For years my Mom has asked for birthday, Christmas and Mother's Day for gift cards to a bookstore or big box store. I felt rather bad doing so, it seemed the easy way out, but she told me that I was buying her a shopping trip where she could get something for herself and not have to justify buying it. Put that way, I thought it was actually a nice thing to get.

If the kids or whoever live far away from you, you have the added advantage that it is easy to mail and you don't have to deal with returning a gift that doesn't fit or work. In some cases it might be kindness (although perhaps not in the LW case) to tell a prospective giver WHEN ASKED "I'd really like a gift card".

I ruefully remember a Christmas when my mother had bought for me a bright red leather jacket with fringe. I was a bashful teenager and avoided drawing attention to myself at any cost; I saw the jacket and almost burst into tears. I still have no idea why she bought it, other than she wanted me to be the kind of kid who would wear a bright red fringed leather jacket. Anyway she'd bought it in another city on sale and exchanging it was impossible and it had cost quite a bit of money and I think she had these visions of how thrilled I would be. It was not the high point of my adolescence, believe me. So if you know what a kid is into or would love, great but if you don't really know them you might be setting yourself and the kid up for disappointment rather than "the perfect gift".

I'm 47 and we STILL don't talk about the jacket incident, BTW.

Hmmm - any PhD’s here. Doubtful.

Actually a lot of people who post on Salon have PhDs, including me, as well as other higher degrees. And I agree with the previous posters: a legal abortion is very unlikely to render one infertile.

If someone has been pressured into having an abortion, she has every right to be traumatized. She doesn't have the right to make other women feel traumatized.

One of the slightly tedious aspects of my job is the constant stream of young people who think they're a lot more original than they are. I really like being around young adults but sometimes I have to bite my tongue back from saying "Yeah, I see someone with your original ideas every semester". Not sure if that would be good news for LW (There are more like me!) or bad (I'm not that amazing?")

And in my world, a 26-year-old female is a WOMAN, not a girl.

Please help the people without children understand that for some, the urge to have a biological child is very very strong and denial is heartbreaking.

Please help people with children to understand that some other people don't feel this way and genuinely don't want children and no amount of harassment will make them feel otherwise.

Please help people with children to quit asking the childless/ childfree why they don't have children. It's none of our business (I have two BTW)

Please help people without children understand that being lectured about why we shouldn't have/ have had children sounds a lot like those lectures they get about why they should have children.

Please help people realize that there are costs and benefits to having children at any age and that the people involved have to decide what their best decision is. I didn't meet the man I wanted to marry and have children with until well into my 30's, so to have had them earlier would have meant having them with a man I didn't love. But having them later means that I often don't have the energy to do some of the things they would like for me to do.

That's all. No problems, right?

condoms/spermicide/sponges are all easily available at Walgreen's/ Wal-Mart/ CVS etc., and all of them include instruction booklets and information about failure rates. I really find it hard to believe that abstinence-only sex ed. is keeping kids from obtaining contraception

Those things are on the shelf, granted, but from what I understand abstinence-only programs lead kids to believe that those things don't really work. Add to that the reluctance to be seen buying birth control (OMG! Everybody's looking at me!!!) and it may seem a useless and embarrassing proposition to adolescents. Add to THAT the fact that a kid subjected to abstinence-only education may well think that prepared sex is more sinful or forbidden than spontaneous I-couldn't-help-myself sex and I think you have a recipe for unplanned pregnanies.

and it's a lot easier apparently to believe that your kid has autism because of something someone else did than because of just random chance or genetics. When students pick a topic for a paper in my Abnormal Psyc class, every semester someone chooses autism and vaccination and invariably the scientific literature shows no connection.

The interesting thing is that in the US, thimerosal has not been in many vaccines for years. Ask the FDA:

http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm#t1

Currently it's mostly in influenza vaccines. It was more important when multiple injections were sourced from a given bottle of vaccine. Now vaccines are usually provided in single-dose vials.

BUT there is nothing, nothing, you can tell a certain core out there to convince them. NOTHING. I just try to educate the people I can and hope it sticks.