Thank you Mimi Kimbrough for your Nov. 21 letter, “Parenting is job with answerability,” pointing out that people who don’t practice birth control when they are already living on the streets are the ones responsible for “child homelessness.”
We are entering that holiday season where the newspapers put out heart-wrenching cover stories daily featuring Maizie and her starving three kids, Leila and her starving four kids, Sharice and her starving seven kids. And I’m supposed to feel guilty. How about this year, try something different: The Columbian should only run stories about women who pulled themselves up from a childhood of poverty by not having multiple out-of-wedlock babies? Hold them up as community exemplars of strength, determination and ambition. Give young girls something to look up to, for a change, rather than just letting them figure that someone will always throw them a bone if they can point to a pathetic baby in their arms and wail, “But Junior’s hungry.”
Ellen Putman
Vancouver
