Blaming Mom, Again

Oh, you just gotta go to TomPaine.com and read Blaming Pregnant Women, by Lynn Paltrow

Ain't it wonderful, folks? Once again, Mom is responsible for everything that goes wrong. The Bushies allow corporations to relax emissions standards, cut back on prevention and intervention funding to pay for their unjustified invasion of Iraq, cut back on maternal and child programs from clinics to WIC, cut the number of meat inspectors and change the focus from "protect the public" to "don't slow down the production line" and their solution to poor child health is to demonize women!

Of course, I don't think women should smoke or drink or use drugs while pregnant. I also know, from having done the research when I was working for the State of Alaska, that there are very few facilities for addiction treatment that will take pregnant women, talk about are set up for them. And, I well remember a conversation with an official of the CDC where I kept saying, "Since we know that fetal alcohol syndrome is a result of an alcoholic mother binge drinking, and that it seldom happens with her first or even second child, isn't it counter-productive to have an educational program that frightens women who discover that they were pregnant when they had that glass of wine at their sister's wedding?" and she kept answering, "Since we don't know how much alcohol is safe, we say none." Now, she never said that the rather large number of studies I was quoting were wrong. She just said that since they don't know, they choose to err on the side of zero tolerance.

The way that plays out, women who have had one drink sometimes get abortions because they believe they have ruined their child. Women who are at-risk decide that since they already have two healthy children, and they certainly drank while pregnant with them, that the whole thing is not a problem for them.

I remember reading, after the Korean War, that the reason that American prisoners caved to brainwashing and torture and Turkish prisoners did not was that American mothers coddled their sons!

My mother told me once that when she was a child, everything that went wrong was her fault because she was the child, and by the time she was an adult, it was her fault because she was a mother.

Yep, blame the wicked, wicked woman. Helen's face caused the Trojan War. Mom's love caused prisoners of war to be unable to withstand torture. Mom's personal habits cause all the birth defects and problems with children.

And we know why, don't we? It's all the fault of that sinner, Eve.