The law itself says 20 weeks “from fertilization” (vs. “gestational age”), and we’re actually only 18 weeks from fertilization–my amazing wife tracked her cycle to a T. The hospital acknowledges it isn’t against the letter of the law, but it is a grey area their policies won’t let them touch. Too risky, too hot button a topic.
We are denied the opportunity to even make a humane and doctor sanctioned medical decision by a bill that we never thought would affect us. I was there at the capitol, fighting for the rights of women. It never crossed my mind I would be fighting for my own.
It’s impossible to say for sure that intensive parenting leads to depression and stress and being dissatisfied, but the links don’t really make sense if you flip them around. It’s also not clear whether intensive parenting has any great impact on the children, but Liss concludes that anything that makes moms depressed probably doesn’t benefit children in the long run. Plus, anecdotally some of us have observed that making your child the center of the universe tends to result in rather obnoxious offspring.
Just yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the people of Michigan had the right, via mob rule, to ban the practice of Affirmative Action at state institutions such as the University of Michigan. It wasn’t a good ruling. Ever since the state voted to ban it, minority enrollment has declined significantly. Which is not surprising, because when you ignore unearned privileged and advantages, it’s hardly shocking when the priviledg and advantaged pull ahead. Obviously the person who starts the race in the middle of a marathon is going to have a better chance at winning.
It seems well-established now that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney engaged in acts of bullying against at least one gay classmate when he was in prep school in the 1960’s. For my part, I am a firm believer that the mistakes of youth should not, in and of themselves, define a person’s opportunities as an adult. In other words, I believe people who do stupid, mean, petty, vindictive things in their youth, or even just earlier in adulthood, deserve the opportunity to change and to demonstrate that change to others. When I hear about something someone did in the past, I am at least as interested in what they have to say about it now as I am in what they did. What they did helped create the person they are today, but it is not the only factor.
One of the many tensions in evaluating presidential candidates is that we don’t want to disqualify them based on the stupidity of their youth. George W. Bush’s blanket denial that “when I was young and irresponsible I was young and irresponsible” seems like a good rule. On the other hand, we want to know who these candidates are who seek to lead us (especially when they spend so much time offering us synthetic versions of themselves). We are looking for some piece of evidence, some sign of what makes them who they are. Many of us prize “character above all” in a president and a lot of those hints about presidential character are located in the stories of youth. If you want to be president, your résumé, accomplishments, and experience are not enough. Your origins matter.
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!['Romney portrait' by uploader was Evrik (Richard Whitney) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARomney_portrait.jpg "'Romney portrait' by uploader was Evrik (Richard Whitney) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons")