Pro-Choice Maryland

Saw this on my friend's timeline, and thought I would share it with you all (no, she didn't write it). It's damn good.

Somewhere there is a woman: 30, no children. People ask her, “Still no kids?” Her response varies from day to day, but it usually includes forced smiles and restraint.

“Nope, not yet,” she says with a chuckle, muffling her frustration.

“Well, don’t wait forever. That clock is ticking, ya know,” the sage says before departing, happy with herself for imparting such erudite wisdom. The sage leaves. The woman holds her smile. Alone, she cries…

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Catholics should not feel they have to breed "like rabbits" because of the Church's ban on contraception, Pope Francis said on Monday, suggesting approved natural family planning methods.

I had fun with this part:
He mentioned a woman he recently met who already had seven children by caesarean sections and put her life at risk by becoming pregnant again. He said he chided her for "tempting God" and added: "That was an irresponsibility."
Ooh, where do I start? I love how women are always being blamed for getting pregnant like we can magically make ourselves pregnant. Seriously, if that was the case, we wouldn't need men and sex (well, if you're having sex for procreation reasons that is). We could just say "I would like to be pregnant now" and boom-badda-bing! There's a bun in the oven. That's not the case in reality. So, where the fuck is the blame on the husband who got her pregnant? I mean...maybe it was his idea for her to get pregnant, whether she wanted to or not.

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I saw and snagged this from ontd_political. By the way, this is going to piss you off.

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there's a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of "fallen women" and their "illegitimate" children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children's playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

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Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?

To answer this, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.

Its quality-of-life index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are—to objective determinants of the quality of life across countries. Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of family life matter too. In all, the index takes 11 statistically significant indicators into account. They are a mixed bunch: some are fixed factors, such as geography; others change only very slowly over time (demography, many social and cultural characteristics); and some factors depend on policies and the state of the world economy.

A forward-looking element comes into play, too. Although many of the drivers of the quality of life are slow-changing, for this ranking some variables, such as income per head, need to be forecast. We use the EIU’s economic forecasts to 2030, which is roughly when children born in 2013 will reach adulthood.

What are your thoughts about this? I'm not surprised that the country I'm currently residing is in the top 5.

I got this snippet from the middle of the article. It's very long, but I think it's an interesting article even though some parts make me roll my eyes.

Last summer, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld this expanded interpretation of the chemical-endangerment law, ruling that the dictionary definition of “child” includes “unborn child,” an interpretation that will be challenged when the state’s Supreme Court considers Kimbrough’s case in the coming months. But the implications of that ruling go far beyond Alabama. Critics like Ketteringham argue that Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law offers a back door into what has become known as the “fetal personhood” argument.

Personhood USA, an organization based in Colorado, was founded in 2008 by Keith Mason after he became frustrated by the mainstream anti-abortion movement’s incremental approach of restricting the availability of legal abortion. “From my perspective, I saw a movement that was largely dying or dead and had a lack of enthusiasm from younger people and from people who had been in the fight for so many years,” he told me. “Something had to change. Personhood is that rallying point, because it’s the crux of the issue.” His movement seeks to establish the fetus’s right to live as equal to that of the mother’s.

Personhood advocates regard fetal rights as a civil rights issue, and they often compare themselves to abolitionists. “I think it would be unequal protection to give the woman a pass when anyone else who injects drugs into a child would be prosecuted,” Ben DuPré, director of Personhood Alabama, said. “What it boils down to is, aren’t these little children persons?”

The goal of Personhood USA is to establish that a fully rights-endowed person is created when sperm meets egg. To that end, it has introduced initiatives and measures in legislatures in 22 states. Though none of these measures have become law, some, like Proposition 26 in Mississippi, have made it to a ballot referendum, and other measures have passed legislative chambers in North Dakota, Montana and Oklahoma. The problem with those measures, from a legal perspective, says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, is that “there is no way to treat fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as separate constitutional persons without subtracting pregnant women from the community of constitutional persons.”

What is everyone's thoughts on this?

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Snippets from the article:
"I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.
Exactly...what they think. Not you or the goverment, Mr. Porritt

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word.”
Hmmm...so if you support a position that says having more than two children is irresponsible, how would you feel if someone suggested that the goverment should take a position where having more than one child or having any children at all is irresponsible? You wouldn't like it considering you're the father of two children.

“Many organisations think it is not part of their business. My mission with the Friends of the Earth and the Greenpeaces of this world is to say: ‘You are betraying the interests of your members by refusing to address population issues and you are doing it for the wrong reasons because you think it is too controversial,” he said.
Well, it is controversial to tell another person what to do with their reproductive life. Telling someone that they are irresponsible for having more than two children is almost as bad as telling someone that they are irresponsible for having more than two abortions. Snippets from the article:
"I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.
Exactly...what they think. Not you or the goverment, Mr. Porritt

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word.”
Hmmm...so if you support a position that says having more than two children is irresponsible, how would you feel if someone suggested that the goverment should take a position where having more than one child or having any children at all is irresponsible? You wouldn't like it considering you're the father of two children.

“Many organisations think it is not part of their business. My mission with the Friends of the Earth and the Greenpeaces of this world is to say: ‘You are betraying the interests of your members by refusing to address population issues and you are doing it for the wrong reasons because you think it is too controversial,” he said.
Well, it is controversial to tell another person what to do with their reproductive life. Telling someone they are irresponsible for having x amount of children is as bad as telling a woman who has had x amount of abortions that they are irresponsible. If you were able to get pregnant, maybe you would understand that.

What do you all think?

Btw, if this post looks familiar, I did make a post about it on pro_choice back in Feburary. I would've crossed posted, but prochoicemd didn't exist then :P