it's a feminist subject because...

To those of us reading these TomKat stories it seems very apparent that Ms. Holmes is not making her own decisions here. I think feminists, above all, want women to be able to make their own decisions.

-- Beth

And you're contribution to feminist decision-making was to waste your college years getting drunk at frat parties. With so-called feminists like you, no wonder the movement is losing ground. Speaking as a feminist, I can't tell you how delighted I am that you're so worried about Katie Holmes, a complete fucking stranger except for what you read in the tabloids. I can't tell you how delighted I am because I'm not delighted. At all. Get offline and do some real work for the cause of feminism. Or go back to a frat party for all I care.

"Believe it or not, I have no idea how to do -- or who does -- the little red stars. For all I know, it's aliens. ;-)"

So aliens have been running Salon of late. That would explain a lot!

To those of us reading these TomKat stories it seems very apparent that Ms. Holmes is not making her own decisions here. I think feminists, above all, want women to be able to make their own decisions.

That's why I detest the tabloids. They're designed to appeal to the lowest of the low in our emotions and few people apply logic to their crap articles all of which are speculative at best.

Who is the source for such confidential matters between husband and wife? You mean the physician who is about to deliver their baby made a call to the Tabloids? Perhaps Katie's best friend? Maybe a Scientologist who, out of concern, just decided to give us a little information.

Maybe it's a little bottom-feeder who makes his money skulking in the bushes, on a slow day, looked up Scientology practices...hmmm, Scientology, baby, Tom Cruise,Katie...here you go, stupid people, eat it up.

So now we have hysteria building. Child abuse, brain washing, Cult doctrine, on and on ad nauseum. Aw c'mon!

Let's look at some facts. Katie Holmes dated, then was engaged for about two years. Did she get pregnant? No. Tom Cruise was married, first to Mimi, then Nicole (who adopted), then dated Cruz. None of these women chose to get pregnant.

Tom and Katie are the commonality among the variables. They got together and choose to have a baby.

Or maybe Katie and Tom both just cannot afford birth control? Wait. Perhaps poor Tom, so ugly (lie), so poor(lie), so unsuccessful (look how little his last movie made)(lie) NEEDS to 'brainwash' poor virgin Katie to having his baby... You see how absurd this is?

I don't read tabloids. Anyone who wants to read a tabloid knows where to find one. If someone wants to read important issues about women, they come to Broadsheet. However, no one can go to a tabloid and find a Broadsheet article.

The headline is insulting at best. No one wants to read such garbage about themselves. There is a karmic payback for writing such bull. Lynn Harris is a talented writer. Certainly she can do better. Again, dress it up all you want, the originator of such a story did not do it out of "concern" for "poor Katie" and the "innocent baby."

I stand by my original opinion. This story does not belong on Broadsheet. Nothing in that story is factual, confirmed, true or of any redeeming value. Red star whatever you want, truth is truth.

To those who scream we should support Katie's choice of natural childbirth, I'd remind you that this is NOT her choice: she is given no other option by the Scientology group.

As to refraining from speaking to a child for 7 days, this is tantamount to child abuse. Sure, they don't know the meaning of words, but the sound of the parents' voices are calming and establish bonding. Study after study shows that infants that don't receive intimate touching and talking in their first days often become sociopaths with no capacity for human intimacy or empathy.

My son did. You know what the treatment is? LIGHT. They had to put my baby in a lightbox because there wasn't enough light coming into my hospital room or the nursery, and he wasn't good enough at breastfeeding yet to get enough milk to flush it out.

Seven days in the dark for a bili baby... well, I don't know if it would kill them, but I suspect it would be bad, bad, bad. And since you can't tell the color of a baby's skin in the dark, no one will know the baby has high bilirubin until they take it out. The way you tell a bili baby without a medical examination is: is the skin orange? (at least for a white child, I don't know what a dark-skinned bili baby would look like. I only ever saw mine.) How are you going to see orange skin in the dark?

Also, it is hard enough to learn to breastfeed without having to do it in the dark. It's really not as simple as "baby glomps nipple" -- both mother and child need to learn. If they're doing formula, ironically, that might be easier, but somehow formula doesn't seem consistent with most of the rest of the Scientologists' ideas.

Quiet and dark won't hurt the baby if it is frequently snuggled -- not for just seven days. But being abandoned in a room by itself could be very damaging; babies have died of that. So I hope they're not talking about leaving the baby there except when feeding; if they're not going to talk to it, and they have the lights off, they better snuggle it frequently.

To be honest, I believe that refusing to allow your baby a medical examination on religious grounds is child abuse, and whether you're a Scientologist or a Christian Scientist, you have no right to deny your children medical examinations. (Treatment is another story; the history of medicine is full of dubious treatments that were seen as absolutely necessary until they turned out to be absolutely harmful, and reasonable people can disagree on matters like "will immunizing my children expose them to the risk of developing autism?" or "should I put a cochlear implant in my deaf baby's ear?" An *examination*, however, to determine what *is* wrong with the child, if anything, to allow the parents to discuss possible treatments with a doctor, is absolutely necessary and should be the birthright of all children.)

Katie Holmes can do whatever stupid thing she wants with her birth; she's a grown woman and if she agrees to something as dumb as "no drugs *and* no sound", whatever. I have no respect for adults who as adults adopt religious beliefs that are harmful to them, particularly women who buy into misogynistic religions as adults (I'd have as little respect for men who buy into misandrist religions, except that, aside from certain extremely fringe radical elements within Wicca, there aren't any.) Holmes deserves what she gets. But people who risk serious harm to their babies for stupid religious reasons are another story.