aamna

My husband and I have been married for almost 4 years. He got his Permanent Resident status approved one year ago. My question is, does the number of years that we've been married count towards this requirement as well? Can we apply for his naturalization soon?

We had a courthouse marriage with one witness, a friend that's like a brother to us, and then a really small religious ceremony with 3 witnesses: my FIL, BIL, SIL, and 3 year old nephew (he doesn't count). We never had a grand ceremony with all the works (mehndi, elaborate wedding outfit, jewelry, etc.), and never will, due to family issues around our marriage.. though I've always dreamed of a big wedding when i was a younger. It's a price I had to pay to have my hubby i guess.

how about if you exclusively breast-feed? health insurance is not something i'm worried about - i have two of them. i know expenses increase when they get older though.. like school years? but i'm not too worried about that either, as my hubby is supposed to graduate with a pharmD in 3 years inshaAllah, and i do not make much but it is sufficient. so i guess what i'm saying is, is supporting a child up to 3 yrs old expensive?? *sigh* my heart aches to stop using birth control, my patience to have a child is hanging by a thread here..

i have a question for those who already have children - is having a child really as expensive as we are led to believe?

well, no i don't think there's any need to.. let's just say we've already been married for 3 years and my body still hasn't adjusted much to his *ahem*.. it feels like the wedding night daily

the thought of hormonal bc scares me.. so i've never used it, even though my gyno always tries to convince me to try it. i always accept her prescription to make her feel satisfied but i never get it filled.. haha. i'm scared it would mess up my body.. so i always use condoms and it's never failed on me..

I also read that that the back-alley thing is a myth. This is what I read:Research from (and permission to use by) David Reardon:

Quote:

For decades prior to its legalization, 90 percent of abortions were done by physicians in their offices, not in back alleys.

Fifteen years before abortion was legal in America, around 85 percent of illegal abortions were done by "reputable physicians in good standing in their local medical associations." In 1960, Planned Parenthood stated that "90% of all illegal abortions are presently done by physicians." The vast majority of abortions were not done in back alleys but in the back offices of licensed physicians.

The majority of physicians performing abortions after legalization were the same ones doing it before legalization. Neither their training nor their equipment improved when abortion was decriminalized. Either they were not butchers before legalization, or they continued to be butchers after legalization. It cannot be argued both ways.

It is not true that tens of thousands of women were dying from illegal abortions before abortion was legalized.

Former abortion-rights activist Bernard Nathanson admits that he and his cofounders of NARAL fabricated the figure that a million women were getting illegal abortions in America each year. The average, he says, was actually ninety-eight thousand per year. Nonetheless, the abortion advocates fed their concocted figured to the media, who eagerly disseminated the false information. Nathanson says he and his associates also invented the "nice, round shocking figure" for the number of deaths from illegal abortions:

Quote:

It was always "5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year." I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But it the "morality" of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the laws [against abortion] eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done permissible.

Research confirms that the actual number of abortion deaths in the twenty-five years prior to 1973 averaged 250 a year, with a high of 388 in 1948. In 1966, before the first state legalized abortion, 120 mothers died from abortions. By 1972 abortion was still illegal in 80 percent of the country, but the use of antibiotics had greatly reduced the risk. Hence, the number dropped to 39 maternal deaths from abortion that year. Dr. Christopher Tietze, a prominent statistician associated with Planned Parenthood, maintained that these are accurate figures, with a margin of error no greater than 10 percent.

However, suppose that only one out of ten deaths from illegal abortion was properly identified. This would mean that the number of women dying the year before abortion was legalized would be less than four hundred, still only a fraction of the five to ten thousand claimed by prochoice advocates.

Women still die from legal abortions in America.

Abortion is normally not life-threatening to the mother. However, the fatality rate is much higher than many prochoice advocates admit. For instance, a widely disseminated prochoice video produced in the late 1980s states, "By 1979 the Federal Government could not identify a single woman anywhere in this country who died of abortion."

This is an amazing statement, since many sources document a number of deaths from legal abortion. According to the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, "the New York City Department of Health reported seven legal abortion-related deaths that occurred between 1980 and 1985. The cause of death in all cases was attributed directly to general anesthesia." (These were seven deaths in a single city.) There were four abortion-caused deaths in a single Florida clinic between 1979 and 1983. In 1986, four doctors and researchers presented a study of no less than 193 deaths by legal abortion between 1972 and 1985. One researcher has uncovered the tragic cases of some 300 women who have died as a result of legal abortion.

Since public health officials stopped looking for abortion-caused deaths after abortion was legal, the opportunity to overlook or cover up abortion-caused deaths is now much greater. A former abortion clinic owner says, "A woman died because of an abortion at our clinic, but the public never heard about it, and it wasn't reported to the authorities as abortion related." When the Chicago Sun-Times investigated Chicago area abortion clinics in 1978 it uncovered the cases of twelve women who died of legal abortion but whose deaths had not been reported as abortion-related. Twelve unreported deaths from abortion in one small part of the country is a revealing number when the official statistics indicated twenty-one deaths from abortion in the entire country the previous year!

Statistics on death by abortion are dependent on the voluntary reporting of abortion clinics, who have much to lose and nothing to gain by doing so. What makes abortion-related deaths hard to trace is that the majority of the deaths do not occur during the surgery but afterward. Hence, any number of secondary reasons are routinely identified as the cause of death:

Quote:

Consider the mother who hemorrhaged, was transfused, got hepatitis, and died months later. Official cause of death? Hepatitis. Actual cause? Abortion. A perforated uterus leads to pelvic abscess, sepsis (blood poisning), and death. The official report of the cause of death may list pelvice abscess and septicemia. Abortion will not be listed. Abortion causes tubal pathology. She has an ectopic pregnancy years later and dies. The cause listed will be ectopic pregnancy. The actual cause? Abortion.

Legalized abortion has resulted in fifteen times more women having abortions. This means that if it is fifteen times safer than illegal abortion, the number of women dying remains the same. Writing in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dr. Dennis Cavanaugh stated that since abortion has been legalized, "there has been no major impact on the number of women dying from abortions in the U.S... After all, it really makes no difference whether a woman dies from legal or illegal abortion, she is dead nonetheless. I find no comfort in the fact that legal abortion is now the leading cause of abortion-related maternal deaths in the U.S."

If abortion became illegal, abortions would be done with medical equipment, not clothes hangers.

One woman told me, "People must think women are stupid. If abortion were illegal and I wanted one, I sure wouldn't use a clothes hanger." Since 90 percent of pre-1973 illegal abortions were done by doctors, it's safe to assume many physicians would continue to give abortions. "Self-help" abortion kits are being widely promoted and distributed by pro abortion groups, who have vowed they will step up their efforts if abortion is made illegal again. Sadly, many women would continue to have abortions. But the "many" might be a quarter of a million rather than a half million. The result would be over a million mothers and babies annually saved from abortion.

Clothes hangers make effective propaganda pieces at prochoice rallies, but they do not accurately reflect what would happen if abortion were made illegal again. Clothes hangers would be used for baby clothes, not abortions.

*Alfred Kinsey, cited by John Wilke, Abortion Questions and Answers

*Mary Calderone, "Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem," American Health 50

*Bernard Nathanson, Aborting America

*Ibid, 42

*U.S. Bureau of Vital Statistics

*Ibid

*Germain Grisez, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments

*"Abortion: For Survival"

*Hani K. Atrash, MD; Theodore Cheek, MD; and Carol Hogue, PhD, "Legal Abortion Mortality and General Anesthesia" American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology

*Michael Kaffrissen, et al., "Cluster of Abortion Deaths at a Single Facility," Obstetrics and Gynecology

*"Jury Orders Abortionist to Pay $25 Million Judgement," Life Advocate

*Dawn Stover, "Cause of Death: Legal Abortion," Life Advocate

*Carol Everett, personal conversation with the author and Frank Peretti on May 24, 1991

*U.S. Center of Vital Statistics

*James A. Miller, "A Tale of Two Abortions," Human Life International Reports

*Willke, Abortion Questions

*Frank E. Peretti, Prophet

*Dennis Cavanaugh, "Effect of Liberalized Abortion on Maternal Mortality Rates," American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology

*Gina Kolata, "Self-help Abortion Movement Gains Momentum," The New York Times

*David C. Reardon, Aborted Women: Silent No More

I'm a woman and I'm passionately against abortion.