Continued from here ...

Of course, that won't take care of the pain and heartache ... only a good pair of pruning shears will help there ... but knowing that there's a secure financial future, no matter what, will make everything easier.

May I also add that fathers should more often be custodial parents in cases of divorce? Women need to get around their guilt and understand that dads are parents, too, and that parent is also a verb. Aside from making it less likely that the woman will face the financial struggles that come with single-parenting, I suspect fewer men would stray if they knew they'd end up having to arrange daycare, do the carpool and keep the drawers full of clean and pressed clothes ... and fewer women would find other women's husbands quite so attractive if they smelled of spit-up and passed out from exhaustion every night at 8:30.

While I'm on about such things, another report from Chicago has nothing to do with what I've been on about, but interests me when it suggests that, "Mothers who fret that their children will send them to an early grave may be closer to the truth than they think."

This evidence, however, isn't exactly current.

A study of 19th century US Mormons showed that for humans, as for other species, there is a trade-off between reproduction and survival - especially for women, said the Austrian researchers from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology in Vienna.

The findings also suggest that the last-born in a large brood of children are less robust than their older siblings, and if this is anything to go by, may not survive to have families of their own.

The researchers based their analysis on statistical data for 21 000 Utah couples who were married between 1860 and 1895, and went on to have an average of nine children, and 16 grandchildren.

They found that the women's survival rates declined as the number of children in their brood increased, possibly because they had the children in quick succession - something that other studies have shown to bring a higher risk of disease and death.

Well, yeah ...

Safe to say, then, that there's something to be said for birth control? It gets my vote.