Killing us not so softly

So “we’re” not in a recession, I’m told. Maybe the NPR announcers and Yale economists aren’t in a recession, but a lot of the rest of us are. Some of us have been in a recession for decades.

Grim evidence of this came for me this weekend in the New York Times, which reported on new research that finds that, for in many parts of the country, and especially for women, life expectancy has actually been falling for the last thirty years. As the article noted, this is almost unheard of in an industrialized nation, and reverses what had been “an American birthright” that each generation would live longer than the last.

If this news came from some other country, there would be much cluck-clucking among the U.S.’ chattering classes. Declining longevity is a sign that things have gone drastically wrong in a society. It is usually seen in countries riven by civil war or economic collapse—think Russia after the collapse of communism, Argentina after its World Bank–aided economic meltdown, Zimbabwe after Mugabe’s disastrous ouster of farmers, or Iraq after the U.S. invasion. And when whole portions of a country start living less long than others, you’ve got a society pulling apart at the seams.

There is no longer a single “we,” but indeed two—or more—Americas. No wonder news anchors can find it credible to report that we’re not in a recession—what do they know of the Southwest Virginia counties where women can now expect to live six years less than they did 16 years ago?

Even in its admirable reporting on this, the New York Times betrays its class-inflected blindness. “A pair of reports out this month affirm that the rising tide of American health is not lifting all boats”—plenty of American have never seen any such rising tide of health, only a rising tide of medical bills.

The Times article didn’t offer much insight into why women are doing so badly. It did mention that smoking peaked later among women than men. What else? I speculate that it has something to do with the fact that women have been bearing the weight of America’s failure to come to terms with the transformation of the family. Women are shouldering largely unaided the burden of raising children and all the stress that comes with it, without either social supports or the support of traditional family structures. Think long work hours, low wages, lack of healthcare, and high childcare costs for often inadequate or crummy care (and meanwhile we get blamed for it all). Just thinking about it shaves a few years off my life.

Yanking babies from their mothers' breasts

It goes without saying that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is one creepy outfit. It takes its sexism so far that it amounts to an allegory: Its polygamy not only requires abuse of its girl children, but turns a large number of its boys into so much surplus to be gotten rid of. As the New York Times reported, the church brutally expels many of its teenage boys from the community, into a world they hardly know.

Yet I can’t count the ways the raid on the Texas compound of the FLDS outrages me. Let me start with the one that hits closest to home for me in this week after I gave birth: the separation of nursing mothers from their infants. Any mother, especially one nursing her baby, will tell you that a mother and her infant aren’t truly separate beings. I am connected to my daughter by cords that begin tugging as my breasts fill, within as little as an hour or two. To break these cords is to do irreparable violence to both mother and child.

Lawyers for the FLDS women asked the judge overseeing the arrangements for the children to grant a restraining order allowing mothers of babies under one to remain with their babies. Get what the judge said when she refused:

[Judge] Walther acknowledged the nutritional and bonding benefits of breast-feeding.
"But every day in this country, we have mothers who go back to work after six weeks of maternity leave," she said.

Apparently our broader mistreatment of mothers justifies mistreatment of these infants and mothers. Here again we seem to have entered the realm of allegory.

Texas Child Protective Services showed equally impeccable logic. "Our main thing is to protect children from abuse and neglect,” said a spokesperson. I fail to see what you can call separating a nursing infant from its mother besides abuse and neglect.

Walther later reversed her decision. That didn’t help the hundreds of older children wrenched from their mothers. With so many children to place, the system was overwhelmed, undermining CPS’ claim that it was acting to protect the children.

The scale of this case and the glaring failure to plan for it have grabbed attention. Perhaps the fact that the FLDS-ers are white helped too. Children of color are disproportionately likely to be placed in the child welfare system. African Americans make up 37 percent of the children in foster care, yet they represent only 15 percent of American children. To remove a child from its parents is to calculate that the risk of harm from leaving the child with its parents is so dire as to overbalance the terrible harm the removal itself inevitably causes. The racial disparities in those decisions suggest that disruption of African American families counts for less than disruption of white families. The huge numbers of children swept into our child protection system—vastly more than in European countries—suggest an unwillingness to look at fixing the systemic ways America fails to support parents. Why can’t we, say, provide secure, decent housing or drug treatment to mothers rather than dump their children into the foster care system? Why can’t we help women escape from the abusive, patriarchal clutches of the FLDS, rather than treating the women themselves as criminals and their children as so much detritus? And, indeed, why can’t we provide paid parental leave so that women can nurse their babies?

Little lady, you don't need equal pay; you need more school

How insulting is this? Senate Republicans this week killed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, saying it would result in too many lawsuits. Um, like, yeah, only if corporations discriminate against women. Sheesh.
It gets worse. John McCain didn’t bother to show up for the vote. Instead, he pontificated from New Orleans that the solution to disproportionate female poverty isn’t the right to sue to enforce equal pay laws, but—check it—better education and training for women. Can you get more condescending?

Mom’s Rising suggests women send him our resumes to give him a little reality check on our skill levels.

A high-finance interlude

Having given birth last week, I feel the need to write about something that has nothing to do with babies or even children. Enough about poopy diapers, sore nipples, and sleep for a minute; let’s take a relaxing break with a little high finance. And here’s my chance to give another shout out to Andrew Leonard of Salon’s How the World Works, this time for a sensible suggestion on the current financial mess.

“Nationalize the rating agencies!” he says, and it makes my heart swell. Leonard explains that when in 1970 the SEC decided to penalize brokers for holding less-than-investment-grade bonds, it designated three private firms as official bond-rating agencies, effectively outsourcing its regulatory responsibility. This created a glaring conflict of interest:

The creators of new securities pay the agencies to get their "paper" rated. But if they don't get the Aaa "investment-grade" rating that they desire from one agency, they might just take their business to another. The structural imperative of the market forced the ratings agencies to give everyone a gold star.

So, says Leonard, let’s insource the ratings game. With the financial wizards of the “free” market showing themselves incompetent to understand the very things they were buying and selling, the claim that the free market is wiser than government rings particularly hollow right now. As Leonard notes, nationalizing the credit-rating agencies might actually save us taxpayers some money, by forestalling more bailouts of investment banks.

Which brings us back to children and babies, since it’s our kids who will be paying off the national debt incurred from things like bailing out Bear Stearns. Really, it’s like the Kevin Bacon game—everything comes back to poopy diapers. They are, after all, where we all begin and end.

Happy Equal Pay Day!

And you thought tax day was a bummer: (un)Happy Equal Pay Day to you all! (It's actually tomorrow, but let's get a jumpstart on the, um, celebrations.) This is how far into the next year all us women would have had to work to equal a man’s wages for 2007. And it gets worse; if you’re a mom you’re not there yet. You’ll have to keep working through May to catch up. (By which time you’re that much further behind a man on this year’s wages and raises. And next year’s worse, and so on.)

But don’t get down; get outraged. The ACLU and others are using the date to drum up support for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would undo last year’s awful Supreme Court decision eviscerating anti-discrimination law. The Supremes ruled that the statute of limitations on suing for pay discrimination kicks in from the first unequal paycheck, even though most victims don’t find out about it until much later. That’s just what happened to Lilly Ledbetter (love the name), who learned only years into her job at Goodyear that she was paid less than her male colleagues, when a colleague slipped her an anonymous note.

Congress is set to vote this week on the bill. Go to the National Women’s Law Center for numbers and script for calling your senators, or to email them.

Something in New Mexico's water?

Another crack in the it’s-our-crazy-hormones theory of women’s minds:

As the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog notes, a Center for Disease Control survey has found that postpartum depression is much more commonly experienced by women who also experienced emotional, traumatic, partner-related, and financial stressors during pregnancy, and those who were physically abused during pregnancy were more likely to report symptoms of depression. Women who were younger, less-educated, and who received Medicaid at the time of delivery were also more likely to report symptoms. And rates of reported symptoms of depression varied from 11.7 percent in Maine on up to 20.4 percent in New Mexico. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, poverty also correlates with higher rates of postpartum depression.)

No surprises here, except you should be surprised if you believe the line that postpartum depression just is a hormone imbalance. If postpartum depression is a hormone imbalance, is there something in the water in New Mexico that sends hormones out of whack? And exactly how do receiving Medicaid and not having a Harvard diploma cause hormone imbalances? And if they do, just how relevant is the hormone imbalance to the problem?

To be clear, I’m not arguing that hormones play no role in postpartum depression. I’m sure they do. But I’m not sure which is the cart and which the horse—are whacked-out hormone levels the cause or the effect of being depressed, or some bit actor in the causal drama? I find the theory that our mental lives just are flows of chemistry to be incoherent. Maybe emotions feel like they’re about things in the world at least largely because they are. Like maybe it’s hard to be a mother in this society, and that can get a woman down, even make her crazy.

Children of single mothers in China don't exist

If you think it’s hard being a single mother in this country, check out the recent NY Times article on single mothers in China, where it’s very nearly illegal to be a single mother. Or rather it’s illegal to be the child of a single mother. These children don’t even have the right to go to school or get any kind of social services, because that requires a man signing off on documents as his father. Talk about existential patriarchy—a child doesn’t exist in China unless a man says so.

This kind of reminds me of those anti-homelessness ordinances in this country that allow people to be arrested for sleeping in the street, etc. Those laws make it illegal to exist if you’re homeless. I guess you’re supposed to just dematerialize if you’re homeless in this country or the child of a single mother in China.

Jersey passes landmark paid family leave

No more New Jersey jokes for me, ever. Jersey this week became the third state in the nation to pass paid parental leave legislation and Governor Jon Corzine, a strong supporter of the bill, is expected to sign it any day. As of July 2009, parents in New Jersey will be able take up to six weeks paid leave to care for a newborn, newly adopted child or a seriously ill family member while receiving up to two-thirds of their salary (up to a maximum of $524 weekly). The leave will be funded by a 0.09 percent tax on workers' salaries that would amount to an average of roughly $33 a year.

There are some disquieting oddities in this law. According to the Philadelphia Business Journal,

Under the legislation, workers would have to exhaust maternity and disability leave and would also have to use at least two weeks of sick leave and vacation time prior to taking paid family leave. Workers would also have to give employers prior notice of their intent to take paid family leave and provide a doctor's note. Employers with less than 50 employees would not have to guarantee the jobs of those who take leave would be held.

What if you have no vacation or sick leave? Unlike most of the rest of the world, the U.S. does not require employers to offer paid sick leave, and almost half of private sector employers don’t. Lots of workers don’t get vacation pay either, or get very little. Low-wage workers are least likely to get either kind of leave.

And why a doctor’s note? Just what would the note say? How about: Paid family leave has been found to reduce infant mortality by as much as 20 percent and to make babies more likely to receive regular medical checkups, get immunizations, and be breastfed. I’m not sure most doctors know this. I’ve really had it up to here with our culture’s worship of the authority of doctors.

And of course there are all those people who work for small employers, who under the law wouldn’t have any guarantee that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned from the leave.
Still and all, it’s great news. The U.S. is taking baby steps to join the rest of the civilized world in supporting parenthood.

Until now, California has been a lone trailblazer, the only state to offer paid leave (since 2004). My own state of Washington passed paid family leave last year, but has been struggling to implement and fund it. See my article at Crosscut.

A modest proposal on surrogate motherhood

I’m starting to feel alienated from my peeps over at Mothertalkers. In a recent post, Elisa, one of the editors, responding to a recent Newsweek cover story, put in a plug for surrogate motherhood.

“Despite some people denouncing it as exploitive, it made me think the opposite: I would consider becoming a surrogate for my closest family or friends. Also, if I needed the additional income, I could think of many worse ways to make money than give this wonderful gift to another couple.”

A number of readers chimed in to say they’d do it too.

Let’s just look at the economics first. Did anyone notice how little surrogate mothers get paid? According to the Newsweek article, about $20,000—for working 9 months, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That’s way less than minimum wage. Considering the major wear and tear on your body a pregnancy and delivery entail—never mind emotional toll and other sentimental nonsense—that is a raw deal. I have a modest proposal: Let’s open up the market in women’s bodies for surrogacy. But women should be paid a fair rate for their 9-months-long, 24-7 labor. Seems to me star athletes’ pay makes a pretty fair guideline, as both are highly physical endeavors that require utter commitment of mind and body, quickly take a lot out of you, and leave you unable to practice the trade for more than a few years. So let’s set a floor of, oh, say, $1 million per pregnancy.

How crass, many will protest. Most of those who commented at Mothertalkers and said they’d be surrogates seemed to be saying they’d do it for something other than the money. Fine. That’s a different matter. Let people make heroic gifts (and I too just might consider being a surrogate for a sister or intimate friend). But then crass contract law should have no part in the matter. A gift is something freely given, and one can change one’s mind about making a gift at any moment. So no court should then turn around and treat such a surrogacy arrangement as binding. Anything different is rank dishonesty, using the traditional glorification of self-sacrifice in women to reinforce the power imbalance created by economic inequality—all in order to enforce contracts for the buying and selling of women’s bodies.

There are lots of creepy oddities of the practice exposed in the Newsweek article. For one, a huge number of surrogates are military wives, and while the article suggests this belies the stereotype of surrogates as ignorant and impoverished, I don't see it that way. The modest $20,000 pay of a surrogate is more than the entire yearly base pay of many of the wives' military husbands; don't tell me these people aren't poor and vulnerable. Another reason military wives make up such a large chunk of surrogates suggests that vulnerability and lack of earning power play a big role:

"Military wives can't sink their teeth into a career because they have to move around so much," says Melissa Brisman of New Jersey, a lawyer who specializes in reproductive and family issues, and heads the largest surrogacy firm on the East Coast. "But they still want to contribute, do something positive. And being a carrier only takes a year—that gives them enough time between postings."

And finally, there's health care. Military wives have generous government-provided health coverage. While they're supposed to tell the insurance companies about their surrogacy arrangements, so their payments can be deducted from coverage, there's no penalty for not telling and no incentive for telling. Efforts to cut off coverage for medical procedures related to surrogacy failed last year, and there are no data on how much the public is paying for this coverage. However much it is, we—you, me, and the rest of America's taxpayers—are subsidizing surrogacy for a well-off few. Next time someone extols surrogacy as a case of free enterprise that shouldn't be repressed, tell them it sounds about as free-market as the Bear Stearns bailout.

I think I might be for a free market if I ever saw one.

It's our fault, installment #5,727

I’ve always kind of liked Salon’s Andrew Leonard, of How the World Works, but now I have a warm fuzzy feeling for him for defending moms against a weird attack from biologist E.O. Wilson.

Just when you thought there wasn’t anything new to blame mothers for, Wilson says “soccer moms are the greatest enemy in modern life of natural history and proper biological education.” By “soccer moms” Wilson means mothers who take their children to arboretums, aquariums, zoos, and natural history museums, where living things are labeled and corralled—which I guess means I’m a soccer mom and so are a huge chunk of mothers. “The worst thing you can do to a child, in my opinion, is take them on a hike through a botanical garden where there are the names of the trees on the side.”

Sure, I agree with Wilson (and Rachel Carson) that setting children free to explore untrammeled nature without labels or cages is the best way to ignite their curiosity about the natural world. But labeled and penned nature has its place too.

As Leonard scathingly notes, there are, like, far, far worse things one can do to a child than take her to an arboretum. Wilson proves himself not only a jerk but a passive-aggressive weenie when he prefaces his labeling of this problem “the soccer mom syndrome” by saying “I hope I'm not offending anyone.” Says Leonard:

If you're going to classify a group of women (and what about the soccer dads, huh, where's their ring of hell?) as "the greatest enemy" of anything, then you might as well take full pleasure in your offensiveness. Because anyone who gets upset isn't going to be assuaged by hearing that you "hope" you're not being an insufferable twit.

Quite.

Pregnancy and punishment

In a taste of things to come in the general election, the right-wing has pounced on remarks Barack Obama made about teen pregnancy. Here’s what Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Pennsylvania last weekend:

"I’ve got two daughters; 9 years old and 6 years old,” Obama said. “I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.

According to the Carpetbagger Report, Sean Hannity, a correspondent for Pat Robertson’s TV show, Hugh Hewitt, and some right-wing blogs are attacking Obama for suggesting that having a baby is “punishment.”

As a pregnant woman (now for the second time), let me school Hannity and Co.: Pregnancy is seriously intense, a takeover of one’s body by an alien being. If you want to be pregnant, it’s a miracle. If you don’t, it’s akin to a nine-month-long rape. And then there’s the child at the end of it. Absolutely, being forced to bear a child unwillingly is a punishment, indeed a life sentence.

Here’s to Obama for seeing this truth and speaking about it. Still, I don’t care for his assumption that getting pregnant as a teenager must be the result of a “mistake.” If he means it would have to result from some error in using birth control, he’s just wrong on the facts. No method of birth control is fail-safe. If he means the mistake was having sex—and given his use of code words about teaching “values and morals” I have to assume that’s what he did mean—I think he’s wrong too, in a deeper way. I don’t see sex as immoral. I see the hatred of the body, and of bodily pleasure, especially of the female body and female pleasure, that underlies most preaching of chastity as a far bigger moral failing than exploring bodily pleasure, even as a teenager. Sure, there are lots of pitfalls to teen sex, high on the list being the risks it poses to girls from misogynist boys, a misogynist culture, and, oh yeah, the difficulty of obtaining birth control and abortion thanks to right-wingers like Hannity and Co.

Fairness to Obama requires noting that he wasn't primarily talking about abortion. He was responding to a question about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.

I do not heart Christine Hassler

It’s not okay to keep quiet about being pregnant when interviewing for a job, says Christine Hassler at the HuffPo. In fact, she says you should mention it in the first interview.

I guess jobless pregnant women should just roll over and give up, then. Because I’m here to tell Hassler that if you ‘fess up about being pregnant in your first interview, you will not get the job. I have to conclude that in Hassler’s world nobody’s broke and pregnant. In her world, every pregnant woman has a sugar daddy (or a trust fund).

Hassler tells us to put ourselves in the employer’s shoes. I would if I could afford them without a job. In my cheap shoes, what I see is a context of discrimination against mothers and a major imbalance of power between a job seeker—especially a female, pregnant one—and employers. Employers don’t do much trying on of my shoes. If they did, they might think more creatively about the benefits of accommodating pregnant employees—such as access to a broader talent pool who, in exchange for a short-term inconvenience, may become long-term assets to firms. In this world, employers don’t think like that. Most view pregnant women more negatively than they do other employees who may require short-term leaves. In fact, it's not uncommon for a woman to lose her job for getting pregnant, putting her on the job market at an inopportune moment. So I don’t see any obligation to wallow in empathy for prospective employers.

I do think it’s sensible to mention your pregnancy early on, before you’ve started work. I suggest mentioning pregnancy after you’ve gotten the job offer. As the lawyer Hassler cites mentions, this provides you with some protection from discrimination. It’s playing hard ball, but let’s get real here. That’s the work world, especially for a mother. Quit preaching masochism and telling me to throw like a girl. I’ve got a kid to feed.

(Shame on Mothertalkers too for agreeing with Hassler. I guess they haven’t tried on those jobless-and-pregnant shoes, either.)