Making babies, just to make ends meet

By Sarah Williamson for the New York Times

Making Babies, Just to Make Ends Meet is a sickening commentary on the American way of the future of birth, as well as the title of an essay in the New York Times Sunday Review section. The writer, Susan Straight, writes about her neighbor, a woman of 39, who had been pumping breast milk for the baby she carried and delivered for a wealthy couple in their late 50s who, with four teenage sons, wanted a girl. "They bought the milk too," is what she says about the blonde and older couple for whom she worked for as a baby carrier. 

A $200 gift allows Oregon mom to keep her baby

Cassandra Daniel and son Elijah

After hearing Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney's crass statements about lower income  Americans, it's inspiring to read the recent story about Cassandra Daniel of suburban Portland, Oregon. 

Daniel was "unemployed and pregnant and struggling to decide whether she could be able to keep her baby or have to give him up for adoption" according to reporter Andrea Castillo of the Portland Oregonian. While browsing at a Portland consignment Shop, Just Between Friends, she met Brooke Unwin, the shop's co-owner (on the right with co-owner Tammy Boren-King). Unwin told a friend about Daniel's plight and the friend donated $200 to Daniel with a note: "God wants you to have this." That gave her hope, Daniel said, and with the money, was able to to buy everything she needed for her child from the shop, which specializes in children's and maternity clothes.

Akin, GOP to women: We are in charge of your bodies, no exceptions for rape

Lorraine

The current rage over rape and abortion set in motion by the incredibly inane comment of Todd Akin, GOP Senate candidate in Missouri, has set us to thinking about our own adamantly pro-choice position: a woman's body is her own and it is her own to decide if she will or will not carry a fertilized egg to term, that is, have the baby.

Akin's ignorance has upped the debate over whether abortion is ever palatable to some, because all he really did is state what true anti-choice zealots believe: that all and any abortion (and that includes the Morning-After Pill and IUDs) methods, regardless of the timing, are Go-directly-to-hell wrong.

To understand ourselves, we must know where we came from

Maternal Grandmother Agnes

Where do we get our talents, our drive, our sense of ourselves? Last night at dinner a woman asked me if I had had a good relationship with my grandmothers, and I had to say, one died before I was born and the other was sickly most of the years I knew her. She died when I was fourteen, and because we did not live in the same town, I never knew her well.

But then I found myself telling my dinner companion more about my grandmothers. The one I did know, Agnes (photo at left), was divorced from my grandfather, a rarity and a scandal back in those days--the Forties and Fifties--and especially a scandal among Polish Catholics, who are among the most conservative and steadfast Catholics anywhere. I barely knew the man she had been married to, my grandfather, nor did I know know why my mother seemed not to like him, or why we almost never visited him. I remember that at his funeral--when I would have been about fourteen--my mother and her older sister were dry-eyed and grim, a younger sister was full of tears. I wondered why there was such disparity in how they were reacting to their father's death.

Romney urges single woman to give up her baby--or be outcast from LDS

Lorraine

Mitt Romney, as a leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, pressured an unmarried woman to give up her unborn child to be adopted. That revelation comes from The Real Romney, a new book excerpted in the February issue of Vanity Fair.  In the book, co-authors Michael Kranish and Scott Helman tell the story of one Peggie Hayes, who had a long-time connection with the Romney family.

Hayes had joined the church with her mother, and knew the Romneys so well that as a teenager, Hayes baby-sat for the Romney boys in Boston. In her last year of high school, however, her mother abruptly moved with her daughter to Salt Lake City. Peggie married, moved to Los Angeles, had a daughter, divorced, and eventually moved back to the Boston area, where she made contact again with the Romneys. She stayed a member of the Mormon church.

Unwed Fathers Can't Win Against the Mormons in Utah

Lorraine

What is Utah doing in the United States? The Constitution protects us from  religious states, no? Not in Utah, apparently.

Its laws in one area seem to be outside those of human decency, and certainly unconstitutional. And it has to do with the Mormon Church, which really controls the electorate, which controls the legislature, the courts, the everything. This is Utah today. Separation of church and state is pro forma, but does not really exist. It is a state like no other where separation of church and state exists on paper only, because the Church of the Latter-Day Saints of Jesus Christ really runs just about everything, and should not be tax exempt.

In yet another case, a single father from another state (Florida) is fighting to gain custody of his nearly year-old daughter whose former girl friend left her newborn with strangers in that unholy state, reports the Salt Lake Tribune, in the first of a four-part series by Brooke Adams. Of course, in Utah, that was perfectly legal, even though the father of the child was doing everything possible to protect his paternal rights. In Utah, that matters not.