Upsetting News Tidbits

Three news stories put up blips on the Mom Radar yesterday, and I want to share all three. I'm not sure which is most upsetting.

First there was the Pedophile Pediatrician. Moral of the story: stay with your child at all times, I suppose. I can only figure that a huge number of parents figured doctors know best and children always say they're scared of getting hurt at the doctor's office. And then the videotapes were found.

Then there was this sorry incident: the woman who starved her one-year-old son to death because her religious leader told her not to feed him. I just absolutely cannot imagine doing this. I mean, what makes it seem more reasonable to believe that your mother and stepfather were offering your son to Satan than that they were showing him the stars? What makes it seem sane to starve your one-year-old for not saying "Amen" on demand? This is the sort of thing that makes me want to read some Connie Willis stories, perhaps aloud to Mowgli, just to remind myself that this is rather outside the Christian norm. The real kicker for me, though, is that the mother was supposed to nurture the child's body to bring him back, although she wasn't supposed to nurture him when he was alive.

Then, silly me, I watched The Rachel Maddow Show. Mowgli will probaby consider her Aunt Rachel, as her voice will be familiar to him from the womb. Yesterday's attention grabber, courtesy msnbc's transcript:

And did you hear Harry Reid talk about—an incredible conversation he had with a constituent who owns a restaurant, a lovely couple and they had a baby and they had good insurance, really good insurance, covered the birth. The baby was born with a cleft palate, and they were so devastated, but the doctors say, “Don‘t worry, we can fix this, we can fix this.” It‘s easily done. And they then got a note from the insurance company: your baby has a pre-existing condition, and therefore you have to pay for this.

Er. Yeah. I'm not crazy about the "pre-existing condition" thing in the first place, although I understand why it's there, but applying it to newborns? Life is a pre-existing condition. Companies could get away with never insuring a baby from now to eternity.

Apparently to be a mother is to worry and get outraged. I also have to wonder if an insurance company will retroactively refuse to cover the pediatric visits from that first story on the grounds that the services provided were not in their plans. Sounds like a tasteless joke -- I don't mean it as one. I'm just wondering where the boundary of the outrageousness really lies.