BABY TRADE

Regarding “The Baby Trade,� by Mary Jo McConahay (Dec. 16): This obscenity will surely continue, unless machismo extends past making babies to taking care of them. If males are taught to ridicule each other not for lack of sexual prowess but for neglect of their children, perhaps men would be more inclined to either provide for their offspring or abstain from unprotected sex, so terrified would they be of shame and embarrassment at the hands of their peers.

In addition, if religion and government guaranteed swift, sure punishment for men and boys who make babies then don’t support them (much the same as girls and women have always been publicly scorned for out-of-wedlock pregnancies), there would be no impoverished, abandoned children.

For all our intellectual posturing, we humans appear to be totally at the mercy of, and controlled by, our sexuality, rather than the other way around. Could this doom us to extinction?

ANNIE CAROLINE SCHULER

West Hollywood