The Duggars tend to elicit a range of reactions, from loathing to near-worship. Some see the Duggars, who are fundamentalist Christians (Baptist), as the embodiment of all that is holy. At the other end of the spectrum lie those who view the Duggars as retrograde polluters who sport bad hairdos, strain the Earth’s resources, keep their children (especially the daughters) in indentured servitude, and conspire to dominate the world by out-breeding the not-so-godly.

I myself fall somewhere in between these two extremes. As a woman who’s deliberately chosen to have only one biological child, I find the idea of having 19 kids basically a year apart in age scary. Then again, I was puzzled by my nephew and his wife’s decision to TTC (that’s for Try To Conceive, not Toronto Transit Commission) right after their existing daughter turned a year old. At the end of the day, however, it’s the Duggars’ choice as to how many children they want to have – especially as they’re paying their own way rather than sponging off the taxpayers.* But wherever we land on the ‘love ‘em or hate ‘em’ spectrum, we can’t help but be fascinated by the Duggars. Why else would they garner so many viewers and so much commentary both positive and negative?

Much of our fascination with the Duggars stems from the fact that by having so many children, they’re outside the norm. Humans have always been intrigued by the unusual and atypical. In other words, the Duggars attract attention for the same reason that the Hensel twins or Aceves family do. (Of course I watched programs about the Aceves family because I had a raging crush on Jesus Manuel Fajardo Aceves, so I can’t exclude the possibility that some female – and perhaps a few male – viewers might feel the same way about Jim-Bob, even if he’s not my type personally.) The Duggars’ outsider status is confirmed by indications that everywhere around the globe, birth rates are falling. My own experience attests to this. During my childhood in the 1970s, the only ‘only’ children I knew were my cousin Brian, whose mom – Aunt Helen – was a single mother by choice before it became the trendy thing to do, and an adopted girl born at the tail end of the healthy white baby glut. Families of four or five children were not considered particularly gargantuan. Fast-forward three decades, though, and Canada’s birth rate, like that of most industrialized nations, is well below replacement level. As The Nation‘s Katha Pollitt writes, women today want small, planned families. People who criticize the Discovery or Learning Channels for ‘promoting overpopulation’ by featuring large families never stop to think that the Duggars wouldn’t receive a fraction of the publicity they currently do if their family size was anything close to the norm. In the grand scheme of things, Jim-Bob, Michelle and their brood are no real threat in a demographic sense.

I also suspect we’re drawn to the Duggars because they’re, well, such a wholesome family, at least on camera. Even a poster on a militantly childfree site was forced to admit that the Duggar children were better-behaved than the average kid (‘no feces smearing’). For members of the so-called Quiverfull crowd and their sympathizers – largely fundamentalist Christians and some Catholics – the Duggars are a model to emulate, aspire to, or at the very least admire from afar. But even individuals who wouldn’t necessarily throw their birth control to the wind might be attracted, in the words of Australian philosophy professor Karen Green, the image of a purer society, positively oriented towards motherhood and paternal responsibility, which the Duggars seem to project. At a time when traditional social structures (marriage, the family, etcetera) seem to be collapsing all around us, such an image might be appealing to some.

Personally, I share almost nothing with the Duggars in terms of my reproductive choices, religious beliefs, or childrearing ideals. For instance, Jim-Bob and Michelle don’t expose their children to ‘secular rock music,’ whereas I just listened to Pink’s song ‘Just Like a Pill’ with its line about a nurse ‘being a little bitch’ in the presence of my four-year-old daughter. Nonetheless, I can’t claim that the Duggars have nothing to say to me. I’m moved by their strong affection for one another. The recent funeral service for Jubilee Shalom was particularly touching – although given the reality that a high proportion of pregnancies in women over 40 end in miscarriage, it didn’t strike me as tragic as, say, a miscarriage in a woman who’d been trying to get pregnant for years. I’m also impressed by the family’s overall happiness – an elusive emotion, it seems, these days. Even some of the things on which I don’t see eye to eye with the Duggars (the Creation Museum, Michelle’s discomfort with dancing on the grounds that even King David’s dancing in the Bible ‘had consequences’) I find more amusing than anything else. And while I’m more than content in my decision to have only one child, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be ‘on the other side,’ with a whole brood rather than just one child to love. But in the end, my feelings towards the Duggars are ones of curiosity, fondness, and even a certain admiration but not hero-worship or emulation.

*I am not against welfare per se in the case of, for example, a mother of preschoolers who leaves an abusive husband or boyfriend and cannot pay for day care, but I do consider it irresponsible to deliberately have children while on social assistance.

Activists are calling for the resignation of a Toronto Catholic District School Board trustee after he suggested that an undocumented immigrant student applying to Catholic schools should “apply for Canadian Citizenship ASAP.”

Both legislation and district policy state that the school district cannot discriminate against undocumented immigrants who apply. In an e-mail to Nadia Saad, a university social-work student who was working with an undocumented student, Frank D’Amico said that they were lucky he didn’t answer an earlier phone call, “because my first call would be to immigration Canada.

“If you want to live in Canada, take our Canadian jobs, use our Social Programs and Health Care … I strongly suggest becoming a citizen. I am forwarding your concern to the RCMP and to immigration Canada.”

The e-mail was in response to an earlier e-mail Ms. Saad had sent numerous trustees about difficulties finding a placement for a student whose parents were undocumented immigrants. In her original e-mail, she referred to a phone call with a school board administrator that she claimed was skeptical of undocumented immigrants; Mr. D’Amico’s response was that “unless you’ve been on another planet for the last Decade, I will remind you, 911. [sic] September 11 the day that changed the world.”

Saad provided portions of the original letter to Cynics Unlimited:

Not only were this TCDSB administrator’s questions unnecessary, unethical, intrusive and condescending, they, along with her tone of voice, reflect a dangerous underlying ideology that is deeply prejudiced and reeks of entitlement. It is extremely troubling to think of what sort of private information might have been shared unnecessarily with this demanding and intimidating administrator had it been the mother of the boy – anxious, fearful, and non-adept in English – communicating with her as opposed to the social worker, and how such information might have been used (against the family).

Furthermore, the administrator’s questioning is problematic in that it contradicts the afore-mentioned TCDSB policy on Students Without Legal Immigration Status, and section 49.1 of the Ontario Education Act which states:
A person who is otherwise entitled to be admitted to a school and who is less than eighteen years of age shall not be refused admission because the person or the person’s parent or guardian is unlawfully in Canada.
Both the TCDSB policy and section 49.1 of the Education Act should in no respect be viewed as generous, benevolent, unique or complementary gestures. In fact, they are obligations in accordance with international law, as is outlined by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which states that each child is entitled to free and compulsory education, on the basis of equal opportunity. Such a fundamentally human and moral obligation to recognize the right to education – not to mention, to be aware of the policies of your own institution – seemed to have been completely lacking where this particular administrator is concerned.

However, it is my understanding that this is not an isolated occurrence: the report compiled by Social Planning Toronto entitled Policy Without Practice: Barriers to Enrolment for Non-Status Immigrant Students in Toronto’s Catholic Schools highlights as one of its key findings the fact that TCDSB administrative staff are unaware of their own board policies and of their legal obligation to admit children lacking immigration status. This report was completed in 2010 and forwarded to the TCDSB, which has given no response of its receipt nor acknowledgement of the findings of the report.

To conclude, it deeply concerns me that TCDSB administrators are acting inappropriately, unethically, and against their own policies, as gatekeepers to a fundamental human right which is clearly acknowledged by TCDSB policy. I urge the TCDSB to thoroughly educate your school principals, teachers and administrators on the policies I have discussed above, as well as on the international law and human obligations underlying them. If the attitude and ideology of other professionals is anything like this particular administrator who was involved in the above conversation, then I would also recommend everyone undergo extensive training in anti-oppressive practice in order to understand how systems of privilege and oppression operate, are reinforced, and must be worked against.

And so the debate that has divided America for the past decade or so has migrated north: should Canada show compassion to undocumented entrants or force them to abide by the rules before providing any benefits?

Last Saturday a Canadian friend called me asking for some advice about fixing his computer. The problem was very simple, and I resolved it within five minutes. I stayed at his house for a while, talking to him and his wife, and when I was leaving, they both said “Gracias, muchas gracias!”

Smiling, I responded in French.

This couple is very nice. He is a contractor (a person who works in civil construction, somewhat like a mason, but he is also a plumber and electrician). I don’t know what his wife does; I have never asked. I met them through a mutual friend.

When I met him, the first thing he said to me was “Hola cómo estás!” I then responded in French – or in English; I don’t remember – and at that time I said I didn’t speak Spanish, even though I have studied it. Then, as a good Brazilian, I explained that Brazil is the only country in the Americas whose official language is Portuguese, and I talked about a whole litany of things, historical matters, etcetera.

On the second, third, and fourth time we met, he again complimented me in Spanish, and I always responded in French. One day I even taught him the correct words in Portuguese, but it had no effect. This continued until at some point I started answering him in Spanish as well.

Last Saturday, the story repeated itself, but in a more humorous vein. We were at a party at house of a friend of my wife’s, and a guest, on noting that we were not Canadian, started speaking to us in Spanish. I responded in English, and he got a frightened look on his face, as if he had committed a gaffe. Then he asked me in English where we were from. When I responded that we were Brazilian, he said, “So, no Spanish?” I said, “No, we speak Portuguese.” From then on the conversation focused on Brazil.

These were not the only occasions in which a Canadian, Quebecois or not, spoke to me in Spanish, and it won’t be the last. In the end, they want to be nice and show their openness to people from other countries.

What the heck is South America; aren’t you a Mexican?

Be prepared to hear all kind of absurdities when you are there. The typical Canadian has no notion of history or geography the way we do – well, I’m speaking from experience and from the studies I’ve done. For many people, there is no difference between the Americas. For others, south of the Rio Grande there is only a vast and immense territory called… Mexico. I’ve been asked whether Brazil shares a border with Mexico.

Many people also believe that outside the Canada-US axis there are only Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, places where most Canadians spend their summer vacations.

In the end, be prepared. You will be surprised.

Does being Brazilian mean being Latin?

Every day that goes by I am more convinced that I am not the stereotypical Latin American. For various reasons, but mainly because I don’t speak Spanish and have no Spanish cultural roots. Culturally speaking, Brazil is very different from its South American neighbours and even more so from the Central American countries.

There were other influences, other mixtures that through the past 500 years have made us Brazilians a special people. For that alone, Brazil is so big that has the luxury of defining its own stereotypes (which is a good subject for another essay).

For this reason I will continue to say that I am Brazilian, not Latin.

Translator’s note: I want to first of all thank Pedro for contributing to Cynics Unlimited for the first time.

The article made me laugh, because I remember reading some time in a book by the world-famous Italian linguist Mario Pei that sometimes Brazilians got huffy when American tourists tried to speak to them in Spanish. They would say, “We’d rather speak English, thank you.”

More seriously, as a Canadian I can kind of empathize with Mr. Silva because as a Canadian I’m sometimes mistaken abroad for an American (that is, if I don’t have my little maple leaf pin on my purse). I’m always conscious of being “swallowed up” by the United States in terms of others’ perceptions of Canada.

My only bit of difference with Mr. Silva is that being part Italian, I suppose I think of “Latins” as anyone who speaks a language descended from Latin, which would include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and even Romanian (even though Romania is a bit apart from this group because of their religious, cultural and historical differences from the other four).

Pedro’s Note : I do agree with your point of view, and in fact I have the same notion of definition of the word Latin. However, the word “latino” used in North America usually refers to people from Latin America (Spanish Latin America) and it translates to English as Latin as well. So when I used it on my text I was saying that I don’t feel like being a typical stereotyped Latin American. But yes, I’m Latin in the sense that my mother tongue is a Romance language.

Finally, read Pedro’s original article in Portuguese at http://www.pedrosilva.com.br/blog/iam-brazilian-for-gods-sake/.

For a large number of people, Nenshi’s victory was indeed a revolution. Indo-Canadian television station OMNI News, for example, compared it to the election of President Barack Obama in the United States two years earlier. OMNI commentator Zuhair Kashmeri saw Nenshi’s win as a sign that mayoralty in Canada was no longer the exclusive domain of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Among the general Canadian population, some suggested that the election of a Muslim mayor in Calgary meant that Alberta might not be the redneck haven it was often portrayed as being. Others noted the irony in the victory of Nenshi in the supposed backwoods of Alberta versus that of (White) right-wing candidate Rob Ford in the reputed bastion of multiculturalism Toronto.

While I understand the South Asian community’s elation, I would like to make my own clarifications. With all due respect to Mr. Nenshi and to Calgary, being elected mayor of a city can’t be equated to becoming president of an entire nation. Canada furthermore has had, and has, non-White mayors. They include Niagara-on-the-Lake Mayor Art Viola, who is of Filipino descent, and the Lebanese-Canadian Mayor of Windsor, Ontario Eddie Francis (note: I personally find it somewhat curious that Arabs are classified as ‘minorities’ by the Canadian government even though many of them – such as dear Mr. Francis himself – are physically indistinguishable from Greeks or Southern Italians). However, Nenshi’s Muslim faith causes him to stand out in a way that Viola and Francis do not. Both Francis and Viola are Catholic. Perhaps Filipinos and Lebanese Christians are Westernized enough to be seen as mainstream: after all, how ‘exotic’ can someone with the name of Art or Eddie be?

Naheed Nenshi’s religion has sparked commentary. Some have wondered darkly whether he might try to impose sharia law on his constituents. This possibility seems fairly remote. For one, Nenshi belongs to a moderate branch of Islam, the Ismailis. Ismaili women, for instance, are allowed to marry non-Muslim men, whereas women in mainstream Islam are not (though Muslim men can wed Christian or Jewish women). Secondly, even if Nenshi were an Islamic fundamentalist intent on bringing sharia to Calgary, as mayor his power to do so would be limited, just as that of Toronto’s Rob Ford – who has been quoted as saying that marriage should be exclusively between a man and woman – to ban same-sex marriage would be.

Finally, what does Naheed Nenshi’s election as mayor tell us about Canadian society in general? Does it mean that racism in this country is a thing of the past? I would say no. On the other hand, Canada does appear to have come a long way, so to speak, from the days when prejudice against groups ranging from the Irish to Ukrainians to Jews to Chinese to Japanese abounded. Also, should a candidate’s faith (or lack thereof) be a factor in deciding whether or not to vote for him or her? Again, I would answer in the negative, unless of course he or she were going to attempt to impose it on others – which Nenshi shows no intention of doing. In the end, all we can hope for is that Nenshi will govern the city and serve the people of Calgary well.

If the reliably hysterical science coverage of British newspapers is to be believed, we’re about to run out of fish, bees and bananas, and those are merely the media-friendly tip of the extinction iceberg represented by an expanding population and manmade climate change.  On this small planet, our mushrooming population of gluttons, gourmands and gastric bypasses will inevitably run out of things to eat, and unless we start on each other our diets are going to be required to evolve to incorporate some ‘unusual’ new tastes, just to put it mildly.

You are what you eat

Mould, industrial waste, lab-grown fish fingers; these are some of the protein sources already shuffling their way towards your plate, and it’s hard to predict exactly which aisle of the global supermarket stocks the grotesque superfoods that will be needed to save hungry, stupid humanity from gnawing off its own buttocks.

Imagine a culinary car-crash between Heston Blumenthal and Ray Mears, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of our future menu:  grasshoppers poached in liquid nitrogen; squirrels toasted over a pile of burning tyres.

If that sounds too weird for you, look away and concentrate on enjoying those beefburgers for the next decade or two.  You’ll want to remember them in the future, when even a fancy dinner resembles a surgeon’s binbag, and decade-old cinema hotdogs are so desirable that they’re regularly hijacked at gunpoint by starving migrants from the encroaching euro-desert.

Well done humanity, you’ve eaten pretty much everything

Exaggeration aside, we really are chewing towards a gigantic helping of environmental apocalypse.  We waste more food than at any time in history, whilst clearing the rainforests to make burgers and busily scoffing our way to the bottom of the ocean floor.

Where is the next course going to come from? Who’s going to bother growing it? We may as well forget about the luckless inhabitants of the developing world (part of the problem is that most of us have already), because they’ll be too busy dealing with hurricanes, flooding and widespread pestilence to produce much in the way of stimulating ethnic cuisine.

An order of doom, topped with gloom, stuffed with woe

Intensive farming is poisoning our land and eradicating pollinating insects, yet pests proliferate whilst useful birds and bees expire in their millions. Urban rodents multiply faster than at any time since the bubonic plague whilst overfed kitty cats maim songbirds and consume enough tinned meat to feed a small third-world family.

We really don’t have enough farmland in the world for humans to eat so much cow, let alone an auxiliary population of obese housepets.  What this means is that every time you see a mad old woman with twenty cats, an entire African village is going hungry.  Bear that in mind when the bomb falls and you’re having second thoughts about the moral implications of cannibalism.

You’re probably thinking that this is all getting a bit dark, so it’s lucky that scientists have been working hard to solve these problems before we start dreaming up exotic marinades for their juicy PHD brains.  In labs across the world, white coats are spattered with a variety of delectable stains, ready for that fateful day when society collapses like an underdone soufflé and Jamie Oliver must roam the street, mugging grandmothers for their hoarded tins of corned beef.

This might seem a long way off, so you may be surprised and/or disgusted to find that many of these monstrous science foods are already on your shelves.  If this makes you a little queasy, you’d best learn to swallow it down with a smile on your face, because your future offers a stark choice between starvation, Soylent Green or an outlandish smorgasbord of artificial foodstuffs scraped out of warm Pyrex beakers.

Continue Reading at Stinkbiscuit >>

Much of the Saveliev/Hansen affair remains a mystery.  Torry Ann Hansen apparently home-schooled Artem and did not attend church or belong to any social clubs.  Though she said she consulted a psychiatrist about her son’s problems, she never actually took the boy to be examined directly. The only member of the Hansen camp speaking to the media is Torry Ann’s mother Nancy, who confirmed her daughter’s claims. The boy’s adoptive grandmother stated that he threatened to burn the family’s house down and attacked his aunt (Torry Ann’s sister) with a three-pound statue after she asked him to correct his math homework.  Meanwhile officials in Russia who met Artem on his return have denied witnessing any of the behaviour he supposedly exhibited in the United States. They even reported that he wept at the thought of leaving his family there behind.

The general public’s reaction to the story was for the most part one of shock and horror.  How could a woman who had pledged to be a mother to this boy abandon him so callously, sending him on an airplane unattended?  Even if he did have issues, Ms. Hansen should have sought help from a psychologist or from the social services in her area. And if that did not work, she might have arranged to have Artem placed in a foster home or with another adoptive family.

However, a few individuals, while not condoning Hansen’s actions, expressed sympathy for her. Many of these were adoptive parents of children from the former Soviet Union with problems similar to those allegedly shown by Artem/Justin: physically hurting family members, pets and schoolmates, lying, running away from home and so on.  In almost all cases, the children’s difficulties could be pinpointed to alcohol consumption during pregnancy on the part of their biological mothers.

Unfortunately, a high percentage of birth mothers of Russian adoptees have been found to be heavy drinkers. One Swedish report discovered that a third of such women were known – note the word “known” – to be alcoholics. It is therefore not surprising that other studies have demonstrated that children adopted from Russia run a higher risk of behavioural and emotional disturbances than those from other parts of the world, like China. Alcohol is after all an especially powerful teratogen (substance that causes birth defects). It can lead to difficulties in the offspring of alcoholic mothers such as attention deficit disorder, poor impulse control and unpredictability.  I know – my (domestically) adopted niece has fetal alcohol syndrome. As Artem was born to a nineteen-year-old alcoholic woman, he may very well have had the disorder himself.

As the aunt of an adopted niece and nephew and potential adoptive parent myself, I feel compelled to comment on the Artem/Justin case.  I first of all consider it unconscionable to put an eight-year-old on a plane unattended.  What strikes me too, though, is Torry Ann Hansen’s apparent naïveté. Did she really think that a young boy who had spent the first five years of his life with an alcoholic mother and another two in an orphanage would magically adapt to life in a foreign country with a new family?  It seems incredible that as a nurse Hansen would not suspect that Artem might have had behavioural issues stemming from his exposure to alcohol in utero.  The news reports said that Torry Ann Hansen was seeking to adopt another child, this time from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.  I hope she doesn’t; she should realize that adoption is not for her.

I might also ask myself what I would do in a situation like Torry Ann Hansen’s.  I can state with virtual certainty that I would never put a young child on a transoceanic flight by himself. But if, supposing for the sake of the argument that her allegations of her son being uncontrollably violent are true, would I have stuck with him through to the bitter end, enduring aggression on his part and danger not only to myself but to my other family members as well, and kept him in my care at all costs?  That I cannot say for sure. I would have in all probability attempted to get as much help as I could for him and myself, perhaps from social services, from a psychologist or psychiatrist or from a member of the clergy. But if all this failed to produce results, I just might have surrendered him to social services, with a guarantee that they place him either in another adoptive home or in a well-run residence for troubled children.

What I like to think, however, is that I would do my best never to find myself in a similar scenario as Ms. Hansen’s in the first place. To begin with, I would not adopt a child with a history of prenatal exposure to alcohol or other drugs. (Note: I would take in my niece if anything ever happened to my sister and her husband, but I wouldn’t deliberately seek out a child at increased risk for fetal alcohol syndrome.) And as it’s not always possible to know the background of an adopted child’s biological parents, I would in all likelihood eschew adopting from Russia, given the high rate of alcoholism among birth mothers there.

I wish the best for Artem/Justin in the future.  And hopefully Torry Ann Hansen will come out of this experience a little wiser as well.

In Italy, a court has ordered, upon pain of having his assets seized, Giancarlo Casagrande of Bergamo to pay his daughter an allowance of 350 euros—approximately $525—every month. Signor Casagrande is 60. His daughter Marina is 32. She was supposed to have graduated with a degree in philosophy eight years ago but, though her classes ended way back at the beginning of the century, she’s still working on her thesis. So Signor Casagrande is obliged to pay up, either in perpetuity or until the completion of Marina’s thesis, whichever comes sooner. Her thesis is about the Holy Grail. Which it’s hard to see why Marina would have any use for, given that she’s already found a source of miraculous life-transforming powers in Papa’s chequebook.

Marina is what they call in Italy a “bambocciona,” which translates, roughly, as “big baby”—the term for the ever-growing number of young adults still living at home. Not their home—with a spouse and young kids and putting out the garbage and repainting the stairs and so forth—but at their parents’ home, in the same bedroom they’ve slept in since they were in diapers.

While there may not be a specific name in North America for kids who stay at home well past the age of 18 (which happens to be the start of college age and 2 years past the age at which a child can legally move out in some jurisdictions), Canadian culture has traditionally regarded such people as parasitic. Growing up in rural Ontario, one came across a small number of individuals who were in their 30′s and still sleeping in their childhood bedrooms. Society generally heaped scorn on such individuals, calling them lazy and unmotivated, and quite often they were correct. Many of the bamboccioni were involved with weed or harder substances, providing parents the opportunity to lecture their children about the dangers of drugs – after all, you don’t want to end up like ______ over there.

The North American bambocciona is also the butt of jokes, being ridiculed in television and movies as an unmotivated clown. New York rapper Thirstin Howell III parodied the plight of the long term dependent in the track “Still live with my Moms”

Trying to f*ck me while his mom’s home,
Free rent, light, gas and phone,
A momma’s boy even though my ass is grown,
Got the same bedroom, since third grade,
Still be living here when I’m eight hundred and eighty eight
…
I always say I’m moving out this year,
But it’ll be sooner if welfare finds out I live here,
Yo it’s cheap by my place,
I ain’t scared to open bills cuz non of them in my name,
Got kicked out, my mom said I could move back,
If I prove that I didn’t steal my sister’s food stamps

Much of the ridicule in North America can be seen as a function of at least two factors -

• America and Canada and both historically “frontier” nations that value individuality and being self-made. This contrasts with more bambocciona-friendly nations like Italy and Japan, which have much older and patriarchal cultures.
• As noted in Steyn’s article, housing and land are much cheaper in North America when compared to other developed regions. This is due in part to the vast amount of arable land in the United States and at least the southern part of Canada. Italy has approximately 1.7 times the population of Canada yet is contained in a land mass smaller than Newfoundland.

Where Independence Fails

However, the Canadian economy has transformed significantly over the past 30 years, resulting in conditions that may leave children who leave home before 30 at a serious disadvantage against their lingering counterparts. Firstly, a college degree is no longer a “nice to have” but the bare minimum required for anyone wanting to have a career. College and University are only partially subsidized in Canada, leaving students thousands of dollars in debt before their first career job. If the student doesn’t have the luxury of living at home, the debt could number in the tens of thousands.

But when school is over there is no excuse for the wee ones not the move out right? Not quite. The average house price in Canada was $332,000 as of September 2009 and rising steadily. Larger centers (where youth are more likely to congregate) paint an even bleaker picture:

Toronto: $407,000 (10.3% yearly increase)
Calgary: $395,000 (1.1% yearly increase)
Vancouver: $611,000 (14% yearly increase)

Back in the good ol days (ie before the 1990 recession) banks expected 10-20% down payment on a new home. Does the average youth have a spare $40,000-$60,000? Before you answer, consider that the median income in Canada was $63,600 as of 2006. Assuming that the median income continues to rise at the same rate as it has over the past 10 years, it can be assumed that the median income for 2009 (not yet available) will be around $66,800. Thus, the ratio of median housing price to median income is around 5 – considerably higher than years gone by (most middle class people I have spoken to quoted about 2-3 for their personal ratio during the 70′s and 80′s) and indicative that owning a home is getting more expensive even after correction for inflation.

Recently, the Canadian government, in an attempt to head off a housing bubble, tightened mortgage restrictions to make requirements even tougher for first time buyers. The new rules requiring buyers to be able to pay a five-year, fixed rate mortgage -regardless of the actual terms of the mortgage- will have the greatest effect on lower-income buyers. New graduates make up a sizable portion of this group and making a larger down-payment will once again be a primary concern.

Ultimately, it is easier to save for a down payment under mom’s roof than it is while renting (a practice ironically looked down upon as indicative of lack of financial responsibility). Thus, the bambocciona is in no danger of going extinct in Canada any time soon.

continued reading article

Under the Taliban Afghan women were legally forced to wear the burqa if they ventured from their homes. Now a Muslim group in Canada is taking the opposite tactic. The Muslim Canadian Congress is urging the Canadian federal government to forbid the wearing of the burqa, and the niqab, in public.* According to the Congress, as an instrument of women’s oppression the burqa has no place in a country like Canada that prides itself on its gender equality. Furthermore, the burqa poses a security risk, as an individual – male or female – could put it on to rob a bank or other establishment without fear of being identified. Finally, the Muslim Canadian Congress says the burqa is not mandated by Islam or even mentioned in the Koran. It is instead a Middle Eastern cultural tradition that was co-opted by Muslims in the region.

Not everyone concurs with the Muslim Canadian Congress’ demand. The Canadian Islamic Congress for instance believes that banning the burqa would violate the freedom of religion and conscience of Muslim women who chose to wear it. To that the Muslim Canadian Congress replies that for many, even most, women the burqa is not a choice but something imposed on them by their husbands and other family members. The group’s president Farzana Hassan stated as well in an interview on CBC Radio that religious freedom is not absolute.

The question of whether or not to ban the burqa presents a dilemma for many Canadians regardless of their religion. In Canada , women’s rights and freedom of religion are two principles most of us take seriously. But what happens when they appear to collide?

I believe the idea of the burqa as a security threat deserves to be discussed. The Muslim Canadian Congress’ Tarek Fatah described at least one incident in Canada in which an individual – a man, actually – robbed a bank while wearing a burqa. Is this a reason to prohibit the burqa in public? Perhaps – though one could argue that in that case ski masks, which have probably been used for more robberies than the burqa has, should be banned as well. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to require that women show their faces in situations where identification is advisable in order to prevent fraud, when voting or taking out money at a bank, for instance. But I suspect the burqa’s potential as a robbery facilitator may be a bit exaggerated by its opponents.

I’m also somewhat wary of the notion that the burqa should be forbidden in order to prevent women from being forced to wear it. This is one of the Muslim Canadian Congress’ main arguments for banning the garment. However, over the years a plethora of restrictive legislation of dubious benefit has been passed for the purpose of “protecting” women. For instance, when Ireland was debating whether to permit divorce (which it ultimately did in 1995) some people claimed that doing so would hurt women by freeing up men to abandon their wives and children. One Irish politician, Alice Glenn, made the now-famous comparison of a woman voting to legalize divorce to a “turkey voting for Christmas.” (Of course we in North America might say a turkey voting for Thanksgiving.) Glenn never mentioned that over half of divorces today are filed by wives rather than husbands. While most of these women do so not because of abuse and/or alcoholism on their spouses’ part but because of dissatisfaction with the marriage in general, it’s not hard to imagine that forbidding divorce does make it more difficult for a woman to be free of a man like Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather. Thus here we have an example of a law (the ban on divorce) ostensibly aimed at helping women which ends up potentially hurting them.

I don’t doubt the Muslim Canadian Congress’ call for a burqa ban stems from a genuine concern for women (though I suspect it’s also an attempt on the group’s part to spruce up Islam’s image in the eyes of non-Muslim Canadians, many of whom associate the religion with the subjugation of women). And the question of whether even in Canada women freely decide to wear the burqa deserves to be examined. Yet the idea of forbidding something that we personally might find oppressive strikes me as paternalistic at best and authoritarian at worst. An analogy might lie in the case of Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas woman with at last count eighteen children and one more on the way. (See my earlier essay about her at Cynics Unlimited) I’ve embarked on a completely different course in my reproductive life: I’ve chosen to give birth to only one child. Just as the Muslim Canadian Congress says the burqa is not part of the Islamic religion, my interpretation of Psalm 127:3-5, “happy is he who has his quiver full of (children),” does not tell me that I should necessarily have as many kids as my body can pump out. One commentator on my quiverfull essay claimed that the Duggars were “brainwashed.” Which may be true, but who am I or anyone else to tell Ms. Duggar that she should not have as many children as she can produce because it’s not something that I would ever do myself or that I consider a religious obligation?

Which brings up the role of religion in society. I agree with Farzana Hassan that freedom of religion is not absolute. For example, courts have – rightly – ordered medical treatment for the children of Christian Scientists. On the other hand, in the same way that political leaders shouldn’t be allowed to impose their religious beliefs about abortion, homosexuality, etcetera, on people who do not share them, perhaps other than in extreme situations it is not the government’s job to decide how citizens should practise their religion. Rather than resort to the law, the Muslim Canadian Congress might consider trying to educate the Muslim community on why the burqa and niqab are not religious requirements.

Though in the end I don’t have any definite answer on whether or not the burqa should be legally forbidden in Canada , I tend to lean against a ban. The occasional conflict between women’s rights and religious freedom isn’t always easily resolved. In attempting to do so, we should be careful to strike a balance between the needs of individuals and the needs of the greater society.

* The Muslim Canadian Congress is not on the other hand calling for a ban on the hijab, or headscarf, which covers only the woman’s hair.

When the procedure first emerged in the 1980s most recipients were married women in their thirties and forties who had experienced premature menopause.  Now however a considerable number of them are single and in their fifties and sixties.  (There was one report of a woman who bore a child at seventy, but as she lacked a valid birth certificate her age could not be verified.)  An example was Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara, a Spanish woman who gave birth at sixty-six to twin boys.  Trailing close behind her was Adriana Iliescu, a Romanian professor who at the same age minus some days had a little girl.

These post-menopausal matriarchs have, not surprisingly, stirred up considerable controversy.  A frequent comment is that childbearing in the sixth decade of life and beyond is unnatural.  Some critics, such as the Roman Catholic Church, oppose all artificial reproduction.  On the other hand, many people who would have no problem with a thirty-year-old woman turning to in vitro fertilization in order to conceive might draw the line at a fifty- or sixty-year-old doing the same.

I must admit being a bit disconcerted by a recent picture of Adriana Iliescu at seventy, walking hand in hand with her three-year-old daughter and looking like a caricature of an elderly woman desperately clinging to youth with her bright red lip gloss and dyed black hair over her wrinkled face.  That she is the young girl’s “mother” rather than grandmother does seem to violate the natural order.  Yet a part of me bristles at the word “natural.”  Much of what women do in their reproductive lives today, from using birth control to terminating pregnancies to conceiving via artificial insemination, is hardly natural.  My own procreative odyssey veered from the natural when I gave birth to my daughter by caesarean section.  As her head was too large and my vagina too small to allow for a normal delivery, letting nature take its course would likely have meant death for us both.  Therefore it might be hypocritical of me to criticize women who also seek the services of what modern medicine has to offer.

Another area of concern has to do with the age of the women in question.  Is a fifty- or sixty-year-old really up to the task of walking a colicky baby, running around the local park with a toddler, or playing ball with a six-year-old?  Many would answer “no.”  More importantly, the risk of a post-menopausal woman dying before her child reaches adulthood is statistically speaking much greater than that of a twenty-, thirty- or even forty-year-old.  This fear was borne out by the recent death of Maria del Carmen Bousada, who died of cancer at 69 leaving her two-year-old twin sons behind (fortunately a nephew of hers, the boys’ godfather, will be taking care of them).

A counterargument is that men can and do become parents in their twilight years without much commentary.  A famous example was the late actor Tony Randall, who fathered two children with his second wife when he was in his late seventies.  One difference is that the majority of elderly fathers have pre-menopausal wives, so there is a good chance of there being one parent around for the children as they grow up.  However, even in this case one could say that because it is difficult for a young child or teenager to lose either parent, women shouldn’t be condemned any more – or less – than men should for deciding to procreate at an advanced age.

Women who resort to egg donation are occasionally asked why they don’t adopt instead.  Some people with reservations about older women deliberately getting pregnant are more accepting of the latter providing a home to an existing child.  In reality, though, adoption is complicated even for couples in their twenties and thirties (shortage of available children, huge expenses, and the possibility of the birth mother changing her mind); with the added burden of age limits set by many adoption agencies and some source countries, achieving parenthood via this route may be virtually impossible for a woman of sixty, especially if she’s not married.

Yet sometimes one gets the impression that even if adoption were more feasible many of these women would still choose to undergo egg donation so as to experience pregnancy and childbirth.   I personally fail to see the psychological advantages of egg donation over adoption.   Women like Iliescu and Bousada have no genetic relationship to the children they bear – barring the rare occasion where the egg donor is a blood relative of the recipient – and other than gestating and giving birth do little that an adoptive mother can’t.  (By the way, adoptive mothers can breastfeed – though they usually have to supplement their own milk with formula.)

One might also wonder why older egg donation recipients did not try to reproduce in their younger years when they were physically capable of doing so.  Maria del Carmen Bousada claimed she was taking care of her own mother until the latter’s death at 101, which may have led Bousada to believe that she herself would have lived long enough to at least see her kids off to college.  Adriana Iliescu had two abortions during a brief marriage in her twenties.  Though Bousada may have had a point when she told a British newspaper that “everyone should become a mother at the right time for them,” I can’t help thinking that it might have been easier for everyone involved – the women themselves, the babies, and their extended families, who, as in Bousada’s case, will often be the ones taking charge of the kids in the event of their mother’s demise – if their reproductive careers had begun sooner than they actually did.  An added bonus of earlier childbearing too, for those to whom heredity is important, is a genetic connection to the resulting offspring.

The question of post-menopausal reproduction is of some personal interest to me as my naturally fertile years draw to a close (I’m forty now).   I am fairly certain that if I try to have more biological children and find myself unable to do so, I won’t turn to medicine to help me achieve this goal.  At thirty or even thirty-five I might have done so, but at this point in time forcing a pregnancy when my body is saying “no” does appear to be pushing the limit.  If I decide to expand my family, adoption – giving a home to a child already in the world – strikes me as the more sensible option.

For all my ambivalence, I cannot condemn women who undergo egg donation after menopause.  I’ve certainly defied nature enough during my own reproductive life (using birth control, having a caesarean, etcetera).  And I don’t think the law should become involved in the matter.  Fertility clinics can use their own judgements as to whether or not to accept women past a certain age.  But between proclaiming there is a set timeframe to procreate and encouraging people of any age in any circumstance to have babies should lay a happy medium.