New Facts About Mother Of Octuplets Raise Ethical Questions

Though doctors speculated that the California mother of octuplets had used fertility drugs to conceive, it's now being reported that she had the embryos implanted...and was already the mother of six children. More »

Once Upon A Time, When We Still Feared Global Poverty, We Learned A Very Interesting Rice Recipe

What is it about the "Global Population, Magnitude Of" thing that so vexes the world's rich people? I'm asking in light of the food crisis and the energy crisis bringing back that old "Malthusian population crisis" fear. I'm also asking in light of my kinda recent discovery that the American rights to the RU-486 abortion pill are owned by some super-secretive subsidiary of the Rockefeller-founded Population Council. (Which is, by the way, charging too much money for it.) But mainly I'm asking because I just read this NYRB piece on two new books about the population control movement in the '50s and '60s which, among other things, taught me this about the challenge Western family planners faced in getting (and sometimes coercing) Third worlders into embracing birth control: More »

Is It About Time We Made A "Pregnancy Pact" Of Our Own?

The conventional wisdom holds that media types are biased in favor of the Theory of Evolution. So why is it all they seem to print these days are stories hellbent on convincing us that the WRONG PEOPLE are procreating?? No doubt you, too, spent more time over the past few months consuming the latest on the Duggar family and the Spears family, that mysteriously-coiffed cult of inbreds in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Pedophiles and the seventeen bored teenagers' homeless deadbeat boyfriends than you did having unprotected sex. But is that good for the future of society? The Yemeni man who sold his 8-year-old daughter to the 30-year-old child molester only did it because he had 15 other children to feed on his panhandling income. And yet three thousand miles northwest in an unspeakably gorgeous town in Italy, the week's New York Times Magazine informs us, the mayor is paying women ten thousand Euros for every baby they can make. More »

The Insane Story Of Stuart Miller's Hollywood Sperm Bank Bondage Cult

Meet Stuart Miller. You thought Dov Charney was a creepy boss? In Stuart's defense, he runs a sperm bank. But Growing Generations is a high-end sperm (and surrogate) bank catering to Hollywood agents and assorted other corporate bigwig types that was just profiled in W Magazine! So you can imagine how Miller's old marketing manager Scott Glasgow found it a little inappropriate when the Boss Man, according to a lawsuit just filed in federal court in Manhattan, emailed him this picture of himself. (There's an even more surreal — though surprisingly SFW — specimen from a company "team building" exercise after the jump.) Still, Glasgow liked his job. He made $100,000 helping gay couples "create new life"! So he had endured Miller's insistence that they share a bed on the company "Vision Cruise" even though he had no interest in actually doing him. The boss was going to make him VP! But then came all the cult classes: More »

Rush Limbaugh: Women Love Hillary Because They've "Had Two Or Three Abortions"

"You have to understand the mindset of a lot of these feminists and women...These women have paid their dues. They've been married two or three times; they've had two or three abortions; they've done everything that feminism asked them to do. They have cut men out of their lives; they have devoted themselves to causes and careers. And this — the candidacy of Hillary Clinton — is the culmination of all of these women's efforts." That's Hillary Clinton's friend Rush Limbaugh on his show yesterday, trying to rile the bonerkiller squad as every day. But hey, let's unpack this. Because to be quite honest, it's a slightly more nuanced portrayal than we're used to from the Right Wing Talk radio, among whom "two or three abortions" is generally code for "whore whore slut" and/or "irresponsible minority rendered incapable by the Massive Welfare State of taking accountability for her actions." No, these women have had two or three abortions because living up to the demands of feminism was some grueling war of attrition. Hm. Sometimes I think it is! Come on Rush, you're human, get inside that woman's head. She's at the clinic, paying for the second abortion she had to get because she "cut men out of her life" — which, let's just be honest, who really does that besides lesbians, Rush? More »

When Did Baby Weight Become Just Plain Fat?

A week or two ago I glanced up from my laptop long enough to catch my first glimpse of a commercial whose audio I had heard dozens of times before. It was for Nutri-System, and the audio consisted of a woman's claim to have lost 41 pounds following the weight-loss regimen. Is that Jillian Barberie? I wondered, unaware that the morning television personality I had watched habitually for years as a resident of Los Angeles in the earlier part of this century had since changed her name to Jillian Barberie-Reynolds or, more to the point, that she had become fat. (And, mercifully, thin again.) I consulted Google: indeed, she had gained 41 pounds. And what unfortunate fate had occasioned this traumatic bloat in Jillian's trademark svelte frame? Oh, pregnancy. Hmm. Well, then. It is now a few weeks later, and I find myself mulling the merits of Lisa Marie Presley's libel lawsuit against the Daily Mail for a related phenomenon, the equation of the weight gained due to one's pregnancy with weight gained due to eating an excess of food. More »

Why Can't Non-Batshit Pro-Lifers Give It Up And Accept The Abortion Pill?

This is Rep. Ray Salva, Missouri Democrat. An early supporter of John Edwards, the Catholic and lifetime Missouri resident is a member of the Optimist's Club and known to be a friend of the environment, the homeless and the eroding middle-class. But we write about him for a much more baffling reason: his addition of an amendment to a statehouse anti-methamphetamine bill. The bill was your typical "make buying Sudafed a pain in the ass" measure. But Salva's amendment would do something entirely unrelated: it would add mifepristone, the RU-486 abortion pill, to the state's list of Schedule 1 Controlled Substances, the list where substances find themselves if they have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. "What other drug could be more harmful (than one that takes) a life?" It's not a bad question: Salva, no stranger to substance abuse, was arrested for drunk driving last February; surely the sort of behavior that could wind up taking a human life. More »