Some things sent me by friends this week:
Another "risks of co-sleeping" article, this one spurred by a couple being prosecuted for child abuse homicide in the infant sleep death of their son. The author reprints at the end a set of recommendations for co-sleeping safety from askdrsears.com; in there is one I’d not seen before, a specific recommendation to place baby next to mother but not between parents. It makes a lot of sense to me, especially if dad is a first-time parent (it takes time to develop nighttime awareness) or a heavy sleeper; I think mothers are hard-wired to be aware of babies in a way that fathers are not. Mark certainly wasn’t very nighttime-aware when we first became parents. He’s definitely developed his sleep patterns since then, but his awareness of the baby is not equal to mine.
Positive, accurate NFP story on a local-TV-news show. And it doesn’t even contain the obligatory reminder that NFP is not protective against sexually transmitted diseases (Duh), or even the ominous "NFP is not for everyone (because some people just can’t control themselves)" warning. Refreshing.
Ramesh Ponnuru rebuts an attack on Catholic bishops’ stance about voting and abortion. As far as I know, the U.S. bishops’ stance is more nuanced than simply "don’t vote for pro-choice politicians;" it’s more like "don’t vote for pro-choice politicians because they’re pro-choice, and if you vote for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life candidate at all, you’d better honestly believe that your reason is proportionately serious." Catholics can legitimately disagree about some of the details here. For instance, what constitutes "proportionately serious?" And how to spend our votes: must we withhold all votes from all pro-choice candidates, or ought we choose a "lesser evil" of two pro-choice candidates if there aren’t any pro-life candidates? Is it even okay to vote for a pro-choice candidate if there are minor pro-life candidates with, we judge, little or no chance of winning? With regard to the first kind of detail, I take the view that hardly anything could possibly be proportionately more serious than a candidate’s opinion of human life. That is the hard-line position. But I take a pragmatic, not a prophetic view, of how to spend my votes; the whole point of voting is to choose lesser evils, after all. Activist Eric Scheidler once suggested to me a helpful rule of thumb: the first question in every election decision ought to be What gains can be made in the cause of life, and how can my vote help?
I wouldn’t have to be a single-issue voter if the Democrats weren’t such a single-position party. (Sigh).
Speaking of that, Simcha links to an important reminder regarding Mr. Obama’s No-vote on the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. It’s a little hard to argue that you’re gravely considering the difficult-to-define balance between the right of an unborn child to life and the right of a woman to control her body when, um, the child isn’t occupying the woman’s body any more. At that point, you’re either putting politics above principles, or you’re a principled defender of infanticide. Nice.
bearing blog 