Strange New World

In the latest “strange things that happen thanks to IVF” category, a widow has tried to claim Social Security survivor benefits for her twin children.  The problem?  The children were conceived from banked sperm after their father died.

Yes, parents die.  However, intentionally creating children who were never alive at the same time as their father… I don’t know what to call it.  Selfish?  Short—sighted?  Over-entitled?  There’s a vast difference between a pregnant mom who loses her husband to accident or disease and intentionally creating a difficult situation that wasn’t already there.

Social Security denied the claim.  The Supreme Court upheld their decision unanimously, saying that the children were never dependent on their father monetarily and were, therefore, ineligible to claim “survivor” status.

The author of the Lifenews article I cited at the top lamented that the Court didn’t rule in favor of the kids (aren’t they people, too?), partially because she seems to think if taxpayers are paying for weird IVF consequences that they’d pay more attention.

Um, Octomom, anyone?  She’s still on public assistance, except for posing for nude photos, last I saw on the tabloid headlines at the grocery store.  So, no, I really doubt that taxpayers footing the bill for one more piece of stupid behavior would wake anyone up to the morals-free, money-reigns world of IVF and all the strange possibilities it opens up.

Unfortunately, we have lost our capacity for shock.

Yes, the twins are people; that doesn’t entitle them to Social Security benefits.  Actually, as people, the twins deserved better than to be manipulated in a lab to create a living memorial to their dead father.  (At least they actually have a father, as opposed to all the children with anonymous sperm donors as fathers.)  Whether it’s a “savior sibling”, bred for donor tissue for a sick older brother or sister, or a memorial child, these children do not deserve to be treated as things for other’s purposes.

G.K. Chesterton, who died well before things got this weird, commented, “We have learned to do a great many clever things.  The next thing will be to learn not to do them.”

I’m not sure we’ll ever learn that.

Honest, always honest…

WordPress started this thing a while back where, as soon as you hit “publish” on a post, you are automatically taken to a screen that shows you the post as it appears on your blog with a sidebar saying something like, “Congratulations!  You have published 845 posts!”  Under that is a goal (“Five more posts to reach 850!”) and a quote about writing.  This is what I got this last time:

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.  — Tennesee Williams

Yeah, this is me.  The crazy woman who cares too much for most people’s tastes about the One Child Policy, genocide in Sudan, adoption, pro-life issues, homeschooling, gardening, and crafting, all at the same time, and couldn’t make happy chit-chat about much of anything except kids and maybe old Navy escapades (“So, we were doing divtacs with the Brits- you know how that is!- and the aft lookout says…”).

*meh*

Some days, I wonder what it would be like to be normal.

Not an ending, but a new beginning

At long last, Chen Guangcheng and his immediate family are safe in America.

The Chinese government, of course, has now sentenced his nephew to death for defending his family during a nighttime raid by police.  (He is accused of murder.)  Other family members and friends of Chen have been arrested, detained, and harrassed.  Without outside pressure, this is likely to continue, in an effort to discredit Chen and his message.

The U.S., ever eager in this administration to bow to all the wrong people, didn’t jump to Chen’s aid when he escaped his years-long house arrest and arrived at the U.S. embassy several weeks ago.  Instead, the embassy officials told Chen to go ahead and leave to get medical attention.  (And, right now, anyone who ever received any training on standing inport deck watch in the Navy is groaning; once someone has taken refuge on board, you do NOT LET THEM LEAVE.  Even if the threat seems to have passed and they’re saying, “Oh, it’s ok now, that’s my brother come to take me home,” once you have given them haven on U.S. territory (a Navy ship or an embassy), you can’t make them leave nor let them leave until you are sure they are safe and have authorization from higher authority.  And you certainly don’t encourage them to voluntarily walk off.)

But what did we expect from a State Department that gave the Russians a mis-translated gag gift that said “overcharge” instead of “reset”?  (A gag gift?  In international politics?!?)

Chen devoted his life and sacrificed his safety to document abuses of China’s One Child Policy.  At first, he may have thought he was only bringing to light abuses of the policy (although the policy itself is abusive).  Eventually, it became obvious that the abuses were part and parcel of any coercive, government-mandated birth control program.  And, no, Beijing was not interested in what a self-taught lawyer was telling them about how the policy was being implemented.  Instead of going after officials grossly overstepping the bounds of the law, the government went after Chen, trying him on trumped-up charges and placing him and his family under house arrest.

The U.S. has long made it a policy that we take seriously our responsibilities to support and encourage freedom and democracy and those who fight for them around the world.

Do we love our money so much that we’d rather compromise our principles than offend our lenders?

Fortunately, Chen has supporters in the U.S., too.  This is not the end of his fight to end the One Child Policy, it is a new beginning.

*snicker*

After a number of deep, thought-provoking posts on death, sin, etc., I scrolled down through Calah’s always-wonderful blog to find…

(After I posted it, I realized you might not be able to read it: “Come the zombie apocalypse, the kids in public schools will wish somebody had taught them melee weapons fighting and small unit tactics.”)

Yeah, that’s my kids, all right.    And you should see how well-armed and camouflaged the rest of the homeschoolers show up at park day, too, so, no, it isn’t just kids whose parents learned most of their parenting skills from Plebe Summer at the Naval Academy.

The faces behind the statistic

The problem with pre-natal testing is that many people (maybe most) don’t use it to prepare for the birth of a child with disabilities, they use it to kill the child before he or she can be born.  This is particularly well documented with children diagnosed in utero with Downs Syndrome; around 90% of children with this diagnosis will be aborted, often under heavy pressure from doctors overplaying the severity of the condition.  (Unlike some diagnoses that are clear cut, Downs is a range.  Someone with mild Downs can function fairly normally, while those with more severe cases will need life-long help.  I would also note that many tests give false positives; I have heard several stories of dire warnings and harrassment to abort from doctors, only to have the child test perfectly normal after birth.)  I’d like to think the March of Dimes and such are trying to help, but promoting pre-natal testing isn’t the way to help, unless by “help” you simply mean decreasing the number of Downs Syndrome children who make it to birth, not the number conceived.

So, a new internet campaign is trying to bring attention to this appalling statistic.  Maybe, if more people understood Downs, fewer would cave into the pressure from the “experts” telling them that their baby would be better off dead.

And, yet again, we have to ask ourselves how many of these children would be allowed to live if our culture didn’t push the idea of one or two “perfect” children and absolutely no more.  If we had space in our hearts for three or four children (or more), would we be more accepting of the less-than-perfect, too?

Family Vacation

One of the benefits of homeschooling is that you don’t have to take vacations when everybody else does.  Therefore, places that are wall-to-wall people in July are easily navigated and enjoyed in, say, May.  Which is precisely what we were doing for the last week.

First, Philadelphia and the Independence Hall NHP on Saturday, after driving up Friday afternoon.

Then, Chinatown, hand-pulled noodles, and the largest sesame balls I’ve ever seen!

In the “exciting for me, but maybe not for you” category, we also found the Catholic parish that serves Chinatown.  They don’t have a bookstore,  but the priest kindly told us to take whatever we wanted out of a box of holy cards and stuff that he couldn’t get anybody to take.  Thirty holy cards of Chinese martyrs and five or six nice, large copies of “Our Lady, Empress of China” later, and I was a happy Catholic momma, especially since we found Oof’s namesake, St. Joachim Hao Kai Zhi!

Next, it was off to Niagara Falls.  We took a lovely (and expensive!) all-day, all-inclusive bus tour, including the Maid of the Mist, a boat that takes you right up next to the falls.

The tour also included tickets for the White Water Walk, which I highly recommend.  The boardwalk, which gets much closer to the water at points, follows some particularly impressive rapids between the falls and the giant whirlpool.

The whirlwind tour took us to the National Toy Museum in Rochester the next day (the kids absolutely loved it, I got very tired of it very quickly), then to the Finger Lakes region for winery tours the following day (which they got tired of very quickly), getting into Lancaster, PA, Wednesday night.  Thursday was dedicated to touring Hershey (if you want the museum and not the over-priced indoor rides, you want the Hershey Story Museum on the main street, not Chocolate World next to the amusement park).

We toured around Amish country, but I don’t really have any good photos of that.  Lots of beautiful farms and hefty noodles.

Finally, we headed home on Friday, via Annapolis.  We went to visit our alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy.  Since I already have tons of photos of that, I didn’t really take that many.  But I did take pictures at Chick and Ruth’s, the deli in downtown Annapolis that was our normal “cheap place to hang out as broke midshipmen” date.  Nothing says “romantic” like giant malts and kosher pickles by the bucket!

No, I won’t smile! I’m slurping chocolate shake here!

By the time we got to our exit off the freeway late that afternoon, the kids were squealing with delight, “WE’RE HOME!!!!”

We are such a bunch of homebodies.  But it was fun to get out.

Ah, yes, the Virginian-Pilot…

I wrote a while back about why I was dumping my subscription to the paper, after decades of being a faithful newspaper subscriber.

If I hadn’t before, this might’ve done it: apparently, a couple was surrounded by a mob of about a hundred at the intersection of Church and Brambleton (edge of downtown Norfolk) on their way home from a concert, someone threw a rock at the car, the driver got out to confront the rock thrower, and then the driver and passenger were beaten by about thirty young men.  The Pilot said precisely nothing for two weeks.

(No, this is not an area you’d go through at night without good reason.  It’s a little “iffy” during the day.  And I certainly wouldn’t get out of the car to argue with anybody, even in daylight.  Heck, if someone from a mob of a hundred threw a rock at my car over on my very boring, middle-class end of town, I wouldn’t get out of the car to argue!)

The couple who were attacked work for the paper.  They were both out of work for a week with injuries and trauma.

But the mob was mostly black, and the victims were white.  Heaven forbid the Pilot say anything so right-wing as to suggest that there’s some sort of problem in the projects by reporting a black-on-white mob crime.

Finally, the news hit the conservative websites today after an opinion piece was published on the incident.  (It’s only mentioned on the Pilot’s website because the piece made the “Most Read” list, a ways down the web page.)  What the author didn’t mention is that the theater the victims were leaving, the Attucks, features a lot of black artists and does programs in the local community for troubled youth (I saw Ladysmith Black Mombazo there; lovely restored theater, but the area around it, once flourishing, is now a total wreck).  The area is bordered by blocks and blocks of the projects.  The comments section at the paper’s website is full of frustrated people from Norfolk saying the police have given up on doing anything about the criminals in the projects, the violence, and the crime.   The location of the attack is only blocks from a number of concert venues and night spots.

And the intersection of Church and Brambleton is the site of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, a large obelisk with fountains around the base in the center of the intersection.

The irony of MLK’s dream vs. the reality is just sad.