Remember Nebraska father Gary Staton? He invoked the state's safe haven law to abandon 9 kids after his wife died. Nebraska has since changed the law to apply to infants up to 30 days old.

Well, Staton is back in the news this week because ... drum roll, please ... his girlfriend is pregnant, with twins, according to Joanne Manzer, the wife of his children's grandfather.

Staton has said previously that he is not haunted by his decision to abandon his children. “I was 100 percent sure that I couldn't last much longer doing this routine over and over, and I wanted to just walk away from it all,” he told the Omaha World-Herald in March.

Before this pregnancy was announced, Staton told the World-Herald that he didn't want more children:

“If I had a thousand dollars,” he said, “I'd get fixed.”

Should a parent who has abandoned some of his children be allowed to have more?

By Rebeldad Brian Reid

A couple of years ago, I was jogging with my father when our conversation turned to how lucky we seemed to be, genetically. That's not to say there was no reason to be concerned: I shared my grandfather's red hair, fair skin and propensity for skin cancer and there is a clear genetic link to Alzheimer's disease, which claimed my grandmother memory and, eventually, her life. But both of them lived well into their 80s and remained healthy and active through their eighth decade .

"Well," I said. "At least there's no other heart disease or cancer risk hanging out there."

"Actually," my dad answered. "My father did have prostate cancer, about 10 years ago. But it was no big deal."

We ran on. I was a little speechless. No one had ever told me before. I'm sure I was away from home at the time. I'm sure it was handled, as was family tradition, with stoic calm. And I'm sure the outcome was positive. Caught early, prostate cancer is not a dread diagnosis.

It's the rare parent who can't claim that there is not some worrisome genetic risk factor in the family tree. Some of us may have been touched, personally or through a family member, breast cancer or mental illness or high cholesterol or any one of hundreds of other conditions.

At some point, we need to share those details with our kids so that they can make good medical decisions, but it isn't easy to pinpoint the right time to talk about that history. Sometimes, the answer is clear: Alcoholism, for instance, should be broached before a child begins to think about drinking. Sometimes, the answer is forced upon us: At some point, kids will ask what really happened to Uncle Frank or Cousin Larry. And sometimes, there's no harm in delaying: I'm still years away from having to worry about my prostate health.

I'm curious if any of you have dealt with this, and when you thought it best to start talking about some of those more difficult family histories.

Brian Reid writes about parenting and work-family balance. You can read his blog at rebeldad.com.

Over on The Post's sister site, Double X, Hanna Rosin and Dana Stevens have contemplated the experiment that one family has embarked on in Sweden. Pop, age 2 1/2, is being raised by 24- year-olds who have decided to keep their child's gender a secret.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother told the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

The child's parents said so long as they keep Pop’s gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.

Pop's wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop's hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

"I respect the instinct to radically reinvent the role of gender in childrearing; I think every mother I know seeks, in some measure, to free her child from the constraint of gender expectations. But this couple’s literal and dogmatic interpretation of that instinct strikes me as borderline child abuse," writes Stevens.

"What the Swedish couple is doing is of course absurd on many levels. To raise a child gender-free requires a kind of vigilance that can only lead to obsession with gender," concurs Rosin.

What do you think? Has raising gender-neutral children "become an ideal" as Rosin suggests? What do you think of the raising Pop experiment?

It was an average afternoon at the playground. The boys rode ahead on their bikes. When I got there, a neighborhood nanny was holding one of her charges, a 2-year-old boy. The boy was repeating over and over, "Go other park." The nanny worked to comfort him, telling me that he had been happily on the swings when a woman next to her screamed at and spanked the child right next to him. The 2-year-old, obviously scared, was ready to leave. As we talked and the nanny comforted, the 2-year-old continually glanced fearfully over at the swings.

The nanny, meanwhile, was a bit flustered about how to help the child not in her care. Should she say something to the woman? Should she simply walk away as she'd done? "It's not right," she said.

Park situations, I've found, can be quite challenging at times. During that same park trip, a preschooler kept walking right in front of my boys on bikes, who were under orders from me to not run over the seemingly unsupervised child. Meanwhile, I did open my mouth and ask two boys to stop kicking the soccer ball, which nearly clobbered a toddler right behind one of them. No other supervisory adult of the pair seemed to notice or care. This particular park is really a small spot of playground equipment. Just down from it is a full soccer field, where the kids could have safely kicked the ball around.

All the while that day and for this past week since, I've thought back to the little boy who'd been hit at the swings. Should someone have intervened somehow? I didn't feel comfortable doing that given that I'd walked up after the fact. And even if I'd seen it, I'm not sure I'd have had the gumption to walk up to this complete stranger disciplining a child in a way she felt appropriate and say something to try to help the child.

There are ways that I've read to ease your way into such situations. For instance, "Kids can be so rough at that age. I know mine were. Would you like to take a break for a minute and let me push?" But when do you intervene using this tactic? How do you help without getting the evil eye -- or worse -- back in return?

By Dana Rudolph

I recently visited my son’s kindergarten to celebrate his “Birthday Walk.” During the ceremony, he carried a globe around a candle that represented the sun. After each orbit, once for every year of his life, I shared photos of him at that age. I explained who was in each picture, several of which showed him with both his moms.

“He has two moms?” one of his classmates asked me afterwards.

“Yes,” I replied, and that was that. He was off to make sure he got a cupcake. In the two years my son has attended the school, that type of reaction is par for the course (give or take the cupcakes). I envision the children filing the information away along with, “Charlie has a radio-controlled stunt car,” and “Jane has a guinea pig.” Our son has two moms and two cats and a new Lego Power Miners vehicle.

I am pleased that my son himself tells others he has a mommy and a momma. I think he realizes it is not a common configuration, but he has not yet learned that some people think it shouldn’t exist. He knows we are as committed to each other as any of his friends’ parents, and we love him as much as they love their children. At his age, that sense of security is the most important thing. He knows that’s what family is all about.

He also knows, as do most kids his age, that “marriage” represents the love and commitment of two adults. Children’s stories and shows are saturated with the concept.

My spouse and I did legally wed two years ago when we moved to Massachusetts after 14 years together. (Our marriage, however, had nothing to do with our legal rights as parents, which we secured in court long before we could marry.) Even if we didn’t have the law on our side, however, I think we would still tell our son we were married. We have been for years, in the emotional sense. We wouldn’t want our son to feel that we were less committed because we couldn’t marry, or that our family was inferior because of it.

That, as I see it, is the number one reason for supporting marriage equality. The technical legal aspects -- hospital visitation, inheritance rights, tax benefits, and all the rest -- could be made equal with federally recognized civil unions available in all states.

The emotional aspects are a far different matter. Based on reports from state commissions in both Vermont and New Jersey, many children of civil-unioned parents feel stigma, a sense of inferiority, and other negative mental health effects because their parents cannot marry.

My son will learn soon enough that many believe his parents should not be married. He will learn our marriage became legally worthless when we took him out of state to Disney World, purveyor of the magical marriage ideal, and that we must still file our federal taxes as “single.”

He will also find out that marriage alone is not enough for equality. He will discover that his friend’s non-biological mom still had to adopt him even though she was married to his biological mom, since some states would not otherwise recognize her parenthood. The lesbian parents of other friends could not marry even in Massachusetts, because one of them was in the military and marriage is a matter of public record. Their family would lose its income and health benefits, and their kids would be thrown out of the on-base school if she got dismissed under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

I dread the day when he will learn these inequities are woven into the fabric of our country. I worry what this will do to his sense of self worth and his desire to be a good citizen. I know my spouse and I will have to explain such things to him, though. Better that we offer guidance in advance.

What gives me hope, however, are his classmates eating cupcakes, taking it in stride that he has two mothers. These kids know instinctively what a family is. I have no doubt their generation will make sure the laws catch up. The arc of the moral universe, like the Earth around the sun, always bends the same way.

Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian, a blog and resource directory for LGBT parents, and writes a syndicated newspaper column on LGBT parenting. She is also a contributing editor for an LGBT group blog called The Bilerico Project.

People do NOT like looking at abnormal looking babies. That's the word out of a SMALL study by doctors Igor Elman and Rinah Yamamoto at Harvard Medical School affiliate McLean Hospital.

In the study, the doctors equated ugly and abnormal. A total of 27 testers -- only six of whom were parents -- were shown photos of 50 normal infants and 30 infants that had abnormal facial features, including cleft palates, skin disorders and Down's Syndrome. The study found that woman avoided looking at the abnormal babies. Both men and woman rated them as "unattractive."

"What our results suggest is that [unconditional parental love] is determined by facial attractiveness," said Yamamoto. The study's authors point to a study in Israel showing that 70 percent of children abandoned by their parents had a conspicuous, non life-threatening flaw in their appearance as proof that a mother's love may not truly be unconditional.

Still, I've got to think that all those birthing hormones have to help us fall in love with our babies. Just looking at a spectrum of normal babies at the park elicits thoughts of cute or not. And while I always keep my thoughts hush-hush, personally, I've always had a different reaction to others' babies than to my own, who simply seemed beautiful to me -- even the one who came out bruised and battered from a difficult birth. In an e-mail exchange yesterday, Yamamoto told me I was on the right track, sending me a study that backs this up.

The study's authors agree that the study isn't perfect. Reports Time:

There are some potential holes in Elman's work, all of which he acknowledges. For one thing, it's possible women avoid the unattractive faces not because they're less sensitive to them but because they're more sensitive, simply finding the hardships endured by unhealthy babies too difficult to contemplate. Such highly tuned empathy can ultimately make them better caregivers, even if a four-second exposure to the idea is painful. "Everyone will try to get away from a stimulus that feels like a punishment and hold on to one that feels like a reward," Elman says.

More important, the way people of either gender react to a picture of an anonymous child with physical abnormalities is likely to be radically different from the way they would react if that child were their own — something that is readily evident from all the disabled children on whom parents lavish love.

Does the look of a child impact your behavior towards him/her? Do you find yourself treating unattractive children differently than attractive ones?

This just in from The Associated Press:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.

In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.

Redding, who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills -- the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school was acting on a tip from another student.

"What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear," Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion. "We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."

What do you think of the outcome?