Testing out my delicious tags autoposting for the first time.
Salon has an interesting article on a new book about women who gave up their children for adoption prior to Roe V. Wade: Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
Spirited away under the pretense of an illness or a family vacation, the women — many of them teenagers — spent their pregnancies away from home and gave birth among strangers. While the maternity homes were billed as a quiet place for women to reflect on their futures, when it came time to sign adoption papers, most of the women Fessler interviewed said they felt intense pressure to relinquish their children. Persuaded by social workers who said they would never be able to provide as well for their babies as a stable couple would, ostracized by families who were shocked by their behavior, and insecure about their own strength and intelligence, most women did as they were told and tried to forget.
Decades later, though, the mothers say the repercussions of those decisions are still being felt, as they struggle with depression, fight to find their lost children, and make peace with their past.
Fascinating. I know I have a cousin out somewhere in the world that I don’t know.
This is the part I think is really interesting, and particularly relevant, given that the religious right is trying to force us back into the dark ages by stamping out birth control, limiting sex education and eliminating abortions:
The second myth was that during the time period the book covers, anyone who got pregnant and sent away was considered a slut. It was an extremely hypocritical time sexually, because by the end of the 1960s something like 68 percent of women were having sex before age 20, but everybody lied about it. So all the girls who were having sex but didn’t get caught could claim they were virgins, but the ones who got pregnant couldn’t deny what they had done. So it was assumed they were either promiscuous or more sexually advanced than their peers, when most weren’t. It turns out, actually, that among the women I interviewed, most became pregnant with their first sexual partner, some with their very first sexual experience, and many within only five sexual experiences. So most likely they got pregnant not because they were promiscuous, but because they were naive. They didn’t know anything about sex; some didn’t even know how babies were born. People just didn’t talk about sex during the era; there was no sexual education, and in some families it simply never came up.
I’m sure you’ve heard the news, but in case you haven’t — as USA Today and hundreds of other media outlets are reporting, several major phone companies, including AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, turned over all of their customer phone records to the NSA — affecting tens of millions of Americans.
They turned over ALL their records — not just records of people who had contact with terrorists. They turned over your records. They turned over mine. The government has a massive database of all of your phone calls.
And the bullshit response they’re coming out with about why this is all okay is that they’re not actually tapping anyone’s phones (that we know of) but just looking at who you made calls to and who you received calls from. So, yeah, that’s supposed to be alright.
Um, no. Who I call and who calls me is NONE OF THE GOVERMENT’S F$%#ING BUSINESS.
If this is not a clear message to you that our government is out of control, and we need to clean house in both congress and the White House, then you’re either not paying attention, or you just to sad for words.
Via Yahoo News:
Lesbians’ brains react differently to sex hormones than those of heterosexual women, new research indicates. That’s in line with an earlier study that had indicated gay men’s brain responses were different from straight men — though the difference for men was more pronounced than has now been found in women.
Lesbians’ brains reacted somewhat, though not completely, like those of heterosexual men, a team of Swedish researchers said in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A year ago, the same group reported findings for gay men that showed their brain response to hormones was similar to that of heterosexual women.
In both cases the findings add weight to the idea that homosexuality has a physical basis and is not learned behavior.
Yeah, no kidding. I like how we have to have science continually research and spell out the obvious just to refute rabid homophobes.
The website goodasyou.com pointed out an anti-gay “sex-ed” (no actual education included) pamphlet distributed by an Alabama Middle School that has a quote that literally made me snort soda out of my nose a few minutes ago.
These same sex “unions” cannot provide an adequate means of achieving a genuine physical relationship with another human being because this type of “union” is contrary to the laws of nature. There can be no real union because same sex bodies do not even fit together.
Somebody seems to have a lack of imagination, there. Apparently, they’ve never read my post on intelligent design, or they’d know better than that.
I can play this meme pretty easily.
Where was I ten years ago?
This post on Same-Sex Marriage I wrote May 14, 1996, just about ten years ago. I had moved into the attic apartment at Mary Byrne’s house the summer of the year before, so I was just starting my first decade in downtown Indianapolis. I was hired to work in the web design department for my current company, which was then Macmillan Publishing, or mcp.com. I believe this was about the time I quit volunteering for a local organization when I found out they were claiming to have a lobbyist in the state legislature, and raising money based on that misleading information. I also quit working for the local pride organization that April because I was pretty redundant and no one would let me do anything.
Where was I five years ago?
My first blog post from May of 2001. I went on a “Big Things” road trip the beginning of May that year, and I was busy preparing to buy a house for the first time. I was pretty well settled into my job, and still working as a designer.
Where was I one year ago?
I was recovering from heart valve surgery, so I was home from work reading and watching lots of TV series on DVD, playing with my dog and taking mandatory walks around the block, which were hard as hell, and sometimes required me to have Stephanie helping me.
Passing it on…
Oh, whoever wants the meme. I hate tagging people.
I can’t believe that I forgot, in my endorsement of Julia Carson, to mention her involvement with developing Fall Creek Place neighborhood — the now thriving neighborhood just north of mine, that is the threshold of an urban renaissance for downtown Indianapolis. Julia was instrumental not only in getting the federal funding to revitalized the neighborhood of Fall Creek Place, but in ensuring that the subsidies went to people of a variety of incomes — that the neighborhood would be affordable to the people who already lived there, and not just to the wealthy people who wanted to move into historic neighborhoods downtown.
Drive down Pennsylvania Street today, and you’ll see row after row of beautifully designed houses in keeping with the character of the original neighborhood. And you see the people living in those houses and walking their dogs and children on the streets, are from a diverse set of cultures and backgrounds. For those of us who live in nearby neighborhoods downtown, the change to our own areas as a result has been breathtaking as well.
You have both Julia Carson and Bart Peterson to thank for that.