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Un Amor Perdido: CDC Racist Propaganda
The CDC has sunk to a new low in manipulative marketing practices. Yes, I know that’s hard to believe, but if you take a look at this fotonovela or Spanish language motion comic book Un Amor Perdido you will be hard put to come up with any other conclusion.
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The Business of Baby — One Long Conflict of Interest Disclosure
The above is an excerpt from Jennifer Margulis’s book The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth and Baby Before Their Bottom Line. Sounds like a Thinking Mom, doesn’t it? If you’re anything like me you breathed a gentle sigh of relief when you read, “though we need support and advice, we do not need to be bullied or intimidated.” As parents in our society, we find ourselves bullied and/or intimidated rather often, don’t we? It often starts the moment you walk in the obstetrician’s office after a positive pregnancy test.
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When Harry (Potter) Met Jenny (McCarthy)
I love Harry Potter. Yeah, I know, I’m not alone. But I’m one of those geeks who had my Amazon order in to get each of the last four books on the day it came out. We own copies of all eight films on DVD. Not the boxed set, mind you, because then we would have had to wait, and that was clearly unacceptable. I nearly divorced my ex a few years early when he gave away a crucial plot point while I was reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6).
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Vaccines — A Global Perspective
The above is an actual comment we received on my most recent blog In the Name of “Protection.” The commenter left a name, but I think I’ll just call her our Friendly-Neighborhood Commenter, or FNC for short. That blog was about my reaction to a meme implying that children should be vaccinated by force, over the objections of their parents, for their “protection.”
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In the Name of “Protection”
I encountered the meme you see here on a Facebook group that I belong to. This post is my response. I’m going to assume intellectual honesty here and commend the poster for actually caring about children’s health. If that’s true, and this person posted this because he cares -- not because he’s making pots of money on his investments in pharmaceutical companies, or he’s getting paid to tout their safety in public forums, or he’s a physician who simply cannot accept the truth of the harm that he’s done in the name of the “greater good” -- then that’s a huge positive.
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Love Thy Neighbor?
“What the World Needs Now Is Love,” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and sung by Jackie DeShannon back in the idealistic ’60s, has been running through my head lately. As a member of TMR, I’m something of a Facebook power user. I’m there a lot. And I can’t help but notice a tremendous amount of vitriol lately targeting specific people – often people who are doing the best they can to accomplish worthy goals, like reducing the rate of autism, improving the lives of those who have autism, making sure no one dies or goes bankrupt due to lack of health insurance, or reducing the incidence of gun…
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The Bejeweled Blitz Meditation
I got a new smartphone last fall, and slowly I’ve managed to accumulate all the apps required to navigate life in the 21st century: Google Maps, The Weather Channel, the New York Times, Pandora, Scrabble, etc. One of the best things about my new phone is that it has enabled me to take up a spiritual practice I had largely abandoned: playing Bejeweled Blitz.
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Divorce and the Special-Needs Parent
Divorce can be visceral and terrifying for most “regular” humans, but for parents with fragile children, the stakes go WAY up, and, as I’ve been separated from my husband of 10 years for the past three years (most people assume I’m divorced since I legally changed my name back) those fears simmer just below the surface for me all the time. It’s hard to talk about them, but I’ll try.
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No One Knows. Or Do They?
Yesterday I read yet another article on how parents who put off having children are to blame for the neurological problems that children are facing in ever-increasing numbers, How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society. Granted, the author never said it flat out, but it was the strong subtext. So what was the response in the autism community to this “insightful” article? I think disgust might be a reasonably accurate description. Mama Mac’s comment was “Bullshit! Older parents don’t make autism. Autism makes parents old!”
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Heartbroken: When Friends Don’t Hear Your Story
I live in Brooklyn, New York. You know, one of those states that got pounded by Hurricane Sandy. My favorite grocery store was flooded long before the peak of the “storm surge” that did so much damage. And I’ve been studying my little heart out for a certification exam that I did not get to take last Friday, because there was no easy way to cross the river into Manhattan. So I'm not in the best of moods at the moment, and, consequently, not feeling much like writing. I like writing when I feel “fired up.” Not only do I not feel “fired up,” one could say that I feel…
writer and editor
