My mom is "pro life," she even had the license plate frames on her car. But at some moment she and my dad realized the only realistic way of preventing abortions was with birth control and honest explicit sex education. It may have had something to do with having more children than they could handle. (I was changing my youngest sibling's diapers when I was ten. At some point it's impossible to pretend you can't smell it. Whoever breaks down first changes the diaper...) My wife's family is similar. Our parents started out creating big Catholic families and eventually embraced birth control, perhaps just as they were running out of money for groceries and realizing the next car they'd have to buy would be a bus rather than a van or station wagon.

By the time I had even the slightest interest in sex, I knew everything about it; the good, the bad, and the ugly. I knew about birth control, protecting myself from sexually transmitted diseases, even that there were sexual predators in the world who desired children. (The last was the beginning of my mom's continuing war with the Catholic church. My mom had wanted to be a nun until she met a lecherous, smoking, hard drinking Catholic priest who obviously had a fetish for innocent young Catholic girls. Later our community suffered a pedophile priest who was quickly removed to Ireland just before the police came knocking on his door with a warrant.)

Anyways, my mom always told us she'd take in any babies we had. That was such a terrifying thought to me and my siblings, having more children crammed into our already crowded house, that none of us had children before we were married, living on our own, and able to support them. And it's not something we accomplished by abstinence or "natural" family planning.

I am absolutely certain my mom has prevented more abortions than any of the fuckwads protesting in front of Planned Parenthood. Those protesters increase the abortion rate, increase the misery, and there is NOTHING commendable about their regressive, destructive, and yes I'll say EVIL religious beliefs. I'd flip them off as I drive by, throw water balloons at them, maybe even run over any signs they've posted in the street, but I won't give them the pleasure. They get off on being "persecuted." To them that's better than sex. Instead, I'll make sure the children of their community, the children they keep in the dark, have the information they need to avoid the pitfalls of sexual relationships.

... or mislabeled the fish entirely.

But probably the worst fish commonly sold is escolar. The flesh of these fish contains an indigestible waxy substance. If you eat more than a few ounces of this fish "...symptoms range from stomach cramps to rapid loose bowel movements, occurring 30 minutes to 36 hours following consumption."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escolar

My dad loves fishing. My parents had a mess of kids Catholic style, and there were always a few more kids and odd adults at the dinner table. My parent's income wasn't quite high enough to feed everyone grocery store meat. But we always had a freezer full of fish that my dad had caught, every kind, including carp.

A quick google search found this:

"If you have any trepidation about eating carp for the first time, try deep-frying pieces of fillet cut to the size of dominoes. Eat the golden tidbits with beer and french fries. There's no one on earth who doesn't like this."

https://www.nps.gov/miss/learn/nature/carpreci.htm

Beer and french fries... yep, that's how you do it.

And when your pants don't fit anymore:

...if you didn't know what he was teaching.

Memorizing a bunch of facts, being able to do the math by rote, that wouldn't get you through his class. You had to feel the subject in your gut.

Kids who had been straight-A students in high school because they could memorize great piles of crap and regurgitate the "right" answers on standardized tests would break down in tears.

This professor was the nicest guy in the world, always accessible and friendly, his teaching assistants were never cruel, but it was impossible to pass his class if you didn't know some physics.

As a nation we have failed any student who graduates from high school without critical thinking skills, without curiosity, without the desire to seek greater knowledge just for the sake of learning it.

I look at Presidents like Reagan, George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump, and I see venal, incurious, and ultimately empty people.

Sadly, a large number of U.S. Americans don't have the critical thinking skills to recognize their abusers. The Republican sabotage of our public schools is deliberate. The devils behind the curtain know exactly what they are doing.