"Your Body is Incapable."

So I've been thinking (uh-oh).  All of this reading about pregnancy, babies, birth, and a woman's right to choose (elective cesarean) sort of makes me wonder where the feminist movement stands on this issue.  How do women like Erica Jong feel about birth?  I'd venture a guess and say she's all for medicated birth and whatnot (pain/suffering is bad and should be avoided at all costs).  But she doesn't make up the entirety of the feminist movement.  As this article states, there are women on both sides of the fence.

Because of my difference of opinion with Erica Jong (and my heated response to her article) I've lost a progressive friend, so having a conversation about this with someone who is on that particular side of the fence with other things is a little less feasible for me.  I don't have a lot of friends who seem so decidedly on one side or the other, and talking about this to someone who is undecided isn't helpful in figuring out how one side thinks of something.
The questions this raises are a whole other bag of tricks.

I wouldn't call myself regressive per se, but some of the staunchly progressive ideas out there raise more concern in me than hope.  It is my opinion that the mechanization of birth is terrible in several ways.  Yes, hospital technology and medicine in general are great, for those who need it.  But the obstetric model of care - that a woman's body is inherently flawed and cannot handle childbirth (something it was designed to do) without the aide of technology - is something I have issues with.  This makes me think of a certain gentleman's opinion that Catholicism taught the very thing obstetrics teaches to it's practitioners.  How, then, do you explain a backwards view of women seeming to be present in our forward-moving medical society?
I suggest that if we were as progressive as pro-choice people want, we would not have women writing about how home birth is something only narcissistic power-hungry women do - because everyone knows that medicine is God and there is no way that an informed woman can safely birth her baby without obstetric intervention (pitocin, epidural, etc).
What I would love to know is how pro-choice people feel about women having the right to choose where they have children.  Given that pro-choice is obliviously medical, I'd wager that they are against assisted home birth, free-standing birth centers and midwifery in general.  But I could be wrong.

As a small side note, the woman behind the above link (Skeptical OB) is getting her information from somewhere that is completely different from everything I've read, and studies I have looked at for myself (also what I've read about the history of obstetrics taking over birthing).  I haven't found any citations on her entries, but I also haven't read a terribly large amount of her blog.  It gets tiring to be told over and over that I need technological intervention, that I cannot survive without it, and that attempting to do so (even if I am informed) makes me nothing short of an idiot.  These aren't her exact words, but the tone I get from her articles gives me that impression.  It's all very fear-based, and I don't trust fear-based information.

So those are my musings, regurgitated because I sat down to stare at the blank new entry box and wondered for a good amount of time what in the world I was going to write about.

I do want to say that I am not against hospital birth.  I am against pressuring mothers into procedures they do not need (episiotomy) for the sake of obstetric convenience.
Hospital birth is a great thing for those mothers who do need it.

A Shift in the Tide.

On being pregnant:

I used to say things like, "by the time I'm pregnant, birth will be pain-free!"  I was definitely a fan of medicine's version of childbirth.  But that was before I really gave it any thought, or looked into it at all.
Medicine is fantastic for the women who really need it; women are saved pretty regularly by hospital staff for various reasons.  However, the interventions these women need are not the interventions all women need.  There should not be a standard of care where you receive the one thing that has been proven to work regardless of your actually needing it.
Hey, hospitals need to cover their ass.  They could get sued.

I digress.

My original intent is to write about what I thought before and what I think now, because what you think before you live something is not necessarily what you think after or during.
As with my opinion on abortion, my opinion of birth is much different now.
I believe that birth can (and should) be a positive experience for mother and baby.  There are risks to the birth I am choosing to try to have, but there are also risks in choosing a hospital birth.  Birth is not risk free, no matter what you choose.
I will be the first to admit that birth terrifies me somewhat.  I think it's mostly the unknown that scares me.  Every birth is different, someone's story about when they gave birth will be different than what I have to say, so the question remains: what will it be like?  I am intimidated by not knowing what to expect (other than pain).  I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in feeling this way among first-time mothers, which is why hospital birth is so appealing to women - there's a certain sense of safety associated with being in a hospital at a time of potential medical crisis.  And yes, there are benefits to being in a hospital if something does go wrong.

People tend to assume that I have just up and decided to have my baby at home.  With this assumption comes the inevitable, "don't you know that birth is dangerous!?"
Yes, I do know this.  I have made this decision based on the information I have acquired and I really believe it to be the best choice for me.  It is by no means the best choice for everyone, and I have neither said this nor meant to imply it.  It is, I believe, the best choice for me.
In talking to these same people I often find that they base their opinions on an article they read in a magazine, or some form of media coverage of something.  And they are adamant that what they think is the only right way to think.
Some of them have never had children.
Some of them will never have children.
These two latter groups I try to take in stride, as they are usually the most vehement backers of hospital birth.  There is nothing to be done but smile and nod at them, because they will never listen to why I made this decision (and continue to research it).  They only want to tell me how stupid and selfish I am for making it.  One blogger (who happens to be an O.B.) called the home birth "movement" narcissistic.  The people I talk to in person are generally of a similar mindset.
As I said earlier: there is no middle ground.

The above is what bothers me most.  I shall call it "the great divide."  People must have their opinions and your opinion is only okay if it matches their own.  Never-mind being open minded about things, or at the very least receptive.
I understand why people are shocked when I say I'm going to try to have my baby at home.  I know that it's not how the majority would do it.  And I know there is a lot of media available against it.  And of course I know the risks involved with it (they are not as terrible as one is led to believe, but they are still present).  I feel, sometimes, that my understanding is like banging my head against a brick wall.  It doesn't matter that I understand these things, all that matters is that I see the error in my own judgement and the terrible mistake I'm about to make.
Dealing with it is even more difficult when it's coming from people who aren't pregnant and potentially never will be.  I'm glad they are concerned for my well-being, but I would appreciate if they gave me credit for the information I've gathered.  I'm doing my best to make an educated decision, and that does include looking at the situation from all of the angles I can perceive.  So in a way these people are helping me, just not in the manner they had in mind.  Still, I'm not really a fan of being given a rather loud version of the cold shoulder.

When I speak with someone who has a different opinion I try to figure out where the opinion came from.  What information led them here?  I tend to work under the assumption that they had some sort of logical thought process behind it (which is not always the case).
I was one such person in my days of, "just give me pain killers," and my pro-choice opinions.  I now understand what I had to overlook to hold those opinions.  For me, it's a damned lot to overlook.

Being pregnant is a life-altering journey.  It certainly has changed my mind about a number of things and solidified my pro-life stance quite a bit just from what I've learned about Baby's development.  It has also opened my mind to things I'd never thought of, and would never have thought of if I was not pregnant.

I suppose what I'm driving at here is that opinions are all well and good, until you're actually living the situation you've formed your opinion about.
Experience can change a lot about a person, not the least of which being their worldview.

More Parenting Redundancy.

I am far from perfect.

I make the same mistakes everyone else makes, and I am about to embark on the great experiment that is parenting.  I don't know what I'm doing, or how to avoid the landmines that are surely embedded in the safest looking parts of the road, but I can guess.  That's really all life is; a series of educated guesses.
I can employ my logic and my intuition - though the two seem to fight more often than not - or I can use the great power of Ignorance: choosing to believe whatever I read first.

The latter option is easiest.

So, for a totally ungraceful transition: I read the Times article everyone is so frenzied over.

"Have you seen the Times cover picture!?"

GASP!  It's so dirty!

I heard about the cover from the security guard at work, and from a few others.  Generally they said something very close to the above statement and expressed their shock over the inappropriate nature of the image.

Here's my problem with it: that lady is very smug.
It's like she's looking at you and saying, "look what I can do.  And I'm better than you for it."

The actual article was well-rounded in my opinion.  Towards the end it turned into a short biography of Dr. Sears, the man who wrote the book about attachment parenting that gets so much praise and hatred.
I laughed, and I was genuinely interested in what it had to say.  Nothing in it was really bias as far as I gathered; the author did a fairly good job of presenting the piece from a neutral angle.  I enjoyed it mostly for this because it's hard to find in a magazine.

What I really gathered from the article is that Attachment Parenting is certainly synonymous with Natural Parenting, and in my view, Logical Parenting.  I will one day read the book Dr. Sears wrote (when I get my hands on it) to see what all the hubbub is about because, right now, I just don't see it.

It serves as a sort of looking glass into the polarization of the parenting/birth debate.  There is one side or the other, I have met no middle ground.  And I cannot seem to have a conversation with someone opposed to home birth or natural parenting (things like co-sleeping, breast-feeding, and baby-carrying) without leaving it frustrated.
Why are these things bad?  I just don't get it.
I'm not saying that anyone is to blame for these unsatisfactory conversations - surely the blame is equally distributed if we must play the game - but it would be nice to understand why people consider these things wrong.
Drinking breast milk is no stranger than drinking cow's milk, or goat's milk.  In fact, it's probably less strange to have a gallon of breast milk in your fridge, if you really think about it.  There's a stigma here, and it's very strong.  I write about it being less strange to pour breast milk on your cereal (a friend of mine's ex-husband used to do this) but the honest truth is that I do think it's kinda weird.  The question is why is cow's breast milk any less weird?

I digress.

The point here is that it's kind of silly to not have a middle ground.  We could probably learn something from each-other if we could communicate more effectively.

As a side note.
If you're not easily offended, watch this.  It's hilarious.

~~~

Sorry for the small hiatus.  I caught a cold/sinus infection last week and subsequently had the motivation to do nothing but sleep and stay on the couch.
Being pregnant and sick is only conducive to apathy.

Also, it sucks.

Honey Bees and Projection Screens.

Bee Love (redbud tree)

Hubby and I went to Grand Junction for Easter weekend and it was pretty awesome to be out of town.  The weather was beautiful (it was also beautiful in Denver) and we spent some time driving around doing various things.  On Saturday the honey bees found the tree in the front of my parents yard.  Their tree is very similar to the one pictured, but has slightly darker blossoms.  The honey bees love it; they were working from late morning to early evening collecting goodies to take back to their hive.  There were so many of them!  Almost the entire top of the tree was covered in honey bees with about three to four blossoms between each of them.  And the sound.  The sound they made was amazing.  All of those bees working on a single tree created a fantastic hum.  You could hear it form inside the screen door, but if you walked outside it was much louder, and much cooler.  It was an experience, to say the least.

At any rate, today I'm writing about projecting yourself onto others: what I was supposed to write about yesterday, had I not been up at three in the morning.

How many times have you caught yourself expecting others to behave the way you behave?  If you're a parent, your answer is most likely higher than those of us without children.
I catch myself doing this a lot.  I mean, a lot.  I slip into the foolish expectation that someone else will treat me the way I would treat them, or have habits similar to mine.  This is easy to do with a lot of things.  I forget that world view is different for everyone.  Sometimes I think, "well it was easy for me, it'll be easy for you."
I feel like this is an error that a lot of people make.  And I do try to correct myself, though sometimes it's quite a long time after the fact that I realize that's what I was doing.
The mistake of projecting something onto another person is simple to make, and it's hard to understand that this is what's happening in a multitude of situations.  The problem is the difficulty level of thinking like someone else.  Thinking like someone else is next to impossible for most people because you can't turn off the you in your brain (at least I can't).  It's extremely difficult not to perceive something with your own special bias (I'm not using this word negatively here).  Because of this we come upon the fallacy of Relativism. In some respects this theory is true, and in some respects it is false; like anything else, it cannot be blanketed over everything the way people seem to want to use it.

People also project onto animals.
This is why you see dogs that are ill-trained, or animal hoarders.  Someone has projected their emotional distress in some form onto the animal present, and the result is sometimes disastrous.  This is true of projecting onto other people as well.

I'm not saying projecting yourself onto someone else is particularly a terrible thing; what I'm saying is that it can cause problems.

The most frequent example I have of this in myself is my lack of understanding for others misunderstanding.  It is so clear to me why I joined Catholicism and why I'm preparing to embark upon the journey into WAPF, it should also be clear to you, the person I am speaking with.
But it is not always so clear to everyone else.  And in my limitations I get frustrated with those who refuse to even acknowledge that perhaps my choices are right, though different from theirs (I am also guilty of not understanding someone's choice, but I try to be nice about it).  In my frustration I find my articulation suffers and I become somewhat stubborn, sometimes very stubborn.  In the end (if the discussion is particularly irritating) I wonder, "why can't they just see my side of things?"  But who's to say they're not thinking the exact same thing about me?
I have my reasons and I try to explain them, but I rely a lot on the assumption that since they were logical to me, they will be logical to someone else.
The common error of projecting my logic process onto the person I'm speaking with.

It's also irritating to realize that someone else has been making assumptions about you based on their own emotional baggage.  The kind of assumptions that are totally out of left field and really don't make any sense if they actually knew you (or were actually observant).
The "up" side is called rose colored glasses and is a term applied to people who are blindly in love with someone, or just intentionally ignoring their faults.  The "down" side doesn't have a name to the best of my knowledge - I might call it seeing red or something similar - and is the opposite end of the spectrum where someone refuses to see any good qualities in someone.

~~~

I'm sorry for the lack of activity last week.  I'm trying to write when possible, but this eye strain is really kicking my ass.  I should make an eye appointment but I can't do that until after September, when I'm not a pregnant lady any more.  At least that's what they tell me.
Until then I'm going to make my best effort to obtain Hubby's glasses so I can sit and stare at the screen for a while.  The difficult part is he doesn't get home from work until around 7:30 p.m., then we eat dinner, then I'm tired and I want to go to bed so I can get up at 5:30 a.m. the next day to work for 9 hours.  It's a viscous cycle, but I don't think I'd change it.  I'll just have to try and work around it.
And try I shall!
I apologize for the potentially sporadic updates that may follow.

~~~

I leave you with this.  Enjoy.

More on HHS and Contraceptives.

I am back.  The convention went fairly good.  I do wish I had been able to garden this weekend, or get some semblance of housework done.  Guess what I'm doing this whole week!

Just in case:
The following post is based upon arguments I have read and heard.  It is not, in any way, intended to refer to every single person and their views about the issue.

Further regarding HHS:
I read two articles in last Sunday's Perspective section in the Post about it.  Both opposing the religious side in favor of "women's health."  One was written by a woman and one was written by a man.  Both brought up valid points in favor of birth control, the latter bringing up the point that the government indeed forces others to pay for things they are opposed to.  The author cited four to six things (I can't remember now) that peoples of other faiths pay for via taxes that they oppose.
The religious argument is not a new one.
I suppose the question now is what makes the Christian/Catholic argument any better than the others?
Upon thinking on the things the author cited (vegans paying for subsidized grazing land for livestock we eat) I've realized that the difference is that birth control is not something that is needed by the majority.  It is not a necessity that people be able to have sex without facing the consequences of a child.  There is a percentage of women (I think the first article mentioned said something around 14%) that need birth control as hormone therapy for treating certain disorders (PCOS) however, these women are most likely not going to die without it.
In a further discussion with my roommate she argued that freedom of religion is acceptable until your religion is hurting someone else.  The example she gave was as such: what if she worked for a Christian Science company and for some reason went to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.  At the hospital she dies on the operating table and needs to be resuscitated.  Now, because Christian Scientists do not believe in medical care they refuse to pay the particular part of the medical bill (after insurance) that is regarding the resuscitation and she is left with the resulting enormous bill.
That's valid, but I don't think a Christian Science company would even offer health insurance to begin with.
I can say, that having been in a situation where I was uninsured and "needed" birth control, it is not difficult to get.  All I did was go to a Planned Parenthood, told them I needed a prescription for this pill, and they gave it to me.  The cost was double what I was paying with insurance but even then it amounted to an extra $10 a month.  I understand that this is hard to come by sometimes, but it's not like I had a high paying job.  I was pretty much below the poverty line according to my income totals at the end of that year, but I made due.  It's all about budgeting, which is a skill Americans seem to notoriously lack.  In any case, I haven't found an insurance provider that covers contraceptives fully (albeit I haven't been really looking for one either).
So my point is that those who argue that it's OK to force someone to pay for something they morally oppose argue that those who are morally opposed are in some way physically harming someone else.  At least that's the way it seems on the HHS issue.
The issue is silly because it isn't like birth control is hard to get.  If someone opposes it and therefore will not pay for it, pay for it yourself.  You're already working, so use $20 of that money every month to buy a pack of pills.

The whole thing frustrates me.  I have a problem with people who expect others to just pony up for their stuff.  The group of people who are entitled to everything regardless.  The same people who will buy a shiny new car when they know damn well they can't afford it and then are surprised (sometimes even enraged) when it gets taken from them because they can't pay.
Yes, there are people who legitimately need the help, and help should come to them in some form or another.
But there are also those people who are perfectly capable of supporting themselves if only they didn't live outside of their means.  I feel like these are the people that make up the majority in this case.

But it could be that I'm just being a cynic.

You are What You Eat.

Today, as I sit at work, I'm thinking about how wonderfully depressing facebook is.  I'm on facebook for the majority of my work days (when I have my laptop with me) because there is simply nothing else to do.  I finish all of my usual online maintenance - as I call it - and I just leave the webpage open in case someone who is online decides to make my day slightly less boring by messaging me.  Before I've gotten to this point I've already slogged through the Denver Post, done the puzzles (the best part), read something from a book, started a grocery list, etc.
I have been struck by the incredible amount of political garbage that is propagated in my news feed.  Some of it is conservative, and some of it is liberal; but all of it is garbage.  Well, most of it.
I come across more bigoted liberal political hoo-ha on facebook than anywhere else.  And I come across a large amount of bigoted conservative hoo-ha as well.  It's pretty equal.
My problem with the liberal hoo-ha is it is generally insulting by implication.  Liberals always bash bigots but in turn are bigoted themselves; saying things like, "(#3:) Politicians believe telepathically communicating with extra-terrestrials (angels) is more important than keeping our oceans, rivers, and lakes free from pollution" listed under "Five unmistakable signs we are re-entering the dark ages," OR things like, "choose reality, it will be better for all of us," is not exactly indicative of an open mind.
Yes, conservatives say stupid things like this too.  

I suppose what I'm really trying to get at is that I am continually (for some reason) surprised at the amount of hate that is lobbed at religion.  Any religion, really.  Man is amazingly prone to hate, in general it seems.  
I had not identified my own perspective with bigotry either, until I began to "cross over."  Now that I am on the other side of the fence I can see where my errors were.  And how stupidly insistent I was about not thinking.
I see this in others.  A lot.  And I know there's nothing I can do to alter it; it takes a certain realization on the behalf of the individual to see your own mistakes.

What I can do is try my very best to be less annoyed with the garbage online, and understand that the people who post it are not filled with hate, but more often are not thinking in a three-dimensional manner.
For example, I cut off an argument with my roommate concerning the legal obligation of religious organizations to pay for contraceptives to get to my point (which had been that there were no women on the panel regarding birth control).  The argument that stemmed from my original point was that it was not okay for the government to force religious organizations to pay for something they viewed as morally wrong.  She felt otherwise, saying that people needed birth control and it was wrong to deprive them of something they needed.  I could have gotten her original point wrong, because I got frustrated with her when she was adamant that forcing someone to go against their morals was okay.  To justify it, she told me a story of a Christian man who worked for a Jewish company.  Said company laid him off two years before retirement so they wouldn't have to pay it.  In my opinion, this is a case of douche-baggery, not a case for oppression of religious freedom.  But we didn't get into a deeper discussion about it because, of late, I've been testy and not in a good place for conversations.  And, after some repetition of the words "the original point of this was" which got a little louder than normal volume (not quite yelling), I dropped it.
Some days I just don't have a fight in me; the energy to defend or explain does not come, nor can I will it to do so.
What I can learn from this is if I am not generally feeling good, I am not a good conversationalist.  I should improve in that respect.


The point of today's post is that people often don't think from both perspectives before making a judgement.  I am guilty of this too, I'm pretty sure everyone is.  I just think we should make an effort to step back and take another look at things before giving them a label.