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On surrogacy

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I love it when I stumble across a good article. I love it even more when it turns out the author is a member of ProWomanProLife. Brigitte Pellerin writes here about surrogate motherhood. My favourite part comes in the kicker: 

What bothers me most about it is that it is part of a wider culture that promotes and aggressively encourages anything that lets adults indulge their every whim and fancy. On any given day, countless women go for an abortion while countless others go through invasive assisted reproductive techniques while other women wait to have their uterus chosen to carry someone else’s precious embryo or their ovaries plucked so they can sell their eggs. The only moral standard here is that whatever I want is right, and must be mine. It is not possible to build a coherently decent society on such a basis.

“What I want is right.” (And when I think about it, do I even know what I want?) This is the basis for our abortion-friendly culture. And we call it “women’s rights.” How very empowering.

Two myths down

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A fascinating column in the New York Times (yes, you read that right), about oxytocin and attachment theory. Not that we can explain everything using a simple hormone. But there is a lot of truth to this stuff. Especially:

Over the past few decades federal and state governments have spent billions of dollars trying to improve high schools. Much of the effort has gone into trying to improve individual math and reading scores. But the effects have been modest and up to 30 percent of students drop out — a social catastrophe.

The dropout rates are astronomical because humans are not machines into which you can input data. They require emotion to process information. You take kids who didn’t benefit from stable, nurturing parental care and who have not learned how to form human attachments, and you stick them in a school that functions like a factory for information transmission, and the results are going to be horrible.

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If I had $37 billion, I would focus it on the crucial node where attachment skills are formed: the parental relationship during the first few years of life.

Here you will notice he does not mention the need for more – and better – institutional daycare (pardon me, early childhood education). Most normal people know the best place for a young child is at home with his or her parents. In most cases, anyway. Yet countless women are being pressured into returning to work shortly after having a baby, and we all know how popular institutional daycare is with politicians. Problem is, none of that is good for the kids (it’s not brilliant for the moms either).

You might also notice an issue the columnist didn’t mention. Thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to argue that legalizing abortion has given us a society where every child is “wanted”. If they were as wanted as all that, kids wouldn’t be flung into daycare before turning one, and they wouldn’t have the kinds of emotional issues David Brooks talks about (to say nothing of what Miriam Grossman has documented).

Not bad, for a NYT column.

Modern love and loaded questions

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A friend thought I might be interested in the NYT’s Modern Love series. I am, though by this point I think I’ve read all I ever need to on Modern Relationships That Are Not.

This is the winning article. The runner ups are equally perplexing.

Dinner ended; he had to go pack for his trip. I asked casually when I was going to see him again. He sighed. “That’s a loaded question.” I asked what he meant, because I thought the question was fairly straightforward.

And that’s with a man she’s already slept with.

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Brigitte objects: I believe this is modern. But it sure ain’t love. 

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Rebecca’s favourite part:

[…] when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious how he viewed their relationship. “The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right?”

Aw, isn’t it sweet how romantic the kids are these days?

Will wonders never cease?

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This blogger with Canoe.ca talks about Juno, the new movie whereby a pregnant teenager has the baby in stark contrast to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a movie I grew up with.

He says:

All I can say to that is that “choice” implies making a decision based on a set of options…

Options. I can recall thinking in my teens and even 20s that I’d rather be dead than unexpectedly pregnant. I meant it. In hindsight, that wasn’t the most mature response, but there you have it. Would have been great to have some mentors putting things in long term perspective.

But a movie that shows there is life for the mother, forget about the baby, after an unplanned pregnancy, is a good thing. And another good thing is to have a Canoe blogger writing about it.

Even if he is a man, and should therefore, by conventional wisdom, sit silently and quietly reflect on how abortion has nothing to do with him.

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Raji adds:

Another Juno article in the NYT on January 13: “Sex and the Teenage Girl”

I liked her comments, especially “….Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple…”

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