Narrator: she wasn't white.

A 37-year-old Lake Forest man says he thought he chose his victim because "he thought she was white," police say.

https://patch.com/california/lakeforest-ca/lake-forest-man-charged-hate-crime-kidnapping-asian-woman

Sounds to me like someone was caught on video with a minor. It's a classical CCP strategy to make Westerners comply no matter what.

https://twitter.com/BethanyAllenEbr/status/1382394287455936519

From the BBC: "Covid: From boom to bust - why lockdown hasn't led to more babies"

(But it also points out how, in many countries, it's become a lot harder to access family planning services.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-56415248

Excerpt:

...The UN's sexual and reproductive health agency says the pandemic has caused nearly 12 million women in 115 countries to lose access to family planning services. It could result in 1.4 million unintended pregnancies.

In Indonesia alone, the government predicts half a million more babies will be born because of the pandemic. During lockdown the government sent cars around towns and cities blasting a message from loudspeakers. "Dads, please control yourself," the message said.

"You can have sex. You can get married. But don't get pregnant."

The country's national family planning agency says up to 10 million people stopped using contraception because they couldn't access clinics or pharmacies in that time...

And, from last July:

"Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born"

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

I like the Q&A outline. (But I doubt that things like low sperm counts have "nothing" to do with falling birth rates, even if they're a relatively small factor.)

Excerpt:

...Countries, including the UK, have used migration to boost their population and compensate for falling fertility rates.

However, this stops being the answer once nearly every country's population is shrinking.

"We will go from the period where it's a choice to open borders, or not, to frank competition for migrants, as there won't be enough," argues Prof Murray.

Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, financial incentives and extra employment rights, but there is no clear answer....

Admit it: It was funny.

> But it also points out how, in
> many countries, it's become a
> lot harder to access family
> planning services.

To imagine that "family planning" needs to be 'served' is delusion.

Some children are more equal than others:

https://twitter.com/GovCox/status/1382767104722489346

That thing about complete sentences, when you first read it, it's like… Well, we're certain that everyone wants to communicate the urgency of their… I'm sure that all of us can agree about the need for… It would be best if each of us took an extra moment to....

To imagine that "family planning" needs to be 'served' is delusion.
______________________________

And what is delusional about it?

Just because Gandhi said, at least once, that abstinence was the only acceptable birth control (for MARRIED couples), doesn't mean he knew what he was talking about. (He also said there should be a law against couples having sex more than four times. In a lifetime.)

While I don't know how effective certain "natural" methods are - the type so complicated that one has to take a course in them, not just read the book - I do know that the rhythm method means abstaining for about three weeks per month, since most women don't have fixed cycles. Guess when half of the other nine days happen!

It's SEXUALITY. That's like a student complaining "But we didn't have to read about THIS in class!"… As if that's where your education & reading was supposed to end.

Or in your example, as if no one should be expected to have any sexual or erotic insights without a stamp of approval from Hillary Clinton or whomever is approving the 'family planning' brochures.

Gandhi is exemplar for very, very few of my principles.

"Access family planning services" is grievously, tellingly desiccated language.

He was a popular teacher of Spanish.

At last, apples to apples! Been waiting years for a piece this strong on the energy requirements for Bitcoin.

I'm afraid I still don't get what you're trying to say.

By and large, the people who think that artificial birth control isn't a social necessity (much as job opportunities are a necessity, and the two are strongly connected), or who think it shouldn't be easily available in pharmacies, tend to belong to one cult or another.

Mind you, I'm not commenting on whether or not it should be "free."

" Gandhi said"

Meh. That fakir refused proper footwear and didn't have the strength to brush his teeth.

Even Mary Poppins knew he was just a super calloused fragile mystic plagued by halitosis.

5 min video interview: The lumber price problem is not going to to go away.

The guy mentions Covid, but doesn't really tie it into the crisis.

Every new comment begins with a new mindset demanding correction:

> people who think that artificial
> birth control isn't a social
> necessity

How many collections of people with attitudes you find difficult are you really equipped to challenge? You seem to be making a lot of plans for a lot of people to make things go the way you want.

For liberals of your (or at least, my) generation, that was a fine way to daydream. But it would be great if you could acknowledge the scope of the command you plan to wield, and of the public trust you imagine at your back.

Lotta expensive, intrusive stuff from government isn't going so well any more.

"artificial birth control"

All I'm saying is, it does society no good to assume that kids will grow up to have happy, LASTING marriages without comprehensive sex education (which their parents are often ill-equipped to give), if and when the couples end up having more kids than they can handle. Not to mention what divorce (and/or poverty) does to kids, who didn't ask to be born.

If we're talking about the sort of community where all they get is abstinence education (as I've mentioned before, if PARENTS can't convince teens to abstain until marriage or death, why should some unfamiliar teacher convince them - or even get paid to try to convince them), there's a good chance that even as married adults, they're going to be too embarrassed even to read a book on birth control - or talk to their doctors about it. Again, that doesn't bode well for future generations.

What's more, married couples tend not to use condoms (for what I hope are obvious reasons) and pretty much all of the more efficient methods require a doctor's assistance. So I can't imagine why such clinics wouldn't be considered highly necessary.

From the teen book Changing Bodies, Changing Lives (I suspect the following misunderstanding happened in the late 1970s, but it could still happen with any teenage patient now, as well as uneducated adult patients).

17-year-old birth control counselor:

"I was telling this girl about how to use her diaphragm and I thought she understood what I was saying. But then the next day she called me up at the clinic and said 'Do you think strawberry or grape jelly is best?' I said 'What do you mean?' and she said 'With my diaphragm. I don't know which jelly to use.' "

Does anyone really want to live in a world where adults have to be constantly reeducated about crucial decisions like that? Or a world where supposedly intelligent politicians don't see anything wrong with flaunting their painful ignorance, such as the male Wisconsin rep, I think it was, who didn't know basic female anatomy facts? (I'll check in a sec.)

Or, for that matter, a world where TSA agents throw airports into a panic because they don't know the difference between the abbreviations IUD and IED?

TSA workers go into a panic

My mistake - the state was Idaho.

From writer Kara Brown, in Feb. 2015:

Republican State Representative Vito Barbieri from the state of Idaho thinks that a woman's vagina has some sort of direct passageway to her stomach because, I mean, how else does the pee come out?

This rather impressive display of anatomical ignorance (h/t Salon) came during a Idaho House State Affairs Committee hearing where the members heard testimony on a bill that "would ban doctors from prescribing abortion-inducing medication through telemedicine."

Our friend Vito asked Dr. Julie Madsen, who was testifying against the bill, if women could simply swallow a camera in order for doctors to perform remote gynecological exams. Madsen I assume chocked back cries of utter disdain and horror before explaining that "swallowed pills do not end up in the vagina."...

(snip)

And, re diaphragms, I suppose it doesn't hurt to point out that one does NOT want to use K-Y jelly either. Why?

It's not contraceptive jelly.

> All I'm saying is,

Annnnd she's off!: Another 549 words follow "All I'm saying is." That's what I mean by "scope." You come off like a relentless, know-it-all busybody.

Lenona, a lot of people aren't "uneducated," they're stupid. (We see it in conversations here a lot: Masks, epidemiology, politics.) Stupid people don't care what darling truths you bring to them. All your thoughtful citations and reasonable plans for spending third-party money to get in there and fuck with stupid people's lives aren't going to help.

SCOPE.

At the very least, they shouldn't have to cross state lines to find a good family planning provider if they WANT one.

Obviously, as a famous fictional character said, in 1974:

"The only reason a lot of people have kids is because they forget to make a trip to the drugstore."

But at the least, one should be able to BUY condoms at the drugstore - and not have to ask the clerk to get them first, as used to be the case.

I'm well aware that even teenagers often get pregnant on purpose, as black journalist Leon Dash famously wrote in his book When Children Want Children.

But as I've pointed out before, even the average poor or working-class woman doesn't have a dozen children, or else the overall U.S. birth rate wouldn't be so low. So...that suggests that on average, poor women WANT to limit their family sizes. Why deny them easy access to what they want? Especially when they ARE willing to pay out of pocket?

And, doctors are usually smart enough to recommend a method that their less-smart patients are unlikely to screw up - such as the IUD, if she's willing. (I don't know how many "foolproof" methods there are these days, when some methods get taken off the market.)

So maybe that - plus the fact that there's no shortage of smart working class women - are big reasons the birth rate in the lower half of society isn't as high as it was in the pre-Pill era.

The relentlessness of the Liberal project…

It would help if you'd explain what good it does to deny comprehensive sex ed to teens - or to cut funding to family planning services, when plenty of poor teens and poor adults AREN'T necessarily eager to have babies immediately, in or out of wedlock, but aren't about to abstain from sex either. As I've mentioned here, Delaware and Colorado seem to be doing pretty well with their comprehensive approaches, with or without help from the state. (I have yet to hear any proof that abstinence education ever delayed teen sex in such communities by more than a year or so on average - clearly, that's not until marriage.)

Just because the teen pregnancy rate (not just the teen birth rate) is more or less going steadily downward, that doesn't change the fact that a woman can't go on the Pill if her pharmacy won't provide it.

Btw, it's been pointed out that since a woman has about 30 years of fertility, it only makes sense that half of all pregnancies are still unplanned. That is, even if she only has sex 12 times a year, on average, but only wants two children, that's still well over 300 times that she has to PREVENT pregnancy, with or without help from the man. (Not to mention that less than a century ago, it would have been socially unacceptable for married women to say they didn't want to have a child at any given time - babies were something that "just happened," after all. So, in a way, there were no "unplanned pregnancies" back then, but at the same time, they WERE mostly unplanned.)

And Gog, would you please tell us where that comes from, since some here might not know you didn't invent it?

"...please tell us where that comes from, since some here might not know you didn't invent it?"

Answer 1:

Pump the brakes there lady, I'm recycling for internet points!

Answer 2:

A cute girl in theater class told it to me as the punchline to a looooong joke. She's famous now.

Gog, who?

Lenona tomorrow

(I have yet to hear any proof that abstinence education ever delayed teen sex in such communities by more than a year or so on average - clearly, that's not until marriage.)
_________________________________________

It's also been said, over and over, that teens in those communities are, unsurprisingly, LESS likely than other teens to use condoms or birth control of any kind when they DO have PIV sex. (Even Fox News hasn't contradicted that, to my knowledge.)

"Gog, who?"

Nah, she's nice. I mean I love name-dropping and all that but not this time.

Besides, you've probably had more celebrity encounters than me. You should dish!

Lenona, soon. You've written a lot of stuff, which is part of the issue

One other point: If we are agreed that the ideology of "every child should be a wanted child (i.e., a child PLANNED by both parents)" is highly commendable, so as to get the poverty and crime rate down, why shouldn't we all be using the best way to achieve that? If that turns out to be comprehensive sex ed, which certainly seems to be true in most (all?) of Europe, what's the problem?

Yes, we may always have abused foster children born to mothers who didn't really want them (or, like many teen boys and girls, wanted babies but didn't want the drudgery of caring for them). However, since the American birthdate has been going down for decades, it seems to me we should, at least, be able to get the number of foster children down to the point where they don't have to beg every week in newspapers, TV, and social media to get adopted. (From what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of those kids are white.)

Let's not forget that the vast majority of violent criminals were abused children as well.

Finally, if each truly non compos mentis woman (as opposed to poor women) were having a baby every year, wouldn't we be SEEING families of 20 children more often - and getting more statistics on that, in the news?

"American birthdate"

I meant, of course, "birth rate."

And, re this:

That's like a student complaining "But we didn't have to read about THIS in class!"… As if that's where your education & reading was supposed to end.

Well, one could also argue that parents should be the ones to teach kids about Home Economics and that teachers shouldn't be spending precious time on that. Yet, that course used to be pretty common in schools. I certainly remember taking a few classes in 4th grade, I think it was. Besides cooking, they included a class on the importance of eating breakfast, which, as a kid, I thought was ridiculous - who WANTS to skip breakfast? Plus a class on dental hygiene.

But, one could argue that learning about proper nutrition is crucial to the nation's health. (It's certainly pathetic that there ARE parents who let their kids consume Coke and ice cream for breakfast just because the kids might cry buckets or worse if the parents don't give in. Or parents who eat the same things for breakfast!)

Not to mention that it's probably a safe bet that one reason high school classes about alcohol abuse are relatively new is that, before 1980 or so, killing someone while driving drunk wasn't really considered a crime. Thank goodness we came to our senses. Just because any ten-year-old understands why drunk driving laws exist doesn't mean the lesson doesn't need to get hammered into a teen's head, over and over, by ALL adults in a teen's life. How is sex ed any less important, when so many girls' AND boys' lives get ruined by babies - not to mention the babies' futures?

P.S. My smart mother never talked to me about alcohol - or about taking car keys away from a drunk friend. Nowadays, that would probably be grounds for neglect charges.

Bottom line is: even if no one ever taught you how to cook, clean, shop the sales, or do basic clothing or house repairs, the worst that can happen (if you don't teach yourself those skills) is that you'll waste a lot of money paying someone else to do them - and drive away potential spouses when they realize how lazy and useless you are.

Sexuality is much more serious. If no one teaches you that you really do have to use two or three contraceptives simultaneously, not just one, or that foam and condoms aren't enough because a lot of nice people have herpes and don't even know it yet, you may not GUESS that you're going to be in big trouble. (Condoms don't protect that well against herpes, IIRC.)

The same goes, more or less, for drug education.

Bottom line is: even if no one ever taught you how to cook, clean, shop the sales, or do basic clothing or house repairs, the worst that can happen (if you don't teach yourself those skills) is that you'll waste a lot of money paying someone else to do them - and drive away potential spouses when they realize how lazy and useless you are.

Sexuality is much more serious. If no one teaches you that you really do have to use two or three contraceptives simultaneously, not just one, or that foam and condoms aren't enough because a lot of nice people have herpes and don't even know it yet, you may not GUESS that you're going to be in big trouble. (Condoms don't protect that well against herpes, IIRC.)

The same goes, more or less, for drug education.