An Interesting Take

Among the various retrospectives I've come across in recent days marking the Pill's introduction 50 years ago this month, probably the most unique I've seen thus far is a First Things piece titled "Beyond the Pill: Looking for the Origins of the Sexual Revolution" from military historian Stuart Koehl.

Therein he offers some observations that are sure to prompt some garment-renting and teeth-gnashing among those who go in for the notion that The 40s And 50s Were Great But The 60s Ruined Everything:

Because of its scope and intensity, World War II shattered an existing moral consensus, creating a socially unstable situation in which “ordinary” morality was jettisoned. People lived very intensely and with the knowledge that everything, including life itself, was transient. The typical American serviceman in World War II had four sex partners, not counting prostitutes. Venereal disease rates for U.S. servicemen in Europe and Australia reached epidemic proportions that eventually required the military to license and regulate brothels. As Kipling wrote, “Single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints”.

While soldiers were fornicating their way across Europe and women on the home front were in contact with men on the war assembly lines, the number of “Dear John” letters received at the front and in the POW cages constituted a real threat to morale. One received in 1944 by a POW in Stalag Luft VII read: “Dear John, I hope you are open-minded, because I just had a baby. His father is a wonderful guy, and he has enclosed some cigars for you”. Of course, most men and women were not promiscuous during the war—just as most men and women today are not—but enough were to have a lasting impact.

After the war, everything was supposed to return to normal, but of course, it did not, and many trends conspired to ensure that they would not, including unprecedented prosperity, social and physical mobility—which broke down traditional ties of family and community, a burning resentment of authority among servicemen and a more relaxed attitude toward sex, growing out of the wartime experience.

For a generation that grew up in uniform, hypocrisy was not seen as something necessary for the smooth running of society. If the boomers grew up rebels, it’s because their parents encouraged rebellion even while outwardly conforming to social norms themselves. Everybody liked sex, and many broke sexual barriers, though still exercising discretion and obedience to form. But, looking at the divorce rates between the late forties to the mid-sixties, one can already see the incipient breakdown of marriage owing, in part, to hasty wartime marriages combined with the stress of servicemen reintegrating into civilian society. ... One prominent feature of many marriages then was the pressure on men to marry women whom they impregnated, resulting in shotgun weddings and “premature” births. Fortunately, it was at a time when a man just out of high school could get a high-paying, semi-skilled job with union protection. It would be safe to wager, though, that many of those marriages collapsed once their children were grown.

Many of the behaviors predisposed by the pill were already common, albeit covert, features of American life once the pill became available. The pill added fuel to a smoldering fire; it didn't start the blaze, but it certainly accelerated it and ensured its spread. The greatest damage done by the pill has been to women. It shifted the onus for avoiding pregnancy to women, absolving men of responsibility for unwanted pregnancies, which, in essence, made sex into a casual activity. Men no longer had to marry the women they impregnated, which, in turn, made legalized abortion inevitable, again leaving women to bear the psychological and moral consequences. So as we mark the anniversary of the pill, we should spend more time trying to understand the social forces that caused us to react to the pill as we did, allowing us to discard a long-standing moral consensus, leaving only sexual chaos and uncertainty.

Overpopulation Underpopulation Is the Problem

Population Research Institute has just released the second installment in its "Overpopulation Is a Myth" series— a slickly produced video that explains in easy-to-understand terms why underpopulation is the real looming demographic disaster:



I first saw this video last week, and about an hour later I received an e-mail from a journalist in the UK asking for a brief comment for a story he was writing about a young British woman who, based on a belief that having children would have damaging effects on the quality of life of people already living, had decided to be sterilized.

I commented on how how tragic it is that someone would decide to not have children based on a mistaken belief that the world is somehow overpopulated—and that, quite the contrary, the real danger in our world is underpopulation. I further pointed out that this is the looming demographic and economic threat that no one wants to talk about. If there are not enough babies being born today, who will support tomorrow's pensioners?

It's a shame that such frantic handwringing about overpopulation still persists in our day. How much more stuck in the Stuck-in-the-Sixties can you get? It's as if Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb had just hit bookstore shelves (and thus had not yet been proven completely wrong), and the writers of Star Trek were still hard at work producing birth control propaganda.

[Cross-posted at Pro-Life Action League and Generations for Life]

Is It a Good Idea for a Couple to Have 19 Kids?

I originally posted the entry that appears below with the title "Is It a Good Idea for a Couple to Have 18 Kids?" on February 2, 2009.

I'm reposting it today in response to this week's People magazine cover:



Seven weeks ago, the now famous Duggar family welcomed the birth of their 18th child.

The next day, a college friend of mine asked me what my take was on said birth.

My short answer: God bless 'em.

I wanted to write more than just this, but hadn't the time.

Now, however, I do.

It seems to me that the question really being asked here—not just by my friend, I suspect, but also countless others—is:

Is it a good idea for a couple to have 18 kids?

This, to my mind, is the wrong to question to ask (or, at least the wrong question to ask first).

Rather, the question to ask is:

Is a given married couple following God's will?

This question can be answered only by 3 people:

1. God
2. Husband
3. Wife

Well, five, really, since God is actually Three Persons, but I digress.

I have exactly no competence to diagnose whether a given married couple (be they the Duggars, or the parents of a guy I used to work with—who had 21 children—or the couple I see at the park who have one child) is following God's will in determining how many children they should have.

Heck, I have enough trouble discerning if I'm following God's will, much less trying to figure out if other people are.

On the contrary, acting in good faith, I can only assume that they are.

Of course, when it comes to morally licit options for planning a family, contraception is right out. (**Shameless plug follows**
And, as it happens, I was recently asked by Sunnyday, one of my e-friends in the Philippines, to speak to the question, "Will contraceptive use make parents more responsible?" in a Filipino parenting magazine. I did so here [PDF].)

Another point to make is that the Duggars endorse the Quiverfull movement (sometimes colloquially referred to as "providentialism"), which teaches that natural family planning is, for all intents and purposes, tantamount to contraception. On its face, such a notion is untenable.

But again, for a given married couple, the decision of whether they could or should use NFP to space pregnancies is up to them to determine—with God's help, natch.

On this topic, a Catholic friend of mine told me not long ago that in the course of an online discussion with other Catholic women about NFP, someone tried to convince the group that it was necessary for a couple to get their bishop's permission before they could use NFP.

When my friend told me that, I had a sudden urge to run to the nearest wall and start banging my head against it in sheer frustration that there could be such profound misunderstanding of what the Church really teaches about when a couple can use NFP.

Christopher West speaks to this topic more extensively in an article entitled "God, Sex, and Babies: What the Church Really Teaches about Responsible Parenthood". And, the uber-intelligent Dr. Janet Smith offers a lengthier, more scholarly treatment of this issue in an essay entitled "Moral Use of Natural Family Planning" [PDF].

All this is to say that while QuiverFull is based on a false belief (i.e., that natural family planning is incompatible with God's will), it is also most emphatically not true to say that a given couple who elects not to "use" NFP within their own marriage is acting irresponsibly by foregoing consultation of charts and thermometers—and by so doing, end up giving birth to 18, or 21, or [insert number here] children.

So, once again, my three word comment on the Duggars' welcoming their 18th child:

God bless 'em.

And indeed, He has.

It's About Time

About.com posts on the Abortion/Breast Cancer link

Breastfeeding in a Pornified Culture

"I just don't think it's proper for women to show their breasts out in public unless they're on the beach."

So said some middle-aged guy who happened upon a group of mothers taking part in a "nurse-in" in Lincoln Square Plaza last Friday in support of a fellow breastfeeding mom who was harassed (sadly, by another mom) earlier in the week.

On the one hand, this guy's comments are boorish, obnoxious, and stupid.

But on the other hand, I have to give him credit for being so up-front about his "issue" with nursing. I've heard not a few times from my beloved wife that people have told her they're "uncomfortable" with her nursing in public, but invariably the objectors fail to subsequently explain why, precisely, it disrupts their comfort level.

I'm of the opinion that nursing in public is often perceived to be indecent because it is (and has been for quite some time) done relatively rarely, due in no small part to the recommendations of a Herd of Indepdendent Thinkers who decided in the middle of the last century that the idea that babies should be fed formula somehow marked a crowning achievement for human civilization.

I say "relatively rarely" in reference to the portrayal of women's breasts as sexual, which is surely the norm in our pornified culture.

In essence, then, to the modern mind, whose perspective our boorish commenter articulates to a T, the "real" — i.e., the belief that women's breasts are primarily for nursing her children — has been replaced by the "counterfeit" — i.e., the belief that women's breasts are primarily, if not exclusively, sexual.

(As an aside: Much the same can be said of contraception and its impact on people's attitudes toward sex. To the modern mind, the "real"—i. e., the belief that openness to having a child is an essential component of sex—has been replaced by the "counterfeit"—i. e., the belief that contraceptive sex is the norm.)

It follows that those of us who believe the opposite—that the real is actually the counterfeit and vice versa—are often considered daft.

My sense is that were public nursing to be done ubiquitously, this wacky popular notion that it is indecent would wane.

[HT: R.M. Schultz via Carrie W.]

EEOC to Catholic College: Drop Dead

I can't say as I'm surprised:

Feds Accuse Catholic Belmont Abbey College of Sexual Discrimination for Not Covering Contraception

So much for separation of church and state.

Thankfully, the BAC powers that be aren't backing down.

From the article:

"As a Roman Catholic institution, Belmont Abbey College is not able to and will not offer nor subsidize medical services that contradict the clear teaching of the Catholic Church," said Belmont Abbey President William Thierfelder. "There was no other course of action possible if we were to operate in fidelity to our mission and to our identity as a Catholic college."

After faculty members filed complaints with the EEOC and the North Carolina Department of Insurance, Belmont Abbey says the EEOC told the school in March 2009 that it would close the file on the discrimination charge, as it had not found the school's decision in violation of its statutes. But the agency later reversed itself, and issued a determination letter to the school on August 5 affirming that the ban amounted to gender discrimination, because it pertains only to women.

"By denying prescription contraception drugs, Respondent (the college) is discriminating based on gender because only females take oral prescription contraceptives," wrote Reuben Daniels Jr., the EEOC Charlotte District Office Director in the determination. [emphasis added]

Aside from presenting us with a clear example of bureaucracy run amok, Daniels' comment also provides with what could rightly be called a "teachable moment".

He noted that only women take oral contraceptives. This, of course, begs the question prompts the question: Why is there no contraceptive pill for men?

The redoubtable Dr. Janet Smith explains why in her talk "Contraception: Why Not":

There's a wonderful book out by Dr. Ellen Grant called The Bitter Pill. She was very much in on distributing contraceptives in the 60's in London, but she saw woman after woman coming in with different pathologies that she found were pill-related high blood pressure, blood clots, cysts in the breast, all sorts of things.

So, she said, "I'm not going to prescribe these anymore." She looked into this and she discovered, that when they were first testing for the pill, they were trying to find a male contraceptive and a female contraceptive pill.

And in the first study group of males, they found that there was some slight shrinkage of the testicles of one male, so they stopped all testing of the male contraceptive pill.

You might notice that there is no such thing in the first study group of females. Three females died and they just readjusted the dosage.

Let's read that again:

And in the first study group of males, they found that there was some slight shrinkage of the testicles of one male, so they stopped all testing of the male contraceptive pill.

And this:

You might notice that there is no such thing in the first study group of females. Three females died and they just readjusted the dosage. [!]

Smith continues:

Now, I don't know what that tells you, but it tells me that there's something sinister going on here. Women are still dying from the pill.

If you look at the insert in any set of pills, you can get this from a pharmacist if you can't find it elsewhere, it says such things as the pill will cause blood clots, high blood pressure, heart disease, greater increase of some kinds of cancer, infertility.

Now, these are very small percentages where this happens, but there are some sixteen million women in the United States on the pill. Sixteen million.

And even a very small percentage is still a very large number of women. Not to mention the day by day side effects. These always fascinate me.

Most women, in fact, 50% of women who start on the pill, stop within the first year because of unpleasant side effects. So, these side effects are really largely those of the sixteen million who continue, so you can imagine how bad they must be for the 50% who stop.

It's not Belmont Abbey College that's mistreating women.

It's the Pill.

Is There a Pattern Here?

This reminds me of this.

[HT: Christina Dunigan at Real Choice]

Baby Steps in the Right Direction

China steps back from one child policy

China is taking the first step towards ending its one-child policy with the authorities in Shanghai encouraging thousands of couples to have a second baby.

For the first time in 30 years, officials in the country’s economic capital have urged eligible parents to plan for a second child. The move was prompted by the growing demographic imbalance in the city and fears that the younger generation will not be able to support the ageing population. [emphasis added]

Did you catch that, overpopulation fear mongers?

Interestingly, this article was posted on July 25, the same date in 1968 that Pope Paul VI, of happy memory, issued the astonishingly prescient Humanae Vitae.

This Is *So* Not Surprising

The Bullwinkle Approach continues to yield extraordinarily predictable results.

It's for Reasons Like This I'm Cynical about the Medical Establishment

I linked to this post a few weeks ago on Facebook, and MWhelehan commented:

My own sister-in-law just had her fourth via Cesarean and the doctor asked her several times if she wanted her tubes tied. I thought that was even more invasive than the surgery. But the explanation was, "We've already got you open..."

From an insurance company's perspective, this is a no-brainer: fork over a few more thousand now, but think of the money we won't have to cough up in the future now that she's done having kids!

I particularly love the "We've already got you open" sales pitch. Imagine going to the dentist to get a filling, and he says to you, "How'd you like for me cut out your tongue? I mean, we've already got your open."

Absurd? Of course.

But it only serves to illustrate that which in reality is absurd: the fact that the medical establishment routinely tells women that they should consider having a side effect laden surgery performed on part of their body that is perfectly healthy and merely doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Disaster?

When you hear the word disaster, what do you think of?

To me, the word brings to mind images of tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, plane crashes — well, you get the idea.

Perhaps it's antediluvian of me to say so, but I don't think of the creation of a unique human being with an eternal soul is an event that would ever warrant such a label.

Silly me.

In an article in today's Chicago Tribune (that reads almost as if it could have been written by someone at Planned Parenthood), we read this:

About 50 percent of pregnancies in the United States are unintended. In good economic times, many families are happy to welcome another child, [ACOG Vice President Dr. Iffath] Hoskins said. But when money is tight, an unintended pregnancy can be a disaster.

It's unclear to me whether it's the ACOG spokesmouth who thinks the creation of a new human life could be a "disaster", or if that's just editorializing thrown in by the writer of the article, one Shari Roan.

Regardless, such misanthropic sentiments are self-evidently appalling, and those who harbor them ought to be ashamed of thesmelves.

A little later in the article, Roan writes:

Every dollar spent in the public health sector on contraceptives saves $3 in childbirth and newborn health-care costs for Medicaid.

Did you catch the subtext there? As Mark Shea has quite rightly pointed out:

The solution of rich Western elites to poverty is always and everywhere, "Just enough of me. Way too much of you. Cull your herds and buy Pepsi."

The Morning-After Pill: Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

When I first heard about the federal court decision last month ordering the FDA to make the morning-after pill available to 17-year olds — a decision gushingly lauded by ACOG, natch — I couldn't help but call to mind this post on the Life Training Institute blog last year.

Therein, Rich Poupard (aka Serge) writes about a web seminar (at one time accessible here) in which Dr. James Trussell made some astonishingly candid admissions about the failure of emergency contraception to reduce the rate of unintended pregnancy.

Trussell's page on Princeton's website notes that he is "a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute and a member of the board of directors of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, The Guttmacher Institute, the Society of Family Planning, and a member of the National Medical Committee of Planned Parenthood Federation of America". It further notes that Trussell "has actively promoted making emergency contraception more widely available as an important step in helping women reduce their risk of unintended pregnancy..."

Poupard notes that Trussell acknowledged, among other things, the following:

1. Trussell previously hoped (published in 1992) that EC would reduce unintended pregnancies and abortion by half.

2. 15 years later 11 studies have consistently showed no decrease of pregnancy rates from use of ECs.

3. Trussell also stated that a future decrease in pregnancy rates from EC use is highly unlikely - an astounding admission. ...

4. Due to difficulties in estimating the expected pregnancy rates, the published efficacy in the package insert of EC is almost certainly too high.

He then trenchantly notes:

This is amazing stuff. Since there was extensive news coverage of the effort to get Plan B to OTC status, why the silence in the wake of information that Plan B will not effect pregnancy or abortion rates? Imagine the outcry if a heart medication was thought to reduce heart attacks by 95% - and was made over-the-counter in order to increase its availability to reduce heart disease. A year later evidence comes out that no study had ever found that it had any effect on heart attack rates, and that the only thing that could be said about it is that it is "probably better than nothing". There would be a great outcry, congressional hearings, and accusations that the evil pharmaceutical companies were gouging unsuspecting patients. However, so far there has not been a peep among those concerned about "women's health" that they could be promoting an expensive medication that may not be effective.

Instead, we get this:

On Wednesday, Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, praised the agency's apparent change of heart.

"We commend the FDA for taking swift action to ensure that its decisions on Plan B are based solely on the drug's safety and efficacy," said Northup, whose group had brought the lawsuit against the FDA. "It is a key step for the agency as it seeks to restore confidence in its ability to safeguard public health and leave politics at the lab door."

According to This, Jocelyn and I Shouldn't Be Very Happy

Especially as we continue to await the birth of our — gasp! — fifth child in the last 6+ years.

By "this", I mean the results of A New Study conducted by People Who Allegedly Know What They're Talking About who have declared:

Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

Funny. We're actually pretty "satisfied" with our marriage right now.

Imagine that.

Mark Shea comments thusly:

For our culture terminal narcissism, this is a big deal, since it conceives of marriage, like everything else, as a tool for self-fulfillment and instant gratification. That's why it bothers to undertake studies like this.

Of course, there is another way of seeing it: kids force adolescent narcissists to grow up and realize it's not all about Me. Those who submit to this process of "growing up" discover newer and deeper forms of satisfaction than the pleasure of being a newlywed. Part of that whole "lose your life and you will find it" paradox that is soooooo out of step with our consumer culture.

I'm going out on a limb and guessing that maybe, just maybe, decades of increasingly ubiquitous contraception — and the anti-child ethos from whence contraception cometh — might just have some impact on couples' attitudes toward having children.

You know, the same anti-child ethos that gives us condom ads like these, which apparently won an award at Cannes in 2006:

NEJM Op-Ed to Pro-Life Doctors: Drop Dead

Medicine needs to embrace a brand of professionalism that demands less self-interest, not more. Conscientious objection makes sense with conscription, but it is worrisome when professionals who freely chose their field parse care and withhold information that patients need. As the gatekeepers to medicine, physicians and other health care providers have an obligation to choose specialties that are not moral minefields for them. Qualms about abortion, sterilization, and birth control? Do not practice women's health.

Because, you know, it's all about "choice".

[HT: JivinJ]

Ka-ching for Planned Parenthood

When I see dreck like this:



...I can't decide whether to do this:



...or don sackcloth and ashes and recite the penitential psalms (followed, perhaps, by the imprecatory psalms).

What's the Solution for Reducing Abortions?

According to pro-choice writer William Saletan, the answer is the Bullwinkle Approach, of course.

Ross Douthat explains why this, uh, isn't such a good idea.

[HT: JivinJ]

I'm Shocked — Shocked, I Tell You

Who could have ever imagined that a maker of birth control pills would deceive women about their supposed health benefits?

Is It a Good Idea for a Couple to Have 18 Kids?

Seven weeks ago, the now famous Duggar family welcomed the birth of their 18th child.

The next day, a college friend of mine asked me what my take was on said birth.

My short answer: God bless 'em.

I wanted to write more than just this, but hadn't the time.

Now, however, I do.

It seems to me that the question really being asked here—not just by my friend, I suspect, but also countless others—is:

Is it a good idea for a couple to have 18 kids?

This, to my mind, is the wrong to question to ask (or, at least the wrong question to ask first).

Rather, the question to ask is:

Is a given married couple following God's will?

This question can be answered only by 3 people:

1. God
2. Husband
3. Wife

Well, five, really, since God is actually Three Persons, but I digress.

I have exactly no competence to diagnose whether a given married couple (be they the Duggars, or the parents of a guy I used to work with—who had 21 children—or the couple I see at the park who have one child) is following God's will in determining how many children they should have.

Heck, I have enough trouble discerning if I'm following God's will, much less trying to figure out if other people are.

On the contrary, acting in good faith, I can only assume that they are.

Of course, when it comes to morally licit options for planning a family, contraception is right out. (**Shameless plug follows**
And, as it happens, I was recently asked by Sunnyday, one of my e-friends in the Philippines, to speak to the question, "Will contraceptive use make parents more responsible?" in a Filipino parenting magazine. I did so here [PDF].)

Another point to make is that the Duggars endorse the Quiverfull movement (sometimes colloquially referred to as "providentialism"), which teaches that natural family planning is, for all intents and purposes, tantamount to contraception. On its face, such a notion is untenable.

But again, for a given married couple, the decision of whether they could or should use NFP to space pregnancies is up to them to determine—with God's help, natch.

On this topic, a Catholic friend of mine told me not long ago that in the course of an online discussion with other Catholic women about NFP, someone tried to convince the group that it was necessary for a couple to get their bishop's permission before they could use NFP.

When my friend told me that, I had a sudden urge to run to the nearest wall and start banging my head against it in sheer frustration that there could be such profound misunderstanding of what the Church really teaches about when a couple can use NFP.

Christopher West speaks to this topic more extensively in an article entitled "God, Sex, and Babies: What the Church Really Teaches about Responsible Parenthood". And, the uber-intelligent Dr. Janet Smith offers a lengthier, more scholarly treatment of this issue in an essay entitled "Moral Use of Natural Family Planning" [PDF].

All this is to say that while QuiverFull is based on a false belief (i.e., that natural family planning is incompatible with God's will), it is also most emphatically not true to say that a given couple who elects not to "use" NFP within their own marriage is acting irresponsibly by foregoing consultation of charts and thermometers—and by so doing, end up giving birth to 18, or 21, or [insert number here] children.

So, once again, my three word comment on the Duggars' welcoming their 18th child:

God bless 'em.

And indeed, He has.

This Is Interesting

Pill inventor slams ... pill

Key graphs:

Eighty five year old Carl Djerassi the Austrian chemist who helped invent the contraceptive pill now says that his co-creation has led to a "demographic catastrophe."

In an article published by the Vatican this week, the head of the world's Catholic doctors broadened the attack on the pill, claiming it had also brought "devastating ecological effects" by releasing into the environment "tonnes of hormones" that had impaired male fertility, The Taiwan Times says.

The assault began with a personal commentary in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard by Carl Djerassi. The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step toward the earliest oral contraceptive pill.

Djerassi outlined the "horror scenario" that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now "no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." He said: "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete."

He described families who had decided against reproduction as "wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it." ...

[Dr Jose Maria Simon Castellvi] also pointed to the "devastating ecological effects of the tons of hormones discarded into the environment each year. We have sufficient data to state that one of the causes of masculine infertility in the West is the environmental contamination caused by the products of the 'pill'." Castellvi noted as well that the International Agency for Research on Cancer reported in 2005 that the pill has carcinogenic effects.

It seems we have here yet another instance of Shea's Two Phases of History.

Phase One, you may recall, is:

What could it hurt?

Phase Two is:

How could we have known?

Show Me a Culture That Despises Virginity and I'll Show You a Culture That Despises Children*

Quoth Canadian pro-choice activist Joyce Arthur in a comment on the National Post website:

Yes Matt W, let’s err on the side of life - WOMEN’S lives. Because the right to abortion is not about a woman’s right to choose, it’s about her right to LIFE - which means far more than just mere physical survival.

Behind your view is the assumption that women are obligated to have babies just because they are capable of it. Not so. Women can never enjoy full human rights or equality unless they can control their fertility. That includes the right to have sex for pleasure, which carries a risk of pregnancy regardless of use of birth control. So abortion must be available as a backup.

And, then, the money quote:

The moral status of the fetus, when life begins etc., does not matter, because women need and will have abortions regardless - even women who think abortion is murder.

Andrea Mrozek trenchantly notes:

Who is honestly going to stand up for our “right” to casual sex (and hey, while we’re at it, can we enshrine that it be really good sex too?) over someone else’s life? Guess Joyce Arthur just did. (It’s also a twisted sense of pleasure that sees women heading to a clinic to put their feet in stirrups for invasive surgery, all as a matter of routine “choice”.)

Uh, yeah.

*HT for the meme: Mark Shea