Search Results
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An expert takes us inside the minds of Cleveland’s kidnapped women.
by SARAH WAYLAND Imagine for a moment stepping back in to the life you lived a decade ago. You might look quite similar, you know where you came from, who your family are, but your reflection will be tainted and tweaked by the experiences you’ve endured during that time. It’s you, but a different you. Every fifteen minutes someone is reported missing to a law enforcement agency in Australia. While the majority of those are located within one month; over 1600 people remain missing for longer than six months. These families, at this very moment, are waiting for the knock [read more]
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Seriously good news for women everywhere.
By CATHERINE DEVENY Awesome news for feminism, childcare workers, kids, parents and single older homeless women sleeping in cars. After a passionate and determined United Voice campaign Big Steps, Australia’s childcare professionals have received a substantial raise. *sound effect of the whole nation exhaling as they say ‘about bloody time!’* To be more concise our childcare professionals are finally getting the long overdue correction they deserve. And with it comes respect and recognition for some of our most loved and lowest paid workers. It will also contribute to a high quality and skilled childcare sector. And, strap [read more]
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Saturday’s news in under 2 minutes.
1. The question everyone is asking today: How worried do we need to be about North Korea? Dictator Kim Jong-un has threatened nuclear war, and warned that the safety of foreign diplomats in his country cannot be guaranteed beyond April 10. Pyongyang has moved a second mid-range missile to the country’s east coast. In response, South Korea has placed two warships with missiles on the east and west coastlines. This week the US also strengthened their own military operations on the South Korean coast, to act as a deterrent. 3. Pope Francis has called for action on sex [read more]
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“I am Adam Lanza’s mother”
By LIZA LONG Friday’s horrific national tragedy—the murder of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut—has ignited a new discussion on violence in America. In kitchens and coffee shops across the country, we tearfully debate the many faces of violence in America: gun culture, media violence, lack of mental health services, overt and covert wars abroad, religion, politics and the way we raise our children. Liza Long, a writer based in Boise, says it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness. Three days before 20 year-old [read more]
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What it feels like to lose a baby.
; ; ; ; ; by MIA FREEDMAN Seven weeks ago today, friends of mine lost their precious son. He was their first child, a beautiful boy called Leo and he died the day after he was born. In all the photos I’ve seen of him, Leo looks nothing like a sick baby. A mop of black hair. Plump, squeezable thighs. Pudgy little arms. A sturdy body. A kind, peaceful face. Somehow, this robustness made his death even harder to fathom for anyone, let alone his parents whose hearts shattered into a thousand pieces the moment they understood he wasn’t [read more]
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‘The adopted child I’m still waiting to meet.’
by TABITHA THOMPSON Our friends and family often ask “Any word yet?” and my usual, uniform response is “Not yet, still playing the waiting game.” Having waded through the endless paper work, the information nights, the training sessions, the assessment and the subsequent approval to locally adopt or permanently care for a child, my husband and I had expectations. These expectations have been slowly dwindling, shrinking to fit the mould of what our social worker had told us in the beginning, “Tthink of this process as a pregnancy”, our own ideas and the actual truth of [read more]
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“My brother sexually abused me. And I’m speaking up.”
By ANONYMOUS Like thousands of others I am a survivor of child sexual abuse. The offender was my older brother, a troubled soul who ultimately killed himself more than a decade ago. I came to forgive him for the years of abuse and in doing so have been able to live a life in which my history has taken very little of my attention and I’ve given my all to the present and the future. I am proud of the life I live, proud I was not beaten by the shame and humiliation of my past, proud [read more]
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‘There’s a placenta in my freezer’
by LINDY ALEXANDER I have a placenta in my freezer. It’s been there since the birth of my son in February. I had to sign it out of the birthing centre, and then it was officially ours. We took the placenta (I never know if I should refer to it as my placenta or my son’s?) home in a bright yellow bag with the words “biohazard” written firmly on the side. I wrapped it in a black garbage bag and put it in the freezer. It was at that point that I started to wonder what I [read more]
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The program that pays drug addicts to be sterilised.
“She has her daddy’s eyes … and her mummy’s heroin addiction.” That’s an actual tagline from an advertising campaign created by Project Prevention, the organisation targeting drug addicts in the United Kingdom and United States and bribing them to get ‘sterilised’. That usually involves permanent birth control methods like vasectomies, tubal ligation (tying tubes) and some long-form devices like IUDs. Addicts get $300 for submitting themselves to operation and, according to Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris, the knowledge they’ve prevented further unwanted pregnancies and the birth of children who might themselves have drug-related defects. She started [read more]
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News: Chelsea Handler says she has no regrets about abortion
Chelsea Handler says she doesn’t regret abortion The host of Chelsea Lately says she had an abortion when she was sixteen years old and doesn’t regret it for a moment. She said on The Rosie Show: “I was so delusional. I was like, ‘I’m ready for a baby.’ I was trying to argue with them and they were like, ‘You don’t understand. You’re throwing your entire life away. You’re not having a child right now’. I wouldn’t be a good mother. You should do whatever you want with your body and you shouldn’t let anyone tell you what to do.” [read more]
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4 hours or 4 days: When should you leave the hospital after giving birth?
It used to be that new mothers would stay in hospital for days after the birth of their children. Now its more like hours. The Herald Sun reports that hospitals are offering mothers gifts (like nappies, frozen meals and cleaning services) and visits from midwives to persuade them to leave hospital early and free up beds to cope with a rising number of births. The offer is usually reserved for women having their second or third babies, although some health experts are concerned that these offers could encourage mothers to go home before they’re ready. When [read more]
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First Wednesday Club: Raising up our teenage girls …
I was in a chemist in Townsville staring at tins of newborn formula when I started to cry. Well, sob. Uncontrollably. My three-week-old baby daughter wasn’t sleeping. Ever. Day or night. Possibly because she was too busy howling. So now – on the advice of an equally baffled paediatrician – I was contemplating that she had reflux. Or was lactose intolerant. Or, you know, just hated my guts. And so we stood there, in that chemist that Saturday morning, my beautiful daughter and I crying together in front of some tins of anti-reflux formula that were on special. I was [read more]
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Buy a gift to support abandoned babies in Uganda
They should be getting ready to spend their first Christmas together. But just a few weeks ago baby Isaac and his destitute mother were discovered sleeping on a verandah in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. Police alerted social workers from Malaika Babies Home, which cares for some of the thousands of babies abandoned in the east African country every year, and the newborn was admitted to the centre. Tragically, a few days later Isaac’s mother died. “We are working to try to reunite him with other family members and have arranged a meeting with his great grandmother to [read more]
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The child abduction stats every parent should know
A few months back I wrote a piece about the location of a missing child. In the days after the piece was published I was interviewed on the radio about my thoughts and the question that came up was whether or not our kids are safe. I was asked about whether or not the idea of a person prowling the streets in a white van was a legitimate fear. I was a bit stumped by the question and after reading and thinking and researching the question my simple answer is I don’t know. The idea of a white van prowling [read more]
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TRAVEL: Child’s play in Tanzania
Two long ropes orbit the boy, making that familiar “tsk tsk tsk” sound on the asphalt. Boys wielding the ropes at each end, double-dutch style, watch the jumper in awe. They’re probably hoping they’ll be as good as him in a year. One second he’s on his hands, his long, ebony-hued legs skyward, jumping upside down as the sisal ropes fly underneath. The next, he’s launched into a plank, hands and feet in sync as bounces horizontally off the ground, allowing the ropes to skim the ground without missing a beat. He exits the ropes and reenters with a full [read more]
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She’s spent 1000 days in hospital. And she’s only 23.
1000 days. 24,000 hours. This represents the amount of time I have spent in hospital as a patient with cystic fibrosis, trying to overcome acute lung infections through the use of very potent intra-venous medication, intensive physiotherapy and various other medical exams. Currently, the median prognosis for a person with cystic fibrosis is only 36 years old. I am 23 years old. This is unacceptable. Better treatments are out there; we just need funding to be able to support the medical research that can find them. As anyone with cystic fibrosis will tell you, CF is [read more]
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There is no closure for the loved ones of the missing.
Social media provides an instant platform for people wanting to respond to tragedy and trauma. No matter what type of loss we might be witnessing the same words tend to swirl round and around – we rally at the injustice of ‘bad’ happening to ‘good’ people, we tell each other to hold our babies tighter to remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have and we commonly fall prey to the word closure….closure for the losses we experience, closure for the packaging up of unimaginable traumas into a neat little box and, my personal favourite, [read more]
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It’s been a Cadel of a week. Here’s what I learned.
Timing is everything. On Monday, mine was lousy when Cadel Evans won the Tour de France and I unwittingly became the public enemy of anyone who’d ever ridden a bike. I didn’t wake up with the intention of offending half of Australia. But by 8am, that’s what I’d done after appearing on The Today Show in my regular What’s Making News segment where Karl Stefanovic asked me to share his intense jubilation over Cadel’s victory. I replied I was happy for Cadel but ambivalent about the over-the top adulation we lavish on sports stars and the way we’re so quick [read more]
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What you do in the privacy of your bedroom could get you fired.
UPDATE, DECEMBER 14, 2011: A child has been refused enrolment at Sacred Heart School in Broken Hill, NSW, because its parents are a lesbian couple. The report from news.com.au: “But in a demonstration of the challenges which same-sex parents and their children still face, the school’s decision to discriminate is probably not illegal, as churches are exempt from prosecution for breaches of the Anti-Discrimination Act. One of the mothers told the ABC the principal had phoned her and said the women’s relationship and living situation was the reason the application had been turned down. Trevor Rynne, principal of the Sacred [read more]
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Project Protection pays drug addicts to be sterilised
Not everyone who has a child is capable of taking care of it, of meeting all its needs, emotional and physical. Is it a basic human right to reproduce? Or should some people who are clearly not in a position to have and raise a baby be encouraged not to conceive in the first place? What if these people were paid to be sterilised? Well, so far, 3500 drug addicts in the USA have been – they were all paid to have vasectomies or tubal ligations, rendering them permanently infertile. Barbara Harris is the director and founder of the US-based [read more]
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Is being Australian really so much about gold medals?
There are many groups in our society for which I have sympathy. Homeless people. The disabled. The elderly. The mentally ill. People who are struggling financially to feed their children. People with chronic illnesses or disabilities and those caring for them. Teachers. Childcare workers. Social workers. Carers. Nurses.
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You can tell a lot about a woman by looking at her wardrobe. Madonna is having a Big Bird moment.
We had this debate a while back when Gwyneth started dressing sexy. Now it's Madonna's turn to confound us with her wardrobe. A piece in the Daily Mail suggests you can tell a lot about a woman's headspace by what she wears. I agree with this wholeheartedly. She also says one look at Madonna lately would suggest she's in a DARK place. Possibly, one with no mirrors….. In the months surrounding the break-up of her marriage, she has veered wildly between dressing down - not caring one iota that she looks like someone who keeps all her possessions in a [read more]
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The first of 8 ticker tape parades was held in Sydney today to welcome home our Olympians. That’s a lot of dead trees being thrown in the air…..
Olympians Tessa Parkinson and Elise Rechichi with fans At the risk of starting to sound like an obsessed killjoy about this whole Olympic thing, is it really necessary to have 8 seperate ticker tape parades to celebrate their sportiness?These are athletes who have decided to dedicate great chunks of their lives into swimming and jumping and riding and throwing for their own personal satisfaction and benefit.Fine. Good on them. I guess.But I can’t help feeling demoralised about the way we as a country seem to praise sporting achievement above all else.Where is the ticker tape parade for midwives? Or nurses? [read more]