Go Ahead and Have The Baby- but Don't Bring It to Church or Anything

The Fetus Fetishists (I'd call them prolifers, but, um, they're not) are forever telling women to have every baby they get pregnant with, no matter what. Not just telling, either, but passing every law they can mange to ensure that all pregnancies result in babies. Are you too poor to support a baby? Too bad, have it. Are you in an abusive relationship? Too bad, baby time. Are you too sick to have a baby? Die giving birth, bitch. Does the baby have a disability incompatible with life, or that would result in a need for medical interventions you can't afford? Deal with it. Is it the result of a rape? Won't that be fun, raising your rapist's baby.

The thing is, and the reason I won't call them prolife, is that once the baby stops being a fetus and is out in the world crying and making trouble and needing food and stuff, they don't want to be bothered, as evidenced by this screed:

Your precious sweet baby was the focus of attention today. I guess you
didn't notice. There you were, Dad, Mom, and sweet baby sitting in the front row.

The way she says and repeats "precious" makes me think she was replacing a word she wouldn't be allowed to use on that forum. Seriously, replace "precious" with "fucking" and watch the tone change not one bit.

It was time for the service to begin. Pastor introduced the very special guest speaker. He was a Jewish man who had studied for the Priesthood before becoming a Christian. He traveled three thousand miles to be with us on Palm Sunday. Later in the evening we would have the opportunity to sit down to a Seder dinner, with him teaching the meaning of the meal.

As he began to speak, you could tell, this was going to be an interesting and powerful message. He barely got started when your baby began making noise. True, precious baby wasn't crying; no, she was only talking, loudly.

So . . . doing what babies do, in other words.

Some minutes into the guest speaker's message, baby talks more and more. Interrupting and causing the speaker to lose his train of thought.

You know what? If you can't give your speech except in complete silence, don't give speeches. You aren't good at it. This is a baby being a baby. Calm the fuck down.

By now, I'm having a difficult time listening to the speaker, my thoughts are
directed to precious baby and Mom and Dad. Frustration sets in, and so now I'm thinking thoughts that are far away from Whom I came to hear about. Jesus. I'm thinking, please take your child out of here. You are being rude Mom and Dad, you are being rude to everyone in the room, but especially to the guest speaker.

You had a baby! And brought it into public! It's rude! Yes, I want you to have 12 babies each, which I am trying to ensure by making birth control and abortion illegal, but I don't want to actually see or hear those babies.

I can see that your own attention is on baby, not on the message. You are sitting in the front row, dealing with a noisy baby, not hearing the speaker, and subjecting us all to this.

Subjecting us all to a baby.

I began squirming in my seat, I'm unable to concentrate on the speaker. By now the speaker is having even more trouble concentrating on his message. Finally, the speaker can't take it anymore and asks you to leave, you force him to, in front of everyone.

The speaker's quite the rude little bastard, isn't he? Would you go back to that church? "Choose life!- and once you do, I will publicly humiliate you for that life being lively."

Everyone's attention is on you and only you. We watch you gather your things and walk to the back of the building and we hear the door close behind you. You chose not to go to the crying room. The special room built and equipped just for you, so that you can watch a live feed while attending to your precious noisy baby. You chose to show your displeasure by leaving the church entirely.

Shocking.

It is now halfway thru the hour. The speaker is standing up front feeling horrible. We his audience, are feeling very sorry for him. And embarrassed.

Sorry for him, huh? Well, he is bad at public speaking. I guess that is a bit embarrassing.

You Mom and Dad, deprived one hundred people of a powerful Palm Sunday message because you chose to sit in the front row with your precious noisy baby. Your noisy baby is simply impossible to ignore.

Darn right. That's why some of us choose not to have babies, you see.

I really thought this crowd would castigate the poster for such an antibaby message, but they don't.

Reality check: I come from a large Italian family, as does my husband. Between our two families, there are always babies and small children. We include them in everything: weddings, funerals, birthdays, whatever. If we're getting together, there will be babies. And you know what? Babies cry, toddlers talk loudly and run around and that's okay. We're not totally out of control at restaurants, but we've enjoyed weddings in which the background music was a wailing baby and nobody cared. That's what babies do. At one funeral, an 18 month old showed off her jumping skills during the eulogy. Whatever, the dead person loved children, what better way to celebrate their life than to let a toddler jump a bit?

So that's where I'm coming from. I'm atheist, prochoice and happily childless and entirely probaby and pro children being children. The uberright, christian fetus fetishists, not so much.

My aunt accused me of being a "Bridezilla" because I refused to allow the pastor's toddler to attend. I had seen too many weddings with a crying infant/toddler.

We had the wedding at 7 PM... and I just knew "But she's such a perfect little angel' would start acting up. She was 18 months.

We had a lovely wedding, small and quiet.

Children: not for weddings.

Sometimes parents just think that their kids are just too cute to be aggravating, but we all know better don't we? This was uncalled for and I agree with you. I feel absolutely terrible for the speaker and for the congregation. If the parents walked out of the church instead of going to the crying room, that was their selfish decision. What they did was not the way of God's children. This was a sad chain of events in which many people suffered. Sad! :-(

Selfish! So selfish! You must have your babies- and be exiled to the crying room. But babies, have them, just not around us, we don't really like them.

I have a very selfish SIL who refused to miss one moment of my daughter's wedding, even though she had a fussy, crying baby. I was never irritated with the baby because she was doing what babies are supposed to do. But I was highly annoyed with the baby's mother who always puts herself and her own interests first. My only daughter was having her only wedding and the gorom, an only son, was having his only wedding. Unfortunately, we missed much of the ceremony due to my SIL's selfishness. I will never understand why people refuse to be more thoughtful. Parents shouldn't have to be told that their sweet, precious babies are creating a disturbance and a distraction when they are making noise in situations like this. I'm sorry that, due to their own self centeredness, the parents were offended and I'm sorry that the speaker and the audience were all so distracted.

Only one wedding and a baby cried! Oh noes! At the Wedding O' the Century last year, the ringbearer was 2 years old. He made it all the way to the special vows and then threw down the pillow with the rings on it and declared, "I'm bored. I want SpongeBob!"

We could have gasped in horror. The bride could have cried over her wedding being ruined, and then it would have been. Instead, she laughed, picked up the pillow and told him to see if he could find a frog in the rocks (it was an outdoor wedding). It was a cute moment and so much more memorable than a "perfect" wedding- just like every other "perfect" wedding I have seen and can't remember one thing about.

One person does point out that Jesus had something to say about children:

There's no denying that these parents should have taken their baby out of the sanctuary. However, I don't believe that Jesus, who gently admonished that we suffer little children unto him, would have handled the situation in the same way.

But no, this doesn't mean that Jesus wanted children around, he was just getting rid of some overenthusiastic baby lover as quickly as possible. (What kind of freak likes a baby once it's born?)

If this is the scripture that you're referring to Matthew 19:13 & Matthew 19:14 I understand this to mean that parents wanted Jesus to pray for their children and so he did.

I love this:

Still there are some parents who think it is a good thing to have their kids with them through the service to the detriment of others because their kids often get bored and will do what kids know best and that is to make nosie to entertain themselves. Some even break free and run around the pews. It is these serial offenders that get me upset. Fortunately the new minister isn't a softy buy speaks to the parents(privately) and asks them to go with their children to the child care area next time. In the end if they ignore the minister's request they are asked to not come into the service at all but stay outside in a area outside where the sermon is broadcast on speakers.

It's parenthood as a contagion. Stay outside and listen to the broadcast, you parent, you.

Prolife: It has nothing to do with loving babies. Nothing at all.

The Scientific Method

religion, science, babies, baby, christian, creationism, ray, hovind, atheism, atheist,

My newest niece just turned one*. I caught a ride to work with my sister and my niece, we'll call her Blondie, was in the back seat with a half-full bottle of formula.

I watched Blondie as she tried to get formula out of the bottle without sucking on it. Her first try was to hold the bottle upside-down. This did not work. Then she tried holding the bottle upside-down and shaking it, with no success. Blondie then experimented with variations on the same theme: holding the bottle at a 90 degree angle, holding it straight out from her body like a wand, with and without shaking, etc.

Eventually, Blondie ended up accidentally squeezing the nipple of the bottle and formula flew out. Success! She then worked out the most efficient way to squeeze the nipple (gripping it with her fingers in the manner of milking a cow) and formula was everywhere, at which point the experiment was abruptly ended.**

Blondie proved to me that humans are born knowing the scientific method. She formulated a hypothesis: If I hold the bottle upside-down, formula will come out. She tested that hypothesis. She worked out the results: formula does not come out when I hold the bottle upside down. She then reformulated the hypothesis: if I hold the bottle upside-down and shake it, formula will come out. She then repeated this process until she got her desired result.

So why is it that my one-year-old niece has a complete, intuitive understanding of science while asshats like Ray Comfort and Ed (Ted? Ken? Whatever.) Hovind can't figure it out?

Oh, wait, that's right- my niece is an atheist, being one year old and all.

Yeah, religion's harmless.

*I really wish I could show you a video of her. She is just the cutest thing ever, but this is the internet and there are pervs. Lots of pervs. Pervy pervs.

**My sister knew what was going on the whole time. She thought it was funny, too, until formula started raining all over the inside of her car.

Ideology Gone Awry

abortion, prochoice, prolife, tiller, baby, faith,
Prolifers like to say that every late term abortion Dr. Tiller provided was "frivolous". No, they weren't. The story of Baby Faith is the story of prolife ideology gone horribly awry.

The Story of Baby Faith Hope is a blog written by a 23 year old woman who discovered she was pregnant with an anencephalic baby. Anencephaly is a neural tube defect which results in a baby that is missing most of its brain. In fact, such babies are missing most of their heads and are born without the top of the skull. You can see some pretty horrifying pictures of you search "anencephaly pictures". These babies have no hope for survival, the only possibility for them is suffering and death. It's a tragedy, plain and simple.

My name is Myah Walker. In about 8 weeks from now I will be giving birth to my little girl, Faith Hope. Faith was diagnosed with anencephaly at my 19-week ultrasound on September 12.

Anything after 20 weeks is a late term abortion. Thank whatever you want they are legal in such circumstances, because I can't imagine being faced with this sort of news and then being forced to rush about trying to get an appointment for an abortion within 5-7 days.

Myah is staunchly prolife.

When given the option to either carry her to term or terminate the pregnancy, I immediately told the doctor that I wanted to carry her to term. It was not a decision that I had to think about. For some reason I had to give the doctors my decision over and over again, which was frustrating. One doctor asked, "Can I ask why you want to continue this pregnancy?" I guess some people are baffled by unconditional love.

No, sweetie, like me they were baffled that you would want to put yourself and a baby through such pain unnecessarily. I can't possibly judge you, the position you were in is unthinkably cruel, but I can't imagine making the same choice, nor should I or any other woman be forced to.

What happens next, however, is even worse. After giving birth, Myah believes that baby Faith has some chance at a normal life. At one point, she describes baby Faith as "advanced". She does everything possible to keep her alive, feeding baby Faith through a tube because she can't coordinate sucking and swallowing, giving her medication after medication for her breathing difficulties, trying to find a pediatrician for her.

What's truly cruel is that Myah blames herself for her baby's death.

On May 23rd, 2009, Faith passed into Heaven. She died of a gastro-intestinal bleed. She did not die of anencephaly, as predicted. She died of a stomach ulcer... something that may have been prevented if we had found our Pediatrician a little sooner. It breaks my heart to think that if we had done things differently, that Faith might not have suffered the way she did. But I have peace knowing that she is safe in Heaven now, living a beautiful pain-free life.

No, Myah, you did not kill your baby. No pediatrician could have saved her. Yes, the medication she was on caused the ulcer, but without the medication, she would have died sooner. She had no chance at all. You did nothing wrong.

To make matters even worse, prolife groups published fairy tales about Baby Faith's short, painful existence.

When the baby was born, she was apparently able to both see and hear and suffered no health problems other than anencephaly. No medication was required in Faith’s daily care and she was able to breastfeed, although she also received nutrition through a tube.

That's an outright lie.

When the baby was born, she had half a skull. Almost every post after Baby Faith was born chronicled her health problems, from constant breathing difficulties to eye infections and bleeding ulcers and she took medication every day of her life.

If Myah had had an abortion, she could have moved on. Instead, she gave birth to a doomed child, came to believe she was not only normal, but advanced, and now blames herself for her baby's death. This is the malignancy of prolife ideology, and ideology that forces innocent women and children to suffer horribly. I can hope that baby Faith couldn't feel pain, but I doubt it. She could open her eyes, she could make noises and move her limbs, she could probably feel pain.

This is what "no abortion ever" forces upon its victims. It is evil.