That's how long it takes to evacuate a campus. In two hours you'd be lucky if everyone even knew they had to leave, not to mention the fact of mass panic and hysteria and the fact that thousands of people had nowhere to go. What if the gunman had been hanging out in a dorm and began shooting people after they returned to the dorm? Yeah, that's right, we'd be second guessing the police for not keeping everyone safe and sound in their classrooms. We want to be safe, and for some people that requires envisioning a better response that would have made people safer, but for the most part, it's a fantasy indulging the worst kind of wishful thinking, that someone could have controlled the outcome of this awful incident.

By your anecdote. A crisis response plan requires that someone (a) know that there is a crisis; (b) be capable of identifying the nature of the crisis; and (c) be sufficiently well-informed to give people a prudent plan of action for protecting themselves. If you don't know what people should do to protect themselves you could easily make the situation worse by simply instilling fear and panic or even, heaven forbid, putting them in a more dangerous position. By all reports, VT didn't know it had a crisis, and it's not clear what officials would have told students to do to remain safe even if they were worried that a crisis could arise -- that is, who students should be looking out for, and how to avoid him, when they didn't even have that information themselves. Since the shooter was among those who would have been unwittingly notified the authorities would have been giving him a road map on how to act.

The LW needs a little more perspective about her boyfriend's role in the accident in order to clarify her emotions. Imagine, if you will, if instead of her boyfriend being up there it was some other climber, a second friend, who was depending on boyfriend to show Joe how to proceed safely. Imagine the same accident, and imagine who that other climber would have held most responsible for what happened. It isn't Joe. Maybe Joe's behavior can be explained by his belief that he is being unfairly blamed for a situation for which boyfriend had primary responsibility, a conclusion that isn't altered because boyfriend put his own life at risk rather than some other climber's, or because he suffered serious and possibly chronic injuries as a result. Maybe Joe is a jerk, maybe he bears some responsibility, but it does sound like there's enough blame to go around, at the very least.

If LW asked me this, I would tell him to ask himself honestly if there are situations in which he has used his illness to rationalize unpleasant or threatening behavior. I used to call this the "gap" with a friend of mine: that place where it's difficult to tell whether the person's illness is taking over, or he's just being a jerk. When it's not clear, most friends hesitate to call you out on the bad behavior, and so, it's possible to "get away" with things that you normally wouldn't be able to. But long-term acquaintances figure this out after a while and often resent being taken advantage of, or otherwise protect themselves in ways that make the mentally ill person less of a friend.

LW, why don't you stress to your daughter that men are frequently complete jerks who don't accept their fair share of responsibility for using contraception leaving their partners exposed to the pain, risk, stigma and expense of unplanned pregnancy and abortion, and that, say, when discussing these topics with their children they will often fail or even refuse to acknowledge that they played a central role in the event and thus bear equal responsibility for negative consequences arising therefrom? The fact of mom's abortions might not seem like such a great punchline to that discussion.

As someone with experience in the IF world, I am mostly in agreement with Liza Mundy's assessment of the current issues facing medical professionals and their IF patients. I would quibble in this respect: To say that reproductive medicine is turning back evolution is unfair and yet another sign of how we are all too quick to see the downside of treatments we don't agree with or would never see ourselves using. One could just as easily say that modern medicine as a whole is turning back evolution. For instance, men who have cystic fibrosis can now have children thanks to modern infertility treatment. Thirty years ago many of these men would not have even lived to a point in their lives when they could expect to marry let alone have children. Is it turning back evolution to find treatments for CF? Is it turning back evolution to give women control over their reproductive cycle with the use of contraceptives? Why is infertility treatment alone being singled out for this pernicious sentiment?

It might surprise you to know that many people who use sperm and egg donors are not given pictures -- adult or childhood -- and that some, even when given the chance, don't want them. And then there are those who not only want them but make choices that reflect superficial traits. And you know what? This same range of preference and perspective is played out every day when people choose mates. Obviously, everyone gets to see their prospective mate (well, unless it's a completely arranged marriage) but there is no question in my mind that more than a few people select their mates on relatively superficial bases. And they have very pretty babies. And contrary to accepted wisdom, there are more than a few parents who aren't happy with what they get even when the baby is biologically theirs. Nearly any trait you can think of that you find distasteful among the infertile can be found among the fertile.