Annie, a reader who is age 23, writes:

I am expecting baby number three! My husband told a friend from work, a young man in his late twenties, and do you know what he said? “Oh, and your wife’s a Catholic, so she doesn’t believe in abortion, huh?” “NO” was my husbands firm reply, with a disgusted, angry look in his intimidating, Sicilian eyes. Can you believe that is the response you get for having a third baby in Boulder? Unbelievable! Like we’re idiots because we don’t want to murder one of our children!

Laura writes:

Congratulations to you. That is wonderful.

I am not surprised at the response of your husband’s co-worker, as revolting as it was. People hesitate to have children today not just because of the economic burden, but because of an active disdain for the disorder and unpredictability of family life. Children are spoiled today and yet so despised. They are not machines. And, that’s the problem.

It’s amazing that some people still believe overpopulation is a problem. Westerners commit cultural suicide by not replacing themselves yet some consider it noble to withold the fruit of their loins. Westerners travel the world to procure children whom they believe are uncared for and yet when someone produces a large family here, they say, “That’s going too far!”

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 “Dear Sister. Do you miss home? When are you coming home to me?”

This is a quote from one little girl’s letter to another. They are twin sisters. One remains in China where she was born while the other was seized from the home of relatives and put up for adoption on the international market.

The quote comes from the remarkable articles of Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times on the sometimes fraudulent adoption business in China. Most of the children end up in the homes of families in the United States. According to some Christians, it is the duty of Americans to take these children thousands of miles away from their families in order to expose them to Christianity and give them all the material benefits of life in the West. [See discussion below about this statement.]

Here is more from Demick’s piece on the twin girl who was seized by government officials:

The twins were separated before their first birthday, when their mother, Yuan Zanhua, a migrant worker, went off to another province. Afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle two babies in addition to an older daughter, Yuan took Shangjie, strapping her to her back, and left the other twin, Xiuhua, with her brother and sister-in-law in the countryside.

Then on May 30, 2002, a dozen officials from the local family planning office stormed Yuan’s brother’s house. They grabbed 20-month-old Xiuhua, shoved her into a car and drove off.

Although couples aren’t supposed to be penalized for having twins, and this rural family was entitled under Chinese law to a second child because their first was a girl, the family planning officials demanded 6,000 yuan, then about $750. The brother had the money, but when he went to get the girl back, they demanded 2,000 yuan more.

“My brother borrowed money from all the families in the village, a little here and a little there. If people could only give 10 yuan, they did,” says Yuan. But when her brother handed over the money, the family planning officials again raised their demands.

“He’d already borrowed money from hundreds of people,” she says. “There was just no way he could get any more.”

By the time Yuan got home, Xiuhua had been sent to the orphanage in nearby Shaoyang. When she complained to the family planning office, she says, the officials sneered at her: “Why did you give birth to so many babies?”

By the way, I have met Barbara Demick. She is one of the finest journalists in America.

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  Lines of Love O, Sarah we'll always love you No matter what you do With eyes, smile, and glasses Or the teasingly-tousled do. You're a pipeline of hope for America, A cup of true liberty; Like Joan, Deborah, and Diana, A torch of femininity. From the moons and mountains of Alaska Came this pure and radiant force. You'll dine on elites for breakfast And ride the Beltway on your horse. O, Sarah we will always love you Even when they say you're essentially dumb. We'll stand by you and protect you From now til eternity come.

Most people probably would say that America’s school buildings resemble prisons with windows – and without the barbed wire – because it would be too expensive to make them otherwise. But, that doesn’t make sense. Some of this ugliness is enormously costly.

In 1906, William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, wrote in his influential book The Philosophy of Education:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

I agree with John Taylor Gatto, author of a more recent book on education, Weapons of Mass Instruction. This architecture serves one of the main purposes of school. Its aim is to create a shallow inner life.

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IN a dialogue on international adoption at the website What’s Wrong with the World this week, I argued that child adoption should occur only within national borders. We cannot control the adoption business in other countries or ever be assured that it does not become a form of child trafficking, especially given the large sums Westerners are willing to pay.

A recent story in the Los Angeles Times confirms my point. According to Barbara Demick:

Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States.

The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China’s restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls.

But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping — sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned.

Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.

“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products,” said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States.

Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community.

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Joel, the reader who wrote in the previous entry, sends this:

I appreciate your reply.  The sense of abandonment felt by middle-class aspiring males in my generation is immense.  Combine this with the preachiness and sentimentality of most social conservatives from older generations, my mother being a good example, and you get a festering resentment toward more traditional forms of living.

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If the rich countries of the West could bring thirty percent, or even five percent, of the poor children of the Third World into Western homes, taking them away from their poor parents and poor grandparents and poor cousins, removing them from the grinding poverty that limits their prospects and shortens their lives,would this be the best thing for these children? The answer to this question appears to be, ‘Yes,’ according to those who support unlimited adoption of the unfortunate children of the world by Western couples.

I say the answer is, ‘No.’  The poor are just like the rich in one respect. They need more than material things. They need their home lands and their people. They cannot be stripped naked of these and be forced to accept a creed of universal liberation. They are human too, not rootless beings fed only by abstractions and material goods.

“If the poor man’s right was only derived from strict necessity, your piddling selfishness would soon reduce him to a bare minimum, paid for by unending gratitude and servility.”

Such are the words of Monsieur le Curé de Torcy, the senior curate of George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. He continues to say of  Christ’s claim, The poor you have always with you, but me you have not always with you:

Rich and poor alike, you’d do better to look at yourselves in the mirror of want, for poverty is the image of your own fundamental illusion. Poverty is the emptiness in your hearts and in your hands. It is only because your malice is known to Me that I have placed poverty so high, crowned her and taken her as My bride. If once I allowed you to think of her as an enemy, or even as a stranger, if I let you hope that one day you might drive her out of the world, that would be the death sentence of the weak.

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LAURA F. writes to Laura Wood:

I know you’re taking a lot of flak from Mrs. Palin’s admirers right now, so I wanted to let you know I appreciate your assessments of her. She is absolutely a feminist. Feminism has been assimilated into mainstream U.S. conservatism and the conservatives haven’t even noticed it. People many years my senior who claim to support conservative family values love her, and I ask them, “If 20 years ago she had come on the scene as she now is, would you have considered her a conservative?” They don’t seem to think it matters because liberalism has progressed so far since then. So in many minds, conservatism means “staying a few steps behind the liberals” rather than having eternal principles. And people are so alienated from our own traditional family structure that they think it comparable to life under the ayatollahs in Iran. Thanks for putting your courageous voice out there.

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FROM today’s New York Times:

An Army cook and single mother is under investigation and confined to her post after skipping her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her son while she was overseas.

The woman, Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, 21, said she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only relative who could care for her 10-month-old son, her mother, was overwhelmed by the task and already caring for three other relatives with health problems.

Her civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, said one of Specialist Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to go anyway and put the child in foster care.

Feminism is great, isn’t? It’s given women the thrilling opportunity to put their children in foster care so that they can go off and work as Army cooks. As Sarah Palin put it, “Things have changed. There’s so much equality now.”

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  In my previous post on Obesity in America, I argued that the poor eating habits of Americans were not just a result of economics or poor nutritional advice or even the decline in home cooking, but of a deep and pervasive spiritual lassitude. The problem of course is not unique to this country. Britain has seen the same phenomenon, perhaps to an even greater degree, among its native population.  Theodore Dalrymple describes it here: I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I've made hundreds, never—not once—have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity—unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along be counted as social. This is not to say that I haven't seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse.…

“This will sound callous, but I think the great suffering people feel in their own country is nothing compared to the great emptiness many feel in countries they feel alien towards. This existential suffering is far worse, far more damaging than the materialistic one. Poverty has always been with us. Societies have always found ways to deal with it. But, I know of no society which can deal with existential emptiness.”

                — Kidist Paulos Asrat, from Jolie and the Hidden Dynamics of International Adoption

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  KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, writer of the Camera Lucida blog and an Ethiopian who lives in Canada, writes: Congratulations on your brave post on transracial adoptions. I wavered to send you this, since the issue is so contentious, but I think, as you have shown, it needs to be said. These days, there is a huge "market" for Ethiopian children for adoption into Western families. Besides Americans and Canadians, Australians are big competitors. Many say that Ethiopian kids are ideal adoptees, since they have mild manners, are alert, and are often attractive. Other African or Caribbean (mostly Haitian) children don't get such rave reviews. Of course, the Ethiopian government, and many other side-agencies, both in Ethiopia and in these adoptee countries, have made this into a profitable enterprise. I think it is terrible and atrocious. There are many examples I can give of very satisfied white families. One was on Oprah recently, showing off its handicapped (she's missing her arms) girl who taught herself how to swim, and speaks impeccable English she learnt in record time. The most famous is Angelina Jolie's daughter, Zahara. This is a notorious case, with an "out there" movie star, but I think it enunciates many of the problems inherent in this unfortunate enterprise. Firstly, the birth mother recanted after the adoption. But I think she was convinced (coerced?) by various agencies that her illegitimate daughter would fare much better with Jolie. In fact, in her…

“The leaves of the trees which are between you and the sun are of five principal shades of color, namely a green most beautiful, shining and serving as a mirror for the atmosphere which lights up objects that cannot be seen by the sun, and the parts in shadow that only face the earth, and those darkest parts which are surrounded by something other than darkness.”

                                —– From The  Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

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  A reader named Paul, commenting in the post on the possible federal takeover of health care, says: "I look at myself like someone in north Africa in the early 7th century: a member of a doomed culture under attack."

  One week after they suffered devastating injuries and possibly the most harrowing experience of their lives, survivors of the Fort Hood massacre "have already begun the process of moving on," according to this report in the New York Times. It quotes one of the victims, who was shot three  times, as saying he was praying for Nidal Malik Hasan and his family. "He had a bad day," he said. The message is this: If these immediate victims can move on and forget this incident, so can you.                                  

                                                              In Genesis, Rachel offers Leah an extra night with their husband Jacob in exhange for the mandrakes gathered by Leah's son. The wild root was believed to magically cure infertility. After years of barrenness, Rachel conceives twice, but ironically dies in childbirth. She names her second son Ben-oni, "son of my sorrow," before she dies.  After early death and grave illness, premature infertility is the worst physical affliction a woman can face. The Old Testament recognizes murder, illness, family strife of every variety. It does not leave infertility out as one of the most grievous curses humankind encounters and it is a major theme in Genesis. More than simply a biological phenomenon or an emotional event, inferility is a state of spiritual paralysis. A woman who wants children and cannot conceive stands on one side of a locked door. On the other side are her children waiting to be brought across the threshold and into life. She struggles with the lock. So palpable and living do these children seem, she enters a state that can only be called mourning. She grieves those who have never lived. One of the greatest crimes of feminism is its callousness to the universal pain of infertility. Feminism has actively promoted promiscuity, which often leads to sexually-transmitted diseases and the inability to conceive. Feminism has actively promoted delayed child-bearing even though female fertility begins to decline in a woman's late twenties. Feminism has actively denied some of the cultural causes of infertility and instead promoted extreme efforts…

  The inevitable has happened. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times have recently posed this question: Do same-sex couples actually make better parents than the old-fashioned, increasingly obsolete Mom and Dad? Here's from the Chronicle writer Amy Graff: My daughter's first best friend had two dads. My husband and I used to joke that the dads were better parents than us, and the thing is they were. We'd show up for a play date at the park, and my daughter would announce that she was hungry. I'd dig out a bag of old mushy raisins from the bottom of my purse (who knows how long they had been in there), while one of the dads would magically pull a spread of carefully chopped fruit (enough for everyone) from his satchel. Now I'm not saying that you can judge a parent by the quality of their snacks but this theme of thoughtful parenting carried through into everything these dads did. Out of any parents I knew, they were the best at gathering their family around the table every night for dinner, at finding a work-family balance, at disciplining their children in a fair yet firm way, at filling their kids' schedule with a healthy mix of creative free play and planned activities. And then there was the dad's relationship, which impressed me the most. They worked as a team, raising the kids as equals. They weren't restricted by gender roles…