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University Delly Kansan, November 9, 1982
Opinion
Right to gather misused
The University Daily Iowan, the student newspaper of the University of Iowa, recently demonstrated one of the media's most important duties to the public — to report on inconsistencies that lead to the squelching of the rights of one group of people in favor of another.
Unfortunately for one of the paper's reporters, however, the demonstration was made the hard way.
To back up its assertion that anyone should be allowed to attend a public gathering, the Daily Iowan sent a male reporter to cover a Take Back the Night rally that was staged in a public park to protest sexual assault against women.
The week before, the paper had published an editorial objecting to rumors that men were not to be allowed at the rally, which was paid for by student government money.
Rally organizers argued that the presence of men could inhibit women from protesting against the widespread violence.
Well, the presence of the male reporter did not inhibit at least two of the women. The paper reported that its reporter was "physically escorted from the park, thrown on the sidewalk, kicked and threatened."
The reporter has filed charges against the two women.
Certainly the newspaper had female reporters to send who would have been less conspicuous at the rally. But it was not bad news judgment on the part of the paper's editors to send the reporter they did.
Readers deserve to know when any organization — for whatever reason — has decided to make a public occurrence open only to an exclusive group. In this case, the group sponsoring the rally may have done more to exacerbate tensions than ease them.
The assault on the reporter was an ironic turn of events that only served to drive home the contentions made in the paper's editorial.
I am appalled by the alleged decline of the American grandma.
Babysitting or just visiting grandparents irreplaceable
Working Mother magazine recently conducted a survey that revealed some interesting facts about America's grandmoms. Only 16.5 percent of the mothers who responded to the survey said that their mothers were the sole source of babysitting. Seventy-seven percent said their mothers did occasional babysitting, but only 35 percent reported that their mothers-in-law babysat
And 29 percent said grandma never babyst
because she had a full-time or part-time job.
I'm not bothered by the fact that more grandmas are working, but I am concerned that
TRACEE HAMILTON
Grandparents are great. They are also very important to a child's development. Naturally, distance can come between a child and his grandparents, and I really feel sorry for those who missed the influence of their grandparents because states or great distances separated them.
they are spending less time with their grandchildren or perhaps more correctly, that their grandparents spend less time with them.
Grandpa and Grandma Lewick were my country grandparents. Every year during harvest I would arrive in my cowboy boots, ready to "help." I'm sure I was more trouble than I was worth, but it was a yearly tradition. I still go the itch each June, no matter where I am or what day it happens, even if grandparents sold it and moved to town not long ago.
I was lucky to grow up in the same town with six grandparents, which is almost more love and attention than a kid can take. Five are still living there, and they are still my stunnerest defenders.
From Grandma Lewick I learned to embroider, and to sew. That is, to sew buttons on cloth. I never progressed much beyond that stage. I'll never forget those buttons — huge, flat opaque white saucers, tiny black pearls, rhinestones, strawberries.
Grandpa Lewick was a yarn-spinner of great repute. He always had a "paddle," and when my sister bickered, he yanked her, usually from the front. BG gun, he threw up inpsairs and got it. Twenty-two years later, he
still threats, but none of us have ever seen the dreaded paddle. Still, who knows?
Grandpa King was my most frequent babysitter when I was growing up, which is why I can't understand a survey that neglects grandpa's role in a child's development. He retired early because of his health, and when I had to stay home from school, he would come sit with me all day while my parents were at work. Dominoes was his game, and he was a pro, although he managed to lose enough to keep me interested.
I never miss a Christmas in Grandma King's kitchen, baking cookies. We have two boxes of cutters in all kinds of shapes — angels, reindeer, holly, camles, lions, trees — and we mix up five or six colors of frosting, and use little silver balsons and red hotls to decorate. Each year you try a new cookie each year we end with more cookies than the entire family could ever possibly eat.
If your mother was one of those who responded, or could have responded, that her mother or mother-in-law seldom baby-sat, then you really missed something. Many grandparents are working and don't have time to baby-sat, or didn't when you were young. But grandparents are our last line with our past, so to help them stay connected, they their heritage, or just in what their parents were like when they were young, grandparents are the fountain of all knowledge.
In fifth grade, my class was assigned to write a history of Lincoln and Lincoln County. While my classmates trudged off to the library, I made three trips, to each grandparents' house, and asked a lot of questions. I came away with a map of main street and how it looked in the past, the names of each building, as well as a few colorful tales that wouldn't have found their way into history books, such as the story of the only hanging in the county.
Many of you will head to grandma's for Thanksgiving dinner in a few weeks, and you're lucky. For those of you with no grandparents living, I'm sorry. Adopt some. They don't have to be blood relations. You can learn a lot from them.
And they'll tell you they get a lot from you, too.
Grandma Hamilton is the needlepoint and antique expert, and she passed her interest in those to me, along with lessons in pitch and playing the organ. And Grandpa Hamilton is a walking encyclopedia on the history of our town. He has written some of his tales so they wouldn't be forgotten.
KANSAN
The University Daily Kanman (USD 650-446) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 First Hall, Lawrence, KS, 60403, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the fall semester. Subscriptions are $15 for six months or $29 a year in Douglas County through the student activity fee POSTMASTER; Send address changes to the University Daily Kanman (USD 650-446).
And lest you think all I learned from my grandparents was how to cook and sew, my King grandparents taught me to fish with the best of them.
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The University Daily
Money a sad reason for abortion rise
The country's present economic condition is pushing many women to making hasty, and unwise, decisions about their lives.
A story headlined "Money problems increase abortion rate." in last week's Kansan, reported that twice as many women as last year said that their financial status was the most important factor in their decisions to have an abortion. In other words, these women had decided that babies were just too expensive to have these days.
Reports gathered by United Press International showed that 53 percent of 200 women surveyed said their financial straits affected their pro-abortion choice. Last year, that figure was 28 percent. The study was done for CHOICES, a New York health center for women, in conjunction with Adelphi University and Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York.
The director of CHOICES, Merle Hoffman,
said that women were sacrificing their desire for
children "because of the reality of the economy," Hoffman went on to blame President Reagan for more than one million annual abortions.
"The Reagan administration's economic policies must be viewed as having a direct effect on abortions in this country, now more than 1.5 million a year." Hoffman said.
The above statement misplaces blame, although it does cite a prevalent reason why many choose to have abortions. The cost of raising children these days is thousands of dollars higher than when our parents raised us. Some economists estimate that the cost of rearing a child from birth to age 18 can be as much as $50,000 in dollars. If we compare that to the drop-in-the-bucket cost of an abortion, which ranges anywhere from $185 to $740, we begin to see why the women surveyed chose to have abortions. An abortion is cheaper — in the long run.
In that light, I can understand why these women made the choices they did. And it saddens me. Yet, when I stop to consider the viable alternatives these women had at their disposal, that sadness quickly diminishes. It seems to me that many other people have managed to make the sacrifices necessary for raising children, including many of our own parents. Those sacrifices may have been cheaper (in today's dollars) to make in the '30s
LISA GUTIERREZ
and *40%* when our parents were conceived, but they were made despite the fact that abortions, however crudely performed, were available even then to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
If the desire of the women surveyed to have children was so great, as Hoffman infintimated, I would think the women would found a way to have them. And unless these women are unemployed and living in one-room apartments in New York's bowery district, they may be forced to make in thinking they are being forced to decide to abort a child because it is too expensive to raise.
If these women truly wanted to bear children, they could carry the infants full-term and let someone adopt the child and pay the "exorbitant" expenses of child-rearing. But they would probably respond that nine months of their lives is too much to ask. I don't know about New York, but in Lawrence the Human Services department acquirers, 1602 Massachusetts St., can refer women to a variety of social programs and adoption agencies to defray the cost of having a child. Some adoption
agencies can even make financial arrangements by which the adoptive parents pay prenatal expenses, which should be an incentive to cost-wary women like those surveyed.
These women took the easy way out. The expedient way. Women can be in and out of a physician's office within an hour, if they choose to have an abortion by the vacuum aspiration method in the first 12 weeks of their pregnancy. A clinical assistant to a Lawrence physician who performs abortions likened this method, in which a drinking straw-shaped instrument is placed in a woman's cervix under vacuum pressure and rotated to remove the embryo, to having a wisdom tooth removed, without the afterfections.
However easy the procedure, these women risked emotional strains, which can be more severe.
"I still think it was the best thing I could have done. But if it happened again, I don't think I would have another one, mostly because it's a strange thing to put your body through," said an 18-year-old KU student who had an abortion last year.
Unlike the women in the survey who cited monetary reasons for having an abortion, this KU student made her decision because she knew of no other feasible options.
"I didn't want to take time out of my schedule for a pregnancy," she said.
I suppose someone is bound to ask why this student became pregnant in the first place. That is no one's business but her own, as is her choice to have an abortion.
However, women who are ultimately faced with the decision of whether to have an abortion should consider all of the alternatives before making such a grave choice. If the women surveyed had done so, I am certain they would have found that the financial burdens of having a child need not "force" anyone into having an abortion.
Letters to the Editor
Mixed-up priorities result in frozen lawns
To the Editor:
Just when I thought I had seen it all, KU's facilities operations department does it again. It isn't bad enough that they feel compelled to saturate the campus lawns while it is raining. But must they water the campus after the leaves fall? Don't they know that grass naturally turns brown and goes dormant in the winter in spite of how much it is watered?
Facilities operations really topped it off Friday morning, Nov. 5. As I walked by the Satellite Union on my way to class, I noticed that the lawn, shrubs and trees were all covered with a heavy glaze of ice. What did F&O expect to happen when they watered when the temperature was 20 degrees? It wasn't enough that they tried to freeze off the plant life, but the heavy sheet of ice on the sidewalks made it difficult to walk around. When man-hours were also warded by having employees scatter sand on sidewalks where there shouldn't have been ice in the first place.
As I looked toward Allen Field House, I saw that the practice field on the west side of Allen was being watered. It had been watered for quite awhile because a thick layer of ice covered the field. I'm sure that this is just the kind of playing area in which the football team loves to practice.
In light of all the budget cuts that this University has suffered recently, I would just like to know how long it will be before KU's administration puts its priorities in the right places. When will they realize that keeping classrooms at a livable temperature is much more important than watering lawns when it is raining and when it is too cold?
Tim Collins Valley Center senior
Beware dieting myths
To the Editors.
There are two critical points I would like to raise concerning the column on dieting by Lydia and Amy.
she did advise people to consult a physician before beginning a diet and acknowledged that a good diet needs to be balanced nutritionally, she said. It was no myths regarding obesity and weight loss.
Myth 1: If you are happy with your obesity, don't try to change. Hamilton implied that one should only attempt a weight loss program out of a personal desire to lose weight or for reasons of health. She went on to say that she had herself no choice but to dulcefully distorted out of a personal desire to lose weight.
Unfortunately, Hamilton leads us to believe that obesity itself is not a health problem. If Hamilton truly needed to lose body fat, whether she was aware of it or not, she needed to do so for reasons of health. Anyone who is overweight needs to lose some of that fat for reasons of health. The body does not function properly with it, and this can affect the mass is too high, there is a health problem regardless of the ability of the individual to slither into Gloria Vanderbilt's jeans.
Myth 2: Exercise is not crucial to weight loss programs. This advice is the most dangerous that Hamilton gave. Obesity is a problem of metabolism. Metabolism does not change in the desired direction by decreasing calorie intake and may increase it through a combined program of diet and exercise. Crash diets decrease body mass, but they decrease the wrong part of body mass.
Crash diets decrease muscle tissue. Fat tissues continue to build because the muscles have not grown enough.
Hamilton claims to be living proof that exercise is not crucial to weight loss, but that is questionable datum. The critical variable is how long Hamilton will remain as living proof that exercise is not crucial to weight loss compared to someone who exercises regularly. I do not advocate such a change to what I tell it to wear rather than at a moment's notice, but 12 minutes of good aerobic exercise five days a week seems like a small price to pay for the benefits it returns.
In fact, crash diets make muscles less efficient in burning fat and may increase the amount of fat deposits outside of the musculature (the old spare tire). Exercise, on the other hand, makes muscles more efficient in utilizing fat as its sole source of energy, thus allowing for better exercise is important for controlling obesity, it may be the only way to control obesity for many individuals.
My final advice in rebuttal to Hamilton's is that individuals seeking a diet and weight loss program seek the advice of exercise physiologists who specialize in designing healthy programs. General physicians do not usually have the expertise to design effective programs or the time to monitor such programs effectively.
Daniel W. Dugan
Wheaton, IL., graduate student
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kanans welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kanans reserves the right to edit or reject letters.