Author Archives: jtjim

Natural Child Birth

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 5, 2005

Setting out the Christmas decorations, a child in the manger, watched over by mother and father, honored by shepherds and wise men, welcomed with love…it gives rise to thoughts about the wonder of life.

Those of us in the boomer generation have lived through a time of great human experimentation.  It has focused on the foundational definition of life itself, with stunning implications for our children and grandchildren.  We stand on the brink of the brave new world we read about in high school English.  And we have a solemn duty.  We must bear witness to the changes we have made to a thread of life that will trail behind as we leave this earth.

Once upon a time, a man and a woman fell in love.  They committed to a lifetime together and gave birth to children.  As each baby grew in the womb, local wives tales served to predict whether the child was a boy or a girl.  In the end, couples went to the delivery room with one prayer, “Let our baby be healthy.”

Today, babies are ordered up according to specifications, like picking out a Beanie Baby off the shelf, ready-made.  The variations on designing babies is endless:

  • In 2002, the story broke about a lesbian couple, both of them deaf, who chose to create a deaf baby.  Their son Gauvin was the second deaf child fathered for them by a sperm donor with five generations of deafness in his family.
  • Recent debate has focused on whether technology should be used to eliminate congenital diseases or disabilities. Many disability and gay organizations have felt threatened by the concept of pursuing “perfect” children.
  • In Britain, the legal barriers preventing a couple from creating a designer baby to help save the life of an existing sick child were eliminated in 2001.  Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis on embryos not only promises a baby free of certain identifiable diseases, but also allows “embryo selection” to determine the sex of a baby.
  • Chinese demographers warn that the nation’s social fabric could unravel based on sex selection that eliminates girl babies.  Figures published in Chinese media reveal 116.86 boys are born for every 100 girls in China. Since the 1970s, when China instituted its strict birth control policy, couples have sought ways to guarantee a son.
  • Sex selection in India and China is achieved chiefly through ultrasound scans followed by the selective abortion of female fetuses. In the United States, the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, is pioneering preconception sex selection by means of a system that segregates sperm that will produce girls from those that will produce boys.
  • In England, Jamie Whitaker was designed by and born to his parents for the purpose of providing a genetic match to four-year-old brother Charlie who suffers from leukemia. Called “test tube baby treatment”, Jamie’s father defends the process by saying he didn’t select his baby for insignificant reasons like color of eyes or sex.  The Whitaker’s doctor Mohammad Taranissi says he is aware of dozens of other couples who want to undergo this same procedure.
  • Faced with high rates of infertility and a declining number of infants available for adoption, infertility treatment has become big business in the United States.  “Success” at producing pregnancies has given rise to the “problem” of increasing multiple births.  Twin births have risen 52% and triplet and greater births have quadrupled since 1980.  Multiple births increased by nearly 400% for women in their 30s and by more than 1,000% for women in their 40s.
  • In 2004, researchers in South Korea created 30 cloned embryos that grew to about 100 cells in size – further than any verified experiment so far. This meant they were able to harvest embryonic stem cells from one of the embryos. Internationally, scientists expressed concern that maverick scientists learning from this experiment will soon attempt to clone a baby. For the South Korean experiments, scientists used 242 eggs donated from 16 healthy women.
  • In 2005, the key South Korean doctor admitted to paying these women for “egg retrieval” in violation of ethical assurances the eggs had been donated.  Bioethicists warn of the dangers such payments pose for coercing poor women into risky medical procedures.
  • Insurance companies are coming closer to dictating gene profiling of unborn babies.  Many anticipate a day when insurance carriers will enforce abortion on parents with a “choose or lose” policy that refuses medical coverage for babies born with problems diagnosed in the womb.

With so much recent attention on creating babies, we must remember this is all taking place at the same time we are aborting over 1.2 million babies each year in the United States.  The reason?  No room at the inn…we can’t find a way to make a place for these babies in our lives.

Two thousand years have passed since the birth of the baby in the manger.  In the past forty years we have prided ourselves on modern progress.  We are busy manufacturing a world to leave our children, where babies are products of human design that can be destroyed like all products when they fail to meet manufacturer specifications.

It seems particularly important this year to look up at the sky and wonder at the majesty of babies created by the great Creator.  If we are dissatisfied with His grand design, how can we feel any greater satisfaction at our own handiwork?

Perhaps we would be better off accepting all babies that arrive at the doorstep, giving praise for their blessing to our lives, opening the door, and making one more bed in the inn.

August 1, 2005 – Signs of Life

January 17, 2005 – The Pregnant Elephant in the Room

June 25, 2004 – Unplanned Joy

See Archives for more past editorials.

Long After the Turkey Is Gone

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 28, 2005

The turkey carcass is in the pot…with onion, hominy and hot sauce.  Soup is on the way.

This year, around the table, we were five generations, from 2 to 82.  Twin toddlers climbed into and out of every lap in the room, not counting the times they were carried around by cousins and tripped over by kitchen cooks.

Stirring the soup, I reflect on the last eighty years, a time our two-year-olds will have to read about in their freshman history books.  It’s easy to mark the cultural changes in the lives of people around the dinner table.

Half of the family arrived by plane this year.  Years ago, when my own grandmother came for Thanksgiving, I remember waiting for her at one of the only four gates at the sole Phoenix terminal.

Back then, workers pushed a rolling staircase up to the airplane, the plane door opened, and travelers climbed down the stairs, exposed to the weather—rain, shine, or sleet—and across the asphalt runway into the terminal.  I would stand on my tiptoes, watching for Grandma’s fancy hat with the pheasant feather.  Like everyone who flew in the 60’s, she dressed to kill in her Sunday best.

Only forty years later, we have four terminals and countless gates at Sky Harbor International Airport.  Travelers now step out of the 747 directly into the comfort-controlled terminal.  And seasoned travelers long ago gave up their Sunday best in favor of comfortable jeans and running shoes.  Forget fancy hats with feathers.

A Thanksgiving feast had to have been unimaginably special to my grandmother who remembered her small town canning food in the school basketball gym during the Great Depression.  If you wanted stuffing in the 30s, you made it by scratch, with dried bread carefully saved over the previous month.  No prepackaged stuffing mix or heat and serve dinner rolls.  Worse yet, no stores were open for the cook who forgot to buy cranberry sauce.

Back then, after dinner, Grandma told us how they would entertain each other in the parlor.  As a kid, she did a great Bug Dance, her mom played the piano, and everyone in the family took turns reading stories out loud.

Today we huddle around the large, flat screen, surround-sound television for Thanksgiving football.  If you blink, we have instant replay…from four different camera angles.  And for viewers who need a “trip down the hall,” Tivo will let them back up to any Hail Mary pass reception they missed while gone.

How can any child today ever truly understand the magic of a clunky black and white television console first introduced in the 50s and the four national stations that went dark after 9:00 p.m.?  Tic tack toe has given way to Game Boy.  Pencils are mechanical.  Running shoes now come with lights, buzzers and wheels.  And fancy hats with feathers are crushed in the corner of a dirty thrift store…or rented out by costume stores.

From 2 to 82, at Thanksgiving this year, we evidence the cultural changes already accomplished.   And we guess at coming changes we will never live to see.  What will our country be like when the twin toddlers turn grey and squint to focus through 2.25 reading glasses?

Will stores deliver pre-cooked turkeys ordered online from cell phones?  Will viewers interact with football teams through wall mural televisions?  Will running shoes with wheels be jet powered?

More to the point, what will the crowd around the table look like in another 80 years?  Will brothers pass the gravy to their clones?  Will everyone be 5 foot eight inches tall, thanks to gene selection…an essential way to match the competition in job interviews where physical appearance is more important than resume experience?  Will children with harelips even exist, when elimination of “imperfect” babies is mandated by insurance companies who set medical protocols to keep costs down?

And at the center of it all, what will our families look like?  This current generation of toddlers now is growing up predominately in homes without fathers.  In four more generations of unwed teen pregnancy, will people even be able to imagine a time long ago when mothers and fathers were married for a lifetime and babies were bounced on the knees of Grams and Gramps at their fiftieth wedding anniversary?

This year’s turkey is gone.  It’s in the pot.  And there’s a lot to think about as I stir the soup.

September 3, 2004 – We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

May 14, 2004 – Order in the Courtroom!

 

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An Impure Thought

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 14, 2005

It used to arrive in a plain brown paper wrapper.  Schoolboys lucky enough to find a hidden copy would sneak off to share it at school… a perfect way to win points with their friends.

In the span of one lifetime, the plain brown paper wrapper has been recycled to make in-your-face glossy catalogues and wall-sized murals of nearly naked teens suggestively posed by Abercrombie and Fitch.  MTV puts the photos to music.  And video games draw you into the fun.

Fully fusing porn with American family life, last May, hometown burger king, Carl’s Jr. gave Dads something to watch with their young boys.  Paris Hilton, barely clad in a thong bikini, “with hoses shooting up everywhere,” writhed in suds atop a Bentley…seductively licking her lips over a hamburger.

As Pamela Paul writes in Pornified, “Today, pornography is not only planted in people’s psyches; it’s everywhere in our culture….We’ve become ‘pornified’—that is, the culture, values, standards, and language of pornography have infiltrated our daily lives, shaping how we view sex and how our sexual and romantic relationships play out.”

And just like the consequences related to sexual promiscuity, the consequences of our porn addiction are beginning to take a toll on marriages, families and our children.  Psychiatrist Jennifer Schneider studied ninety-one women and three men, “all of whom had spouses or partners seriously involved in cyber sex.”  She found they all shared feelings of hurt, betrayal, rejection, abandonment, humiliation, jealousy, and anger.

But Schneider’s study points to something not so widely known about addiction to porn.  As Paul reports it, more than one in five of those surveyed by Schneider, “had separated or divorced as a result of their spouse’s cybersex addition.  Half reported their spouses were no longer sexually interested in them, and one-third said they were no longer interested in sex with their partner.”

Men interviewed by Paul tell it best.  “Kenneth, a married man and father of three, began to have trouble relating to women in the real world.  ‘I objectified them,’ he explains… ‘If you meet someone and you’re preoccupied with women’s anatomy because you spend time looking at porn, then in the real world, you spend a lot of time looking at women’s anatomy.’”

Another father addicted to porn, Liam tells Paul, “It takes a three-dimensional human being with feelings – someone who could be your daughter, sister, or mother – and basically says, this is a creature that is only intended to satisfy your sexual desires.  It becomes your natural way of thinking.”

Even as married fathers like Kenneth and Liam struggle to overcome their addiction to porn, teachers in our classrooms are witnessing its impact on our youth.  Dana spends five days each week in the classroom talking about sex with teens.  She and the kids cover the physical, emotional and relational reasons for abstaining from sex until marriage.

On the last day of class, Dana brings up the subject of porn.  “I can see it in their eyes,” she says.  “Half of the kids in the class look down at their desks.  They’re involved with porn, and they’re embarrassed.”

Dana has a hard job in a culture that mixes porn with simple television commercials for hamburgers.  She must help students understand the damage of an impure thought.  She must lead them through the natural consequences of linking a beautiful expression of intimate sexual love to the heartless eroticism of porn.

We train our bodies with our minds.  And the irony of training our minds with porn is that we destroy our ability to enjoy the natural physical sexual pleasures that sustain a marriage between husband and wife.  Our libido is no longer satisfied by natural sexual activity.  And our intimate emotional connection with our sexual partner is destroyed.

“It’s really a shame that today, people are actually afraid to admit they are opposed to pornography,” Paul says. “It’s time we realized that this line of thinking – fed to us by the pornography industry – doesn’t have to be our way of thinking.  The reality is that using and accepting pornography has negative effects on our lives.”

The brown paper wrapper existed for a reason.  Its existence acknowledged the harm that can come from an impure thought.  And for the teens who meet Dana each week, this is a message that can’t come too soon.

 

Read More About the Impact of Porn

 Pamela Paul, PORNIFIED: How Pornography Is Transforming our Lives, our Relationships, and our Families, TIMES BOOKS, Henry Holt and Company, September, 2005.

 October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

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Public Policy Never Mended a Broken Heart

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 7, 2005

Maybe Anthony is a good father.

Maybe we need more fathers like Anthony.

And maybe we need more sports heroes to be the kinds of fathers and husbands, like Anthony, who step up to the line of scrimmage and run a touchdown when it comes to being the best kind of dad a kid could want.

Maybe.  But Marleen doesn’t think so.

Marleen read the story about Anthony and how he turned down a pro-football contract to fulfill his responsibility to an unborn child who became his son.  She read how he built a strong, healthy marriage with his teen girlfriend.  She acknowledges that Anthony took responsibility as a husband and father.  And while she finds his example…well…exemplary …she wrote me to complain.

“The problem is not with fathers abandoning their children,” says Marleen, “it is with bad public policy forcing them out of their children’s lives.”  She goes on to list the laws we have on the books to try to provide for America’s children:  child custody, child support, visitation requirements, and shared custody agreements.

Marleen chides me.  She claims the number of “bad men who truly do abandon their children” are “statistically insignificant.”  Citing fathers who are “forced” to pay child support and those who are “jailed for non-payment,” Marleen aims her final shot at me.  “The problem is not with fathers, it’s with the father-unfriendly policies in the U.S.”

While I can agree with Marleen that solutions to father absence are imperfect, she misses the most obvious solution at hand.  She misses the entire point of telling Anthony’s story.  She sees the trees…every oak and pine and aspen…but she misses the forest.

Every one of the 1.5 million births in 2004 to unmarried women produced a child in danger of growing up without a father.  More than 4 in 5 births to teens were to unmarried girls.  In 2004, more than 35 percent of births were to unmarried women.

This is not the kind of problem that is “statistically insignificant.”  Nor is it a problem that can be met by public policy “fixes.”  No child was ever hugged by public policy.

The fix to the problem facing our children and grandchildren lies in the hearts of the adults today, their parents and grandparents, who must face some hard truths.  We must look in the mirror and ask what we could be doing differently.

What would the future look like if children were encouraged to see sex as the behavior belonging to adults who committed to each other in marriage?  What would marriage look like if we taught teens and young adults effective tools to keep relationships healthy and positive?  What would divorce look like if we had a culture that encouraged couples through the hard times with counseling and support?

This is not an impossible dream.  This is the set of expectations that ruled the world for thousands of years.  These expectations succeeded not because they were public policy, but because individual people understood and accepted the importance of sacrificing personal momentary pleasure for the long-term benefit of mutual happiness.

When we teach young men and women to value intimate relationships as a sacred trust, and when we teach them that sex is the ultimate gift of this trust to be fulfilled inside of marriage, we will set the stage for them to care enough to abstain from unmarried sex.  This is the foundation of reversing statistics on unmarried births.  It is the beginning of bringing fathers back home again.

Will life be perfect?  Is life perfect now?  If we use the imperfections of today to disqualify any attempt to teach our children a better way, we are justifying failure.

Yes, Marleen, we can treat failure with public policy.  But we will never overcome failure with public policy.

No child will sleep better tonight, hugging a public policy manual.  Public policy has never mended a broken heart.  And most importantly for the children we love, no public policy will ever make a vow to love, honor and cherish them till death us do part.

 

The Story of Anthony and Mary Ann

October 17, 2005 – Fatherhood Is More than a Paycheck

 April 23, 2004 – m…m…Married?

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TEEN SEX: How Many? So What?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

October 24, 2005

The Picture of the Problem depends on who is taking the picture.  For us as parents, the picture that matters most to us is the family portrait hanging over the fireplace.  We focus our concerns on the circle of family photographs–in the faces of each of our children and grandchildren, precious lives we hug each morning, tickle each day, and tuck into bed each night.

For experts studying the Problem, our family pictures and our precious children disappear, buried under an avalanche of statistics.  This is just as much a part of the problem as the problem itself, creating a divergence in views between experts and parents.  We love our children, but who can love a statistic?

Years ago, reading about Andrew Carnegie in my seventh grade history book—for the first time, I realized one person could have millions of dollars in his own personal bank account.  Just imagine it!  What would it feel like to have a million dollars?  The numbers were huge–too big for my young mind.

So it is with teen pregnancy.  The numbers can be simply staggering.  Math teachers labor to impress children with the enormity of a number as large as a million.  One popular lesson has school children working to collect one million of something:  aluminum pop tabs from soda cans or printed letters on a newspaper page.  How far would one million dollar bills reach?  How high would a stack of one million pennies climb?

Thinking of one million pregnant teens, the mind goes blank.  A million?  Maybe the best way to understand the big numbers is to make them smaller.  In truth, the realities of teen pregnancy can best be understood by looking around us, to the lives of our family and friends.

I remember back to a friend in my eighth grade class in 1965, a quiet girl who dated a handsome dark-haired boy.  They weren’t the only “couple” of my eighth grade class.  For instance, Debbie was famous for kissing her boyfriend between classes, and Kathy was the envy of the girls because she went on a class hayride with heartthrob Bob, a source of school rumors and gossip for nearly two weeks.

But the quiet girl and the handsome, dark-haired boy were different.  They were serious.  And then one day, the quiet girl was gone.  Just like that.  Silently, the ripples of gossip carried the news across the classroom, “She’s pregnant.” And no one said anything more.

The choices in 1965 were limited.  In eighth grade, the quiet girl was too young for a shotgun marriage.  Abortion wasn’t legal, nor did it have social approval.  Although we didn’t discuss it, we all knew common practice dictated that she had been secreted off to a home for unwed mothers or to a family out of town where she gave birth to the baby and gave it up for adoption.

The next time I heard of a classmate being pregnant, I was a senior in American History–four years later.  A pretty, athletic girl walked through the desks and up to the front of the room with a withdrawal slip.  Mr. Halbert signed the paper, and she turned to face us on her walk out of the room.  Students moving out of our school always grabbed attention—there were so few of them who left, and, naturally, someone in the room had to ask, “Where’s she going?”  Again, ever so quietly, the news passed around the room, “She’s pregnant.”

A short time later, in May, I graduated from high school with plans to attend Arizona State University.  The birth control bill had just arrived on college campuses around the country, and I was on hand to witness the beginning of a quiet revolution.

Now, after 30 years of “controlling birth” with a pill, the best measure of social change is evident in the lives of the people I know:  in my own family, in the schools where I taught, with the students at my children’s high school, at church, and in the families of friends and neighbors.  Teen pregnancy is no longer a rare occurrence, something we hear of every four years or so.  We all know of young women and men who are parents—unwed teen parents.

And when pregnancy touches the life of a young person we love, there are simply no statistics to measure the impact on their lives.  Statistics are flat numbers, two dimensional counters that fill up governmental reports.  But they fail to illustrate the more personal significance of teen pregnancy for our children and for our nation.

When you hug your child tonight, when you pull the bedcovers under her chin, ask yourself if teen pregnancy is your only fear about teen sex.  If she gets pregnant, she will become the concern of statisticians.  They ask, “How many?”

But you’re the parent.  And you know the meaning of sex beyond the statistics.  Is that the best the experts have to offer us, a few pills or a patch to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg?  Parents have the heart to ask, “So what?”  And we know that the answer to this question is in the family photos on the mantel above the fireplace…in the lives that we cherish, no matter how few.

________________________

One million printed letters on a newspaper page would cover a bedroom wall eight feet high and six feet long; one million dollar bills end to end would reach 96.9 miles; and a stack of one million pennies would climb nearly one mile up into space, enough for four stacks of pennies as high as the Empire State Building.

 

April 11, 2005 – Why I Teach Abstinence

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