Story #1: Educated, career-oriented American women falsely assume they can easily conceive children when they’re in their 40s.

Story #2: An unemployed, probably uneducated and possibly bipolar American woman easily conceives and bares 15 children with 3 different men and then demands that the state take care of them.

I read, listened to and watched these stories on the same day, one right after the other. While I guess I should be thankful to live in a country where women and men can put off having children just as easily as they can make 15 of them, demand the state help take care of them and forego their (well, the father’s, in this case) responsibility to take care of 2 of them, somethin bout this just ain’t right.

I guess what’s wrong is the ease with which we demonize the women in either story and how easily the men in these stories are let off the hook.  Some organizations are actually calling for public service announcements to inform women that fertility doesn’t last forever and that they should have babies at prime healthy fertility time—when they’re in their 20s.  An NPR listener with the alias “RealityCheck” commented, “If a woman wants children, she needs to resign herself to the reality that for quite a few years, her children need her pretty much full time. Mothering should not be considered a part-time job. Too many women think they are entitled to a demanding, fulfilling career and children. They’re not. Once they decide to become a mother, that’s their job until the children are old enough to take care of themselves.”

Need her full time, not their dad.  Raising children is her job, not the father’s.

I wonder if RealityCheck has kids and if so, do they know who he is?  Do they like him?

Another listener, 33-year-old Brian Thompson, wants to get married and have a family and to allow about 5 years of relationship-building so that he’ll know his wife or girlfriend well before even bringing up the topic of maybe starting a family.  He’s limiting his dating pool to women in their 20s because after 5 years of working on a relationship, those mid-30s eggs inside women who are ready to be married and have a family will just be too old.  Brian said, “Everywhere I turn, women in their twenties prioritize casual relationships, saying they ‘aren’t looking for anything serious right now.’ I wish these women would grow up and stop squandering their fertility.”

Really?  Um, Mr. Thompson, what were YOU thinking about when you were in YOUR 20s?  Sex?  Condoms?  Graduating from college?  A career?  Probably.  Something serious?  Probably not.  So why would you expect a woman in her 20s to be ready for the things you weren’t studying 10 years ago?  Just because a woman is biologically in her prime for motherhood?  PSA to all the Brian Thompsons out there, a woman’s biological readiness for a lifetime of responsibility does not necessarily correlate with her emotional and spiritual maturation for the same commitment.  Whatever age you are, yoke up with somebody on your level!

Or don’t, and have an Angel Adams.

Mother of 15.  She’s 37, and her oldest child is 11, which means she started having them at perfect fertility ripeness.  And is she getting glory for choosing to be a full-time mom?  A show on TLC about her growing family?  No.  She’s getting jail time for refusing to tell a judge whether or not she’s pregnant again, and her kids are in foster care.  Her fiancé, father of 10 of her children, is in jail.  The father of 2 of her children doesn’t want them.

Guess he’s just not the Brian Thompson type.

I’m sorry the father of 10 of them is in jail, and maybe I should cheer him for being a fiancé instead of a boyfriend, but I wonder, what were you thinking after, say, baby number 5?  I give you more credit than I do RealityCheck, but before lockup, had you made raising your kids your full-time responsibility?

Adams seems to love her kids and to have wanted every single one of them.  But in our wonderful world she’s as stupid as the 53-year-old Real Housewife who thought her missed period indicated pregnancy instead of the onset of menopause.