Rock the Cradle

Realigning the C-section incentives

2009-08-06T12:21:00.001-07:00

Check out my new piece on Crosscut about steps Washington state is taking to reduce C-sections by, as President Obama would say, "realigning incentives. It's on the homepage right now; find the permalink here.

Parade's push for child care

2009-07-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

Parade, that feminist rag. Who knew? Perhaps only the unassailably bland newspaper insert could get away with such an unapologetic insistence on the critical need for affordable, high-quality child care, calling it not just a crisis, but a 25-year-old one that is past due for solving.

The choice of anecdotes to lead “The New Push for Quality Child Care” with is deft: Timisha Daniels describes leaving the work force after having a child, deciding that child care would eat up too much of her salary and not trusting child care much anyway. Now her husband is laid off, she’s been struggling to find work, and she wishes she had made a different decision. The story neatly, but gently, illustrates the economic forces that steer women to ever so reasonably enter traps.

The author puts America’s refusal to provide social benefits to mothers in unflattering context by explaining that, “In European nations, high-quality child care, especially for 3- to 6-year-olds, is seen as a right of citizenship. Governments view it as an investment in the nation’s future, and excellent facilities with top-notch care are plentiful,” and noting that the only countries that fail to offer paid parental leave besides the U.S. are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, Liberia, and Swaziland.

Gotta love the blithe sweep of “experts on family issues and child development say the realities of the 21st century demand” social support for child care. (Finally, a journalist uses “experts say” to good ends.) None of this is really groundbreaking, except that after all these decades of day care horror stories and the assumption that child care is a necessary evil, it’s a delight to read so unwavering a disposal of all that. In Parade!

It’s all a little less surprising if you notice that the author is Leslie Bennetts, former New York Times reporter, Vanity Fair contributing writer, and author of The Feminine Mistake, one of the recent salvos in the quote unquote Mommy Wars. Here’s the blurb on the book:

…Women are constantly told that it’s simply too difficult to balance work and family. Not only is this untrue, Bennetts says, but the arguments in favor of stay-at-home motherhood also fail to consider the dangers of dependency and the difficulty of reentering the workforce after opting out. When women sacrifice their financial autonomy by quitting their jobs, they become vulnerable to divorce as well as the potential illness, death, or unemployment of their breadwinner husbands.

Timisha Daniels, exhibit A.

"Nonworking parents"?

2009-07-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting this letter published in The New York Times. But as The Daily Show* would say, who needs the old media? I have a blog!

Therefore:

To the editor:
A phrase in the July 5 article “Safety Net Is Fraying for the Very Poor” made me scratch my head. “Nonworking families with children”? As a parent of two small children, I know that no parent is nonworking. I think the phrase the reporter was looking for was “nonearning parents.”

This isn’t just semantics. Accepting that parenting is a socially valuable job that the market fails to remunerate implies providing social benefits to parents, such as paid family leave and what you might call parental wages—welfare without the stigma, without the punitive restrictions and narrow time limits, and with benefits robust enough to actually remove becoming a parent from the list of leading causes of poverty spells. This would mean a repudiation of welfare reform’s insistence on “pushing single mothers into jobs” (as if they didn’t by definition already have them), a policy whose shortcomings your article highlighted.

* Ridiculing newspaper reporters for...using land lines? Excuse me, but just where does Jon Stewart get the loads of good information that go into his monologues? The New York Times and other sources of "aged news." Criticize The New York Times for its failures of journalism, like boosting the case for the Iraq War (which the Daily Show did, briefly), but not for using land lines. (How many times has your cell phone dropped a call--do you want to be the reporter getting the big scoop from a whispering source and having to say, "Can you repeat that louder? What was that? You're breaking up"? Let's hear if for land lines.) This segment was juvenile, unfunny, and plain old mean.

Breastfeeding a crime?

2009-07-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

If you thought staying home was the way to avoid being hassled for breastfeeding, watch out for BWI. That’s Breastfeeding While Intoxicated, and apparently it’s a crime, even when done in the privacy of your home. A North Dakota woman was jailed after cops were called to her house on a report of domestic violence, when she appeared drunk and she nursed her baby in front of them. Now the woman is in jail, facing up to five years in prison, and her nursing baby has been taken away from her.

Comments from one of the cops suggests that it wasn’t the drunkenness that got her arrested. It was the breastfeeding. Grand Forks Police Lt. Rahn Farder told the AP, "It is quite unusual for a mother to be breastfeeding her child as we are conducting an investigation, whether she was intoxicated or not." It actually sounds like good parenting in a very stressful circumstance. With cops bursting in and a man possibly having just beaten up the mother, the baby was probably screaming her head off, and there isn’t any better way I know to quiet and soothe an upset baby than breastfeeding.

While it’s probably not healthy for a nursing baby’s mother to be repeatedly intoxicated, there’s no evidence that breastfeeding during a single episode of drunkenness harms a baby at all, as a doctor blogging at Skeptical OB notes. On the other hand, the doctor says, feeding a baby a bottle while drunk actually might be harmful, because mixing formula in the wrong proportions could harm a baby. Yet all the details of the story suggest that the police would not have arrested her if she had been feeding the baby a bottle.

And of course separating a nursing baby from its mother is clearly harmful.

According to Salon, the cops didn’t do a blood alcohol test on either the mother or the baby.

What about the domestic violence that brought the cops to the house? The boyfriend who was likely the cause of the mom’s beat-up face was not charged. And people wonder why women don’t report domestic violence more often.

The mother has apparently pleaded guilty to the charges, which suggests she had a very bad lawyer. The case reeks. Where’s an ambulance-chaser when you need one? ACLU, somebody, sue the pants off that police department.

BTW: Love the Skeptical OB on this story and her point about Americans’ inability to assess relative risk (including her dig about the risk of putting kids in automobiles). She’s got some whiggy ideas about homebirth, though. I suspect she’s using bad data on homebirth safety—I look forward to checking into it.

Health care reform and midwives

2009-06-24T22:12:00.000-07:00

Below find an open letter from Suzy Myers, midwife and women’s health care pioneer. Certified Professional Midwives, whom she represents, are the midwives who practice independently, outside of hospitals, i.e. at home births or freestanding birth centers. The other kind of midwife is nurse midwives, who largely practice in hospitals. If CPMs are federally recognized, covered by Medicaid, and become more widely used, the U.S. could save millions, perhaps billions, of dollars on childbirth while improving care.

June 20, 2009

We are at a moment in history that could affect the future of midwifery for decades. We have the opportunity to positively influence health care legislation to ensure access to midwifery care or be left behind as details of a reformed system are established in law in the next few months.

The M.A.M.A. campaign is a historic coalition of the key midwifery and consumer organizations in the U.S. unified behind the goal of achieving federal recognition of Certified Professional Midwives. Our specific goal in the next weeks is inserting an amendment into the health care bills that are moving through congress right now to mandate Medicaid coverage for CPM services on the federal level.

This multi-faceted campaign is being directed by a steering committee of dedicated volunteers, and paid staff: an experienced lobbyist in Washington D.C. , campaign coordinator and a project consultant with national health care reform experience and connections.

This week Amber Ulvenes, MAWS lobbyist and midwifery consumer, and I are participating in a country-wide “fly-in” of midwives and advocates to DC to work with the campaign’s federal lobbyist to amend this language into the Senate Finance bill when it goes to committee mark-up the week of June 22nd.

In addition to mobilizing grass roots support, right now funds are urgently needed to sustain this work through the next few months when legislation is being drafted.

What you can do:
1. If you are a midwife, talk with each of your current clients about the M.A.M.A. campaign. Give them the link to the web site: http://www.mamacampaign.or g/. Ask them to sign up, endorse, give money and volunteer to pitch in. If you have an e-list of past clients, please send a personal message asking for their support and directing them to the web site.

2. Send this message to everyone you think supports increased access to midwifery care and ask them to join the M.A.M.A. campaign and donate.

3. Sign up yourself! Numbers count. Dollars count. This is a moment when we must mobilize all available resources!

Thank you,
Suzy Myers
Midwives Association of Washington State Board of Directors
National Association of Certified Professional Midwives Board of Directors

Childbirth: the low-hanging fruit of health care reform

2009-06-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Quick, what’s the number one reason to be hospitalized in this country? Heart attack? Car accident? Here’s a hint: It’s not a disease. It’s not even an injury.

The answer is childbirth. And what’s the most common operating room procedure? C-section.

Given that 85 percent of women give birth and it’s no secret how 240 million Americans arrived in the world, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Nor should it really be a surprise that maternal and newborn charges are far and away the nation’s number one hospital cost, $86 billion in 2006, according to Childbirth Connections. Given all this, you’d think that, as talk of health care reform, and especially containing health care costs, fills the media, childbirth would be a major topic.

You’d be wrong. I haven’t read a peep about it in all the newspaper and magazine articles on Obama’s drive to cut health care costs, except for a couple of good articles in USA Today last December, generated by a report from Childbirth Connections.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the ways the country pays too much for the wrong kind of care. A recent article in the New Yorker made the point that some parts of the country spend much more on medical care than others, without being healthier for it, the moral of the story being that we can cut costs while improving care. Obama reportedly passed this article around to members of Congress (hallelujah, an intellectually curious president for a change).

Yet oddly the article didn’t mention childbirth, even though C-section rates vary wildly by region and by hospital, and the nation’s C-section rate is over 30 percent, more than double what the World Health Organization recommends, which is to say that half of all U.S. C-sections are unnecessary. USA Today estimates unnecessary C-sections per year cost the nation at least $2.5 billion a year, but that is surely conservative, given that there are probably 700,000 unnecessary C-sections, each costing at least $5,000 more than a vaginal birth (not to mention the costs from additional medical complications). Add in the other childbirth interventions—such as episiotomies or continuous fetal monitoring—that are routinely done far in excess of what evidence recommends, and there have to be tens of billions of dollars that could be cut from our spending on childbirth each year while improving care.

As a doctor put it to USA Today, "Fortunately, maternity care is a place where good care and good economics come together."

Why aren't other media covering this?

Thank you, Dr. George Tiller

2009-06-05T12:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking all week about George Tiller. As sad and angry—particularly at the negligent law enforcement officers of Wichita—as his murder makes me feel, what I know about George Tiller’s life uplifts me. That there was a man who, knowing he was risking his life, dedicated himself to helping women gives me new love for half the species. Reading the newspaper—yet another story of a man who murdered his children to get back at his ex-wife, or hired someone off Craigslist to rape his wife at gunpoint—I often find myself consumed with misanthropy. (Wrong word, I know—it’s not humanity I’ve got a beef with—but there isn’t the right word. No coincidence, that.)

George Tiller reminds me that while men too often consider women’s freedom a threat to be countered with brutal violence, men are also capable of making the highest sacrifice to defend the right of women to self-determination. Thank you, Dr. Tiller.

Dr. Tiller was one of only four doctors nationwide who provided the kind of late-term abortions he did. As Salon asks, where will women—and sadly, girls—go now?

"We always sent the really tragic cases to Tiller." Those included women diagnosed with cancer who needed abortions to qualify for chemotherapy, women who learned late in their pregnancies that their wanted babies had fatal illnesses, and rape victims so young they didn't realize they were pregnant for months. "We sent him 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds."

To make a donation in Dr. Tiller’s name to the National Network of Abortion Funds, to help provide the kind of health care he did to poor women and women facing major obstacles to getting abortions, go here.

An end to the chain gang?

2009-05-28T22:31:00.000-07:00

Good news for a change, though this is one of those silver linings that come with dark clouds: Last week New York’s legislature passed a bill outlawing the practice of shackling women prisoners during childbirth. The new law will make New York the fourth state to restrict cuffing of women in labor.

Do the math: That means 46 states and the federal government allow this “barbaric and unconscionable” practice (in the words of Senator Velmanette Montgomery, one of the bill’s sponsors), although apparently the feds are taking steps to restrict shackling of laboring prisoners.

It makes you wonder if, huh, it might be men making these policies. Anyone who has ever been in labor knows you gotta move. Forcing women in labor to lie down and lie still is cruel and unusual punishment that increases pain and raises the likelihood of complications harmful to mother and baby. Shackling a woman raising the likelihood a woman may need a C-section and in turn can cause delay when an emergency C-section becomes necessary, delay that can endanger mother and baby.

(Come to think of it, it’s kind of a metaphor for the ordinary treatment of women in labor by the American medical establishment. In fact, not so long ago, women in labor were regularly tied down to hospital beds.)

Back in 2006, when Amnesty International did a study on the phenomenon, the New York Times ran an article on it. It quoted an Arkansas prison spokeswoman (of course they dug up a woman) defending the practice: “Though these are pregnant women, they are still convicted felons, and sometimes violent in nature. There have been instances when we've had a female inmate try to hurt hospital staff during delivery."

In fact, most women in prison (a full 70 percent) are there for nonviolent offenses, and when Amnesty asked prison officials for examples of women trying to escape during labor, they couldn’t come up with a single case.

Yeah, bulletin to prison officials: a woman in labor is busy (that’s why they call it labor). She doesn’t have time or energy to spare on running away.

(Not surprisingly, this news stirred barely a ripple outside the feminist blogosphere. Cheers to Salon and Our Bodies Ourselves’ blog.)

Another related cloud: A lawsuit by an Arkansas prisoner (serving a brief sentence for a nonviolent offense) over her shackling during labor is still wending its way through the courts. A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the claim that the shackling was cruel and unusual punishment, but the ACLU’s National Prison Project successfully demanded a rehearing by the full court. Stay tuned.

Rosin smackdown

2009-05-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

Discovered a new blog today, PhD in Parenting, and found the best researched answer to Hannah Rosin's Case Against Breastfeeding I've yet seen. Check it out.

Premature births in Washington shooting up

2009-05-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

“The rate of premature births is climbing in the United States, with Washington's rise among the steepest in the nation,” shooting up about 30 percent in the last ten years, reports the Seattle Times. Who knew? Why Washington? I can’t imagine, and want to hear more.

There’s lots more that’s intriguing in the article, including this: “Breast-feeding premature babies within the first hour of birth boosts their survival, as does skin-to-skin contact.” And yet I know that these are not the practices of our local hospitals, including the hospital with one of the busiest birth units, which touts itself as Seattle's state-of-the-art place to give birth—Swedish First Hill. A woman I know who was trying to breastfeed her premature infant there was told by a nurse that a premature baby uses more calories trying to breastfeed than she takes in, so why bother. She was also told that breastfeeding, even holding the baby, would “overstimulate” and tire the baby.

(And by the way, speaking of birthing practices that are contrary to what evidence says is best practice: At the same hospital, I have heard numerous stories of women whose non-premature babies were given bottles, despite the mother’s stated wish to breastfeed and without any discussion of alternatives that don’t undermine breastfeeding. Such as, in the case of a newborn who isn’t getting enough milk from nursing, feeding with an eyedropper or with a tube at the mother’s breast, as I did in my first child’s early days.)

The article notes that prematurity occurs at high rates in both third-world and developed countries, but doesn’t explore why this might be, or that the answers look very different for the two categories (or even among populations within, say, the U.S.—such as among affluent, older women having IVF-induced multiple births versus poor, young women of color). Worse, it doesn’t mention that rates of prematurity vary tremendously among countries, even among developed countries. For example, the U.S.'s rate of premature births is double Europe's.

That leaves open the field for readers to dismiss the issue, as one commenter did: “Perhaps we can waste some more time trying to fix something that will always occur.” Premature births will always be with us, like the poor.

As it happens, premature births in the U.S. have been on the rise in tandem with the rise in poverty and inequality. As I've ranted about elsewhere, correlation is not causation, but...

A specter is haunting health insurance

2009-05-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

Ah, the power of a little fear to make corporations do the right thing. And what could be more terrifying than the specter of (a teensy dose of) socialism? Seems that, faced with the threat of a government-run plan, health insurers are ready to mend their discriminatory habit of charging women more than men for health insurance. This is only the latest bone they’ve thrown: In November insurers agreed they’d accept all customers, without regard to preexisting conditions, and in March they said they’d stop charging more to sick people. Apparently they’ll concede anything to fend off having to compete against a public option, as the Wall Street Journal put it.

It bodes well that the issue is being framed in the terms (and in the Wall Street Journal, no less). All us good capitalists are in favor of competition, right? Why should a private company fear having to compete with clumsy, bloated, ineffective government? This is just the framing supporters of a public option would want. Still, the fight to ensure that there is a public health plan option will be monumental, insurers correctly sensing that this is the crucial nose of the camel of eliminating our crazy system of private insurance.

Back to the issue of gender discrimination in health coverage: When The New York Times began covering the discriminatory insurance practice last fall, insurers defended the practice as based on sound actuarial data; women use more health care than men, especially during their reproductive years.

They were right.

On the data, that is, not on the morality of their discrimination. The issue raises important points about the need to socialize health costs, especially the costs associated with reproducing the species.

The insight goes beyond health costs. Should women bear the overwhelming burden of the caregiving (of both children and the elderly) necessary to continuing the species or should society as a whole share that burden? And what should sharing that burden fairly look like?

Wouldn’t it be nice if health care reform provoked that long overdue conversation. Don’t hold your breath.

P.S. Check out MoveOn's funny ad on the issue of a public health coverage option.

Happy Equity Pay Day!

2009-04-28T11:01:00.000-07:00

Congratulations, sisters, we've finally reached that day in the year when we've caught up to what our brothers earned last year. Now we can start trying to catch up on this year.

Yup, since we earn on average 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, it takes us several months extra to earn what a man earns every year, putting us farther and farther behind. And then there are those raises that are based on what we're currently earning. Goes a long way toward explaining why so many women are in poverty and especially why so many old women are poor.

But sorry, if you're a single mother, you've got a few more months of catchup, since you only earn 60 cents on a man's dollar.

Breastfeeding not a feminist issue?

2009-04-26T22:23:00.000-07:00

Annals of unsurprising news: Someone has finally studied the economic impact of breastfeeding and found, you guessed it, breastfeeding for a “long” time—anything more than six months—hurts a woman’s earnings. This via Slate’s Hannah Rosin, of “The Case Against Breastfeeding” fame, who correctly notes that the impact of breastfeeding on women’s earnings should be an obvious question, yet none of the breast-feeding literature mentioned it until now.

Like Rosin, I’m glad someone finally studied the question. It is maddening the way that the “breast is best” campaign treats the decision whether to breastfeed as if it occurred in a vacuum, as if it were solely an individual mother’s responsibility, rather than a social one—whether to create a society that enables breastfeeding or not. To push breast-feeding “as if it only affects an infant's health, and not the woman's life or position in her family, and her workplace” is wrongheaded. It’s also, by the way, an anti- or at the very least non-feminist move.

So Rosin’s right that not all efforts to push breastfeeding are feminist. Perhaps that’s all she means by her zinger of a last line: “Breast-feeding now loses its free pass into the feminist cause.” But she seems to imply much more—that breastfeeding isn’t a feminist issue at all.

It’s interesting to consider the history of the original breast-is-best-ers: the founders of La Leche League, who thought of themselves as early feminists and sought to wrest control of mothering back from the experts. At the time their movement arose, medicine typically assumed that mothers knew nothing about the business of mothering and that the female body was a defective object. Edwina Froehlich, one of the founders, was told by her doctor to forget about trying to breastfeeding because, at 36, she was too old. That she did so anyway must have been tremendously empowering. A friend of mine told me she once looked at her plump, six-month-old, entirely breastfed, child and thought proudly, “That’s all me.” Consider that no one but a nursing mother is ever indispensable to anyone. The inventors of formula sought to dispense with her.

As the La Leche League founders saw, breastfeeding is an issue about women's power. That makes it a feminist issue.

Yet the La Leche League founders were all Catholics housewives and they wrote in their breastfeeding manual as late as 1981, “Our plea to any mother who is thinking about taking an outside job is, ‘if at all possible, don’t.’ ”

That’s hardly a feminist position, precisely because it assumes the male-dominated standards of the work world, rather than questioning them. But that’s just what Rosin seems to be doing. There is, currently, a conflict between the demands of work and the needs of mothers; surely any feminist worth the name thinks it’s the work world that needs to change, not mothers.

Balance this

2009-04-22T22:40:00.000-07:00

This is one of those stories that makes my eyes roll so hard they nearly pop out of my head: “A business class at George Washington University aims to teach young women how to balance their careers with their personal lives," reads the promo for an NPR program.

I hoped for a moment that this was a case of media distortion and the class was really something else entirely. Nope. Professor Kathy Korman Frey describes balancing work and family as “a real entrepreneurial experience,” and says “so much of work-life balance is really practical, so it’s really teachable.” For example, one “time-management” assignment is for students to examine their daily schedules for a 24-hour day and “find an extra hour.”

There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t know where to start. How about with the fact that NPR and a prestigious university found it plausible to discuss the topic of work-life balance as an individual dilemma without once mentioning the political context that creates the dilemma, namely the American absence of social supports for parenting? Or that it never occurred to NPR to invite a guest who might mention these political questions, such as, oh, say, a feminist?

As the NPR host actually (sort of) noted, this class is home ec for the new century. Instead of learning to make potholders or jello molds, these future Suzy Home-and-career-makers learn how to “find an extra hour” and how to “locate and hold on to good childcare.” (It’s so hard to find good help these days.)

I’ll tell you how to hold on to good childcare: Create a nationally subsidized system of childcare centers that pay workers living wages. Treat childcare as a fully tax deductible and refundable business expense. And for balancing life and work, few things work so well as paid family leave.

The NPR program was weirdly vague. Just what “work-life” balance might mean wasn’t made clear. It appeared merely to mean being really busy, especially as the professor described the issue as affecting even her busy but childless students. Nowhere was there any reference to the specific, crushing difficulties faced by parents in our society—difficulties which for most mothers are desperate economic problems—let alone the specific historical and political facts that created these difficulties.

The insidious thing about the class is that it responds to a profound social problem in such a way as to silence potentially political discontent.

Balance this, George Washington.

Ominous news on child poverty

2009-04-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

A new report on child poverty [PDF] by the research organization Child Trends makes for disturbing reading. Its findings—among them that child poverty has been on the rise since 2000—are especially ominous in the current economic crisis.

If one in five U.S. children were poor in 2007, and 8 percent were in deep poverty (below 50 percent of the poverty level), how many more children are now suffering all the consequences of poverty documented in the report? If a society accepts such high levels of child deprivation in good times, how much child misery will it tolerate as times worsen?

Even as poverty was rising and deepening (and as elements of the social safety net, such as welfare, were being dismantled), families were becoming less likely to use the social programs for which they were eligible. Maybe there’s a silver lining in that. The solutions seem clear—more outreach to inform families about safety net programs and streamlining of the application processes. Also, as the economic crisis ripples out to affect more and more people, perhaps awareness of safety net programs will grow.

Given its shocking findings, the solutions Child Trends advocates are tepid. Though the report notes that childcare is a major drain on poor families’ income (23 percent of low-income two-parent families and 40 percent of families headed by single mothers spend more than half their income on childcare), its suggestion is merely to continue existing childcare subsidies and “assess whether more funding is needed.” Other suggestions (such as encouraging marriage and discouraging single motherhood or redoubling efforts at child-support enforcement) ring of last century’s political debates (the child-support enforcement proposal seems particularly tin-eared in this economy—can you squeeze blood from stones that have already been laid off and foreclosed on?). Nor is there mention of current proposals to transform the conditions that make childhood (and parenthood) such a predictor of poverty—such as paid family leave or federally mandated paid sick leave.

While the report concludes that its findings “underscore the need to resume efforts to reduce child poverty,” readers will have to seek elsewhere for systemic proposals to reduce child poverty, let alone eliminate it.

For more warnings about what the economic downturn may mean for children, go to the Center for Budget and Policy Priority’s page on poverty and see especially the graphs about children at the bottom of the page.

Two (or three or eight) embryos no better than one, IVF study says

2009-04-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

Timed perfectly in the still-buzzing hullabaloo over the octomom, a new study has cast doubt on the American practice of implanting multiple embryos when doing IVF, in the hopes of upping the odds of a successful pregnancy. The study found that implanting multiple embryos at a time didn’t increase the odds, and of course it does increase the costs and the dangers brought by multiple births.

Our Wild Western approach to fertility treatment contrasts with the more regulated European model, which it appears not only has safety and cost-containment to say for itself, but also effectiveness. The elephant in the room, of course is our insane employer-based healthcare system. Here’s hoping that studies like these encourage Obama and others, as they seek to reform our healthcare system and contain its out-of-control costs, to look at placing limits on the number of embryos that can legally be implanted at a single go.

So far, even as discussion of cost-containment is getting lots of play, I haven’t heard discussion of birth practices. Yet the American love of technology has spectacularly played itself out when it comes to birth, turning a basic human rite of passage into a miracle of science. Not, in fact, quite such a miracle, if you look at what we have to show for it: rates of maternal and infant mortality, premature birth, and complications that are nothing to brag about. Talk about win-win: changing our birth system to something less medicalized would contain costs and improve health. And regulating reproductive technologies by limiting embryo implantation would be one step in this effort. For starters, it would likely bring our out-of-control C-section rate down significantly.

I’m also fascinated by the sociological implications of our IVF practices. America has been engaging in a living social experiment: What does a dramatic rise in the incidence of twins (and triplets) do to a society? I hope some brave sociologist plans to study the phenom, even as it may be coming to an end. Historians may someday speak of this era’s children as “Generation Twin.”

Discrimination straight up, nothing reverse about it

2009-04-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

“Reverse discrimination” being an oxymoron typically used by bigots with a sense of entitlement, I expected to read of such a case when I saw this headline: “Prosser couple claims reverse discrimination.”

Turns out, by my lights, Charlene Honeycutt and Charles Weems were discriminated against. They live together and had until 2007 received healthcare benefits through Weems’ employer, Batelle Labs. The couple considered marrying, but that would have cost Honeycutt, a widow, her Social Security benefit from her dead husband. In October 2007, Honeycutt was just finishing up radiation treatments for breast cancer when Batelle informed its employees that it would no longer offer opposite-sex domestic partner benefits.

The discrimination seems pretty clear. It’s too bad that Honeycutt and Weems (and their lawyer) have chosen to call it “reverse discrimination,” implicitly blaming gays for Battelle’s misbehavior (quite the “What’s the Matter With Kansas" moment). There’s nothing reverse about it. It is part of the web of injustice woven by a) our employer-based healthcare (non) system and b) patriarchy (not unrelated systems). They’re being punished for not being married.

Although the modern nuance of offering same-sex partner benefits adds a wrinkle, Battelle is quite clear that marriage is being enforced: “’The company only extends medical benefits to same-sex domestic partners because they "have no other legal way to obtain health care benefits,’ [Battelle spokesperson Staci] West said.” That is, marital status is the proper way to deliver benefits—not, say, as a right of citizenship (or of simple humanity). People should get married, and if they fail to do so, they lose their claim to benefits. Those who can’t get married are a special exception.

There’s also the unsurprising fact that Battelle was looking to save money by denying benefits to anyone it could by law or social code get away with not insuring. That's called capitalism, and it's one of the many reasons delivering healthcare via employers is bankrupt.

None of this is the fault of gays, though the “reverse discrimination” language suggests they’ve hogged an unfair share of some scarce resource. However, the movement for “marriage equality” does bear some blame. It contributed to the social acceptability of Battelle’s behavior by furthering the idea that marriage is the ideal and the proper unit for allocating social rights and benefits. Time was when, instead of demanding their right to the benefits allocated through marriage, gays questioned the institution of marriage altogether—and I for one mourn that earlier incarnation of the movement.

And then there’s the issue of Social Security, a system designed to support the primacy of the male breadwinner and which discriminates against working wives and single women (see my earlier post).

I would agree with marriage equality advocates that the state of Washington’s domestic partnership law, which grants many of the rights of marriage to same-sex couples and opposite sex couples over the age of 62 is no solution. Now, when 40 percent of babies in this country are born to unwed mothers, most women spend most of their lives unmarried, and we are on the brink of overhauling the employer-based healthcare system, is hardly the moment for the state to renew its enforcement of marriage.

Vote! Should media continue the Mommy Wars?

2009-03-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

Unsurprisingly, “The Case Against Breastfeeding” has provoked a deluge of responses (including my earlier one), and like clockwork the media have digested Hannah Rosin’s nuanced, complex (and problematic) account of her own experience into a soundbite. MSNBC, for example, blithely spews, “Some women are questioning whether the health benefits are worth it. Breast-feeding provides benefits to mothers and babies, but can also be uncomfortable and inconvenient for working moms.” Our work culture erects nearly insurmountable barriers to breastfeeding, so we should…forget breastfeeding. The bathwater is indispensable; out with the baby.

It gets better. Find this at the bottom of the MSNBC article: “Vote! Should Mothers Breastfeed Their Babies?”

Hilarious. An article decrying the oppressiveness of judging women for their breastfeeding practices prompts a public vote to tell mothers whether to breastfeed.

For a soundbite that gets it right, try this from MomsRising: “Moms are being urged to breastfeed but set up to fail.” Quite.

How about a bailout for single moms?

2009-03-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

We're aren't hearing much about the needs of women, let alone single moms, for economic stimulus these days, so word out to Kelly White, writing at WeNews. Her article is jam-packed with data, including this addendum to my post about the high cost of childcare: single mothers spends 45 percent of their income on childcare. And you wonder why so many single moms and their children are in poverty.

The case against self-hatred

2009-03-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

Where to begin to rebut the “Case Against Breastfeeding”? In this month’s Atlantic, Hannah Rosin claims breastfeeding keeps women down—she compares it to the vacuum cleaner of the 50s ‘Feminine Mystique'—and that the evidence for its health benefits is thin.

There are some serious flaws in Rosin’s claims about the science, nicely described here. And the idea that breastfeeding is itself as oppressive as being a 1950s housewife is just weird.

But what I find the most intriguing element of the piece is what shows up in the first two paragraphs. Rosin describes being ostracized in the playground when she tells other mothers she’s thinking about cutting short the breastfeeding of her third child.

…circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets. In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club.

There’s so much here to, as they used to say in grad school, unpack, that the mind reels. It’s a classic reactionary setup, really quite Rovian: It sets up a hated elite (lattes and chardonnay here are replaced by organic snacks and sleek strollers, but the effect is the same as in a Limbaugh rant) who engage in terrible oppression, which justifies a counter-attack, much as the Christian right typically must paint themselves as oppressed and embattled to justify their attacks on gays, civil liberties, and women’s reproductive rights.

Yet in the real world, it’s women who breastfeed for the full two years the WHO recommends who are the struggling minority in the U.S. Only 31 percent of U.S. babies are breastfed exclusively for even three months, and only 11 percent are exclusively breastfed through six months, and that with breastfeeding having recently reached new highs. Among the reasons women most commonly cite for giving up breastfeeding or supplementing with formula is—can you guess?—returning to work. This is no surprise, given that there is no such thing as paid family leave in this country, nor even are most workers guaranteed their jobs back if they take unpaid leave.

In my highly progressive, pro-breastfeeding circles, I know of almost no mothers who returned to work fulltime who continued breastfeeding exclusively. It is nearly impossible to do so.

Still, I think Rosin is, in a warped way, on to something in perceiving herself ostracized among her privileged community for considering cutting breastfeeding off. Our misogynistic culture maddeningly, at once curtails our choices (by not offering paid leave, for example, or for permitting hospital practices that discourage breastfeeding) and valorizes individual choice as its pre-eminent value. Women often respond to this contradiction by turning on other women. It exacts such a toll in this culture to acknowledge that one hasn’t acted freely—especially in the deeply intimate sphere of reproduction--that many women would prefer to embrace their supposed “choices” and vilify other women who made different “choices.”

I think of the friend of mine who, while 8 months pregnant, was sneered at by another mother for planning a nonmedicated birth. “Well, if you want to be a martyr, you go right ahead.” Given the high rate of women who report having had disempowering birth experiences, I suspect that many women who have experienced awful treatment in birth have as the path of least resistance embraced their “choices,” leaving no honest outlet for their anger, which gets channeled at other women.

This is a problem that goes way beyond breastfeeding and it’s far past time for women to stop turning on each other. I welcome thoughts.

Childcare is breaking families' budgets

2009-03-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Nearly one-third: that's the share childcare takes out of the budget of the average middle-income family of four with young children. Eating up 29 percent of their money, childcare represents the single largest item in these families' budgets, according to a report from Pre-K Now.

If you don't have kids and this figure astounds you, I'm here to tell you it's about right. I guess my partner and I and our two kids are getting a bargain; only 25 percent of our budget goes to childcare.

Given that a parent can't work for a wage unless she has childcare and (especially since the end of welfare) can't live unless she has a wage-earning job (or a sugar daddy), this is a crisis.

Boys been reading Rock the Cradle

2009-03-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

Some college kids in California have filed a ballot initiative to do just what I’ve been advocating: get the government out of the marriage business. No surprise, the media are largely getting it wrong, calling it a “gay marriage initiative” and suggesting it’s a joke.

The boys’ initiative would erase “marriage” from the legal books and grant everyone the right to “domestic partnerships,” gay or straight. It’s unclear to me whether the contract would have to be a sexual one, or if you could create a union with your sister, friend, cousin, whatever, for purposes of life partnership, sexual or not.

I first learned of this from a libertarian-leaning blog in my home state, which got the point better than the MSM mostly did, although he did file the post under “gays.” Are other posts tagged “straights”? “Squares”? “Bigots”?

And the initiative sponsors don’t have quite the right analysis of their brilliant idea, calling it a “compromise.” There’s nothing compromising about it. It's a radical departure in the right direction. See my blog post on the subject.

Anyway, way to go, boys.

This trend just in

2009-03-11T22:14:00.000-07:00

Different media same day: “Some Laid-Off Women Now Stay-at-Home Moms” (MSNBC) and “As Economy Slips, New Mothers Cut Short Their Maternity Leave" (Wall Street Journal). I thought I’d wandered into an Onion parody. Which is it—are women being opted out or opted in?

Both stories are no doubt true—as descriptions of the experiences of some moms, somewhere. But that’s not how the pieces are framed. Instead they purport to describe a new “trend.” Trend stories are the slipperiest game in journalism. Journalists especially love to get breathless about supposed trends in women’s social roles, mixing up description and prescription, from the supposed marriage dearth peddled in the 1980s and debunked soon after by Susan Faludi to the “opt-out revolution” hyped by the New York Times’ Lisa Belkin in this century and debunked by Joan Williams in the American Prospect, among others. The New York Times’ trend stories are weirdest, warped as they are by the confluence of gender and class. Their m.o. is to pick some tiny slice of the East Coast’s ultra-privileged and take them as representative of the whole country.

Strollers are bad for you

2009-03-03T22:06:00.000-08:00

I always wondered what the effects of all the containerization we subject kids to these days might be. From carseats to strollers to high chairs to motorized baby swings, we love to place our babies inside of plastic containers removed from human contact.

It didn’t seem like the effects could be good. My kids howl whenever I stick them in their lonely carseats, although the sensory deprivation eventually puts them to sleep.

Researchers in Britain wondered, too, and have found evidence that, indeed, forward-facing strollers, which cut children and parents off from almost all sensory contact with each other—no touch, no eye contact, on noisy streets we can't even hear each other—have bad effects. Spending a lot of time in one of these strollers apparently retards children’s language development.

I fear that the stroller controversy will become one more thing for moms to feel guilty about and one more thing for poor folks who can’t afford fancy front-back convertible strollers to get beat up about. Keep in mind, though, a swag of cloth tying a baby to your body beats the fanciest stroller any day.

(And I’m still unconvinced by the efforts to tell parents that a fancy crib is better than sleeping with their babies. Last I checked we were still mammals, and mammal babies need touch. To convince me otherwise, show me the research and don’t sweep all those crib recalls under the rug.)

The petri dish can't replace the female body

2009-02-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

It’s not really surprising, but it is interesting that evidence of the long-term health risks to babies born from IVF is starting to emerge. For a while now there has been some evidence of higher rates of prematurity, low birth weight, and birth defects in IVF babies. What’s more interesting is what the New York Times is reporting today—that there are “unusual gene expression patterns”—bad ones—in IVF babies.

This dovetails precisely with what current biological science would predict. Turns out that the science I was taught in high school biology class about genes, that they are blueprints from which critters are mechanically churned out, is nearly all wrong. The blueprint, or computer code, metaphor doesn’t work. We can’t be said to simply be the sum of our genes. It’s more like we’re the sum of a process, namely what’s called by biologists “development”—the precise, complex choreography that results in the growth of a creature from (almost) nothing.

So it makes sense that doing part of that development in a Petri dish instead of the human body would have consequences, genetic ones at that. The age-old yearning to be free of the female body has once again been frustrated.

Everybody's favorite villain (again): the single mom

2009-02-04T21:52:00.000-08:00

Events have shifted that octuplets story. I figured it would play out the way the story of the McCaughey septuplets in Iowa did—with oohs and ahs and a donated 16-room house, 15-passenger van, baby food from Gerber, and a lifetime supply of Pampers from Procter & Gamble —and I was all set to rain on that parade.

Never underestimate the power of race or sexism to flip a story. Now that it has emerged that the mother of the octuplets is unwed (and has six other kids), there isn’t much gushing. The headline in my local paper reads, “Winning Sympathy the Hardest Task.” In the article, a call-out headed “Cost of 14 Kids” reads “for a single mother, the cost of raising 14 children through age 17 ranges from $1.3 million to $2.7.”

Excuse me?

Last I checked, children cost the same to raise whether by a single mom, a single dad, two moms, two dads, or a mother and a father. Suggesting children cost more if raised by single mothers vilifies single mothers, implying they’re parasites on society. The birth of the octuplets already burdens society, in the form of the millions of dollars their birth cost our medical system, but that would be true even if Ozzie and Harriet were their parents.

This woman is surely crazy, but then so are the McCaugheys and the Gosselins (of the TLC reality show). It’s just that certain forms of insanity—such as having sextuplets in God’s name or putting your children on a reality show—are socially acceptable and others aren’t.

Lynn Paltrow of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (so glad to learn about them!), put it best (courtesy Salon’s Broadsheet):

"When the pregnant woman is not brown or black and the drugs/technologies are provided by big pharma, the discussion focuses on questions of ethics. But if the issue is childbearing by low-income women of color, and the drug is homegrown/ illegal then the debate is a question of punishment through the criminal justice or civil child welfare system." Paltrow also cited a study showing that, while we often talk about the effects illegal drugs can have on pregnancy, "women who take fertility drugs and choose to carry three or more embryos to term often experience pregnancy loss and risk severe, lifelong harm to the children who survive."

Why aren't Sasha and Malia going to public school?

2009-02-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

Michelle Obama rocks, but I'd feel a lot more excited about her recent visit to the Department of Education and promises of improvements in public education if she and Barack sent their kids to public school.

I can just hear the but of course they can't do that guffaws, and it may be true that DC public schools suck. That begs the question of why they suck. I bet they'd stop sucking if the elites sent their kids there. The bottom line is that our public schools should be good enough for the president's children. This is a democracy. We should expect no less.

Strange choices bring octuplets

2009-01-28T22:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last few weeks talking to mothers who can’t get the most basic health care for their children—because they have no health insurance—so the story of the octuplets born this week stuck in my craw. Even as mothers can’t get their daughters the asthma medications they need, can’t get their children to the dentist, can’t get their son’s broken shoulder set properly, get taken to collections for the bill from treating a child’s ear infection, 46 doctors and untold millions of dollars have been devoted to this freak of un-nature.

And it is certainly not natural. The newspapers are being coy about the question how the mother came to bear so many babies at once. But they do note that there’s virtually no chance this happened naturally; it’s a near certainty the parents used fertility treatments, most likely IVF, and that the parents refused what’s delicately termed a “reduction.” Yet as AP notes, “Multiple births can be dangerous for babies and their mother, and in some cases, may result in lasting health problems.” That’s an understatement. One of the doctors in the case noted that the human uterus is designed to hold at most two babies. Putting more in there puts a mother’s life at risk and is likely to cause terrible health complications and suffering for the babies (including long-term physical and cognitive problems).

Make no mistake, therefore, octuplets are the result of choices, some very strange choices at that, most likely based on strange and incoherent ideas about God’s will. The parents and their caregivers chose to have multiple embryos implanted and they chose not to reduce the number of fetuses in the interests of the health of mother or babies.

This case is also the result of choices we as a society have made, to devote resources to enable these strange choices, at the expense of basic health care for all children. The AP article on the case quotes a doctor saying that doctors can’t force women to have reductions, but in most European countries there are limits on the number of embryos doctors are allowed to implant or the number of cycles of IVF covered by national insurance (and there is evidence that increasing the number of embryos doesn't increase the odds of success).

All of us bear the cost of extraordinary medicine like this, through our insurance premiums and our tax dollars, in the form of the state and federal funds that go to hospitals, doctors, and medical schools. As I have listened to Vicky worry about her daughter’s next asthma attack, Paula anguish over missed check-ups and dunning letters from collections, and Traci worry about the pain in her son’s teeth, I am disgusted by my society’s choices. The octuplets are no miracle.

The change cometh

2009-01-22T21:52:00.000-08:00

What more can I add to all that’s been said about this beautiful week? Not much. Just when I was coming off my inauguration high, Obama’s first executive orders came down. Oh, yes, it’s real. Closing Guantanamo, ending torture, opening government, protecting public lands from oil drilling, lifting the global gag order—sweet rain in the desert.

And then there was the news that Michelle Obama does not plan to spend all her time on selecting ball gowns and redecorating the White House. She has just appointed the general counsel of the National Partnership for Women and Families to be her policy director. The Wall Street Journal describes Jocelyn Frye as “one of Washington’s most visible advocates of expanding family leave and ending pregnancy discrimination” and reads the appointment as a signal that Michelle Obama is “preparing to take an activist stance on such policy issues as family leave and flexible scheduling.”

Looks like Michelle too may have the Obama touch, the ability to make hot button issues safe for prime time, She’s jujitsuing the requirement for the First Lady to focus on family into a feminist agenda.

Online sex predators a rare breed

2009-01-15T21:53:00.000-08:00

My favorite “Dog Doesn’t Bite Man” news of the week: “Threat overblown of online sexual predators.” A task force of state attorneys general has found that sexual solicitation of children online is not a significant problem.

People seem to love to get hysterical about this supposed problem, perhaps because it is an excuse to a) violate civil liberties, including free speech, and b) avoid addressing the real sexual threats to children, namely people known to them. It’s so much nicer to pretend the problem is scary faceless Others, not the people close to us. If we admitted that the problem is close to home, we’d have to accept its causes in our culture and, for many, complicity in it. Children are most often abused by someone they know, and what may be worse, they often aren’t protected or supported by the people closest to them. In my experience as a teacher, I’ve heard quite a few stories of abuse and it seemed that worse than the abuse itself was the experience of not being supported, protected, or believed by those they most trusted and loved.

Here’s to the attorneys general for the reality check.

Mom's fault, as usual, or, yet another installment of crummy science reporting

2009-01-08T22:39:00.000-08:00

Get a load of how the media played today’s story on new evidence of the risks of early C-section. Here’s the LA Times lead: “Thousands of women put their babies at needless risk of respiratory problems, hypoglycemia and other medical ailments by scheduling cesarean deliveries too early.” It’s women who put babies at needless risk. Not doctors or hospital policies. As usual, it’s mom’s fault.

Why would silly moms do this? NPR concluded its spot on the same research by noting that women may be scheduling C-sections early to insure that their “personal physicians” (idiotic term) were available to deliver their babies. To protect their babies, women may just have to let go of that choice, intoned the reporter.

The research looked at “elective” C-sections, that is C-sections for which there is no medical reason. Why would anyone have such a thing? The Times opined that it was women who are “too posh to push.” Again, those irresponsible moms.

Nowhere in the stories was there any mention of whether medical practice and policy might have anything to do with this problem. Nowhere in the stories was there any attention paid to the strange fact that doctors perform such a thing as a C-section for which there is no medical reason, or the disturbing fact that researchers could find 13,000 elective C-sections to study.

In further scolding of women, the LA Times mentioned that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology has counseled that women wait until 39 weeks before having an elective C-section. But missing from the stories was the information that ACOG and the American Medical Association have ruled elective C-sections to be ethically neutral, despite the health risks C-sections pose to women and babies (especially repeat C-sections) or that when researchers have looked for women who chose C-sections for the heck of it, they haven’t found any.

The Listening to Mothers survey, the biggest and best look at the subject, managed to find one woman among the 1600 surveyed who chose a C-section of her own volition. A full quarter of those who’d had C-sections described themselves as “pressured” by medical caregivers to have the operations—information that doesn’t appear in medical records that term the C-section “elective.” And, thanks to another directive from ACOG, fewer and fewer hospitals will allow women to even attempt vaginal birth after C-section. Women’s childbirth choices certainly play a role in this issue, but their choices aren’t made in a vacuum.

Nor did the stories mention the inherent risks of C-section, regardless of when they’re scheduled. The LA Times story did contain a hint in that direction: “The initiation of labor is a baby's way of signaling that it is ready to live outside the womb,’ [Dr. John Thorp, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coauthor of the study] said. When doctors schedule elective C-sections, ‘we're saying we're smarter than that signal,’ he said. ‘There are some babies who aren't ready to make that transition and are forced to do so.’ ”

Bread (and roses), not circuses

2009-01-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

Amazing fact: Forbes calculates profits of the big four sports (I guess that’s baseball, football, basketball, and tiddlywinks?) at $1.6 billion, but these industries receive taxpayer subsidies totaling more than $2 billion a year. That is, taxpayers provide the entire profits of sports. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

I’ve always had a deep resentment of sports analogies, the continued job security of sports writers even as investigative reporters become an endangered species, and sports films with “universal appeal,” not to mention taxpayer-funded stadiums. Why am I supposed to take overgrown boys’ games any more seriously than I would expect anyone to take pedicures, eye-brow-plucking technique, or the collection of Beanie Babies?

Now I know what I've always suspected: the whole sports business really is parasitism, pure and simple.

The above revelation comes from a terrific article in the current issue of Mother Jones laying out how we can get the economy back on track. Check it out.

Another fact to ponder in a different article in the same issue of MoJo: Tax cuts and credits for corporations and wealthy individuals have a negative return on investment—less than 37 cents on the dollar—while every dollar spent on food stamp benefits returns $1.73 to the economy. I’d like to see what the return on investment in childcare or paid family leave might be. Something tells me it’d be better than sports stadiums.

Notes on Christmas

2008-12-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on Christmas, now we’ve survived it.

1. I Heart Doctor Seuss: On Christmas eve, my (Jewish) partner and I found ourselves reading “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” I was newly aware that what makes this story so great is its moral complexity. Unlike George “you’re either with us or against us” Bush, Dr. Seuss presents his central character as both villain and hero. Dr. Seuss may be laughing at his grinch, but he also seems to identify with him; who hasn’t sometimes felt their stomach turn and their heart shrink when witnessing this saccharine celebration of purchasing piles of cheaply made crap? The over-indulgence in tinsel, toys, and gorging that grosses out the Grinch is repugnant. His theft of all the ticky tack in Whoville is mean, but it is also a gift, clearing out room for the Whos to remember the real spirit of Christmas.

2. Down with White Christmas, Up with Herald Angels and Satan’s Grasp: When I listen to the Bing-era Christmas songs, I hear the jingle of cash registers. I can’t separate these modern secular songs from malls and mobs of bargain hunters. On the other hand, I’m no Christian, but I get choked up when I hear “Joy to the World,” “Hark the Herald Angels,” “We Three Kings, and “Holy Night” (way, way better than the sentimental pap of “Silent Night”). These songs are serious and sometimes dark. (Note the minor key of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and the reference to freeing us from “Satan’s grasp when we had gone astray.” Not for nothing is this song, and that very line, the background of the ominous last scene in “Three Days of the Condor.”) The joy is therefore earned and real. What they celebrate is the possibility of the redemption of the world through the birth of a child. This is the miracle we all participate in with every birth.

Bah humbug and happy Boxing Day (don't forget the presents for the servants). On to Three Kings Day.

Build windmills and wipe babies' bottoms

2008-12-17T20:48:00.000-08:00

A number of critics have begun to note the macho slant of Obama’s job plan, as it’s being outlined so far. Katha Pollitt, for one, has done so, but then she would, wouldn’t she? (I mean that very much as compliment.) More noteworthy are columns in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and, believe it or not, Forbes.

The economist Randy Albelda writes in the Boston Globe that although we certainly need bridges, roads, windmills, and efficient cars and the jobs that go with them, those jobs will overwhelmingly go to men. Albelda notes that “almost one-quarter of families with children under the age of 18 are headed and supported by women as are the majority of single-adult households without children.” You wouldn’t think that you’d have to point out that leaving out women leaves out most of the country, and the majority of its breadwinners, but you do.

Writes Linda Hirshman in the New York Times, “Mr. Obama compared his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower-era construction of the Interstate System of highways. It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery.” This column is almost enough to make me forgive her for her earlier polemics.

Neither Albelda nor Hirshman include in their criticism the demand that Obama’s jobs plan should include aggressive affirmative action and efforts to pull women into apprenticeship programs in the construction trades. In Forbes, Ruthie Ackerman makes this point. “The answer is not, as Hirshman suggests, to create more low-paying jobs "in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work." The solution is redefine what we consider women's work.”

I can’t help feeling that Hirshman and Ackerman both have it half wrong, and both carry some misogyny around, Hirshman in assuming that women will always do “women’s work” in social work and teaching, and Ackerman in rejecting that work as unimportant. Ackerman would do well to read her fellow Forbes columnist Thomas Cooley arguing for investment in education as part of the stimulus package, not because it helps women, but because it will have the biggest long-term payoff.

Ackerman describes the trades as unsexy. Not to me. A person who knows how to build something—that’s pretty sexy. When my sweetie puts on a pair of Carharts, I go a little mushy. That kind of apparel puts me in mind of the men who worked as part of the original stimulus plan, in the Civilian Conservation Corps, building the trails, bridges, picnic tables, and other amenities I enjoyed throughout my childhood and that my children still enjoy. My daughters ought to get a chance to build such things and say proudly to their daughters, “I built that.”

If I had sons, I would want them to be proud of jobs they'd had caring for children, to point to flourishing people and tell their sons, "I helped raise that." If such work were better paid, such a thing would be far more likely.

How about both and? Get people (including women) building trails, daycare centers, and windmills, and give people (including men) well-paid jobs caring for our elders and children. I want it all. We can do it.

What kills children?

2008-12-11T21:30:00.000-08:00

What poses the biggest threat of death to children? You might think infectious diseases, and that’s true for infants. But if a child survives infancy the single biggest cause of fatal injury is cars. Cars are the single biggest killer of children ages 10 to 19.

That’s true around the world and across cultures.

This has implications for President-elect Obama’s jobs and infrastructure program: better make sure all that road building includes plenty of sidewalks, in short supply across much of the U.S. And how about bike paths, traffic-calming intersections, crosswalks, and stoplights?

Yet again that old socialist bogeyman Sweden comes out well on this issue, with much safer streets than other countries. Obama should be studying Sweden for lessons on infrastructure projects, as well as how to rescue a banking system.

Our bodies, our ignorance

2008-11-30T22:39:00.000-08:00

The New York Times today was a bonanza: not one but two stories relating to reproductive science and Crazy Things Americans Do. Especially when they have a) too much privilege and b) too little accurate scientific knowledge.

Exhibit A, page A1: “Born to Run? Little Ones Get Test for Sports Gene,” about a genetic test designed to “determine which sports suit the talents” of a toddler. One parent of a toddler aiming to sign up for the test thought “it’s good to match them with the right activity.” The test analyzes one gene in the 20,000-strong human genome. Supposedly, the reporter tells us on A1, “a 2003 study discovered the link between ACTN3 and those athletic abilities” for speed or endurance. But gentle readers who make it past the jump find that a scientist says the test may actually be “snake oil,” and that the genes merely “have a role in athletic performance.” A role, as in one role among many, as in a link, not the link.

Always keep an eye on the verbs in sensational stories about genetics: there’s nearly always some very flabby words flapping around in there taking up the slack where clarity and rigor ought to be. “Has a role in” and “link” tell you nothing about what causes what or exactly how it does it.

The problem goes deeper than the usual sensationalism necessary to sell newspapers. To think that any complex human trait or behavior could be controlled by a single gene is terrible science (a scientist quoted in the article said that at least 200 genes affect athletic performance) is to have a totally wrongheaded understanding of genetics. Nor do genes alone determine athletic performance or height or weight or … Never mind the broader environment, like, oh, say, how much encouragement to play baseball a child is given; current genetic science suggests that the precise choreography of hormones and growth that happens in the womb is crucial to the expression of any trait.

Which brings me to Exhibit B, cover of the New York Times Magazine: “Her Body, My Baby,” reads the title, next to an astonishing photo of two women. One, very pregnant, is dressed in slightly rumpled khakis and functional shirt that could have come from Wal-Mart or Sears. The other is slim, taut, hair perfectly upswept, black spike heels tall, jewelry exquisitely understated, and black dress little and perfect.

The small smile on the slim author in the little black dress looks smug. How could it look anything but? Iew, iew, iew. I don’t think I can take anymore of these posts from the New York Times’ bubble of privileged women.

Anyway, it turns out that nowadays most surrogacies involve the surrogate woman carrying a baby that is genetically unrelated to her, created through IVF using the sperm and egg of what the article calls “the intended parents.” (Let’s call it like it is: the paying parents.)

This is a strategy to get around the legal implications of the Baby M case and ensure that the surrogate mother’s legal claim to the baby is as weak as possible. Somebody, however, should call a genetic biologist to the stand to talk about the role of the womb in creating a mammal’s essential nature. (For more on this, see for example my review of The Century of the Gene.) The woman whose womb created the baby may not be the “genetic parent” of the child, but she most certainly is biologically related to it.

If I can make it through this article without gagging so hard I rip the magazine, I’ll have more to say…

Walker on Michelle O., or the stupid job of First Lady

2008-11-22T22:37:00.000-08:00

It’s hard not to read a major Oedipal* subtext to Rebecca Walker’s work. It ain’t hard to link the distancing from feminism in her writing to her struggles with her mother, Alice. This dynamic was obvious in a recent column for The Root about Michelle Obama.

I don’t know what Michelle Obama’s so embodying feminist goals that she surpasses them is supposed to mean, especially given the quote at the end of the article: "The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity." I don’t know what feminism is if it isn’t the cause of freedom, and I don’t know how you surpass that.

Too, Walker’s criticism of feminism’s “monopoly by women over 50” would have been a say wha? moment for me if I didn’t know who her mother was or that she’s has had a very public falling out with her.

In most senses of the words “feminism” and “monopoly”, the claim is totally false. If feminism means the broad movement for women’s equality, I’m counterexample number one, being a feminist and still many years shy of 50. And I know I’m not the only one. What Walker has to mean is that her mother monopolized for her what feminism is, and she’s got issues with her, so she’s got issues with feminism. I can’t think of a nicer way to make sense of her blather on the subject.

Of course this hasn’t hurt Walker’s career, since the powers that be are always delighted to give an anti-feminist woman, better yet an anti-feminist black woman, plenty of airtime. It’s too bad, though, because there are interesting things to say about Michelle Obama. I think Michelle Obama is the bomb and I loved it that she was quoted immediately after the election saying she’d be working to raise awareness of the struggles of working moms. And damn is it something fine to see a gorgeous, regal black woman as First Lady of the United States of America.

But all that wonderfulness doesn’t change that fact that First Lady is a sucky thing for any self-respecting person to have to be. A pure decorative adjunct to a man in power—what could be more antithetical to feminism? Even as I glory at how Michelle Obama will raise the position to its highest function, and indeed to some extent by her very existence open new possibilities for black women and women in general, I’m sorry the position still exists and sorry for Michelle Obama. She’s putting her own career on hold to go sit on a pedestal and try to give her daughters as normal a life as possible while they’re on a pedestal.

Walker’s right that Obama’s response to a question about having to leave a “high-powered and highly compensated career” was graceful (though the bit about her kids coming first was straight from the necessary script of a First Lady). Quite so, one’s whole life defines who one is, with what this culture normally means by career (paid work in the market) being only one part of a meaningful life. But that doesn’t mean it’s right that in our system women married to men in very high positions of power are required to sacrifice their own ambitions.

Still, if Hillary Clinton shows anything, it’s that the crappy job of First Lady just might finally be transformed into a stepping stone to power in one’s own right. And that thought opens all kinds of avenues for fantasy about the future.

*Of course this is not the right word for struggles with one's mother and her legacy of power; not surprisingly, our language lacks such a word.

Blue blind spots

2008-11-06T21:59:00.000-08:00

Non-evangelical Americans were puzzled as to why Bristol Palin’s pregnancy caused so little distress among evangelicals, so it was only a matter of time until someone in the chattering classes tried to explain the matter. Margaret Talbot’s article on the subject in the New Yorker, “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” is an intriguing stab in the direction of an answer, but its brief, shallow treatment of the question left me dissatisfied.

It’s always seemed to me that right-wing-appeasing liberals of the Hilary Clinton ilk, who think they can find common ground with anti-abortionists in the goal of reducing teen pregnancy, were not only wrong to concede that abortion is a “tragedy,” but also wrong in the assumption of common ground on teen pregnancy. (This showed, I think, the same tin ear for both effective politics and integrity that Hilary exhibited in thinking she could get universal healthcare if she just made enough compromises with the insurance industry, and that Bill showed in just about every issue he ever addressed.)

Here’s what I’ve always suspected: Reducing teen pregnancy isn’t a goal of the religious right. Their reaction to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy suggests I’m right. Religious conservatives aren’t horrified by sex before marriage or sex by teens (in fact, your mainstream liberals may be more uncomfortable with teenage sex). In fact, teen pregnancy is actually more good than bad, in the religious right worldview. More (white) babies is good, but, more important, girls having babies young, as long as they get married—and within a conservative social framework pregnancy can push women into marriage--helps keep women disempowered and under the control of men. The bedrock of religious right ideology is gender hierarchy. Sex, even teen sex, isn’t bad, as long as it’s controlled by men (or boys) and women pay the price for it. (For more evidence that this is so, check out The Girls Who Went Away and my review of it.)

All this makes sense of the various phenomena Talbot describes. Liberals may be as much—or even more—uncomfortable with teen sex as religious conservatives, but liberal culture has absorbed the assumption that women deserve independent lives and careers. Having babies young, in this you’re-on-your-ownership society that lacks either strong government supports for mothers or strong extended family supports, is an economic and personal disaster. These are such fundamental assumptions of liberal culture as to be invisible to most liberals and centrists, which is why they assume without evidence that the religious right must share their goal of reducing teen pregnancy. The liberal worldview on these matters is a muddle—motivated half by a moral impulse, namely feminism's call for the equality of half the world, which it can’t quite yet really own, and half by economic rationality. Whereas the conservative worldview is pure, principled, and coherent (though of course it runs counter both to economic reality in the 21st century and to the great arc of history in favor of the principle of equality).

Health insurers discriminate against women

2008-10-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

This one sent my outrage-o-meter off the charts: The New York Times is reporting that women pay significantly more for individual health insurance than men do, and the difference persists even when you consider only insurance that doesn’t cover childbirth. One insurance company, Anthem in Columbus, Ohio, charges 30-year-old women almost 50 percent more than men the same age.

The health insurance companies claim that women go to the doctor more often and have more lingering health problems. Just when you thought you couldn’t get more offended, read what the spokesperson for one of the insurers, Humana, said by way of justification, which just justified my belief that insurers are the lowest blood-suckers of the earth: “Bearing children increases other health risks later in life, such as urinary incontinence, which may require treatment with medication or surgery.” Screw you, too, buddy. As if having to suffer humiliating long-term medical issues as a result of helping continue the human race weren’t unfair enough, he has to throw it in our faces as an excuse for ripping us off? (See my earlier post.)

The article quotes Marcia Greenberger, a lawyer for the National Women’s Law Center criticizing the discriminatory practices. Greenberger claims that this practice can’t be justified by actuarial principles. That may be true—men probably incur more costs associated with heart attacks, say—but it misses what seems to me the deeper lesson. If anything is by rights a social cost, the burden of childbirth is. That our current system lays this cost at the feet of individual women throws into dramatic relief the utter bankruptcy of our system of treating health care as a private issue. The only insurance pool that makes sense is all of society, as (historical paradox though it is) United Autoworkers founder Walter Reuther saw. Or, as Malcolm Gladwell has put it, we should ditch the actuarial model of insurance for a social model of insurance.

These gender disparities show what a discriminatory dead-end efforts, like John McCain’s, to further privatize the system are. Greenberger notes that tax credits for health insurance—like those McCain would offer—would be worth less to women than men because of the higher premiums they face.

If McCain wins, and implements his health care plan, further privatizing the costs of reproduction, I suggest women go on reproductive strike. (Not a new idea, I’ll admit, although we’ve got one up on the Athenians, since we could go on reproductive strike without going on sex strike, at least until McCain and Palin outlaw abortion and contraception.)

Over 3 million cribs recalled

2008-10-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

While waiting for research actually comparing the dangers of babies’ sleeping in cribs versus sleeping with parents, I read of the latest crib recall. This time it’s 1.59 million Delta cribs (yes, you read that right, million with an m), the biggest single recall in a string of crib and bassinet recalls over the last few months. In September the Consumer Products Safety Commission recalled 600,000 Simplicity drop-side cribs and another million of a different type of Simplicity cribs. In August it recalled 900,000 cribs. The recalled cribs had been linked to a number of infant deaths.

So I’m still skeptical about New York state’s campaign against co-sleeping. Where’s the science that says it’s better than the alternative?

Lenders prey on kids

2008-10-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

In case you weren’t already outraged at the bailout for Wall Street, check out this op-ed in the New York Times on how parents are being disproportionately hurt by the mortgage crisis (AKA the predatory lending crisis). According to Eric Nguyen, “Nearly two-thirds of those trying to save their homes in bankruptcy have young children.” Among the many nasty elements of the disastrous bankruptcy bill passed in 2005 was one making it much harder to renegotiate the terms of a mortgage on a primary residence than on investment property.

Nguyen imagines a mother who becomes ill, racks up medical debt, and can’t pay the mortgage on her children’s home, then compares her with a wealthy childless couple who invest in a condo, run up credit card bills, and declare bankruptcy. Who winds up on the street? The kids.

Oh, and by the way, who voted for the bankruptcy bill? John McCain. Barack Obama voted against it. (Shamefully, though, his running mate Joe Biden voted for it.)

The right to register at Home Depot?

2008-10-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

While I was out in the woods last week, I missed the remarkable Connecticut decision on gay marriage. And it is something. Not only did the state supreme court rule that gays have a right to marriage; it went further and said that civil unions are no substitute. The court ruled that both a law restricting marriage to heterosexuals and civil unions intended to provide all the benefits of marriage to same sex couples are unconstitutional because these laws violate the equal protection clause of the state constitution.

I think the Connecticut Supremes took the only coherent position possible, and the decision, couched as it was in comparisons to the civil rights and women’s movements, was inspiring, and nearly choked me up.

Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same-sex partner of their choice,” Justice Palmer declared. “To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others.

And then, reading down the New York Times article on the ruling, I was deflated by this, from one of the plaintiffs who’d sought the right to marry: “For 28 years we have been engaged. We can now register at Home Depot and prepare for marriage.”

Home Depot? This is what the great struggle is about?

I return to what I said in an earlier post: if the state grants marriage to any, it must grant it to all. But let’s get the state out of this bogus business altogether.

Cloth versus disposable: the fight goes on

2008-10-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

In the perennial--and to new parents, fascinating--debate over disposable diapers versus cloth, add a good article in the Boston Globe. I'm still a cloth advocate, but a hypocritical one, because we're now using disposables on our second child. The decision wasn't entirely ours--our daycare won't use cloth--but then again we aren't even using cloth at home now.

One line from the Boston Globe article made me snicker, mostly at myself. Turns out that Seventh Generation, the leading "ecofriendly" disposable, whose diapers come in an inconically natural brown color and which my baby wears, dyes them that color for branding purposes. Doh.

One of the reasons I'm skeptical of studies that purportedly find cloth vs. disposable a toss-up is that it seems factors that favor cloth get left out. Such as the possibility that multiple children can use the cloth diapers--they last a good while. Also, the author left out of her article the issue of disposable diapers encouraging later toilet training (because they hold so much liquid away from the child's skin that the child doesn't learn to find soiled pants unpleasant).

Anyway, check it out and decide for yourself.

Washington paid leave sinking, women lawyers rising

2008-10-02T21:10:00.000-07:00

The bad news and then the good news. First, Washington's groundbreaking paid family leave program may be going down the toilet, done in by a bad economy and a governor who can make herself seem fiscally conservative by cutting a controversial new program, even though it's small change compared to the many-billion-dollar deficit the state faces and it's a social support families need now more than ever in these tough times. Officially, Governor Gregoire is just "suspending" work to set up the program, not killing it, but it will be hard work to get it going again once setup is halted. And you can forget about it and a lot of other good programs if her opponent, Republican Dino Rossi, unseats her in the upcoming election.

Now the good news, or maybe it's the good news-bad news: Although women have made up at least half of law school graduates and new hires at big firms for the last 20 years, there are few women partners at the top firms. That's largely because of the hostility of the profession to mothers: according to the Los Angeles Times, about 42 percent of women leave the profession because of a lack of family-friendly policies. But (here's the good news part), the LA Times also reports, firms are finally beginning to see the error of their ways, implementing mother-friendly policies, like longer maternity leave and part-time positions.

I've got to harsh my own buzz now: Until these policies are made mandatory for all companies across the country, they will remain the privileges of the lucky few.

All the news that's pseudo-science

2008-09-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

I found this week’s cover story in the New York Times magazine on “The Bipolar Kid” troubling. Despite the apparently reflective subhead, “What Does It Mean to Be a Manic-Depressive Child?” the article didn’t answer that question. By page two of the article we learn that experts don’t agree on what characterizes manic depression in kids and many say the “the illness looks significantly different in children.” And the prime expert quoted in the article says that mania, one of the twin poles that define manic depression, actually looks not like” elevation” but like “irritability” in kids.

Huh? If you don’t know what characterizes a disease, how do you know what counts as having it? And if you redefine the terms that had been used to characterize the disease, what does it even mean to say someone has it? This is classic bad science.

That’s bad enough. But the heartbreaking part is that labeling these kids with this pseudo-diagnosis sets them on track to medication with psychoactive drugs with major and often devastating side effects. Drugs like Lithium are nerve agents that cause Parkinson-like damage to the brain. Bad enough to do that to a grownup, whose brain is fully formed and can give meaningful consent to such treatment. But to do this to the forming brain of a child is barbaric.

The children described in the article are seriously disturbed—and disturbing. My heart went out to the little sister of a rage-filled boy, who clearly had been abused and traumatized by him since birth. And I could imagine that when a child is that out of control and violent, especially if you have other children, you would feel desperate to find some way of controlling him. Drugging him no doubt seems preferable to putting him in a padded cell for the rest of his life. But to call the drugging “treatment” and claim you have a scientific diagnosis becomes an excuse to treat thousands of much less disturbed children with these drugs. No surprise, that’s exactly what’s happened. A recent study cited in the article found a fortyfold increase in the number of children diagnosed with manic depression between 1994 and 2003.

Breast is best; formula may be deadly

2008-09-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

Yet another reason to breastfeed: The latest poison news from China is about babies sickened or even killed by tainted formula. Seems to me we've been here before. Remember the Nestle scandal back in the 1970s and '80s and the boycott that got Nestle to back off from marketing formula in the Third World?

The story of formula has always seemed to me like a parable of capitalism. Start with something free, a gift of nature, and figure out a way to get people to pay to buy a substitute. Brilliant!

Breast is certainly best. That said, there are many reasons women in industrialized countries may find themselves with few options but to feed their babies formula. If you work full time, it is challenging to keep breastfeeding. Believe me, I know this well. The last few weeks, since I've gone to fulltime paid work, have been stressful. Despite a supportive work environment where I have a comfortable place to pump, and a daycare that supports breastfeeding, I've just barely been keeping up with my baby's eating. Where breastfeeding is a beautiful balance, a perfect positive feedback loop, where the amount the baby eats determines how much milk a mother produces, pumping is a creaking substitute that easily becomes a vicious spiral. The machine rarely pulls out as much as a baby eats. And the stress over this can cause one's milk supply to slow. And then if you start supplementing, it's likely your supply will further decline, and so on.

All of which is not to say mothers of babies shouldn't work, but rather that a society that cares for children must provide a panoply of social supports, from paid leave to places and time to pump to well-paid part-time work.

For me, a combination of running down to the daycare at lunch each day to nurse, pumping all the time, and taking the herbs fenugreek and blessed thistle has worked--for now. The liquid gold reserves in the freezer are finally building up again. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Palin and the issues--finally

2008-09-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

In the wake of that painful ABC News interview, I'm glad to see feminists are shifting the discussion of Sarah Palin from the political-is-only-personal question of whether it's okay for a mother with an infant to pursue a high-powered job. Answer: Sure, although that's hardly a choice facing most mothers. For most of us, it's a question of exactly when the rent money is due and will my no-power job cover it once I send the baby to daycare.

Let's move on to the real issue: whether our society properly supports mothers so they can freely choose whether and when to take a paid job after giving birth. Oh yeah, and then there's the matter of whether to give birth, and Palin's cruel support for subjecting victims of incest or rape to forced childbirth.

That's just the shift Women Against Sarah Palin are pushing. And of course the trusty Katha Pollitt.

The shards of the glass ceiling still cut

2008-09-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

Judith Warner’s New York Times column gets it dead-on about Sarah Palin and the utterly condescending way that women politicians have been talked about lately. As she said, ”Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?... Having Sarah Palin put forth as the Republicans’ first female vice presidential candidate is just about as respectful a gesture toward women as was John McCain’s suggestion, last month, that his wife participate in a topless beauty contest.”

I think they find her acceptably 'real' because Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man. That’s the worst thing a woman can be in this world, isn’t it? Intimidating, which appears to be synonymous with competent. It’s the kiss of death, personally and politically.
But shouldn’t a woman who is prepared to be commander in chief be intimidating?

Warner goes wrong in only one place: ”Her presence inspires national commentary on breast-pumping and babysitting rather than health care reform and social security,” Warner writes, as if breast-pumping and babysitting were fluff with nothing to do with issues of national importance. But speaking of serious national policy issues like Social Security, who does Warner think will pay for the benefits of the next generation of retirees? The children being cared for by breast-pumpers like Palin.

The assumption that the need to breast-pump and find babysitters (or bring your kids to work with you) inherently make you an unintimidating lightweight is just the kind of sexist condescension Warner is inveighing against. Why can’t you be a highly effective worker or even a powerful, intimidating power broker and pump breast milk? (Once upon a time, millennia ago, the ability to bring forth life and nurture it at the breast was the very model of intimidating power.)

Isn’t it time we had a conversation about these assumptions? And about the need to revise our workplaces to accommodate powerful, intimidating—or ordinary and not so intimidating—people who breast-pump? And to realize that these people are not obscure exceptions to the norm, but, potentially, half the workforce?

In fairness, what Warner’s getting at is presumably not breast-pumping and childcare per se, but the stupid way they’re being discussed, as purely private matters (and thus titillating), rather than as aspects of fundamental issues—namely how we support the primary caregivers of our next generation—that our society needs to come to terms with institutionally.

The stupidity of the discussion of Palin’s family situation is a symptom of what Warner calls the “dogged allegiance to up-by-your-bootstraps individualism—an individualism exemplified by Palin, the frontierswoman who somehow has managed to 'balance' five children and her political career with no need for support.” As Warner says, this individualism “is leading to a culture-wide crack-up.” Perhaps that’s because it was always a hypocritical individualism, dependent on the unpaid, nonindividualistic caregiving of women. Here’s to its rapid demise.

Blackberries, Breast pumps, and Oval Offices

2008-09-02T22:31:00.000-07:00

As different as Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin are from each other—one tough, smart, cosmopolitan, and centrist, the other naïve, shallow (in the words of a high school classmate), provincial (only once has she left the country), and far-right, their candidacies provoke similar emotions in me. A moment of elation that a woman has come so far, followed quickly by dismay. Not this woman.

I was delighted to read that Palin regularly brings her children to work, has a stay-at-home husband (at least at the moment), has “discreetly” nursed her infant in meetings, and answered a question about whether she’s a night or morning person by mentioning putting down her Blackberry to pump breastmilk.

Of course she can get away with all this because she also hunts animals from airplanes. So it always is—the first woman allowed in the door has to out-man the guys to get in the door (call it the Maggie Thatcher syndrome). And it doesn’t hurt that she plays the religion card while enacting her Madonna and child tableau.

I’m ready to defend her against critics who cluck their tongues at her for returning to work a few days after having given birth. A woman has to do what she has to do to make it in this unforgiving work world, and no one would think twice if a father went back to work a few days after his wife gave birth (indeed, that’s the norm). Certainly, after having done the tremendous labor of giving birth a woman is exhausted and depleted in a unique way, and she shouldn’t have to do anything but lie in bed and nurse. But doing otherwise harms no one but herself. I’m sure Palin had terrific care for her infant.

Indeed, it appears she brought her child with her. And it’s here that Palin’s story gives glimpses of a different world and a different conversation. We shouldn’t just be having a conversation about whether and when a mother should return to “work.” We should be redefining work itself. If mothers had the right and the financial supports to not return to paid jobs for a reasonable time after giving birth, workplaces and work hours were far more flexible, and parents had the right to part-time work, perhaps the occasional mother who loved her job might choose to return to work shortly after giving birth, bringing her infant with her and working as many or as few hours as she felt able. In short, work should be redefined so that it no longer is incompatible with caregiving, and the normal worker should be redefined as someone who likely is the primary caregiver to someone.

For all that Palin’s story offers a glimpse of these possibilities if we look for them, in truth she is a single, privileged exception that only proves the rule. What we need is a movement to demand these privileges as rights and commonplace necessities.

Superbugs and birth

2008-08-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

Second in an occasional series: What I’m reading while pumping breastmilk...

A recent article in the New Yorker about antibiotic-resistant infections and their prevalence in hospitals is truly frightening, and it prompted this thought: Birthing women and newborns should, wherever possible, stay the hell away from hospitals. And: C-sections, representing just the kind of surgical wound (an oft-infected one, I might add) that drug-resistant bacteria love to colonize, should be done as rarely as possible.

The tragic history of childbed fever, which proved to be a doctor- and hospital-caused epidemic, suggests good reason for worry about infection of birthing women. While discovery of the cause in the late nineteenth century—that doctors were moving between patients and from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands (ugh)—and introduction of antiseptic techniques dramatically reduced deaths from childbed fever, they weren’t eliminated until the introduction of antibiotics. But the bacteria that cause it were never eliminated—it's caused by the Group A and B strep bugs, among the bugs known to be developing antibiotic resistance. So the news that antibiotics are losing their effectiveness bodes badly for women birthing in hospitals.

Boston marriages revived?

2008-08-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

I’m glad to see Broadsheet picking up on a topic I’ve discussed previously: the need to recognize other forms of partnership besides either heterosexual or gay ones. Although Carol Price’s post didn’t make the connection with the debate over gay marriage, she did pose the question, “Isn’t it time to legally recognize the bonds of friendship?” She cited others asking the question, noting articles on the subject in the Boston Globe and The New York Times.

No one in the articles or the blog post suggested the kind of systematic revision of the tax code I do, and several experts quoted seemed to miss the point altogether, dismissing the idea of giving friendships legal standing as typical American over-legislation. But Laura Rosenbury, a law professor at Washington University quoted by the Boston Globe, gets it:

"If the law decides to support some relationships, why not others that similarly involve care and support? What is it about marriage or marriage-like relationships - that is, relationships that are assumed to have sex in them?"

Jane Gross in the New York Times focuses on those who are single and childless and their need for support in old age. But this isn’t only an issue that should concern single women. It’s past due time for women to consider that most of us will spend less than half our lives married to a man (see my old article in Salon on this topic). I’ve already considered that my spouse is likely to die many years before me (sorry, sweetie) and that my friends will be the support of my old age.

Most women quit breastfeeding quickly

2008-08-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

First the good news: Three out of four U.S. mothers are now breastfeeding their newborns, according to a recent study from Brigham Young University. I’ve heard horror stories from older women of babies being fed mixtures of Karo syrup, so let’s hear it for some enlightenment.

But now the bad news: Although the American Academy of Pediatricians recommends breastfeeding through the first year and the World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding for two years. most women have quit breastfeeding by the time their baby reaches six months.

The researchers found that children who were most likely to be breast-fed for more than six months typically had mothers with higher levels of education and incomes. Before we all leap to blaming stupid moms, surely a major cause of the drop-off is the lack of paid family leave in this country, the pathetic part-time job market, lack of flexibility in most work places, and the downright hostility of most workplaces to pumping and breastfeeding. Those women with more education are more likely to be able to take significant time off and to have higher-status jobs where pumping is a viable option (Starbucks, for example, wins kudos for supporting mothers among its managerial staff, but just try being a barista and breastfeeding).

I’m here to tell you that breastfeeding is great—no need to remember to lug any food with you! And it’s free!—but pumping sucks. Itoffers nearly all the stupidity of formula feeding—endless bottle washing—and you have to hide in a bathroom or cleaning closet and hook yourself up to a milking machine, all the while watching the clock tick and hoping nobody else is noticing that, once again, you’re not at your desk. Which stress of course tends to reduce your milk production, which in turn ups your stress. I understand why women quit breastfeeding after they return to paid work.

But here’s to my fellow Western staters and to immigrants—the populations most likely to breastfeed.

Depression increases your risk of...depression

2008-08-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

Why is it that news about postpartum depression seems so often to fall in the no-shit-sherlock category?

Check out this item: “Psychiatric history affects 'baby blues,' study says.
Mental health issues may increase postpartum suicide risk.” Um—it took researchers with master’s degrees to figure this out?

Then again, read deeper and you find more to undermine conventional wisdom than to reiterate common sense. Midway down the article I see this: Rates of suicide attempts by women after giving birth is much lower than in the general population.

This does make sense; most women, even depressed ones, feel an obligation to their newborns to stay alive. Still, you might think from all the publicity about postpartum depression that women were at high risk of suicide after pregnancy.

Talk about postpartum depression is a strange mixture of the deadly obvious repackaged as profound scientific insight and thoroughly bogus leaps of logic repackaged as unquestionable science. This says to me that we’re thoroughly confused about postpartum depression. And "mental illness" in general, for that matter. My favorite billboard ever, which I used to pass by daily on my way to work, is "Number one cause of suicide: Untreated depression." Can we say tautology, class?

Go, Ohio

2008-08-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

As an article in the Dayton Daily News put it forlornly, Ohio rarely leads the nation in anything. (Not even plant closings, where it's probably edged out by Michigan.) But Ohio is poised to become the first state in the nation to require employers to give workers paid sick leave.

I don't have to tell parents how important sick leave is. The Dayton Daily News article reports that 2.2. million Ohioans have no paid sick leave and another million don't have the right to use it to care for their sick children. For low-income workers, who are least likely to have paid sick time and least likely to have the right to use it to care for sick children, one illness in the family can mean losing a job and financial ruin. This is just one element of the shadow of fear that defines the American economy. Most other rich countries have seen fit to lift that shadow by offering, among other pieces of the safety net, paid sick leave.

If voters pass this initiative this fall—and as of now 71 percent support the measure— Ohio workers will get seven paid sick days.

Here's hoping Ohio is just the first.

As the economy slides, the safety net doesn't catch women

2008-08-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

You know times are tough when the Wall Street Journal runs stories on how hard it is to qualify for unemployment. This week the Journal reports that most of those losing their jobs in the current economic slide won’t qualify for unemployment benefits.

Only 37% of the country's unemployed received benefits in 2007, down from 55% in 1958 and 44% in 2001, according to the Labor Department. The others have exhausted their benefits, haven't applied or don't qualify.

The article goes on to note that the unemployment insurance system was set up for “traditional male breadwinners in traditional, manufacturing-type jobs," according to labor economist Lawrence F. Katz, and doesn’t fit people who work part-time, move in and out of work, or juggle multiple jobs. Which means, especially, it doesn’t fit mothers.

This is not news to me. When I went on unemployment after losing my job shortly after my first child was born because my employer was unwilling to accommodate my need for part-time work, I went through the wringer. First I had to fight to prove I qualified, in part because I’d been working part-time. I had to claim I was seeking full-time work. Then, I faced the Kafka-esque double bind that jeopardizes mothers who try to claim insurance benefits: Failure to have childcare counts as not being “ready and available for work,” and therefore disqualifies you for benefits. It’s true; how can you even look for work if you don’t have childcare, let alone accept work, what with decent childcare taking so long to locate? But how are you supposed to pay for childcare if you don’t have a job—and you can’t get unemployment? Nor of course is childcare provided as an unemployment benefit. It was maddening.

I got caught on the horns of this dilemma because I was twice required to come in to the unemployment offices to wait around and let underpaid bureaucrats peruse my paperwork. Once my partner was unavailable to watch our daughter, and although I was allowed to reschedule my mandatory appointment, this triggered the remorseless wheels of denial. Luckily, the human caseworker carefully asked me if I was unavailable—had no childcare—all the time or just that one time. I said just the once, she didn’t push further, and I was docked exactly $36 from my unemployment check. Thank goodness for real humans inside the system.

But the system must be changed, not just as the Journal suggests, to allow for people outside of long-term, full-time work, but also by providing childcare assistance as an unemployment benefit. In these hard times, change can't wait.

Slogan of the week

2008-07-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

The first in an occasional series, Highlights of my reading while pumping breastmilk...

Writing in the Nation, Linda Gordon says, "As the feminist slogan goes, "Women deliver." I've never heard this slogan before and don't know who used it, but it rocks. Here's Gordon's explanation, which encapsulates a big chunk of the meaning of feminism:

In other words, when women control resources, the social gain is greater than when men control resources. Improving health for the poor is as likely to produce progressive change as any other strategy, because health activism these days requires challenging the world's most powerful and destructive
forces. Matters of the body are politically fundamental.

A break for single parents

2008-07-23T21:36:00.000-07:00

Since having kids, I now divide the world into two kinds of people: the ones who give me the evil eye when my children are howling and the ones who offer to help. Nowhere does this Manichean division seem more true than when I’m traveling. My heart bleeds when I see a mother struggling to keep a couple of children calm while herding them and all their belongings onto an airplane and I’m always shocked that everyone isn’t leaping forward to help. On Guatemalan buses, friends have told me, a crying baby is handed from arm to arm among the passengers. America a child-friendly culture, my tuckus.

My mother tells epic tales of traveling alone with me, so I’m delighted to learn (via Mothertalkers and Newsweek) of organizations that cater to single parents. About time. These organizations offer not only assistance, but company, something single parents could use just as much.

McCain is scary: installment #5,543

2008-07-19T22:29:00.000-07:00

This doesn’t really need any commentary: Feministing headlines it “McCain: "Isn't rape hilarious?!" McCain allegedly told this joke in 1986:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, "Where is that marvelous ape?"

Here’s his campaign’s response to the story resurfacing, which pretty well confirms the story's true:

He's long said that he's said and done things in the past that he regrets," Rogers said. "You've just got to move on and be yourself -- that's what people want. They want somebody who's authentic, and this kind of stuff is a good example of McCain being McCain.

Yup, that’s just what I’d say. Let’s sure not let him be McCain in the White House.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town…CNN ran this headline about a recent Obama press event: “Obama talks about glass ceilings, child care, equal pay.” Moms Rising has sent out an alert asking folks to send Obama a thank you for talking about these issues. Contrary to what some may think, Obama ain’t the second coming. He’s a cautious, savvy politician and he’s going to disappoint us. But, jeez, he doesn’t make rape jokes. Or say he doesn't want to talk about his position on birth control, or think the cause of the gender pay gap is women's underqualification.

Teen sexual activity no predicter of HPV risk

2008-07-16T22:07:00.000-07:00

If public health decisions were made rationally in this country, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control would put paid to the argument that only sluts should get the HPV vaccine:

Turns out a teen’s level of sexual activity doesn’t predict her level of risk of contracting HPV, the virus that causes genital warts and cervical cancer. The researchers report that HPV is so common that anyone who ever becomes sexually active is likely to get it, and so every girl should get the vaccine.

But of course public health politics aren’t rational and so women will continue to die from a preventable cancer. Including, it seems likely, especially the daughters of right-wing Christians, whose parents, if this vaccine is not made mandatory, will be free to decide that their daughters don’t need this sluts’ vaccine, but whose husbands, judging by the recent track record of right-wing Christian politicians, may well be engaged in plenty of extracurricular sex that puts their wives at risk. Seems to me there’s only one interpretation possible: right-wing zealots want women to be punished for having sex (and even for their husbands’ having sex). There’s a dark side of me that takes grim pleasure whenever this truth is exposed, but mostly I’m depressed. The daughters of zealots don’t deserve to be punished for their parents’ misogyny. Nor do the rest of our daughters.

Sadly, it’s not just the children of the far-right who are at risk. Many parents are reluctant to give their young teenage daughters the vaccine because they can’t conceive their daughter might be sexually active or about to become so. This study should provide the squeamish with a reason to vaccinate their daughters: Any time their daughter ever has a single sexual partner she will be at risk unless she’s vaccinated. Every female but a nun should get it, and, hey, nuns have been known to change their minds, so they should too.

The study should also change the mainstream medical establishment’s approach to the vaccine, too. According to RH Reality Check's blog, the American Cancer Society recommends that women 18 and older talk decide whether to be vaccinated based on a conversation with their doctors about their sexual history. This study shows sexual history is no predicter of HPV risk and the cancer society should get on board with vaccinating everybody. (And indeed it suggests that even the CDC's recommendation that all females ages 11–26 get vaccinated is too narrow. What about older women?)

Why I’m not for gay marriage

2008-07-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Before you decide I’m a homophobe, let me be clear: In a society where the government sanctifies heterosexual partnership under the name of marriage, I regard the denial of that sanctification to same-sex couples as a violation of basic rights. If the government grants anyone that right, it must grant it to all.

But instead, let the government stop granting marriage to anyone.

But I am married, so what gives?

There you get to the heart of why I’ve been thinking so much about this issue, but have taken so long to post on it. I have always been skeptical of marriage, and I used to have nightmares about finding myself in a white dress walking down an aisle. (Eek! How did I get here?) But after I had been with the man I’m now married to for a few years and realized I planned to create a lifelong partnership with him, I came to see refusing to accept the label of marriage as largely irrelevant and pointless. We had a wedding—I wore red, not white—and against all my expectation I enjoyed it. A woman rabbi married us, our families were there, and I, who am an only child and the daughter of a single mother, was delighted to be embraced in a new family. Warm and loving as that family would have been to me if we had decided not to get married, there’s no denying that that ceremony gave me a new status in the family. I now belong in a deeply comforting way. I gained a privilege that gays have traditionally been denied and that must change.

I also gained the 300-some dubious legal benefits of marriage. I say dubious, because many of these benefits are gains for my family unit but they have the effect of disempowering me. Our family unit may gain economically from the marriage—we can file a joint tax return, and my husband can claim for the family the right to Social Security based on 150 percent of his income, instead of 100 percent. But as a wife, I will face significant disincentives on my paid work. Because of joint filing, my earnings are taxed at a much steeper marginal rate than they were when I was single. (Ann Crittenden explains this well, although she doesn’t emphasize that this is a different problem from the more commonly known “marriage penalty”—the problem remains even if the couple as a unit doesn't pay any more than the total the two would pay separately. For a more technical explanation, see Siv Gustafsson’s scholarly paper [PDF]. For a full-length book on the subject, check out Edward McCaffery's terrific Taxing Women. )

Many women in this situation elect to drop out of the paid workforce, basing their decision only on a comparison of current costs and benefits. Yet dropping out of the workforce results in major long-term costs, including big hits to my lifetime earnings, my savings (including government-encouraged, tax-free savings under a 401K), and my accrual of Social Security. Social Security is designed to allow me to receive benefits under my husband’s umbrella, but my marriage had better survive for more than 10 years or I get nothing. If the marriage survives and I do take paid work, I likely will get no return on the Social Security taxes I pay on my earnings; that is, a non-wage-earning wife will get the same Social Security benefits I do, despite all the additional taxes I pay in.

If I am among the working poor, and I stay in the paid workforce once I marry, I will likely lose all or most of the Earned Income Credit, subjecting my earnings to whopping effective rates higher than the rich paid under the New Deal.

When a couple has a child, these disincentives to the wife’s paid work kick into overdrive. Rather than treating childcare as a business expense (as it clearly is) and allowing full deduction of it, let alone offering major tax credits or a full system of government-funded childcare, we get a token credit on a small fraction of the enormous cost of childcare. So lots of women drop out of the paid workforce when they have a child and even more do so when they face the cost of childcare for two or more children. Yet earnings are power, so this means they lose power, both within the marriage and in the larger world.

Marriage as a government-backed institution, whatever the privileges that come with it, remains a raw deal for women.

A majority of Americans now support domestic partnerships, but are uncomfortable with gay marriage. To which I think the solution is the abolition of marriage—as a government-backed institution. Which is not to say that marriage should be abolished altogether. Just get the government out of it. Let rabbis, priests, imams, and gurus and their associated communities provide the sanctification people want and need and let them call it what they want. Meanwhile the government would offer only domestic partnerships. And while we’re at it, let’s extend the right to enter these partnerships not just to gay and straight couples, but to any pair of consenting adults who want to live together and share living expenses, property, and, perhaps, responsibilities for children. Which is to say, junk the link between sex and partnership. Friends, sisters, cousins could become domestic partners if they liked.

When an unmarried acquaintance of mine faced a terminal illness, she knew she’d be turning to Medicaid to cover the high costs of dying, but Medicaid required her to spend down all her assets first. Her only asset was a condominium she occupied with her sister and wanted to pass on to her. If the sister had been her husband, she could have done so, without jeopardizing Medicaid coverage. Why should the government treat this relationship with her sister as any less significant than marriage to a man? Why should the government treat any life partnership between two adults less seriously than a sexual one between a man and a woman? Gays have raised this question, but we should take it far deeper and broader. This is both a practical matter and a matter of liberty and human flourishing, especially for women. Let us create less rigid and more expansive notions of family.

We should abolish joint filing and jettison the system that grants social benefits—from Social Security to health care—on the basis of marital status, in favor of granting them as rights of citizenship, or better yet as human rights.

Facebook to users: pick a gender

2008-07-09T14:43:00.000-07:00

This is kinda off topic, but it combines two subjects close to my heart—gender and grammar, whoopee!—so I can’t resist. Broadsheet reports that when Facebook sends a newsfeed about your friend’s latest picture tagging, instead of “Pat Smith tagged themself in a picture” you’ll now read “Pat Smith tagged himself” or “Pat Smith tagged herself.”

Darn but that old third-person singular is still giving us feminist grammarians grief. I’m not crazy about singular use of “they”—it violates my love of precision in language and often creates confusion—but I’m inclined to think it’s about as good a solution as we’re gonna get. We do need a solution, because “he” just isn’t a generic pronoun. And weird invented pronouns just sound, well, weird. Language after all is a social game; as Wittgenstein said, you can’t just go off and create a private language. Unless everyone suddenly embraces a new pronoun you can’t create a new one.

This is why Facebook’s effort to accommodate those who don’t wish to be boxed into gender categories by allowing users to enter whatever they want in the gender category doesn’t cut it. If you enter “shim” for example as your gender, you have immediately labeled yourself oddball. Which is not the same as staying gender neutral.

I’m sorry Facebook has taken this step. Everywhere else in life we’re forced to announce our genders, and now we’ve lost one place to opt out of that game. As a parent, I’m acutely aware of how ferociously gender is policed in children. People get really uncomfortable when they guess wrongly that my blue-bedecked baby is a boy, even though neither the baby nor I care. And heaven forbid a boy child should wear pink. And when my partner and I chose not to find out the kids’ sex before birth, people were more startled by that than when they learned we were choosing to have the children at home. Which is precisely why we chose not to find out. Let the kids—and us, their parents—be free of the rigid pressures and expectations of gender at least until they’re born.

You didn't think I was going to be able to bring this back to parenting, did you?

Cuddling is risky, says New York

2008-07-08T15:19:00.000-07:00

This is one of those stories that sets my outrage-o-meter climbing higher with each detail: New York and a number of other states have launched “Babies Sleep Safest Alone” campaign, claiming that “Co-sleeping is risky.” (In multiple languages, no less.)

There appears to be no science behind this claim. New York’s Office of Children and Families claims that co-sleeping is involved in approximately 20 percent of the child fatalities reported to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, but as we used to say in graduate school, let’s unpack that statement. “Involved” is an exceedingly weak verb, eliding a lot of imprecision as to what the real causes of the deaths were.. The campaign notes that alcohol, drugs, obesity, and overcrowding of the bed with people, toys, or blankets also appear to have been “involved” in these deaths.

And what about the risks of not sleeping with your baby? Of the 80 percent of child fatalities reported to the register that didn't involve co-sleeping, what fraction were caused by sleeping alone? That is, by unsafe cribs, from SIDS—the risk of which has been shown to be reduced by co-sleeping—from smothering in blankets or toys in cribs, or more broadly from whatever went wrong that was unnoticed because the baby was far away from an attentive caregiver?

This campaign and previous ones like it don’t cite studies proving cribs are safer than co-sleeping. They simply assume it. In fact, the burden of proof rightly goes the other way; humans have been sleeping with their babies since before we became human (and in most countries they still do). It’s a practice that was part of our evolution, and it seems plausible that closeness to the breathing warmth of one’s mother helps regulate all sorts of functions in the unformed human newborn. SIDS studies bear this out.

And co-sleeping makes breastfeeding a heck of a lot easier.

I got even more irritated when I read what I assumed would be a rebuttal of the campaign from Mothering magazine. The author wrote that she had planned to participate in activism against it, then decided against it.

After some reflection, I realized that New York's campaign wasn't really directed at me…The recommendation…fails to differentiate between parents with limited resources who bed-share out of necessity, those who do so out of neglect, and those who intentionally bed-share in what they believe to be the best interests of their child.”

She goes on to detail the evidence in favor of co-sleeping, but that comment illuminated one of the creepiest aspects of the campaign: its not-so-subtle classism. It’s okay for well-to-parents to choose to bed-share (or better yet buy an expensive “co-sleeper” sidecar), but heaven forbid you should do so because you’ve got nowhere else for the child to sleep. Perhaps co-sleeping is okay if you’re sober and slim and so on, but we can’t expect stupid (read poor) parents to understand that nuance and act on it. And we well-to-do, educated parents shouldn’t oppose the campaign because it isn’t directed at us.

But we’re all in this together. Official campaigns that discourage breastfeeding affect all of us. Guilt-tripping mothers for doing the most natural thing in the world affects all of us.

This seems to me yet another installment in the official valuing of the parenting money can buy over what it can’t; rich parents can buy nurseries with fancy cribs and high-tech monitors, while poor ones can only cuddle. I for one think cuddling is the better deal.

Missourians finally free to give birth at home

2008-07-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

Finally, women in Missouri have the right to a midwife-attended home birth. By a 5-2 decision, the state supreme court rejected an effort by doctors to abolish a recent law legalizing the practice.

Until recently, Missouri was the only state where having a home birth attended by a certified midwife was actually a felony. A group of doctors sought to return women in Missouri to that benighted situation, claiming they had standing to sue by virtue of speaking for their patients. That is, seeking to speak on behalf of women who might foolishly try to have home births if they weren’t prevented, and therefore can't be trusted to speak for themselves. As Susan Jenkins, legal counsel for the National Birth Policy Coalition and a consultant to the Missouri midwives, stated:

“This case confirms the message that’s been reverberating loud and clear in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere ever since the American Medical Association launched its attacks against midwives and home birth last week—physicians do not have the right to speak for patients when it comes to deciding who delivers their babies.”

Our Bodies Ourselves notes how weirdly the concept of choice is being used by the medical establishment when it comes to reproduction and childbirth. At the same time that the AMA and American College of Obstetricians pushes the acceptability of “elective” C-sections, it is making VBACS harder and harder to have and opposes the expansion of women's choices in caregivers and birthing places.

Pope Benedict the lactivist?

2008-06-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-02T21:47:00.000-07:00

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).

You will learn from this experience, or else

2008-05-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-20T13:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-05-07T14:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

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?

Killing us not so softly

2008-04-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-04-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

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.)

The indelicacies of being a job applicant in a delicate way

2008-03-31T12:18:00.000-07:00

Remember when I wrote about losing out on yet another job to motherhood? Turns out that what I experienced was, like, so illegal in my state, which is developing some of the strongest anti–pregnancy discrimination law in the land. Ironically, just a few days before getting discriminated out of that job, I’d been chatting at a party with a lawyer who works on pregnancy discrimination and who told me about a new case she’d worked on that strengthened pregnancy discrimination protections.

That case was just like mine, only mine was even stronger and clearer. I didn’t file charges with the local civil rights board, as a lawyer advised me to do, just confronted the temp agency rep, who ate crow after talking with his lawyer. He quickly found me other work (and promised to educate his staff and that of his client).

Here’s the good-bad news: I am not alone. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that complaints of pregnancy discrimination rose by 14% between 2006 and 2007 and by a whopping 40% increase over the last decade.

Good for women for filing complaints. But yuck that we have so much to complain about. And, sadly, in most states the law against pregnancy discrimination isn’t very strong. The National Partnerships for Women and Families explains, “Under the law, pregnant women do not receive protection from adverse treatment, and employers can fire, lay off or refuse to hire pregnant women. However, the law states that pregnant women cannot be singled out, that employers must prove that men are held to the same standards and that male job candidates are asked comparable questions during the hiring process.” This explanation isn’t crystal clear to me, but I do know that in my home state—Washington—in a hiring process, you can ask only whether an applicant can do the job, and requirements, including physical ones, must be clearly established and uniform for all applicants. So rejecting me on the grounds of pregnancy for a job that required the ability to occasionally lift up to 25 pounds—which I said I could do—was clearly illegal. The fact that the job offer was rescinded after I mentioned I was pregnant was what put the employer in hot water.

The law couldn’t help me in the grayer area where I simply never received job offers after I mentioned I was pregnant. Broader changes in the job market are required. If paid parental leave were funded throughout the country, high-quality daycare provided and publicly subsidized so that mothers could work without the likelihood of disruption, and if temporary work weren’t so prevalent, we’d likely face less pregnancy discrimination.

Still, if employers understood that the law forbids the kind of paternalism toward pregnant women I was subjected to, I think that would transform attitudes and reduce discrimination. I was told, “We’d feel so bad if we needed something heavier lifted.” Never mind feeling bad about leaving me jobless (or considering that my 2 1/2-year-old is heavier than 25 pounds and I’ve lifted her every day of this pregnancy); the law makes clear that it’s not an employer’s job to protect people in a Delicate Way; that’s my business.

This is a profound shift, and not just for Neanderthals. I found myself rethinking the matter once I understood the law. If employers thought more clearly about the actual requirements of the job and let go of irrelevant assumptions about who they picture doing it, we’d be a step in the right direction.

It's our fault, installment #5,726

2008-03-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

As if we needed more proof that mothers can’t win, the Boston Globe recently ran an editorial claiming that the long hours Americans work are women’s fault. The next day the Wall Street Journal reported on a study that found lawyers who are mothers are less productive than non-mothers—whereas lawyers who are fathers are more productive than non-fathers. Which is it—are we women cold workaholics or slackers?

As both Broadsheet and Carolyn Elefant in a letter to the WSJ noticed, there’s a problem with the lawyer study’s definition of productivity. The researchers in fact measured billable hours, which they equated with productivity, which isn't necessarily the same thing at all. Elefant wrote, “I’d be curious to see, for example, whether women lawyers manage to complete tasks more quickly precisely because they have less time. If that’s the case (and I suspect it is), perhaps having children makes them [more] productive, not less.”

Exactly.

The study also found that women without children are more “productive” (bill more hours) than anyone else, male or female, though that brings us back to the Boston Globe’s diatribe against women for working such long hours and upping the ante on all of us.

And then there’s that depressing bit about father lawyers working extra hours, which fits with what researchers have found in other fields. As Joan Williams, Ann Crittenden, Edward McCaffery, and others have explained, the depressing fact that men tend to work even longer hours after they have children is the result of the gender role specialization that our culture—including our tax code—drives parents into. Combine the presumption that mothers be the primary caregivers with the likelihood that the wife in a couple earns less than her husband, add in the lack of public subsidies and meaningful tax deductions for childcare, and, just to really slant the deck, toss in a tax code that heavily taxes the wages of the secondary earner in a family, and you’ve got a recipe for fathers specializing in breadwinning and mothers in caregiving—fathers working longer hours, mothers fewer. Bingo.

Which would seem to suggest that it’s men, or at least fathers, not women, that the Boston Globe should be blaming for the trend to long hours—or that she’s on the wrong track altogether in blaming workers, rather than corporations or government policies. In part because of the perception that mothers are less committed to their work, mothers get paid 40 percent less than men (see that item in my list of facts over to the right). A woman wouldn’t be irrational if she felt the need to overcompensate for this assumption by working extra hours (or, if she’s paid hourly, compensate for her low rate of pay by working more hours), thereby demonstrating her devotion to work. Many mothers will tell you that after they had babies their bosses subjected them to extra demands beyond what other employees faced, as if to test their commitment to work. So give me a break (yet again) with this it’s-our-fault business.

"Single mothers ruining society"?

2008-03-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

I’ve had it up to here with headlines like this: “Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe” (said Slate), with their not-so-subtle subtext that, as Broadsheet put it sarcastically, “single mothers are ruining society.” I’m sick of hearing this line assumed as given fact even in liberal circles. I take this personally—that would be my mother—a fact that always startles the liberal men who spout this crap in my presence. I think they assume that single mothers are a) African American, b) teenagers, c) poor and ignorant, or d) all of the above. None of which fits my Harvard-educated mother who chose to have me at 24 (but who did briefly go on welfare after I was born).

The central argument is that because poverty is so high among single mothers, lack of marriage must be the cause of their poverty. “Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system,” Slate’s Emily Yoffe says.

This makes me think the right headline should be, “Failure of education in basic statistical principles is a national catastrophe.” As any stats prof will tell his undergrads, correlation does not equal causation.

Here’s some pretty easy-to-come-by evidence that lack of marriage isn’t what’s causing child poverty: Sweden for over a decade has had the world’s highest rate of out-of-wedlock births—they’re now a majority of Sweden’s births—and yet one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the world. In several other Northern European countries with low child poverty rates, unwed mothers also are in the majority. France just last year joined this group.

A few other facts Yoffe and others of her ilk ignore: An American child is 79 times more likely to become a victim of child abuse than a Swedish child, although (because?) far more American children than Swedes are born within marriage. More than one third of all impoverished young children in the U.S. today live with two parents. And here's a zinger: Among African-American families, children from single-parent homes show higher educational achievement than their counterparts from two-parent homes.

And about that income stratification: It’s likely the causation goes precisely the other way. That is, because income is distributed far more unequally in the United States than in most other developed countries, it is difficult for low-wage workers (male or female) to support a family without a second income. And—duh—the shortage of affordable child care makes it difficult for single mothers to support themselves, whereas Western European nations provide publicly subsidized day care, not to mention myriad other supports to parents. The real catastrophe that we Americans should be talking about: the economic toll parenting exacts in America.

In addition to staggering ignorance of logic, the single-parenting-is-a disaster arguments always seem to me to expose a nasty cynicism about marriage. Given the lower rates of marriage among mothers in countries with rich social supports for parents, it appears it takes economic coercion, vulnerability, and shame to get a majority of mothers to marry. Apparently that’s the state marriage promoters want women to be in—that’s the kind of marriage bargain they’re for. Yuck.

Domestic disputes

2008-03-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

Good news, eh? The India Times (via Feministing) reports that Muslim women are on their way toward finally having the right to divorce on the same terms as Muslim men. If the The All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board has its way,

a Muslim woman would be entitled to seek divorce if her husband was found having illicit relationship with another woman.
The board has also rejected any divorce done through SMS, e-mail, phone as video conferencing, besides rejecting divorce done on provocation.
A Muslim woman can seek divorce if she is forced by her husband to indulge in unnatural sex. She can also seek divorce if her husband contracts AIDS.

Fine, good news. But I can’t seem to see the sunshine for the black cloud: the realization that India’s women are governed, in their family relations, by the law of the religious community they happen to belong to. Not so long ago, I was shocked to learn that in Israel, the “democracy of the Middle East” family law is handled by Orthodox rabbis.

How many other countries do the same, treating family as sectarian religious matters rather than as a matter of human rights? This isn't an issue only for Third World countries. Remember when the Archbishop of Canterbury created controversy by suggesting Britain would likely soon have to allow Muslims in Britain to be governed by sharia? And right-wingers want to introduce “covenant marriage” in this country—they’ve succeeded in a couple of states.

Some commentators on the archbishop’s remarks suggested this would be just fine because people would have to choose to be governed by sharia, much as people in the few states in the U.S. with covenant marriage have to choose to enter it (very few have). In neither India nor Israel do you have any choice. But in any case, if you live within a religious community, how meaningful is such “choice”? You might make the same argument for the legalization of slave contracts; in fact, our society has come to recognize that some “choices” are abhorrent and cannot be enforced or even allowed by the state. It wasn't so long ago that in this country a man beating up his wife was treated as a private matter, a "domestic dispute." Let's not forget what the stakes are when we privatize family law.

How do we tell the children?

2008-03-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

Among the many angles on the Eliot Spitzer the media are chewing on is how parents should talk to children about infidelity. Forget prostitution for the moment—I’m not ready to figure out how you explain to children the buying and selling of sex. What about infidelity?

Having grown up the child of a single mom, I always thought one of the grosser things about marriage as mythologized in our culture was how it muddled up the parents’ sexual relationship in their relationships with their children. Ick. My mother had boyfriends and partners over the years, but I always knew that had nothing to do with my relationship with her (and that ultimately I came first). And I think that’s a good thing.

Now, against all my expectations, I’m married. Which raises for me the question of how I make sure that my children know that my relationship with them is one thing and my relationship with their father is another. I’m pretty confident that infidelity and divorce—let alone prostitution—are not on the horizon for us, but I’m sure there will ups and downs in the marriage and I hope my children will understand that that’s about me and their father and not about them. My relationship with my children is unconditional.

But I lack models for how you convey this within the confines of heterosexual marriage. Perhaps one element is generally conveying that mama and daddy are separate (and imperfect) people and that our lives extend beyond our children, so there’s never any shattering of idols. My partner and I each spend time caring for our daughter alone, so I hope that we are cultivating equal and separate relationships with her. Still, we are a family unit—which is pretty wonderful, I think—and that is all she knows. I guess I just hope I never fetishize that unit. We’re still, also, individuals.

Any thoughts, gentle readers?

Do we all work at the Emperor's Club?

2008-03-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

Get a load of this angle on the Eliot Spitzer story (thanks, Broadsheet):

Telephone operators at the Emperor's Club criticized one of the women for cutting sessions with buyers short so that she could pick up her children at school. 'As a general rule,' one said, 'girls with children tend to have a little more baggage going on.'

Sound familiar, girls?

Do I care if Eliot Spitzer hires prostitutes?

2008-03-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

I so wanted to like “Who Cares If Eliot Spitzer Hires Prostitutes?”, Glenn Greenwald’s post on the hour’s hottest scandal at Salon.com. Purchasing sex is decidedly—shall we call it tacky? No, let’s be honest and call it morally bankrupt. But it’s not an abuse of public trust or public power (although I have to assume that it’s power that corrupted Spitzer into thinking he could get away with it and probably power that got him thinking it was cool to buy sex). I’ve always been ambivalent about prostitution laws, since although I consider the purchasing of sex abhorrent, I don’t think criminalizing women who sell themselves is a good way of dealing with the practice.

And I always thought of Eliot Spitzer’s raison d’etre as opposition to corporate malfeasance and greed, not private sexual behavior, as has been the case with so many of the right-wingers caught in sexual scandals, so I haven’t really seen the hypocrisy as all that direct. Still, he’s branded himself as “Mr. Clean” and he did prosecute at least one big prostitution case. And give me a break with Spitzer's wrapping himself in the righteousness of the progressive causes he's championed (come to think of it, that's kind of like the way he apparently used a friend's name to register at the hotel where he brought prostitutes).

Anyway, I was prepared to hear Greenwald sympathetically. He approvingly cites another blogger writing that if two consenting adults have sex and once gets paid, that’s illegal, but if several consenting adults have sex, film it, and they all get paid, that’s just business—ridiculous, says Greenwald. This is a funny point. Except that it misses the main point. It’s precisely the one-sidedness that makes prostitution a moral problem. When one person purchases the body of another, you’ve got a sin. When whole classes of people can purchase the bodies of whole other classes of people, you’ve got one sign of a social evil. To be a woman in this world is—to riff on Catherine MacKinnon—for your sexual body to be purchase-able. Which, I think, harms all women. I’m not with MacKinnon on outlawing porn, because I do think there’s a difference between word and act. And I’m not sure I’m even for outlawing prostitution, precisely because the law treats buyer and bought as equally to blame, which misses the point just as Greenwald does. Prostitution is not, as Greenwald claims, a victimless crime.

Still, I can’t get myself worked into too much of a moral lather over Spitzer’s deeds. I don't expect politicians to be personal saints. Mostly I think Spitzer's an idiot. He got caught by Bush’s Department of Justice and some banks that noticed suspicious transactions. Did it not occur to him that these two groups were likely to be out to get him?

And unlike some self-righteous liberals noting the disparity between Spitzer’s treatment and the retention in office of accused sex criminals David Vitter and Larry Craig, I thought Spitzer rightly had to go. There’s a difference between the legislative branch and executive branch. As an executive, Spitzer wouldn’t have been able to get anything done.

What I’m maddest at Spitzer for is his treatment of his wife. I’ve had it with political wives being forced to stand up with their husbands and use their victimhood to help their husbands salvage some sympathy. As if having the world know your husband bought sex (possibly partly because he wanted some rough trade) weren’t bad enough, you have to go stand by him under the klieg lights (looking haggard to boot)? Screw that. That’s another form of prostitution, and if that’s what marriage means marriage oughta be illegal. Let him twist by himself in the wind. That’s what I call personal responsibility.

Update: Gack! Apparently Silda Spitzer is getting lots of judgment thrown at her. According to Broadsheet, at least one commentator blamed her for the scandal (because she supposedly didn't kink things up enough). I can't do more than sputter at this. Damn them. (And Broadsheet offers some plausible and reasonable possible motivations to explain Spitzer's stand-by-your-man act.)

This just in: being poor is depressing

2008-03-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

This oughta put paid to the idea that postpartum depression just is hormones: Researchers at one of my alma maters, the University of Iowa, have found that poor women (in Iowa) are many times more likely to suffer from postpartum depression than better off women. Yeah, no kidding, being poor is depressing.

Another study by the same researchers found that African-American women are more likely than white women to get depressed after birth, while Latinas are less likely to get depressed. The lead researcher suggested that the differences can be traced to differences in social support.

I find the press release darkly amusing in its bureaucratic caution. “Considered together, the results of both studies highlight … the need for early identification programs.” I picture social workers saying to patients, “I think you should be aware that our data suggest there is a high likelihood that you are poor/black.” If you ask me, the results of the studies highlight the need to end poverty and racism and the way our society isolates mothers.

Which is not to dismiss the program the researchers have created to help depressed women postpartum, called “listening visits,” in which mothers get the chance to talk about their difficulties with a caseworker or nurse. But here again there’s something darkly amusing: The visits were modeled on the “health visitor” provided by Britain’s National Health Service for new mothers, and the Iowa researchers imported Brits to do the listening. Eek—the socialists are coming; don’t tell Aetna, Blue Cross, Kaiser, …

Thanks to the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog for noting this research. The blog’s also got other good stuff.

Women in Iraq bowed but not broken

2008-03-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

I've just discovered this organization, the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, which in honor of International Women's Day tomorrow issued a statement of solidarity with women of the world and is circulating a petition to "End the Genocide on Women of Iraq." Among depressing lowlights of the petition,

The southern cities of Iraq which are totally under the grip of Islamist parties have turned into no-woman zones...Since the 2003 occupation of Iraq, these cities were open land to "Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice- PVPV" Islamist militant squads, gangs and individuals...The top of the female death toll list is occupied by PhD holders, professionals, activists, regular office workers, and then prostitutes. This PVPV campaign terrorizes the female population so as to restrain women into the domestic domain and end all female participation from the social and political scene.

Feministing lists a number of other efforts to celebrate International Women's Day.

Birth mothers react to Juno

2008-03-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

I know from reader feedback that Katha Pollitt and I aren’t after all alone in finding Juno disturbing. Thanks, gentle readers. Thanks now also to the Chicago Tribune, which ran a piece last week about reactions to the film by women who gave children up for adoption.

Check out the lead:

When Kateri McCann gave up her baby for adoption, she was a lot like the heroine of the hit movie "Juno": young, starry-eyed, and in love with the idea of doing the best thing for herself and her child while making the dream of parenthood a reality for a deserving couple.
She thought she could outsmart grief, she says, and for about a year and a half she succeeded.
Then came the tears, the nightmares, the spiraling depression.

And this:

McCann [says] that Cody, the "Juno" screenwriter, nails the initial stages of adoption with eerie precision, but misses the big picture almost entirely.
"It seems like [Cody] knew someone in that situation, paid really close attention -- and then lost contact when [the birth mother] became depressed."

Sluts talk back

2008-03-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

Priceless: The Colorado state rep who called teenage mothers “sluts” and urged that they be shamed and sent away was forced to eat crow at a school for teen mothers (thanks to Feministing for flagging it). When he visited the Florence Crittenton School, Larry Liston actually apologized to the students, saying, “I uttered a word which I regret and I apologized for. It's a word I don't use. Scout's honor. I never use it"—uh, yeah, except for that very public time he did use it.

Not sure if this means he’ll change any of his policy positions, but still.

Ironically, the Florence Crittenton Association originally provided homes for “fallen” and “wayward” women—i.e. unwed and pregnant—and, especially during the ‘40s through the ‘60’s these homes were among the places where “girls who went away” were sent to hide their shame (and their families’) and then give up their babies for adoption (exactly what Liston seemed to be advocating in his original speech). By the early ‘70s, thanks to the women’s movement, Roe, and the rising acceptance of unwed motherhood, the demand for these homes had largely evaporated, and they began closing or being transformed into schools like the one Liston visited. I love it that girls at a Crittenton school faced Liston down—poetic justice. Some things really do progress.

(Although about some things we still have trouble being honest: If you google Florence Crittenton, you’ll find plenty of info on the history of their homes, but nothing noting that girls there were pushed to give up their babies in circumstances when they had little opportunity to refuse. I know this only because of reading “The Girls Who Went Away.”)