Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I want to have our first kid soon. Before we start trying, we need to figure out how to handle my mother.

We aren’t close at all. I maintain a polite relationship with her to minimize guilt trips and dramatics that arise when I keep the much-greater distance I would prefer. She’s learned that there will probably be a kid eventually, and she’s become obsessed with moving near me and being “Grandma’s Babysitting Service.” I’ve tried telling her that wouldn’t work for us, but she says, “You have no idea how hard it will be, especially after the second” or “Why have babies if you’re going to dump them at some day care?” or “You can’t afford good child care.”

We can afford day care, and while it’s expensive, more importantly, it’s not my mother. She was a big believer in corporal punishment and severe “Tiger Mom” parenting methods. I would never leave a kid with her unattended for even a few minutes.

We have major differences in values, and she thinks it’s her responsibility that her grandchildren participate in her religion (she embraces its most judgmental and hateful aspects), which is unacceptable to my husband and me. I don’t want her “help” raising my child, and I don’t want to deal with her guilt trips, unsolicited advice, and other intrusions into the happy and stable life I’ve built for myself.

She claims all her friends live near their grandbabies and take care of them when the parents have to go to work, and that it’s not fair that she might not get to do the same. She has started looking at homes in our area (where she knows no one but us), and, as she can’t afford to live in the city, she’s started telling us to move to the suburbs and get a house with enough room for her to live with us. This is not happening. Is there a way to handle this short of full estrangement while she’s living in a fantasy world and not my metro area?

As a woman practicing medicine, raised by a first-generation immigrant father and Hispanic mother, I fit the image of an underrepresented minority. Yet my education and position belie that stereotype.

As a young girl, I remember walking in our small town in Maryland watching my Indian father’s expression harden and eyes dim as he held back from reacting to racially directed comments—shouted as we walked by—urging him to return to his “home country.”

I didn’t understand at the time what racism meant or the traumatic impact that repeated experiences could have on health. Lately I have understood it all too well.

A New York City high schooler who took her own life after she was allegedly bullied and forced to perform sexual acts on other students had experienced the abuse since she began attending the school, and school staff knew about it but did not intervene, a lawsuit by the girl's parents alleges.

Mya Vizcarrondo-Rios jumped 34 stories from the roof of her apartment building with her backpack still on shortly after 2 p.m. on Feb. 28, 2018, and was pronounced dead at the hospital about an hour later. She was 15 years old.

The Health and Human Services Department (HHS) announced Friday that it is proposing a rule that would change a regulation under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that expanded anti-discrimination protections to transgender individuals.

The new regulation would change the 2016 rule that banned discrimination -- on the basis of sex and against trangender people -- by health care providers that receive federal funding.

In a release announcing the proposed change, HHS pointed to a Texas judge's December 2016 injunction that kept the Obama-era rule from being implemented. U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor sided with the state of Texas and other plaintiffs who argued that the Obama rule would force health care providers and insurers to enable transgender people to be treated and get coverage for gender transitions and abortions, despite their religious beliefs or against their medical judgment.

We all feel a higher calling sometimes. Maybe it’s to be a teacher. Maybe it’s to leave your six-figure job and be a full-time drag queen. Or maybe, if you’re the CEO of Chick-fil-A, it’s a calling to donate to anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.

In an interview with Business Insider, Chick-fil-A’s vice president of corporate social responsibility and executive director of the Chick-fil-A Foundation Rodney Bullard said that the company felt a “higher calling” to donate its money to anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.

The Department of Health and Human Services today announced its final “conscience rule” excusing health care personnel from participating in procedures to which they have religious or moral objections.

Activists have warned that the rule could jeopardize health care for LGBTQ people, such as those seeking gender-confirmation procedures or HIV treatment and prevention services, as well as women seeking contraception or abortion.

A draft of the rule was released in January 2018 so that HHS’s Office for Civil Rights could receive comments from the public on it. Donald Trump announced the finalization of the rule during a Rose Garden speech this morning for the National Day of Prayer, and HHS published the final rule on its website.

A Pennsylvania man who was seemingly not in the Christmas spirit last week was arrested after he allegedly assaulted a man for singing festive songs, according to reports.

A California man tortured a Chihuahua by binding it with electrical wire and using it as “a soccer ball,” police said.

A witness called cops to report that a man used wires to tie the missing dog, named Max, and repeatedly kicked him in Santa Ana on Sunday, authorities said.

Arriving officers found Jose Manuel Pantoja standing over the dog — who had a bungee cord around his throat and chest, and multicolored electrical wire around his legs.

“If you run into a Salvation Army bell ringer this Christmas season, don’t strike up a conversation about President Trump or gay marriage,” warns FOX News host Todd Starnes is telling his audience.

Starnes says employees “have been told to stop posting their opinions about gay marriage, abortion or anything political on social media because it might reflect poorly on the organization.”

The far right pundit says he has leaked copies of internal memos from the home office to staffers instructing them to keep mum about controversial topics.

The religious charity has come under fire in the United States over the past decade for their atrocious record on LGBT rights. To attempt to stem the ongoing outrage over the group’s previous stances on LGBT issues, they started a public relations campaign to deny that they are anti-LGBT while never acknowledging their history.

With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the future of Roe v. Wade is looking increasingly grim.

But even while the landmark law remains in place, the rollback of abortion access across the US is already well underway — and women who want to safely terminate their pregnancies face an increasing number of roadblocks.

Enter Aid Access, a new online service through which women can obtain medical abortion pills, mifepristone and misoprostol, to take at home. As first reported by the Atlantic’s Olga Khazan, Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician and activist, launched the service six months ago in response to overwhelming US demand.

While the National Eating Disorder Association reports that the LGBTQ community is disproportionately plagued by eating disorders, experts are saying that being a minority contributes to this dilemma.

Dr. Norman H. Kim, national director for program development at Reasons Eating Disorder Center, believes that queer people are drawn to unhealthy eating habits because of minority stress. Behaviors such as binging, purging, and undereating are a symptom of chronic social stress LGBTQ people experience as minorities, he told Stylecaster.

The rates at which queer people are having this reaction to being otherized are alarming.

Henry’s Burgers & Cream is the kind of tiny local restaurant in a tiny Alabama town whose Facebook page is usually filled with updates about the daily specials (the fried popcorn shrimp plate seems to be a favorite), with good luck messages for the Brookwood Middle School football team, and frequent reminders to pre-order your party trays for Alabama football game days. Roll Tide, and all that.

On Wednesday, the Hatter family who run Henry’s posted an atypical update, ensuring everyone that they had issued a “heartfelt apology” to an irritated customer, and promising that “by God’s grace, [they] would to continue to please as many customers as possible.” And presumably, by God’s grace, none of their employees will call a customer a crazy bitch again, even if she does order a burger without cheese.

Map features in Snapchat and other popular mobile apps, including The Weather Channel and Citi Bike, referred to New York City as “Jewtropolis” on Thursday in what appears to have been an anti-Semitic act of digital vandalism.

Each of the affected apps uses mapping company Mapbox for their mapping features. Mapbox in turn relies partially on user-generated information, apparently opening the door to such attacks.

A federal court has given the Trump administration until Friday, Aug. 10, to figure out a plan for the 28 immigrant children still detained at the Shiloh Treatment Center in southeast Texas. Any child who is not deemed to pose “a risk of harm to self or others” must be transferred to a less restrictive facility, per Judge Dolly Gee’s July 30 ruling in a lawsuit filed earlier this year. She also addressed the lawsuit’s claims that residents at Shiloh have been given forced injections and prescribed antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotic drugs without consent. The government must stop this practice, she determined, and make sure that psychotropic drugs are given to detainees at Shiloh only in accordance with Texas child welfare laws and regulations.

For weeks now, this misuse of psychiatric medications has been cited as a prime example of the White House’s “despicable,” “reprehensible,” “inhumane and unconscionable” border policies. “President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy stands to create a zombie army of children forcibly injected with medications,” said the article from the Center for Investigative Reporting that first brought the allegations to light. “The president has to be ordered not to give children psychotropic drugs, but I’m the one that’s tripping?” one Democratic candidate for Congress said a few days ago, in defending progressives’ call to defund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A Georgia restaurant owner says he is investigating after an employee called 911 on an African-American family who had stopped for dinner during a vacation.

WSB-TV reports that Felicia and Othniel Dobson of North Carolina on Monday had stopped for dinner at a Subway in Newnan with their four children, ages 8 to 19, when a restaurant employee called police.