more letters, more opinions

So I wrote two letters this morning, one to the N. Korean delegation in New York regarding a group of Christians that were arrested and called spies (and possibly executed), and another one regarding persecuted religious minorities in Iraq to my Representative, Brian Bilbray.
I'm trying to not get carried away with do-gooding. I tend to get carried away, and am not able to keep up the pace of my goodness, and then I get jaded about myself, and stop even the minimum of effort. So my goal is one or two letters a week for at least November. That seems pretty doable.
In other news, I saw this post about women not signing up for birth classes. I have a few thoughts on this.

• One one hand, I think entirely too much attention is paid to pregnancy, at the exclusion of the much harder stuff involved with actually raising your child. Or breastfeeding. I think a lot of women would be better served with a breastfeeding class, and maybe a Q&A with real moms about what to expect from motherhood.
  
• I wonder if women are avoiding the classes because so many of them are just "Hospital 101".
  
• I had mixed feelings about our birth class--a lot of it seemed sort of self-indulgent--but in the end, during my birth, I thought about some of the facts we learned, and the knowledge really helped me not freak out. And talking about birth, and reading what to expect--not just reading about it--also proved helpful.
• But bottom line, I think not taking a birth class is a bad idea. As the blog points out, the lack of birth education generally leads to more medicalized births. Women think birth isn't possible without major medical interventions, because no one tells them differently--and they sure won't learn about that on TV.
  
• With all the publicity right now about our broken health care system, I wonder why nobody has pointed the the elephant in the room: the fact that we overspend egregiously on complicated hospital births for perfectly healthy babies and women. Anaesthesiaologists, hospital stays, medical equipment, surgeries, all of these things add up. And much of it is done not to soothe women, or help them (I'm all for epidurals if it helps someone get through a difficult labor--not so much into it just as a matter of course)--but to keep hospitals and doctors from getting their butts sued. This cannot be a good idea.

So there you go: the righteous indignation roundup. Happy Veteren's day.