[Bit]

Originally Posted by June

And also, unfortunately, most people who acquire MS or other illnesses, often do not have the funds to just hire a fucking nanny or a housekeeper.....

And yet we do not take their children away.

My parents unofficially adopted the son of my mother's best friend when he was still in grade school, because her friend's MS had progressed to the point that she was not able to care for all ten of her children.

No one EVER tried to take the children away. It would have been unconscionable.

Gemme said, "So, anyone who has the money should just hire a nanny and not have that one on one quality time with their children?"

*puzzled look* What is quality time? How do we define it? Is one required to dress a child for school in order to have quality time? Is one required to cook for that child to have quality time? What if one spends the time they have reading to a child, or helping a child with their spelling, or any of a hundred other things which show love but do not require physical activity?

Believe me, I remember the times my mother read to me WAY more fondly than the times she went shrieking and slamming through the house doing housework, and by kindergarten we were all perfectly capable of taking our own baths and dressing ourselves.

As for whether this particular woman has a choice in the matter, it's pretty normal for people to get up to a couple hundred pounds, maybe a little more--you know, for a woman, size 2x is a VERY common size.

She weighs three times that. How did she get there? Surely she has the same hormonal imbalances that plague anyone who weighs three or four hundred pounds, right? Nobody gets that big just by eating; your hormones have to be out of whack for that kind of weight.

Seriously, by the time a person weighs five or six hundred pounds, what can they do for a living? Does this woman truly have the life choices that people are ascribing to her?

Maybe she does; maybe I'm seeing it wrong. But in this day and age when child protection agencies are failing to rescue children who are beaten every day, children who are the victims of incest, children who are used for sex with strangers so their parents can get more drugs--all parental choices!--in this day and age when the system utterly fails those who need it the very most, why are we focused on this woman?

I have a very uncomfortable feeling that it's because she's visible. I have a very uncomfortable feeling that it's because she's trespassing on our culture's strongly-held stereotypes of proper womanhood, proper motherhood.

We do not actually know that her children are or will be unhappy or neglected in any way.