Free Republic

BATON ROUGE, LA, June 2, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- For the second time in as many years, Governor Bobby Jindal has vetoed a bill that would have made it legal to enter into a contract with a surrogate mother in Louisiana. Both vetoes took place despite enormous support in the state legislature. In his veto letter Jindal, who is Catholic and considered a likely GOP presidential candidate in 2016, said he had concerns about "how this legislation impacts the way we value human life."

TORONTO – For women, smelling a newborn baby feels as good as drugs are to addicts or cheeseburgers to those just breaking a fast, new Montreal research suggests. A University of Montreal scientist says a newborn baby’s odour lights up the reward centres in our brain in a way other scents can’t. And for women – specifically moms – the experience, a rush of dopamine to the brain, is heightened. The reaction is so strong, it exists even if the baby isn’t in front of you. It’s chemistry between mom and baby. “What we’ve shown for the first time is...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Texas gubernatorial hopeful Wendy Davis brushed off criticism about her life story from Bristol Palin, saying that nothing Palin accused her of was true. Davis was responding to a blog post from the daughter of former Gov. Sarah Palin, who wrote last week amid questions about the timeline of Davis’s personal biography, slamming her for allegedly leaving her kids behind with her ex-husband after finishing law school. “Gosh, children are sooo inconvenient, huh? I’m glad my mother didn’t put motherhood on the shelf when she was elected to City Council, then became our mayor, then governor,” Palin wrote, addressing her...

Every time I hear someone say that feminism is about validating every choice a woman makes I have to fight back vomit. Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself? There’s no way those two things are the same. It’s hard for me to believe it’s not just verbally placating these people so they don’t get in trouble with the mommy bloggers. Having kids and getting married are considered life milestones. We have baby showers and wedding parties as if it’s a huge...

This morning I followed a link on Facebook that took me to this post. It's written by a "feminist" and the point she wants to make is that being a wife and mother is not a valid choice, or even a difficult one. Let me first say, Ms. Glass, that I have been both sides of this feminine coin. I have owned my own business. I have managed a company of over 20 employees. I worked my way through college, and I'm now a mother of two and very proud of it. When my kids were very young, I stayed...

Many married couples cite the birth of their first child as the happiest day of their lives; but childless couples are in fact more happily married than those who have children, a study has found. The project has found that people without children are more satisfied with their relationships and more likely to feel valued by their partner. The study, by the Open University, involved interviews and surveys with more than 5,000 people of all ages, statuses and sexual orientations. When people were asked to rate the quality of their relationship those without children emerged as happier overall. […] Yet...

'I love you whoever you are': Wife gives her husband's new fiancee an incredible Christmas surprise with an emotional seal of approval... two years after she DIEDBrenda Schmitz died of ovarian cancer two years ago. She was a wife and mother to four boys One month before her death, she wrote a letter to be sent to a local radio station when her husband fell in love again For the past 20 years KSTZ has been granting listeners wishes, and Schmitz was a fan of holiday program The letter asks for her husband David's new fiancee to be treated to...

...IS SURE TO SEND CHILLS THROUGH YOUR SPINE & TEARS STREAMING DOWN YOUR FACE Brenda Schmitz, a wife and mother of four boys, died of ovarian cancer at 46-years-old in September 2011 — but what she left behind is undoubtedly generating tears around the world today. One month before passing, Brenda wrote a letter to her husband David and had it sent to Des Moines radio station KSTZ “Star” 102.5 FM. Each year the station takes submissions and grants Christmas wishes. On Friday, the station invited David to their studios.

"This is not a selfie. This is an act of war," writes one Australian blogger in response to the image — just one of many blogs, news outlets, body-image experts and social-media commenters around the world to weigh in on the matter in the past few days, putting the photo at the center of a major online body-image controversy. "This whole situation has become ludicrous. The competition for women to give birth and then immediately remove any trace from their their bodies that they ever carried a child is OBSCENE. There is no other word for it." Another blogger calls...

Two Egyptian sisters hurl mum to death from train 50-year-old mother had rebuked one daughter, 21, for misbehaving Two Egyptian sisters in their 20s hurled their mother to death under the train on which they were travelling after a heated argument with her. The 50-year-old mother had rebuked one daughter, 21, for misbehaving inside the train in the northern province of Dakhaliya, triggering an argument between the two. Newspapers in the Arab country said another daughter, 23, sided with her sister and joined hands in carrying their mother and throwing her out of the window. The mother died instantly under...

Women in the workplace isn't just about feminism, it's economic necessity with the GOP-shredded safety net During a HuffPost Live segment last week titled “Masculinity Now,” Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes aired a series of expletive-laden perspectives on modern femininity, none of them positive. While McInnes’ host and co-panelists maintained their calm, the blogger and publisher ranted that “feminism has made women less happy,” citing cultural pressure to “feign” toughness and inappropriate presence in the workforce as culprits. In short, McInnes’ claim is that the majority of women are naturally predisposed to derive satisfaction from “being domestic and shaping lives” rather...

Throughout Europe, births to single mothers more than doubled between 1990 and 2010 (from 17.4 to 38.3 percent, 1). Imagine if it were to increase at the same rate for the next two decades! Such rapid changes are very unusual historically. They cry out for explanation from social scientists. This steep rise in single parenthood is found in most developed countries, including the U.S. Here, single parenthood increased from around 5.3 percent in 1960 to 41 percent in 2009 (2). The surge in single parenthood in Europe Change was even more rapid in some European countries. Births outside marriage increased...

This past Saturday, Dr. Steve Davis gave the message at my mother's funeral. As pastor of First Baptist Church of Carrollton, Ga., he recounted that, during a recent visit, she told him that she was the luckiest person on earth. Take her circumstances into account: She had endured and beaten both uterine cancer (in the 1970s) and colon cancer (she was given a clean bill of health last month). She had entered a nursing home in 2006, where many thought she would stay (including my sister and me), but returned home to live on her own in 2007. She suffered...

It’s brought to you by the letter P — for prison. PBS’s “Sesame Street” is moving from ABCs and counting numbers to offering its young viewers a bigger lesson in life: how to cope when Mommy or Daddy lands behind bars. Called “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration,” the program is distributing “tool kits’’ to schools, community centers and even jails in 10 states — including New York — starting today to help kids ages 3 to 8, organizers said. According to one “tip’’ for caregivers, “Before you visit your incarcerated loved one, let your child know some of the things...

I listen to you often and enjoy your radio show, but why don’t you ever ask women to go to work? When a family is broke, and the woman is at home raising one child who is already in the fifth grade, why can’t the wife get a “second job?” George Dear George, I think far too many ladies, in the name of paying for stuff they don’t need, have left the household and the children for the workplace. Many of them didn’t even want to do this; they just felt obligated to do it by people like you. There...

The headlines were misleading: "Moms are Breadwinners in Record 4 of 10 Households." Immediate thought: Wow, 40 percent of wives are primary breadwinners. Nope. If you read down to the fifth or sixth paragraph in most stories about the new Pew study, you'd discover that the number of women out-earning their husbands was actually just 22.5 percent of married couples with children under the age of 18. The 40 percent figure includes single-parent households, in which the mom is not the primary, but the sole, earner. They're always lauded, those single moms. Politicians of both parties always append the word...

Mother's Day is Sunday. Traditionally, it is a day to honor and respect all that mothers do and sacrifice for the sake of their children. And while this day is important, special, and necessary, we can't help but wonder what our country would be like if we celebrated mothers every day. If mothers and babies were held in the highest regard, as they should be, each and every day of the year, think about the lives that could be spared. Think about the heartache that would not come about because a mother chose to abort her child. That would truly...

Let's talk about the mom who regrets her children. Last week, the Daily Mail published a first-person story by Isabella Dutton, a 57 year old mother of two who declared her children to be "the biggest regret of her life." Since the Daily Mail is possibly the internet's leading purveyor of "human interest in hating other humans" stories, it goes without saying that the article incited (and was intended to incite) a monstrous tsunami of scorn. "A mother could never regret her children." It's a truism. But considering the life-altering effect of children on their mothers, it seems impossible that...

When Kelly Makino was a little girl, she loved to go orienteering—to explore the wilderness near her rural Pennsylvania home, finding her way back with a compass and a map—and the future she imagined for herself was equally adventuresome. Until she was about 16, she wanted to be a CIA operative, a spy, she says, “like La Femme Nikita.” She put herself through college at Georgia State working in bars and slinging burgers, planning that with her degree in social work, she would move abroad, to India or Africa, to do humanitarian work for a couple of years. Her husband...

DOJ: Children Do Not Need—and Have No Right to--Mothers March 3, 2013 By Terence P. Jeffrey Georgetown Law School. (AP Photo/Haraz Ghanbari) (CNSNews.com) - The Obama Justice Department is arguing in the United States Supreme Court that children do not need mothers. The Justice Department’s argument on the superfluity of motherhood is presented in a brief the Obama administration filed in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, which challenges the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that amended California’s Constitution to say that marriage involves only one man and one woman. The Justice Department presented its conclusions about...