Felicia Boots: ‘I was a good mum and I never meant this to happen’

By Leah McLaren - Sunday, November 11, 2012 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

On the face of it, expat Canadians Felicia and Jeff Boots were the sort of shiny, privileged couple many Londoners are pre-programmed to envy. They had two beautiful young children (Lily Skye, 14 months, and 10-week-old Mason) and had just moved into a $1.9-million five-bedroom house on a quiet street in a part of south London known as “Nappy Valley”—named for its upper-middle-class café culture of stay-home mummies pushing prams while their husbands rake in bonuses in the city. They had emigrated from the Toronto area so Mr. Boots could pursue his high-finance career in London. They were the last sort of family who would be classified as “at risk.” And yet they most certainly were.

When Jeff Boots came home from the office one evening last May, he found his wife sitting in the dark on the staircase rocking and hugging herself. She asked him not to go upstairs but he did. There, on the floor of a walk-in closet he found the tiny bodies of his suffocated children and a handwritten note from their mother.

Before the paramedics arrived, Jeff Boots was heard wailing in the street. “My lovely son, my beautiful daughter,” his raw anguish shattering the evening air. Felicia Boots was led from the house. She was later charged with their murders. Continue…

Why breastfeeding is overrated

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, January 10, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 331 Comments

"Telling a woman that the only feminist position is to breastfeed is antithetical to feminism" | Photography Brandon Thibodeaux/Getty Images

Joan B. Wolf is an assistant professor of women’s studies at Texas A&M University and the author of the controversial new book Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood.

Q: The Canadian Paediatric Society recommends that babies be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life. In your book, you argue that human breast milk is being falsely touted as a magical elixir.
A: The discourse surrounding breastfeeding is extraordinary. We’re told it can protect against everything from ear infections and diabetes to leukemia and heart disease, and can even improve social skills.

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The problem with not having kids

By Mark Steyn - Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 6:30 AM - 1,040 Comments

Anything happen while I was gone?

Oh, yeah. The collapse of the global economy. Armageddon outta here. The ecopalypse is upon us. Down south, President Obama has abandoned the gaseous uplift of “the audacity of hope” and warns we’re on the brink of the abyss. In the old New Deal, FDR warned that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” For the new New Deal, President Hopeychangey says we have nothing but fear itself. Get used to it. In Russia, the nation’s wealthiest oligarchs have seen their net worth decline by two-thirds. They can’t steal it as fast as it depreciates. Even yard sales of Soviet nukes to chaps with Waziristani business cards won’t make it up.

The only thing booming is declinism. In Britain, the Baby Boomers are now “Baby Gloomers,” according to the Daily Telegraph’s Elizabeth Grice, who gives the impression she’s working it up into a book proposal for one of those slim volumes of contemporary manners one keeps in the guest “loo,” amusingly illustrated with line drawings of once prosperous middle-class couples reduced to trawling the supermarket shelves for bargain “wine boxes” and microwaveable “Italian-style” focaccia. In the U.S., Steven Kotler thinks this is no time to get hung up on details. The planet is going to hell. So what’s the big picture? The rooty-tootiest root cause of all?

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