably they are freezing water botttles as well to keep them colder. Absorb all your nourishment from these items for a few years and God only knows what will turn up in your body.
Anyway, anyone who has had to prepare formula for a baby knows you have to sterilize bottles and nipples (many today containing some plastic or silicon additive) BEFORE feeding them to an infant.
Yet in spite of more and more evidence cropping up that breast milk is by far the best and safest nourishment for infants (not to mention the most economical), I just recently had the opportunity to glance through one of those books (there are dozens of them out now) instructing men on how best to establish a relationship with a nursing infant. This particular one had practically an entire section dedicated to giving men instructions on this issue: which could basically have been titled 101 Tips to Interfere with a Nursing mother and Infant. Even to the point of encouraging a young mother to bottle feed instead of breast feed, just so the father could have a chance to feed the infant as well, totally self-centered and selfish behavior on the part of men.
As usual the best interest of children can be tossed out the window at the latest whim of men, that’s the message I got from that book.
Grow up already you nitwits, that's my message.
A 1993 study conducted by Finish researchers had revealed that consuming dairy products early was linked to diabetes risk.
This is because beta-lactoglobulin, a protein in cow’s stimulate babies to make antibodies that also attack glycodelin, a protein vital for training the immune system.
This in turn disturbs immune system, thereby misguidedly destroying insulin-producing pancreatic cells, leading to type 1 diabetes.
Supporting the previous findings, Marcia Goldfarb of the company Anatek-EP in Portland , Maine , also discovered five children with type 1 diabetes, who were fed cow’s-milk formula and all had antibodies to beta lactoglobulin.
“It’s fascinating, but needs more back-up data,” New Scientist quoted Mikael Knip of the Hospital for Children and Adolescents in Helsinki , Finland , as saying. He is conducting further study, TRIGR, to test whether children fed formula have a lower risk of disease than those fed with hydrolysed version, where the milk proteins have been broken down.
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/early-consumption-of-cows-milk-may-boost-diabetes-risk-re-issue_10047549.html
I found this particular article extremely interesting since I, myself, have recently developed Type II diabetes as have a good number of my siblings; and, there is some evidence coming out now that even Type II diabetes could be related to early nutrition. Many of us baby boomers were probably the first experimental generation with so many formula-fed babies. Frequently cereals were introduced into our bottles at any early age. This was a common way of feeding babies then, in order to fill them up and help them sleep more. It appears breast milk is more easily digested by infants; and, thus babies must wake up more often when they are breast fed in order to be fed more.
So giving a bottle with a little baby cereal mixed in it was seen as a harmless method of providing a more filling early diet to infants and giving them a sounder sleep.
Additionally in an old Joslin Diabetes Center newsletter from December 1, 2004, which I only read about a year or so ago, there was a reprint of a New York Times article claiming that early introduction of cereals into an infant’s diet could also be responsible for the vast increase of diabetes in the west. A study in Germany and another follow-up one in the United States appears to show some “correlation between diabetes and early introduction of cereals and other foods into the diet of infants at genetic risk of the disease”.
Regarding all these allergies young children appear to be suffering from today, I have also seen another study claiming that early introduction of cereals could be a contributing factor in that as well. Especially these horrible peanut allergies since many cereals have some extract of peanuts introduced into them, either peanut oil or some other peanut additive.
Last but not least, a medical alert from the John Hopkins Medical Center is warning how plastic containers or bottles holding foods or liquids can leech into the contents when heated up or frozen (as in freezing plastic water bottles or microwaving foods in plastic containers). This is becoming noticable now with so many veterans of the Iraq war beginning to turn up with immune disorders after eating those ready-to-eat meals served in plastic and heated up in microwaves for them over in Iraq. Probably they are freezing water botttles as well to keep them colder. Absorb all your nourishment from these items for a few years and God only knows what will turn up in your body.
Anyway, anyone who has had to prepare formula for a baby knows you have to sterilize bottles and nipples (many today containing some plastic or silicon additive) BEFORE feeding them to an infant.
Yet in spite of more and more evidence cropping up that breast milk is by far the best and safest nourishment for infants (not to mention the most economical), I just recently had the opportunity to glance through one of those books (there are dozens of them out now) instructing men on how best to establish a relationship with a nursing infant. This particular one had practically an entire section dedicated to giving men instructions on this issue: which could basically have been titled 101 Tips to Interfere with a Nursing mother and Infant. Even to the point of encouraging a young mother to bottle feed instead of breast feed, just so the father could have a chance to feed the infant as well, totally self-centered and selfish behavior on the part of men.
As usual the best interest of children can be tossed out the window at the latest whim of men, that’s the message I got from that book.
Grow up already you nitwits, that's my message.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Evolution of Poverty into a Crime against the State
The following article shows how being too poor to support your children has now morphed into a felony, whereas previously it was considered just an unfortunate circumstance of life. Of course I don't need to point out how poverty disportionately impacts the African-American community and how this Johnson administration change in dealing with children in poverty has been the impetus to the custody wars that are now raging in every comminity across our nation.
So once again we see how the greed of men inevitably winds up paving the way to war.
BTW, this particular case was overturned on a technicality which doesn't mean that thousands of poor people aren't already languishing in prison due to not being able to afford an appeal. It's probably just the tip of the iceberg we see here with this one case in Virginia...
http://www.wvrecord.com/news/212940-justices-say-legislature-wrong-on-felony-child-support
Justices say Legislature wrong on felony child support
5/29/2008 8:30 AM
By Steve Korris -Statehouse Bureau
CHARLESTON - West Virginia legislators violated state and national constitutions when they forced fathers facing felony child support charges to prove they couldn't pay, the Supreme Court of Appeals decided May 23.
The Justices unanimously erased a law stating that in child support prosecutions "the defendant's alleged inability to reasonably provide the required support may be raised only as an affirmative defense, after reasonable notice to the State."
The law "unconstitutionally shifts to a defendant the burden of disproving an element of the offense," Justice Robin Davis wrote. "We have previously observed that it is a foundation of criminal law that the State must prove all the elements of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt."
The law violates due process under Article III of the West Virginia Constitution and the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, she wrote.
The Justices granted a new trial to Gabriel Stamm in Harrison County after Circuit Judge James Matish sentenced him to prison for a year to three years.
Matish also ordered Stamm to pay court costs and to make restitution of $7,386 to the mother of his child, Rebecca Roth, and $1,864 to the state.
Officers arrested Stamm Dec. 22, 2005, on a complaint from Roth that he hadn't made a monthly payment in more than a year.
He had acknowledged paternity in March 2004, and for a few months he had paid Roth $167.52 a month.
Grand jurors indicted him in 2006 on a felony charge of failure to meet an obligation to provide support to a minor.
Stamm moved to dismiss on constitutional grounds. Matish denied the motion.
At trial, Stamm asserted inability to pay as an affirmative defense.
When the state closed its case, Stamm moved for acquittal. He argued that the state failed to demonstrate his ability to pay.
Matish denied the motion, so Stamm presented evidence for his inability to pay and moved again for acquittal. Again Matish denied it.
"If the evidence of inability to pay creates a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury whether the accused could reasonably provide the support obligation at the time alleged in the indictment, then the jury must return a verdict of not guilty," Matish told jurors.
Jurors found Stamm guilty of the felony charge and Matish sentenced him.
On appeal, Harrison County assistant prosecutor Kurt Hall argued that Matish's instruction cured any problem of due process.
Davis disagreed, writing that Matish "did not make it absolutely clear that the burden remained on the State to prove, beyond doubt, Mr. Stamm's inability to pay."
"... the instruction could have misled the jury into believing that Mr. Stamm bore the burden of proof as to his ability to pay support," Davis wrote.
Greta Davis of Public Defender Corporation in Clarksburg represented Stamm.
So once again we see how the greed of men inevitably winds up paving the way to war.
BTW, this particular case was overturned on a technicality which doesn't mean that thousands of poor people aren't already languishing in prison due to not being able to afford an appeal. It's probably just the tip of the iceberg we see here with this one case in Virginia...
http://www.wvrecord.com/news/212940-justices-say-legislature-wrong-on-felony-child-support
Justices say Legislature wrong on felony child support
5/29/2008 8:30 AM
By Steve Korris -Statehouse Bureau
CHARLESTON - West Virginia legislators violated state and national constitutions when they forced fathers facing felony child support charges to prove they couldn't pay, the Supreme Court of Appeals decided May 23.
The Justices unanimously erased a law stating that in child support prosecutions "the defendant's alleged inability to reasonably provide the required support may be raised only as an affirmative defense, after reasonable notice to the State."
The law "unconstitutionally shifts to a defendant the burden of disproving an element of the offense," Justice Robin Davis wrote. "We have previously observed that it is a foundation of criminal law that the State must prove all the elements of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt."
The law violates due process under Article III of the West Virginia Constitution and the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, she wrote.
The Justices granted a new trial to Gabriel Stamm in Harrison County after Circuit Judge James Matish sentenced him to prison for a year to three years.
Matish also ordered Stamm to pay court costs and to make restitution of $7,386 to the mother of his child, Rebecca Roth, and $1,864 to the state.
Officers arrested Stamm Dec. 22, 2005, on a complaint from Roth that he hadn't made a monthly payment in more than a year.
He had acknowledged paternity in March 2004, and for a few months he had paid Roth $167.52 a month.
Grand jurors indicted him in 2006 on a felony charge of failure to meet an obligation to provide support to a minor.
Stamm moved to dismiss on constitutional grounds. Matish denied the motion.
At trial, Stamm asserted inability to pay as an affirmative defense.
When the state closed its case, Stamm moved for acquittal. He argued that the state failed to demonstrate his ability to pay.
Matish denied the motion, so Stamm presented evidence for his inability to pay and moved again for acquittal. Again Matish denied it.
"If the evidence of inability to pay creates a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury whether the accused could reasonably provide the support obligation at the time alleged in the indictment, then the jury must return a verdict of not guilty," Matish told jurors.
Jurors found Stamm guilty of the felony charge and Matish sentenced him.
On appeal, Harrison County assistant prosecutor Kurt Hall argued that Matish's instruction cured any problem of due process.
Davis disagreed, writing that Matish "did not make it absolutely clear that the burden remained on the State to prove, beyond doubt, Mr. Stamm's inability to pay."
"... the instruction could have misled the jury into believing that Mr. Stamm bore the burden of proof as to his ability to pay support," Davis wrote.
Greta Davis of Public Defender Corporation in Clarksburg represented Stamm.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Time for These Parents to Look for Another Job
Well adults might have ‘triumphed’ here, but the children of this country certainly did not…
I have said this before and I’ll say it again: mothers have no right choosing occupations that take them away from their children for long periods of time and then think their childrens’ lives should remain on hold until they re-appear again.
Your priority is your children and that is your number one job. Unless you happen to be one of the rare individuals who is doing a singular job like discovering the cure for cancer or leading a force that is fighting off an alien invasion from outer space, you are very replaceable in any other job except being your child’s mother. Nobody else can do that but you.
I don’t see this as a victory for children, but rather as a victory for adults who want their cake and eat it too. You can’t have children and carry on like a single person with no attachments. Sorry it won’t work. Any occupation that mandates the possibility of years of travel/relocation; and, thus, separation from your child so that they need to be in the care of someone else is not for you. Additionally, Americans since WWII have overwhelming stated that they don’t want parents to be in the trenches during wars. They would rather have single women drafted then married men for this reason.
Perhaps US policies for allowing people to sign up in the armed forces needs to be re-evaluated and parents need to be phrased out from all the services. Anyway, it’s even more expensive benefits wise to allow people with children to be in the armed forces. As if they get injured or killed, the tax-payers are forced to pay benefits for these children until adulthood, not to mention the trauma to the children. So it will be a benefit to everyone involved to enforce a no-parent policy in all branches of the service.
Professional soldiering is an occupation for single people, not for those with families. Even the ancients understood this and the Romans themselves did not allow their professional soldiers or centurions to have families for this reason. Of course in a home invasion type of situation, everyone women, old people, children, everyone was involved in defense, but a professional army in a country of almost 300 million citizens (like ours is) does NOT need to include people with children within the professional military.
Sorry parents, but you need to look for another job.
http://www.daytondailynews.com/o/content/oh/story/opinions/columns/2008/05/25/ddn052508wehrmanweb.html
Turner triumphs in custody battle
By Jessica Wehrman
Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2008
WASHINGTON — As a lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner can be tenacious and stubborn, eager to convince others of the merits of his arguments, and unwilling to concede in a fight.
Maybe it's his Tae Kwan Do training — Turner has a second-degree black belt. Maybe it's something he picked during his years as a lawyer. A former aide once described as "Mike Turner" moments when Turner would get his way through the art of persuasion and by the chutzpah of being willing to ask for things other people are too shy to request.
Either way, those skills served him well last week as the Centerville Republican tried to convince four Democratic chairmen to pass a measure that would protect U.S. troops deployed overseas from having their children taken away.
Turner fought this fight last year, when he introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that would bar courts from taking away custodial rights of parents deployed overseas. That amendment, as originally written, would also have kept courts from using a parent's military deployment or possible deployment as a basis for terminating custody.
The amendment passed the House last year but ran into a roadblock in the Senate, which only adopted the part that kept courts from terminating custody while a parent was deployed.
In Washington, passage of even part of a bill is often heralded as a triumph. But Turner was not done.
"There are really two parts of this," he said. "Protecting men and women while they're deployed and then protecting them when they get back. What we got last year protected them when they were gone. We wanted to protect them when they got home."
So this year he tried to add the provision to the Defense Authorization bill.
That's when he hit another roadblock: The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee balked at including court-related amendments in a Defense bill, and asked that the Defense bill not include such amendments.
It was time for another Mike Turner moment.
Turner approached the chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., on the floor, and pleaded his case. Then he went to the chairman of the Veterans Committee, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., and argued for his amendment. Filner advocated for him, and Turner's bill passed the House by voice vote.
But Turner wanted to provide an extra level of security for his bill, which ran the risk of obscurity — and defeat — by heading to the Senate on its own. A sympathetic Democratic staffer with the House Armed Services Committee convinced the chairman of the House Rules Committee to include Turner's bill, already passed, in the final House Defense Authorization bill.
Now Turner's bill is going to the House folded into the Defense Authorization bill — a bill the Senate is expected to take up later this year.
Score one for Turner.
Score another for Lt. Eva Slusher of Kentucky, who had to fight for custody of her daughter Sara after Slusher was deployed to Fort Knox to help troops being sent to Iraq.
"The men and women who are serving this country should not have their service used against them," Turner said. "It's important that we honor their service to the country and not penalize them by taking away their kids."
I have said this before and I’ll say it again: mothers have no right choosing occupations that take them away from their children for long periods of time and then think their childrens’ lives should remain on hold until they re-appear again.
Your priority is your children and that is your number one job. Unless you happen to be one of the rare individuals who is doing a singular job like discovering the cure for cancer or leading a force that is fighting off an alien invasion from outer space, you are very replaceable in any other job except being your child’s mother. Nobody else can do that but you.
I don’t see this as a victory for children, but rather as a victory for adults who want their cake and eat it too. You can’t have children and carry on like a single person with no attachments. Sorry it won’t work. Any occupation that mandates the possibility of years of travel/relocation; and, thus, separation from your child so that they need to be in the care of someone else is not for you. Additionally, Americans since WWII have overwhelming stated that they don’t want parents to be in the trenches during wars. They would rather have single women drafted then married men for this reason.
Perhaps US policies for allowing people to sign up in the armed forces needs to be re-evaluated and parents need to be phrased out from all the services. Anyway, it’s even more expensive benefits wise to allow people with children to be in the armed forces. As if they get injured or killed, the tax-payers are forced to pay benefits for these children until adulthood, not to mention the trauma to the children. So it will be a benefit to everyone involved to enforce a no-parent policy in all branches of the service.
Professional soldiering is an occupation for single people, not for those with families. Even the ancients understood this and the Romans themselves did not allow their professional soldiers or centurions to have families for this reason. Of course in a home invasion type of situation, everyone women, old people, children, everyone was involved in defense, but a professional army in a country of almost 300 million citizens (like ours is) does NOT need to include people with children within the professional military.
Sorry parents, but you need to look for another job.
http://www.daytondailynews.com/o/content/oh/story/opinions/columns/2008/05/25/ddn052508wehrmanweb.html
Turner triumphs in custody battle
By Jessica Wehrman
Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2008
WASHINGTON — As a lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner can be tenacious and stubborn, eager to convince others of the merits of his arguments, and unwilling to concede in a fight.
Maybe it's his Tae Kwan Do training — Turner has a second-degree black belt. Maybe it's something he picked during his years as a lawyer. A former aide once described as "Mike Turner" moments when Turner would get his way through the art of persuasion and by the chutzpah of being willing to ask for things other people are too shy to request.
Either way, those skills served him well last week as the Centerville Republican tried to convince four Democratic chairmen to pass a measure that would protect U.S. troops deployed overseas from having their children taken away.
Turner fought this fight last year, when he introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that would bar courts from taking away custodial rights of parents deployed overseas. That amendment, as originally written, would also have kept courts from using a parent's military deployment or possible deployment as a basis for terminating custody.
The amendment passed the House last year but ran into a roadblock in the Senate, which only adopted the part that kept courts from terminating custody while a parent was deployed.
In Washington, passage of even part of a bill is often heralded as a triumph. But Turner was not done.
"There are really two parts of this," he said. "Protecting men and women while they're deployed and then protecting them when they get back. What we got last year protected them when they were gone. We wanted to protect them when they got home."
So this year he tried to add the provision to the Defense Authorization bill.
That's when he hit another roadblock: The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee balked at including court-related amendments in a Defense bill, and asked that the Defense bill not include such amendments.
It was time for another Mike Turner moment.
Turner approached the chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., on the floor, and pleaded his case. Then he went to the chairman of the Veterans Committee, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., and argued for his amendment. Filner advocated for him, and Turner's bill passed the House by voice vote.
But Turner wanted to provide an extra level of security for his bill, which ran the risk of obscurity — and defeat — by heading to the Senate on its own. A sympathetic Democratic staffer with the House Armed Services Committee convinced the chairman of the House Rules Committee to include Turner's bill, already passed, in the final House Defense Authorization bill.
Now Turner's bill is going to the House folded into the Defense Authorization bill — a bill the Senate is expected to take up later this year.
Score one for Turner.
Score another for Lt. Eva Slusher of Kentucky, who had to fight for custody of her daughter Sara after Slusher was deployed to Fort Knox to help troops being sent to Iraq.
"The men and women who are serving this country should not have their service used against them," Turner said. "It's important that we honor their service to the country and not penalize them by taking away their kids."
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Cautionary Tale about a Neglectful Mother
I was going to look for something uplifting on Mother's Day; but I stumbled across this article and it was too powerful to pass up. Especially since it covers so many of the themes I frequently blog about here: 1. How feminism has evolved into a cult with the destruction of the mother/child bond as it's main target; 2. How women continue to viciously undermine one another, (yes, even mothers and daughters) and last but not least, how NOT making any children you bring into this world your primary focus is selfish and damaging to them.
I see it everyday where I work. Women having babies and returning to work after the poor little things are barely a few months old and dumping these kids off on just about anybody. They work from 9:00 in the morning until late in the evening. I often wonder why they even bothered having kids as they spend no time with them whatsoever. I think I put more planning and time into my adoption of a puppy, who ultimately graced my life for almost 10 years.
So I guess this article is also a cautionary tale to women who think they can have children and ignore them for the sake of a job...
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3866798.ece
TIMES ON LINE
From The Sunday Times
May 4, 2008
The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother
The Color Purple brought Alice Walker global fame, but her strident views led to an irreconcilable rift, her daughter tells
Margarette Driscoll
In the mid-1980s, The New York Times ran a profile of the American writer and activist Alice Walker. Her novel, The Color Purple, had won the Pulitzer prize and was being turned into a film by Steven Spielberg.
The article was illustrated by a photograph of Walker sitting on her teenaged daughter’s knee. It was meant to be a “fun” picture; but, in retrospect, according to Rebecca Walker, the photographer unwittingly portrayed the true nature of her relationship with her mother.
Alice Walker was, and remains, an icon of the American civil rights movement. “People adore her. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘Your mother saved my life’ and ‘I have an altar to your mother in my bedroom’. They feel a connection to her and revere her greatly,” says Rebecca.
Walker’s success as a campaigner was to her detriment as a mother. Like Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her home and her children as she directs her energy towards the poor of Africa, so America’s icon often went to feminist meetings and rallies and left Rebecca to fend for herself. Her daughter experimented with drugs and became pregnant at 14.
“My mother\did a lot of leaving to go to her writing retreat, which was over 100 miles away — so she’d go there and leave me a little bit of money, leave me in the care of a neighbour,” recalls Rebecca, now 38.
“When I was pregnant at 14, I think it was because I was so lonely that I was reaching out through my sexuality. My mother’s a crusader for daughters around the world, but couldn’t see that her own daughter was having a difficult time. It was me having to psycho-emotionally tiptoe around her, rather than her taking care of me.”
Walker is furious with Rebecca for making such sentiments public, and mother and daughter are estranged with little hope of reconciliation. Rebecca has a three-year-old son, Tenzin, whom her mother has never seen. Their last meaningful exchange, during Rebecca’s pregnancy, ended in Walker sending a terse e-mail in which she resigned from “the job” of being her mother, and told her that in any case their relationship had been “inconsequential” for years.
The depth of her anger was such that she refused to budge even when Rebecca had a difficult birth and Tenzin’s life hung in the balance in a special-care baby unit. “My father called her to tell her what was happening. He couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t run right over . . . In some ways, I wanted her to — but in other ways, I didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t be able to be there for me in the way I wanted. It would be problematic.”
Walker, the eighth child of poor sharecroppers, grew up in Georgia during segregation. Her extraordinary intellect and determination won her a scholarship to study in New York; and after university she returned to the South and became involved in voter-registration drives and setting up children’s education programmes in Mississippi.
There she met Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. In the midst of the feverish, sometimes murderous, racial politics of the time, they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi, defying both their families’ disapproval and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
The marriage did not last but it produced Rebecca: a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge. The problem was that, during her childhood, Rebecca felt precisely that — a political symbol rather than a cherished daughter.
Being progressives, Walker and Leventhal decided on shared parenting but came up with the agreement that Rebecca would alternately live two years with each of them. From the age of eight, she lived in utterly different worlds: with her father and stepmother in New York’s conventional, rich, Jewish, Upper East Side; and with her mother among bohemian, black, mostly poverty stricken activists and feminists in California.
She felt she did not fit into either world. In New York, she was the only black face in the neighbourhood. Yet she felt she was far too steeped in “white privilege” for her mother’s friends’ taste. And, if she tried to talk to her parents about any of this, she was ignored.
“My father had come out of world war two and the Holocaust, my mother from the segregated South. Their attitude was, ‘The Gestapo isn’t after you, you’re not getting beaten up by mobs just for sitting at the lunch counter — what’s your problem?’ ” she says.
Walker had also joined the early feminist movement — Gloria Steinem is Rebecca’s godmother — and it was her politics, more than anything, that shaped mother-daughter relations. The so-called “first wave” feminists believed that housework was another form of slavery and that women did not have an innate need to nurture but had been conditioned into their subordinate role as wives and mothers through centuries of patriarchy.
“My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships,” says Rebecca.
When Rebecca became pregnant at 14, Walker wasn’t shocked: she calmly picked up the phone and arranged an abortion. “Her feminist thing was about empowering me to have an active sexuality and to be in control of my body, and that trumped any sense of boundaries,” Rebecca says.
Certainly, Walker believed that what she was doing was right. Leaving her teenaged daughter to “do her own thing” was a way of fostering Rebecca’s independence and avoiding inadvertently passing down patriarchal values.
“Her circle were questioning power relationships and whether a mother had any more knowledge than a child. Some friends of hers were living on communes. I know those kids and they’re totally screwed up.
“Some were sexually abused, all kinds of bad stuff happened, but even those who survived intact don’t want to create communes for their children. They didn’t want to be raised by 10 different parents — again, it was this ideological thing trumping the maternal instinct.”
Towards the end of senior school, an ecstatic Rebecca showed Walker her offer letter from Yale. Instead of celebrating her daughter’s success in landing a place at one of the world’s top universities, Walker asked her coolly why she wanted to go to a bastion of male privilege.
Rebecca went to Yale anyway, and started thinking about feminism for herself. Her first book examined what feminism meant to young women and what role it played in the modern world. “When I began to challenge status quo feminism, my mother started to feel very injured,” she says. “To have a daughter who was questioning feminism — it was seen as a threat. Imagine Margaret Thatcher having a hippie child who wanted to live in India and become a Hare Krishna. It was that kind of schism.
“I keep telling people feminism is an experiment. And just like in science, you have to assess the outcome of the experiment and adjust according to your results, but my mother and her friends, they see it as truth; they don’t see it as an experiment.
“So that creates quite a problem. You’ve got young women saying, ‘That didn’t really work for me’ and the older ones saying, ‘Tough, because that’s how it should be’.”
The debate goes on: Rebecca, who lives in Hawaii with Tenzin and Glen, his Buddhist-teacher father, recently wrote about why she was supporting Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton — and immediately came under fire.
“The response from older feminists was that I, and other young women, were naive in thinking Obama could ever truly represent us, and we should be supporting the female candidate. The belief is that women become more radical as they get older, that we’re naive and we’ll ‘get it’ later on.”
Predictably, Walker was upset at Rebecca’s next publication, Black, White and Jewish — a memoir about growing up in her fractured family. “My father was quite shocked at first, but he got behind me 100%. However, my mother felt very injured,” says Rebecca. “I’m not blameless. I can be very direct and strong in my opinions and I wasn’t as sensitive to other people’s feelings as I could have been.
“My mother is a celebrity, and celebrities need to constantly police their reputation. If you put a chink in their public persona, it can be very dangerous and threatening to them.”
The final showdown happened while Rebecca was pregnant, and is chronicled in her new book, Baby Love — a diary of her pregnancy in which she explores modern women’s dilemmas about relationships and motherhood.
Having been raised to believe that “it’s not nature, it’s nurture”, she was not prepared for the strength of her feelings for her baby. “I adore him,” she says. “He’s really into running and jumping and he’s very attached to me. It’s all, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy’, and it’s very difficult to leave him.”
People she meets constantly express surprise at what’s happened — surely having a child should have brought her closer to her mother, rather than splitting them asunder? She agrees.
“People don’t really understand how strong ideology can be,” she says. “I think sometimes of that group and that feminism as being close to a cult. I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought. It’s been an ongoing struggle. When you have a cult, you have a cult leader who demands a certain conformity . . . And when you have a celebrity who has cultural-icon status, economic power beyond what you can imagine, you can’t resist that person — if you want to stay in their realm. Because once you start challenging them, they kick you out.”
Baby Love by Rebecca Walker is published by Souvenir Press at £15. Copies can be ordered for £13.50, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
From Rebecca’s diary
June 29, 2004
Two days ago, I checked my e-mail to find a note from my mother threatening to send an attached statement [to a website.] In a nutshell, she took offence to a section of my 2001 memoir, reprinted in a publication two weeks ago, in which I wrote that my parents didn’t protect or look out for me . . . In the statement, she calls me a liar, a thief (because when I was eight, I took quarters from her purse during my parents’ divorce) and a few other discrediting unmentionables . . .
I went over to her house to find out what the hell was going on. Never have I been so frightened by my mother. She sat me down and called me “someone who thinks she is a good person but really isn’t”. She said that because I wasn’t from the South and didn’t have the full memory of slavery (read: I am half white), that I don’t know what it feels like to be sold down the river.
I asked whether she thought it was a little strange that I wrote about my struggle in an attempt to get her to take care of me, but here we were, talking about how I should be taking care of her.
She grew quite vicious. After two hours of trying to convince her of the merits of my existence, I left the house shaking. [My partner] Glen was extremely upset: This is how she treats you when you’re pregnant?
November 24
E-mails have been flying back and forth. I ask her to apologise for the statement she threatened to send [to a website]. She tells me that she and all of her friends think that I have lost my mind. When I write that if she can’t apologise, I don’t want contact because I feel she is too emotionally dangerous for me and my unborn son, she writes that she won’t miss what we don’t have. She [adds] that she has been my mother for 30 years and is no longer interested in the job. Instead of signing “your mother” at the end, she signs her first name.
I see it everyday where I work. Women having babies and returning to work after the poor little things are barely a few months old and dumping these kids off on just about anybody. They work from 9:00 in the morning until late in the evening. I often wonder why they even bothered having kids as they spend no time with them whatsoever. I think I put more planning and time into my adoption of a puppy, who ultimately graced my life for almost 10 years.
So I guess this article is also a cautionary tale to women who think they can have children and ignore them for the sake of a job...
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3866798.ece
TIMES ON LINE
From The Sunday Times
May 4, 2008
The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother
The Color Purple brought Alice Walker global fame, but her strident views led to an irreconcilable rift, her daughter tells
Margarette Driscoll
In the mid-1980s, The New York Times ran a profile of the American writer and activist Alice Walker. Her novel, The Color Purple, had won the Pulitzer prize and was being turned into a film by Steven Spielberg.
The article was illustrated by a photograph of Walker sitting on her teenaged daughter’s knee. It was meant to be a “fun” picture; but, in retrospect, according to Rebecca Walker, the photographer unwittingly portrayed the true nature of her relationship with her mother.
Alice Walker was, and remains, an icon of the American civil rights movement. “People adore her. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘Your mother saved my life’ and ‘I have an altar to your mother in my bedroom’. They feel a connection to her and revere her greatly,” says Rebecca.
Walker’s success as a campaigner was to her detriment as a mother. Like Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her home and her children as she directs her energy towards the poor of Africa, so America’s icon often went to feminist meetings and rallies and left Rebecca to fend for herself. Her daughter experimented with drugs and became pregnant at 14.
“My mother\did a lot of leaving to go to her writing retreat, which was over 100 miles away — so she’d go there and leave me a little bit of money, leave me in the care of a neighbour,” recalls Rebecca, now 38.
“When I was pregnant at 14, I think it was because I was so lonely that I was reaching out through my sexuality. My mother’s a crusader for daughters around the world, but couldn’t see that her own daughter was having a difficult time. It was me having to psycho-emotionally tiptoe around her, rather than her taking care of me.”
Walker is furious with Rebecca for making such sentiments public, and mother and daughter are estranged with little hope of reconciliation. Rebecca has a three-year-old son, Tenzin, whom her mother has never seen. Their last meaningful exchange, during Rebecca’s pregnancy, ended in Walker sending a terse e-mail in which she resigned from “the job” of being her mother, and told her that in any case their relationship had been “inconsequential” for years.
The depth of her anger was such that she refused to budge even when Rebecca had a difficult birth and Tenzin’s life hung in the balance in a special-care baby unit. “My father called her to tell her what was happening. He couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t run right over . . . In some ways, I wanted her to — but in other ways, I didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t be able to be there for me in the way I wanted. It would be problematic.”
Walker, the eighth child of poor sharecroppers, grew up in Georgia during segregation. Her extraordinary intellect and determination won her a scholarship to study in New York; and after university she returned to the South and became involved in voter-registration drives and setting up children’s education programmes in Mississippi.
There she met Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. In the midst of the feverish, sometimes murderous, racial politics of the time, they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi, defying both their families’ disapproval and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
The marriage did not last but it produced Rebecca: a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge. The problem was that, during her childhood, Rebecca felt precisely that — a political symbol rather than a cherished daughter.
Being progressives, Walker and Leventhal decided on shared parenting but came up with the agreement that Rebecca would alternately live two years with each of them. From the age of eight, she lived in utterly different worlds: with her father and stepmother in New York’s conventional, rich, Jewish, Upper East Side; and with her mother among bohemian, black, mostly poverty stricken activists and feminists in California.
She felt she did not fit into either world. In New York, she was the only black face in the neighbourhood. Yet she felt she was far too steeped in “white privilege” for her mother’s friends’ taste. And, if she tried to talk to her parents about any of this, she was ignored.
“My father had come out of world war two and the Holocaust, my mother from the segregated South. Their attitude was, ‘The Gestapo isn’t after you, you’re not getting beaten up by mobs just for sitting at the lunch counter — what’s your problem?’ ” she says.
Walker had also joined the early feminist movement — Gloria Steinem is Rebecca’s godmother — and it was her politics, more than anything, that shaped mother-daughter relations. The so-called “first wave” feminists believed that housework was another form of slavery and that women did not have an innate need to nurture but had been conditioned into their subordinate role as wives and mothers through centuries of patriarchy.
“My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships,” says Rebecca.
When Rebecca became pregnant at 14, Walker wasn’t shocked: she calmly picked up the phone and arranged an abortion. “Her feminist thing was about empowering me to have an active sexuality and to be in control of my body, and that trumped any sense of boundaries,” Rebecca says.
Certainly, Walker believed that what she was doing was right. Leaving her teenaged daughter to “do her own thing” was a way of fostering Rebecca’s independence and avoiding inadvertently passing down patriarchal values.
“Her circle were questioning power relationships and whether a mother had any more knowledge than a child. Some friends of hers were living on communes. I know those kids and they’re totally screwed up.
“Some were sexually abused, all kinds of bad stuff happened, but even those who survived intact don’t want to create communes for their children. They didn’t want to be raised by 10 different parents — again, it was this ideological thing trumping the maternal instinct.”
Towards the end of senior school, an ecstatic Rebecca showed Walker her offer letter from Yale. Instead of celebrating her daughter’s success in landing a place at one of the world’s top universities, Walker asked her coolly why she wanted to go to a bastion of male privilege.
Rebecca went to Yale anyway, and started thinking about feminism for herself. Her first book examined what feminism meant to young women and what role it played in the modern world. “When I began to challenge status quo feminism, my mother started to feel very injured,” she says. “To have a daughter who was questioning feminism — it was seen as a threat. Imagine Margaret Thatcher having a hippie child who wanted to live in India and become a Hare Krishna. It was that kind of schism.
“I keep telling people feminism is an experiment. And just like in science, you have to assess the outcome of the experiment and adjust according to your results, but my mother and her friends, they see it as truth; they don’t see it as an experiment.
“So that creates quite a problem. You’ve got young women saying, ‘That didn’t really work for me’ and the older ones saying, ‘Tough, because that’s how it should be’.”
The debate goes on: Rebecca, who lives in Hawaii with Tenzin and Glen, his Buddhist-teacher father, recently wrote about why she was supporting Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton — and immediately came under fire.
“The response from older feminists was that I, and other young women, were naive in thinking Obama could ever truly represent us, and we should be supporting the female candidate. The belief is that women become more radical as they get older, that we’re naive and we’ll ‘get it’ later on.”
Predictably, Walker was upset at Rebecca’s next publication, Black, White and Jewish — a memoir about growing up in her fractured family. “My father was quite shocked at first, but he got behind me 100%. However, my mother felt very injured,” says Rebecca. “I’m not blameless. I can be very direct and strong in my opinions and I wasn’t as sensitive to other people’s feelings as I could have been.
“My mother is a celebrity, and celebrities need to constantly police their reputation. If you put a chink in their public persona, it can be very dangerous and threatening to them.”
The final showdown happened while Rebecca was pregnant, and is chronicled in her new book, Baby Love — a diary of her pregnancy in which she explores modern women’s dilemmas about relationships and motherhood.
Having been raised to believe that “it’s not nature, it’s nurture”, she was not prepared for the strength of her feelings for her baby. “I adore him,” she says. “He’s really into running and jumping and he’s very attached to me. It’s all, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy’, and it’s very difficult to leave him.”
People she meets constantly express surprise at what’s happened — surely having a child should have brought her closer to her mother, rather than splitting them asunder? She agrees.
“People don’t really understand how strong ideology can be,” she says. “I think sometimes of that group and that feminism as being close to a cult. I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought. It’s been an ongoing struggle. When you have a cult, you have a cult leader who demands a certain conformity . . . And when you have a celebrity who has cultural-icon status, economic power beyond what you can imagine, you can’t resist that person — if you want to stay in their realm. Because once you start challenging them, they kick you out.”
Baby Love by Rebecca Walker is published by Souvenir Press at £15. Copies can be ordered for £13.50, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
From Rebecca’s diary
June 29, 2004
Two days ago, I checked my e-mail to find a note from my mother threatening to send an attached statement [to a website.] In a nutshell, she took offence to a section of my 2001 memoir, reprinted in a publication two weeks ago, in which I wrote that my parents didn’t protect or look out for me . . . In the statement, she calls me a liar, a thief (because when I was eight, I took quarters from her purse during my parents’ divorce) and a few other discrediting unmentionables . . .
I went over to her house to find out what the hell was going on. Never have I been so frightened by my mother. She sat me down and called me “someone who thinks she is a good person but really isn’t”. She said that because I wasn’t from the South and didn’t have the full memory of slavery (read: I am half white), that I don’t know what it feels like to be sold down the river.
I asked whether she thought it was a little strange that I wrote about my struggle in an attempt to get her to take care of me, but here we were, talking about how I should be taking care of her.
She grew quite vicious. After two hours of trying to convince her of the merits of my existence, I left the house shaking. [My partner] Glen was extremely upset: This is how she treats you when you’re pregnant?
November 24
E-mails have been flying back and forth. I ask her to apologise for the statement she threatened to send [to a website]. She tells me that she and all of her friends think that I have lost my mind. When I write that if she can’t apologise, I don’t want contact because I feel she is too emotionally dangerous for me and my unborn son, she writes that she won’t miss what we don’t have. She [adds] that she has been my mother for 30 years and is no longer interested in the job. Instead of signing “your mother” at the end, she signs her first name.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
True or False: Child Support Enforcement Leading to Custody Wars
As always, I'm a little late with responses.
For some reason I'm still having problems with the Google blog system and I haven't been getting emails sent to my account telling me someone has posted a comment. Of course I have almost 200 posts on here and no way of knowing if someone has posted a comment, unless I get an email telling me they have.
It's definitely my lack of technical skills which is the reason, I have to go back and look at how I set up my options. I guess when I removed the moderate coments feature, I took off the notify by email feature as well. So there might be other comments scattered throughout my blog as well that I'm not aware of; thus, if I missed responding to someone I apologize. This is a small blog but I always try to respond to every commentor.
Quite my accident I found Richard's last comment. He compared my view of how the Johnson era changes to child support policy eventually led to the custody wars to the conspiracy theory that the government created AIDS to destroy black people. I felt it was a charge worthy of a whole separate post since it's on one of my favorite topics: child support policy leading to custody wars; and, frankly I didn't have another article to post anyway.
So I posted the begining of the comments to the end.
PolishKnight said...
Question
Hello NYMOM.
It would be very helpful to me if you could clarify your position on the so-called 'rights' or non-rights of men as fathers in this situation.
If men don't have "rights" as "sperm donors" unless contractually specified, and you agree with this, then do you think that "child support" for non-married people should be eliminated? Or is this a case of men not having rights but burdens by default?
In regards to this case, this isn't a simple "sperm donor" case but rather of a he-said/she-said issue. He says he wasn't a simple sperm donor and she disagrees. This isn't the same as anonymous sperm donors going to clinics looking to claim babies years later...
3:45 PM
NYMOM said...
I think I said many times that unmarried women should NOT be able to take a man into court for child support, although I would let the state take an unmarried man or woman into court IF the resultant child became a public burden.
I also stated that unmarried men should NOT be able to take a woman into court for visitation or custody.
These are things people would have to negotiate between themselves as they did in the past.
The ONLY time the state should get involved is if abuse or neglect is involved. Or a child is placed on public benefits of one kind or another.
4:07 PM
Anonymous said...
That was Charles Murray's position back in the '80s when he wrote the infamous Bell Curve.
Recognizing that it is mostly the dopes of our society doing unmarried births (still true, for the most part), he advocated keeping the rules real real simple.
No marriage, no rights, no goodies.
But he also favored cutting the other illegitimate daddy, the state, out of the deal as well.
By ending the public benefits that encourage births among the least suitable parents and making unwed birth the financial disaster it once was.
Which is probably stronger medicine than our system can swallow, so we'll continue to have the least fit producing more offspring for the more fit to support.
At least until the Muslims swallow up Western society and unwed motherhood ceases to be a statistically significant phenomenon, for obvious reasons. I hope I won't be around for that.
Richard
3:46 PM
NYMOM said...
Yes Richard, my position is just the opposite of Charles Murray's then.
I say that as long as people are not coming to others looking for handouts, they can do what they want with their lives. Marry, not marry, father works mother is home, mother works father is home or both parents work and use a trained chimp to raise thier kids.
I'm okay with it.
As long as the children are happy, healthy and safe it's up to their parents how they order their lives.
But Murray was wrong in many ways.
One thing that has been demonstrated recently in a pretty thorough study is that in states with strict enforcement of child support single mother birthrates dipped over 20%. That's a pretty big drop and I guaranteed you that most of the dip is in the communities that Charles Murray CLAIMED were just having kids to get money.
So women, even poor, young, uneducated ones, will change their behaviors if they see that it will lead to losing their children. What woman is going to make such an investment in having children only to risk having them snatched away a few months later????
So Murray underestimated the mother/child bond as men are often apt to do...
6:14 PM
Anonymous said...
You're saying that child support enforcement leads to poor women losing their children?
Not following that. Unless maybe this is more of that BS about men suing for custody to avoid paying child support.
If so, not buying it. Poor women lose their kids all the fucking time and and least of all to the fathers. CPS takes them away all the time and puts them with fosters or with grandparents if they're willing.
They even have a nickname for CPS: "the baby-snatchers."
And poor women see kids all around them dead from drugs and crime, or carted off to juvie or jail.
None of it deters their reproduction one bit.
And Murray wasn't saying these gals have kids just to get the money. More like, they don't worry enough about having illegitimate kids because they know the benefits are there.
If child support enforcement changes anyone's behavior, ever think that maybe it motivates the guys to put on some of those free condoms that Planned Parenthood works so hard to get out?
Which is good for everybody.
Richard
11:56 AM
NYMOM said...
I'm saying that stricter child support enforcement leads to more custody battles in our legal system which is currently infested with politically correct gender neutralized feminists. This has been going on since the late 80 early 90s...
I guess the word has now effectively spread, so there has been a dip of about 20% or so in the ratio of single mothers in those states with stricter child support enforcement.
I believe that this will also translate, if anyone cared to look, into a substantial dip in the population of African Americans in those states. Remember single mothers have been the engines of growth for that community. Let's face it if those woman had waited for a marriage to a husband with a good job in order to have any kids, their entire population would have been extinct about 50 years after the Civil War.
But that was the entire point when the idea of child support was first foisted off on the community after the riots in the 60s...a spiteful and mean-spirited attempt to destroy these people that has backfired and now haunts us all.
7:20 AM
Anonymous said...
"But that was the entire point when the idea of child support was first foisted off on the community after the riots in the 60s...a spiteful and mean-spirited attempt to destroy these people that has backfired and now haunts us all."
Wow! That's got to be the most far-fetched conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Right up there with the government creating AIDS to wipe out the black population.
Turning to child support was nothing more or less than an effort to keep the monetary demands of single mothers from swamping the economy.
A "spiteful and mean-spirited attempt to destroy these people" would have been more like simply eliminating the public benefits altogether. Turning to child support to defray the costs wasn't mean-spirited at all. It was very moderate and logical under the circumstances.
But if it also gets more of those guys to put a glove on it, hey, so much the better.
Richard
11:28 AM
NYMOM said...
Sorry I didn't respond but I didn't see this comment reflected in my emails. There's something slightly whacky about this google blog system, or maybe I'm not handling it correctly. Not sure.
But anyway: some public policy experts, at the time that the child support policies were enacted, saw the mean-spirited intent behind them. It was nothing but an attempt to shift the blame for the condition of Afr. Americans away from the 100 year post-emancipation denial of economic opportunities and foist it off onto the backs of their own families.
A more advanced form of blaming your mother or some other woman for everything men do wrong.
The changes were instituted under the Johnson Administration; but like many other public policy changes, the true impact didn't become apparent for a decade or two after the fact around the 80s/90s. The changes were made after a commission was put together to identify the 'causes' of the lack of advancement of Afr. Americans after the riots.
Anyway they came to the conclusion that the main problem was not a history of racism denying economic opportunity to black youth; but the fact that too many Afr. American men were abandoning their families and not providing enough economic support to their children.
The original intent behind child support was to reimburse the states for any assistance a poor woman needed to raise her kids. Initially it was just reimbursement for 'welfare' any actual money given to her. But now it's morphing into ANY assistance including state-supported child care in order for a mother to go to WORK...Eventually it will be for anything: medical, food stamps, housing and not to be able to pay it is considered criminal. Many many poor men are sent to jail and now, many poor women are starting to join them.
I actually used to correspond with a poor woman who lived in the south and hasn't been allowed to see her children in three years. She had lost custody to her ex-husband. Anyway she was under court-ordered house arrest, only able to go out to work and back (they had some kind of electronic bracket on her) and most of her paycheck was taken to pay child support. She was actually about to get evicted as she couldn't pay her rent on what she was left with...and many poor men are in the same situation as you know.
So this entire situation has gotten out of control, with even middle class families being dragged into it now (who never had a problem with collection of public benefits). Now the child support they pay is usually forcibly garnished through the state-run system that then uses those numbers to get reimbursed from the federal government for collecting child support monies. The federal government reimburses the state $1 for every $2 they collect or something of that nature.
So no one can address this issue properly to reform it, if we continue denying its ugly origins. Trying to compare this to some nut saying the government causes AIDS is not a valid argument. Why not try to address the actual child support issue instead of blowing it off.
For some reason I'm still having problems with the Google blog system and I haven't been getting emails sent to my account telling me someone has posted a comment. Of course I have almost 200 posts on here and no way of knowing if someone has posted a comment, unless I get an email telling me they have.
It's definitely my lack of technical skills which is the reason, I have to go back and look at how I set up my options. I guess when I removed the moderate coments feature, I took off the notify by email feature as well. So there might be other comments scattered throughout my blog as well that I'm not aware of; thus, if I missed responding to someone I apologize. This is a small blog but I always try to respond to every commentor.
Quite my accident I found Richard's last comment. He compared my view of how the Johnson era changes to child support policy eventually led to the custody wars to the conspiracy theory that the government created AIDS to destroy black people. I felt it was a charge worthy of a whole separate post since it's on one of my favorite topics: child support policy leading to custody wars; and, frankly I didn't have another article to post anyway.
So I posted the begining of the comments to the end.
PolishKnight said...
Question
Hello NYMOM.
It would be very helpful to me if you could clarify your position on the so-called 'rights' or non-rights of men as fathers in this situation.
If men don't have "rights" as "sperm donors" unless contractually specified, and you agree with this, then do you think that "child support" for non-married people should be eliminated? Or is this a case of men not having rights but burdens by default?
In regards to this case, this isn't a simple "sperm donor" case but rather of a he-said/she-said issue. He says he wasn't a simple sperm donor and she disagrees. This isn't the same as anonymous sperm donors going to clinics looking to claim babies years later...
3:45 PM
NYMOM said...
I think I said many times that unmarried women should NOT be able to take a man into court for child support, although I would let the state take an unmarried man or woman into court IF the resultant child became a public burden.
I also stated that unmarried men should NOT be able to take a woman into court for visitation or custody.
These are things people would have to negotiate between themselves as they did in the past.
The ONLY time the state should get involved is if abuse or neglect is involved. Or a child is placed on public benefits of one kind or another.
4:07 PM
Anonymous said...
That was Charles Murray's position back in the '80s when he wrote the infamous Bell Curve.
Recognizing that it is mostly the dopes of our society doing unmarried births (still true, for the most part), he advocated keeping the rules real real simple.
No marriage, no rights, no goodies.
But he also favored cutting the other illegitimate daddy, the state, out of the deal as well.
By ending the public benefits that encourage births among the least suitable parents and making unwed birth the financial disaster it once was.
Which is probably stronger medicine than our system can swallow, so we'll continue to have the least fit producing more offspring for the more fit to support.
At least until the Muslims swallow up Western society and unwed motherhood ceases to be a statistically significant phenomenon, for obvious reasons. I hope I won't be around for that.
Richard
3:46 PM
NYMOM said...
Yes Richard, my position is just the opposite of Charles Murray's then.
I say that as long as people are not coming to others looking for handouts, they can do what they want with their lives. Marry, not marry, father works mother is home, mother works father is home or both parents work and use a trained chimp to raise thier kids.
I'm okay with it.
As long as the children are happy, healthy and safe it's up to their parents how they order their lives.
But Murray was wrong in many ways.
One thing that has been demonstrated recently in a pretty thorough study is that in states with strict enforcement of child support single mother birthrates dipped over 20%. That's a pretty big drop and I guaranteed you that most of the dip is in the communities that Charles Murray CLAIMED were just having kids to get money.
So women, even poor, young, uneducated ones, will change their behaviors if they see that it will lead to losing their children. What woman is going to make such an investment in having children only to risk having them snatched away a few months later????
So Murray underestimated the mother/child bond as men are often apt to do...
6:14 PM
Anonymous said...
You're saying that child support enforcement leads to poor women losing their children?
Not following that. Unless maybe this is more of that BS about men suing for custody to avoid paying child support.
If so, not buying it. Poor women lose their kids all the fucking time and and least of all to the fathers. CPS takes them away all the time and puts them with fosters or with grandparents if they're willing.
They even have a nickname for CPS: "the baby-snatchers."
And poor women see kids all around them dead from drugs and crime, or carted off to juvie or jail.
None of it deters their reproduction one bit.
And Murray wasn't saying these gals have kids just to get the money. More like, they don't worry enough about having illegitimate kids because they know the benefits are there.
If child support enforcement changes anyone's behavior, ever think that maybe it motivates the guys to put on some of those free condoms that Planned Parenthood works so hard to get out?
Which is good for everybody.
Richard
11:56 AM
NYMOM said...
I'm saying that stricter child support enforcement leads to more custody battles in our legal system which is currently infested with politically correct gender neutralized feminists. This has been going on since the late 80 early 90s...
I guess the word has now effectively spread, so there has been a dip of about 20% or so in the ratio of single mothers in those states with stricter child support enforcement.
I believe that this will also translate, if anyone cared to look, into a substantial dip in the population of African Americans in those states. Remember single mothers have been the engines of growth for that community. Let's face it if those woman had waited for a marriage to a husband with a good job in order to have any kids, their entire population would have been extinct about 50 years after the Civil War.
But that was the entire point when the idea of child support was first foisted off on the community after the riots in the 60s...a spiteful and mean-spirited attempt to destroy these people that has backfired and now haunts us all.
7:20 AM
Anonymous said...
"But that was the entire point when the idea of child support was first foisted off on the community after the riots in the 60s...a spiteful and mean-spirited attempt to destroy these people that has backfired and now haunts us all."
Wow! That's got to be the most far-fetched conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Right up there with the government creating AIDS to wipe out the black population.
Turning to child support was nothing more or less than an effort to keep the monetary demands of single mothers from swamping the economy.
A "spiteful and mean-spirited attempt to destroy these people" would have been more like simply eliminating the public benefits altogether. Turning to child support to defray the costs wasn't mean-spirited at all. It was very moderate and logical under the circumstances.
But if it also gets more of those guys to put a glove on it, hey, so much the better.
Richard
11:28 AM
NYMOM said...
Sorry I didn't respond but I didn't see this comment reflected in my emails. There's something slightly whacky about this google blog system, or maybe I'm not handling it correctly. Not sure.
But anyway: some public policy experts, at the time that the child support policies were enacted, saw the mean-spirited intent behind them. It was nothing but an attempt to shift the blame for the condition of Afr. Americans away from the 100 year post-emancipation denial of economic opportunities and foist it off onto the backs of their own families.
A more advanced form of blaming your mother or some other woman for everything men do wrong.
The changes were instituted under the Johnson Administration; but like many other public policy changes, the true impact didn't become apparent for a decade or two after the fact around the 80s/90s. The changes were made after a commission was put together to identify the 'causes' of the lack of advancement of Afr. Americans after the riots.
Anyway they came to the conclusion that the main problem was not a history of racism denying economic opportunity to black youth; but the fact that too many Afr. American men were abandoning their families and not providing enough economic support to their children.
The original intent behind child support was to reimburse the states for any assistance a poor woman needed to raise her kids. Initially it was just reimbursement for 'welfare' any actual money given to her. But now it's morphing into ANY assistance including state-supported child care in order for a mother to go to WORK...Eventually it will be for anything: medical, food stamps, housing and not to be able to pay it is considered criminal. Many many poor men are sent to jail and now, many poor women are starting to join them.
I actually used to correspond with a poor woman who lived in the south and hasn't been allowed to see her children in three years. She had lost custody to her ex-husband. Anyway she was under court-ordered house arrest, only able to go out to work and back (they had some kind of electronic bracket on her) and most of her paycheck was taken to pay child support. She was actually about to get evicted as she couldn't pay her rent on what she was left with...and many poor men are in the same situation as you know.
So this entire situation has gotten out of control, with even middle class families being dragged into it now (who never had a problem with collection of public benefits). Now the child support they pay is usually forcibly garnished through the state-run system that then uses those numbers to get reimbursed from the federal government for collecting child support monies. The federal government reimburses the state $1 for every $2 they collect or something of that nature.
So no one can address this issue properly to reform it, if we continue denying its ugly origins. Trying to compare this to some nut saying the government causes AIDS is not a valid argument. Why not try to address the actual child support issue instead of blowing it off.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
More Attempts by Men to Sell Off Our Children to the Highest Bidders
I've had the following article saved for a few weeks but was debating whether or not to post it. One of the reasons I didn't want to is because I didn't want it to seem like I was picking on Israel, since this sort of thing goes on in every western country. Unfortunately the article chose to focus on an Israeli couple and I couldn't find another one so casual in its dismissal of this mother's humanity and the natural rights of all mothers to their own children. You would think they were talking about picking up a new puppy from a dog, the off-handed way they described what was going on.
Anyway, I decided to go with it.
It amazes me that these people feel so entitled that they don't mind going half a world away to exploit some poor Indian woman and her children in order to meet their own needs. No problem whatsoever with using this women's body for money, as she is so desperately poor that she has no other option. As if this was such a great way to make an income, how come they couldn't find some Israeli girl to perform this service for them?
They have played on this woman's desperate need to give a decent life to her already-born nine year old son and convinced her to sell them another one of her children. As, let's make no mistake about it: this is the child of the woman who will ultimately bring this baby into the world through bloody pain and suffering. I don't care how that child arrived inside of the mother's body, from a test tube, from a one-night stand, or from the Archangel Gabriel sneaking into her bedroom in the middle of the night. This baby will be the child of the woman who is investing her body in bringing that new life into existence. Who will go through the inconvenience, disfigurement and yes, bloody pain and suffering in order to bring another human being onto our planet.
All for cash on demand.
It's totally disgraceful.
There is no such thing as a surrogate mother, there are only mothers.
This is a framework men have invented and labeled women with, in an attempt to degrade all mothers' natural rights to our own children. To make less of them. By putting all these qualifers on our relationships with our children: one is non-custodial if not legally named custodial, one is only a surrogate unless a court said otherwise.
I don't recognize these labels or the courts that impose them.
I remember once reading that in most ancient societies children took the status of their mothers. At the time I thought it didn't make much sense, but now I understand the logic. It's a common-sense recognition of how little men invest in the entire life-giving process, so it's almost a back-handed compliment to motherhood.
Anyway this entire surrogacy business, along with the custody wars incited by men for monetary gain, are nothing but more of the ongoing struggles by jealous men to deny womens' unique and powerful bond with our children. Ultimately it's an underhanded attempt to usurp the natural rights of mothers and hand them off to the highest bidder. It's unethical and should be made illegal, at least for money. You can find some woman to do this for you for free, fine; but no money should be allowed to be exchanged.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/world/asia/10surrogate.html?em&ex=1205380800&en=4f10981efa67a853&ei=5087%0A
********************************************************************************
MUMBAI — Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.
The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 2,500 miles from the couple’s home in Tel Aviv, produced by doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.
“The child will know early on that he or she is unique, that it came into the world in a very special way,” said Mr. Gher, 29, a communications officer for the environmental group Greenpeace.
An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).
“People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them (they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.
The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda — The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies if there is no genetic connection.
There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.
Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.
“Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow,” he said.
In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them live together in a hostel attached to the clinic there.
Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.
Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.
This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”
Surrogacy is an area fraught with ethical and legal uncertainties. Critics argue that the ease with which relatively rich foreigners are able to “rent” the wombs of poor Indians creates the potential for exploitation. Although the government is actively promoting India as a medical tourism destination, what some see as an exchange of money for babies has made many here uncomfortable.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development said in February that it was weighing recommending legislation to govern surrogacy, but it is not imminent.
An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”
Even some of those involved in the business of organizing surrogates want greater regulation.
“There must be protection for the surrogates,” Mr. Rupak said. “Inevitably, people are going to smell the money, and unscrupulous operators will get into the game. I don’t trust the industry to police itself.”
He said that the few doctors offering the service now were ethical and took good care of the surrogates but that he was concerned this might change as the business expanded.
Mr. Gher and his partner, who asked not to be named to preserve his privacy, have worked through their doubts and are certain they are doing a good thing.
“People can believe me when I say that if I could bear the baby myself I would,” he said. “But this is a mutually beneficial answer. The surrogate gets a fair amount of money for being part of the process.”
They are paying about $30,000, of which the surrogate gets about $7,500.
“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”
Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”
In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.
Although some Indian clinics allow surrogates and clients to meet, Mr. Gher said he preferred anonymity. When his surrogate gives birth later this year, he and his partner will be in the hospital, but not in the ward where she is in labor, and will be handed the baby by a nurse.
The surrogate mother does not know that she is working for foreigners, Dr. Kadam said, and has not been told that the future parents are both men. Gay sex is illegal in India.
Israel legalized adoption by same-sex couples in February, but such couples are not permitted to hire surrogates in Israel to become parents. A fertility doctor recommended Rotunda, which made news in November when its doctors delivered twins for another gay Israeli couple.
Rotunda did not allow interviews with its surrogate mothers, but a 32-year-old woman at a fertility clinic in Delhi explained why she is planning on her second surrogacy in two years.
Separated from her husband, she found that her monthly wages of 2,800 rupees, about $69, as a midwife were not enough to raise her 9-year-old son. With the money she earned from the first surrogacy, more than $13,600, she bought a house. She expects to pay for her son’s education with what she earns for the second, about $8,600. (Fees are typically fixed by the doctor and can vary.) “I will save the money for my child’s future,” she said.
The process requires a degree of subterfuge in this socially conservative country. She has told her mother, who lives with her, but not her son or their neighbors. She has told the few who have asked her outright that she is bearing a child for a relative.
So far, for the Israeli couple, the experience of having a baby has been strangely virtual. They perused profiles of egg donors that were sent by e-mail (“We picked the one with the highest level of education,” Mr. Gher said). From information that followed, they rejected a factory worker in favor of a housewife, who they thought would have a less stressful lifestyle.
Mr. Gher posts updates about the process on Facebook. And soon the clinic will start sending ultrasound images of their developing child by e-mail. Highly pixelated, blown-up passport photos of the egg donor and surrogate mother adorn a wall of their apartment in Israel.
“We’ve been trying to half close our eyes and look at it in a more holistic way to imagine what she would actually look like,” Mr. Gher said of the donor’s blurred image. “These are women we don’t know, will never know, who will become in a way part of our lives.”
Anyway, I decided to go with it.
It amazes me that these people feel so entitled that they don't mind going half a world away to exploit some poor Indian woman and her children in order to meet their own needs. No problem whatsoever with using this women's body for money, as she is so desperately poor that she has no other option. As if this was such a great way to make an income, how come they couldn't find some Israeli girl to perform this service for them?
They have played on this woman's desperate need to give a decent life to her already-born nine year old son and convinced her to sell them another one of her children. As, let's make no mistake about it: this is the child of the woman who will ultimately bring this baby into the world through bloody pain and suffering. I don't care how that child arrived inside of the mother's body, from a test tube, from a one-night stand, or from the Archangel Gabriel sneaking into her bedroom in the middle of the night. This baby will be the child of the woman who is investing her body in bringing that new life into existence. Who will go through the inconvenience, disfigurement and yes, bloody pain and suffering in order to bring another human being onto our planet.
All for cash on demand.
It's totally disgraceful.
There is no such thing as a surrogate mother, there are only mothers.
This is a framework men have invented and labeled women with, in an attempt to degrade all mothers' natural rights to our own children. To make less of them. By putting all these qualifers on our relationships with our children: one is non-custodial if not legally named custodial, one is only a surrogate unless a court said otherwise.
I don't recognize these labels or the courts that impose them.
I remember once reading that in most ancient societies children took the status of their mothers. At the time I thought it didn't make much sense, but now I understand the logic. It's a common-sense recognition of how little men invest in the entire life-giving process, so it's almost a back-handed compliment to motherhood.
Anyway this entire surrogacy business, along with the custody wars incited by men for monetary gain, are nothing but more of the ongoing struggles by jealous men to deny womens' unique and powerful bond with our children. Ultimately it's an underhanded attempt to usurp the natural rights of mothers and hand them off to the highest bidder. It's unethical and should be made illegal, at least for money. You can find some woman to do this for you for free, fine; but no money should be allowed to be exchanged.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/world/asia/10surrogate.html?em&ex=1205380800&en=4f10981efa67a853&ei=5087%0A
********************************************************************************
MUMBAI — Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.
The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 2,500 miles from the couple’s home in Tel Aviv, produced by doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.
“The child will know early on that he or she is unique, that it came into the world in a very special way,” said Mr. Gher, 29, a communications officer for the environmental group Greenpeace.
An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).
“People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them (they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.
The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda — The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies if there is no genetic connection.
There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.
Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.
“Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow,” he said.
In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them live together in a hostel attached to the clinic there.
Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.
Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.
This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”
Surrogacy is an area fraught with ethical and legal uncertainties. Critics argue that the ease with which relatively rich foreigners are able to “rent” the wombs of poor Indians creates the potential for exploitation. Although the government is actively promoting India as a medical tourism destination, what some see as an exchange of money for babies has made many here uncomfortable.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development said in February that it was weighing recommending legislation to govern surrogacy, but it is not imminent.
An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”
Even some of those involved in the business of organizing surrogates want greater regulation.
“There must be protection for the surrogates,” Mr. Rupak said. “Inevitably, people are going to smell the money, and unscrupulous operators will get into the game. I don’t trust the industry to police itself.”
He said that the few doctors offering the service now were ethical and took good care of the surrogates but that he was concerned this might change as the business expanded.
Mr. Gher and his partner, who asked not to be named to preserve his privacy, have worked through their doubts and are certain they are doing a good thing.
“People can believe me when I say that if I could bear the baby myself I would,” he said. “But this is a mutually beneficial answer. The surrogate gets a fair amount of money for being part of the process.”
They are paying about $30,000, of which the surrogate gets about $7,500.
“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”
Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”
In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.
Although some Indian clinics allow surrogates and clients to meet, Mr. Gher said he preferred anonymity. When his surrogate gives birth later this year, he and his partner will be in the hospital, but not in the ward where she is in labor, and will be handed the baby by a nurse.
The surrogate mother does not know that she is working for foreigners, Dr. Kadam said, and has not been told that the future parents are both men. Gay sex is illegal in India.
Israel legalized adoption by same-sex couples in February, but such couples are not permitted to hire surrogates in Israel to become parents. A fertility doctor recommended Rotunda, which made news in November when its doctors delivered twins for another gay Israeli couple.
Rotunda did not allow interviews with its surrogate mothers, but a 32-year-old woman at a fertility clinic in Delhi explained why she is planning on her second surrogacy in two years.
Separated from her husband, she found that her monthly wages of 2,800 rupees, about $69, as a midwife were not enough to raise her 9-year-old son. With the money she earned from the first surrogacy, more than $13,600, she bought a house. She expects to pay for her son’s education with what she earns for the second, about $8,600. (Fees are typically fixed by the doctor and can vary.) “I will save the money for my child’s future,” she said.
The process requires a degree of subterfuge in this socially conservative country. She has told her mother, who lives with her, but not her son or their neighbors. She has told the few who have asked her outright that she is bearing a child for a relative.
So far, for the Israeli couple, the experience of having a baby has been strangely virtual. They perused profiles of egg donors that were sent by e-mail (“We picked the one with the highest level of education,” Mr. Gher said). From information that followed, they rejected a factory worker in favor of a housewife, who they thought would have a less stressful lifestyle.
Mr. Gher posts updates about the process on Facebook. And soon the clinic will start sending ultrasound images of their developing child by e-mail. Highly pixelated, blown-up passport photos of the egg donor and surrogate mother adorn a wall of their apartment in Israel.
“We’ve been trying to half close our eyes and look at it in a more holistic way to imagine what she would actually look like,” Mr. Gher said of the donor’s blurred image. “These are women we don’t know, will never know, who will become in a way part of our lives.”
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Sorry, here's another one...
This is just a trip down memory lane for me. Sorry folks but here's another one...
*************************************
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Single Mothers by Choice
I don't understand why so many people are upset about this class of women deciding to be single mothers. I mean we've had women in the lower classes as well as the rich doing this crap for decades and no one was the least concerned. Now suddenly responsible career women, who've worked productively all their lives and contributed to society, decide they wish to be mothers and it's the end of civilization as we know it.
It's not that big a deal.
This woman has worked, she has a career. That child will do just fine. He'll be no more of a burden then any of the millions of ghetto mothers' or some rich bimbo starlets' irresponsibly produced children will be.
Actually having a baby in this manner takes planning as well as stable finances. Anyone can see this as it's already cost the woman $10,000 in IVF treatment to have her child.
If people want to pick on some irresponsible reproductive behavior why not focus on some of the two categories I mentioned above. Those that produce vast amounts of children through irresponsible reproductive behavior which eventually become a burden on the taxpayers in most systems.
This child and others produced like him will not become that...their mothers will make enough income to support them quite comfortably...
This woman is rather plain, although she appears nice enough from the story. Yet, she might have never met a man who was willing to settle down and have a stable long-term relationship with her, however. As let's face it, in our media-obsessesed world most men want the women they marry to be much nicer looking then this poor girl.
Not to mention that at her age, she'll probably never meet anyone if she hasn't met them already.
YET she'll probably be a fine mother, dote on her only child and ultimately raise a fine, healthy, productive son--all without the use of a male overseer to monitor her behavior.
Imagine that.
Many are condemning her as selfish. Well guess what ALL parents are selfish. You have to be to bring any children into the world we've created for them today. So if you are going to tag women like this as selfish, then prepare for extinction...as that's the next step when all these wonderful unselfish people lead us down that road.
Last point: men better get used to this happening more and more today, as women are getting highly fed up with their behavior...even all this custody crap they started recently to avoid child support, ie., as in Fed-ex's and Brittany's Spears' custody fight.
Men are rapidly sliding into irrelvancy with all the trouble they are causing.
As I've said many times, a test tube is cleaner, quieter, and a heck of a lot less trouble then the average man is today...and these women are proving my point.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?
in_article_id=416733&in_page_id=1879&in_a_source=
Daily Mail
24 hours a day
Motherhood is my right
By RUTH YAHEL Last updated at 08:22am on 16th November 2006
A growing generation of single career women are reaching their late 30s unmarried but still desperate to become mothers. Many are embarking on parenthood alone - and their quest will soon be made easier.
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt wants the law changed to allow single women and lesbians to have fertility treatment without the need to prove there will be a father figure in the child's life.
Here, Ruth Yahel, a 41-year-old TV production executive, explains why she decided from the outset to be a lone parent, and why - in her opinion - they should not be vilified:
When I was in my 30s, I remember feeling pangs of longing whenever I held friends' babies. My biological clock was ticking but it was never the right time, never the right relationship.
Even when I reached my 39th birthday, I didn't feel I had yet become one of those women destined not to have children. Then, at the start of 2004, my married sister - the mother of a baby boy - asked me whether I still wanted children. When I said 'yes', she asked me how I thought 'that might happen'. My initial reaction was one of annoyance, but her words sparked something inside me. I was fast approaching 40 and a potential loss in my fertility, yet I had a desperate desire to have a child.
In every other area of my life I had made conscious decisions about what I wanted.
But when it came to what, potentially, was the most important thing of all, I was leaving everything to chance. I had always been rather intimidated by career women who would categorically state that motherhood was not for them. I couldn't imagine letting go of the idea unless I had to.
Sometimes I envied them and thought how liberating it must be not to have to worry any more. But, mostly, I feared falling into the group of women who don't get around to having children and end up bitterly regretting it.
Like most women my age, I had tied in all hopes for children with the desire for a lasting relationship. It had never occurred to me to see the two things as something separate. That evening with my sister, it suddenly dawned on me that these two things might never coincide. I had to act - and quickly.
I was lucky enough to have a friend, Nico, prepared to father my child. We met in Italy in 1991 when I was teaching English as a foreign language in a private school. Nico was one of my students. He was married at the time and I was in a relationship, and we became close friends - although sex was never on the agenda.
Long before I'd started worrying about my fertility, he once suggested having a child together and I'd laughed it off. Now I thought about it differently.
I was fortunate in that I already had a genetic father, Nico, who wanted to be an active figure in the child's life, so I decided to go for it.
Before embarking on the process, I went to a clinic in London to make sure I had no fertility problems. With hindsight, I wish I'd done this when I turned 30.
A lot of women spend their 20s and 30s trying to not get pregnant and it's only when they want to that the problems begin to surface. In my case, the damage had already been done.
Endometriosis had affected my ovaries and Fallopian tubes. The only option now was IVF. Two cycles of expensive IVF, costing £5,000 each, followed. I had counselling before and during fertility treatment to help me through the outcome.
I took stock of how I'd come to this point. It was my time to reflect on my fears and concerns, my time to feel sorry for myself (and at times I did) that I wasn't going to have a child within a conventional relationship.
It was like a mourning process. But I would leave each session feeling strong enough to work towards my chosen goal.
On February 7, 2005, I celebrated my 40th birthday at a party thrown for me by friends and family. Many people in the room didn't know I was having IVF treatment, and I didn't touch the champagne they handed me. I knew that in a week's time, I would be taking a pregnancy test and finding out if I was going to have a baby.
The wait was nerve-racking. When I took the test and it was positive, I was stunned. I couldn't believe that such a clinical process had resulted in a pregnancy.
Nico, my friends and family were all delighted. If they were sad that I wasn't going to have a child as part of a couple, they didn't show it. They knew that I already bitterly regretted that myself.
Luca Gabriel, was born naturally in October that year after a healthy pregnancy. My mother and sister were there and Nico held his son minutes after he was born. We chose his name together. I felt totally vindicated. I had my baby and nothing else mattered.
Now I feel utter relief and joy that I found the courage to act. But at the same time, I feel anger and frustration for other women in the same position as I was.
I believe that modern motherhood is in crisis. Women have been told they can and should compete equally in the workplace. We invest a huge amount of our time, money and energy in the pursuit of this so we feel we're achieving something.
But somewhere along the line we've all too often had to leave behind motherhood. As much as I hate to admit it, these two roles do not fit naturally together.
In your working life you have some control - you have a structure and, hopefully, you feel a sense of accomplishment and are rewarded both financially and emotionally.
As a mother, your day has little structure; you're busy all the time, yet when asked: 'What did you do today?' you can hardly recall what filled that time and why you didn't get out of the house.
When we think about returning to work, we worry we won't be flexible enough to respond to the work environment and that we'll have to compromise on material and personal pursuits. We worry about lack of money and free time.
Most of all, we feel like bad mothers for handing our babies over to childminders.
And employers don't always do all they can to dispel those fears.
Of course, being a mother, especially a single mother, is hard work. But once you've made the decision to go for it, you will find the time and energy you need and make it your priority. You learn to live a different life with your child. I've had considerable support from my workplace and have been able to work flexibly around my commitments to my son.
Things that seemed so important to me before - material things, my appearance, going out to smart restaurants - seem less so now.
The main accusation levelled at woman who, like myself, have chosen to be single mothers, is that we are selfish. People say it wasn't meant to be or accuse you of being rash and irresponsible.
But there is nothing irresponsible about the thought processes and procedures a single woman has to go through to have her own child or adopt.
As the son of a women who became a single mother by choice, at least Luca won't have to go through the pain of his parents splitting up. He knows his parents' relationship has clearly defined boundaries.
He will have access to his birth father and extended family, and will know as much of his own cultural heritage as he chooses, because I was lucky enough to have a suitable known donor. Even though Nico is now teaching in Rome, he sees Luca every few months.
I was no more selfish than any other woman conceiving. We all want to feel our baby in our arms, hold them close, smell their sweet skin, relish their triumphs and watch as others coo over our child.
In the end, we are all selfishly driven as parents. We are driven by our own need to procreate, and we feel it's something that as human beings we should do - even if we have to act outside the bounds of convention: the desire to have a child doesn't go away because a woman is single.
Motherhood is something that every woman has a right to try for. When there is no father figure, a woman will do much soul-searching on how to provide male role models for her children.
I was worried, of course, that Luca wouldn't see his father every day. I didn't know for sure what effect this would have on him, but I vowed that I would do everything in my power to compensate for that and try to limit the damage.
I agree that a good marriage or relationship may well be the best family background you can offer a child, and it's something I still want for myself. But it's most definitely not the only responsible way to do it.
And I would say that single parents planning for children are most acutely aware of the difficulties involved. They understand their own obligations and probably deal with their children's needs as sensitively as possible because they've had to struggle so hard to have them.
Hopefully, our children will be less likely to complain that they were overlooked or taken for granted.
I still hope to find a great relationship in the future. Maybe Nico will have children of his own; maybe Luca will have a sibling via conception or adoption.
Undoubtedly, Luca will have friends who come from single-parent homes via more conventional circumstances, if divorce rates are anything to go by.
Last year, I took part in the Channel 4 series The Baby Race. It brought together a group of single, incredibly brave women, all united by our quest to be mothers.
We formed a support network for each other that is still going with many more members. Of all ages and backgrounds with different routes to motherhood in mind, we always had a common goal.
I remember meeting them all for the first time at a photoshoot and being completely overwhelmed by the feeling of solidarity and unconditional support from a group of strangers.
Some of us have managed to have and adopt children, some are no longer single. The majority, however, are still trying for and awaiting their babies. Their children will have an upbringing full of love, hope and possibility.
Single women can change things and set a good example to those around by exercising their right to have children and bringing them up compassionately and with dignity in the face of any scepticism. The face of modern motherhood is changing and we must accept that.
Luca has just turned one-year-old. I planned a family party at home with cake and presents. Nico came over for the weekend.
The last year has been a whirlwind. I don't realise how much he has changed my life until occasionally I'm without him, and I walk into his bedroom and look at the empty cot. When he's not around, something is always missing.
I wouldn't go back to my old single life for anything. My overriding message to women in my position would be to make a positive choice about whether to try for motherhood. Don't leave things to chance and don't feel powerless simply because you haven't met the right man.
It is your decision, and yours alone.
posted by NYMOM | Saturday, November 18, 2006
9 Comments:
Anonymous said...
I don't really have much of a problem with the woman in this story. If a woman is fertile and she wants to get pregnant no one can really stop her. She wasn't but she paid for her own IVF treatment so thats fine.
This is what I have a problem with:
"Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt wants the law changed to allow single women and lesbians to have fertility treatment without the need to prove there will be a father figure in the child's life."
Ok, if men have all these supposed privilages then will the law be changed so that men in the UK can have children like this at the expence of the taxpayers?
11:13 AM
NYMOM said...
It's pretty simple really: because of expense and the fact that men having children require a surrogate mother.
It's one thing for the government to pay for and allow a sperm donor to be used. Basically they are paying a small sum for a guy to read a few Playboys and ejaculuate into a plastic cup.
With a surrogate mother involved, you are going to a whole other level of expense on top of taking advantage of a woman who needs money. As there is no reason on earth for a woman to go through all the difficult and painful procedures involved with being pregnant and giving birth EXCEPT that she desperately needs money.
But I think most people who ask these questions already know the answers. This is an attempt to continue the gender neutral farce that feminists and men have been trying to make of motherhood for years now...
AND I don't think it would make any difference to the distractors of this woman in the article, whether or not the government paid for her procedures or she paid for it herself, as they would be against women doing it either way.
This is another red herring...
Another ploy on the part of men to sidetrack women who are independent of one of them.
I mean what's the point of claiming the UK government will pay for the procedures when you effectively passed laws that it's illegal to be an anonymous sperm donor in the UK anymore? What woman (other then the one in this article who clearly wasn't thinking very clearly when she signed up for this) is going to take a chance that some sperm donor can show up at anytime in the future and have her and her son dragged through an expensive and ongoing custody battle?
Most women would not take a chance like that.
The whole point of women going to this kind of trouble to get pregnant outside of normal channels is so that they don't have to face one of these custody wars incited by some man in the future. Clearly it negates the whole point to do what this woman did with someone you know...as she's actually got the WORSE of both worlds...she's doesn't have a traditional father to help out on a daily basis, YET she has given someone the exact same legal rights to her child as herself...
It really didn't make much sense.
Anyway, when the UK banned anonymous donors it killed the whole point for most of the women who would have children using a donor.
Thus the whole issue is moot anyway.
Few women will avail themselves of the government services, as the dealbreaker would be that you couldn't use an anonymous sperm donor. Otherwise, you'd be signing yourself and your child up for years of litigation AFTER birth and potentially loss of custody within a few years down the road.
The woman in this article wasn't thinking very clearly when she did this...and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if her 'sperm donor' didn't show up again in a few years time and wind up wresting custody of her son from her and just moving to Italy with him.
I predict most women who wish to have children in this manner will just leave the UK and go to countries where they can use an anonymous donor and get pregnant there...otherwise they put themselves and their children at risk later...
8:05 AM
Anonymous said...
Interesting spin you put on it.
If men and women are supposed to be equal then why cant men say "It's my right to be a father!" and recieve government funding to assist him as women will be getting soon in the UK.
You need a man and a woman to make a baby so why does only one side get funding for single parenthood? That's not 'equality' at all is it?
As for the sperm donor clinic question, your right, it is a moot point but not for the reasons you state. Sperm banks have dried up because removing anonymity means men are now being hit for child support. As far as I know no male donor has ever sued a woman for custody of the child, at least not in the UK.
As for your last comment about women going abroad to get pregnant what can I say. Yes, women will always have this choice and I'm sure a few will exercise it. But I can't see the majority of western women going for this option because having an overseas 'recreational sperm donor' rules out free-loading some child support doesn't it?
8:50 AM
NYMOM said...
"It's my right to be a father."
It's not government that denies men the right to be a 'father' but God, nature or evolution which has deemed WOMEN as the bearers of life.
Okay.
Fatherhood is not a naturally occurring event, like motherhood, but rather a social construct.
Government allows you equality in the things it is possible for us to be equal in, bearing children for men is not one of them.
Thus, your rights to do anything ENDS the moment they infringe on someone else's, ie., as in having to force women to bear your children for you. AND yes, it is force when you use economic power over someone else to manipulate them.
BTW, no anonymous sperm donor was EVER hit up for child support.
That's a lie made up by the men's movement to justify support of a policy which was clearly nothing but a spite-driven policy against single women, like the one featured in the article above, who were wishing to be mothers but never met the right partner.
AND yes, many women will go overseas as they will figure out the motivation for this policy and not wish to burden themselves and their children with an endless custody battle afterthefact. Since you continue to try and paint this change in policy as about child support, when, in fact, it is not...
It is about men still trying to exercise control over womens and childrens' lives, even though you voluntarily chose to not be married or have families.
You made your own choices, yet you still continue to wish to control womens' choices in this area because they are different from your own.
Learn to live with your own choices and move on with your lives...
11:12 AM
Conshus_mamma said...
Having grown up with the idea that single motherhood stigmatizes a woman, I have NEVER viewed this as an option for myself, that is until I found myself pregnant.
I'd always known that if I were to get pregnant in the relationship that produced my child, I would not carry it to term. The relationship lasted more than 8 years. I was very comfortable with the arrangement. I had not wanted children, and he already had three. When I found out I was pregnant in June of this year, I thought I miscarried shortly after taking the home pregnancy test. When I went to the hospital, and heard, at 7 weeks, the immensely powerful and life-changing sound of that heartbeat, I knew that I was going to be a single-mother - there was no way I could end the life that was producing such a strong and powerful sound.
It never occurred to me that by making this choice to be a single mother I was making such a profound statement. I am in my mid-thirties, am educated, have strong financial means, and while I lived most of thinking only of my single self, am finding it easy to transition into the idea of being someone's mother.
In reading this, I am finding a sense of the power of being a woman and not waiting for the requisite man+marriage in order to start my family. I appreciate the thoughts that have been provoked and can feel a shift in my perspective about choosing to become a single mother.
11:31 PM
NYMOM said...
Well I guess I have to ask how does the child's father feel about this unexpected pregnancy as he already has three children. Is he okay with having a fourth child now????
7:23 AM
NYMOM said...
You know I love how people decide to link with you w/o asking any permission and then the link is a snide negative comment about you...it's almost like a sneaky way to get around the comment moderation I've set up.
Not that I wouldn't have published her comment, mind you. As I've published far worse.
What galls me is that I was totally supportive of the woman in the article being a single mother...yet still get side swiped by, you guessed it, another woman.
When oh when will women stop viciously sniping at one another...
7:37 AM
Conshus Mama said...
The father is not pleased with this new pregnancy, and is not okay with having a fourth child now.
3:28 PM
NYMOM said...
Well you will have to proceed extremely carefully in this situation as even the other kids and their mother(s) will side with him in this situation, believe it or not.
They will follow his lead, as you will be seen as bringing a rival to the table, thus potentially reducing their share of his resources.
Selfish but realistic...
Additionally the courts will not be friendly to you either, if it winds up there...hopefully it won't...
Take care.
4:27 PM
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"But Can't You Just Freeze Your Eggs?": Infertility Fear and the ...
The yoga studio where I volunteer just started a six-week workshop to enhance fertility. Apparently this isn't a new idea. And call me - single, thirtysomething, would sure like to be a mom, why yes, me - crazy, because I thought for a ...
posted by lauriewrites @ 2:26 PM
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Saturday, November 18, 2006
Single Mothers by Choice
I don't understand why so many people are upset about this class of women deciding to be single mothers. I mean we've had women in the lower classes as well as the rich doing this crap for decades and no one was the least concerned. Now suddenly responsible career women, who've worked productively all their lives and contributed to society, decide they wish to be mothers and it's the end of civilization as we know it.
It's not that big a deal.
This woman has worked, she has a career. That child will do just fine. He'll be no more of a burden then any of the millions of ghetto mothers' or some rich bimbo starlets' irresponsibly produced children will be.
Actually having a baby in this manner takes planning as well as stable finances. Anyone can see this as it's already cost the woman $10,000 in IVF treatment to have her child.
If people want to pick on some irresponsible reproductive behavior why not focus on some of the two categories I mentioned above. Those that produce vast amounts of children through irresponsible reproductive behavior which eventually become a burden on the taxpayers in most systems.
This child and others produced like him will not become that...their mothers will make enough income to support them quite comfortably...
This woman is rather plain, although she appears nice enough from the story. Yet, she might have never met a man who was willing to settle down and have a stable long-term relationship with her, however. As let's face it, in our media-obsessesed world most men want the women they marry to be much nicer looking then this poor girl.
Not to mention that at her age, she'll probably never meet anyone if she hasn't met them already.
YET she'll probably be a fine mother, dote on her only child and ultimately raise a fine, healthy, productive son--all without the use of a male overseer to monitor her behavior.
Imagine that.
Many are condemning her as selfish. Well guess what ALL parents are selfish. You have to be to bring any children into the world we've created for them today. So if you are going to tag women like this as selfish, then prepare for extinction...as that's the next step when all these wonderful unselfish people lead us down that road.
Last point: men better get used to this happening more and more today, as women are getting highly fed up with their behavior...even all this custody crap they started recently to avoid child support, ie., as in Fed-ex's and Brittany's Spears' custody fight.
Men are rapidly sliding into irrelvancy with all the trouble they are causing.
As I've said many times, a test tube is cleaner, quieter, and a heck of a lot less trouble then the average man is today...and these women are proving my point.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?
in_article_id=416733&in_page_id=1879&in_a_source=
Daily Mail
24 hours a day
Motherhood is my right
By RUTH YAHEL Last updated at 08:22am on 16th November 2006
A growing generation of single career women are reaching their late 30s unmarried but still desperate to become mothers. Many are embarking on parenthood alone - and their quest will soon be made easier.
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt wants the law changed to allow single women and lesbians to have fertility treatment without the need to prove there will be a father figure in the child's life.
Here, Ruth Yahel, a 41-year-old TV production executive, explains why she decided from the outset to be a lone parent, and why - in her opinion - they should not be vilified:
When I was in my 30s, I remember feeling pangs of longing whenever I held friends' babies. My biological clock was ticking but it was never the right time, never the right relationship.
Even when I reached my 39th birthday, I didn't feel I had yet become one of those women destined not to have children. Then, at the start of 2004, my married sister - the mother of a baby boy - asked me whether I still wanted children. When I said 'yes', she asked me how I thought 'that might happen'. My initial reaction was one of annoyance, but her words sparked something inside me. I was fast approaching 40 and a potential loss in my fertility, yet I had a desperate desire to have a child.
In every other area of my life I had made conscious decisions about what I wanted.
But when it came to what, potentially, was the most important thing of all, I was leaving everything to chance. I had always been rather intimidated by career women who would categorically state that motherhood was not for them. I couldn't imagine letting go of the idea unless I had to.
Sometimes I envied them and thought how liberating it must be not to have to worry any more. But, mostly, I feared falling into the group of women who don't get around to having children and end up bitterly regretting it.
Like most women my age, I had tied in all hopes for children with the desire for a lasting relationship. It had never occurred to me to see the two things as something separate. That evening with my sister, it suddenly dawned on me that these two things might never coincide. I had to act - and quickly.
I was lucky enough to have a friend, Nico, prepared to father my child. We met in Italy in 1991 when I was teaching English as a foreign language in a private school. Nico was one of my students. He was married at the time and I was in a relationship, and we became close friends - although sex was never on the agenda.
Long before I'd started worrying about my fertility, he once suggested having a child together and I'd laughed it off. Now I thought about it differently.
I was fortunate in that I already had a genetic father, Nico, who wanted to be an active figure in the child's life, so I decided to go for it.
Before embarking on the process, I went to a clinic in London to make sure I had no fertility problems. With hindsight, I wish I'd done this when I turned 30.
A lot of women spend their 20s and 30s trying to not get pregnant and it's only when they want to that the problems begin to surface. In my case, the damage had already been done.
Endometriosis had affected my ovaries and Fallopian tubes. The only option now was IVF. Two cycles of expensive IVF, costing £5,000 each, followed. I had counselling before and during fertility treatment to help me through the outcome.
I took stock of how I'd come to this point. It was my time to reflect on my fears and concerns, my time to feel sorry for myself (and at times I did) that I wasn't going to have a child within a conventional relationship.
It was like a mourning process. But I would leave each session feeling strong enough to work towards my chosen goal.
On February 7, 2005, I celebrated my 40th birthday at a party thrown for me by friends and family. Many people in the room didn't know I was having IVF treatment, and I didn't touch the champagne they handed me. I knew that in a week's time, I would be taking a pregnancy test and finding out if I was going to have a baby.
The wait was nerve-racking. When I took the test and it was positive, I was stunned. I couldn't believe that such a clinical process had resulted in a pregnancy.
Nico, my friends and family were all delighted. If they were sad that I wasn't going to have a child as part of a couple, they didn't show it. They knew that I already bitterly regretted that myself.
Luca Gabriel, was born naturally in October that year after a healthy pregnancy. My mother and sister were there and Nico held his son minutes after he was born. We chose his name together. I felt totally vindicated. I had my baby and nothing else mattered.
Now I feel utter relief and joy that I found the courage to act. But at the same time, I feel anger and frustration for other women in the same position as I was.
I believe that modern motherhood is in crisis. Women have been told they can and should compete equally in the workplace. We invest a huge amount of our time, money and energy in the pursuit of this so we feel we're achieving something.
But somewhere along the line we've all too often had to leave behind motherhood. As much as I hate to admit it, these two roles do not fit naturally together.
In your working life you have some control - you have a structure and, hopefully, you feel a sense of accomplishment and are rewarded both financially and emotionally.
As a mother, your day has little structure; you're busy all the time, yet when asked: 'What did you do today?' you can hardly recall what filled that time and why you didn't get out of the house.
When we think about returning to work, we worry we won't be flexible enough to respond to the work environment and that we'll have to compromise on material and personal pursuits. We worry about lack of money and free time.
Most of all, we feel like bad mothers for handing our babies over to childminders.
And employers don't always do all they can to dispel those fears.
Of course, being a mother, especially a single mother, is hard work. But once you've made the decision to go for it, you will find the time and energy you need and make it your priority. You learn to live a different life with your child. I've had considerable support from my workplace and have been able to work flexibly around my commitments to my son.
Things that seemed so important to me before - material things, my appearance, going out to smart restaurants - seem less so now.
The main accusation levelled at woman who, like myself, have chosen to be single mothers, is that we are selfish. People say it wasn't meant to be or accuse you of being rash and irresponsible.
But there is nothing irresponsible about the thought processes and procedures a single woman has to go through to have her own child or adopt.
As the son of a women who became a single mother by choice, at least Luca won't have to go through the pain of his parents splitting up. He knows his parents' relationship has clearly defined boundaries.
He will have access to his birth father and extended family, and will know as much of his own cultural heritage as he chooses, because I was lucky enough to have a suitable known donor. Even though Nico is now teaching in Rome, he sees Luca every few months.
I was no more selfish than any other woman conceiving. We all want to feel our baby in our arms, hold them close, smell their sweet skin, relish their triumphs and watch as others coo over our child.
In the end, we are all selfishly driven as parents. We are driven by our own need to procreate, and we feel it's something that as human beings we should do - even if we have to act outside the bounds of convention: the desire to have a child doesn't go away because a woman is single.
Motherhood is something that every woman has a right to try for. When there is no father figure, a woman will do much soul-searching on how to provide male role models for her children.
I was worried, of course, that Luca wouldn't see his father every day. I didn't know for sure what effect this would have on him, but I vowed that I would do everything in my power to compensate for that and try to limit the damage.
I agree that a good marriage or relationship may well be the best family background you can offer a child, and it's something I still want for myself. But it's most definitely not the only responsible way to do it.
And I would say that single parents planning for children are most acutely aware of the difficulties involved. They understand their own obligations and probably deal with their children's needs as sensitively as possible because they've had to struggle so hard to have them.
Hopefully, our children will be less likely to complain that they were overlooked or taken for granted.
I still hope to find a great relationship in the future. Maybe Nico will have children of his own; maybe Luca will have a sibling via conception or adoption.
Undoubtedly, Luca will have friends who come from single-parent homes via more conventional circumstances, if divorce rates are anything to go by.
Last year, I took part in the Channel 4 series The Baby Race. It brought together a group of single, incredibly brave women, all united by our quest to be mothers.
We formed a support network for each other that is still going with many more members. Of all ages and backgrounds with different routes to motherhood in mind, we always had a common goal.
I remember meeting them all for the first time at a photoshoot and being completely overwhelmed by the feeling of solidarity and unconditional support from a group of strangers.
Some of us have managed to have and adopt children, some are no longer single. The majority, however, are still trying for and awaiting their babies. Their children will have an upbringing full of love, hope and possibility.
Single women can change things and set a good example to those around by exercising their right to have children and bringing them up compassionately and with dignity in the face of any scepticism. The face of modern motherhood is changing and we must accept that.
Luca has just turned one-year-old. I planned a family party at home with cake and presents. Nico came over for the weekend.
The last year has been a whirlwind. I don't realise how much he has changed my life until occasionally I'm without him, and I walk into his bedroom and look at the empty cot. When he's not around, something is always missing.
I wouldn't go back to my old single life for anything. My overriding message to women in my position would be to make a positive choice about whether to try for motherhood. Don't leave things to chance and don't feel powerless simply because you haven't met the right man.
It is your decision, and yours alone.
posted by NYMOM | Saturday, November 18, 2006
9 Comments:
Anonymous said...
I don't really have much of a problem with the woman in this story. If a woman is fertile and she wants to get pregnant no one can really stop her. She wasn't but she paid for her own IVF treatment so thats fine.
This is what I have a problem with:
"Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt wants the law changed to allow single women and lesbians to have fertility treatment without the need to prove there will be a father figure in the child's life."
Ok, if men have all these supposed privilages then will the law be changed so that men in the UK can have children like this at the expence of the taxpayers?
11:13 AM
NYMOM said...
It's pretty simple really: because of expense and the fact that men having children require a surrogate mother.
It's one thing for the government to pay for and allow a sperm donor to be used. Basically they are paying a small sum for a guy to read a few Playboys and ejaculuate into a plastic cup.
With a surrogate mother involved, you are going to a whole other level of expense on top of taking advantage of a woman who needs money. As there is no reason on earth for a woman to go through all the difficult and painful procedures involved with being pregnant and giving birth EXCEPT that she desperately needs money.
But I think most people who ask these questions already know the answers. This is an attempt to continue the gender neutral farce that feminists and men have been trying to make of motherhood for years now...
AND I don't think it would make any difference to the distractors of this woman in the article, whether or not the government paid for her procedures or she paid for it herself, as they would be against women doing it either way.
This is another red herring...
Another ploy on the part of men to sidetrack women who are independent of one of them.
I mean what's the point of claiming the UK government will pay for the procedures when you effectively passed laws that it's illegal to be an anonymous sperm donor in the UK anymore? What woman (other then the one in this article who clearly wasn't thinking very clearly when she signed up for this) is going to take a chance that some sperm donor can show up at anytime in the future and have her and her son dragged through an expensive and ongoing custody battle?
Most women would not take a chance like that.
The whole point of women going to this kind of trouble to get pregnant outside of normal channels is so that they don't have to face one of these custody wars incited by some man in the future. Clearly it negates the whole point to do what this woman did with someone you know...as she's actually got the WORSE of both worlds...she's doesn't have a traditional father to help out on a daily basis, YET she has given someone the exact same legal rights to her child as herself...
It really didn't make much sense.
Anyway, when the UK banned anonymous donors it killed the whole point for most of the women who would have children using a donor.
Thus the whole issue is moot anyway.
Few women will avail themselves of the government services, as the dealbreaker would be that you couldn't use an anonymous sperm donor. Otherwise, you'd be signing yourself and your child up for years of litigation AFTER birth and potentially loss of custody within a few years down the road.
The woman in this article wasn't thinking very clearly when she did this...and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if her 'sperm donor' didn't show up again in a few years time and wind up wresting custody of her son from her and just moving to Italy with him.
I predict most women who wish to have children in this manner will just leave the UK and go to countries where they can use an anonymous donor and get pregnant there...otherwise they put themselves and their children at risk later...
8:05 AM
Anonymous said...
Interesting spin you put on it.
If men and women are supposed to be equal then why cant men say "It's my right to be a father!" and recieve government funding to assist him as women will be getting soon in the UK.
You need a man and a woman to make a baby so why does only one side get funding for single parenthood? That's not 'equality' at all is it?
As for the sperm donor clinic question, your right, it is a moot point but not for the reasons you state. Sperm banks have dried up because removing anonymity means men are now being hit for child support. As far as I know no male donor has ever sued a woman for custody of the child, at least not in the UK.
As for your last comment about women going abroad to get pregnant what can I say. Yes, women will always have this choice and I'm sure a few will exercise it. But I can't see the majority of western women going for this option because having an overseas 'recreational sperm donor' rules out free-loading some child support doesn't it?
8:50 AM
NYMOM said...
"It's my right to be a father."
It's not government that denies men the right to be a 'father' but God, nature or evolution which has deemed WOMEN as the bearers of life.
Okay.
Fatherhood is not a naturally occurring event, like motherhood, but rather a social construct.
Government allows you equality in the things it is possible for us to be equal in, bearing children for men is not one of them.
Thus, your rights to do anything ENDS the moment they infringe on someone else's, ie., as in having to force women to bear your children for you. AND yes, it is force when you use economic power over someone else to manipulate them.
BTW, no anonymous sperm donor was EVER hit up for child support.
That's a lie made up by the men's movement to justify support of a policy which was clearly nothing but a spite-driven policy against single women, like the one featured in the article above, who were wishing to be mothers but never met the right partner.
AND yes, many women will go overseas as they will figure out the motivation for this policy and not wish to burden themselves and their children with an endless custody battle afterthefact. Since you continue to try and paint this change in policy as about child support, when, in fact, it is not...
It is about men still trying to exercise control over womens and childrens' lives, even though you voluntarily chose to not be married or have families.
You made your own choices, yet you still continue to wish to control womens' choices in this area because they are different from your own.
Learn to live with your own choices and move on with your lives...
11:12 AM
Conshus_mamma said...
Having grown up with the idea that single motherhood stigmatizes a woman, I have NEVER viewed this as an option for myself, that is until I found myself pregnant.
I'd always known that if I were to get pregnant in the relationship that produced my child, I would not carry it to term. The relationship lasted more than 8 years. I was very comfortable with the arrangement. I had not wanted children, and he already had three. When I found out I was pregnant in June of this year, I thought I miscarried shortly after taking the home pregnancy test. When I went to the hospital, and heard, at 7 weeks, the immensely powerful and life-changing sound of that heartbeat, I knew that I was going to be a single-mother - there was no way I could end the life that was producing such a strong and powerful sound.
It never occurred to me that by making this choice to be a single mother I was making such a profound statement. I am in my mid-thirties, am educated, have strong financial means, and while I lived most of thinking only of my single self, am finding it easy to transition into the idea of being someone's mother.
In reading this, I am finding a sense of the power of being a woman and not waiting for the requisite man+marriage in order to start my family. I appreciate the thoughts that have been provoked and can feel a shift in my perspective about choosing to become a single mother.
11:31 PM
NYMOM said...
Well I guess I have to ask how does the child's father feel about this unexpected pregnancy as he already has three children. Is he okay with having a fourth child now????
7:23 AM
NYMOM said...
You know I love how people decide to link with you w/o asking any permission and then the link is a snide negative comment about you...it's almost like a sneaky way to get around the comment moderation I've set up.
Not that I wouldn't have published her comment, mind you. As I've published far worse.
What galls me is that I was totally supportive of the woman in the article being a single mother...yet still get side swiped by, you guessed it, another woman.
When oh when will women stop viciously sniping at one another...
7:37 AM
Conshus Mama said...
The father is not pleased with this new pregnancy, and is not okay with having a fourth child now.
3:28 PM
NYMOM said...
Well you will have to proceed extremely carefully in this situation as even the other kids and their mother(s) will side with him in this situation, believe it or not.
They will follow his lead, as you will be seen as bringing a rival to the table, thus potentially reducing their share of his resources.
Selfish but realistic...
Additionally the courts will not be friendly to you either, if it winds up there...hopefully it won't...
Take care.
4:27 PM
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