Submitted for further examination.

[kyburg]

The whole "women having children" issue.

Since I hadn't see it anywhere on the FL this morning -

This woman:



Is in jail, no bail. Why?

This woman:



Is the hospital after an emergency c-section was completed, and remains in critical condition.

Pennsylvania State Police said Peggy Jo Conner attacked her neighbor, Valerie Oskin, in Oskin's trailer early Wednesday. Conner then drove Oskin, who was eight months pregnant, about 15 miles to a remote area and tried to cut through a C-section scar on her abdomen with a razor blade. Oskin has a 7-year-old son.

I see a lot of discussion about the woman who's had her 16th baby - and everyone looks hale, healthy and well-groomed in the few photographs you can see.

Wealth comes in a lot of forms - I keep repeating that money is not the only currency people deal in.

The two stories are tied together in that it's women having babies - or NOT having babies - that's at issue.

And until we address the innate issue of valuing a female life based on that fact, we won't make much headway on many of the other issues.

I'm sure there's a huge rant in here someplace. But I need to keep it simple because, well, no time.

Who's at fault?

The person doing the deed. First person who blames a man in either of these cases, looses influence points. Big time.

(The 16 kids look like the product of improved living conditions, BTW. They look like the product of a lot of conditions being met, including the social network to support such an undertaking. You can bet the two adults are NOT doing this alone.)

And it's shallow and very callous, but is it my imagination or is the criminal significantly uglier than the victim? Is having a baby that much an leveler in that regard? It really does something for the argument that women having children because of some deficiency in their self-esteem will not succeed, doesn't it?

Sad. Unbelieveably...there just are no words.

Comments

[neintales.livejournal.com]

I'll agree they are probably not doing it alone. I'm sure there's relatives, friends, and even hired help all over the place.

But that doesn't mean the same as 'awful white trash horrible baby factory' still. *sigh*

I think I've ranted enough for four people on the subject today already, really.

As to that story? Sad.

And very 'yes' that being able to have/having babies shouldn't be kept as what defines women as women anymore, and that is what needs addressing, instead of namecalling and violence.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

No hired help. The older kids help the younger ones. They're all homeschooled, too. Also, the mother's last two or three pregnancies wound up with medically induced labor because her body is so used to being pregnant it wasn't remembering how to start labor by itself. That info's from a Discovery Channel documentary on the Duggars. That last bit, above and beyond the rest, tells me she's allowed herself to become a baby machine. And I find it just plain sad that she'd abuse her body like that.

[the-m0g.livejournal.com]

I saw the lady with the 16 kids this morning on the news. First word out of my mouth was "CONDOM!"

Seriously though, why would someone WANT to have 16 children? What mindset do they get in? Not to mention the women going through labor 16 times! Reminds me of that one bit from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life when the lady is washing dishes then *plop* out comes another baby!

I wonder if they only had that many children so they COULD be famous. Guiness Book of World Records and such. The publicity alone is what puts food on the table...

[vigilante024.livejournal.com]

well they definately won't win the record for most children, my boyfriend's father was one of 20, though I doubt it was because both parents wanted to have that many children...

[luscious-purple.livejournal.com]

I think the world's record for kids by a single woman is 69 -- from some 19th-century Russian woman who had lots of multiple births.

[vampireanneke.livejournal.com]

Your forgetting about all the unwed teenage mothers as well. I totally would support a law that required temperory sterilization for both genders until the age of 18. (A petition could be filed to have children earlier then that.) But people would never let this happen, because they see it as affecting their given right to have children, regardless of how f-ed up the children will be. Then the religious nuts who say that such a law would be 'giving' permission for teenagers to have sex. (rolls eyes). The world is messed up, and it's not getting any better.

About the attacker's appearance

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

Of course the attacker looks uglier than the victim. The attacker's photograph is the one released by whichever law enforcement organization is holding her - it's her brand-spankin'-new mugshot. It's not a picture one gets to gussy up for. The victim (who last I heard, her condition was definitely improving, thanks be!), her photo looks to be driver's license or ID picture, of a sort that one can "pretty up" for.

Re: About the attacker's appearance

[turandot.livejournal.com]

*nods* Exactly right. I'm sure the family released the victim's best picture, whereas no one but a high profile white collar criminal would be allowed to have a say on what picture gets released to the press.

Of course, that won't stop most people from taking one look at the picture and quickly assessing: "ugly, inside and out", without even knowing why she did what she did. That is to say, I'm not inclined to condone what she did, it's horrible and horrifying, but I'm going to reserve my judgment on whether there was any tenuous justification to that woman's actions until and unless she gets to tell a jury about it.

Re: About the attacker's appearance

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry - one is a mug shot, the other one is a mug shot (from the DMV).

In all my years driving, I never "gussied-up" for a driver's license. I'm looking at bone structure, weight - and age.

It shouldn't matter what you look like. When it does - and someone takes action like this because they don't look like something out of fashion magazine...or as good as the neighbor...something is very, very wrong.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I actually know the Duggars- he was a state representative a few years back, and I met their eldest kids. Better behaved kids only exist in myth, I think. They're really religious, and the whole kid thing is because they believe that every child is a precious blessing from God and that they're doing Gods will by having so many. Hopefully, the kids will sprout out on their own and get away from the religous stuff when they grow up. Otherwise, they're fine people.

[kinchyle.livejournal.com]

I saw a show on TLC about the Duggars (family with 16 kids). They are very conservative, very Christian and believe that they should have as many children as God will grant them. Some people might call them right-wing nut-job Jesus-chrispies, but I'll leave that up to the judgement of the reader. The father is a car dealer, real estate agent and former three-term state Representative. The mother stays at home and home-schools the kids. In their off-time, they work on the home they are building for themselves.

While they do get some help from people in their church, they handle everything on their own for the most part. They have quite a system down where the kids are basically broken into teams with one of the older kids in charge of making sure a middle-aged child helps her with the one or two babies they are assigned to watch. All the girls have white socks and all the boys have black socks to make laundry easier. Every week or two, they load everyone into the family bus and go clean out an Aldi's. Meals there are produced on an industrial level. It's actually kind of impressive, even though I think they're insane for doing it.

In closing, insert standard "if you want so many children, how about adopting unwanted kids" rant here.

[kshandra]

In closing, insert standard "if you want so many children, how about adopting unwanted kids" rant here.

*nods emphatically* Seems to me that would be the Lord's work.

What I think bothers me most is thinking about what kind of life the elder children must have. Do they get any socialization outside of blood relatives?

[moropus.livejournal.com]

No, the older kids don't get a life. My parents had 6 kids and I'm the oldest. They turned me into a domestic servant so they could work 2 jobs each to feed us all. God may have told my parents birth control was evil, but he never told them how to afford to feed us. When I got fed up and moved away, the whole thing fell apart.

[kuangning]

Of course not. To get raising that family down to a system, everyone's got to have their place in it, 24/7. They don't even go to school outside the home, so they don't get the 8-hour-a-day break I used to pray for every weekend, and I only have 3 siblings. And as religious as they are? Their girls are going to go straight from raising siblings to caring for husbands and having babies, poor things -- and the parents aren't ever going to wonder if there's anything wrong with that.

[lackofgravitas.livejournal.com]

There was a documentary over here a while ago about a family with 15 kids, and much as I wanted to, I really couldn't find a thing to criticise about them. They were pretty much self-supporting, the kids were well looked after, well behaved and all the rest. It seemed to me that you can't attack someone for doing something that you wouldn't do yourself, or something that usually turns out wrong, when they're obviously entirely different people to yourself, and when for them it hasn't turned out wrong.

Out of context with any consideration of the two women's looks, but in my experience, yes, having a baby is a huge leveller. And if your self-esteem is on the low side, it will come back and bite you on the bum, big-time.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

In my experience, having a baby will age you faster than anything short of a time machine. :)

That silliness said, women who have babies are of all physical appearances, and women who hurt people are of all physical appearances. I don't think traditionally unattractive women are any more likely to seek childbearing than attractive women, at least in my experience. Perhaps when this woman went beserk, she picked an attractive woman because she was jealous of her for more than her pregnancy. But as someone's pointed out, it's a freakin' mug shot. I have seen thousands of mug shots in my line of work, and Julia Roberts would look like a hag. Remember Nick Nolte's DUI mug? Uh huh.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

It just jumps out at me. Stealing from someone with more currency - in this case, it was a pregnancy. And then you can't help but wonder what she was thinking -

They're both mug shots. And frankly, they're both awful -

[dudemungus.livejournal.com]

The thing I saw in her photo was incredible sadness. A person in the kind of terrible melancholy that comes with mental illness. Why did she do what she did? I think the answer is pretty obvious--she was mentally unwell to the Nth degree. While the horror of her actions is obvious, I pity her the state she is in, that this seemed a rational thing to do.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

The whole thing didn't work - if you read all the associated stories, this was a last-ditch relationship after failed marriage, etc.

"Nothing without a man." That's what I smell.