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The Thinking Housewife
 

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Hannah’s Higher Education

February 10, 2012

 

MIKE ADAMS has a piece at Townhall relevant to the recent discussions here about the “reproductive freedoms” of college women.  I disagree with his point that university students in America should be fighting for women’s rights in Islamic countries, but his other points about the deliberate corruption of students by Women’s Resource Centers are excellent. The piece is titled “Hannah and Her Blisters.” He writes:

Dear Concerned Grandparent:

I am so sorry to hear that your granddaughter has dropped out of school less than halfway through her course of study in English Literature at a public university supported by your tax dollars. I am especially sorry to hear that she has contracted herpes and that, just before Christmas, she spoke of ending her life. Read More »

 

A Book Against Birth Control — and Six More Children

February 10, 2012

 

JILL FARRIS writes:

My husband and I are Protestants. Twenty years ago, we were the proud parents of two children; a girl and a boy. Our family was “complete.” We were against abortion, involved in Right to Life and volunteering at pregnancy centers. Then we were loaned a book called The Way Home by Mary Pride, whose hard-hitting writing educated us in the history of birth control and “planned barrenhood.” To our dismay (and discomfort), we learned that the Catholic church had not stood alone against birth control for centuries. No, indeed, both Protestant and Roman Catholics had wisely understood that choosing to control the timing of pregnancy was a dangerous (and ungodly) choice and would quickly lead to the widespread acceptance of abortion.

After much heated discussion,we humbly (and, admittedly, with fear and trembling) repented of our use of birth control and told God we were willing to raise up many children if He chose to send them to us. We were blessed with six more children.

How can I describe or explain the awe and wonder we have experienced as we look at the children we could have missed? Read More »

 

Notes from Readers

February 9, 2012

 

TOM B. writes:

Thank you for your blog. My wife and I both “survived” the divorce holocaust of the seventies. We are now ten years married, and homeschooling our four children, ages 8,7,6,6.

We live in Silicon Valley, and sometimes feel like partisans in an insidious ideological war. Our life experiences made us conservative; having children compounded the effect. Read More »

 

More on the College Health Center

February 9, 2012

 

JOSH F. writes:

Just imagine that at the same time those decrepit old slobs in Congress and professional sports officials RAIL INCESSANTLY about athletes using PEDs (performance enhancement drugs, particularly artificial hormones) and claiming  the poor example it sets for our children, we have “American”  universities and society at large practically shoving artificial  hormones down the throats of our daughters from the very start of  puberty well into their twenties. Our daughters are taking steroids to  overstimulate their reproductive systems in order to render their reproductive capabilities non-functioning. All the while these  “elite” stuff their faces with Viagra, Xanax, Prozac and the like –  all considered performance enhancement drugs by anyone with some intellectual honesty.

 

More Women on the Frontlines

February 9, 2012

 

PENTAGON officials announced today – with a perfectly straight face, as if they were talking about serious military affairs instead of an immense public folly – that 14,000 combat-related positions will be formally opened to women this summer, pending approval by Congress. According to the LA Times, women will “serve in non-infantry battalion jobs, such as radio operators, intelligence analysts, medics, radar operators and tank mechanics. They could be placed together with combat forces, such as supply convoys in areas of fighting.”

The move, which makes a less formal arrangement to that effect official, was not greeted warmly by representatives of female advocacy groups. But then have these martinets ever greeted anything or anyone warmly? Imagine the burden of trying to accomplish what no country serious about defending itself has ever accomplished. No wonder they are grim. They said the Pentagon should open all combat positions to women. As is typical, they did not offer a single substantial reason why women in combat would help the military better fulfill its mission. Sure, women in the military have helped soldiers frisk women in burqas but that is no reason to open tens of thousands positions to them.

No one wants a soldier for a mother. That’s something they also never mention. Nor do they mention how the very appearance of a female soldier, however capable she may be, is one of the most depressing and demoralizing sights in the world, tangible evidence if there ever was any that the spirit of feminine nurture has been trashed.

Reader Henry McCulloch writes: Read More »

 

Parenthood and the Path to Perfection

February 8, 2012

 

KEVIN STAY writes:

In much of the recent discussion on contraception and children, contributors mention the idea of happiness. Many today are misled down dead end paths in its pursuit.

I do not know how to better state this without sounding unduly Eastern and metaphysical, so forgive that in advance. But the beginning steps on the path to true and enduring happiness require certain realizations. First, we are in fact the children of a Creator every bit as real as you and I. Second, one of the primary goals of the Creator is that each of us receive a full measure of joy/happiness. Third, all of existence is described and governed by laws and rules. (We have at best a very limited understanding of those laws and rules.) So, given those three things how do we best go about finding real happiness? Read More »

 

The American University: Citadel of Casual Barbarism

February 8, 2012

 

ACCORDING to the Associated Press:

Students at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania can get the “morning-after” pill by sliding $25 into a vending machine, an idea that has drawn the attention of federal regulators and raised questions about how accessible emergency contraception should be. [emphasis added] [OH MY, QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN RAISED!!]

Read More »

 

Islands of Fertility in an Ocean of Demographic Decline

February 8, 2012

 

THE NATIONWIDE INCREASE IN FERTILE CENSUS TRACTS

By Jesse Powell

A traditionalist or patriarchal subculture is growing throughout the United States among all religious groupings (and presumably among people more secular in orientation as well). This is what a close analysis of the 2000 Census and the 2010 Census reveals. To support this claim I look at what I will call Fertile Intact Census Tracts (FICTs). A FICT is defined as a census tract with more than 2.5 children per married couple that has children, a greater than 90% Married Parents Ratio (MPR), and more than 500 children in the census tract (all these measures are applied to the white Non-Hispanic population only). A FICT census tract has high fertility, a high proportion of intact families, and a big enough population to prove the positive indicators are not an accident but truly represent the character of the neighborhood. FICTs can be assumed to be highly religious census tracts; an upper class neighborhood might have a high MPR but it is unlikely to have a high fertility rate. A neighborhood with both intact families and a high fertility rate is a marker of religious influence.

Neighborhoods that are merely upper class are declining throughout the nation; they are declining in terms of their white child population and in terms of their white MPR. Read More »

 

Exhibit B

February 7, 2012

 

faith and grace feb. 2012 021

ANOTHER READER sends proof of her failure to use contraception. Her daughter was born just over a week ago.

When contraception is widely available, when it is embraced as normal, when births are planned and scheduled, when deliberation replaces surrender, when convenience replaces hardship and struggle, every child seems like a choice, the product of human will and desire. This delusion represents immense hubris. No child is chosen. What is chosen in this face? It’s a gift too good to be true.

Read More »

 

More on Child Abuse in the Local Library

February 7, 2012

 

LAUREN writes: 

I am a mother of two small children. We visit the library weekly, having to walk past the adult computer terminals to access the children’s section. 
 
I just called my library in light of your recent post. The librarian told me that freedom of speech prevents the library from filtering the websites that the library patrons can access. She said in her 16 years of working there, that there have been some incidents of patrons viewing pornography, but that those patrons were told to stop or leave if the screen was in view of others. Read More »
 

On the Hedonist Who Profits From the Sacrifices of Those Who Raise Children

February 6, 2012

  

JAMES P. writes:

Bruno claims that Catholicism is a “very harsh doctrine” because it requires that one sacrifice materialistic pleasures like buying a new car or new home or taking a vacation in order to have children. Even if one accepts the argument that the requirement to procreate and raise children is “very harsh” (though humans throughout history have somehow happily done this), what exactly is the point of belonging to a Church that makes no demands on its members? If all you want to do is what makes you happy, why belong to a Church at all? No doubt Bruno will respond that this is exactly why he does not belong to a Church. However, he appears blissfully unaware of the numerous moral and practical objections to his philosophy of selfish hedonism.

Read More »

 

A Renaissance Face

February 6, 2012

 
Self-portrait, Raphael 1504-1506

Self-portrait, Raphael 1504-1506

 

The Hypocrisy of Catholic Objections to Obama’s Latest Ruling

February 6, 2012

 

MANY CATHOLICS encountered official outrage at church yesterday over Obama’s recent ruling that under his healthcare plan, Catholic hospitals must include coverage for contraception and abortion-inducing drugs in their health plans for employees.

As Christopher Badeaux argues at RedState, this outrage on the part of America’s bishops is in many cases highly hypocritical.

Where were the bishops and pastoral leaders when Obamacare was proposed or when Obama, a candidate who clearly supported abortion, was running for president? Better yet, where have the bishops been for years while Catholic politicians who openly supported abortion received communion, as have those who admitted to voting for them? Read More »

 

Breastfeeding: The Wholistic Contraceptive

February 6, 2012

 

KIMBERLY writes:

My parish priest brought up this topic of contraception today, in the aftermath of Obama’s ruling that Catholic hospitals must now subsidize contraception and abortion in their health insurance plans. He’s such a good priest and I’m sure he has nothing but the best intentions, but he said something that was annoying to me.
 
He said, “Why would the government ask us to use money for contraceptives rather than use the money to pay for formula for babies?” And as you know, that was quite the wrong thing to say, because our government already supplies 53 percent of our country’s formula through WIC. We certainly don’t need to waste any more money doing that. How about spending some of that money on breastfeeding consultants? But that apparently did not dawn on this highly gifted priest, and to me, that says a lot.
 
Breastfeeding, or the lack-there-of, is entirely connected to the contraceptive issue. I wonder how closely the pill followed the bottle, or the bottle the pill.
 

Porn and “Intellectual” Freedom

February 6, 2012

 

IN RESPONSE to complaints by Seattle area parents that their children are being exposed to hard core porn when they walk by library computers,  Barbara Jones, director of the American Library Association’s intellectual freedom office, said last week, “Sometimes, in a library, you’re going to see information that’s going to make you uncomfortable.”

The freedom of an adult to do anything he desires is more important to our morally-stupefied elites than the freedom of a child to visit a public library and return home with his innocence intact.

According to the Seattle Post Intelligencer, one mother’s ten-year-old daughter was reduced to tears and unable to sleep after viewing violent sex while walking past a library computer in use by an adult patron. The woman was told by a librarian “the library is a public space; it’s more like a bus stop than a safe haven.”

Read More »

 

Exhibit A

February 5, 2012

 

Dec. 2011 464

A READER sent this proof of her own failure to use contraception.

 

Contraception and the Culture War, Cont.

February 5, 2012

 

JOHN PURDY writes:

First let me thank you and your participants for some very fine, well-argued writing in the post “Contraception and the Culture War.”

Speaking as someone who, regrettably, was never able to have children (though not for wont of trying) I have a hunch that, as society ages, we’re going to see a lot of rather sad and despondent seniors. I, myself, will most likely die alone and have very few people at my funeral. I feel cheated out of something. I, of course, took many actions myself but rejecting marriage and family, after I had grown up a bit, was never one of them. Read More »

 

February 5, 2012

 

BorgheseGAROFALO1530

Madonna and Child with the Archangel Michael and Saints, Garofolo, c. 1540