I remember my old friend, Dr. Herbert Ratner, saying that the best gift a husband and wife can give to their child is a baby brother or sister. Over the past week or so as my daughter, Katy, visited from Indiana, and I also officially turned 85, thoughts about siblings have been in my mind. The responsibility of having small children and the expense and difficulty of traveling with them had kept Katy from visiting her family in the East for too many years. But Katy finally came and as a mother I had occasion to rejoice as my children reunited and found pleasure in each other’s company.

The research seems in indicate that only children do not suffer from onlyness. According to Dr. Alex Cutting they describe “advantages like lack of rivalry, more privacy, greater affluence, and more time and attention from their parents.” One of the biggest disadvantages of being an only child is having no one to share in the care of aged parents. Also, since the parents, in a sense, have all their eggs in one basket, there is often a pressure to succeed and to “be there” for the parents more than the child might choose. Read the rest of this entry »

Women are complaining of a “shocking gender inequity” because some insurance companies that will cover Viagra for men will not cover birth control pills for women. After all, they say, thirty years of buying The Pill will cost a women close to $5000. According to the ACLU, women of reproductive age pay 68% more than men in out-of-pocket health care costs.

The men have something broken that they want fixed. The women, on the other hand, have something fixed that they want broken. They want their fertility destroyed. The men want a medicine. The women want a drug that does nothing at all to promote wellness and has many harmful effects. Women who would not consider polluting the environment are willing to pollute the “ecosystem” of their own bodies in such as fashion that every cell of every organ is affected. With good reason Dr. Herbert Ratner has called birth control pills “chemical warfare against women.” Obviously he has a different perspective than the women clamoring for The Pill. Why? Read the rest of this entry »

We are all familiar with the smiling housewife in the TV commercial who says, “I use new HAPPY detergent in my automatic Whing-Ding washer because when I first opened up my new washer there was a big box of HAPPY packed right inside of it. In fact, HAPPY is recommended by the manufacturers of nine out of ten automatic washers. Now, with HAPPY, Monday is fun-day!”

We would think Mrs. Housewife pretty silly if she didn’t try her box of HAPPY, since it came so highly recommended. The manufacturer should know what detergent is best for his appliance. If she just threw out her HAPPY and forever after washed her clothes with bar soap that she pulverized each day in her HANDY-DANDY blender we would suspect that she wasn’t quite up to par when it came to common sense.
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As a Catholic woman, mother of seven, with a BS in Biochemistry and a stint in the U of Chicago medical school, the subjects that have intrigued me over the years have involved the relationship of faith and family, science and scripture, biology and the Bible. Thus I have studied and written about natural childbirth, breastfeeding, health and nutrition, child-rearing, abortion, contraception, evolution, homosexuality, stem cell research, and so on. At each stage of my life it seemed natural to learn about what was impacting me at the time, all the way from pregnancy to old age–which is where we are now.
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