ProWomanProLife

I can’t be the only one who thinks of the song when you hear about Gloria Steinem’s new documentary.

I have not watched the documentary. I have, however, watched the 80s era music video. Well worth it. (I will watch the Gloria Steinem documentary at some point, so commentary will be forthcoming.)

I believe abortion is not solely a women’s issue because I think men ought to be involved with and responsible for their unborn children, too.

Others believe it because they think men have babies. No really.

This is such a stupid thing to have done. I am very disappointed.

Wow. Just wow.

When parents say their children are the true source of happiness and fulfillment in their lives, they may be enacting a psychological defence to justify all the time, money and energy they put into the job, finds a new Canadian study.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests parents are idealizing their role to cope with the downsides of being mom and dad — namely, how expensive it is to raise a family.

Not to mention the fact that parents idealize and overemphasize the joys of parenting sometimes to prevent themselves from strangling the apple of their eyes when they’ve stuffed something nasty down the toilet or scribbled all over the walls or peed on their car seat after swearing they didn’t have to go, or when they won’t stop asking one dumb question after another, or [supply your own list of examples here].

Parenting is WORK! It’s hard! And yes, it can get expensive. Nothing that’s worth doing is easy. People do what they can to get themselves through it. That’s because they’re human.

This is so ridiculous:

Breast milk ice cream is London’s latest food double dare: the breast-milk-infused flavour “Baby Gaga,” is now available at the Icecreamists restaurant in London’s Covent Garden.

Icecreamists founder Matt O’Connor is confident that his take on the “miracle of motherhood” will catch on, even at at £14 pounds, or $22 a serving. “The Baby Gaga tastes creamy and rich,” he told the Daily Mail. “No-one’s done anything interesting with ice cream in the last hundred years. We’ve came up with a method of infusing ice-cream with breast milk. We wanted to completely reinvent it. And by using breast milk we’ve definitely given it a one hundred percent makeover. It’s just one of a dozen radical new flavours we’ve invented. We want to change the way people think about ice cream’.

“A costumed Baby Gaga waitress serves the ice cream in a martini glass filled with the breast milk ice cream mix. Liquid nitrogen is then poured into the glass through a syringe,” reports the Daily Mail. And the restaurant will serve the  the concoction with whisky and other cocktails as well, making it a bit more of an adult-oriented treat.

[...]

The breast milk was provided by mothers who answered an advertisement on online mothers’ forum Mumsnet. Victoria Hiley, 35, was one of 15 women who sold milk to the restaurant.

“It wasn’t intrusive at all to donate – just a simple blood test. What could be more natural than fresh, free-range mothers milk in an ice cream?” she said.

When Ms. Hiley first saw the advertisement she thought it might be a joke, but when she found out it wasn’t, she provided the first 30 fluid ounces of milk, enough to make the first 50 servings. Women get paid £15 for every ten ounces of milk.

“Some people will hear about it and go, ‘yuck’ but actually it’s pure, organic, free-range and totally natural,” said Mr. O’Connor. “I had a Baby Gaga just this morning and I feel great.”

Re Andrea’s post from yesterday. Just heard on the radio something about a contest to kill coyotes that didn’t sit well with the authorities because it offers a prize for the best kill (here’s a news story about it, in case you’re curious). The news reader explained that you can’t benefit from killing an animal, even if it’s a pest.

Wish they had a rule like that for killing humans…

p.s. coyotes really are a pest.

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Deborah adds: Tell that to the folks at the University of Victoria. Even the hippies there are okay with a rabbit cull.

Look, I’m not against breast-feeding. Not at all. It’s great if that’s your thing. I’m not even that squeamish about lactating in public (though not very wild about it either). But this is pushing it.

The Wisconsin Bang variety is “deliciously creamy,” City Funk has a “dizzying sweet finish,” and Sweet Air Equity is a “mild, hard cheese that crumbles in your mouth.” The fromage connoisseur might salivate at these tantalizing descriptions, but for those who know the key ingredient — human breast milk — these culinary accounts elicit everything from curiosity to utter disgust.

To New Yorker Miriam Simun, a breast-milk cheese-maker who recently served up the creations as part of a university project, the question is: To eat or not to eat. We consume breast milk as a baby, so why not spread it on a baguette as an adult? We consume cow’s cheese, so why not sink our teeth into cheese coagulated from human milk?

A new decade, a new kind of creepy crime:

A California man faces six years in prison for using personal information found on women’s Facebook profiles to take over their e-mail accounts, steal nude pictures of them and sometimes even blackmail them. One victim likened it to “virtual rape.”

George Samuel Bronk pleaded guilty in Sacramento Superior Court Thursday to seven felony charges, including computer intrusion, impersonation and possession of child pornography.

The charges stem from a nine-month period ending in September, during which Bronk hijacked the e-mail accounts of hundreds of women across 17 states and in England, the Sacramento Bee reported.

A press release from the office of Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general, says Bronk targeted his victims by searching Facebook for women who posted both their e-mail addresses and also personal information such as their favorite foods, their father’s middle names, their high-school mascots and their favorite colors.

Such details are routinely used in “identity challenges” when changes are made to online personal accounts. “Social engineering” scams, such as phishing scams, are designed to trick the victim into revealing this sort of information — but Bronk found it all right there on Facebook.

With it, Bronk could pose as a legitimate e-mail user, hit the “Forgot your password?” button, pass the identity challenge, change the password to one of his own and take over the e-mail account, locking out the victim.

And then the problems would begin.

Bronk, 23, searched hundreds of “sent mail” folders for any nude photographs or videos.  If he found any, he’d often sending the most scandalous or pornographic pictures to the women’s contacts lists, or would contact the victims directly and threaten to make the pictures public unless they sent him even more revealing ones.

In some cases, he’d go back for seconds. After he’d taken over an e-mail account, he’d e-mail Facebook from it and tell the company he’d forgotten the victim’s Facebook password — and then take over the woman’s Facebook account as well.

In October, when police confiscated Bronk’s computer and arrested him, they found more than 170 files of explicit photographs stolen from e-mail accounts he had hijacked.

Here’s the part I *really* don’t get: Why do people keep nude and/or explicit pictures of themselves on web-based servers? Are they trying to get in trouble? I don’t know about you, but my sympathy switch is broken. If you’re going to post explicit pictures of yourself online, you deserve to be embarrassed publicly.

Women still don’t know much about baby-making… That’s the conclusion I get from an otherwise very long and tediously non-judgmental article on egg freezing.

Women are born with a finite number of eggs. At birth a woman’s ovaries contain approximately one to two million oocytes — immature eggs; by puberty, the count drops to 400,000. During each menstrual cycle, about 1,000 oocytes begin to develop but only one becomes a mature egg. The others left behind die. Not only does the supply shrink but egg quality decreases over time as well, since the best eggs are used up when young, so that each egg now offers less chance of pregnancy and a higher risk of miscarriage.

By the time a woman reaches age 39, “there aren’t many (follicles) left that have got enough strength to raise their hand,” says Dr. Al Yuzpe, co-founder and co-director of the Genesis Fertility Centre of Vancouver.

“My usual response is, ‘You may not look 40, you may not feel 40 but your ovaries don’t know it,’ ” Yuzpe says. He frequently encounters women who had no idea of the limits of their fertility. “They’re not only shocked, they’re tearful, they’re angry. ‘Nobody told me that I wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48.’ ”

I don’t expect everyone to know every detail about the production of eggs in female humans. And I speak as someone who knows fairly little, beyond the basics. But I always knew that if I waited too long, I wouldn’t be able to have children. What do you mean, nobody told you that you weren’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48? There’s not much point “educating” people who just won’t listen.

… who has five children, would like you to have just one. To save the planet, of course. Thought I’d pass this amusing tidbit along.

As you were.

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Andrea adds: A global one-child policy. Wow. Sounds like a mandate for the United Nations. They might already be on it, who knows?