Are you serious??? Withdrawal is a downside? Withdrawal is temporary. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to quit caffeine. After all, why should you if it is not having negative effects? I don’t see the danger in moderation, but why do you see EVERYTHING as somehow related to misogyny? It’s illogical. William pointed this out in the first response. But since all you carry is a hammer, all you see are nails.

www.disillusionedwords.com

When an egg and a sperm get together, some surprising amount of the time, like 50% or 80% of the time, a live baby doesn’t result after 9 months.

Many of those the woman is not technically pregnant, since pregnancy begins at implantation, not at conception.

also, if the study is confirmed, my espresso machine is a factory for abortifacient and a surreptitious way out of a dilemma for women who are not delighted about their little demonstration of fertility.

But most of that 16% is just because rolling the genetic dice, one from dad, one from mom, did not add up to a whole number between 2 and 12 and the machinery kicked out the the 13 or the 5 and 3/4 or whatever. Roll again or change the dice…either way is a pain.

My advice, if anyone cares: Tune 99% of these studies out. They’re all done on an observational basis (they have to be, since you can’t lock people up and forcibly give them a potentially unhealthy diet—at least, not on purpose) and so can’t fully use the scientific method.

When I was a teenager, there was a lady at our church who was involved in anti-abortion activism (mostly outside the church, but she’d talk about it at church sometimes). The way she’d go on about those poor dead fetuses you’d think she would be draped in black if she heard about a miscarriage. But another woman at the church miscarried, and was publicly very upset about it, and she said some godawful insensitive stuff right in the middle of coffee hour. It seemed she was only concerned about dead fetuses when they offered an opportunity for her to harangue the previously pregnant woman. If the woman actually wanted the baby (and to quote Mark Foxwell, it’s a baby if the pregnant woman wants it to be a baby), her loss didn’t even register with Mrs Pro-Life.

I was at the maternal-fetal medicine specialist’s office yesterday. While they still can’t tell me why the crackhead can carry a baby to term and have a live delivery and I, who followed all their little rules, cannot - he did say one thing that I thought was useful. Paraphrased - the human body is meant to withstand and reproduce through all sorts of harshness and cruelty, yet to create life and sustain it past the first trimester is a very delicate and fragile thing. I take this as, “Fuck it. Have the stupid Diet Coke, Coca-Cola, chocolate, fish, cheese, wahtever. You can’t control it with minor shit like this.”

And BTW, I give up on the whole pregnancy thing. Just. Can’t. Do. It. Any. More.

It’s the same in all debates on security tradeoffs. But the fear of having to say “If only I had kept my kid locked in the cupboard under the stairs he wouldn’t have got run over by a car” is not helpful in making good decisions.