The liberals' war on childbirth rages in studies, in the media, from the White House, and in a new Hollywood effort showing an unmarried, "platonic" man and woman who decide to conceive and raise a child in a loveless relationship.
It's obvious why liberals prioritize public education, including college: If they don't give birth to their own children, they must use such institutions to indoctrinate other people's kids, otherwise liberals will become extinct.
For background, click headlines below of previous articles:
To Cut Costs, Lower Birth Rate, Says White House
Childless Women: White and More Educated
New York City Liberals Choose Abortion NOT Procreation
The Religious Procreate, Others Don't
-- From "Years of research point to strain kids put on relationships" by Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY 3/7/12
More than 25 separate studies in the past two decades find that marital quality takes a dive with a baby's birth: babies raise stress, reduce happiness and otherwise upset the household, experts say. The movie, [Friends with Kids,] out Friday, points to that in a tagline: "Love. Happiness. Kids. Pick two."
"Kids do lower marital satisfaction and there's not much we seem to be able to do to prevent it," says Brian Doss, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. He is among researchers whose intervention studies haven't succeeded in stopping sharp declines in relationship satisfaction. "The fact that we've been largely unsuccessful may suggest it's a really difficult and tough experience and it's not necessarily a deficit in these couples' relationships or how they're approaching it."
Ninety percent of the 218 couples in an eight-year study Doss co-authored experienced a decline in satisfaction, he says.
To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.
From "'Friends With Kids' Nails the Comic Complications of Sex and Parenting" by Elizabeth Greenwood & Raina Lipsitz, The Atlantic 3/9/12
Does parenthood ruin everything?
In a word, yes. At least, that's the case if you believe the characters of Friends With Kids . . .
After popping out a kid or two, your now-cavernous vagina will be as empty as your social calendar—or so fears poor Julie, the film's heroine (Jennifer Westfeldt). . . .
The movie punctures the smugness of parents who deem their single friends selfish, but doesn't mock people who choose to have kids. Bored bachelor Jason wants children, but realizes, after watching his friends go through the process of obtaining them, that "The setup is flawed." The messy business of childrearing saps the crackling heat from a marriage; couples go from not being able to keep their hands off of each other to not wanting to be in the same room. So why not just go for it with his best friend Julie? They're both gainfully employed Manhattanites, they're in love—the call-each-other-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-yet-somehow-entirely-platonic variety—they both want kids, and they're not getting any younger. Julie seems to be in her late 30s, and gets pregnant after a deeply awkward, sweetly adolescent one-night stand with Jason—a minor miracle the denizens of Upper West Side fertility clinics would surely envy. Once the little bundle of joy arrives, things get, you guessed it, a little more complicated.
To read the entire opinion column above, CLICK HERE.
From "‘Friends With Kids’: A comedy that makes marriage post-kids look tragic" by Janice D'Arcy, Washington Post 3/9/12
“Friends With Kids” is hilarious for viewers who have already survived the harrowing first years of parenthood and, if married, have remained so. For those married folk who haven’t had kids and plan to some day, it might be better considered as a horror flick. Or birth control.
Overall, the movie reminded me of the day I, fully pregnant at the time, approached a mother overseeing two kids and asked if she had any advice for an about-to-be-new mom.
The mother looked at me with two earnest, pleading, bagged eyes. “It’s hard on the marriage,” she said. “It’s hard to be nice to each other when neither of you is sleeping.”
To read the entire opinion column above, CLICK HERE.
From "Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility" by Lisa Miller, Washington Post 3/2/12
Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel. Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000 babies.”
. . . What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply
Especially worrisome is the inevitable corollary to that belief: Women should put their natural fertility first — before their brains, before their ability to earn a living, before their independence — because that’s what God wants.
And now, with their crusade against birth control, the Catholic bishops are helping to articulate and elevate that unspoken and archaic value in public. Fertility is a gift from God, they say.
To which I say this: We’ve come a long way from the days of the Bible, baby, and I don’t want to go back there.
. . . as a point-by-point guidebook to modern domestic life [the Bible is] nearly worthless.
To read the entire opinion column above, CLICK HERE.
UPDATE 1/13/14: From "Couples Without Children Have Happier Relationships Than Those Who Do" The Huffington Post UK
Childless men and women are more satisfied with their relationships and more likely to feel valued by their partner, the research project by the Open University found.
But researchers also discovered that women without children were the least happy with life overall, whereas mothers were happier than any other group even if their relationships faltered.
The study also found that unmarried parents are slightly happier than married parents.
To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.
