Category Archives: Life

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

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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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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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Succeeding at Failure

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

September 5, 2005

Timken High School in Canton, Ohio, has succeeded in setting a new record.  Sixty-five of the girls attending Timken are pregnant.

This record is matched by another startling local statistic.  According to the Canton Health Department, out of 586 babies born through July at local hospitals, 104 of the babies had mothers between the ages of 11 and 19.

Nationally, last week, radio and television talking heads picked up this story and ran with it.  Outrageous, they shouted.  Outrageous!  What a dismal record of failure!

Failure?  Really?

Think about it.  Timken girls and boys have succeeded at one thing.  They have succeeded in absorbing the messages of modern American culture and incorporating those messages into their lives.

Reality television validates casual sex between “consenting” guys and gals.  So Timken guys and gals consented.

Popular entertainment idols jump in and out of bed so fast that we lose count.  So Timken teens played like they are stars of the silver screen.

“Sexperts” insist that teens are incapable of resisting sexual temptations.  So Timken teens didn’t.

“Sexucators” go into classrooms and use false promises of “protection” and “safe sex” to downplay the true failure rates of condoms.  Sex is fun, not risky.  So Timken teens reach for promises of good times.

Rap and sports heroes brag about the number of women they conquer…and leave.  So Timken males fade into the background as the girls are counted by statisticians.

And sadly, American culture runs away from defining marriage as an expected standard for raising children.  So Timken teens will be unmarried parents.

If you consider what we are teaching our children, it appears that Timken teens have simply excelled at learning what they have been taught.  They are not alone.

Stella is a pregnant teen who doesn’t attend Timken.  She and her boyfriend were really “serious.”  So they had sex.  Now he’s gone and Stella is pregnant.

Sure, her feelings are hurt at being dumped by her boyfriend.  But Stella likes being pregnant.  She looks forward to being a mother and having a baby to hold.  And maybe, just maybe, her boyfriend will come back.

Next week, Stella’s friends and family are throwing her a baby shower.  Her aunt has brought over a baby bed and stroller.  And everyone is getting excited, anticipating her approaching due date.

Statisticians will count Stella as an unfortunate unwed pregnant teen.  But in the real world where Stella lives, she is making a family using the pattern she has been given.

She had sex because she was serious with her boyfriend.  And she is having a baby because she is pregnant.  Stella has grown up in a world where babies enter our lives as casually as new cars and prom dresses.

If you talk with Stella and her friends…and I suspect the young girls of Timken high…they have the same eternal dream of women going back thousands of years.  They long to be mothers and raise children.   And they are.

They have learned what “sexucators” have been teaching.  Babies are no longer the expected product of a married couple committed to each other for life.  Marriage, sex, love, infatuation, fun, babies and families…all of it is up for grabs…depending on the mood of the day and the luck of the dice.

Is it failure when 65 girls at Timken High School are pregnant?  Not if they have succeeded in learning what we have been teaching them.

 

October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

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Planning to Have an Emergency

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

August 29, 2005

It is called emergency contraception.  By any other name, Roget’s Thesaurus calls it a crisis, a highly volatile, dangerous situation requiring immediate remedial action.

We’re all familiar with emergencies.  The water pipe that breaks and floods the house…

…the car brakes that fail, sending you sailing through the intersection right under a red light…

…the flames erupting from the skillet on the stove, burning oil popping onto wood cabinets and kitchen curtains…

…the category four hurricane bearing down on your coastal home…

…the tight chest pains making you collapse onto the snow bank you’ve been shoveling…

…all of them…dangerous situations requiring immediate remedial action.

It used to be called emergency contraception for a good reason.  It implied that thoughtful, careful people were going about their lives, following prudent actions, taking care to avoid emergencies…when all of a sudden…an emergency happened…totally out of the blue…unexpected…unanticipated…and outside of our control.

Emergency contraception?  Where is the emergency?

The campaign to provide emergency contraception over the counter to all women, and the girls who would one day be women, belies the very essence of its name.  The Morning After…in the light of day, with both feet on the ground, when it comes to mind that we had an emergency last night…there’s a better remedy for this type of emergency than taking a little pill

The remedy for the morning after is engaging the brain on the night before.  Yet, the biggest fans of emergency contraception are those who oppose abstinence education, who reject the idea that children should learn sex is best inside marriage.

Repackaging “the morning after pill” as emergency contraception is a public relations game of the first order.  Sheila, the director of a pregnancy clinic, attests to this.  As the media blitz first put emergency contraception on the front page, calls to her clinic skyrocketed…calls from men.  Over three-fourths of the questions for Sheila about using the “emergency” pill came from men.

Like professional hucksters, proponents for over-the-counter access to emergency contraception point to the married woman whose birth control failed.  They point to rape victims.  Yet for these emergencies, we can create effective access to emergency contraception.  It doesn’t require putting this pill in easy reach of teen girls.

Truth is, if you think you might be planning to have an emergency, there’s a better way.  Plan to not have an emergency.  Plan sex for the right time and with the right person.  The Centers for Disease Control says the healthiest time for sex should be in a lifelong, monogamous, faithful relationship.  Mom and dad call it marriage.

Plan B, for emergencies, works best when we know what a real emergency is.  And anyone who wants to give us a plan for emergencies owes us the best plan of all…a plan for avoiding them.  Plan A.  Abstinence until marriage.

 

June 6, 2005 – Planned Parenthood’s War Against Choice

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