An end to the chain gang?

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

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

“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

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!

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?

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

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.