I've seen what an early fetus looks like. I've had a miscarriage and I had an ectopic pregnancy. So, I'm speaking from first-hand experience. (I've also given birth.) I don't need a film with all the exaggerations of film (scale in this case) to create something that isn't. Yeah, if you angle your camera and zoom up the magnification, you can emphasize the baby aspects of something that does not, in fact, look much like a baby.

In reality, early miscarriages look like bloody pink blobs. So do early abortions. Really early miscarriages look like heavy periods--most women don't even realize they were pregnant.

As for the earlier comment from someone else that most pro-lifers are women. First, most pro-choicers are women. Furthermore, pro-choice groups are nearly all headed by women while the anti-abortion groups are headed by men. So, I'm not buying the notion that women are the big opponents to abortion. I haven't noticed women lawmakers being the ones trying to pass anti-abortion laws in South Dakota.

So quit being disingenuous.

The stats you're citing show a difference that falls within the margin of error. More to the point, how the questions are phrased means everything in the abortion debate. Or experience, for that matter. Thus, more Catholics oppose abortion, but Catholic women are more likely to have an abortion than their non-Catholic counterparts.

But again, the most virulent opponents of abortion have been men. There are women who would never have an abortion themselves and, thus, would see themselves as pro-life, but know better than to assume no one should have access to abortion. This is pretty much what it came down to in South Dakota--it's one thing to think abortion is yucky and sinful, quite another when you realize what having no access to abortion might mean to you and yours personally.

The paintings are fairly charming, but even a "normal" artistic child's work changes dramatically between the ages of four and seven. Where's the progression? The works of the four-year-old Marla look great for a four-year-old, but three years later, particularly with all that investment of time, there should be some sort of progress and there's not. The flower shapes are the same; the perception is still highly two-dimensional. And the background is background is background.

Mozart's music at three and Mozart's music at seven sound different. One of the aspects of high-giftedness is that ability to progress very, very rapidly. Olmstead's drawing, such as it is, isn't particularly developed for a seven-year-old. I've seen six-year-old's work that showed the beginning understanding of perspective and overlapping. That kind of development isn't there--and you'd expect it to be if this were a talented child to develop normally.

And there's the rub. I'm of the school that thinks Marla Olmstead does get to touch the paint to canvas under heavy coaching and fixer-upping, etc. by dad. However, I think whatever is going on is actively destructive to the child's actual artistic development. There's too much invested in her helping to create a recognizable "Marla Olmstead" instead of letting her rapidly change and the develop the way talented kids do at that age.

By the way, even autistic kids develop artistically--check out Oliver Sacks' essay on Stephen in An Anthropologist on Mars.

LW

I hesitated to write at this late date, but I see you are reading the letters, so I wanted to add another perspective and hope you'll see it.

Like you, I was small. Thanks to nursing and birthing babies, I'm now a 38C. In my case, I didn't go back down--i.e. I gained weight. It's okay, but I'd rather be thinner and smaller. It's a nuisance finding things that fit. I did have a guy in Las Vegas ogle them pretty obviously not too long ago and it struck me, as well, funny--nursing will do that to you. Wouldn't want to pay for that experience--there's something weird about it compared to other kinds of ogling--like my breasts weren't really part of me. Honestly, I preferred being eyed up and down--at least all of me was being looked at. It's less dehumanizing.

But more than that--and this is the other perspective--I come from a family where there's been a lot of breast cancer. My mom was diagnosed when I was 14.

And, honestly, I'm just so damn grateful that my breasts have been healthy that the media's obsession with size and perkiness strikes me as so besides the point. I mean, it's no one else's business to tell me how my breasts should look--that there's some damn notion to measure up to. I've got more important things to worry about. Undergo surgery if I don't have to? Cut open my breasts if I don't have to?

Breast size isn't about function, it's about fashion--fashion changes and it can be adapted. There are lots of small-breasted stars who are considered great beauties and adorable to boot--Charlize Theron, Kate Hudson are current ones, Sigourney Weaver, Audrey Hepburn, of course. Jean Harlow, the sex goddess, was quite small (and hippy). Check those women act and see how they dress and carry themselves.

It's true you're not "perfect", but maybe the bigger question is why do you have to be?

On the guy thing--and I say this as someone who's been married for eons--you don't want to marry or even date a guy who runs a checklist on body parts. Men who love you, love all of you--quite often they're just so damn happy to be getting laid that the last thing they want to do is think about what's wrong with their girlfriend. And a lot of 'em like their women to be (and feel) real--too much artifice makes a lot of them uncomfortable. Yes, there are some who want trophies, but you really don't want them.

So go take care of yourself.