Pope Benedict the lactivist?

I’ll make a wild bet here and predict this will be one of very few posts in which I praise the Catholic church’s stance on anything having to do with women and reproduction. So I’m going to enjoy this moment.

The official newspaper of the Holy See, L'Osservatore Romano, has chided Catholics for being offended by depictions of Mary’s breastfeeding baby Jesus. "Jesus was a baby like all others. His divinity does not exclude his humanity," church historian Lucetta Scaraffia said, according to the British Telegraph. The newspaper noted that since the 17th century artists have been covering up Mary’s mammaries to avoid “unbecoming” “carnality” in sacred images.

But, as Father Enrico dal Covolo, a professor of classic and Christian literature at the Pontifical Salesian University, pointed out in L’Osservatore, that’s kinda the point. The word made flesh and all that.

You ask me (and you did, since you came to this page), there isn’t anything more sacred and symbolic of the human condition than a mother nursing a child. Anybody who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch was never breastfed (or owes his mother an apology).

I may never say this again: Go, pope!

Now I’ll get tiresome and suggest that the irrepressibility of the Mary cult shows how tortured Christianity is. The ancient worship of the mother goddess makes a whole lot more sense than the death cult that is the Jesus myth, and the weirdness of the Holy Trinity dissolves if you let the threesome be father, mother, and child... I’m sure theologians all over the Holy See are now smacking their heads, saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and turning right to revising their texts. Get to it, boys.

AMA seeks to outlaw home birth

Not content with discouraging and disapproving of home birth, the American Medical Association at its annual meeting last weekend passed a resolution to press for the outlawing of home birth. Given the skyrocketing c-section rate, the spiraling cost of birth, and the nothing-to-be-proud-of U.S. maternal and infant mortality rates (our newborn mortality rate is the second worst in the developed world), this move seems, well, a little insecure. Fact is, studies have found home births to be as safe or safer than hospital care for low-risk births and they cost two-thirds less. Chalk this one up as just one more episode in the sorry history of the AMA.

RH Reality Check rightly places this as part of broader attempts to criminalize motherhood, having “at their core coercive control over pregnancy and childbirth.”

"It's unclear what penalties the AMA will seek to impose on women who choose to give birth at home, either for religious, cultural or financial reasons-or just because they didn't make it to the hospital in time," said Susan Jenkins, Legal Counsel for The Big Push for Midwives 2008 campaign. "What we do know, however, is that any state that enacts such a law will immediately find itself in court, since a law dictating where a woman must give birth would be a clear violation of fundamental rights to privacy and other freedoms currently protected by the U.S. Constitution."

Gays: not all galloping down the aisle

Just when I was beginning to worry that the gay community had gone all square on us:

The New York Times’ article on gays who married in Massachusetts started off peddling the soothing line that gays are no threat to conventional marriage. (They’re just like us! They get divorced. They can’t get their boyfriends to commit. They dream about their wedding outfits.) I began getting depressed.

They saved the good stuff for after the jump. There we get Eric Erbelding and Michael Peck, whose “rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.” Most married gay couples Erbelding knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.” Phew.

And after I was embarrassed by the statistic that two-thirds of same-sex weddings in Massachusetts have been lesbian marriages—see, every woman’s life goal really is that white wedding dress—I read of Joyce Kauffman, who aims at a more creative definition of family and considers marriage a patriarchal institution that “politically makes me kind of queasy.” Thank you, sister.

Weddings tend to make me kind of queasy, too—so smug, they are—and I always felt the air lightened by knowing gay folks looked at them askance too. The gay subculture provided alternative models for living that expanded the sense of the possible in intimate life. Much as I agreed that it was a matter of human rights that if straights had the right to marry, gays should too, the world felt narrowed when gays began clamoring for marriage.

But this conversation isn’t over, not among gays and not among straights.

Retrograde in the City

In case you were tempted to see Sex and the City, read this.

Especially this:

Worse still is the sneering cut as the scene shifts from Carrie, carefree and childless in the New York Public Library, to the face of Miranda’s young son, smeared with spaghetti sauce. In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life?

…[A]lmost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it.

I love you, Anthony--this isn't even your best stuff.

Leave it to women to save the world

File in the no duh department:

Pick any litany of environmental horrors you can think of.

Little if any of this would have transpired had human numbers peaked long ago. Such a peak might have occurred by now, even with the gains in life expectancy of the past century, if the status and reproductive intentions of women had found consistent support rather than silence and censure.

writes Robert Engleman of the Worldwatch Institute in an excerpt on Alternet from his new book, "More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want."

Leave to women, more than to anyone else, the decision about when and how often to bear children ... History ... suggests that doing so has moderated population growth in the past, and contemporary evidence makes clear that it does exactly that today.

This has been said many times before, but it seems to keep being forgotten. And thanks to Engleman for taking a swipe at those moaning about falling birth rates, who apparently want to see women perpetually barefoot and pregnant and the world groaning with the weight of us all. I thank Engleman especially for taking a swipe at that stripe of environmentalist who favor Big Fixes (which as he notes are often not only ineffective but downright dangerous).

What’s new(ish) in his piece is that he joins his warning about population with the problem of worsening resource depletion and ends up with a rather encouraging thought:

The current momentum of population growth all but guarantees there won't be population declines for several decades. Those are precisely the decades during which humanity could make the easiest gains in energy efficiency. And just about when energy use is about as efficient as it can be in an imperfect world, human population could begin to shrink. That will remove much of the burden of squeezing additional water from the stone of a super-efficient global energy system. The need to reduce demand for fossil fuels will grow more urgent with each passing year as the global climate warms and the illusion of endless carbon-free energy gradually fades. And population decline reduces energy demand, all else equal, without any hardship for anyone.

Birthing behind bars, but not alone

Reading a recent article in the Seattle Times on doulas in the state prisons, I wasn't sure whether to feel ashamed or proud of my state. It’s a horrible thing for babies to be born in prison—horrible for the mother and boding horribly for the child—made worse by the inhumane ways most prisons treat laboring women (some prisons actually handcuff women to the bed during labor, and prison health care is rarely good). Although the article describes doulas as having been resources for pregnant women for centuries, and it’s true that there have always women who’ve informally offered other women their expertise about childbirth, in fact doulas as such were created only in the last few decades by the women’s health movement, with a prominent role by activists in Washington state, including Penny Simkin.

Typically doulas attend births, while it appears the doulas in the Washington prisons are mostly restricted to prenatal counseling and attend birth in only a few cases. That’s too bad, because studies (PDF) have found that having doulas supporting mothers during labor and delivery dramatically improves health outcomes and reduces C-section rates. Which is a good thing even if you don’t care about incarcerated women; reducing C-sections and reducing complications in birth saves a lot of money for the state’s taxpayers.

The Times article failed to mention that the rate of babies born to incarcerated women has skyrocketed in recent decades, as the female incarceration rate has skyrocketed. U.S. imprisonment has been rising dramatically across the board—we now have the biggest prison population in the world, 1 out of every 100 American adults—but it has been rising much faster for women than men. The female incarceration rate is up 775 percent since 1971, double the rise for men. The single biggest factor in that rise, according to Silja Talvi, author of Women Behind Bars, is the drug war, as I noted in an earlier post.

Again this is an issue worthy of concern whether you’re a bleeding heart or not; imprisonment is expensive. Drug treatment, on the other hand, is cheap.

The Times reporter barely brushed against the other horror of female imprisonment: Most women in prison have been sexually abused. Nearly every one of the hundred or so women Talvi interviewed for her book had been a victim of sexual abuse or domestic violence, and many had been raped. Giving birth can bring the trauma of that experience back to the surface, according to Simkin, who offers special counseling and birth support for abuse survivors.

It will be interesting to track whether the state continues this program and whether it expands it to provide labor support. And keep on eye on whether Washington’s female prisoner population continues to grow. Perhaps as state budgets grow ever tighter, bean counters will notice this huge budget item and see an opportunity.

Got sliced? No health insurance for you

Another way the American birth system and the you’re-on-your-ownership economy rip women off: The New York Times reported this weekend that some insurers are denying health coverage or raising rates on women who’ve had C-sections. With more than 30 percent of all births in the U.S. now ending in C-section—and rising—and more and more people self-employed or freelance and therefore looking for individual health coverage rather than the group coverage sponsored by employers, this potentially affects a huge number of women.

These insurers are being entirely rational. C-sections are hugely expensive compared to vaginal births, and when you’ve had one C-section you’re nearly guaranteed having them in subsequent births. Ninety percent of women with a previous C-section now have repeat C-sections, thanks largely to guidelines issued in 1999 by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that strongly discouraged vaginal birth after caesarean, So a woman who has had a C-section does represent a risk of heightened medical costs. Insurers, like the rational capitalists they are, seek to off-load that risk, just as employers seek to offload risk to workers by hiring them on a freelance basis, without offering health coverage.

The insurers may be acting rationally, but the larger medical system is crazy. If capitalism worked the way it’s supposed to work, “the market” in its infinite wisdom would push C-sections to a minimum, perhaps lower than the WHO recommended maximum of 15 percent. Instead, the C-section rate keeps rising.

Despite mythology about women who are “too posh to push,” this rate is not driven by women asking for C-sections. A 2005 survey by Childbirth Connection found that only one woman among the 1600 polled said that she’d had a C-section at her own request for no medical reason. On the other hand, one quarter of those polled reported feeling pressured by a medical professional to have a C-section. And then they pay for it, in a high rate of infection of the incision, extended recovery and pain in comparison to vaginal birth, risks of injury to the baby, greater difficulty initiating breastfeeding, and greater risks of breathing problems in the baby—and finally in a loss of insurance coverage.

Ponder market insanities like this when presidential candidate John McCain advocates pushing our medical system even further into the 'free' market (you can go to his site if you're willing to translate the rhetoric into English, but Elizabeth Edwards' explanation of his plan is a whole lot more direct).