A French nursing assistant admitted Thursday suffocating eight of her newborn babies “because she did not want any more children”, prosecutors said.
Dominique Cottrez, 45, was charged with murder after telling police that after having two daughters she did not want more nor “to see a doctor to get contraception”, prosecutor Eric Vaillant told reporters.
Cottrez’s husband Pierre-Marie Cottrez was freed after denying any knowledge of the killings, which came to light when police found skeletal remains buried in a garden and dumped in plastic sacks in a garage.
[…]Investigators said she had confessed to suffocating the babies shortly after their births between 1989 and 2006 or 2007, and to concealing the bodies from her husband under household clutter in the garage.
[…]In past cases some defendants have said they were in denial about their pregnancies and not fully responsible for their actions, but Vaillant said Cottrez had admitted to being “perfectly aware” of her condition.
[…]Prosecutors described it as the worst case of infanticide in recent French history, following a string of similar cases in which isolated and troubled mothers disposed of their newborns.
What could possess a woman to act in such a selfish way? How can she put her own selfish desires before the moral obligations she freely chose to impose on her self through her own decision to get pregnant? How can a woman believe that she is justified in killing her own children just so that her quality of life is not diminished?
In the latest example of myth-making on the connection between sports and domestic violence, England’s Association of Chief Police Officers stated in May that during the World Cup “cases of domestic abuse increase by nearly 30% on England match days.” The figure came from a study sponsored by the British Home Office, so it seemed credible. The shocking figure sparked a big publicity campaign, with a lurid poster featuring a cowering woman covered in bruises and the imprint of a man’s shoe.
[…]An actually trustworthy study done by the London Metropolitan Police Authority contradicted the thirty percent “finding,” but by then the media had a story that was too good to check for veracity.
[…]Anyone remember the big 1993 Super Bowl Sunday hoax? The media all jumped on a bad statistic and ran with it then too. It was “reported” that domestic violence increased by 40% during the Super Bowl. Journalists called it the “abuse bowl” and NBC ran a public service announcement telling men to stay calm during the game or they would end up in jail.
In the same year the National Coalition against Domestic Violence circulated a brochure in which they claimed that half of American women would face violence from their mate and that “more than a third are battered repeatedly every year.” This is simply an outrageous lie – fewer than one percent of the female population can be said to be “battered” – but such was the hysteria around the subject of domestic violence at the time, that people were ready to believe all men were basically monsters.
Only one reporter, Ken Ringle of the Washington Post, actually ran down the stat to its source, which was an offhand comment by a feminist activist at a press conference. It was made up out of whole cloth. There was no actual increase of domestic violence during the game. And for the past 17 years since that Super Bowl, no one has found a domestic violence link to it.
Thank you Barbara Kay for telling the truth and defending men from irrational fears and hatred.
Why do these feminist myths emerge? And why do so many women believe them? And why do so few women investigate these issues themselves? What do women have to gain from believing in myths?
Well, if all men are predators, then it seems reasonable to think that women shouldn’t marry them, or trust them to be faithful protectors and providers. So what will women do for protectors and providers if men can be relied on? The answer is bigger government and more social programs – like taxpayer-funded abortions, taxpayer-funded day-care, taxpayer-funded IVF, etc. Laws may also be needed to control men’s behavior to keep them from being bad, since men are so awful. Pretty soon, it will be illegal to even criticize women for anything they do. Oh wait – that is already punishable by jail in France.
How can a man afford to marry and start a family when he is paying 40% of his income in taxes to replace men with government and to control men’s supposedly predatorial behavior? He can’t!
Christina Hoff Sommers
Christina Hoff Sommers
Christina Hoff Sommers is my favorite feminist scholar. She’s an equity feminist – that’s the good kind of feminist that is so rare today.
I read both of those articles and I may blog about them later, but they are all worth reading now. If you want a really good long article on the alleged discrimination against women in math and science classes, then read this. It is long – but because it’s by Christina Hoff Sommers, it reads like poetry. You won’t even look up until you’re finished reading the whole thing. She is such a talented writer!
Complacency and “general hopelessness” have been blamed for the failure of young British men as research reveals that underperformance in school and university is now creeping into their working lives. A report published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank says male graduates are far more likely to be unemployed than their female counterparts.
Figures show that the economic downturn caused an increase in graduate unemployment from 11.1% at the end of 2008 to 14% by the end of last year. But when the figures are broken down by sex a stark picture emerges of 17.2% of young male graduates failing to find jobs compared to 11.2% of women.
[…]Bahram Bekhradnia, the HEPI’s director, spoke of the “general hopelessness of young men”. “The increase in unemployment that occurred between 2008 and 2009 is striking. For those graduates who have not found work it is a personal tragedy – a really bad start to their working lives,” he said.
He pointed to forecasts that suggest women will dominate the professions within 15 years. “That has all sorts of implications for things such as family creation, child-rearing and so on. The situation in some countries is even more extreme. An American woman told a conference I attended of the fury of black American women who found it impossible to form relationships with men of the same race with similar educational attainment because black American males weren’t going to university.
[…]Around half of the difference can be put down to subject choice, but the rest is unaccounted for and could indicate discriminatory forces.
[…]…the underachievement of men in school, university and adulthood is now an international phenomenon and it is one that is being increasingly studied in psychology.
Why are men struggling to find jobs? Well they are not doing very well in school.
In 2006, the high school dropout rate, which was 1.5 points higher for girls in 1970, was 2 points, or almost 20% higher, for boys (10.3% vs. 8.3%).
A 2007 study led by James Heckman of the University of Chicago asserted that “the pattern of the decline of high school graduation rates by gender helps to explain the recent increase in male-female college attendance gaps.”
The gender gap in college attendance for at least the past several years has returned. In late April, Uncle Sam’s Department of Labor told us that after three years of almost equal gender enrollment by high school graduates (2006, 2007, 2008), 202,000 more women than men from the class of 2009 went on to college. Women make up almost 55% of the current year’s freshman class.
The problem is that there are almost no male teachers and also that boys don’t learn well in co-ed classrooms – they get distracted by girls. The curriculum is not suitable for boys, who learn better with different materials that focus more on things that boys like, like wars, guns and adventures. Boys learn better with male teachers and all-male classrooms because they need male role models in order to succeed.
The organization MenTeach, a Minnesota organization dedicated to increasing the number of males working with young children, posted a survey on its Web site showing that males constitute less than 20 percent of America’s 2.9 million elementary and middle school teachers. The 2008 survey, based on source data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed even more drastic differences among different grade levels:
44 percent of America’s 1.2 million secondary school teachers.
18.8 percent of America’s 2.9 million elementary and middle school teachers.
2.4 percent of America’s 685,000 pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teachers.
Most women want men to be strong husbands and fathers, so they’ll need to make sure that men have jobs. In order for men to have jobs, they’ll want to oppose feminists who discriminate against men in the education system.
WINTERY KNIGHT 