Martha Hirschfield and Hanna Rosin

Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: A lot of messages about birth control, and about penguins. Great discussion on childcare followed on from Paul Decker's post, below. Some readers--how can we put this?--weren't fully in sympathy with the Breakfast Table's new mothers: others were.]

I quote: "Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: But what if Noa want to be a zoologist, specializing in penguins?" I suppose we need to cut new mommies some slack, but there aren't any penguins at all in the Arctic. How many hundreds of emails came in with this point? Sigh. Unfortunate, but there it is, the medium makes criticism so much easier. If this were print in the pre-internet era, then you might get two letters pointing out that penguins live down below in the Antarctic and are primarily food for leopard seals and so forth. But now, with Dear Editor only a click-on-reply away, the possibility of gazillions of outraged penguinphiles writing to you at once and crashing your server can't be called a mere possibility, but rather a stone cold certainty, and cold stones naturally brings me back to the odd fascination penguins have with pebbles, which they stack in little heaps. Nearly 15 years ago, when the oldest of the offspring was a newly gooing bundle and I was the only dad in the park with a stroller, I decided to do something once a day in the company of grownups, so as not to go berserk. I wound up taking Intro Chinese. The rest is rock and roll history, and here I am in Beijing, with three and a half years already spent here in a couple of big chunks, and all four sons fluent in Mandarin Chinese-- two in fact taking end of term Chinese tests as I write-- and all because when Martin was born, there was no internet, there was no Breakfast Table, there was no email inbox, there was no Instant Messenger. Congratulations on the birth of your wee one. Says I, father and primary child care provider for nearly a decade and a half, there is nothing better. Nothing comes close.

--Mike Connelly

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A pacifier is not pure distraction. It has mystical properties. I believe the sucking actually produces changes in the child's neurochemistry. The problem is how to get the damn things away from them. My 2 and three-quarter month old daughter worships her pacifiers--she literally builds shrines to her pacifiers. Help!

--David Edelstein

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Pacifier elimination is the first cold turkey parenting situation. Later will come unlimited cable TV and internet privileges. Depending on how phone services are billed in your locality, phone call privileges may go the way of the pacifiers for some period of time so that school work can get done on time. If you are lucky to not have free local calling, you can just make them pay for the itemized charges which usually makes them stop calling their friends all night long.

The cute thing about teenagers is that they whine the same way they did as two year olds when you took away the pacifiers.

--Tom R.

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New mother Hanna has not spent enough time reading trashy women's novels. They often make reference to abortifacients, usually after the heroine gives it up to the hero in some ill-advised fashion, gets pregnant, and tries to keep it a secret. Fun things like wacky combinations of herbs. Even better, the birth control measures! Sponges soaked with vinegar!

As far as the Pill being an abortifacient as well as a preventive measure: it does prevent ovulation, as Momma Hirshfeld points out. However, it provides a backup plan as well. If you do ovulate anyway, the fertilized egg cannot implant into the uterine wall. So, technically, a potentially viable pregnancy is ended. The key word is technically - certain people, such as Ashcroft, will make any argument rather than accept that people should have control over their own bodies. Why do certain Republicans think the government should no power over our monetary decisions, but should have total control over our biological ones?

--Laura

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Apparently Martha was able to find a place in a decent child care center because of her affiliation with a federal agency. But what of the vast number of other families without access to such resources? Preschool child care is a state issue (except in the federal District of Columbia), but as far as I know, no state is doing anything to support it. Yet, there has been no organized movement to do anything to change this, either by getting state support for private preschools or by any other means (though there are plenty of efforts to get state support for private schools, and they aren't all religious).

I have thought from time to time that raising child care work from its current low-paid ghettoization in the dot-com economy would be a unifying cause that liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives would embrace. It hasn't happened yet, but I haven't given up hope.

--Paul Decker

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