home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: alt.support
- Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!scott.skidmore.edu!saims!nosberg
- From: nosberg@saims.skidmore.edu (nancy osberg)
- Subject: Donahue.... kids
- Message-ID: <1993Jan12.215006.26806@scott.skidmore.edu>
- Sender: news@scott.skidmore.edu (news manager)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: saims
- Organization: Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs NY
- X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
- Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 21:50:06 GMT
- Lines: 34
-
- I'm a little late coming into this conversation (?), but I've read the
- comments here several times and my feelings remain the same. To
- "gisle" I would have to say that had your mother given you away (back
- in the 50's or 60's, I believe you said) she would have been run out
- of town on the rails! In "those days" to have done something like
- that would have caused both your mother and you to have some
- derogatory names placed on your heads. I'm not saying that was good,
- I'm just saying your mother did what was considered the right thing to
- do at the time. Now, in our present world, it is not considered a bad
- thing (as it would have been then) to say "I can't bring up this child
- properly, so I'm going to give it away." It's all well and good that
- we have become that advanced, but it seems to me a very important
- issue is being overlooked here and that is the fact that too many
- women (for too many reasons) become pregnant BEFORE they are ready to
- have a child. It seems a more dominant issue today as we see child
- after child being left to the streets or given up for adoption or
- homeless or whatever or perhaps it's not. Perhaps all those folks who
- were abusive to their kids in the 50s and 60s, but kept them (and from
- the responses, there seem to be a lot of you out there who lived with
- abusive parents) were in the same situation--not really ready to have
- children--but because of the times, couldn't very well give those
- children away.
-
- As I said, I feel the real issue here being overlooked is that people
- should decide they are not ready to raise children BEFORE they have
- them, not AFTER they have them. It's a little like putting the cart
- before the horse, and given that children are our most important
- resource, I think we should be a bit more careful in planning them.
- Of course, that's another whole "ball of wax"--how to be sure planned
- parenting is followed. Instead of giving credit to those who have
- babies and then find they can't handle them, why don't we try to find
- solutions to having babies we can't handle in the first place.
- Education? More accessible birth control? More accessible abortions?
- Someone must know the answer.
-