July 17, 2019

KLM slammed for asking mother to cover up while breastfeeding

Filed under: Aviation,General by Orangemaster @ 7:45 pm

KLM is getting bashed on social media for having asked the mother of a newborn to cover up while breastfeeding on a flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco. The mother explained to the stewardess who had asked her to cover up that her daughter did not like having a blanket over her, but the stewardess said that it was important to consider other people’s feelings.

“Breastfeeding is permitted at KLM flights. However, to ensure that all our passengers of all backgrounds feel comfortable on board, we may request a mother to cover herself while breastfeeding, should other passengers be offended by this.”

Feeding your child is offensive because, well, boobs. Boobs’ primary use are to feed babies last time I heard.

Once the mother told everyone online that people should not fly with KLM, the airline receive thousands of reactions from outraged folks. Parool newspaper also explains that women showing a lot of cleavage apparently are also asked to cover up with a blanket because clients (who, and really?) complain about, well, boobs performing their secondary function: being boobs.

Funny replies include handing out eye masks for people bothered by human feeding humans.

(Link: parool.nl, Photo of KLM A330-200 by caribb, some rights reserved)

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January 31, 2019

Dutch company to let a woman give birth in space

Filed under: Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:09 pm

Feel free to look up having sex in space regardless of who is involved, which I filed under ‘complicated/pass’ in my mind palace. However, if you want to move on to giving birth in space, there’s a Dutch company that wants to tell you about its plans.

Dutch company SpaceLife Origin, a collaboration between business people (dudes, right?) and organisational expert Egbert Edelbroek (a man) from Eindhoven. In 2024, the company’s goal would be to have a Dutch woman give birth in space.

“If we don’t learn how we can procreate in space, then as humans we’re bound to Earth, while life on Earth is increasingly under threat”, explains Edelbroek. It’s under threat because we’re billions of morons using the planet as our own personal rubbish bin, but sure. If we want to go to Mars, we’re theoretically going to have to find out what it’s like to procreate in space. I’m secretly hoping women just won’t want to, but that’s me talking science-fiction.

SpaceLife Origin wants to start with fertilisation in space using an embryo incubator called Mission Lotus. Experts warn against problems such as a baby being exposed to ionising radiation that causes cancer and the g-force that occurs with space flight. Oh, and weightlessness, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other things.

I hope the woman (women?) who sign up and anyone else really know what they are getting into, but that also goes for anybody who thinks getting to Mars is easy at this point.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

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October 12, 2018

Baby invited to meet bureaucrats at town hall

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:21 pm

Baby-booties

The town of Schagen, North Holland sent a letter to one of their newest residents, inviting them to town hall in order to find out about what bureaucrats can do for them. At this point in time, the answer is so not much because the town sent a letter to a three-month-old baby girl whose diary is pretty much full up for the foreseeable future.

Yes, she is a new resident of Schagen, but why didn’t the town have a good look at the baby’s date of birth before sending this kind of useless correspondence? I’m quite sure that the rest of the country checks these kinds of details first.

In true bureaucratic form, and even though the baby’s parents and the town had a good laugh about the mishap, the bureaucrats managed to blame the newly implemented privacy law (possibly the General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR), saying they could not easily check a date of birth, which I call bullshit on. All newborn children as well as every single resident of the Netherlands must be registered with town hall, making it pretty clear when reading their date of birth who is a baby. The GDPR has enough articles about when to use personal data and when not to.

After the father posted the invitation for his daughter on Facebook, people commented that they too had received weird letters from their town: an eight-year-old boy was invited to come and talk about real estate law.

A few years back, the Dutch tax office, a very different breed of bureaucrats,
pestered a nine-year-old for not filing a return when of course they didn’t have to.

(Link: nhnieuws.nl, Photo of baby booties by Winam, some rights reserved)

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January 24, 2017

Amstelveen hospital wants to deliver Amsterdam’s babies

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 9:58 pm

450px-Flag_of_Amsterdam.svg

While 20% of pregnant women from Amsterdam were being refused access to three main hospitals in 2016 because there was not enough personnel and beds, a hospital in the neighbouring city of Amstelveen wants to declare maternity space in their hospital as ‘territory of Amsterdam’ to help them out. In 2015 only 7% of Amsterdam’s women were refused at hospitals, but that was before one major hospital shut down their maternity ward. As well, note that this is happening in a country with one of the highest percentage of home births in the world, about 30%, so imagine if more women decided to give birth in a hospital.

Besides wanting to help out women from Amsterdam with additional maternity ward space, the personnel of Amstelveen understands how much people from Amsterdam want to be able to have ‘born in Amsterdam’ on their children’s birth certificate and passports. To give you an idea, when you meet someone Dutch and ask them if they are from Amsterdam, you rarely get a nod or a ‘yeah’, you often get a ‘I was born and raised in Amsterdam!’.

In a similar vein, in 2011 the mayor of the island of Terschelling wanted to have part of a hospital in Leeuwarden declared ‘territory of Terschelling’ in order to claim more island babies, but that didn’t pan out.

(Links: nhnieuws.nl-1, nhnieuws.nl-2, parool.nl, Image: Flag of Amsterdam, public domain)

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January 20, 2017

Sisters give birth twice on the same day

Filed under: Health,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:07 pm

Two sisters from the region of Twente, Overijssel have recently given birth on the same day. In fact, this is the second time the sisters have given birth on the same day. And that’s not all: Jennie and Gerita have actually been pregnant three times at the same time. Sadly, the first time they both were pregnant Jannie had a miscarriage and Gerita had an ectopic pregnancy.

A year later, Gerita told Jennie she was pregnant again and Jennie’s mouth fell open: she was pregnant as well and as a precaution hadn’t told anybody yet. And they had their babies on the same day.

Both sisters ended up giving birth on the same day the third time around as well. However, due to complications with Gerita’s pregnancy, her baby was to be born one week earlier than planned, which was one day before Jannie’s baby was to be delivered. Both children were eventually born on the same day.

They both joked that it’s going to be very complicated with birthday parties for quite some time.

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo of Crying baby by Chalky Lives, some rights reserved)

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December 5, 2016

Amsterdam will get a baby hatch in 2017

Filed under: Health by Orangemaster @ 8:17 pm

We had a modern era baby hatch open up in Dordrecht back in 2013 and after that a few more opened up around the country, but now it’s the capital’s turn to have one, set to open in 2017.

Earlier this year Zwolle got a baby hatch in the Isala hospital, the first time a Dutch hospital has opened such a service.

It’s illegal to abandon a child as a foundling in the Netherlands, and can land someone four years of prison or a hefty fine of 20,000 euro. Making it punishable does mean babies are found in places like bins, the streets or a forest, some alive, but some dead as well. In 2014 a live baby was found in a container in Amsterdam whose parents were never traced, and a dead baby was found near Sloterplas in Nieuw-West in a sports bag not too long ago.

Child Protection Services in the past claimed that children have the right to know who their parents are. The government has no plans to close down, stop or pursue anyone who would abandon a baby in a baby hatch, so the government is still doing what it does best, which is nothing.

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January 11, 2015

Baby hatches to open across the country

Filed under: Health by Orangemaster @ 9:44 pm

About a year ago Dordrecht opened the first modern day baby hatch for women in dire situations to be able to drop off their unwanted babies safely as foundlings. Online news source Dichtbij.nl says that Groningen and Papendrecht each have one as well. The provinces of Zeeland and Noord-Brabant will soon be opening baby hatches, and there are plans to open some in more prominent places such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and Maastricht.

Currently Dutch law forbids abandoning babies for them to be adopted as foundlings and Child Protection Services agrees, claiming children have the right to know who their parents are. The government has no plans to close down, stop or pursue anyone who would abandon a baby in these places, so the government will remain inert on the issue for now.

Sadly, an alternative that occasionally makes the news is when a child has been left in the forest or in a rubbish bin.

(Link: www.bbc.co.uk, Illustration by Leonardo da Vinci)

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January 31, 2013

First modern era baby hatch to open in Dordrecht

Filed under: Dutch first,Health by Orangemaster @ 10:50 am

Planned for this year Dordrecht will have the very first modern day baby hatch where unwanted babies can be safely left for them to become foundlings. Modern day because it has been a practice since the Middle Ages and, depending on one’s beliefs, there’s also the Bible telling us about Moses who was adopted as a foundling by the Egyptian royal family.

The Netherlands currently does not have a place for mothers who do not want to keep their children, and the baby hatch in Dordrecht plans to fill that void. Since Belgium allowed baby hatches in 2000, three babies have been ‘dropped off’. During the same time span some 278 babies in Germany have been ‘deposited’. At the moment, Dutch law forbids abandoning babies for them to be adopted as foundlings.

On the one hand, more help could be given to these women for them to keep their infants, on the other hand, sometimes it is the father, step-father, other family members or even pimps that give away the baby for them. There must be a plethora of reasons why someone would give up a child, but considering the process is anonymous, actually finding out what those are is difficult, making way for much speculation and easily blaming the mothers for everything.

Although the UN claims opening baby hatches goes against the rights of children, even the Vatican has a baby hatch or ‘baby box’ as they are sometimes called.

(Links: www.trouw.nl, www.bbc.co.uk, Illustration by Leonardo da Vinci)

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January 17, 2013

Cry babies produce different poo than other babies

Filed under: Health by Orangemaster @ 5:00 am

Boffins from Wageningen University, together with more boffins from the Radboud University Nijmegen have recently published a study showing that cry babies produce different feces than other babies. One to two-week-old cry babies apparently have twice as many proteobacteria in their poo and much less of other types of bacteria as compared to other babies, although the study does not say why. It also says that by giving cry babies probiotics, which are found in baby food, these babies will cry much less.

(Link: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl, Photo of Crying baby by Chalky Lives, some rights reserved)

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February 14, 2011

Woman, 62, expecting a baby next month

Filed under: Dutch first,Health,Weird by Orangemaster @ 5:01 pm

A 62-year-old woman from Harlingen, Friesland may soon become the oldest woman in recorded Dutch history to be a mom. She underwent an IVF treatment in Italy where apparently age wasn’t an issue. The current record holder is a woman from Enschede, Overijssel who was 57 back in 2005 when she had her son.

I recently heard ‘how disgusting, there’s this famous singer having her second baby at 42, that’s just irresponsible’ and I also noticed a large percentage of the poll on the RTL website said that a 62-year-old woman ‘shouldn’t have the right’ to have a child. So what is OK then and whose business is it really? That’s right, it’s complicated.

I know one thing for sure: as long as a woman’s body can still get pregnant, she can potentially try and have babies. And IVF crossborder shopping is not news.

(Link: rtl.nl, Illustration by Leonardo da Vinci)

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