Eyes Wide Shut When it Comes to Procreation

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            We hate to start the new year on a negative note … but you know we’re going to do it anyway. How many would-be parents think about the personal suffering of those with physical or mental illness, ongoing wars, racial injustices, and human unkindness, not to mention our brutal treatment of animals?

            Mark O’Connell, in his article in the August 3, 2014 New York Times Magazine, has mulled over it all.  “What A Raw Deal for the Poor Little Guy,” delves into what children face simply by being born, and his own parental angst about a world that is doing badly.

            O’Connell takes the reader on a journey from the time he was about 10 years old when his father took him to a nursing home to visit a female friend.  In the bed next to the friend another “impossibly ancient and decrepit” woman, agitated with the indignity of old age, said, “look at what’s happened to me.” Her voice was pleading and the young O’Connell was shaken, enough so to upset the applecart of his innocence.

Samuel Beckett

Writer Samuel Beckett. Photo – Wikimedia Commons

           O’Connell first read Samuel Beckett in college, “with his sense that to be born at all was a form of damnation.” In Waiting For Godot, the Pozzo character reminds the reader that “the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

            O’Connell went on to read the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who stated without apology that “The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other.”  Schopenhauer also posed a bold question: If procreation was not accompanied by pleasure, but rationally deliberate, wouldn’t people feel so sorry for the upcoming generation and that they would spare children the “burden of existence”?

Aarthur Schopenhauer

18th Century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Photo – Wikimedia Commons

            In spite of his philosophical acumen, O’Connell’s wife had a son in March of 2013. While he sat in the hospital with her and the baby, he read the Irish Times. He was horrified by the news: “massacres, rapes, recurrent outbursts of savage recreational violence, a world built on a seemingly unshakable foundation of economic cruelty and injustice, the continuing project of environmental destruction … What a world. What a species. What a raw deal for the poor little guy.” No kidding.

            Kudos to Mark O’Connell. He went into fatherhood with eyes wide open, while he continues to struggle with his simultaneous love for his progeny and his own pessimism about “the world we chose to bring him into.” He thought twice about the pitfalls of life, and the state of the world before making a child.  Given his wisdom, we choose to believe that he is likely to have just one.

Sobering Statistics on Chronic Depression

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About one of every nine Americans age 12 and older takes antidepressants. That makes them the third most commonly used prescription drug and the most used by people 18 to 44, according to a study by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study involved almost 13,000 people between 2005 and 2008. A 2010 update indicates similar results.

What is particularly shocking about the results is that about four times as many people are on antidepressants as there were in 1988. While it is true that the statistic does not mean that four times as many people were depressed, it does indicate that four times as many people were taking antidepressants.

In the first chapter of our book Enough of us: Why We Should Think Twice Before Making Children, we consider the possibility that the children we hope to create as individuals are not always the happy people we dream of raising.

The results of the study are sobering reminders of just one aspect of the perils facing anyone brought into the world.

A deeper analysis brings even worse news. According to the study, only “about one-third of persons with severe depressive symptoms take antidepressant medication.” And of those Americans who take anti-depressants, more than 60 percent have taken it for at least two years, and about one in seven have taken the medication for 10 years or more.

Another reason for concern is that, “Less than one-third of Americans taking one antidepressant medication and less than one-half of those taking multiple antidepressants have seen a mental health professional in the past year.” This could mean that those who are continuing with their meds may not be getting timely advice from a mental health professional, especially for those who are combining drugs.

It deserves pointing out that the study indicates the frequency of antidepressant drug use at any one time. It stands to reason that over the course of a lifetime, a lot more than one in nine adolescent and adult Americans will be candidates to take these drugs for depression and/or anxiety.

We wonder how many would-be parents take the odds of producing contented kids into account before deciding to procreate.

 

Air Pollution Kills Two Million People per Year

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Climate change denier Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma sits on the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. In January he is likely to become the chair of that committee. So what does this mean? It means that when it comes to environmental protection, the most important person in the Senate is hostile toward the idea of keeping the Earth’s air clean.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina “estimates that around 2.1 million deaths are caused each year by human-caused increases in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) – tiny particles suspended in the air that can penetrate deep into the lungs, causing cancer and other respiratory disease.”

As we discuss in our book Enough of Us, even as industrialized countries around the world reach agreements on curbing fossil fuel use, world population continues to soar, especially in developing, or Third World, countries. And as these countries develop, they will be demanding more energy-hungry comforts, contraptions, and conveniences.

Just this week President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached a loosely constructed agreement on curbing climate change. Much of the agreement concerns cutting back the use of coal.

Inhofe is a conspiracy theorist. He believes that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Hollywood elite, Al Gore, Michael Moore, and Democrat supporters MoveOn.org and George Soros.

James Inhofe

Senator Jim Inhofe

Left out of most discussions of both environmental pollution and climate change is the amount of detrimental output from livestock, the production and feeding of which accounts for more pollutants than all transportation fuels—including road vehicles, boats, trains, and airplanes—combined.

Let’s say for the moment that Inhofe is right; that God would never allow humans to change his grand plan for the planet’s ecology. How about the UNC study that states that two million people a year die from just pollution? But that’s not all. The same study estimates that an additional almost-half-million deaths result from increases in ozone.

It makes sense that even if the preponderance of scientific evidence is wrong,  we should still be worrying about all the non-climate-change-related poison in the air.

And let’s say, for argument’s sake, that there is a 75 percent chance that the anti-climate change ninnies are correct. If one of them heard from his mechanic  that the family car had a 25 percent chance of having a disastrous mechanical breakdown on the highway, would he opt not to have a possibly life-saving repair done to the vehicle?

Humanity is approaching a precipice. As we do so we are increasing in number. It’s time to remove our blindfold and thin the herd by cutting back on our reproductive numbers. It’s not Inhofe and his ilk that will suffer the most, but their progeny will.

Why Won’t the News Media Discuss the Real Cause of Air Pollution and Climate Change?

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If we were to assert that cars are the cause of traffic accidents, we would be disingenuous. Cars are hunks of metal, plastic, and rubber that just sit there. It’s people who make them dangerous missiles. We drive them around. The same is true for air pollution. So much for metaphors.

Allow us to elucidate. Last Sunday we were watching Cosmos on the Fox Network. The host and lecturer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made an eloquent case that climate change and global warming are real, that human behavior is largely responsible for it, and the consequences are likely to be dire. Fine.

But the blame, as in most arguments we come across, goes something like this: We are burning too much coal, petroleum products, and natural gas. The argument usually goes that the burning of fossil fuels is killing our environment. In other words, just as people drive cars that cause destructive accidents, people cause the pollution that destroys our environment.

The cure? Replace our fossil fuels with wind and solar power. To that, some arguments go, add hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal and nuclear power. Fine. The problem is that no one in the mass media is saying anything about the root cause, the drivers, as it were. The root cause is too many people. Demographers estimate that human populations will grow by about 40 percent by the end of this century. It’s crazy. No matter how fast we replace fossil fuels with renewable and other alternate sources of energy, we’re still going to need to supply an additional three billion of us with electrical power.  

But the communications media virtually never discuss the need to educate our ourselves about not producing more of us than the planet can handle. It seems as though we can discuss anything except the drivers of the metaphorical cars of environmental destruction who are causing the problems. Perhaps they are afraid that mentioning family planning is the third rail of environmentalism.  

So, it may be up to Mother Nature to control her children by letting them destroy their home and killing them off by means of environmental disasters. Sooner or later the news media will have to talk about the dead elephant in the room.

U.S. Gets a “C-” Reproductive Report Card

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 According to the nonprofit Population Institute, The United States gets a grade of “C-” for its efforts to promote family planning and reproductive health. According to its “Report Card on Reproductive Health and Rights,” the country does a poor job of assisting its residents in obtaining essential family planning resources.

            The Report, released last year, gave nine states a grade of “F” while only 12 got a “B-” or better. Only Washington, Oregon, and California earned an “A”.

          What do all these letters mean? Reproductive health, as measured by the institute, is determined by four criteria, each broken down into sub-categories:

  • Effectiveness (30 percent):
  • Affordability (30 percent);
  • Prevention (20 percent);
  • Clinic access (20 percent).

          Effectiveness consists of teenage pregnancy rate and unintended pregnancies.

          Affordability consists of Medicaid availability for family planning, insurance that covers contraception, and funding for family planning clinics for low-income families.

          Prevention is broken down into two criteria: mandated school sex education and access to emergency contraception.

          The fourth criterion, clinic access, consists of abortion restrictions and protective legislation for clinic access. 

Color-coded map of states' grades

Population Institute Reproductive Health and Rights states map

         Title X (Title Ten) passed by Congress and approved by President Richard Nixon in 1970, provided low-income and uninsured individuals with access to family planning resources like birth control and preventive healthcare services. As a result, tens of millions of women who might not otherwise have had the option of limiting or spacing their pregnancies have been able to do so.

          “We’ve seen a lot of progress in the last four decades,” said Population Institute President Robert Walker in the report, “but we can’t take anything for granted.” Recent events, like legislation in Texas that restricts abortion clinics by requiring untenable operating requirements, concerns Walker. These
include such restrictions as requiring the clinic to be near a hospital or to have expensive budget-busting equipment in the clinic that would exceed any reasonable need for such facilities. “The U.S. still has an unacceptably high rate of unintended pregnancies, including teenage pregnancies, and yet family planning clinics in many areas are being forced to close, and schools in many states are using unproven, abstinence-only sex education curricula.”

          Fairness dictates we concede that some of the criteria employed in determining these grades are biased against those with religious beliefs that eschew abortion rights. But that still leaves a wide swath of heads-in-the-sand thinking in states that make it difficult to obtain abortions and are hostile to the availability of family planning. Among the most contemptible of these nexuses occurs when states like Texas attempt to close down Planned Parenthood locations because they provide abortions. The irony is that more than 95 percent of Planned Parenthood funding goes for services designed to help people avoid or plan pregnancies.

          According to Walker, the United States has a higher rate of teen pregnancy than most other developed countries. So while Texas (with a grade of D-) and New Jersey (C) have slashed state funding for family planning clinics serving low income uninsured folks, access to food stamps and unemployment insurance benefits are being hacked on the federal level as well. In other words, some families will grow larger while their ability to feed their most vulnerable members, the kids, will diminish.

          According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2011 state legislators introduced about 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions. Of those, 135 became law, tightening restrictions in 36 states.

          Let’s give this all some perspective. State legislatures dominated by conservatives tend to oppose the funding of family planning facilities, especially those that offer abortion or the so-called morning after pill. They also oppose generous contraception policies for teenage girls. These same legislatures frequently oppose health care reform, Medicaid and other benefits for those in the lower economic strata. Combine that with cutbacks in food stamps, and these states are whipping up a recipe for ipecac soup.

          Whether or not you believe that reduced population is a good thing, how can these anti-reproductive-health cohorts believe that their policies, or lack of them, are a good thing? Read more about these issues in our book, Enough of Us.

 

Should we Prevent Devastating Pregnancies? What’s Your Opinion?

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            Adopting foster children can be an unending series of trials and tribulations. Maggie Jones’s “The Meaningful Life of a Supersize Family,” in the November 17, 2013 New York Times Magazine, makes the case in spades. The article profiles two families that have sacrificed the niceties of life in order to provide hearth and home for kids who most need it.  

            Misty and Jon already had four biological children. Even so, they discussed the adoption option and realized the $20,000 it would take to complete the process would overstretch their budget. But an ad on a Christian radio station about a new organization that was helping Christians to adopt foster kids helped change their minds. It opened the door for the Misty-Jon family (they didn’t want their last names used) to take in Denver County foster children, with the intention of adopting them. They were able to receive financial help including Medicaid and payment of therapy expenses.

            Their first foster children were brothers, Shon and Cory. They were told that the boys’ mother had dropped them off with a man who couldn’t care for them, and she never returned.

            Of the two, Shon had the worst time adjusting to his new family. He would lie in bed at night, head in hands, staring straight ahead until Misty left the room. He’d wake up in the same position in the morning “as if he were on guard all night.”

            Eight months later, as the adoption process was inching along, a caseworker informed Misty and Jon that Corey and Shon’s mother had just given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. They were dangerously premature at 24 weeks old. Each infant weighed one pound, and the county was asking for foster parents to

Premature ababy and mother.

10-week premature baby being held by her mother (this is not drug-related). Photo courtesy Polihale, Wikimedia Commons

cuddle the babies in the hospital. The boy died days before Misty and Jon’s first “holding” hospital visit, but his sister Olivia survived. Having severe heart problems, she was hooked up to a ventilator. After six months of driving 45 minutes every other night to the hospital to hold Olivia, Misty brought the little girl home, with a tracheostomy tube to help her breathe, a feeding tube, and full-time nursing care paid for by Medicaid.

            Another girl, Raena, was supposed to be a short-term placement. Her mother was on track to regain custody of the four-month-old, who weighed only 11 pounds. A relative’s boyfriend had shaken the child and thrown her into a bassinet, which resulted in two permanent brain injuries. When Raena’s mother lost her parental rights due to drug problems, Misty and Jon, who were caring for this special-needs child, “eagerly” began the adoption process.

            Maureen and her husband Christian heard the same religious radio ad as had Misty and Jon. They also had four birth children, and believed they had a calling to adopt foster children. The result was they adopted two boys. David and Ernesto’s birthmother was 16 when she had David. Thirteen months later, she gave birth to Ernesto, even though she tested positive for methamphetamine. Ernesto struggled with sensory issues: In one instance, he wrapped his torso in duct tape and in another, covered his head in Vaseline. He had screaming fits, hit his adoptive mother, and “grabbed her hair with both hands so that she couldn’t move.” Maureen rightly suspected that he had been exposed to drugs in utero.

             These stories lead us to ask the big question: Is it time to consider laws that prohibit unfit parents (drug addicts and child abusers) from repeating their traumatic, inhumane, and costly mistakes?  Progeny from parents who have no capacity to “think twice before making children,” frequently suffer sad and dysfunctional lives. The families who take in and take care of these children suffer too, both financially and emotionally. Society suffers by paying for services to dysfunctional parents and the children they sire. Citizens witness the cruelty to these offspring with horror, unable to stop the injustice. Why do our laws allow it? Can lawmakers and voters set boundaries that will actually save the yet unborn from a terrible fate?

          What do you think? We’d love to start some dialogue in this topic.

Parents can be Hurt by Their Offspring in More Ways Than One

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              Thirty-year-old Margo Steines wrote an achingly personal essay in the October 27, 2013 Sunday Review section of The New York Times. “Recalling Painful Lessons in Forgiveness” begins with Margo ministering to her mother’s wounds after Margo’s Rottweiler attacked her. Apparently, Mom had reached her hand into the car and the dog bit it, but good. The result was a bloody mess. This incident is a lead-in to the daughter’s guilt over the pain she caused her mother through the years, triggered in the present by her failure to warn her parent “not to reach her hand into the car.”

            By her own admission, Margo was a problem child.  She recollects a “scrap of loose-leaf paper” on which her mother wrote “You were our dream,” during a family day at one of her rehabs.  Far from being a dream, the list of Margo’s nightmare behaviors is daunting:

  • Stealing from her mother before the age of 10
  • Running away from home at age 17, leaving no trace
  • Hanging out at New York’s  S-and-M clubs with “hookers,” “johns,” and “addicts”
  • Becoming a drug addict and alcoholic
  • Attempting several drug overdose suicides

            It’s clear in the essay that this Marlboro-smoking daughter is conscious of her own wish to have a “beautiful child who will love me and grow strong, proud and capable. . .  .” Isn’t that every would-be parent’s vision?  Things do not, and will not, always work out that way, however. That is a message we promulgate in our book, Enough of Us.

            Having a drug-addicted, acting-out child is a “smasher” as Steines describes it. She remembers her mother searching for her in downtown S-and-M clubs; at home on her hands and knees “scrubbing up my messes, wondering if I’d ever be O.K.”; dealing with the frustrations of the insurance system related to “the fancy Connecticut rehab center she sent me to”; and her mother arriving at the hospital “while I was getting an overdose pumped from my stomach … knowing I had tried to throw away the life she had given me.”

            This story is not uncommon. Considering the most recent statistics, more youngsters seem to be turning to drugs and therefore to some seriously dysfunctional behaviors.  The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported this development in the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey of 2012 in the article, “Drug Facts: High School and Youth Trends.” The report states: “Marijuana use by adolescents declined from the late 1990s until the mid-to-late 2000s, but has been on the increase since then.  

Kid smoking pot

Photo: Marijuana-addict.com

           “6.5 percent of 12th graders now use marijuana every day, compared to 5.1 percent in 2007.” Furthermore, 22.9 percent of twelfth graders used marijuana in the month prior to the survey, compared to 14.2 percent in 2007.

            Nonmedical use of prescription and over-the-counter medication is also on the rise among teens and contributes significantly to their drug problems. The most commonly used prescription drugs by young people are Adderall (stimulant) and Vicodin (pain reliever).

            And while fewer teenagers smoke cigarettes, other forms of tobacco used in hookah water pipes and small cigars continue to raise concerns about high-schoolers. More than 18 percent had smoked a hookah in 2011 and almost 20 percent had smoked a small cigar, both of which exceed the percentages of those who smoked cigarettes.

            What does all this mean? The underlying message is that bearing and raising children can cause great strife, especially in an age where drug use is common; and especially during a time when medical marijuana, although helpful for the sick, is not great for young people whose brains are still developing. Would-be parents who believe that bearing children will make their dreams come true should think twice, and then think again. While their kids are likely to bring more pleasure than pain, the odds are not overwhelmingly in their favor. They need to ask themselves: Am I really up to the task?

 

Pass It Forward: Fertility After Pediatric Cancer

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Years ago, a female friend was diagnosed with breast cancer weeks before her wedding. Her fertility was uncompromised, so a year or two after a double mastectomy, she remained determined to have children. Her first baby was a boy. No problem. Before her second child was born, she shared with us that she feared having a girl because she didn’t want to go through what her mother had suffered through with her, that is a daughter who contracted breast cancer. Our friend did give birth to a female.  Davida is still young, in her third year of college, and to our knowledge she has not yet been tested for the breast cancer gene.

            In an article on the New York Times blog, “After Cancer, Fertility is Often Within Reach,” a 39-year-old working mother, Karen Cormier, revealed that after developing a “rare form of kidney cancer” at age 5, she assumed she wouldn’t be able to become pregnant due to her doctors’ counsel that the treatments damaged her reproductive organs. Three years after adopting a child, Ms. Cormier became pregnant and had Ryan, “a walking biological miracle.”

            The Times blog post makes the point that many adults who survive childhood cancer struggle to conceive, especially if they had received pelvic radiation treatments, a certain class of chemotherapy drugs, high doses of radiation, or stem cell transplants. After the two latter treatments these youthful patients became completely sterile. Nowadays, though, fertility treatments for both male and female childhood cancer survivors increase their chances of overcoming clinical infertility, leading doctors to surmise that young patients’ ovaries and testes may be more resilient than originally believed.

           Cancer trade magazine According to the Times article, a recent large study in The Lancet Oncology found that about two out of three female survivors who turned to fertility treatments did become pregnant – “a rate of success that mirrored the rate among other infertile women.” Other recent studies found that many adult men with low sperm counts after having childhood cancer (due to side effects of chemotherapy) “undergo procedures that harvest viable sperm, allowing them to father their own children.”

            Although this article holds out hope for many would-be parents who had pediatric cancer, it fails to mention the possible consequences for their biological children, specifically, what about the hereditary cancer that parents with their own early history of the disease might pass on to their child?  

            According to the American Cancer Society, only about 5 percent to 10 percent of all cancers are inherited.  In spite of this low percentage, “cancer in a close relative like a parent or sibling . . .  is more cause for concern than cancer in a more distant relative.”  Also, a family member that had a very early onset or rare cancer should consult with a genetics specialist for their children’s sakes.  

            Due to the widespread media coverage of Angelina Jolie’s recent double mastectomy, many Americans have become aware of

Angelina Jolie inherited her mother's predisposition for breast cancer.

Angelina Jolie. Photo courtesy Georges Biard

some women’s predisposition for breast and ovarian cancers. Had Jolie had genetic testing a few years earlier, she might have decided against having biological children. Indeed, her daughter Shiloh, with a grandmother who had contracted breast cancer and a mother who carried the gene for same, is most probably at high risk for the illness.

            Over the years, in some of Cheryl’s conversations with would-be parents about adoption, many expressed a concern that if the adoption isn’t “open,” meaning that if the biological parent isn’t in the picture (and/or cannot be reached), the adopted child’s unknown health and psychological history could lead to serious medical problems. Yet, some of these same would-be parents seem willing to pass an inherited illness like cancer onto their own biological child!

            So, here’s the message to doctors who specialize in fertility, and to would-be parents who suffered from childhood cancer but yearn to have biological offspring: Think twice before making children. The genetics you pass along may be dangerous for the kids.

Caring for Our Elders – Do We Need More Children?

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[Sonia Burke lives in Portugal. She writes this essay in response to our September 4, 2013 column, “No Progeny Necessary – The Boon of Boomer Communities.” (https://www.enoughof.us/no-progeny-necessary-the-boon-of-boomer-communities). For background, we suggest you to read that column first.]

 

          In Europe there has been considerable debate about aging population and the sustainability of the welfare state. The question is, can nations afford pensions and national health care? But instead of presenting people with real solutions, we continue to hear that the solution is breeding more people.

          I’m childfree and I am sticking to that. What troubles me is the lack of will to put forward ideas that will accommodate the ever-increasing number of senior citizens and ensure their care. It doesn’t have to come from the public sector. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. But I am sure government incentives could give the private sector reasons to create appealing spaces in which those at the later stages of life can live and socialize, in contrast to the depressing elderly care homes that none of us would like to see their parent in.

          Ironically, while opting out of motherhood was very clear to me, I failed to realize that I should have a say when it comes to looking after my own parents. My parents were both 40 years of age when I was born. Having had my maternal grandmother living with us–and my paternal grandmother living at my aunt’s – this idea should have at least crossed my mind. Still, perhaps my mind was assuaged by the fact that my mother vowed never to put me through what her mother had put her through. And, let’s face it, if someone was difficult in their younger years they won’t have cute and cuddly personalities as they age. You can tell a child to go to their room, scold them for misbehaviour and expect they don’t repeat whatever they did wrong again. You can’t do that with a parent.

          I love my mother and my late father. When my father died we invited my mother to come live with us (we live around three hours away from her village). As you can imagine, when a death happens suddenly you don’t have time to think about such sensitive issues with a clear head. I lost my father when I was 25 and my life was just starting to unfold. His death brought it all to a halt. Neither my husband nor I imagined this would be a permanent thing. But at the time we felt the right thing to do for my mother was to invite her to live with us. Without much thought I was repeating what my mother did with her own mother, thus ensuring that I brought into my home and my marriage the very same atmosphere I’d experienced growing up. It was not pretty. Luckily, not having children stops me from any possibility of doing the same to someone else. Phew.

          After 10 years living with us, and a marriage that came far too close to ending, I had to tell my mother the arrangement wasn’t working.  Since she continues to be very healthy in every way, she’d have to split her time between our house and hers for all our sakes. This was heart-breaking and still is. No child, and no young couple, should be put through this decision.

           My mother used to say she’d go to a nursing home when she needed one, although now it’s a whole different story; it’s a taboo subject. If I try to discuss the future with her, we don’t get anywhere. I need to leave my country soon (as many are doing throughout southern Europe to find work) and I ask when are the governments going to start helping adult children and face the issue that many seniors need to make arrangements for their future? Many of these elderly, like my mother, are still perfectly capable of making decisions. But nothing  worth considering is being offered to them. You’d have thought that investors would gather around this new demographic reality and together with the government start promoting co-housing options. What we’re currently witnessing is that everyone is brushing the dirt under the rug and preferring to anticipate more babies, when what we’re really giving birth to, as a society, is millions of eventually aging citizens who may not have anyone to care for them.       

A senior residence in Ohio

Senior village in Columbus, OH

   I’m in my mid 30s and my husband is in his early 40s. Even if we did want children, we would not be able to afford them. If you consider that most of my friends who went to university are currently in the same predicament as we are (long periods of unemployment, low-paid jobs and therefore no stability) … how can we look after the elderly? I’ll still have a mortgage to pay when I get to the age of 70. My mother was financially independent in her 30s and retired at 55. My friends who have stable jobs barely make it to the end of the month with money in the bank, thanks to the high cost of living. How can my generation, and the one that’s right behind, care for the elderly when they have to work to survive? (Not to get rich… to survive). Most countries support parents with children to raise. But for adults who need to support their parents, there is no such assistance.

          Many of the elderly continue to enjoy their lives into their 90s. I know many who do and who don’t expect to live with their respective families. But even they are not really planning for the day when they can no longer be independent. I am sure these elderly would, if only there were choices presented to them.

          There are currently only two senior villages (as we call them) in my country, where the elderly can still have their own homes, cook, clean and have assisted care if they need to. The advantage is that they can have their family over to visit anytime, unlike what happens in care homes. Unfortunately no other projects have emerged. Wouldn’t this be good for the economy? It could create jobs. Healthier people in old age have fewer health issues and are less of a burden on national health, surely? Plus, their children are free to pursue their lives.  

          I can’t imagine anything more unethical than expecting people to breed for the sake of economics and to ensure their own care in old age.

 

Lone Star State Deserves Another Star . . . for Mindless Abortion Policy

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           The Texas legislature recently passed, and Governor Rick Perry signed into law, a bill that not only closes most of the state’s abortion clinics, it will also increase the number of babies born with serious birth defects. We have often pondered how a state with six of the 20 most populous cities in the country can be so regressive in its thinking.

Texas Governor Rick Perry

Texas Governor Rick Perry signed the anti-abortion bill

           On July 11, 2013, Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatric cardiologist, posted a column on Slate.com in which he answers the question, “Who Has an Abortion After 20 Weeks?” In a nutshell, here is how he answers the question: “Comprehensive fetal testing … (is) typically performed just before 20 weeks of gestation. Such scans are critical for uncovering major birth defects.” These defects include severe brain malformations, heart defects, missing organs and limbs, and other serious imperfections.

          Therefore, by virtually abolishing the abortion option at 20 weeks of pregnancy, Texas has almost guaranteed that mothers with fetuses that have traumatic defects, and who cannot afford to seek abortions in other states, are considerably more likely to need various forms of public assistance in order to care for their newborns. State taxpayers, in many cases, will have to bear the burden of care, particularly in light of Texas’s rejection of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

          So while those with money can hop a flight to, say, New Mexico or Colorado, to terminate a 20-week-plus pregnancy, those without the cash … you get the idea.

          But wait – there’s more. Less reliable tests are available at earlier than 20 weeks. There’s just one drawback: they are less reliable. So let’s say a doctor tells the expectant parents that their baby may be suffering from anencephaly (in which a major part of the brain is missing), but that it’s too soon to tell for sure. The parents are now in the position of deciding whether to gamble on a healthy baby or, alternatively, to abort the fetus because they cannot emotionally and financially afford to cope with a severely disabled child. If they opt for the latter, they may be aborting a perfectly healthy fetus.

          Is this what Texas lawmakers were intending? Our guess is they either gave it little (or no) thought, or they were more concerned with mollifying the folks who might vote for them.

          According to Dr. Sanghavi, approximately one-third of all women in the United States will have an abortion by age 45. One reason is that about half of all pregnancies are unintended, to no small degree because birth control is not foolproof – 5 percent of women on the pill get pregnant each year.

          Every year “in Texas, about 85,000 women have an abortion,” explains Sanghavi, “of which only about 1,000 are performed after 20 weeks of gestation.” That’s a little over 1 percent.

          Of the 400,000 babies who are born, “16,000 have a birth defect of some type. Of these, about 700 have major brain defects, 600 have major chromosomal disorders, and the rest have any number of other birth defects.”

          In the first chapter of our book Enough of Us, we discuss at some length the possibility that pregnancies will end disappointingly, if not in total disaster. It seems to us the lawmakers of Texas are determined to increase the odds of such unfortunate outcomes.

          As the good doctor concludes in his essay:Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act

          “In the end, restriction on late mid-term abortions may seem motivated by concerns about a healthy fetus; after all, the Texas bill was called the ‘Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.’ But a closer look strongly suggests that no matter what the legislators do, some fetuses and families will still be faced with a great deal of misery.”

          Many Texas politicians decry the intrusion of big government into our everyday lives. They may or may not have valid points to make. But this? These lawmakers are telling a significant minority of would-be parents to take a guess, decide whether to abort or not, and hope for the best. If not, they may be stuck with a decision that will mean disaster to both parent and child. Now, that’s big government intrusion.