...is that before an abortion, they need to determine gestational age, and for that you need an ultrasound. You need to know gestational age in order to to know which procedure to use. You can't just take someone who's walking in asking for an abortion and start whacking around in her uterus without taking a look at what's inside of it first.

Atul Gawande had an interesting article in The New Yorker (9 Oct. 2006) titled "The Score"; it's about "how childbirth went industrial." Basically he sets up a distinction between craft and industry--if medicine is a craft, he writes, then you can expect OBs to become expert in the highly specialized labor-and-delivery skills that are available to help move a difficult pregnancy along (like the use of forceps, for example, or techniques for delivering breech babies, etc). But if medicine is an industry (which it is, of course), then you can't expect all OBs to become good enough at these difficult and highly specialized skills to wield them successfully often enough, so you look instead for the "simpler, more predictable" (his words) solution to delivery problems--the C-section. He argues that from a medical standpoint it's easier to teach someone how to do a C-section (an extremely straightforward operation) than to teach how to use forceps correctly.

I'm not a hospital-birth-basher: both my kids were born in the hospital and I was attended by MDs (no midwives--personally, I like doctors). My experiences were fine by me (took home two healthy kids) though the first one was pretty medicalized (induction, long unproductive labor, epidural, forceps extraction, lots of internal tearing of my vaginal walls, lots of blood loss). But I do recognize that in the U.S. (and elsewhere too, I'm sure), the craft model has long gone the way of the dodo--it's an industry, and just like McDonald's has achieved world domination (joking, sort of) by finding the simplest, most predictable, most easily repeatable and easily replicable way of churning out its product, so has medicine.

For Blackglasses: thanks for the sorority/fraternity snottiness. "I guess a small wedding is okay if you're such a loser that you have only five friends and an 'uninvolved' family, but a popular kid like me just couldn't deny 1,000 people an invitation to my glorious princess party!"

Here's a thought: all those gazillions of your very bestest friends from high school/college/grad school/work/etc? You might try having smaller, more frequent get-togethers with them, where you'll actually be able to talk to them, rather than relying on your MegaWedding to perform the function of maintaining close ties. You know, a get-together in which they don't expect you to pay $10,000 for the pleasure of your company and you don't expect them to pony up an expensive gift.

(A suggestion--just avoid using "whom" altogether, because when you do it wrong, it really stands out.)

Now, for the rest of the "educated people" (blackglasses' phrase) who've chosen simplicity--my people, that is. My husband and I got married for insurance purposes (we were leaving grad school and he had a job lined up but I did not). My parents gave me about $1000 to help out. We spent most of it on a caterer (a friend from grad school) who did an awesome job (I still remember and try to replicate the food he made). We bought a selection of yummy cakes from a great local bakery. We bought beer and wine. I found a simple summery dress (not a wedding dress) at a local outlet mall. We invited our closest friends and family to a ceremony we held in our backyard and we invited a much larger group (more family, the rest of the grad school friends, the college friends) to a post-ceremony party. We were legally married at a JOP a few days before the ceremony, with our two closest friends as witnesses. Because we are not religious, we didn't have a clergyperson at the backyard ceremony; we asked one of our best friends, a graceful and articulate and universally charming person, to officiate. Oh, and we asked for donations to favorite charities instead of gifts.

The party was great; when I look at the pictures from it, I see clumps of happy people standing in our lovely backyard having great conversations--they're all relaxed, eating great food, and having a great time. I see in the pictures all the little kids running around--we could have kids at the ceremony because it was so casual. My husband had the idea to set up a large piece of posterboard and poster paints; he asked everyone to make a handprint on the posterboard and sign it. We've got it framed in our bedroom; people did the most creative things! Some people carefully painted each finger a different color, some people made cool shapes instead of traditional handprints (a soaring bird shape, for example), people wrote little notes and best wishes next to their prints...it was so cool.

Mike, some people would argue that making contraception easily available and making sure teens know how to use it correctly is promoting responsibility--responsible sexual behavior, that is.

What you're in favor of is preachy-ness (before they have sex and get pregnant)and scolding (after they have sex and get pregnant). Which doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. Your approach only makes the preacher/scolder feel morally superior--it doesn't significantly affect behavior. So why do it?