I know a woman who did this. She also didn't immunize her children or have receive any healthcare EVER, and she unschools. I consider her to be the biggest flake I know, and not a very harmless one at that. The poster whose wife 'distrusted strangers' enough to want to give birth alone in the basement with a hottub and candles does nothing to dispel my impression that these couples or single women who do this are eccentric fools. Hopefully their luck will hold out when they too refuse to immunize or participate in their community schools, as I suspect most will do.

You don't have to be an obstetrician to know that while childbirth is a natural event, so is maternal and infant death. Midwives of old didn't wash their hands any more than doctors did, by the way. The reason most of us go to the hospital is because we know that when something goes wrong in childbirth, it goes wrong fast. We will happily trust those strangers if we need them so that we and our babies can live.

Another reason we give birth in hospitals is pain management. I can't believe people are still saying labor pain is imaginary! I would like those people who think this to meet my mother in law: she gave birth 12 times without any pain management at all. She will tell you that some labors were quick, some long, some incredibly painful, some easy. Noone can generalize about this. Personally, mine felt like torture and if I ever do it again I'll take the epidural without any shame.

Lastly, everyone who reads this should reflect on how many women and babies we know who wouldn't be here if it weren't for modern obstetrics. I know several. Even the anonymous husband whose wife gave birth in the basement was probably grateful that those doctors were 5 minutes away.

My labor hurt more than anything I ever experienced before or since, including appendicitis. Let's talk after you give birth.

Often treated as a dirty joke, sperm donation is rarely examined for it's ethics. Even when having a woman having child via sperm donation is discussed ad nauseaum, the sperm itself is treated as coming from some magical source, as if sperm donation really did create children without fathers.

But it doesn't. When a man sells his sperm, he is knowingly accepting the likelihhod that he is creating a new human life. We may criticize the women who use these services as delusional about the importance of fathers for their children (and I think they are very delusional), but at least they have every intention of raising the children they bring into the world. A man who makes children with no concern about who will raise them? Well- I wouldn't breed my dog because I wouldn't have control over how her puppies were treated. A man who deliberatly, for MONEY, donates sperm anonymously? Is any one REALLY foolish enough to think that this wouldn't matter to the resultant children? That they wouldn't feel the same complicated feelings that adoptees do? To paraphrase another poster: these men have carelessly played with the lives of other humans, and you can't sign that away on a contract.

My siblings and I were all married in the 90's. Back then people were saying average weddings cost 25,000 or so. But all four weddings, taseful and catered at rented locales, didn't even come to 10,000 each-with full bars and 100+ guests. I always scratch my head about that 24-28,000 figure and I have suspected that the wedding industry itself is putting it out there so people will measure their own budget against it.

Many of us come from largish families and view a wedding as the way to publicly promise to love and cherish in front of God, family and friends. The idea that it has to cost nearly 30,000 is false. $20 with the justice of the peace won't feel real for those of us who view a marriage as a public and very important sacrament- 10,000 between two families is doable.

Age verification is to keep underage users from lying about their age, and older predators from posing as teenagers.

I am abivalent about being a word police officer, so to speak, but I have a strict policy against EVER calling a woman a skank, or a slut, or a whore. I don't care what she is wearing. I put those words in the same category as nigger and fag (sorry). I doubt the NYT would sub title an article "faggy or masculine? ". As for the other poster's comment:

" the Latina and Black women have more skanky votes than a white woman wearing something nearly identical"- the answer is that the misogynist tendency to judge a woman's character by her clothes is only tempered by classism. A college student in a cotton tank top gets a pass. A poor woman in a glittery tank top is a whore.

Fashion matters, and there is good and bad taste, appropriate and inappropriate. But the words we use to describe tacky clothes on women don't have to be "skanky" or "slutty". Leave her morals out of the discussion. Lets treat women's clothes the way we treat mens: thumbs up or down.