Sherry Chandler

Some Mother’s Day Follow-Up

From Allegre’s Diary at the Daily Kos:

I’m tired of the tears.
I’m tired of the chants.
I’m tired of the rallies and vigils and pleas for peace - for our children’s sake.
I’m tired of singing the same songs generation after generation after generation…

But I’m not going anywhere and now, neither are my children - third generation peace activists.

My husband & I took our children to the Code Pink Mothers Day peace vigil at the White House Saturday and Sunday, and this mother can’t think of a better way to celebrate - standing tall with other mothers and their kids demanding that once and for all, our leaders stop waging war in our name, using our children as cannon fodder.

From Nora Ephron’s Huffington Post blog:

I have never approved of Laura Bush, for all the obvious reasons, but I have to admit that I’m intrigued by her in one respect: she’s truly a mystery as a mother. I never like to judge people motherhood-wise, because you never know. But it’s hard to think of any First Lady who has been seen less often with her children. Is she deliberately ruling out the promiscuous photo opportunities? Does she have a political position about her daughters’ right to privacy? Or is it just that they never call, they never write, they never visit, as the old joke goes.

Anyway, on Mother’s Day, I decided to watch Laura Bush on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. She told George she doesn’t believe her husband’s low approval ratings. She claimed that the press enjoys printing the bad news. She said she wasn’t seeing either of her daughters on Mother’s Day. No surprise in any of that.

From AFP:

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Canadian Melissa Vatkin has joined thousands of couples flocking to the United States to cash in on the disputed luxury of being able to dictate the sex of their next baby.

Parents from around the world are forking out around 19,000 dollars for a groundbreaking gender selection treatment offered by only a handful of US clinics but banned in most countries.

The high-tech method of resolving the ancient question of “Would we prefer a boy or a girl?” has raised ethical concerns and fears that it could worsen an already worrying gender imbalance plaguing countries such as China and India.

But for couples like the Vatkins, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, which proponents boast gives parents a 99 percent certainty of delivering a baby of the sex of their choice, the procedure is a godsend.

…

Other couples come from much further afield. More than 50 percent of the couples that come to Steinberg for help are from outside the United States.

Would-be parents from territories such as China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Britain and Canada are flocking to Steinberg’s Los Angeles and Arizona clinics.

“They come from everywhere that it’s banned by law,” Steinberg said. “But in the United States we really guard and cherish reproductive choice and we are very reticent to allow the government to impinge on that.”

…

He stresses that his clients mostly opt to keep fertilised eggs in his eggbank rather than discard them. He said the technique was more humane than the current trend of aborting foetuses or dumping female babies in India and China.

1. Let’s talk about poetry
2. Mother’s Day Report Card
3. from “The Mother on the Other Side of the World”
4. Scene with Orphan and Mother
5. Weaponizing space

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