You will learn from this experience, or else

At a dinner party last night, we got into a discussion about what country it would be most educational to take children to. A friend who’s a former teacher mentioned she’d taken a group of high school students to Poland about ten years ago. To which my partner responded, “Poland? Poland? You could have gone to any European country and you chose Poland?”

Sorry, Poles and Pole-philes, no offense, but Warsaw just doesn’t have the allure of Rome or Barcelona or even London. Too many Soviet-era concrete high rises. Learning about WWII and the concentration camps was a major reason behind our friend’s decision to take the kids there, but as my partner noted, teens aren’t likely to be transformed by a trip to Auschwitz if they are dragged there against their will. Which is an important truth about education in general—you can't make a person learn. Education happens when a teacher somehow taps into a student’s desire to learn.

So here’s a fun game: Where would you take a group of American children for an educational trip of, say, a week? My vote: Cuba. Why? It’s a dramatically different culture from ours, with a dramatically different economic system that has been vilified in this country, yet despite poverty has achieved remarkable successes. Such as healthcare for all and literacy for all. And, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of cheap oil imports, Cuba transitioned major elements of its economy away from oil (including by moving toward organic agriculture on a large scale). Plus it’s warmer than Poland, with better music. And cooler cars. Lectures on economic systems and oil use go down better when they’re followed by sunbathing.

What travels did you find transformative, readers?

Texas can't take FLDS kids away, says court

Update on the Texas Fundamental Latter Day Saints case, in which over 400 babies and children were seized and sent to foster care all over the enormous state of Texas:

On Thursday, an appellate court ruled that there was no evidence that the children were in immediate danger of physical or sexual abuse. (Which seems right to me; it’s when the girls hit puberty that they’re in danger, not at age 1 or 5, as most of these children were, and in any case they’re in danger from their fathers and the church’s fathers, not their mothers.) If the ruling holds, the state’s case falls apart.

Can’t call this exactly a happy ending, as mothers interviewed by The New York Times said they’d go back to the ranch and the ultra-patriarchal cult that runs it. But it is a victory for justice, denying the government the power to separate children from mothers except where there’s clear evidence of immediate harm, even if they belong to a despised group, whether it’s poor black folk, dramatically over-represented in foster cases, or a misogynist cult. Here’s hoping the decision has ramifications beyond this lurid case.

Australia moves closer to paid family leave

The U.S. has just moved closer to solo spot on an ignominious list: The U.S. and Australia alone among industrialized nations fail to offer paid parental leave, and last week an Australian government panel held hearings on implementing paid leave. It’s unclear when Australia would get the leave, but the recently elected Labor government has supported paid leave.

Under one plan being floated, mothers would get six months paid leave and fathers four weeks. I don’t like the gender bias of that, but that’s quibbling. It’s a vast improvement over the current Australian scheme, which grants families a payment of $5,000 on the birth of a child. Because of this credit, some sources already put the U.S. as alone in failing to give paid parental leave. That’s incorrect, because the baby credit is very different from paid leave, and it’s important to understand why.

A child credit was a major plank—the most expensive plank—in the Republican Party’s Contract with America back in the ‘90s. Whereas paid leave from one’s job empowers women, enabling them to stay in the paid labor market, child credits, like Australia’s or the Contract with America’s, are payments to families and in no way alter the barriers to mothers’ employment. In fact, they can encourage women to stay out of the paid labor market, further reinforcing gender role specialization within families and therefore the imbalance in power between women who specialize in unpaid caring labor and men who specialize in paid labor.

Another way to look at it is that paid parental leave reduces the economic penalty for child rearing, whereas child credits are rewards for breeding (and since they go as much to fathers who don’t engage in caregiving as to mothers, or fathers, who do, they reward a merely biological function). People who choose not to breed—and who might do so for admirable reasons, such as not contributing to the overpopulation of the world—might rightly resent such bias. Paid leave reduces a tilt in the playing field, while child credits increase the tilt toward traditional families and inequality within them.

Cold bars, blue eye shadow, and the price of not snitching

This story broke my heart: In one of those “heartwarming” Mother’s Day stories, a reporter went to a Southern California youth prison to cover a special visiting day for the inmates from their children. A nonprofit had even provided free transportation for families. “The eager moms pulled their hair into neat pony tails, borrowed their favorite blue eye shadow and ironed the only clothes they own as they primped for a visit from their young children.” But only one child showed up.

It gets worse: Father’s Day is always more crowded than Mother’s Day.

The imprisonment of women is skyrocketing, up 775 percent since 1977, rising at double the rate of men. The single biggest factor in that rise, according to Silja Talvi, author of Women Behind Bars is the drug war, with its mandatory minimum sentencing, the resulting pressure to snitch to avoid those sentences, and the fact that women are less likely to snitch than men. “Prosecutors will come to them and say they will go to prison unless they give up the names of three higher-ups, but women usually either say they don't know those people or will simply decline. Men will snitch and, unfortunately, they often get less time in prison than women who don't,” Talvi says. And then men get visits from their kids and women don’t.

Just in case you weren’t already totally bummed:

Nearly every woman I interviewed (around 100) had a serious history of trauma or abuse in her life, emotional abuse or sexual abuse or domestic violence. Many had been raped. More than a third of the women entering the prison system were homeless.

God, this world is unfair. But there are people like Talvi in it. Talvi scraped and fundraised and spent her own money to get the stories of these women out to the world. And she found women beaten but unbowed:

I also didn't expect the women to be as tremendously resilient as they are. I expected to hear "Help me!" or "I can't take it anymore!" or "I'm going to kill myself!" They didn't do that. ... Instead, they often said, "This isn't just about me" ... they have a real sense of responsibility for each other.

The amazing, indispensable female body

Happy Mother's Day!

I've just discovered another couple of cool sites relevant to this blog: The Women’s Bioethics Project blog and the Center for Genetics and Society. For all those of you either thinking of keep the wolf at the door at bay by donating eggs or those who might use donated eggs, the CGS tracks the ethics and science of egg donation, among other topics. Bottom line: egg donation is painful and dangerous, much more so than the companies that harvest eggs let on. Apparently the latest industry effort to expand its business is trying to convince women to harvest their eggs and freeze them for procreation later, when they’ve established their careers. Don’t go for it, this site suggests. Stick with the old-fashioned form of impregnation.

Doing away with the need for women’s bodies is a long fantasy of science fiction and indeed of science. But the Women’s Bioethics Project explains, along with lots of other topics, the difficulty of creating an artificial womb. Although we’re often treated to news stories that assume we are the products of genes alone—that we are our genes—more and more scientific research is demonstrating the indispensability of the whole maternal body for creating a baby. Quoting another blogger, the site reports that we’re many decades off from a successful “human uterine replicator” (and that might be optimistic). “Even once we've sorted out the technical aspects of the womb itself, we'll have to deal with what the rest of the mother's body contributes to development.” (Which, by the way, has important implications for surrogacy. Even though, post–Baby M, most surrogates carry babies that are not genetically related to them, the importance of the gestating body to development suggests that the surrogate has to be regarded as biologically related to the baby she carried, and therefore she has some parental rights.)

Déjà vu all over again. We’re always hearing that the female body is defective and could be readily improved upon by science. Except whenever it's put to the test, technology falls short of the old-fashioned female body. Remember how formula was supposed be as good and maybe even superior to breast milk? Then scientists began discovering myriad ways that mother’s milk is better than any artificial milk. Same thing, apparently, with gestation. Doesn’t look like us moms will be obsolete any time soon. (In case you were worried.) Happy Mother’s Day—you’re amazing!

Children are parasites?

When I recently published an article at Crosscut.com on Washington state’s landmark paid family leave legislation (only the second in the nation), readers’ responses were striking. Two-thirds of comments expressed the same feeling: the legislation is “a token for the irresponsible,” a “confiscation of my tax dollars” for “social parasites.” One reader even called the legislation morally depraved.

Putting aside the extreme language and not terribly coherent arguments (“If you can't take the time to raise a child why are you having one?”—the point is precisely to enable parents to take time to care for their newborns), I think these comments reveal an important and deeply American strain of thought. The line of thinking goes something like this: Individualism is the ideal state, we shouldn’t be fostering dependency, people are responsible for themselves and their own children, and don’t ask the rest of us for handouts.

This line of thinking has some appeal—I value individualism and independence myself. But independence is an achievement, attained only temporarily in the middle of life by even the luckiest of us. Somehow I just know that these letter writers were men, and men who have forgotten that they got to their enviably independent state only thanks to years of care by their mothers (and probably many others). (And who probably have wives who do their laundry, cook their food, and maybe type their manuscripts.) I’d say the real social parasites are all of us on our unpaid mothers. So if you have a distaste for this kind of social parasitism, consistency requires you to support test tube gestation and the raising of children in dormitories by well-paid professionals. Or you don’t mind the human race ceasing to exist. Or—phew—how about a little paid family leave?

I tend to think people like the letter writers don’t mind dependency—of their wives on them, for example—and it’s in fact the independence social supports like paid family leave foster in women that discomfits them. I’d like to ask the reader who wrote that “I for one am not planning on being a social parasite in my dotage” who he thinks will be paying for his Social Security. In fact, it’s those who are children now (it’s a politically useful myth that we each pay for our own Social Security).

I may mock this kind of thinking, but it has a powerful hold in America, and loosing its grip is crucial and difficult.

Giving up baby

What is it with this moment that it produces these so-called feminist movies about women giving up babies? First Juno and now Baby Mama, a movie about a woman and the surrogate she hires.

I haven’t seen Baby Mama, so I’ll withhold judgment on the movie itself. But I do think it’s striking that, just as with Juno, this movie is being celebrated for its strong female heroines and feminist sensibility—yet the core of the plot is the use of one woman’s body to produce a baby for another. And it appears that the movie traffics in the same clichés about gender and class as Juno did—rich, uptight, sterile career woman versus uninhibited, low-class, fertile girl/woman. Both movies seem to use a veneer of feminism—and, particularly insidious, of supposed female solidarity—to purvey deeper anti-feminist messages. We are still in the backlash.

The commentary on Baby Mama also recycles the class-blindered idea that we’re in the grip of an obsession with babies. It may be true that for women of a certain age and class—the same chattering class that writes the reviews—becoming a parent is a current challenge and obsession. But that hardly makes it a culture-wide issue.

The subhead for Salon’s review of Baby Mama called it “this spoof of our child-centric culture.” In a similar vein, an article on the recent surge in the U.S. birthrate quoted Nan Marie Astone, associate professor of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University. "Americans like children. We are the only people who respond to prosperity by saying, 'Let's have another kid,'" she told the AP.

Where was I when the notion that America is child-loving and child-focused culture became conventional wisdom? Where did anyone get this idea? An American child is 79 times more likely to be a victim of abuse than a Swedish child and two to three times more likely to live in poverty than a child in other industrialized nation, We offer no national paid family leave, have no nationally supported system of early childhood education, require employers to give no sick leave or vacation, and have no rules requiring equity in rates of pay for part-time work. How exactly are we child-loving?