What if Men Got Pregnant?

A young woman I know gave birth recently.  Her baby was taken from the hospital in the careful arms of a case worker from an adoption service and into the loving arms of a waiting family.  Then the young woman went home to try to get on with her life.  One million girls and women in the United States tear a hole in their own hearts every year.  85% of them receive an abortion.  15% give up their child to adoption.  100% of them are changed forever.  100% of their decisions are thrown into the grist mill of our seemingly endless moral debate about the correct fate for the lives involved.  Beyond these life-altering events 400,000 teenagers give birth - 10% of all births in the United States.  These girls, too are changed forever.

The politics of the womb are brutal and in stark contrast to the weakness and vulnerability of a post partum woman.  Our capacity as individuals to love and nurture is not matched by a collective capacity to understand and tolerate.  As the national debate rages on,  the girls and women behind the statistics struggle to move on, some with empty arms, and many with empty wallets trying to make ends meet.  Do not fool yourself that these stories all have a happy ending.  Would it be different if men got pregnant?  I don't mean every time.  I mean - what if the sex act were a crap shoot and either partner might conceive.  Would we view romance differently?  Would we be more accommodating of others?  Would we reconsider what we consider "privacy"? 

The life-changing responsibility for the successful mating of the sperm and egg has always been born by women. The lucky ones, and by a small margin, the majority, are women in stable circumstances with the means to raise their child.  But many are not so lucky.  That makes us a two class society: those for whom the monthly cycle of fertility creates a regular exposure to risk; and those who may walk away.

Do We Know What We Want?

For 25 years politicians and alternative energy advocates have wanted to decrease US dependence on foreign oil.  They have bullied the country into huge capital expenditures on mass transit and given credits and incentives for carpooling, van-pooling and riding bicycles to work.  They have advocated taxing petroleum with the expectation that the tax would allocate the cost of our dependence evenly across our economy.  They have argued that it would be a good thing if petroleum based products, especially gasoline, are more expensive because we would use less of them and turn instead to substitute sources of energy. 

But.  Every time the price of gasoline rises we hear a cacophony of complaints that the associated "pain" is too great.  When the price rises in the winter we have Congressional calls for subsidized heating fuel.  When it rises in the summer we see a Congressional scramble to find a way to salvage summer driving vacations.

And.  Whenever there is a push to develop our own known petroleum reserves in Alaska and our mountain states we hear that more drilling in the US is a problem, not a solution.  We stall and complicate the issue of new permits to drill achieving an effective moratorium on our domestic industry.

Then.  We subsidize off shore drilling in Brazil.  Again.  Several years ago we made a $2 billion loan to Brazil's state-owned Petrobras.  And now the President announces that he is prepared to make another - this time $3 billion.  Is it OK to drill off Brazil but not in our own waters?  Should our deficit-financed economy lower the risk and raise returns for a foreign company when our own industry is sidelined?

We need to make up our minds what we want to do.  I vote for our own industry, in our own waters and on our own lands, protected by the best environmental regulations in the world.

Pucker Up and Blow

That is not what Lauren Bacall said to Humphery Bogart in "To Have and Have Not".  What she said was: "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve.  You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything.  Not a thing.  Oh, maybe just whistle.  You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?.  You just put your lips together and blow."

This winter, I decided to learn to whistle.  Not the easy-go-lucky whistle that most people can do.  I wanted the turn-their-heads whistle that you can hear over even thunderous applause.  I had believed that the skills required were innate or possibly passed only to a chosen few selected at random in their early teens.  Like others who have great respect for the web, I turned to Google and discovered step by step instructions assuring me that I would be a whistling fool in a few weeks.  Starting at step one: "Tuck away your lips" you know you are following a carefully thought-through path.  Be sure you have a mirror handy so you know when you have successfully completed step two: "Draw back the tongue."  Don't give up. 

There are many useful applications of an ear-piercing whistle.  Let me know when yours is ready.