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Stringer Bell is confused. "Whaddaya mean The Wire's not feminist?"

The Wire, the HBO series that ran for five seasons, will apparently live on, despite its shelf life, in a class at Harvard. And Professor William Wilson, the self-admitted "huge fan" who will be teaching the class, is high off of The Wire's Kool-Aid:

"I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication," Wilson told the audience before poking fun at himself, "including studies by social scientists."

As a racial justice advocate who loves politics and sexually diverse representations of people of color, one can't help but be a sucka for The Wire. (Also, I am not going to lie. I might have dedicated a Facebook status, or ten, to good-God-what-have-you-done-to-me Idris Elba.) But when you fasten your feminist goggles and take another gander, you are bound to get bamboozled, psyched out and sucka-punched by yet another attempt to be progressive -- hold the feminism.

Elizabeth Ault, a bad-ass feminist at the University of Minnesota, begins to sum up The Wire's gender problem in the title of her paper: "You Can Help Yourself, But Don't Take Too Much": African-American Motherhood on The Wire. At one point she states,

The Wire is quite capable of creating sympathy for the struggles of men... shows us characters like alcoholic police officer Jimmy McNulty, strategizing drug kingpin/real estate developer Stringer Bell, and corrupt (okay, maybe just stupid) cop Thomas Hauk, and doesn't dictate how we interpret their storylines; rather, much of the show is full of precisely the sort of representational ambiguity that obviates calls for "more positive representations" and earns the "authentic" plaudit--except, again, when it comes to black mothers, women without the social or cultural capital of those men.

Then she goes for the jugular:

The institutions that The Wire is so devoted to condemning have failed these women too. In order to make its damning assessment of urban politics within its own institutional context of Time/Warner-owned HBO, The Wire must make some compromises. In this case, black mothers' sexualities, their subjectivities, their desires, and therefore their fitness as parents is the price the show, like so many before it, is willing to pay.

Her paper has not been published yet. But it's chock full of good stuff about the director's decision to opt-out of "woman of color feminism" and her analysis of the director's reinvestment in "heteropatriarchal family." I don't know what Wilson has planned on the syllabus, but he needs to give our girl Liz a call. Because the urban inequality problem he rails on about is gendered.

Seems that some people are upset that one of the models on Teen Vogue's November cover is pregnant.

19 year-old Jourdan Dunn isn't visibly pregnant, but talks about her pregnancy in the magazine.

The cover has raised eyebrows among some parents, teens and advocates against teen pregnancy.

"There's no message to send to them that that's not OK. Maybe if she's on the cover to tell them 'Be careful,' that's one thing," said Catherine Essig, a 19-year-old sophomore at Dallas' Southern Methodist University, who was concerned about 15- and 16-year-old readers.

Many advocates said parents should use the cover as a way to talk to their kids about sex and the importance of planning pregnancies for the right moment in their lives.

"Teen parenting isn't glamorous, even if you are a teen model," said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association.

First of all, I'm not sure why this magazine cover is scandalous and this one isn't. Teen pregnancy is talked about and featured everywhere - from glamorized pics of Bristol Palin to MTV''s 16 and Pregnant. And the fact is, the teen pregnancy is a reality - the teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. went up for the second year in a row for the first time in a decade (thanks, abstinence-only education!). Is it really better to hide the issue?

I understand concerns about making teen pregnancy seem "cool," but I don't think that shaming young women who are pregnant or ignoring their existence is an answer. As Teen Vogue Editor-in-Chief Amy Astley said, "Teen pregnancy is a difficult, real-life issue that Teen Vogue readers (with an average age of 18) are mature enough to be exposed to...[we] felt it was important to support, not punish, Jourdan." Agreed.

A study put out by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy has found evidence that the majority of teens at risk of unwanted pregnancy are not from low income and/or single parent families.

via Susan Reimer for the Baltimore Sun.

According to research conducted for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, only 28 percent of those who report having given birth or fathered a child as a teen lived in families with incomes below the federal poverty line.

And just 30 percent of those who report having given birth to or fathered a child as a teen say they were living with a single parent.

We are not only wrong - and probably bigoted - about whose teens get pregnant. Those of us in middle-class, intact families have our heads seriously in the sand if we think it can't happen to us.

This doesn't change that low-income families are disproportionately at risk of unwanted or teen pregnancy, but it certainly changes the demonized media image of the poor, black, single, teenage mom, so readily available to the national imagination. Looks like all those family values indoctrinated via abstinence-only education programs are not working out so well for all the "intact" families of America.

Peggy Robertson was denied insurance coverage because she previously had a c-section. But her super kind and thoughtful insurance company told her that if she got sterilized, they would give her coverage. Seriously.

Another video about Robertson's story after the jump.

My childhood friend Mollie sent me not one, but two copies of her former professor's book, when she noticed that I was thinking and writing a lot about work/family balance issues (thanks Mollie!). Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have it All by Sharing it All by Joanna Strober and Sharon Meers is a deeply-researched, very practical guide to getting real about some of the most critical unfinished business of contemporary feminism.

Unlike Linda Hirshman's Get to Work, which leaves many readers feeling judged and misunderstood, or Leslie Bennett's The Feminine Mistake, which leaves many readers thinking doomsday thoughts, Strober and Meers approach the subject with healthy doses of both realism and optimism. They are women who have been through it, and lived to tell the tale. (Both are heterosexual, and so their own life examples are from this perspective. Unfortunately they didn't do much to look at non-hetero couples or non-marrying types).

After reviewing all the research that proves that dual working families are actually healthier, happier, and more economically viable, they go on to talk about some of the roadblocks to making it work and their suggestions for getting past those roadblocks.

One of the insights that really struck a personal chord was that women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit to parent, that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.

Via The Economist, some data about teenage pregnancies in the US:

On one point, however, experts agree: when it comes to teenage births, the United States is backsliding. Between 1991 and 2005 the teenage birth rate declined by 34%, according to the National Centre for Health Statistics. Between 2005 and 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, it crept up 5%.

A quick and easy blame game points to the Bush era abstinence-only policy, which is scientifically proven to fail.

But those working on the issue of teen pregnancy know it's more complicated than that. Access to sex education and birth control are key to preventing teen pregnancies--but not all teen's want to prevent their pregnancies. Some want to be parents, despite their young age.

Silvia Henriquez, the ED of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (disclosure: I work for them), is quoted in the article:

Latina teenagers, for example, have a considerably higher birth rate than any other group, even though they have similar rates of sexual activity. Silvia Henriquez, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, reckons that access is the problem. Latina teenagers are less likely to have health-care coverage for contraceptives, and are more likely to lack transport to the free clinics in their cities.

For some Latina teens (and others), parenting may actually be a choice. Now often it's a choice that is couched within the context of little hope for their own future--why "wait" to parent if you don't have access to college education or real career options? The same can be said of other groups, but Latinas are focused on because of our particularly high rates of teen parenting.

I don't think being young makes you a bad parent. It does mean you're less likely to make money in a society that rewards high levels of education and long working hours.

For me, an ideal strategy to address teen pregnancy and parenting is a situation where young folks are given access to education, birth control, but also support if they do decide to parent at a young age.

Lately I have been mulling over military moms who, upon notification of deployment, scramble to find childcare for their children. I can't help but wring my hands and ask: where are all the fathers? And I am not talking marriage here or even money. I am talking about mutual parental involvement. Women are expected to step up when their husbands go off to war. We should expect the same of men whose wives are deployed.

My heart goes out to army moms, women who are practically invisible in war coverage. This piece stumbles on so many kernels of truth about the societal discrimination women face. For me, this narrative is particularly revealing:

Sergeant McFadden, who holds only an associate's degree, wanted to hold on to her career. "It matters what I do," Sergeant McFadden said. "I love helping people. It's for our country. My dad was a Vietnam vet. I feel like I owe it to him."

It hit me like a ton of bricks: McFadden is expressing something afforded to men that we haven't quite gotten around to prioritizing for women. The plain truth is that boys and men grow up in a culture where their careers matter. Many employers insist on policies that make it impossible to reconcile the role of parent and with the role of wage-earner. McFadden, and the many other women who are torn about deployment because of motherhood, reveal how we lose out as a country when we don't give both men and women equal opportunity to be employed in a profession where they can work to their fullest potential. 

This is about so much more than military moms in heterosexual relationships. What about single moms and gay and lesbian parents who are being discriminated against by the military? What about women of color who are the least likely to be in positions where they can rely on child care? What about the rights of queer women and women of color to have non-normative paths to motherhood? All of these people have the right to express their service to country by enlisting in the military, but our country's policies and prejudices work against them.

Much ado was made about the President's back-to-school speech, but not nearly enough folks have made the connection between the potential of today's students and work/family balance. In this speech, President Obama said: "What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future." When girls grow up to have equal access to reaching their professional potential, only then can we truly have the best and the brightest in our military and at all levels of public service.

H/T to Smita Satiani Huff Po blogger who referred me to this article and wrestled with these issues with me.

When asked about motherhood in an interview for Prevention magazine, she said she actually learned what not to do from her mom, which is to sacrifice your entire being for your kids:

"She'd say being a good mother isn't all about sacrificing. It's really investing and putting yourself higher on your priority list."

"Throughout my life, I've learned to make choices that make me happy and make sense for me. . . So I have freed myself to put me on the priority list and say, yes, I can make choices that make me happy, and it will ripple and benefit my kids, my husband and my physical health."

"That's hard for women to own. We're not taught to do that. It's a lesson that I want to teach my girls."

I can't afford a child, I'm going on the pill! Oh snap, I can't afford that either...

The Guttmacher Institute released a new study yesterday revealing that the economic recession has not only caused women to be less prone to want to have children, but literally half of the women researched said the recession has led them to either delay pregnancy or limit the number of children they have.

On top of the cost of birth control, we're in a bind that leaves us pretty much screwed; while women want to avoid getting pregnant because they can't afford a kid, amost one in four women have put off seeing a gynecologist in the past year to save money, and report having a harder time paying for birth control than they did in the past. Dr. Sharon Camp, Guttmacher president and CEO, put out a statement:

"The recession has put many women--including middle-class women who are having trouble making ends meet--in an untenable situation. They want to avoid unintended pregnancy more than ever, but at the same time are having difficulty affording the out-of-pocket costs of prescription contraception. Unfortunately, while delaying a prescription refill or skipping pills may save women money in the short term, it increases their risk of an unintended pregnancy and results in greater costs related to abortion and unplanned birth later on."

Check out the entire report, "A Real-Time Look at the Impact of the Recession on Women's Family Planning and Pregnancy Decisions."

h/t to Leila.

A new study shows that states that skew towards more conservative religious beliefs tend to have higher rates of teenage girls giving birth. (Shocking, I know.)

Researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh says,"We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself."

Now, obviously studies like these have the whole correlation/causation issue going on - but from the work I did write The Purity Myth, this study makes sense to me.

If you grow up in an area where you're taught that sex is bad and contraception is evil (and that it can kill you), when you do have pre-marital sex - as 95% of Americans will - you're much less likely to protect yourself. Not only because you've been taught that condoms cause cancer and other such ridiculousness, but also because you may think that if sex happens in the heat of the moment - and you didn't plan for it like a bad, slutty girl - you're not as tainted.

My friend Cristina wrote an incredible post about her recent birthing experience that I wanted to share with everyone. An excerpt:

No tears. No screams. And all I had was half a glass of Prosecco eight hours before my daughter, Francesca, showed off her pipes and I had her little naked body in my arms. My doctor told our doula (childbirth coach), "This is rare, isn't it? You don't see births like this." Cindy, who calls her practice Gentle Birth Doula Services, attempted to convince the doctor that she had seen births like this.

I promise I'm not just posting this episode of WBAI's Healthstyles because I'm interviewed on it. The awesome Tristin Aaron of the Women's Media Center guest-hosted this show and interviewed me, Jaclyn Friedman, and Jennifer Block - author of the great book Pushed: The painful truth about birth and modern maternity care. Tristin, Jaclyn and Jennifer are some seriously smart and compelling women - so please give a listen.

The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. - along with all of its descendants - is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh. Check out this interesting meditation on having babies and your carbon foot print by my friend Molly May.

This is sort of astounding:

Women with a family history of breast cancer may have a new weapon against the disease: breast-feeding. In a new study of more than 60,000 women, nursing a baby for at least three months cut the risk of breast cancer in half for those who had a family history of the disease.

The researchers say that breast-feeding could be the equivalent of taking the drug tamoxifen for five years, which is a well-known way to cut breast cancer risk in women with a family history of the disease.

While breastfeeding didn't affect women who don't have a family history of the disease, for women with at least one close relative with breast cancer, breastfeeding cut the risk of premenopausal cancer by 59% compared to those who didn't. That's pretty significant.

Since needing to feed your hungry child apparently isn't good enough reason, maybe folks won't be so opposed to women breastfeeding in public, knowing it could potentially be life-saving and all. (Though something tells me not to hold my breath.)

I wasn't all that surprised to find that people are having a hissy over the world's first breastfeeding doll. Why, do you ask? Because apparently the doll not only will turn little boys on, but promote early pregnancy - to, um, 5 year olds.

Spain is the maker behind Bebé Glotón, which means "gluttonous baby." The box the doll comes in includes a halter top with flower nipples (heh) to direct the child where to put the baby to feed it. Innocent enough, right? But between the headlines ("Baby Glutton the breastfeeding doll. A 'sucky' idea?") to shocking Fox News' abhorrence over the idea that breasts are meant for anything but sexual pleasure, I'm ready to throw down:

I'm appalled by the haters who are the ones stigmatizing and sexualizing a perfectly natural act that children often imitate. Will folks ever be able to realize that our body parts are not purely for public consumption?

Related:

Is there a breastfeeding backlash?
Bill Maher: Boobies Mine!
The Case Against Breastfeeding

As a follow-up from Miriam's post earlier this month on noncustodial moms, we find The Today Show had a feature highlighting the issue.

A new three part feature in Marie Claire magazine highlights non-custodial moms--mothers who after a divorce do not maintain primary custody of their children.

The article highlights three mothers, who all have spent some time as the non-custodial parent of their children, and for different reasons.

Check out the profiles here.

Rebeka Spicuglia is one of the featured moms, and she writes more about non-custodial parents on her blog here.

I think these features are important, to dispel myths about divorced parents and parenting styles. Not all children end up with their moms after a divorce, for a multitude of reasons, a few of them explained in this feature.

Every once in awhile, as a writer, you read a book that raises that bar in your own mind about what is possible in your profession. Enrique's Journey is such a book. In it, Pulitzer Prize winner Sonia Nazario, follows the journey of a 17-year-old boy from Honduras as he tries to make his way to America to be reunited with his mother--who left when he was a small boy to pursue the American dream. As he rides on top of trains, tries to avoid gangsters and police, begs for food, sleeps in graveyards and abandon homes, struggles with drug addiction etc., I got the most lucid, gripping portrait into the journey of the child immigrant that I've ever been exposed to.

Nazario's reporting bowled me over. Her story originated as a Los Angeles Times feature, and continued to expand from there. She's spent months retracing Enrique's journey, exhaustively reporting all of those who he met along the way, in addition to the various members of his own family. This dedication allowed her to make the journey really come alive--from the smell of the mangoes thrown onto the train by rare, generous poor folks living along the tracks to the local politics in a tiny church in Nuevo Laredo.

Enrique and his mother, Lourdes', story is not uncommon. From the book:

In Los Angeles, a University of Southern California study showed, 82 percent of live-in nannies and one in four housecleaners are mothers who still have at least one child in their home country. A Harvard University study showed that 85 percent of all immigrant children who eventually end up in the United States spend at least some time separated from a parent in the course of migrating to the United States.

I simply can't recommend this incredible book enough. Especially at this moment, when the news is filled with headlines about both immigration and Honduras, this book sheds light on the real lives being affected. Enrique's Journey not only engages your heart, but fills your mind with ideas about the power of tenacious storytelling.

Shameless self-promotion time. My first article is up at The American Prospect, Delivering Affordable Healthcare, on the connection between midwives and health care reform.

Michelle Bartlett is not the typical Washington high-stakes health-care player. She's probably not on the radar of anyone in Congress or the Obama administration. Bartlett is a midwife in Idaho, but in the last few years, she's been trying her hand at lobbying. This came after a night spent in jail for using medication during a home birth she attended in 2000. Bartlett was the second midwife to be charged for this type of practice in Idaho, and thanks to her efforts, she will be the last in her state. "I've done a lot of hard things in my life, and giving birth was one of them," Bartlett says. "But giving birth to a law was really hard."

On April 1, Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter of Idaho signed legislation allowing certified professional midwives (CPMs) like Bartlett to administer medication during births. Unlike certified nurse midwives who are able to practice in all 50 states and generally work in hospital settings alongside obstetricians, midwives like Bartlett are referred to as "direct entry" midwives, and practice exclusively outside of hospitals, mostly in homes or birth centers. These CPMs spend three to five years training and meet the standards for certification set by the North American Registry of Midwives.

...

State licensing fights may be the first step for these midwives, but it's not their last. Now they're turning their attention to the federal health-care reform debate, and a look at the maternity-related health-care costs quickly explains why. Childbirth is among the top five causes for hospitalization, and the No. 1 cause for women. According to Childbirth Connection, Cesarean section is the most common operating-room procedure, and in 2009 the C-section rate hit an all-time high according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at 31.8 percent of all births. These rates account, in part, for the increasing cost of maternity care in the U.S. Maternal and newborn charges totaled $86 billion in 2006, 45 percent of which was paid for by Medicaid. The federal government is already footing a huge portion of the U.S.' maternity-care bill, and these midwives think they can help reduce costs significantly, and not just for low-income women.

Read the rest of the article here.

There's a fascinating article in the latest issue of O Magazine on the new trend in Adult Sex Education. Yep, that's right, churches in particular, and plenty of other institutions, are starting to teach adults about sex. Michael Tino, a Unitarian Universalist minister, one of the authors of such a curriculum told O:

You can have the best high school sexuality curriculum in the world, but a lot of critical issues are not going to be addressed in those classes: How do I enjoy my sexuality if I've lost a breast to cancer? How do I manage being a parent and a sexual person? Can I feel sexually satisfied if I don't have a life partner?

It makes so much sense. It also made me slap my forehead and wonder, "Why haven't we thought of this before?" It's nice to see something coming out of the church community with such a holistic view of human health and wellness. It's not just innovative; it's radical. This lil' exchange between two middle-aged women was enough to convince me that the classes are awesome:

Judith admits that she can think of a few good things that result from getting older. "My husband of 13 years always accused me of being frigid because I never had an orgasm with him," she says. "After we split up, I definitely learned I wasn't frigid. Which was a relief. Which was fun."

The women marvel that virtually all of them have had distressful sexual experiences. One says her sex life was "messy," explaining that she means nonlinear. "I was always a little ashamed because I didn't do the perfect progression of first kiss, go steady, first love, first sex," she says. "It's nice to see that all the women were a little out of order."

And then Larry goes and explains why he signed up for the course with his wife of 15 years: "We're past the Kama Sutra part of life. You want to--you need to--broaden the definition of sex. Like the other night, my wife was singing to me, and I said, 'Oh, you're making love to me.'"

Okay, you may not be at the singing=sex stage, but you have to admit that expanding our definitions of appropriate or normal sexual behavior in loving relationships, or solo, later in life is a great thing for everybody. Other women report realizing that there is no "normal" when it comes to genitalia. One woman realized that it was okay that she had a stronger libido than her husband--something she'd always felt shame about. Another finally talked to her husband about his masturbation habits and started to get more comfortable with non-exploitative porn.

My only quips with the piece were that a) there was nothing about sexual assault, which I found really hard to believe and b) the author didn't differentiate the government role in all of this very well. She mentioned the $150 million annually for healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood initiatives, but to my understanding, the majority of this money is not going towards expanding the definition of healthy sexuality but narrowing it.

Speaking of adult sex, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (of Manifesta, Grassroots etc.) are chipping away at a new book, this one focused on sex after kids. If you've got some--kids--and are or aren't getting some, then go fill out their survey here. They explain:

In 1957, Betty Friedan and several of her classmates from Smith College created a reunion questionnaire. The responses were so illuminating that Friedan turned it into her ground-breaking 1963 best-seller The Feminine Mystique. Fifty-one years later, we revisited Friedan's original questions to create our own questionnaire in the hopes of shining a light on our generation--and specifically our sex lives and how they do/don't change or evolve once kids enter our lives. We hope you will share and help us to understand our generation as parents.

Check out RH Reality Check's Anna Clark's recent piece on the occurrence of incarcerated pregnant women who are shackled when giving birth. It gives a lot of insight to its legal status in various states as well as the work behind the anti-shackling movement.

Even if you don't watch reality television, or television at all for that matter, you'd be hard-pressed to avoid the recent controversy over Kate and Jon Gosselin, and their eight children. The stars of the beloved reality spectacle, Jon and Kate, Plus Eight, are divorcing. Despite salacious rumors about infidelity, they claim that it is just a gradual growing apart and, they add, the media spotlight certainly did help matters. It's hard to feel much empathy for a couple complaining of overexposure when they signed the contract that would expose their entire family, eight little children included, to 24 hour cameras.

But perhaps it's not just the media, or Jon and Kate, that are to blame. Kiri Blakeley, of Forbes.com, argues that female consumers are also culprits in this family dissolution. We're the ones hungrily scavenging for every last juicy morsel about the couple's demise, particularly the stories about what Kate did wrong, Blakeley argues. We're feeding the sexist media beast. She writes:

It's obvious who is devouring the Monster Mom headlines: Women. Research firm Mediamark estimates 73% of US Weekly's, 83% of In Touch's, and 77% of Star magazine's audience are female.

It's complicated. One of the most powerful ways in which we can practice our feminism is in our consumption choices. This can mean everything from where we buy our food to what kind of tampons we use to, yes, what magazines we read. The editors of feministing aren't afraid to admit that we've got some of our own guilty pleasures (All My Children, horror movies, reggaeton etc.), but they induce guilt for a reason--we know that our consumption of these things contradicts our values on some level.

No one's perfect. At the same time, I get incredibly sick of hearing everyone complain about the quality (or lack thereof) in the magazines marketed at women, and then turn around and support these same magazines by buying them at the airport kiosk. If we really want television programming or print media that speaks to our issues, then we need to tune into shows that reflect our desires, write letters to the magazines that don't.

It takes some self-discipline to avoid some of the more salacious crap on television and in print, that's for sure. But if we really want the media world to change, then we're going to have to start taking responsibility for our consumption choices. A guilty pleasure here or there makes us human. Blindly consuming "monster mom" stories about Kate Gosselin, celebrity weight loss exposes, or the latest Real Housewives series threatens to keep the sexist status quo very much in place.

I'm wondering how the feministing community draws the lines when it comes to television and media consumption. Do you allow yourself People magazine at the airport? Do you watch reality television that degrades women? Have you ever written a letter to the editor when a magazine did something you either loved or hated? Why or why not?

See community blogger crazyface8d on the topic.

There's an interesting article in this month's Atlantic by the notoriously pithy and unsentimental Sandra Tsing Loh called "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." In it, she reveals that she is getting a divorce from her husband of 20 years, over an affair, but even more it seems, because the passion had just petered out of the marriage and Loh didn't feel inspired to work to get it back. She springs off from her own predicament, however, and examines this country's paradoxical relationship with marriage:

Americans hold two values at once: a culture of marriage and a culture of individualism. Or is it an American spirit of optimism wedded, if you will, to Tocquevillian spirit of restlessness that inspires three out of four Americans to say they believe marriage is for life, while only one in four agreed with the notion that even if a marriage is unhappy, one should stay put for the sake of the children. If America is a 'divorce culture,' it may be partly because we are a 'marriage culture,' since we both divorce and marry (a projected 90 percent of us) at some of the highest rates anywhere on the globe.

Setting Loh's TMI style aside, which I find kind of grating, I think that she touches on a lot of really important points in this piece--starting with her analysis of Cherlin's smart book. One of the reasons I've resisted marriage, besides solidarity with friends who can't legally participate in the institution (becoming more and more hazy), is this sense of hypocrisy. We pressure young people--especially women--to get married, then act shocked when they jump into promises they can't keep; the allure of being "princess for a day" and/or having the false security of a marriage certificate pushes so many people into marriages that won't last. Even worse, the disintegration of these marriages is framed as a failure, even when it's the best thing for everyone involved (including kids).

Where Loh and I part ways is in her analysis of changing gender roles and their effect on the longevity of people's marriages. In essence, she argues that husbands who cook and care take end up neglecting their wives' sexual needs, causing even more distance, leading to divorce. Of course this is based on her two best friends, not some sort of sample size, so it comes off as baseless albeit titillating. It also sounds eerily similar to a lot of anti-feminist blather. Part of why I like Loh is she's such a bold writer, unafraid of saying unpopular things. Part of why she annoys me is that she sometimes misses the wider context for her claims. In truth, men who take responsibility for raising their kids and cooking a meal now and again have happier wives and more functional marriages, as so many studies have proven.

We've been mulling over the idea of doing a forum on marriage here at feministing, since so many of us editors have different takes on the issue. Stay tuned for that...

An update on this story:

From the Bangor Daily News:

A pregnant, HIV-positive African woman will give birth in a Portland hospital rather than a federal prison after a U.S. District judge on Monday ordered that she be released on personal recognizance bail while her appeal to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is pending in Boston.

U.S. District Judge John Woodcock last month sentenced Quinta Layin Tuleh, 28, of Cameroon to 238 days in prison -- twice as long as the recommended sentence of 114 days -- for having false documents.

The National Advocates for Pregnant Women has more about the case on their blog.

Marilu Morales has filed a federal lawsuit after being allegedly shackled while giving birth at Cook County Jail in Chicago.

...Morales was eight months' pregnant when she was incarcerated in April 2008, according to the lawsuit. It could not be immediately determined on what charges Morales was being held.

When she went into labor three days later, she was taken to Stroger. A sheriff's deputy shackled a hand and foot to the hospital bed, the lawsuit alleged.

Morales was in labor for four hours before a physician ordered the deputy to remove the shackles shortly before she gave birth, the lawsuit said. The shackles were allegedly put back on immediately after the baby was born.

This is the fourth lawsuit that Flaxman has filed against Sheriff Tom Dart's office regarding a pregnant prisoner had been shackled while giving birth. Unbelievable.

Related posts: Judge jails HIV positive woman to "protect" her fetus
New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression

Last week, I wrote about Quinta Layin Tuleh - a 28 year old woman from Cameroon sentenced to 238 days in federal prison because she is HIV positive and pregnant.

Today, Margo Kaplan from the Center for HIV Law and Policy has a piece on RH Reality Check analyzing just how terrible the judge's decision was.

Judge Woodcock's decision ignores the complex factors involved in a pregnant woman's medical treatment decisions - as through being HIV positive makes one incapable of reasonable decision-making - and glibly equates being HIV-positive and pregnant with committing a crime. When reading the sentence, he makes clear that his sole reason for keeping Tuleh in prison was that she was HIV-positive and pregnant, and that, had she been pregnant and not HIV-positive, he would release her with time served. He reasons that he could keep Tuleh in jail "to protect the public from [her] further crimes."

...While some states do, indeed, criminalize HIV exposure, Judge Woodcock does more than this - he imprisons a woman for the mere possibility that she might transmit HIV in the future. His reasoning essentially criminalizes being HIV-positive and allows the state to jail anyone with HIV simply because they have HIV and are capable of transmitting it to another. It classifies anyone with HIV as a threat to society who can be incarcerated at the whim of the state to protect public health.

Make sure to check out the whole piece, Kaplan does a great job linking the paternalism, discrimination and misogyny that are so rife in this case.

I recently got an email from a reader about her reflections on activism after Dr. Tiller's death. Here is her email:

Hi, Miriam, Among my many reactions to Dr. George Tiller's murder is a desire to put my money where my mouth is (so to speak) with regards to my support for choice in reproductive health. I'm contacting my local Planned Parenthood about volunteering in whatever ways they need. But for me "pro-choice" is about more than access to abortion. My local birthing center just shut down (to the disappointment of one of my best friends, who's seven months pregnant). I'm really interested in becoming a doula and/or midwife, but I have very little medical training. Would you consider doing a post about why and how you became a doula, and how that work intersects with your support for abortion rights? I'm really interested in hearing about your experiences.

I left her name out of it for privacy reasons, but she's right on target. For me being pro-choice has always been about more than just access to abortion and I think a broader focus on the many phases on people's reproductive lives is a great response to anti-choice hate and violence.

I'm a doula. I've been a doula for four years now, practicing on and off, only as a volunteer. You can read more about this at my other blog, Radical Doula. I went back and found my very first guestblog that I wrote for Feministing, right when I started calling myself a radical doula. Here is what I wrote:

During the pre-conference training organized by Be Present, Inc, I stood up and introduced myself as a radical doula. This was a designation that I came to assume for myself through an understanding that my beliefs (which seemed to me completely logical and altogether natural) placed me apart from a large part of what I have come to call the "birth activist" community (midwives, doulas and advocates who work toward changing the standards of care for birthing women in the US). This conference highlighted many of the ways my politics are a seeming contradiction: I'm a doula and I'm a pro-choice abortion advocate. I'm a doula and I'm a lesbian. I'm a doula and I may never have children. I'm a doula and I'm Latina. I'm doula and I'm not entirely comfortable with the gender/sex binary.

What was so groundbreaking about this conference was that it brought together two of my worlds, the birth activists (midwives, doulas, academics) and the pro-choice activists (policy people, advocates, organizers). I can see now how these two groups, the former of which dedicates its time to supporting women as they bring children into the world, and the latter that fights for women's rights to not bring children into the world, don't necessarily go together. The irony is that I never understood the contradictions that exist between the them until Lynn Paltrow pointed it out to me precisely because the two are really good about not mentioning the others issues. The midwifery conferences I have been to in the past never mentioned the issue of abortion allowing me to erroneously assume that they were all pro-choice just like me. Likewise, the pro-choice conferences rarely mentioned the issues that face birthing women so focused as they are on the rights of women fighting not to birth. So congratulations NAPW, you succeeded in beginning a dialogue between the two movements (as stilted and precarious as it may have been at times) even just by creating a space where that dialogue was possible.

What this conference made entirely clear to me (and maybe what I already understood from my own dual roles) is that the activists from these two camps need to be in the same room, if not simply because the people whom we are fighting are one and the same. The people who want to take away women's rights to abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sex education are the same ones who aren't afraid to forcibly subject women to c-sections, limit the scope of women's choices about how they birth or place the rights of an unborn fetus above the rights of a woman. So let's keep the conversation going, and focus on how we can protect women's choices throughout all the phases of their lives.

I think in time's like these, when the lines between our movements are being drawn so starkly, that it's even more important to reemphasize these connections.

In that vein, there is an amazing project in NYC that I was part of the early stages of that is looking for applicants! It's called the Doula Project.

Details after the jump.

From the Bangor Daily News:

A woman from the African nation of Cameroon could give birth in a federal prison because she is HIV-positive.

U.S. District Judge John Woodcock last month sentenced Quinta Layin Tuleh, 28, to 238 days in federal prison for having fake documents. Woodcock said the sentence would ensure that Tuleh's baby, due Aug. 29, has a good chance of being born free of the AIDS virus.

"Judges cannot lock a woman up simply because she is sick and pregnant," said Zachary Heiden, legal director for the Maine Civil Liberties Union.

"Judges have enormous discretion in imposing sentences, and that is appropriate. But jailing someone is punishment -- it is depriving them of liberty. That deprivation has to be justified, and illness or pregnancy is not justification for imprisonment."

Yet that's exactly what Woodcock did - using the paternalistic justification that he is looking out for the best interest of Tuleh's unborn child, who he apparently thinks will benefit from the stellar prenatal care given in prison.

"My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant," he said at Tuleh's sentencing, "and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she's carrying. I don't think that the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault.

"If I had -- if I were to know conclusively that upon release from imprisonment a defendant was going to assault another person," Woodcock said, "I would act in a fashion to prevent that, and similar to an assault, causing grievous injury to a wholly innocent person. And so I think I have the obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm."

I agree with Jess: I fail to see how Tuleh's inability (if that really is the case) to procure affordable, decent healthcare is an "assault" against her fetus, rather than the system's assault of Tuleh. And of course, one wonders if Woodcock's decision would have been the same had Tuleh been from Denmark or Italy, not Cameroon...though you don't have to wonder long. (70% of cases involving prosecuting pregnant women are brought against women of color.)

For more information on the U.S.' long history of persecuting pregnant women (and what you can do about it) check out the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the Women and Prison project, and the Rebecca Project for Human Rights.

Related posts: New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression

The Women's Prison Association released a new report on Mother's Day, about incarcerated parenting mothers called Mothers, Infants and Imprisonment A National Look at Prison Nurseries and Community-Based Alternatives.
Since there is no standard policy for what happens when a woman gives birth while incarcerated, it analyzes the two options that are available now, prison nurseries that allow moms to keep their children with them for limited periods of time, and community-based programs that allow parents to fulfill their sentences in the community under supervision while parenting.

This is an increasingly important issue as incarceration rates, particularly for women, have grown immensely in the past decades. According to the report:

Between 1977 and 2007, the number of women in prison in the United States increased by 832 percent. 2 According to data released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in 2004 four percent of women in state prisons and three percent of women in federal prisons were pregnant at the time of admittance.3 In 1999, BJS reported that six percent of women in local jails were pregnant at the time of admittance.4 As the number of women in prison has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, states have had to consider what it means to lock up women, many of whom are pregnant or parenting.

There are important impacts on these families, particularly since the majority of these women are non-violent offenders who will eventually be released and be the primary caregivers to their kids.

The overwhelming majority of children born to incarcerated mothers are separated from their mothers immediately after birth and placed with relatives or into foster care. In a handful of states, women have other options: prison nurseries and community-based residential parenting programs.

Prison nursery programs allow a mother to parent her infant for a finite period of time within a special housing unit at the prison. Community-based residential parenting programs allow mothers to keep their infants with them while they fulfill their sentences in residential programs in the community.

Some of their research findings:

• The number of prison-based nursery programs is growing, but such programs are still rare. Only 9 states have these programs, and almost half were created in the last five years.


• Research shows that these programs benefit mothers and children. Women who participate show lower rates of recidivism (likelihood to commit a new crime), and their children show no adverse affects as a result of their participation. Improves maternal child bonding as well.


• Many women parenting their infants in prison nurseries could be doing so in the community instead. Women in both types of programs are serving relatively short sentences for non-violent offenses, and will continue primary caretaking responsibility for their child(ren) upon release. Most women in prison nursery programs present little risk to public safety. The issues that bring most women in contact with the criminal justice system - drug addiction, lack of education, poverty - are better addressed in a community setting than in prison.

You can read the full report here.

Related posts:
Supreme Court: Pregnancy discrimination A-OK!
Pregnancy Discrimination Galore at Bloomberg LP
Quick Hit: Employers get real (discriminatory)
Pregnancy discrimination complaints at record levels
Pregnancy discrimination on the rise
Double whammy

Approximate transcript after the jump.

Check out this interesting guest post by Carla Goldstein, the director of the Women's Institute at Omega, on the feminist progress within her own family. This is one more voice to our continued exploration of generational issues, leading up to the conference this fall at the Omega Institute. We are publishing a series of guest posts as a fun way of initiating some of the speakers--who are generally new to blogging--into our exciting online community. Please make them feel welcome. And don't forget to turn in your scholarship applications! They're due June 1st.

My day began with bringing my pouting 8-year-old daughter to school, mad because we were late again. I felt sympathetic, remembering what it was like to always be the last kid at drop off and pick up. My mom, who was a single parent in the 1960s and 70s, was constantly juggling work and caretaking.

As I drove home I remembered that I had nothing in the fridge to feed my mother, now 70 and visiting from Florida for my daughters' dance recital. I made a quick detour to the supermarket. Walking into the store, I realized I was still wearing pajama bottoms. After a moment of panic, I decided whatever! I shopped anyway. Back in the car, I felt a well of gratitude towards my mother for her "whatever!" attitude that mortified me as a child, and turns out to be an essential source of my strength as an adult.

While unpacking groceries, I asked my mom what messages her mother had given her about being a woman. She had trouble finding something on point. Then out came a sequence of two short memories. The first was about her mother (my grandmother) who grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in the East Bronx during the early 1900s. When my grandmother had been a little girl, her mother (my great grandmother) had insisted she get a pair of roller skates because all children should have skates, not just the boys!

My mother's second memory was about her father refusing to let her take driver's ed in high school. He believed women had no need to drive. My grandmother tried to persuade him, but lost the argument. Years later, at age 55, my grandmother taught herself to drive and then helped my mother learn to drive who was then 35 years old.

Upon hearing these two stories, I had a new way of understanding my matrilineal heritage. Until this telling, I had always attributed my adolescent hobby of roller skating to be a happy accident and my early driving as a necessity. It never occurred to me that my mother's enthusiasm for my skating or her permission to drive as soon as I hit the age limit was connected to a family through-line of liberation. The personal stories that connect to the history of women's mobility reminded me that social change is an ever intertwined process moving between our private, day-to-day lives and larger political forces.

Over the past century, women's lives have changed so radically -- and unevenly! Some women still have no freedom of mobility, and even worse are stuck in slavery, violence and racking poverty. The promise now, aided by a global communications network, is that we can share information, knowledge, inspiration, and resources, as we build stronger coalitions to take the next leap in liberation for ourselves and the planet so desperately in need of women's leadership.

At this year's Women and Power conference at Omega Institute we will be talking across the generations to reflect on and celebrate how far we have traveled, to examine things left undone, and to inspire each other to take the next leap forward in building a world where women's dreams are valued and realized.

We are hungry to hear your intergenerational stories -- online at feministing, and in September at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York.

With love, Carla Goldstein

Carla Goldstein's complete bio is after the jump.

Not only do female unionized workers earn more, but this great op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News by a single working mother gives us personal account of why unions can be a pretty damn big feminist issue:

I became a single mother of an 8 year-old son while I was serving in the United States Army. This was a very frightening experience for me. My son's dad was not around to help raise him. After I left the Army, I found a job working for a company where women had no opportunity to advance. I was fortunate to then land a union job. I started work with a 90-day probation period, and on my 89th day I had an accident for which I was fired.

Even though I didn't have grievance rights, my union fought for me. The accident wasn't my fault, but my employer argued I was responsible. Because of my union steward, however, the mediator decided to reinstate me. To begin with, the accident wasn't my fault, and the mediator also pointed out that there were four men who were involved in accidents in their first 90 days and weren't fired. Would I have gotten my job back if I didn't have a union fighting for me? Was this worth every penny of my dues? You're darn right it was. I love my job and I raised my son with no worries. I earn a fair day's pay, decent benefits and have job security. Shouldn't everybody have this?

The op-ed was written in efforts to get Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which she has recently said she would consider negotiating.

Read more here about why the Employee Free Choice Act is a feminist issue and take action here.

When Carol Sarler shares the following info over at the Daily Mail, you might assume that she'd then make an effort to defend the perfectly reasonable right of all women to decide when, if, and how they have children (IF being the operative word here):

Research conducted over six years shows that far from bosses and colleagues always being suspicious of a working mother, the opposite is becoming true: it is the childless woman who is regarded as cold and odd.

As a result, it is these single-track careerists who are increasingly likely to be vilified, refused jobs and denied promotion because many employers believe them to lack what the study calls 'an essential humanity'.

Instead, this incredibly insensitive and just plain discriminatory writer, does everything in her literary powers to chastise any woman who doesn't want children:

It's not the mothers, for a start, who are going to turn up late and hungover after a night on the razz; they'll have been up, dressed and alert for hours, having cooked a family breakfast and delivered their children to school. On time.

It's not the mothers, usually, who run the office bitch-fest.

They're not there to compete for the attentions of the male executives; they're there to get out of the house; they're there because they genuinely enjoy some adult company; and they're there because they have mouths to feed other than their own and shoes to buy for someone else's feet.

I'm the kind of lady who has known she wanted kids since she was a kid. It's just something I've felt in my bones. But it is exactly because it is such an intuitive, personal feeling that I know it isn't necessarily, nor should it be, a shared sentiment. Raising children is a huge sacrifice--financially, emotionally, in terms of sleep and autonomy--and one that, yes, a lot of women and men are up for, but it is beyond understandable when folks don't want to procreate. It actually makes more rational sense in a certain way.

If you love your childless life, and don't feel the pull to procreate, why in the world would you do it? So you could be a better worker, as Sarler bizarrely suggests? So you can cease your boozing? So you can stop looking for a man (because, ahem, all women are heterosexual and all mothers are married. Wha?!)? So you can stop being such a bitch (this, too, makes perfect sense...childless women, who get eight restful hours of sleep, great sex, and can spend what would have been diaper money on a massage or a great meal are always such bitches!)?

Suffice it to say that this Sarler gal has gotta a lot of hate mail coming her way. And I hope it's not just from those wacky childless women, but from all of us who champion every woman's right to choose about children.

Thanks to multiple readers for giving up the heads up.

And this report tells us why. Some interesting tidbits via New America Media,

The result shows that women immigrants' main challenges are helping their children succeed and keeping their families together. The obstacles are formidable. 79% of Latin Americans, 73% of Vietnamese, 70% of Korean and 63% of Chinese acknowledged speaking little or no English. They also confront anti-immigrant discrimination, lack of health care and low-paying employment.

Bendixen said that this is something that shakes the perception that immigration is always about economics and dollars. In fact, many of the women start out in low-paying jobs even though they may have held professional positions in their home countries. In the United States they might work as a hotel maid, waitress, house cleaner and textile worker.

These results indicate that women may be putting devotion to the well-being of their families ahead of personal job status and pride in choosing to emigrate.

Also, on the racist assumption that women immigrants are somehow submissive, not only to the men in their families but also in the work environment,

Among other findings the poll showed that their roles change within their households. The overwhelming majority--Latin American (81%), Chinese (71%), Vietnamese (68%), African (66%) and Arabic (53%)--said they had become more assertive at home and in public after coming to the United States.

"We cannot assume that they are submissive back in their countries. They come from smaller towns where you are very close to your family, they want to make sure everyone is okay. And when they get here, they also want to make sure they have a better living. Sometimes they face domestic violence, but that also happens here in the United States," said Silvia Henriquez, Executive Director for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

Today our nation's highest court ruled in AT&T v. Hulteen that women who took maternity leave and were discriminated against by AT&T are shit out of luck.

Before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed, when women took leave from their AT&T jobs to have a baby, those days did not count toward their pensions -- even though other types of leave, such as temporary disability, were not removed from the pension equation. So when the women went to retire, they had lower pensions than other employees who had worked there the same number of years, even those who had taken leave for other reasons.

AT&T lawyers said their pension plan was legal when the women took pregnancy leave, so they shouldn't have to recalculate their retirement benefits now. Congress did not make the Pregnancy Discrimination Act retroactive, they said, so the women should not get any extra money.

A majority of the justices agreed. "A seniority system does not necessarily violate the statute when it gives current effect to such rules that operated before the PDA," wrote Justice David Souter, who will retire next month.

Basically seven members of the Supreme Court are saying, "You were discriminated against? You're about to retire with less money because of it? Tough."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented. By making it illegal to discriminate against women on pregnancy leave, "Congress intended no continuing reduction of women's compensation, pension benefits included, attributable to their placement on pregnancy leave," said Ginsburg, the court's only woman.

Even if the Pregnancy Discrimination Act cannot be applied retroactively, lawyers for the women argue that

the decision below should still stand based on Lorance v. AT&T Technologies, in which the Court held that if a seniority system is found to be facially discriminatory, it "'can be challenged at any time,'" and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which specifically provides for challenges to an intentionally discriminatory seniority system "when a person aggrieved is injured by the application of the seniority system."

Given that women tend to make less money during their working years and then live longer than men, they already struggle financially during retirement. And this ruling isn't going to help. According to the National Women's Law Center, which filed an amicus brief (PDF) in the case,

The most recent population surveys show that the median pension benefit for women over 65 is $8,110, compared to a $12,505 median for men in the same age range.

Much like the Court's awful ruling in Ledbetter, Congress could fix this with legislation.

The court's decision could affect thousands of women who took pregnancy leaves decades ago and now are headed toward retirement, said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project. Now, the only way women who took pregnancy leave before 1979 can make their leave time count is through the good graces of their company or through legislation by Congress, she said.

Since I've never been too optimistic about the "good graces" of companies, I think it's time to push Congress to remedy this.

Scott Lemieux has more on how this relates to the diversity of the Court.

In the news today is Elizabeth Adeney, a 66-year-old woman who is pregnant. Let the shame-fest begin!

Professor Severino Antinori, who treated Rashbrook and has pioneered the IVF techniques involved in impregnating older women, said Munro, who will be 67 in July, was too old.

"I am shocked by the idea of a 66-year-old woman giving birth," he said. "I respect the choice medically but I think anything over 63 is risky because you cannot guarantee the child will have a loving mother or family.

"It is possible to give a child to the mother up to the age of 83 but it is medically criminal to do this because the likelihood is that after a year or two the child will lose his mum and suffer from psychological problems."

Quoth Becky Sharper:

O RLY? Because children born to young mothers are thus guaranteed "a loving mother or family"? And their mother's gestational age ensures that those kids never lose their moms and never suffer from psychological problems? Who are you fucking kidding, buddy? A 2-minute conversation with your local social worker or family court judge will blow away that excuse. I also love how he "respects the choice medically" but then rushes to personal judgement as fast as he possibly can.

I'd add that when a man who is eligible for Social Security benefits fathers a child, we rarely see quotes about how his choice was "medically criminal." I smell a double standard.

Each individual woman has the right to decide what's best for her when it comes to reproduction. Women have the right to choose abortion, the right to give up a child for adoption, the right to have children without getting married first, the right to sterilization, the right to NOT be sterilized, the right to IVF treatments (regardless of their partner's gender), and the list goes on. Debating a woman's fitness to be a mother or what course of action is "natural" for her is essentially buying in to an anti-choice worldview in which we can define who is and who isn't a fit mother.

Usually when the media and lawmakers weigh in on a woman's personal reproductive choices, they target low-income women, young women, women with disabilities. Adeney's situation is different because she is a woman in a position of relative privilege who has gotten pregnant via very expensive IVF treatments, but judgments about her decision are rooted in the same brand of sexism.

On a related note, check out the great work by National Advocates for Pregnant Women. And pick up Jeanne Flavin's Our Bodies, Our Crimes. (All proceeds benefit NAPW!)

This story from my hometown is deeply disturbing:

Blood covered Terra Keil's hands, and her cries echoed against the jail cell walls.

But the Dubuque County Jail inmate said she took little notice of her own tears; she was focused on the howls coming from the infant squirming in her arms.

Early Tuesday morning, the 19-year-old Dubuque woman gave birth behind bars.

Keil claims guards ignored her pleas for help and left her to deliver her son alone. Jail officials say the mother never showed signs she was in labor.

"I guess it's a he said-she said situation," Keil said. "I know it's their word against mine, but how does somebody have a baby in jail without anybody noticing?"

Except it's not a "he-said, she-said" situation. Keil went into the jail cell pregnant, and came out with a baby.

"I was screaming I needed help, and I even pounded on the door a few times, but nobody came," she said. "Around 7 a.m., a guard came in and asked me if I wanted breakfast. I was crying and holding my stomach and said that I needed a nurse, but he only said, 'Do you want breakfast or not?'

"And that's when it hit me -- I'm going to have this baby on my own."

Police records confirm that she asked for a nurse when breakfast was delivered, and that she had screamed for help. What part of "women inmates are human beings" is so hard to understand?

Keil's son was placed in foster care, as she has another three months to serve. Seems like an opportune time to point to this new report from the Women's Prison Association about programs for inmates with newborns.

Related:
Voices of Justice Now: Safe motherhood

Whatever you might think about Code Pink or direct action, you can't argue with how incredible this quilt is. Thousands of women from over 11 countries sent in these little cozies to be stitched together--the resulting quilt reads "I will not raise my child to kill another mother's child." It's an enormous, gorgeous spectacle if there ever was one. I'm just wondering which museum is going to snap it up.

I'll be doing a live chat with JayVon Muhammad, a Certified Professional Midwife, about access to home birth for low-income women at RH Reality Check today, Wednesday, at 12pm EST.

Information here.

Hope you can join!

Another article I wrote is up at RH Reality Check, about the much improved access to out-of-hospital birth for women in Washington State, including those on Medicaid. This piece is a follow-up the my first article about out-of-hospital birth. It's nice to have some good news about maternity care in time for mother's day.

Nationally, only a small portion of women give birth outside of hospitals (around 1%) and very few of those women are low-income. In a recent piece for RH Reality Check, The Cost of Being Born at Home, I painted a grim picture of the options afforded to low-income women around the country who are considering out-of-hospital birth. Few out-of-hospital childbirth providers are registered with Medicaid. Cost and physical space available at women's homes are also significant prohibiting factors. And lack of knowledge of the practice, as well as lack of targeting from media and advocacy promoting home birth (such as the pro-home birth film The Business of Being Born), impact low-income women's decisions about where to birth.

But there's at least one exception to this national trend, brought up by the advocates I interviewed and by commenters responding to my original piece-Washington State. In fact, thanks to a history of expansive access to midwifery care and a number of big legislative gains, low-income women in Washington State now have more birthing options than most women around the country.

According to Audrey Levine, President of the Midwives Association of Washington State (MAWS), 2.3% of births statewide in 2007 were performed out-of-hospital. While still a low percentage, that's more than twice the national average of 1%. What is even more impressive is the number of those births that are reimbursed by Medicaid. According to Levine, around 45% of out-of-hospital births attended by midwives in the state are Medicaid births. That mirrors the percentage of births to women on Medicaid overall in the state-also around 46-47%. (Of the 26 states that license CPMs, only 9 allow CPMs to participate in Medicaid, so this percentage is a significant departure from the situation nationally.)

Read the rest here.

Also, on Thursday I'll be participating in a livechat at RHRC about access to out-of-hospital birth. Join in if you're interested! More info here.

Check out the books: Returning to My Mother's House, Feminist Art and the Maternal, and In Her Own Sweet Time.

Approximate transcript after the jump.

You know, it's not often that a commercial makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. The tagline: "Tu cama. El lugar mas importante del mundo." ("Your bed. The most important place in the world.")

Read a translation and transcript here.

Via Radical Doula and Birth Activist.

The due date is quickly approaching..... Everyone is eagerly waiting to see the new addition to the family. The pictures that are taken will be in the albums forever..... but wait, who is that unrecognizable monster in a hospital gown? NOT YOU!

Finally there is A Dressed Up Delivery!

We at Pretty Pushers believe that you deserve to look your best when you work your hardest. The enclosed five items are sure to keep you feeling fabulous until the job is done!

I'm sure you're dying to know what these five magical items are. 1) Pink lip gloss and a mirror 2) A "delivery dress" 3) A headband 4) A lemon-water towelette 5) Heated massage oil

As a doula who has accompanied women during childbirth I can tell you that the only useful thing in the kit is the massage oil and maybe the headband. Massage can be great for pain mediation during labor, and if your hair is long you might want it out of your face. Oh, and the mirror could come in handy, because some women like to see what they are doing as they push.

Perpetuating screwed up ideas about women's beauty is already infuriating enough, but now we need to mix it in with childbirth. If you've ever actually been with a woman after she's given birth, I'd say she looks pretty damn beautiful, sweat and all.

Jennifer Block, author of Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, has a great piece up on Babble about the backlash against breastfeeding. (Specifically, she takes on Hanna Rosin's recent Atlantic article.)

We tell women that breast is best, we tell them to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months, we even tell them it will raise their kid's IQ (and we should give that a rest), and then we send them home with formula samples, or with a baby whose throat is too sore to suckle, or a mom whose milk is delayed because of surgery, and we don't teach technique, and we are offended when a woman breastfeeds in public, so we make her feel housebound, and we don't give a mother and her partner paid leave, and we send her to go back to a workplace without on-site childcare, and so her only alternative to formula is to plug her nipples into a machine, and if she's lucky she gets periodic breaks and a "non-bathroom lactation room" in which to pump, and if she's not she gets a toilet, and so on and so forth.

It's no wonder women are ready to burn their nursing bras.

Nice.

For more takes on Rosin's piece and breastfeeding, check out Pandagon, Kay Steiger, Broadsheet, Rachel's Tavern, and Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Hanna Rosin takes on breast-feeding in this this month's Atlantic:

In Betty Friedan's day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around--a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the "happy housewife heroine," as Friedan sardonically called her. When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears's Breastfeeding Book--a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up--the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound

Thoughts?

Remember when Bristol Palin basically admitted that abstinence doesn't work? Well, sounds like she (or rather her mom on her behalf) is singing a different tune now and I am going to have to agree with Renee that there is something fishy, sad and manipulative about using your teenage daughter to further your political agenda.

In response to Levi Johnson being on the Tyra Show yesterday discussing openly that the Palin's knew they were knocking boots, Sarah Palin released the following statement:

"Bristol's focus will remain on raising Tripp, completing her education, and advocating abstinence," [spokeswoman Meghan] Stapleton continues. "It is unfortunate that Levi finds it more appealing to exploit his previous relationship with Bristol than to contribute to the well being of the child."

See Levi's clip from the Tyra Show here.

Seriously, they didn't have safe sex every time? And here I thought it was immaculate conception (/sarcasm) As one commenter remarked at Renee's place, Levi is effectively getting out of being a father. While his story holds more water and helps us understand what bullshit abstinence-only is, he ends up benefiting from this very same conservative doctrine and it is at the cost of Bristol Palin's ability to advocate for herself. Between what her mother wants and her baby-daddy walking away, she ends up without an effective narrative to support her story. Both frames of "abstinence-only" and the "the dad that walked away" are stories well fleshed out and justified by the right. Abstinence-only dogma hurts the very thing it claims to protect; the lives of young women.

Related:
Bristol Palin lost her Voice and her Autonomy.

From The New York Times:

Here's a pop quiz: Which of the following would violate federal employment law?

1. Laying off a pregnant woman.

2. Laying off a woman on maternity leave.

Pencils down. The answer is "neither."

So long as employers can make the case that the firing has nothing to do with pregnancy or maternity leave - it's all good. And it makes sense in theory: after all, folks who do a bad job should be fired no matter what their pregnancy/motherhood status. But the problem is, it seems like employers are using the economy to discriminate against mothers.

"Some employers are using the economy as a pretense for laying off just one person," Ms. [Elizabeth] Grossman, [a lawyer for the New York district office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] said. "And very often that person is pregnant or the oldest employee on staff. The economy may be the legitimate cause -- or there may be discrimination."

Last year the number of pregnancy-based discrimination charges filed with the E.E.O.C. was up nearly 50 percent from a decade earlier, to a total of 6,285. That number seems likely to rise even higher this year.

The whole article is really interesting; make sure to check it out. For more information on motherhood and discrimination, go to Moms Rising.

NY Times blog Economix has post by Nancy Folbre from yesterday on the discrimination that working caregivers experience - especially when they're mothers:

During the 1920s and 1930s, many employers refused to hire married women, or fired them once they married. As my fellow Economix blogger Casey Mulligan points out, such "marriage bars" are not allowed today. But family responsibilities still weigh more heavily on women than on men, accounting for much of the pay gap between the sexes. Some policy analysts argue that mothers make a lifestyle choice, opting for easier, more flexible work over greater responsibility and higher pay. Others, like myself, argue that our economic system imposes unfair penalties on those who care for others.

But shouldn't both sides in this debate protest when women (or men) are penalized simply because they are caregivers? Considerable evidence suggests that maternal responsibility intensifies gender stereotyping in harmful -- and often illegal -- ways.

I'm actually a pretty big fan of Folbre and glad to see her voice in the Times; I read her book The Invisible Heart in college - definitely recommend it.

Check out this guest post over at Shakesville, from a woman who has had an abortion and given up a child for adoption:

I'm the birth mother of an adopted child, vehemently pro-choice, non-Christian, very unsuited to motherhood, and after over a decade, have got some things to tell the world about adoption. It's been stewing since I heard about the recent rash of pre-abortion ultrasound legislation. While I am touched that so many men in such various states are so deeply worried about women possibly being all sad from having an abortion, I wish to point out to these compassionately bleeding hearts that the alternatives are not exactly without their own emotional consequences.

I have given a baby up for adoption, and I have had an abortion, and while anecdotes are not evidence, I can assert that abortions may or may not cause depression - it certainly did not in me, apart from briefly mourning the path not taken - but adoption? That is an entirely different matter. I don't doubt that there are women who were fine after adoption, and there is emphatically nothing wrong with that or with them; but I want to point out that if we're going to have a seemingly neverending discussion about the sorrow and remorse caused by abortion, then it is about goddamn time that we hear from birth mothers too.

Believe me when I say that of the two choices, it was adoption that nearly destroyed me - and it never ends. The only comparison I have is the death of a loved one. The pain retreats, maybe fades, but it comes right back if I poke at it. Writing this has taken me nearly two weeks. Normally, I can write this amount in about thirty minutes, with bathroom breaks. I started to type, and stopped only to reread, then go wail into my pillow. There is no such thing as "over" with this.

Birth mothers are a demographic seldom heard from, and then generally only in the context of how soon they want to "replace" their lost child. This is a huge WTF to me. I went into a self-destructive tailspin for over a decade, and never once thought that maybe a new doll would do the trick. Yet every support group, every online forum, every possible resource I found, all zeroed in on this one-size-fits-all panacea. I didn't want a new baby. I never wanted any babies in the first place. I also didn't want an abortion, and I don't see how any of my reasons for any of this are anyone's business, either. It was my choice to make, and that is that.

Read the rest here.

These are important perspectives to keep at the forefront as adoption is touted as the preferred alternative to abortion.

A Mikwaukee right wing talk radio show host Mark Belling called women who breastfeed "sows" on his show the other day in response to a proposed breastfeeding bill. You can listen to the segment here, although coincidentally, that podcast of the segment is no longer on the show's website. He says:

"Without regard to what you think about women who get off by behaving like sows by pulling out their you-know-what in front of everybody else in the world and letting their babies start sucking, whatever you think about that, you don't have the express it so crudely, well why not? It's a crude practice, given how adamant some of these sows are, that's an appropriate term, isn't it? It's..it's what a pig does and it does it in public, right? I mean, I don't, I - hehehehe..."

Email Belling and let him know who the pig is here. Or better yet, call the station at 414-799-1130.

h/t to Brooke

UNICEF released this pretty compelling video, "Missing" to bring attention to the prevalence of maternal mortality in the world. Their statement:

"We call these women 'missing' because their deaths could have been avoided. In fact, 80 per cent of maternal deaths could be averted if women had access to essential maternal health services.

We know where and how these women are dying, and we have the resources to prevent these deaths. Yet, maternal mortality is still one of the most neglected problems internationally."

Via UN Dispatch.

Rachel at Women's Health News brings our attention to this proposed bill in Tennessee that would target certain pregnant women for drug and alcohol testing.

(c) The department, in promulgating rules to implement this act, shall consider the following as indications of the necessity for alcohol or drug testing: (1) No prenatal care; (2) Late prenatal care after twenty-four (24) weeks gestation; (3) Incomplete prenatal care; (4) Abruptio placentae; (5) Intrauterine fetal death; (6) Preterm labor of no obvious cause; (7) Intrauterine growth retardation of no obvious cause; (8) Previously known alcohol or drug abuse; or (9) Unexplained congenital anomalies.

As Rachel explains in comments, the bill's regulations would target low-income women, "the women who may not have health insurance or time off work or money or transportation to get prenatal care, who are going to have those same barriers to going through drug rehabilitation."

Of course, tactics like this regarding pregnant women is nothing new. In fact, it's a trend.

Aunt B. says it best:

In other words, the precedent they're setting is that, once you are pregnant, your body is not your own. You no longer know what's best for you. Your doctor no longer knows what's best for you. You are not allowed to not realize you're pregnant. You're not allowed to be afraid. You're not allowed to be too poor to go to the doctor. You have to do what the State tells you to do while you're pregnant, because, while you're pregnant, your body is not your own.

(Mamapundit has more, as well.)

For more information on pregnant women's rights, check out the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

I am always very critical of videos that try and show "other" ways of being, but I actually found this to be extremely interesting and a solid example of how matriarchal traditions allow for a type of freedom that modernization believes it invented. As feminist thinkers we have parsed this hegemony of dialog that somehow equates women's liberation with colonization and modernization, but it still gets lost when it makes it to the mainstream.

Check it out.

Thanks to Heather for the link and pointing out that the Wikipedia entry for Matriarchy calls them "hypothetical."

I feel bad for her. Her story was used by her family and the GOP to make an example of what is considered "responsible" behavior for a teen mom. Holding all that, she is telling the truth that abstinence is not realistic for young people, even if it should be what everyone strives for. Comprehensive sex-ed wouldn't be this unrealistic.

via Gawker.

(h/t to Aaron)

Via AP:

Police said Thursday they will investigate death threats against octuplet mom Nadya Suleman and advise her publicist on how to handle a torrent of other nasty messages that have flooded his office.

Word that the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother is receiving public assistance to care for the 14 children she conceived through in vitro fertilization has stoked furor among many people.

Police Lt. John Romero said officers were meeting with Suleman's publicist Mike Furtney about the flood of angry phone calls and e-mail messages against Suleman, her children and Furtney.

"We are aware of the media accounts of the threats, and that they are being sent to the West Los Angeles detectives for appropriate action," Romero said.

Furtney said 500 new e-mails were received early Thursday.

In the meantime, MSNBC ponders "baby addiction - when moms always want a newborn, even at the expense of other children." Sigh.

During a humanitarian trip to Sierra Leone supporting a tetanus-vaccination project, Salma Hayek cross-nursed a sick newborn. (ABC made the mistake of saying the child was born on the same day as her daughter - they actually just share the same birthday.) I tend to feel similarly with Hoyden About Town's post on this. (Watch the entire segment here.)

What are folks' thoughts?

If you tuned in to the Grammys on Sunday, you already caught this tidbit. MIA, who's baby was due on Sunday, showed up to the Grammys and performed her track"Swagger Like Us," in collaboration with T. I., Jay-Z, Kanye West and Lil Wayne, nine months pregnant. I think bad-ass is an understatement.

Start your Tuesday dancing!

I love this track. I will post better quality video when I get a chance. I am impressed by her energy level and slap in the face to conventional beliefs that pregnant women should hide themselves and their bodies. I have heard rumors that MIA is retiring early. I really hope this is untrue, she brings such a refreshing confidence and unapologetic feminism to her work. This South Asian sister beams with pride knowing someone so bad-ass is repping us.

Meganaut524 covered on the community site as well.

Click to enlarge

The woman who gave birth to octuplets has provided plenty of fodder for feminist conversation, but that's not what I'd like to write about. I want to know why someone from the Los Angeles Times sent out an email (above) calling selective reduction "killing off" babies.

Andrew Malcolm, a writer and blogger for the paper, sent out a mass email last week with the subject line: "fyi octuplet mom alrdy had 6 kids so docs offered to kill off some of the 8 for her."

So much for objective journalism.

Ann Coulter says single motherhood is "a recipe to create criminals, strippers, rapists, murderers."

That is all.

Via Feministe.

Wow, this is sort of the depressing opposite of that orgasmic birth story we posted on recently:

According to a civil suit filed Monday, Skol arrived at the hospital at about 4 a.m. Her usual doctor was out of town, so Dr. Scott Pierce filled in. The lawsuit alleged that Pierce showed up at Rush four hours later, and when he did, he allegedly reprimanded Skol for not calling before coming in. The lawsuit claims he said there was not enough time to administer pain medication.

The suit also accuses Pierce of telling a nurse that Skol got the pain she deserved because she had not called ahead.

"Sometimes pain is the best teacher," he allegedly said.

Skol says the doctor gave her an excruciating vaginal exam in the middle of a contraction. Then, although she was not fully dilated, she claims Pierce instructed her to start pushing.

When Skol or the staff questioned his methods, Pierce told Skol, "Shut up, close your mouth, and push," according to the suit.

If what the suit alleges is true, that's seriously disturbing.

Discuss amongst yourselves...

From the Sunday New York Times, Alex Kuczynski tells her own version of Baby Mama. She opted for surrogacy after years of infertility and failed pregnancies and IVF attempts.

At 31 weeks, my baby was kicking and stretching. On the sonogram screen, I could see that he was doing his customary sit-ups. The monitor broadcast the slushy sound of his heartbeat.Then she tore off the sonogram images and handed them to me with one hand; with the other, she reached down to wipe the gel off the stomach of the woman who was bearing my child.

I did not give birth to my son. He is the product of my egg and my husband's sperm. After half a decade of trying to become pregnant, sometimes succeeding but always failing to carry a baby successfully to term, I came to the conclusion that if we wanted to have a child who was genetically related to us, we would have to find a woman with a more reliable uterus to gestate and deliver our baby. That was in April 2007. I was 39 years old. Exhausted by years of infertility, wrung emotionally dry by miscarriage, my husband and I decided we would give gestational surrogacy -- hiring a woman to bear our child -- one try. It was a desperate measure, to be sure, and one complicated by questions from all the big sectors: financial, religious, social, moral, legal, political.

What I appreciate about the piece is its directness and honesty. Alex covers many of the issues that come up for a couple choosing surrogacy, with humor and sincerity. She even touches on the issues of class that are implicit in these kinds of arrangements. Probably because Alex was already a writer for the NYTimes, she was able to tell her own story, which makes it seem less sensationalized than a piece written by a third person. But, for the same reason, there are more critical perspectives toward surrogacy that are still missing from these debates. I would love to see a similar article to Alex's, written by a surrogate mom, for example. Even so, these stories are an important realistic counter to movies like Baby Mama.

More from feministing on surrogacy, here and here.

I am not totally sure how to respond to this commentary on CNN about Michelle Obama's choice to stay at home during the presidency of Barack Obama. I don't want to be too hard on it, because I do think on one level highlighting that there are also women of color that stay at home and sometimes feel isolated and alienated so they should build relationships, well that is great. Having the resources to be a stay at home is even better. However, suggesting that you should stay home to do it for the betterment of the country and to uphold traditional values-well that is just not OK.

She makes an apt argument about black women taking care of wealthy white people's children.

From breast-feeding to bathing to rocking them, the women tended their owners' children, while not being allowed to lavish such attention on their own. Long after slavery was over, little changed in this dynamic.

It was common for black women to leave their own children at home to fend for themselves and go to work for low wages as domestics in the homes of well-off white families. As African-Americans have gotten more opportunities, a college degree has been a ticket to the career ladder. Period. Devoting full time to motherhood is considered a waste of education by many in the black community.

And while I think there is some cultural impetus for black women working outside the home, I think more times than not, it is class privilege that gives people the ability or idea to "stay at home."

Outside of the class assumptions behind the idea of the "stay-at-home" mom, I don't necessarily think that Michelle Obama's choice to stay home is a win for us women of color that are just looking for a role model to let us know we can stay at home nor does it disrupt the racist idea that only white women stay at home. I think it feeds into antiquated notions of motherhood that make her more palatable to a wide audience suggesting that yes, she disrupts the idea of the "normal" American by being black, but is as American as apple pie, by staying in the home.

via CNN.

An article from this weekend's NYTimes chronicles the rising trend in home births in NYC. It partially credits the recent Ricki Lake documentary, The Business of Being Born.

The article does a good job of addressing the different challenges for women giving birth in their NYC apartments. It takes about space concerns, neighbor issues, clean up and hospital transfers. The article is also accompanied by a slideshow of photos from various home births.

What the article doesn't address is the huge class divide in these types of births. I, as a doula and general advocate of midwives and out of hospital births, am a huge supporter of home births. I think they are better for moms and babies who have low-risk pregnancies. I think moms feel more comfortable and are away from the stress and pressure of a hospital. She is on her own time line, no questions asked.

But the huge drawback to promoting home birth is that it is primarily an option for upper middle class women. Not everyone has a home that is safe to birth in. This could be because of family circumstances, overcrowding, lack of support from partners or simply lack of adequate space. There are also obvious financial barriers since most insurance companies won't cover home births.

It's unfortunate that an article about birth in NYC didn't address this issue at all, seeing as it is such a diverse city, in terms of both class and race.

Also, once again an article about women's health is marginalized, this one was placed in the Home and Garden section. At least it wasn't in Fashion and Style this time.

For all you law students out there, a fantastic reproductive justice writing contest hosted by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. They are giving out significant cash prizes, $1,000 for first prize, $500 and $250 for the runners up. The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2009.

Issues of concern to pregnant and birthing women have often been missing from discussion in law school gender discrimination and feminist jurisprudence courses and among reproductive rights activists. Thanks in large part to public education efforts by writers, filmmakers, and community activists, there is an unprecedented amount of attention and momentum surrounding the rights of pregnant and birthing women. To advance these efforts further, NAPW has developed two writing contests. NAPW and numerous Co-Sponsors and Supporters hope that these contests will leverage the enthusiasm and creativity of a new generation of feminist legal scholars and spark critical thinking about the need to address childbirth and birthing rights as constitutional and human rights issues.

Contest I: Birthing Rights as a Matter of Gender Equality

This contest asks for a critical analysis of the absence of birthing rights issues from gender discrimination and feminist jurisprudence textbooks and curricula (in fact, none of the top three casebooks used in law school courses dedicated to gender and the law address the issue of childbirth or midwifery).

Contest II: Challenges to Bans On Women Having Vaginal Births after Previous C-Sections

This contest asks students to develop legal theories that can be used to challenge policies banning pregnant women from having a vaginal birth after a prior caesarean section (VBAC). This topic will encourage students to address a growing problem that has received very little attention from the feminist legal community both in academia and within the leading women's rights legal advocacy organizations.

For the full writing prompts, submission guidelines, more information about our co-sponsors and supporters, and periodic updates, please visit the NAPW website.

Apparently Motrin got lots of mothers peeved when they ran the following ad:

Just a tad condescending. Ick. The response to the ad (yay online activism!) was so overwhelming, that Motrin apologized and is removing the ad from circulation.

Via Rad Campaign, Writes Like She Talks and LA Moms Blog.

From Lynn Paltrow's piece at RH Reality Check:

This summer, the question of abortion and the rights of the unborn once again took center stage as a presidential campaign issue. In August, at the Saddleback Civil Forum, Pastor Rick Warren asked both presidential candidates: "At what point is a baby entitled to human rights?" Senator John McCain's answer, "at the moment of conception," immediately established his anti-abortion bona fides.

But the right answer, as a matter of international human rights principles and simple justice, is: human rights attach at birth, not at conception.This is the only position that ensures that upon becoming pregnant, women do not lose their human rights.

Political candidates of all persuasions should rest assured that to oppose the recognition of human rights before birth is not to deny the value of potential life as matter of religious belief, emotional conviction or personal experience. Rather, it is to recognize the value of the women who give that life.

Right on.

Cross posted at Radical Doula

Some good news for your mid-week: The Bureau of Prisons recently announced it has changed its policy and now bans the shackling of pregnant women during transportation, labor and delivery.

Maria Jones, who was incarcerated for violating drug laws, tells the story of having labor induced two weeks prior to her due date, but being "kept in shackles, leaving 18 inches between her ankles, and told to pace the hallway for several hours. 'It was so humiliating. My ankles were raw,' she said. 'I had shackles on up until the baby was coming out and then they took them off for me to push...It was unbelievable. Like I was going to go anywhere.'"

[...]The new policy represents a huge victory for the thousands of women incarcerated in federal prisons throughout the country -- a victory hard won by groups like The Rebecca Project for Human Rights and other organizations that have advocated for this change.

But this is only the beginning. In 47 states there is no legislation to restrict the practice of shackling pregnant women; state and local prisons are not subject to the new federal policy. And the U.S. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which increasingly detains immigrant women who have never committed a crime, has refused to specifically end the use of restraints on pregnant women.

So basically, it's a good start, but we need to keep advocating that state and local prisons, as well as ICE, also ban the practice of shackling pregnant women. As the ACLU notes, women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population. This issue is not going away anytime soon.

Amnesty International has info on the situation at the state-level.

It's discreet, but it's there. Yay for positive representations of breastfeeding. It can be sexy.

Via DoulaMomma

Gloucester High School, site of the 17 High School girls who got pregnant this past summer, voted to make contraceptives available (with parental consent) at the high school health center last night.

Good move, Gloucester. Now while it's unclear that these young women would have been impacted by this change in policy (remember, it's alleged that at least half of them wanted to get pregnant) this will be a great service to the rest of the teens at this high school.

Want more about this story? Read Courtney's op-ed about the missing pieces in the original Gloucester coverage, Vanessa's take down of girl shaming and Jessica talking about giving credit to Crisis Pregnancy Centers.

White Dude Knows Best! Above: Men who want to control the bodies of women they deem unfit mothers. Louisiana state Rep. John LaBruzzo (left) and Texas state District Judge Charlie Baird (right).

It's been quite a week for government violation of the bodily integrity of poor women and women of color. First, there was the judge in Texas who set "not having children" as a condition of a woman's parole. (I just linked in the WFR on Sunday, but Cara discussed it at length. Go read her post.)

And today, via several readers, comes the news that John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, wants to pay low-income women $1,000 apiece to get sterilized. Everything about this is so incredibly offensive, I don't know quite where to begin. Let's start with a quote from LaBruzzo:

"We're on a train headed to the future and there's a bridge out, " LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. "And nobody wants to talk about it."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Low-income women having children is a "dangerous demographic trend"?! Sounds like the recent round of racist propaganda we saw related to the "Demographic Winter" movie. (Film summary: You should be panicked because brown people are reproducing at faster rates than white people.) But LaBruzzo protests that he is not a racist -- he's a problem-solver!

LaBruzzo said other, mainstream strategies for attacking poverty, such as education reforms and programs informing people about family planning issues, have repeatedly failed to solve the problem. He said he is simply looking for new ways to address it.

"It's easy to say, 'Oh, he's a racist, ' " LaBruzzo said. "The hard part is to sit down and think of some solutions."

It's not as if this country has ever done a good job providing low-income women with the tools and information to make their own decisions. Programs that aim to do that have been consistently underfunded and poorly implemented. So no, we haven't tried all other options. And even if we had, his idea is still completely appalling.

LaBruzzo is correct that it's very easy to say he's a racist. Because, um, he's espousing a historically racist policy. What he clearly deems to be a new and creative solution has unfortunately been around a long time. Compulsory or coercive sterilizations for low-income women, disabled women, and women of color were extremely common up until the 1970s, and slightly less common but nevertheless occurring with regularity the the decades since. The paternalistic attitude that "certain women" cannot be trusted to make their own reproductive decisions is still an underlying theme of a lot of backwards legal and policy decisions. LaBruzzo and Texas judge Charlie Baird are part of this despicable tradition.

So, my friend Deanne sent me this picture last week (that quickly got all over the internets) of "Teen Pregnancy Barbie." After several google searches failed me, I realized that if I just look at the website, "Teen Pregnancy Barbie" is a multimedia art project by artist Nina Westerberg (powerpoint of process here). Now, I have talked about Barbie art before and many people didn't agree with my opinions, but since I am a glutton for punishment, I will try here again.

I think this is supposed to be ironic and tells us a story about youth, motherhood and that the Barbie American dream isn't peachy and perfect, like Barbie wants us to think it is. This is OK, but let's talk about the real state of young women and motherhood so we can get appropriate education and resources where we need them.

What do you think? *ducks*

On the very day Sarah Palin was announced as McCain's running mate, I linked to Jill's post on the already-emerging sexist meme questioning her fitness to hold office while holding a baby at the same time. And since the news of her daughter's pregnancy, the media racket over Palin's fitness to be both VP and mother has grown even louder.

To be clear, I think the question of work/family balance is sometimes asked with regard to male politicians. (The criticism of John Edwards' decision to continue his primary campaign after his wife's cancer diagnosis springs to mind.) But far and away, the question is more likely to come up when the candidate is a woman. Especially a woman with young kids. So yeah, I think it's typically pretty sexist.

But as long as all sorts of bloggers and news outlets are asking... YES, of course Sarah Palin is capable of having a very important job and still being a good mother. Absolutely. As with all major life choices women make, it's condescending to assume that she somehow hasn't thought this through, or that she hasn't already been doing a demanding job while simultaneously being an attentive mother. Writes Monika Bauerlein at Mother Jones (who, along with another mother of a young child, is editor-in-chief of the magazine):

Too many women have been patronized out of jobs they wanted with pseudo-considerate treacle like "I thought your priority right now was your family." It's happened to friends of mine; it's happened to me; if you have ovaries, chances are pretty good it has happened or will happen to you. That's the reality of living in post-women's lib America, and that's why one part of me is heartened by the Palin pick. People may find lots of reasons why she shouldn't be in the White House--but at least, having little kids didn't put her out of the running in the first place. And for that, I have to confess, I'm grateful to John McCain.

I'll grant her that. But also it's important to note Palin's privilege here. She has a partner who is able to be a full-time caregiver for her kids. She has excellent benefits and access to health care. She has a flexible office situation (one article discussed how she had a crib next to her desk). This is way more than a lot of working women have. Awhile ago, my colleague Dana Goldstein went to a conservative women's lunch, where Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers was speaking. Like Palin, McMorris Rodgers was a new mother of a baby with Down syndrome, and had a full-time caregiving partner. Dana wrote,

It's mind-boggling, of course, how McMorris Rodgers can advocate for women's economic mobility even as she opposes programs, like S-CHIP, that help mothers pay for their kids' medical needs. On June 27, she did not vote when the Committee on Education and Labor, on which she sits, passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would overturn a May Supreme Court decision that made it almost impossible to file complaints of gender or race-based pay discrimination. No Republican Committee member supported the bill.

And this is the exact question that's not being asked about Palin. The media are clamoring to ask whether she can juggle her children and her career. But they aren't saying a peep about whether she wants to enact policies that will make it easier for women -- especially women who do not enjoy the privilege that Palin and McMorris Rodgers do -- to perform this balancing act.

Where does Palin stand on S-CHIP? On fair pay? On paid family leave? I have no idea. But her running mate, John McCain, was rated by the Children's Defense Counsil as the worst senator for children. He supports businesses who discriminate on the basis of gender. He attempted to weaken the Family and Medical Leave Act. And he supported Bush's veto of S-CHIP. (Gloria Feldt and Carol Joffe have more.)

The real story here is not how Sarah Palin chooses to balance her own life. It's about whether she (and McCain) are committed to making these choices easier for all women. And clearly, the answer is no.

So, after watching a few of the clips from the Obama and McCain appearance at an evangelist church, I am actually not sure why Obama agreed to doing this. Tactically, it appeared to be on McCain's home court and many have speculated that McCain had even heard the questions before hand while Obama was answering them. That said, I am concerned by the way that Obama answered the question on abortion (and I am not afraid to say it!).

Personally, I think he blew it. Now, I know many liberals have argued otherwise and while I hear the arguments, that Obama is more nuanced in his approach and was obviously playing with the idea of a "higher power," in his answer, I think he should have come out and said point blank, "I believe in the reproductive rights of families and women", instead of pandering to a crowd, he will never win over by trying to cater to their anti-abortion attitudes. It ain't gonna happen, at least not with the evangelists.

I know there is this fear about calling Obama out on his talking points because we don't want to give the right something to run with, but I do think we have to use the media to hold all our politicians accountable, now and after the election. It is clear that Obama's talking points on repro rights need to be fleshed out with regard to a conservative, evangelist audience, since most of us (on the supposed left) know where Obama stands on most issues of reproductive rights. As my coworker Karlos and I discussed on the train ride home from work yesterday, we understand why he couldn't explicitly say, "pro-choice" on the onset. I may not agree with that, but as a frame it is very difficult to push on this crowd. However if he had pushed reproductive rights as a human rights issue within the frame of reproductive justice and the responsibility of the state to protect and provide reproductive health services for everyone, mothers, babies, families, etc and then discussed how abstinence-only sex education has done absolutely nothing for the number of abortions in the last 4 years, it might have positioned him better on this issue.

As feminists we can't be afraid to demand what we want to hear from our politicians regarding abortion. There has been an assault on pro-choice and the language has been co-opted to make it look as though the pro-choice camp doesn't care about families, babies or mommies. And that couldn't be the furthest thing from the truth. It is the transparent and documented truth that access to reproductive health for women creates a healthier and happier society, is what motivates us to continue fighting for pro-choice legislation.

Check out this piece I co-wrote with the amazing Elaine Tyler May on the Gloucester teens. We felt like two things were really missing from the coverage last month: 1) a race analysis and 2) a historical perspective. We tried to provide both and would love to hear your thoughts. An excerpt:

Americans seem to have collective amnesia about the long history of white, "respectable" girls getting pregnant. Black, brown, immigrant and working class girls have long been the public face of teen pregnancy, thanks in no small part to Ronald Reagan's racist invocation of the "welfare queen." When these young women get pregnant, it is often framed as an economic problem: who will support these babies? When young white women get pregnant, however, it is the moral question -- not the bottom line -- that fuels the debate: Who will marry these girls?

It turns out that the only thing truly unprecedented about the Gloucester girls is the way they are answering -- or more accurately, not answering -- that very question. They don't seem to want to get married.

Babies have been sold on the black market for a long time and in highly impoverished areas it often seems like a good idea when you stand to gain thousands of dollars. But inevitably, when you are selling not only the product (a baby) but also hijacking the means of production (a woman's body), illegally, gender based human rights violations are pretty much inevitable.

Call it bizarre business, but the fact is that it is booming. It could be described as a baby factory where women who suffer disability in child bearing source babies. The proprietors are clever enough, as the homes are registered as non governmental organizations(NGOs). In the homes, the operators simply source teenage girls who are pregnant and not interested in keeping the babies. In some cases, some who are desperate to make money are lured into the business. They are taken into the homes where there are men ready to make sure that the girls become pregnant.

I find this last line particularly disturbing. How exactly do they make sure the girls become pregnant? How exactly does one "become" pregnant? Are they forced into having sex perhaps?

And to ascertain that the girls are healthy, HIV and AIDs tests are conducted on the girls before being admitted. The girls stay there until they give birth. Once they are through with this assignment, they are allowed sometime before they leave the homes. Depending on their ability to negotiate, the NGOs, according to our source, pay about N50,000 for the baby. In most cases, the girls do not see the babies they carried for nine months, as there is a ready market for them.

Wow, just wow. The police have been raiding homes and arresting the girls, such as this example where neighbors were complaining that the young women were being held hostage against their will. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me-arrest the girls. Also, Nigeria doesn't have the best track record in taking care of their mother's to be.

New research out on postpartum mental illness is making it clear that there may be more serious conditions for new mothers than just postpartum depression.

Post Tramautic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is most commonly associated with combat veterans and victims of violent crime, but medical experts say it also can be brought on by a very painful or complicated labor and delivery in which a woman believes she or her baby might die. Symptoms can include anxiety, flashbacks and a numbness to daily life. Even as medical advances have resulted in many more lives saved during high-risk births, extreme medical interventions can leave a mother severely stressed -- especially if she feels powerless or mistreated by health providers (emphasis mine).

I'm happy that the piece highlights the connection to increased interventions and powerlessness during childbirth. Both of these are seeing a higher incidence as our c-section rate soars and medical interventions become the norm. This isn't just going to have an impact on the babies being born, but the mothers as well.

Cheryl Beck, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Nursing who researches birth trauma and was an adviser on the Childbirth Connection survey, says the mothers who reported signs of PTSD in the survey appeared to have a higher rate of medical interventions and describe feeling powerless in a threatening environment.

Dozens of breast-feeding women packed themselves into a Vancouver H&M last week to protest the store, where employees recently told a mom that breastfeeding was against H&M policy because it might offend other customers.

Just after noon the trendy clothing store in a downtown mall was filled with a sea of nursing moms, strollers, toddlers, dads and others who turned out to make a political point.

"It is normal. It is not obscene. It is every baby's need to have food and be nourished and nurtured," said Veronika Polanska as she rallied the moms to publicly feed their babies.

..."I don't want to live a world or city where that's acceptable to shun women for breastfeeding," said nursing mum Sonia Tilley-Strobel.

H&M corporate spokesperson Laura Shankland came to the protest to smooth things over: "We apologize. And it seems to be a miscommunication and a misunderstanding. Our policy is to allow breastfeeding nursing mothers to breastfeed or express milk freely in our stores."

Related Posts: Lactivists protest Applebee's, Alabama women can breast-feed in public. So they do., Kansas gives out breastfeeding cards

Picture via.

In the category of shameless self-promotion, check out my feature over at RH Reality Check on the myth of the elective c-section.

When the media covers the rising rate of c-section, it's often ready to lay the blame at the feet of a woman we've come to know well over the last few years -- the busy career mom scheduling her delivery between important business deals, penciling in labor and delivery the way she pencils in a client meeting. As criticism of surgical birth mounts, the idea that mother-initiated c-sections are spurring an overall increase in the practice has only become more popular.

Colorlines reports:

BEHIND THE THICK GLASS THAT RUNS THE LENGTH of the Yuba County Jail's visitation corridor, Tatyana Mitrohina's eyes glisten, and then fill with tears as she recounts the last time she saw her son. "During the visit, he climbed into my arms and fell asleep with his head on my shoulder while I walked around with him," she remembers.

Two months after that visit, Mitrohina was sent to the Yuba County Jail in Marysville, California, hours away from her 2-year-old son, who is in foster care. She was convicted on charges that she had hit him. While she does not deny the charges, she does say she had expected to be released from jail and to get counseling and start to rebuild her life with her child. But with the increasing collaboration between local authorities and federal immigration officials, Mitrohina found that she would not get that second chance. The government had slated her to be deported to Russia, the country she left as a teenager.

Read the rest here.

Madeline Holler at Babble tells the story of her illegal home birth. Check it out and feel free to share any home birthing stories in comments!

Ricki Lake, Jennifer Block and Abby Epstein respond to the AMA decision in the Huffington Post. Check it out.

The other trouble with the American MDs is that they seem to have lost all respect for women's civil rights, indeed for the U.S. Constitution -- the right to privacy, to bodily integrity, and the right of every adult to determine her own health care. The "father knows best" legislation they are promoting could indeed be used to criminally prosecute women who choose home birth, say, by equating it with child abuse.

Research evidence be damned, the doctors want to mandate you to go to the hospital. They don't want you to have a choice.

Time magazine has a story about a Massachusetts high school that has apparently started a trend among their girls – to be mommies:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year.

After some digging, school officials found that almost half of the pregnant students had actually made a pact to get pregnant and raise their kids together. But the school still isn’t willing to offer contraception to their students. And Time implies that meeting teen mothers’ needs in the school may be the problem:

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.(Emphasis mine)

So is that the solution? Stigmatizing teen mothers and denying them an education? Blaming the prevalence of teen pregnancy in a school on sex ed and family-friendly school policies and denying birth control to sexually active students is definitely not going to help this situation.

The school’s nurse practitioner Kim Daly and the school’s clinic medical director Dr. Brian Orr actually attempted to get permission to offer birth control to the students, but were shut down with what seems like a "How dare you??" response. Mayor Carolyn Kirk said, "Dr. Orr and Ms. Daly have no right to decide this for our children." What the mayor doesn’t seem to understand is that it wouldn’t be their decision at all, but the students’. Both Daly and Orr resigned in protest.

There’s obviously a lot to address at this school and in the community, but the focus of blame is in the wrong direction.

Thanks to all the readers who alerted us to this story!

Via RH Reality Check and the Big Push for Midwives:

Steff Hedenkamp, Communications Coordinator for The Big Push for Midwives says, "Maternity care is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. So it's no surprise to see the AMA join the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in its ongoing fight to corner the market and ensure that the only midwives able to practice legally are hospital-based midwives forced to practice under physician control. I will say, though, that I'm shocked to learn that the AMA is taking this turf battle to the next level by setting the stage for outlawing home birth itself-a direct attack on those families who choose home birth, who could be subject to criminal prosecution if the AMA has its way."

Apparently Ricki Lake and her new hit documentary the Business of Being Born might be partially to blame. With the soaring costs of maternity care, the further increasing c-section rate and our not-so-great maternal mortality rate, it's no surprise that birth activists and mothers are up in arms about this.

UPDATE: You can read the text of the resolution here.

I am so deeply saddened by Rebecca Walker's recent expose on her childhood as Alice Walker's allegedly neglected daughter and the ways in which it scarred her. The two have been publicly nipping at one another for years, but this seems like the nail in the coffin of their doomed relationship.

I'm sad, first and foremost, for Rebecca--a third wave icon and clearly reflective and evolving leader of the movement. Whether everything she alleges (that her mother never went to her school functions, didn't spend time with her or money on her necessities etc.) is true or not, it is the emotional truth of what she experienced.

But I'm sad, on a larger scale, that she would (1) equate feminism with this experience and (2) not see the gray areas in between her mother's relationship to mothering and her own.

In terms of the former, she acts like our feminist legacy is explicitly anti-mothering. She writes: "Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating." This is so NOT my experience in the world or at home, where I was raised by a prototypical feminist mother (though not a famous one). Many, many of the second-wavers that I know and love are passionate about being mothers, while they recognize that there are dangers in it and many issues that arise from its all-consuming nature. Any biological confusion that women have is not a direct product of feminism; it's a complicated biproduct of the time we are living in, feminist successes included.

In terms of the latter, Rebecca seems to have swung the pendulum so violently in the other direction that she won't even acknowledge the ways in which mothering is problematic for independent women in a sexist world. She writes, "I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters - a happy family. "I, for one, am freaked out to be a mom (though I know I want to), not because I think it is impossible not to lose myself, but because I think it is easy to. I want to find a middle ground between helicopter parent and can't be bothered, between stay-at-home and workaholic, between mother as identity and mother as irrelevant role.

Isn't that what so many of us are striving for? Isn't that what Amy Richards' new book is about? Why isn't this acknowledged in Rebecca's vicious take down of her own mother?

Your thoughts?

Regina McKnight - the South Carolina woman who was who was convicted of homicide after she gave birth to a stillborn baby - has had her conviction overturned.

McKnight was the first woman in South Carolina to be convicted of homicide by child abuse due to a stillbirth. Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), says that McKnight "was convicted on junk science and was not fairly represented at trial."

NAPW, who has been instrumental in bringing attention to cases like McKnight's (of which there are far too many), has the full story.

Feministe, the Oklahoma Women's Network Blog, RH Reality Check and the ACLU also have more.

Judy Norsigian is co-founder of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and co-author of the ground breaking Our Bodies, Ourselves published in 1970. Since its publication, women's groups around the world have developed cultural adaptations of, or other publications inspired by, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Most recently, women's groups in Albania, Russia, South Korea, and Tibet have produced new publications in book and other formats. Judy is also the co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause and most recently, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth. Check out the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog when you can: http://ourbodiesourblog.org/

Judy speaks and writes frequently on a wide range of women's health concerns, including abortion and contraception, sexually transmitted infections, genetics and reproductive technologies, tobacco and women, women and health care reform, and midwifery advocacy.

Here's Judy...

Bloomberg LP, the news and financial data corporation founded by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is being charged with 58 cases of pregnancy discrimination. So far.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the charges in September when they had 3 cases, in which they now have 58 women who say their duties were reduced, or that they had been excluded from employment opportunities because they were pregnant:

The EEOC lawsuit claims the company discriminated against pregnant employees by cutting their pay and demoting them. It also claims the women were paid less when they returned from maternity leave and were demoted and replaced by 'junior' male employees.

The sad part is that I'm not surprised. At all.

A UK-wide survey finds that 76 percent of employers said that they would not hire a woman if they knew she were going to become pregnant within six months of starting her employment. More findings:

52 per cent will weigh up the chances of a candidate getting pregnant, taking into account age and whether they have just got married (although asking that direct question to an interviewee is not allowed).

68 per cent of employers would like more rights to quiz candidates about their plans for a family.

Depressing and infuriating. Check out NAPW's Guide to Pregnancy Discrimination in Employment for more information on pregnancy discrimination at work.

According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, complaints of pregnancy discrimination hiked up by 14% between 2006 and 2007. There has been a 40% increase over the last decade, reports the National Partnership for Women and Families.

The Wall Street Journal suggests that this is party because women are increasingly working later into their pregnancies, including new advocacy being created for pregnant women and women with children.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act can't straight up protect women from being fired or not hired, but if they're singled out based on their pregnancy, they're liable to take action. And unfortunately, the Family and Medical Leave Act poses a problem: while unpaid maternity leave is required, it doesn't doesn't require paid maternity leave. (California and Washington are exceptions.)

Regardless, it's good to see women taking more action on pregnancy discrimination; we're getting closer to accurate numbers on how prevalent it really is in the U.S. and maybe, just maybe, our family-friendly policies will someday get friendlier. Check out MomsRising and the National Advocates for Pregnant Women has a great list of more resources about pregnant women and mother's rights at work.

A Republican California assemblyman proposed a bill that would deem pregnant women "temporarily disabled" in the third trimester of their pregnancy and allow them access to handicapped parking. The bill failed, but I think this is really interesting.

The classification of differently-abled people is usually pretty stigmatizing. Disability rights activists have talked about the problem with being overly protective of differently-abled people while overlooking systemic problems in the care of people with disabilities and the lack of appropriate legislation to protect their individual rights.

People with disabilities are constantly fighting against a misinformed public, discrimination and the often erroneous belief that differently-abled people are helpless and can't make decisions for themselves. It is not OK, but we can agree that these assumptions are prevalent. So if that is the case, and we have politicians that want to classify pregnant women as "disabled" these same misconceptions apply on some level. There is then the belief that pregnant women are unable to take care of themselves, make choices for themselves, etc. Is the answer for society's mistreatment of both differently-abled people and pregnant women legislation that will classify women as "temporarily disabled?"

I don't think so. But then you think about what is possible, given the current laws with regard to differently-abled people and it is true that pregnant women sometimes have special needs and those needs should be protected by the government.

I just have a problem with calling people "disabled" and to extend that category to pregnant women. It is infantilizing, something the legal system loves to do to "vulnerable" populations through demoralizing and poorly phrased legislation. Isn't there a way to protect people's rights and allow them fair access depending on their abilities without saying they are disabled? And I am not overly concerned with the terms alone-but the meanings and assumptions that are attached to them.

A survey released yesterday revealed that nearly half of maternity wards in the UK turned away women in labor last year:

Of the 147 NHS Trusts that provide maternity services, 103 provided figures. Of these, 42 percent reported having closed or having been forced to divert women to another site at least once last year because of capacity problems.

A Department of Health spokesperson responded:

"It is difficult precisely to predict when a mother will go into labour and sometimes, at times of peak demand, maternity units do temporarily divert women to nearby facilities. When this does happen, it is often only for a few hours and to ensure mother and baby can receive the best care possible."

Okay, but can't a few hours be critical in some cases? Deputy general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives Louise Silverton said: "The key issue here is what the women want. Women want to know and develop a relationship with their midwife and not feel as if they are on a production line. Midwives want to be able to deliver the best possible individualised care and not feel like they are working in a baby factory."

This seems pretty crazy to me. Has anyone had this happen to them or someone they know?

Reason magazine topped its article on the "we need more white babies!" movement (and its accompanying film, Demographic Winter) with this great headline:

Best EVER! But seriously, the article also makes the excellent point that people don't choose to remain childless for some weird or nefarious reason. Some of us, uh, just don't want kids, and have decided our lives will be just as happy or happier without them.

When I think about my happiness and my lack of desire to have babies, I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode in which Marge starts a crusade against "Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens, and Gays," and she has the following exchange with childless activist Lindsey Naegle:

Bart: Mom, I locked your keys in the car.
Marge: Then wait in the shadows!
Bart: Also, Maggie puked in your purse again.
Lindsey Naegle: Poor me… all my purse is full of is disposable income.

Of course, you should feel free to have lots of babies if you like them and they make you happy!

For midwives that is.

The good news: Missouri just passed a law that would decriminalize midwifery and allow for the licensing and regulation of Certified Professional Midwives. From today's press release:

Midwives advocates across Missouri and the nation today celebrated the passage of Senator John Loudon’s (R, Chesterfield) midwifery licensure bill, SB 1021, from the Missouri Senate Committee on Pensions, General Laws and Veteran’s Affairs. The long-anticipated legislation would decriminalize the practice of midwifery in Missouri and establish a board to license and regulate Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs).

Awesome.

The bad news: last week the American College of Obstretics and Gynecology came out against home birth once again.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) reiterates its long-standing opposition to home births. While childbirth is a normal physiologic process that most women experience without problems, monitoring of both the woman and the fetus during labor and delivery in a hospital or accredited birthing center is essential because complications can arise with little or no warning even among women with low-risk pregnancies.

They also came out against the type of midwives (certified professional midwives) the MO bill supports. I still think this is very much about childbirth as a business, and a fear that OBs will lose the current monopoly they have on the practice. The history of the move from midwives to obstetricians is connected to this same logic.

From a press release by the Big Push for Midwives:

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a trade union representing the financial and professional interests of obstetricians, has issued the latest in a series of statements condemning families who choose home birth and calling on policy makers to deny them access to Certified Professional Midwives. The Big Push for Midwives calls on ACOG to abandon these outdated policies and work with CPMs to reduce the cesarean rate and to take meaningful steps towards reducing racial and ethnic disparities in birth outcomes in all regions of the United States. CPMs play a critical role in both cesarean prevention and in the reduction of low-birth weight and pre-term births, the two most preventable causes of neonatal mortality.

Want to know more about home birth? Watch the Business of Being Born.

Full disclosure: I'm a doula and a big supporter of midwives as well as out-of-hospital birth options.

So apparently Australian researchers have found more evidence showing that women can be more forgetful during pregnancy. What I want to know is where the hell "baby brain" came from and are you as perturbed by the term as I am?

Joan with Javonn, one of the many babies she helped deliver

Joan Bryson became a midwife in 1991, and between her nursing experience and midwifery practice, she's assisted in more than 1,000 births.

At her private practice in Brooklyn, NY--Community Midwifery--she provides midwifery and health care for women in their teens to post menopausal years, including regular gyn exams, breast exams, primary care screening, preconception counseling, STD screening and prevention and family planning.

She is also an active member of New York City midwives. Here's Joan...

With hospitals charging as much as $12,000 to $15,000 to deliver babies, home births cost $3,000 to $4,000. And now, New Hampshire may require insurance companies to pay for babes delivered at home by midwives.

While the federal government reimburses women for home delivery under Medicaid, a woman with health insurance that includes maternity benefits has to pay out of her own pocket if she decides to deliver at home.

On a related note, it's not news that Rick Lake recently made a documentary which argues that the medical industry has turned childbirth not only into a business, but pregnancy into a medical condition that needs to be "treated." Check out the trailer after the jump.

Has anyone seen the movie? Thoughts? Experiences?

Who said teens need role models when they can be their own? This week, high school students are our hero.

Pregnant teens at East High School in Denver are requesting maternity leave due to the school giving unexcused absences if school days are missed immediately after giving birth. Unfortunately, it's not atypical for a high school to make being pregnant or teen mother difficult to stay in high school; aside from the general struggles of being a teen parent, another Colorado school rejected the suggestion from one student that a day care center be created within the school because the principal felt it would encourage teen pregnancy.

Let's hope East High won't have a similar sentiment. (You know, because a month off and some day care makes having a kid at 16 SO appealing.) Only a third of teen moms receive their high-school diplomas and 1.5 percent get college degrees before they turn 30, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

Back east in New York City, high school students have testified before the City Council to make sex education in Bronx high schools mandatory. While the NYC Department of Ed approved sex ed curricula to be disseminated to all high schools, it's at the principal's discretion as to whether the curriculum is used or not.

But that wasn't enough for concerned teenagers from P.S. 218 in the South Bronx, who have been advocating for the right to sex education in all Bronx high schools, a borough where the rate of teen pregnancies is nearly 14% as opposed to 10% throughout all of New York City.

If that's not some serious inspiration, I don't know what is. Here's to the teen activists of Denver, New York, and beyond.

The New York Times reports today on a Mexico City policy that mandates children born in prison stay with their mothers until they're 6 years-old--rather than being raised by relatives or foster parents.

Fifty-three children under the age of 6 live inside the prison with their mothers, who are serving sentences for crimes from drug dealing to kidnapping to homicide. Mothers dressed in prison blue, many with tattoos, carry babies on their hips around the exercise yard. Others lead toddlers and kindergartners by the hand, play with them in the dust or bounce them on their knees on prison benches.

...A debate continues among Mexican academics over whether spending one’s early years in a jail causes mental problems later in life, but for the moment the law says babies must stay with their mothers. So the prison has a school with three teachers.

This is a hard one. I cringe at the idea of children being taken away from their mothers, but I also doubt that a prison is the healthiest place for a child. Women who lack the financial resources to care for their kids in prison say that their children are often sick because of the poor condition of the cells and can't afford to buy the prescriptions given to them. I'm especially wary when there are women who want their children raised elsewhere.

Ms. Rendón, however, said she sometimes wished she could give her daughter to relatives to raise. No one gives her money, so she makes a living selling snacks to visitors. Her child is delicate and gets sick frequently with chest colds, she said. She said she considered the prison food unhealthy, so she buys food for the girl from a grocery store the prison allows to operate inside its walls...“I think the best thing for my daughter would be for her to be outside with her grandmother,� [she] said.

For more information on women in prison (in the U.S.) check out the Women's Prison Association. For organizations that work with women in Mexico, look to MADRE and Amnesty International.

Jamie Lynn Spears must be so pleased that her decision to have a baby meets with the approval of a republican presidential hopeful that she's (likely) never met.

"Apparently, she's going to have the child, and I think that is the right decision, a good decision, and I respect that and appreciate it," [Mike Huckabee] told CBS News.

"I hope it is not an encouragement to other 16-year-olds who think that is the best course of action. But at the same time I'm not going to condemn her..."

You know, unless she decided to have an abortion. Then I'd call her a sinning whore. I realize that Spears herself has made her pregnancy public (though given her celebrity it seems unlikely she had any other choice), but I don't see how this means that random men she doesn't know have the right to comment freely on her situation and its moral implications. Of course, antis like Huckabee think that it's their right to judge all women and their reproductive decisions so I suppose I shouldn't be shocked.

In a way, Spears has come to represent an anti-choicers dream--the universal American teen they can wax misogyist about. She's a pretty white teen who is being "responsible" by keeping her baby. But she had premarital sex, which makes her ripe for chastising. And the anti-choicers swoon! (I wonder how giddy they'd be if it was a young woman of color who was in the spotlight....just saying.)

The point is, Spears is a person--difficult to fathom, I know--and perhaps people should treat her with a little dignity, rather than as a political argument.

Nancy Northup is the President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization that uses constitutional and international law to secure women's reproductive freedom. The Center has won groundbreaking cases before federal and state courts, U.N. committees, and regional human rights bodies, such as the European Court of Human Rights. Working at the state, national, and international levels, the Center has built the legal capacity of women's rights advocates around the world, working in over 45 countries.

Nancy is an attorney with extensive experience in constitutional impact litigation, criminal law, and reproductive rights advocacy. Here's Nancy....

Contributed by Miriam Pérez

The NYTimes Style section had an article yesterday about "baby mama gifts," "baby baubles" and so-called "push presents." These refer to gifts given to women shortly after giving birth, as a reward for enduring pregnancy and childbirth. The author makes it seem like this is a trend sweeping the nation, in addition to it being a throw back "from the time cavemen brought trinkets to their wives." The article starts with out with a story of a woman presented diamond earrings by her husband in the delivery room after 17 hours of labor. It continues through the stories of women who received any number of gifts: rings, watches, bracelets, even a hot tub.

"It's more and more an expectation of moms these days that they deserve something for bearing the burden for nine months, getting sick, ruining their body," said Linda Murray, executive editor of BabyCenter.com.

The interesting thing about this trend is its connection to the concept of valuing women's work. If pregnancy and childbirth has value, should women be compensated for the time and effort that they are putting into childbearing? If so, what kind of compensation would be fair? Conversations about paying women to serve as surrogate mothers have stirred up these conversations, and some states want to make it illegal to compensate women for more than their medical expenses during surrogacy arrangements. Placing value on women's work (in the home, rearing children, etc) is a feminist dialogue that has been going on for decades, but this kind of materialistic compensation definitely doesn't sit well with me. How about we think of more creative and beneficial ways honor the work of motherhood.

"This isn't the time to give a $200 piece of jewelry," said Rhonda Grote, president of ThinkThoughtful.com, an online gift consulting company in Bradenton, Fla. "I do not think that because a woman has had a baby she requires a Tiffany & Company item. She requires help, love and emotional support."

Gee, I wonder why. Via the New York Times:

The birth rate among teenagers 15 to 19 in the United States rose 3 percent in 2006, according to a report issued Wednesday, the first such increase since 1991. The finding surprised scholars and fueled a debate about whether the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sexual education efforts are working.

The federal government spends $176 million annually on such programs. But a landmark study recently failed to demonstrate that they have any effect on delaying sexual activity among teenagers, and some studies suggest that they may actually increase pregnancy rates.

And as reader Sara points out, it's sort of hilarious to see the Heritage Foundation's comeback:

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, said that blaming abstinence-only programs was “stupid.� Mr. Rector said that most young women who became pregnant were highly educated about contraceptives but wanted to have babies.

You know, because being a teen mom is such the craze these days. Let's take that statement, replace "educated" with "terrified" and "but wanted to" with "and therefore," and we'll be a bit more on the right path.

Andrew Lavallee at WSJ online takes on the snarky and funny podcast, turned online video show that is shaking up the world of abstinence-only education and has become widely popular. If you have not already seen the Midwest Teen Sex Show, please put some time aside and check it out. It is smart and FUNNY. I am still laughing at this episode on birth control.

Now, you know what we at Feministing think of most sex ed that is out there and it ain't cute. Most of it doesn't not apply, does not work or ignores the real ways that young people are living. Mainly it doesn't respect the choices they make or treat young adults as people that can think. But Midwest Teen Sex Show makes fun of all of it, while smartly including some tips on safe sex and other such things.

That sort of wry, pointed presentation has helped the show lure thousands of viewers since its debut this past summer. Some may have been attracted by the provocative title, but this isn't pornography. Instead, it aims to teach teenagers about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators -- host Nikol Hasler, the aforementioned woman, and Guy Clark, an aspiring filmmaker.

The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim -- and boring -- to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face.

Yeah, but interestingly, sex educators are not into it as much. The fear is that it is too satirical and humorous, while holding back hard truth. I don't think that is necessarily true though. Most of popular culture is snarky, sarcastic and full of inside jokes. Young people know how to decipher these messages and will still make their own conclusions. I think that if this has the ability to reach wide audiences it will still be more effective than, "save it for marriage." Let's be real. When I was young, I didn't always listen to the facts, especially when someone was forcing them down my throat. I listened to people I trusted and definitely paid attention when they made me laugh. But more importantly, I learned from watching other people and making some mistakes myself.

Midwest Teen Sex Show is using real world experiences with snark to get a point across and I think that is a lot more effective than many of the other types of snoring sex ed that is out there.

Thoughts?

Thanks to Shilpa for the heads up.

For those of you in New York, there's an awesome event tomorrow at the New School featuring the preeminent thinkers on women, work, motherhood, and the so-called "opt-out revolution":

WORKING MOTHERS: WHO'S OPTING OUT?
Tuesday, October 16, 7 p.m., $8 admission
The New School, New York City
Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)

You've read the articles--and gotten angry at the debate. Are vast numbers of working mothers bolting the career track--or dreaming of doing so? Are elite women betraying feminism by staying home with their children? Or do the Opt-Out stories rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence--while shoving aside actual labor statistics and working families' needs?

JOIN US as some of the KEY THINKERS and CRITICS of the "opt-out" storyline DISCUSS & DEBATE the real state of working motherhood in America today.

Moderated by E.J. Graff, senior researcher, Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University, collaborator on Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It.

The panel includes Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It; Linda Hirshman, lawyer, professor emeritus Brandeis University and author of Get to Work; Heather Boushey, senior economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research, and co-author of Hardships in America and The Real Story of Working Families; and Ellen Bravo, author of Taking On the Big Boys: Why Feminism Is Good for Families and Business and the Nation.

Seriously, it's like the all-star team of work/life issues...

Click here for more info. And if, like me, you can't make it to New York, fear not! They're going to be posting a video of the discussion online.

Today, the New York Times takes on a trend for new (and rich) mothers: postpartum plastic surgery. (With a really horrendous title, I might add: "Is the 'Mom Job' Really Necessary?")

"Mommy makeovers" are being marketed by plastic surgeons across the country in an attempt to reach out to women post-childbirth, so that they can get their, you know, "normal" bodies back:

In 1970, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,� the seminal guide to women’s health, described the cosmetic changes that can happen during and after pregnancy simply as phenomena. But now narrowing beauty norms are recasting the transformations of motherhood as stigma.

These unforgiving standards are the offspring of pop culture and technology, a union that treats biological changes as if they were as optional as hair color. Gossip magazines excoriate celebrity moms who don’t immediately lose their “baby weight.� Even Cookie, a luxury parenting magazine, recently ran an article that described postpregnancy breasts as “the ultimate indignity� and promoted implant surgery; a photo of droopy water-filled balloons accompanied the article.

Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover� seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.

The Mommy Makeover website is nothing less than atrocious, with a slideshow introduction of "beautiful" mothers and their children with the text: "Embrace the feeling of being a woman." Which apparently means going under the knife.

So these surgeons are not only pitching this idea that women's bodies are "used up" after they give birth, but even physically deformed. In other words, while it's more than natural for a woman to bear a child, her post-baby body isn't natural and needs to be "fixed." (For a minimum of $10,000, I might add.)

There are way too many double standards and oxymorons to list here; all I know is that it never ceases to amaze me how obvious the war over our bodies is.

P.S. I second Feministe's request that the NY Times start to "focus more often on issues affecting more than the top 1% of the income distribution." Amen.

It's a shocker, I know. And if I was pregnant, this would just stress me out even more. Via the Guardian:

Most expectant mothers suffer stress during pregnancy, potentially putting at risk their baby's development in the womb, according to a survey. A poll of more than 1,100 pregnant women by the baby charity Tommy's revealed that almost 90% endured stress prompted by an array of causes. Worries range from money to food, work pressures and relationships.

Women are also struggling to deal with concerns over a range of 'taboo' topics they feel they cannot confess to publicly, according to the survey, conducted to mark the start of Tommy's pregnancy health month. The taboo topics include fears of developing post-natal depression, and that they may not want or love their baby.

Two-thirds lamented their partner's failure to appreciate how tired they were, and being told it was 'just their hormones' whenever they became upset.

Maternal health specialists say women should try to reduce stress or risk complications such as limited growth of the unborn baby, premature delivery or, in cases of prolonged high stress, miscarriage.

To say there's a threat to the development of a pregnancy because the woman stresses about things that everyone stresses about seems a bit silly to me. People stress out. And baby receptacles aren't too easy to come by these days. We have, you know, lives and stuff.

However, it was good to address the fears (or "taboos") that women may have but feel guilty about saying because of expectations to be the oh-so-thrilled mother-to-be, and the "hormonal drama queen" stigma that's attached to pregnant women. Has anyone had similar experiences?

Via Slashdot, I read an article today in Computer World summarizing the experience of four women and how the thrived in IT. It was definitely interesting, but I have some issues with the framing of the issues.

The first profile about Monique McKeon who eventually worked for the Chubb Corp ( a woman friendly place apparently where she is happy) experienced in her early career in IT a struggle between her home life and having a flourishing career.

At the consultancy, her travel schedule kept her out of town more than she was comfortable with. Then, when her first child was born, the bottom fell out. “I heard through the grapevine that one of the partners said I wasn’t as committed as before I had children,� she says. “That was the day I started looking for a job.

Please don't tell me the work place doesn't discriminate against working mothers. If a male employee showed affection or interest towards one of their children, would they be called out for a lack of commitment to the job?

At the end of every profile there is a little bit of advice:

You can balance an IT career with your home life, but it means making choices that are true to your priorities and understanding the trade-offs. “Having it all� is a fantasy.

That's right ladies, get used to it. You will not have the same choices, so be happy with the ones you have. I am sure the author of this piece did not intend for this article to denigrate the success of these women in anyway, but actually wanted to highlight some of the experiences of women in IT. However, it is clear that thriving doesn't mean actually beating boys at their own game. It means learning how to balance home and career, which is not something that men have to do.

It appears, at least to me, thriving means making strategic choices that may not always be the most career savvy, but allows you relative peace and minimized discrimination. I guess in order to thrive you have to forget that you want to get to the top and "refocus" your energy to where a woman's energy ought to be, on her family! I mean imagine you were a woman that didn't care about having kids and just wanted to make it to the top? What are you then?

There is a lot more to the article I am not getting into here, but really grim aspect for me is the significant decrease in the number of women that are going to college for computer science. I guess in light of Cara's excellent analysis of sexism in tech culture, why am I NOT surprised?

Coping strategies to make it in any workplace are great, but let's not cover up the deeper issues here.

This week’s New York Times magazine included a piece from the idea lab about research that is being done ways to prevent obesity in newborns. The piece explains that the study of obesity (a disease that affects almost a third of the US population) focuses on lifestyle and genetic causes, but researchers are beginning to look into a third area as well, what they call “developmental programming.� This idea proposes that “like many aspects of our physiology, [obesity] can be traced to the months just before and after birth, when the brain and other organs are still fine-tuning themselves.�

Statements like these frighten me, for a variety of reasons. Mainly, I get scared because the implications seem to further burden the pregnant woman—not only is she already freaked out by all the things that could go “wrong� during her pregnancy (there are a million and one books telling her exactly what to eat, how to live, what to avoid), but now we can scare her with another proposition, that if her child later develops obesity, it’s her fault. The article references a few conditions in utero that might have negative effects: the “thermal environment� or stress hormones in the mother. Of course appetite and metabolism are two things they also think are developed during this phase of development.

The main scientists researching these possibilities are trying to develop an infant formula that would “program babies’ metabolisms to provide permanent resistance to excess pounds.� The author takes this one step further—that this formula could turn these children into one of those people (you know, that we all hate) who can eat whatever they want and not gain an ounce. Forget breast milk ladies—now we’ve got trimspa for the three month olds.

Beyond the scary implications of this kind of manipulation at such an early age—is this really what we want for our children? This kind of intervention assumes that excess weight is the only marker for an unhealthy body, which we know is not true. What about skinny fat? Even someone with what is considered a “normal� weight can have other health problems related to diet and exercise--high blood pressure, blocked arteries and high cholesterol. If weight gain is no longer a motivator for healthy eating, will we give in altogether? Also, we need fat, in certain amounts, it lines our organs and plays an important role in our body function.

The real scary sentiment is at the end of this piece where the author implies that the unhealthy eating habits “oceans of soda, mountains of baked goods and sparkling glaciers of ice cream� are an inevitable part of our society—so maybe it’s easier to change our babies than to change our habits.

Via reader Wyndi comes this truly gross NPR piece about how the wealthy are apparently breeding like crazy, in a trend dubbed (seriously) "competitive birthing." One mother actually says, "Baby number 4 has become the new must-have accessory."

Given the incredibly high cost of raising children these days -- with housing, child care, camps, clothing, and college tuition -- big families are apparently now a status symbol. A lot of the NPR story is anecdotal, but the reporter does talk to a demographics analyst, who says that census data shows the number of high-income families having three or four kids has shot up 30 percent in the last 10 years. "It's an unprecedented jump, and completely counter to 100 years of history," he says.

I feel like the kids-as-status-symbol story bubbles up occasionally. But what's new here, if you take the NPR reporter's word for it, is that having lotsa babies has become a way for super-educated moms who have left the workforce to "justify" their choice to opt out.

In other words, the more kids, the more comfortable these women seem with their stay-at-home status. One mom explains, "I know in some sense I feel more validated to say I'm a mother of four. Of course I'm not working now! What are you thinking? How could i possibly do anything else? This is a full-time job." Another says that having more kids "gets you a lot more recognition for a notoriously thankless job."

I have no idea how widespread this "trend" really is. But it doesn't seem completely far-fetched to me that women who used to be career-driven would want to direct their competitive energies somewhere -- and for some women, that's become a quest to be the best mom. ("Best" in this case, of course, equals "most kids.") Says one woman, "All that drive gets channeled into the children when they quit their job."

It's also easy to see that a formerly successful businesswoman would feel pressured to ensure that anyone could tell, just by looking at the size of her brood, that there's no way she could have continued to work outside the home. It's as if more babies are a defense mechanism -- not only against the raised eyebrows and judgments of women who stayed in the workforce, but also against any doubts these wealthy breeders may themselves harbor about their decision to opt out.

In an interesting essay over at The Nation, Annabelle Gurwitch fears she's become a Tipper Gore type because she didn't want her kids exposed to the sexist and disturbing movie posters for Captivity. Gurwitch describes her strong beliefs about free speech, and then this:

But that was all before one fateful morning last March. It was on that day that I was driving a carpool of third graders to school when my son pointed at a large looming advertisement and asked, "What's that, mom?" I craned my neck--it was pretty high up, but still visible from the car--and glimpsed some extremely violent and disturbing images. What was being depicted exactly was hard to make out.... A woman crying, maybe; someone encased in a mask with tubes inserted in the nasal passages; and finally what looked like a female body lying inert, her body draped over a bed. The poster read: "Abduction, confinement, torture, termination." Naturally, as a left-wing liberal, I assumed it was detailing abuses at Abu Ghraib and the anguish this has inflicted on the spouses of the prisoners. But no, it was advertising a movie.

To the children, however, I replied, "That person has just found out she's very ill. She goes to the hospital and is placed in a full-body cast, and when she gets home she sees her medical bills, which are so exorbitantly high that she passes out." Were they convinced, confused, politically indoctrinated? I'm not certain, but the rest of the ride to school was very, very quiet.

So apparently the Captivity poster Vanessa wrote about was the second iteration. The first was even more disturbing. And Gurwitch was not the only feminist mom who was troubled by her kids seeing these ads. Wrote Jill Soloway in the HuffPo:

A couple of weeks ago I was driving my son to school when I took a left onto LaBrea, and, as usual, sat in traffic for a couple of minutes. As we waited for the construction bottleneck to ease up, we sang along with the new Shins CD. And then, at the same moment, we fell silent.

We were both noticing the same thing.

It was a billboard for a movie. There was actress Elisha Cuthbert, super-heavily made up-dare I say whorishly-- being used as the centerpiece of the most repulsive, horrifying, woman-hating, human- hating thing I have ever seen in public. [...]

The next morning I decided to take a different route. Except this time I saw two more of the same billboards. It felt like they were EVERYWHERE, peppered all over my city. That afternoon, after the ride home with two more ten year olds in my car-one, a little girl, whose face I watched in my rearview mirror as she tried to make sense of the billboard. Now I was ready to take action.

Even as the letter-writing campaign to Lions Gate Films succeeded in removing the "Abduction, confinement, torture, termination" ads, Gurwitch writes that the questions kept coming from the kids, even about the new, less graphic ads.

This week, the new posters for Captivity went up in my neighborhood. Right on the bus stop at eye level for the kids to see in our carpool today. The new image is simple. A gorgeous woman's face imprisoned behind a chain-link fence. This time, one can clearly see she's crying and mascara is running down her face.

My son asked me what the girl had done wrong and why she was being punished. I was going to say, "She's crying because she heard about the recent Supreme Court decision limiting a woman's right to choose," but I felt defeated, so I just said, "I don't know."

Even though her first explanation made me laugh, her feelings of ambiguity over opposing these ads struck a much more serious chord with me. I have no children or plans to have them, but I can see the desire to keep these images away from kids. They're different than other types of sexist ads I dislike (say, boob-filled beer commercials, or gender-role-heavy ads for household cleaning products). Sexualized violence against women is a whole new level, and I can see how having to explain it to your kids would bring out the Tipper Gore in almost every free-speech-loving feminist.

So I'm curious, dear readers, how do you talk to your kids (and others') about sexist images in the media, particularly disturbing or violent ones like the Captivity ads?

This is still news? That some women can lead fulfilling lives without breeding?

...at least in the minds of most people who are actually getting married. Amanda has a great post up about how fewer and fewer couples see marriage and babies as inextricable.

Of course, this has got to be deeply upsetting to fundamentalist Catholics. I spent the past weekend at a very traditional Catholic wedding in my hometown Iowa. Now, I've definitely been to Catholic weddings before, but not since I was a kid. And what really stood out to me about hearing the Catholic vows this time around is how procreation-focused they are. The Church makes the couple swear that they want to have lotsa babies. It's a promise right up there with "''til death do us part." The priest asks,

Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?

This is, it turns out, part of the underpinning of the Catholic Church's opposition to contraception. Want to get married but don't want to become a babymaking machine? Well, tough, you're in violation of your wedding vows.

I find the whole thing pretty appalling. And speaking of, check out the (two-piece! I shit you not) bridesmaid's dress I was sporting this weekend... (Below the fold.)

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reports that they are seeing more complaints, and more suits filed, on behalf of pregnant women who have been discriminated against.

“The increase in pregnancy discrimination charge filings and lawsuits is cause for concern,� says David Grinberg, a spokesman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Such charges filed with the EEOC, state and local agencies jumped nearly 19 percent to a record 4,901 last year, from 3,977 in 1997. And, he adds, “pregnancy discrimination lawsuits by EEOC have increased about threefold from six or fewer per year in the early to late 1990s, to 16 or more per year since 2001.�

Not only are women being discriminated against by not being hired or being fired because of pregnancy, but apparently one of the biggest issues is how much time an employee can take after the baby is born.

Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, workers who are employed by firms with 50 employees or more and have worked for a company for at least 12 months have to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to employees for medical reasons including pregnancy and the birth of a child.

Often disputes arise when employers either don’t honor that or employees take more than 12 weeks, only to find their job has been given away.

Lovely. For information about pregnant womens' rights, check out the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which is an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. MSNBC also has a handy little sidebar explaining your rights here.