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Published Letters: 292
Editor's Choice: 20
Mike, I am the primary breadwinner in our household. I outearn my husband by a wide margin. When we got married I came with a house, a well paying job, no debt, substantial savings and retirement fund. I'm tired of hearing that as a modern woman (ie feminist) I'm in actuality a gold digging nag-whore who's going to steal my husband's hard earned cash and alienate our kids from him while I run off with the pool boy.
I really don't get it. The same men that deplore working women and working moms and prefer that their wives stay at home and raise the kids (without pay), then complain about the unfairness of alimony payments in the event of a divorce. So does that pre-nup that you are advocating include an annual salary for your wife for the housekeeping, cooking and child care? When you encourage your spouse to stay out of the working world and compromise their job marketability, how do you expect them to earn a decent living in case of a divorce?
Even within my fairly progressive family I have to put up with the inevitable questions about what I'm going to do about my career when we have kids. Or I get eyeballed by my boss because I'm hitting my prime reproductive years, but my husband's boss doesn't even consider that having children could impact his job. Because it is completely outside the realm of possibilities that my husband could be the primary caregiver or it's just assumed that he outearns me? I have to justify my career and ambitions and the fact that I would like to have children also ("having it all"), while my husband gets a free pass because it's expected that he can have both.
Marriage *is* special. But it's not one person shutting up and smiling and turning themself off from their partner. When my husband comes home from the office, I want him to talk to me about his day, and if it turns out it was a bad one, it's my turn to tell him that it's okay and yes his boss is an idiot and deserves to be pushed down the elevator shaft. And he does the same for me. I know he has my back and I've got his.
Why bother clocking in? Especially in a profession that is so physically demanding. If she had made her $14 million by cleaning toilets would you accuse her of opting out or would you just call it a well earned retirement?
My concern with the ruling is that it is based on a term "partial-birht abortion" that has no medical definition. So what is it really banning? The specific Dilation and Extraction (D&X) procedure or abortions past a certain timeframe or both? How can viability not meaning anything here? What about the cases in which the fetus has such severe defects that it is not viable, meaning even if born, that it will die or would most likely not even survive the birth or even worse it is not alive (womb death). Are women now force to carry to term and going through a vaginal birth or C-section that could compromise their life or health? How can the "right to life" of a fetus that will certainly die soon after birth or a dead fetus trump the rights of the woman to her life or her health? She is a living breathing person supposedly protected under our constitution. How can you justify sacrificing her life for no life or a life that won't continue past a few days? If just the D&X procedure is banned, are there other more risky procedures that would have the same outcome as the D&X, but just with more risk to the woman's life/health? How is that more morally justifiable? Or is it just less "icky"? If there was the big concern about the health "loop hole" why didn't they allow a specification for physical health?
As a woman how is planning on having a child in the next couple of years, it is worrisome to me about what my options are in the case of a non-viable pregnancy. Reading the stories of the women presented in the case is just absolutely painful. None of these women wanted this procedure, they would have rather had pregnancies that resulted in healthy babies. How is more moral to have forced the to not only face the definite death of their baby, but also force them to suffer through dangerous births that could harm their health and future fertility.
What if Duane and Alvin were identical twin brothers and the evil brother pretended to be the good brother and had sex with the good brother's girlfriend? Or if Alvin was an evil criminal had Duane's (the good cop) face transplanted onto his face and then went to Duane's house and had sex with Mrs. Duane? Okay, yeah I'd call that rape by fraud. Otherwise, the girlfriend is full of crap.