Letters to the Editor
jebldmm
Published Letters: 933 Editor's Choice: 164
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So... what are the options for these girls?
[Read the article: Undercover attack on Planned Parenthood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What kind of options do pregnant young girls have? 1) They can go to have an abortion, and expose their lover to arrest 2) they can have the baby in a hospital ... and expose their lover to arrest 3) they can induce an abortion themselves, and end up in a hospital or dead 4) they can have the baby in a bathroom, with no prenatal care or medical assistance, then ... ??? I'm not in favor of teenagers having sex with older men, but there have got to be better options than forcing young girls to either betray their lover (in their minds, that's what it is) or risk their health. If one of those options involves having the girl lie about her age, then so be it. And if this is against "policy", then the policy (and the law that requires it) should be changed.
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Wasn't the al qaida strategy to incite us?
[Read the article: Cheney plays the blame game]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The ones who "validated" their strategy were Bush and Cheney and their cronies. The only al aaida strategy was to terrorize America and incite us to reckless action which would create more hostility between us and the Arab world, allowing terrorist groups to prosper. Terrorism is up, American goodwill is down, al qaida is sitting pretty, and we'll be damn lucky not to end up in WWIII against the middle east before Bushco is done. History is going to look back on the Iraq War as the worst foreign policy blunder of all time. Bush will be held up as a warning to future leaders in how not to react to a crisis.
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How is this insulting to white people?
[Read the article: Is Oprah the new Imus?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm as easily offended as the next person, and I am white (well, technically kind of pinkish beige), but I'm having a hard time understanding the comments here that say that this was insulting. I think that this was an effective and touching comment on how much things have changed. It is unlikely that there were very many, if any, black people who had white people working for them during Oprah's grandmother's day. Merely referring to a race is not insulting. Calling black (or white) women whores is insulting, and that is what Imus was fired for. If Imus had simply made the comment "there are a lot of black women on that basketball team", I suspect he would still be working on the radio.
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Scripturally Speaking, the worst legacy that Falwell is leaving behind is...
[Read the article: The stone is cast]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...that he single-handedly sent thousands, if not millions, down the wrong path regarding Christianity. True Christianity preaches kindness to strangers and loving understanding and forgiveness of our enemies. We are taught by Jesus not to judge lest we be judged ourselves. We are told that we have no right to condemn another if we have sinned and that the fault we see in another is distorted by the aberration in our own eye. Falwell, and his fellow commercial evangelists, taught us that we didn't have to listen to Jesus' teachings as much as we had to listen to their own interpretations of Jesus' teachings.
One of the moral concepts that I remember from reading scripture is the one which tells that when Jesus comes back the people will be separated into two rows on the left and right: sheep and goat, good and bad. And the theme goes that some who think that they are goats will actually be found out to be sheep and some who think that they are sheep will be proven to be goats.
I am fairly certain that there are Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Taoists and Wiccans and a variety of other belief groups out there, who will prove to be "Christians", and a heck of a lot of "Christians" who will prove to be Falwells and Robertsons and Bakkers and Swaggarts et al.
ejb
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Historically, a lot of women surviced childbirth
[Read the article: Extreme childbirth]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So did a lot of babies. That's why we're all here. But a lot died, too - Mothers and babies. I once did a class exercise in a statistics class. We visited an old cemetary and identified the gender and age of the people who had died. Then we collected similar information from recent obituaries. The results were dramatic - young women rarely die nowadays, but in the past they often died in childbirth, and were buried next to their dead infants.
Modern medicine has been so successful in reducing the risks of childbirth that women are no longer afraid of it. They have no reason to be, since the odds of dying in childbirth in the U.S. are extremely low. That is the only reason that these women feel so confident that they are willing to experiment with medicine free childbirth. I don't think this will catch on, though. Dead babies and dead mother's make for terrible publicity. How many women are willing to take a 1 in 5 chance that their baby will die and risk their own death in order to make a statement against modern medicine?
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Trudy B - premature isn't always fatal
[Read the article: Extreme childbirth]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, some premature babies die. But I know of 2 recent premature births (2 months and 1 month pre)and both had happy endings - because the parents had good medical care. Adequate prenatal care can reduce the likelihood of premature delivery, and doctors can often delay the onset of labor and provide drugs to help the babies lungs to make it more likely that the baby survives and thrives. We don't know how premature this woman's delivery was, but it's safe to say that if she had gotten medical care the baby would have had a much greater chance of surviving.