http://news.yahoo.com/s/eonline/20090225/en_tv_eo/101589

kate, i’m interested in exploring this a little further. in what way do you feel that child abuse is the direct result of the nuclear family/social ostracisation? there is also significant child abuse in communities with extended family set ups; indeed, many disciplinary styles used in other cultures would be easily classed as abuse here.

that the patriarchy causes child abuse, i completely agree with. I’m just somewhat more hesitant at placing at the feet of a particular family model; it occurs without regard for social class/family model. while lack of support is one cause of parents abusing their children, it’s not a necessary or sufficient reason (though absolutely it can contribute significantly, i’m not denying that); often enough well supported parents do the same, sadly.

To be angry at the persons who abused children needlessly does not necessitate rage at all persons who seem to possibly meet the stamp of potential abuser.

Who are we to judge will abuse children? All poor women? Poor white women? Poor black women? Children of illegal immigrants? Women who don’t have an IQ of x? Women who are unmarried, women who aren’t wealthy?

And what about the men who spawn irresponsibly? The men who impregnate young women, the other woman, their third wife, the sixth woman they’ve shacked up with?

What about the upper middle class who hide in large houses in neatly kept neighborhoods who dine with the mayor or lobby the senate? Don’t they abuse children also?

The real shame in the octuplet story in my mind, is not just the doc, who frankly, made a nice chunk of change implanting this woman’s uterus, but also the community. Doesn’t this family live in a neighborhood of other people? Doesn’t anyone know them? Why do these people feel so alone? Where was the support that could have steered this woman’s quest for whatever she felt she needed into something healthier for her?

The child abuse rampant in our western culture is a direct result of the nuclear family; which of course is the construct of the patriarchy; where women are isolated from one another and communities do not exist in real, tangible means, but only in some fantasy dream through televisions and internet.

The nay-sayers would have left me alone if I had only followed convention and abandoned my children at sub standard daycare to pursue a paying career, a career to pay enough to buy a home to lock my children and my dirty secrets away behind an acceptable lawn and a nice car.

I applaud you Courtney and all those like you, but your anger is misplaced. Blame the patriarchy, not the bad mothers who would have been less likely to exist or to have harmed their children had there existed a real community around them.

As for the octuplets, the latest news that the media is bleating is that the mother does receive assistance and that for at least three of her past children she receives SSDI because they in fact have some disabilities.

She apparently paid for her IVF treatments with a settlement she received for a workman’s comp claim. Also, her parents begged the doc who performed that previous fertilization services to not service her again, so she found another willing to patronize her breeding dream.

My outrage with how this entire story is played out in the media is that very little effort was made on part of the press to find and put heat on the doc who implanted her with the six embryos. Sure, she had her wingnut ideas, but that doesn’t let the doctor off the hook; he should have known something about her history prior to even considering working with her and once knowing, could have made the decision to not contribute to what is obviously a very dysfunctional environment.

I mean hell, people have to go through years of testing and interviews just to be considered good enough to adopt one child, but some doc seems to think its ok to plant this mom who already had 6 young children under her sole responsibility with more? One household visit and conversation with the primary caretakers would have elicited a different decision, might it have?

Which also leads me to her parents. Although they claim they cried out for her to not do it, she did it anyway. She lives at their home, apparently they have agreed to and accepted assisting her in caring for her first brood. Why? Isn’t that enabling this woman to behave like a 13 year old girl? Why is everyone surprised when she was told not to bring home that pony but did anyway?

Not only this women, but this entire family has serious issues going on with eachother and these children are the result. But hell, if I had a dime for every adult who has kids, or marries that asshole next door, or does some other life changing event simply to spite the parents, I’d be rich right now.

As to Courtney: Good thing you didn’t know me when I was a young mother. Although I met many like you who clucked their tongues at my young personage with three yougun’s in tow.

I’m sure you would have hated me and judged me unfit as I struggled in my old ragged clothes with my barely kempt, raggled children, struggling off to the AFDC office, or to pick up my WIC vouchers or struggling with my screaming wild middle child in public. Yes, I’ll bet it was even you or your shadow personage who came up to me with finger in my face at the bus stop and harangued me in public because you drew the conclusion from your own astute observation that my middle child was being tortured as she wriggled like a convulsing worm at the end of my arm whilst screaming like a pained lemur monkey. Yes, it was you who accused me of child abuse and told me to hurry up and stop that right now or you’d call the authorities.

You didn’t even notice that my daughter immediately stopped her wriggling performance and stood upright and silent in awe at your surprising intrusion on her effort to gain pressure me by force of will to allow her unlimited access to swing on the rope barriers the along the city hall building.

Maybe it was you who sequestered my two daughters in junior high school from class, to grill them on their immediate family’s lifestyle choices. Was it you who had to know right then and there and put my children under threat of punishment, whether or not their mom was doing drugs or alcohol? Whether mom had a job? What did mom do at home in her free time? Where was dad, was he in prison? Where was their brother (who I informed the school upon my response to this unauthorized Q&A Session that I had removed him from the district but it was no surprise she didn’t know as they’d neglected to ensure him a proper education in that district)?

Maybe it was you Courtney who advised the Republican party since Ronald Reagan to make blaming poor women with children a cornerstone of their domestic policy? You must have applauded when Newt Gingrich and others wrote the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 as the legislation that would Change Society as We Know It, build bridges, bring world peace, send astronauts to Mars, keep people employed, bring up the economy and make poor women rip out their uteri and donate them to Baptist churches across the country.

Yes, it was you.

Wouldn’t it be better for them to just not have existed at all? If you had your choice between a psychotic, abusive mother whom you couldn’t escape and to whom all laws gave parental rights and non-existence, which one would you choose?

This isn’t a choice. It’s like when 12 year olds scream I never asked to be born!!! It’s idiotic. No, you didn’t ask to be born. It’s possible that you don’t ask for 78% of what happens in your life. Life is pain. Suffering. You don’t choose between a shit life and never having existed (if it was a shit life and not existing, you could always kill yourself) – if you didn’t exist you couldn’t mkae the choice. So who the hell are you to make that decision, the decision as to wether or not someone would chose to exist for them, which is what you are doing by presenting a question to which you already have the answer.

Actually, the idea that your parents are obligated to you because they had the privilege of Wouldn’t it be better for them to just not have existed at all? you life is a very western, individual centric philosophy. In the east (and i’m talking here India eastward, it may well be further west, i’ll just stick to what i’m sure of) it’s more along the lines of : no matter what you do, you can never, ever repay the debt you have to your parents that springs from the movement they gave you life. Nothing you can give them could ever possibly come close to the gift of life (well, buddha said getting them enlightened would crack it, but that’s the only thing). Nothing they can do could ever diminish the magnitude of your obligation to them. and yes. this includes the junkie parents, the parents that beat you, the parents that heap physical and emotional abuse on you. you can leave, but they have not negated their gift; you are not free of your debt. no matter how bad they are. life is a gift that trumps all.

But last of all:
Who gets to decide who gets the forced sterilization’s? And the mandatory contraception and the like? You? Child protection? the police? the courts? who? what?

Ok – this is last. I actually have sympathy for your intellectual position; I can understand why it does seem attractive to mandate sterilization for truly bad parents, but you want to look at a slippery slope argument: this who set up is one that crys out to punish women and those without resources. I mean… do we get to sterilize people whose religion we dont’ believe in, or only if they make their kids pray? what if the fetus has downs syndrome? should the be mandatorily aborted? Blind? Deaf? A family history of genetic defects? what about a family history of mental illness? As soon as you open it up for “bad parenting” – the issues of who is a bad parent emerge; then you have to start asking for who is it better to “never have existed”. And that really is a slippery slope to hell.

That is all. Carry on.

Courtney, you’re coming off as a eugenics-proponent fascist, are you aware of that? Also, totally judgmental and entirely lacking compassion. I’m not saying that’s *who you are*, I’m saying that’s *how you sound* in this exchange.

*chuckle* It’s very kind and tactful of you to say it in such a way. However, you’re right – I am judgemental and I do lack compassion for people who “accidentally” have children when they have the ability to do otherwise. I am judgemental and I do lack compassion for people who suck at parenting. There are some things in life that “the best I could” just isn’t good enough, and having kids is one of them. I reserve my lack of judgement and compassion for the children of aforementioned parents.

I understand the whole “eugenics-proponent fascist” comment, I really do. It’s kind of a scary concept, to limit childbearing. Hence my “who watches the watchers” aside. But, in a way, we already do that by limiting access to resources for quality childrearing to those on the top of the social heap, in a nearly Orwellian manner. Stupid slum kids? No big deal – we’ll never ask them to run a country, but lots of cheap labor at McDonalds is always handy. Methinks that if there were vastly fewer children in the world, then those children would become more precious and cherished precisely because of their scarcity. Perhaps the difference is that facists are open in their goals?

There’s a great book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy called Mother Nature, and in it she details what happened to unwanted babies before the advent of formula. So, is it better to keep them alive and suffering, or die young and suffering? What about the middle ground, where they outlive formula, but die of starvation later? (AKA, the 2 billion or so of us who are food insecure, as they call it.) Wouldn’t it be better for them to just not have existed at all? If you had your choice between a psychotic, abusive mother whom you couldn’t escape and to whom all laws gave parental rights and non-existence, which one would you choose?

saltyC is a poopy-head!

Also, totally judgmental and entirely lacking compassion. I’m not saying that’s *who you are*, I’m saying that’s *how you sound* in this exchange.

“I did the best I could” but now my child needs stitches because I beat h/h

to

“I did the best I could” but sometimes I just buy the kid the goddamn ice cream cone, even though it’s full of fat and sugar and it’s almost h/h bedtime

–what’s the use in that?