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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/9701/full/features/cancer/home.html
http://www.tamu.edu/univrel/aggiedaily/news/stories/archive/111998-3.html
http://health.discovery.com/centers/pregnancy/americanbaby/pregnancybenefits.html
Actually if you google it, and it has been in the American Medical Journal, Scientific American .... pregnancy before 30 does decrease cancer rates in women by a significate rate.
The last link on the benefits, note the one about your periods - one of the causes of infertility is irregular menstrual cycles. Pregnancy frequently improves and restores normal menstrual cycles - fertility still goes down with age, but if you've already had a child, you've extended your regular menstrual cycles out for a few years, also infertility can be caused by a lack of fertility hormones (estrogen, progesterone, folllicle stimlating, luteinizing, gonadotropin) these decrease with age - but after a pregnancy they go back to normal(or are increased by the pregnancy) - atleast for awhile - so you've removed two possible causes of infertility by having a child. Having a child before 30 improves the odds of having a child later. That doesn't mean forever - everyones fertility is still declining rapidly after 30, its just a matter of odds. (And that 30 is not a hard and fast rule, it depends on genetics and when women in your family start menopause, it could be earlier or later)
The UCSC article recommends hormone supplements rather than pregnancy. The TAMU article is about alpha-fetoprotein, and says that its effect is most pronounced in women who become pregnant before 20. That article says that if their theory on the protein are correct it may, in the future, be administered to women to reduce breast cancer rates. The Discovery article explicitly states that these are all just hypotheses; it also says that both pregnancies and breastfeeding (which delays resumption of menstruation) seem to produce the protective effect.
The first and second articles you cited both support what I said, which is that Seasonale or a similar birth control pill regimen will have the same effect as pregnancy. The second article talks about a protein which is not currently commercially available, but if its benefits are proven I would guess that it will become as common as iron and calcium supplements.
I don't know...the fury, rhetoric and pathology of Laurel's denigration of open adoption -- and adoption in general -- makes her sound an awful lot like the infamous anti-adoption wingding Tricia Vaughan Smith, who also, in an oxyomoronic twist, does a really bad ersatz comedy routine called "The Comic Mom."
Anyway...most of these anti-adoption fanatics were adopted themselves, and apparently hold adoption responsible for the less-than-perfect parental skills of their adoptive parents, or perhaps for their own mental health challenges and serotonin imbalances.
Ignore them, because they are not personally prepared to finance every single mother around the world who can't afford to care for her child. They don't have a solution, they just have complaints and whines and gripes, and "poor me, I was adopted" rants and raves, and blatherings about blood and "real" mothers versus "custodians."
They'd rather see children aborted, living in orphanages, in poverty, or dead of disease and malnutrition, then with adoptive parents.
Yeah, I'll take Laurel, and her adoption-hating pals seriously when they actually have some sort of idea of what to DO to help the mothers they think should have no right to make an adoption plan, and the children who have no future...
Sign me...
Disgusted with the Anti-Adoption People
Johnnie Girl, I feel kind enlightened now that I some idea of how young you are! Let me clarify something for you: the idea that women choose career over family is a misogynistic myth! It undsrscores a hateful notion that a woman who chooses anything other than motherhood is selfish.
None of my friends had children until their thirties. And, aside from a few, they don't have terribly exciting jobs nor are they making bank. Rather, they waited until they found a man (or a woman) with whom they could share the responsibility of raising children.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's no recipe for family. Was it Tolsotoy who said that thing about all happy families are the same? Tolstoy was full of shit. There are about a million ways to make a happy family.
Thank goodness--an adoptive mom who gets it! Open adoption is often hard for the adults, but is what's best for the child.
I'm so glad Ms. Friedman had a big enough heart to understand why maintaining contact with Jessica was important to Madison. It's not about "Who does this child belong to?" but "Who belongs to this child?"
I'm also glad that this article did not ignore the pain that's inherent in adoption. Too often people try to make adoption a shiny, happy thing when it's so much more complex than that. I appreciate the honesty and subtlety of this story.
Pregnancy can destroy your health. Turning 30 is the artificial point at which we can accept that we are no longer young and accept that we are never going to have the bodies we had when we were young. Destroying your health deliberately by getting pregnant earlier than that just seems like it's damn unfair, like deliberately aging ten years in nine months. And the fertility dropoff after 27 is way overrated. If you try before 34 and you don't get pregnant, odds are, you weren't that fertile at 27. Everyone's different (I got pregnant at 36 while breastfeeding *and* on the mini-pill. Others can't get pregnant when they start in early 20's. 27's a statistical average.)
My mom had me when she was 19. She suffered pre-eclampsia so severe the doctor put her on a 1,000 calorie diet, and her health was never the same after that. At age 33, after having three kids (she finished up at 27), she developed type 2 diabetes, which at the time was fairly unheard of for a woman her age.
I had my first biological baby at age 34. My health was great until I turned 30. It sucked a lot worse after the baby, but at least I had my ten good years of adulthood.
Adoption is not a perfect solution, but often better than any available alternative. My mother was adopted, and was haunted by it her whole life. Recently she has come in contact with her birthfather's family, and has been amazed to discover how similar she is to them in many respects. Yet her *love* will always be for the family that took her in and raised her as their own. My stepchildren, which I acquired at the ages of 2 and 3, think of me as their mother and their biological mother as something more akin to a fun but flaky aunt who turns up randomly and takes them to the movies, only to disappear again sometimes for a year at a time. They are perfectly aware that biologically, I am not their mother, but they don't care. My husband chose to take his stepfather's last name and to completely cut himself off from his abusive biological father's family when he was 11 or 12 or so, because as many problems as he's had with his stepfather, the man's been far better to him than his bio father ever was.
Blood is important. Knowing your blood is very important -- it tells you what is *you*, what is your environment, and what is from your family. But love is for the people who raised you, the people who cared for you. The people who wiped your butt when you were toilet training and read you stories and taught you how to ride a bicycle may be completely different from you as human beings, but they are who you will love and who you will look to as rolemodels. Your blood tells you where you came from but the parents that you love tell you who to try to be.
It is vastly more important to be in a good place regarding your own readiness to be a parent, your emotional state, and your financial situation than it is to make sure that your kids are raised with their own blood. A child who becomes a parent (and some people are children even when they're 25) and cannot quickly mature to meet the demands of their new life will probably make their child's life miserable; a person who has a child too young is statistically much more likely to doom that child to a life of poverty, and here in America, poverty means you don't live nearly as long as if you were middle class or wealthy. Why would you cut ten-twenty years off your baby's life just to make sure you had one before your biological clock ran out? Why would you saddle a tiny baby with a miserable, immature mother (or father, for that matter) when waiting would make you a better parent? There are people who become great mothers and fathers even though they had children young. My mom was a great mother. My mom also knew from the time she was 4 that she wanted to be a mother, and embraced me eagerly even though I was unplanned and she was unmarried at the time, because she had wanted me (or someone like me) her entire life. Other people, not necessarily so prepared, or so capable of embracing their responsibilities. Parents need to be grownups, and in today's society most people simply don't mature until they're pushing 30.
So is adoption perfect? No. But a closed adoption is worse than an open one, because people do crave to know who is their own blood. It won't reduce the person who feeds you your bottles and sings you to sleep and bandages your boo-boos to "a live-in nanny that [the parents] visit sometimes" -- the person who cares for a child is that child's parent, full stop, and as much as adoptive children crave to *know* their own blood, they *love* the people who stood as parents to them. The same is true of stepparents when bio-parents are not in the picture by their own choice. And having a child when you're not prepared to have a child is far, far worse than giving love to a child that isn't biologically yours, and people who say otherwise either totally misunderstand human nature, or are assholes. (You know, sheep can't adopt. An hour after birth, a ewe knows the smell of her lamb and will not accept a different lamb, no matter how needy. Humans, whether designed by God or made that way by the blind force of evolution, are capable of accepting and loving children of no biological relation to them. That is the way we are. You want to be a sheep, fine for you, but most of us would rather be human.)
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
