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Well Margaret Wente is at it again. In a column last week titled Yellow duckies and other killers , she claims that "Mothers across Canada have been prostrated by the plastics scare." It's hard to be a good mother these days. Deadly perils lurk everywhere. Take that yellow bathtub ducky, contaminated with a dangerous substance known as BPA. But why stop there? Wente proceeds to list other putative hazards: toxic mould, pesticides, perfumes, "death-rays from the sun", walking barefoot in the grass. The message is clear: stop worrying already! We forget how negligent our own parents were. They gave us naked sunbaths and let us suck on plastic duckies and roll around on pesticide-drenched lawns. It's astonishing how ignorant they were, and how many of us managed to grow up. Now Margaret Wente is no scientist (what was your first clue?), so she needs an outside authority: Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health [ACSH], a...

While a baby carriage makes for a good visual, it's a bit ironic. Once the baby is born there are no special parking spots, at least at the supermarket where I took this photo.

In the April 19th edition of the Globe and Mail ("Canada's National Newspaper") columnist Maragaret Wente had a piece titled "The great plastics panic". Wente reports that at an elementary school near where she lives, plastic water bottles have been "banished": The kids know what's at stake. Plastic is death! At home, their anxious parents have stopped microwaving with plastic wrap. They've thrown out their plastic baby bottles and replaced them with ones made of glass. Leading retailers ... have banished plastic containers, baby bottles, sippy cups and pacifiers containing one offending chemical from the shelves. No wonder. A barrage of media reports have warned that the chemical in question - bisphenol A, or BPA - may be linked to breast and uterine cancer as well as lowered sperm count, early-onset puberty, obesity, hyperactivity, miscarriages, diabetes and other horrors. "So," she asks, "how worried should you be?" ...