All the News That's Hard to Believe

 Skeptical by nature, still I try my best to keep an open mind. Live and let live, I say. If someone wants to cut off his penis and get fake boobs and start wearing nail polish and high heels to feel better about himself I say go for it, even though deep down I think it's a manifestation of mental problems. But hey -- not my business.

About that skepticism. A Special Section in yesterday's New York Times called "A WOMAN'S RIGHTS" started off with an article entitled "Jailing Mothers for Miscarriages." This pushed me to my limits. Discussing laws in certain states that punish women for harming fetuses, the article contains the following two scenarios:   
     "Stomach pains woke Keysheonna Reed late one night in December 2017. She climbed into the bathtub, hoping she would not wake any of the other nine people living in her small home in eastern Arkansas. Within minutes she'd delivered twins, a boy and a girl. Both babies were born dead."   

      "Katherine Dellis felt dizzy one day in 2016, passed out and woke up on her bathroom floor to find her stillborn fetus beside her."

Having given birth myself the natural way, those two paragraphs made me laugh out loud. My own experience involved 23 hours of intense labor followed by two-and-a-half hours of pushing, after which the attending physician resorted to a pair of forceps to actually pull the baby out of my womb. A staff of nurses and a labor coach aided in the delivery, during which there was much screaming on my part, enough to cause one of the nurses to suggest that I should "get a grip." (She was quickly banished from the room.)

So you can see why I found it hard to believe that in the first instance, the young girl could deliver two babies without making a sound, and by the way why not wake at least a couple of the other nine people in the house? And in the second case, the baby, though dead, apparently delivered itself, somehow sliding out of the body of a totally inert woman and landing right next to her.

The fact that the reporter of that article swallowed these birth accounts hook, line and sinker, as did the section editor and the paper's managing editor, is why I steer clear of The New York Times, especially when it's pushing an agenda.