Earlier this week on Your Comeback, Emma Gilbey Keller wrote about Kat, a single physical trainer who decided to have a child with a sperm donor. She's looking for submissions from other women who have chosen to be single moms. Did you have a one-night stand and decide to keep the baby? Did you get artificially inseminated? Did you decide to have a kid with a platonic friend? Emma wants to hear from you about your choice: E-mail her at emma@thecomebackbook.com.

Photograph of mother and baby by Digital Vision/Getty Images.

Tags: Emma Gilbey Keller, single moms, sperm donors, your comeback

For the last couple of days I've been attempting to follow a pornography trial unfolding in Zambia this week. On June 10, during a strike among healthcare professionals that left the population seriously underserved, Chansa Kabwela, a news editor for the Zambia Post, sent photographs of a woman giving birth on the grounds of Lusaka's University Teaching Hospital to the country's vice-president, health minister, and several human rights groups. The woman had been turned away at the hospital because no medical personnel were available to attend to her. The two photographs reportedly show the woman on the ground, legs spread, with her fetus partially delivered in breach position. By the time she received medical attention, the baby had suffocated. Kabwela is on trial for "circulating obscene materials."

I am no expert on African sexual politics, but my first reaction to this case was to wonder how anyone could consider the charge legitimate, especially when the accused is an editor of a paper openly critical of Zambian president Rupiah Banda, who first demanded the police investigation into the matter. Yet it's being continued. Is the judge beholden to Banda in some way? Or is there some way in which these pictures could be considered pornographic?

Obscenity isn't easy to pin down, as we know too well from the American judiciary, which has tried unsuccessfully—and sometimes comically—for more than 50 years. None of the articles I've read mentions how Zambian law defines the "obscene materials" that its penal code prohibits distributing. The Secretary to the Cabinet's personal secretary, a woman, who saw and was offended by the pictures Kabwela sent, testified that they violated cultural taboos. However, both she and the Minister of Health's female secretary, who also saw a copy of the prints, told the court that they don't think the photographs would arouse any viewer. Can they be considered pornography anyway for simply exposing this woman's body? Is it important that, according to Kabwela, the photographs were submitted to the Post by the woman's husband, not the woman herself? Or that he intended for them to be published (Kabwela opted to send them privately instead) to raise awareness of the situation? And what do we make of the activism and dissent the case has inspired among Zambian feminists? Or of the fact that for at least one man, as this beautiful essay from the Media Institute of Southern Africa's Rashweat Mukundu reveals, the photographs aroused exactly what Kabwela intended: compassion?

Photograph of Rupiah Banda by Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: sexual politics, Zambia

"We all know the future of sex involves robots and teledildonics," writes Annalee Newitz on io9.com, "but what will love be like in centuries to come?" Newitz—recently anointed one of "100 Geeks You Should Be Following on Twitter"—does a bit of forecasting and describes three potential scenarios, "based on current trends."

The first she titles "serial and parallel monogamy"—which sounds a lot like polyamory, a phenomenon Newsweek's Jessica Bennett discussed on XX Factor last week.

[L]ong-term romantic relationships start to look more like friendships. The emotions are no less intense, but the structure of the relationships might take on the characteristics of friendships today: Constantly-changing groups of people whose feelings for each other range from talk-every-day closeness to casual meetups at the pub. Stability will be provided by the network, and by a few long-term close connections ...

The third possibility is "neo-courtly love": marriages revert to being social/business transactions between families, and spouses look outside the home to find passion and romance.

The first scenario seems the most immediately plausible to me, but all three make for interesting thought experiments. Best of all, Newitz's post offers a list of novels and authors that explore each of these ideas, making it a handy, sci-fi-inflected companion piece to Double X's guide to beach book reading.

Photograph by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: annalee newitz, futurism, io9, romance

A few weeks ago, Double X readers and contributors discussed the case of Lady and Edward Downes, who traveled to Switzerland, accompanied by their family, to die together at an assisted suicide clinic. Today, BoingBoing directs readers to an essay by British fantasy legend Terry Pratchett in which—spurred by the recent Debbie Purdy ruling in the UK—he movingly, lucidly, outlines his reasons why assisted suicide should be allowed under the law.

The 61-year-old "came out" as an Alzheimer's sufferer in 2007, and the essay is shot through with Pratchett's own sense of mortality. He writes:

I hate the term 'assisted suicide'. I have witnessed the aftermath of two suicides, and as a journalist I attended far too many coroners' inquests, where I was amazed and appalled at the many ways that desperate people find to end their lives.

Suicide is fear, shame, despair and grief. It is madness.

Those brave souls lately seeking death abroad seem to me, on the other hand, to be gifted with a furious sanity. They have seen their future, and they don't want to be part of it.

Pratchett acknowledges the issue of obligation, which Kerry brought up vis-a-vis the Downes—the potential that some elderly or terminally ill people may feel pressured to end their lives, for fear of becoming a burden on family members. Pratchett recalls a fan of his, a young boy who was terminally ill but still full of "fortitude and [a] sense of style." He writes:

I would like to think my refusal to go into care towards the end of my life might free up the resources for people such as him.

Let me make this very clear: I do not believe there is any such thing as a 'duty to die'; we should treasure great age as the tangible presence of the past, and honour it as such.

I know that last September Baroness Warnock was quoted, or possibly misquoted, as saying the very elderly sick had a 'duty to die', and I have seen people profess to fear that the existence of a formalised approach to assisted dying could lead to it somehow becoming part of national health policy.

I very much doubt this could be the case. We are a democracy and no democratic government is going to get anywhere with a policy of compulsory or even recommended euthanasia. If we were ever to end up with such a government, we would be in so much trouble that the problem would become the least of our worries.

But neither do I believe in a duty to suffer the worst ravages of terminal illness.

Ultimately, Pratchett's perspective on the matter is borne out of a belief that people are essentially rational, well-meaning creatures who should be trusted to make their own decisions. "In this country we have rather lost faith in the wisdom of ordinary people," he writes. "And it is ordinary people, ultimately, who must make such decisions."

The whole thing is worth a read, if just to see how a man who once envisioned Death as a character is learning to face up to the real thing.

Tags: assisted suicide, terry pratchett

Amidst the flood of John Hughes remembrances swirling about the Internet this morning—read Dana Stevens' excellent obituary for Slate here—one is generating more smiles and sighs than others. In "Sincerely, John Hughes," Alison Byrne Fields recounts the two years she spent corresponding with the writer-director after she saw The Breakfast Club and poured her heart out to him in a letter. (Hughes' people initially responded with a form letter and some TBC stickers; Alison got irate and badgered him into writing her a real letter. Gotta love that teen girl moxie.)

Hughes wrote Alison long letters from the set; encouraged her to keep writing, even when her English teacher wouldn't; and sent her a box of Ferris Bueller schwag as an apology for having skipped several months of correspondence. (Alison had written to his boss at Paramount when she hadn't heard from him—again, there's that moxie. When do we lose that, do you think?) The whole thing is incredibly moving, and well worth a read. I can't help but be happy to know that John Hughes, who created some of Hollywood's most memorable teen icons, cared about real teenagers, too.

(Side note: John Richards, the DJ who hosts KEXP in New York's morning's show, is currently spinning '80s classics in Hughes' honor; we just heard "Girls on Film" and are now being serenaded by the sweet sounds of Bow Wow Wow. Listen at 91.5 FM in New York or online.)

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: alison byrne fields, breakfast club, ferris bueller, john hughes