According to David Brown of the Washington Post, "about 12.9 million babies are born too early each year, representing 9.6 percent of births. Of 4 million deaths that occur soon after birth, 28 percent are attributable to prematurity. Some of the data provided by WHO is only for women bearing one baby. Women carrying multiple fetuses have a much greater risk of delivering early."

Africa has the greatest percentage of premature births (11.9%), but as the Los Angeles Times notes, the United States isn't far behind, with 10.6%. Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press notes that "different factors fuel prematurity in rich countries and poor ones," and that these factors need to be focused on in order to reduce premature births and infant deaths.

Neergaard describes a "kangaroo care" program in Malawi wherein mothers are urged to tie their premature babies to their stomachs, as opposed to carrying them on their backs, as the "skin-to-skin contact keeps the infants' body temperature more stable, a key to survival, and they can nurse at will, promoting weight gain."

In the United States, however, Brown writes, the "increase in the number of older women having babies and reproductive techniques that make multiple gestations more likely are probably contributing to the trend. Black women also have a 50 percent higher rate of preterm delivery than white women," though Neergaard notes that "scientists don't even know all the triggers for preterm birth or how to stop early labor once it starts." In any case, the shocking numbers gathered by the WHO call for a better understanding of premature births, the factors that lead to them, and what can be done to ensure a safer, healthier pregnancy and delivery for both mothers and babies in the future.

13 Million Premature Births Worldwide, 1 Million Deaths [LATimes]
Report: 13 Million Babies Worldwide Born Premature [AP]
Study Finds 1 In 10 Babies Born Prematurely [WashingtonPost]

For those who haven't yet read it, Roiphe's piece, subtitled, "Why won't feminists admit the pleasure of infants?" is basically about the "narcotic" effect of new motherhood on Roiphe's brain. It's mostly a highly personal account of her desire to be with her baby at all times — except for this paragraph:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a "vocation." The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Double X editor Hanna Rosin, who edited Roiphe's piece, claims not to know what all the fuss is about. She says, "I am baffled by the enraged responses from otherwise very intelligent feminists," and that Roiphe's language in the above paragraph is "a fairly mild and gentle way to make what is an obvious and undeniable point." It is pretty mild, on the face of it — although the phrase "one of the minor dishonesties" hints not only at more minor dishonesties but possibly some major dishonesties as well. But is Roiphe's point — that feminists have painted motherhood as both drudgery and "a job like any other" — actually "obvious and undeniable?"

In a guest post on the site, writer Amy Bloom responds,

What baffles me is her claim that somehow feminists have failed to acknowledge, in writing, that many lucky mothers love their babies. (We do understand that that is a gift, right? That many mothers find themselves unable to experience that lovely, dopey, mind-altering attachment?) Really? No word on this from Grace Paley,Tillie Olson, Adrienne Rich, Ursula LeGuin, Bronwen Wallace?

I'd add Sharon Olds, whose poetry about her children often details exactly the kind of narcotic feeling Roiphe describes. And Jayne Anne Phillips, who says her research for the novel Motherkind consisted of "laundry, cooking, nursing, mothering, grocery shopping, driving, driving, driving, reading, listening, talking, birthdays and all holidays." These women may not be who Roiphe thinks of when she thinks "feminist," but they reveal that motherhood has frequently served as literary inspiration.

Rosin's surprise is a little disingenuous — Double X chose the subhead "Why won't feminists admit the pleasure of infants," so they must've known they were stirring the pot. In fact, the feminism-motherhood-drudgery paragraph they clearly chose to foreground with this subhead isn't even the one that bothered childless, feminist me. That would be this one:

I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby's hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.

I'm sure this is merely a rhetorical use of the second person here, and elsewhere Roiphe's essay is personal and non-prescriptive. But what bugged me about Roiphe's assertion that "you" would choose a baby over The House of Mirth is its combination of exceptionalism and universalism. It implies both that motherhood is totally unique — no intellectual endeavor can compare to it — and yet somehow the same for everyone. Roiphe's not the only writer to take this tack — Caitlin Flanagan makes a similar point when she says you're "just guessing about love" until you've had a kid. And these kinds of blanket assertions about motherhood may be why we keep getting into "mommy wars" (having said this twice now, I'm going to try never to say it again) in the first place.

As Bloom points out, it's "a gift" to feel an all-encompassing, addictive love for your baby — not every mother feels it. And unlike Roiphe, a lot of women aren't privileged enough to have the time or economic resources to indulge it — plenty have to leave their babies to go to work. Some choose to even if they don't have to — and still love their children. Some want to do nothing but admire the new life they've created. Others are inspired to — yes — write about that life. But when they write, they don't speak for everyone.

Part of my problem with Roiphe's piece was that it scared me. It described a kind of surrender of the self and the intellect that I found terrifying, even though Roiphe described it as transcendent. If I ever have a child, will I have to surrender like that? Maybe. And maybe I'd like it. But I'm willing to bet that motherhood, like personhood, takes many different forms — and that if everyone acknowledged this, we'd fight about it a lot less.

Katie Roiphe: My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic [Double X]
Feminists Do Write About Newborn Addiction [Double X]
What Did Katie Roiphe Say That's So Offensive? [Daily Dish]
This Round To Katie Roiphe [Daily Dish]
Straw Feminist Weekly: The Baby-Hater [Shapely Prose]
In Defense Of Katie Roiphe [Double X]

A Time article on the Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act (oddly, written by someone named Robert McNamara, presumably not the deceased former Secretary of Defense) says that although the bill doesn't specifically set aside money for postpartum depression screening, critics think screening would "naturally increase" if it passed. They say this could lead to false positives (as few as a third of women whose initial postpartum depression screen is positive actually have the disease) and unnecessary medication. Supporters of screening counter that postpartum depression is far from rare — up to one in seven moms get it — and that we routinely screen babies for conditions that are much less common. And screening might prevent tragedies like that of Melanie Blocker-Stokes, the act's namesake, who jumped off a building when her child was 3 1/2 months old.

It's hard to argue with increased funding for research into a condition that kills some new mothers and plunges many more into misery — not to mention putting babies at risk. At the same time, there's something a little "Yellow Wallpaper"-y about assuming that all women are in danger of flying off the handle and harming themselves or their kids. Psychologist Paula Caplan notes that adjusting to motherhood is tough, and we shouldn't assume that everyone who has some difficulty with it is mentally ill. Rather, we "should be addressing the social factors causing women to be upset after they give birth, not locating the problem within the women." Women's studies professor Ingrid Johnston-Robledo offers a similar opinion: "We need to find a way to come down in the middle: acknowledge women's depression but not assume that all women who struggle with the transition to motherhood are depressed." But that would mean developing a measured, considered response to a potentially divisive issue. Can we do that in this country?

The Melancholy Of Motherhood [Time]

In order to do so, she must, with the help of People, imply that her life totally sucks. People helpfully mentions that she didn't appear at all in her high school class's graduation slideshow, and that she spent graduation night "not with a gang of friends but at home, giving her 5-month-old son a bottle while her extended family plays 'Eskimo bingo.'" Bristol adds that she has had to write a school paper while listening to her son cry, and that "girls need to imagine and picture their life with a screaming newborn baby and then think before they have sex." But perhaps the strangest thing about the article is her statement that,

If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody.

Not only does the ignore the many ways to prevent the specific consequence Bristol's talking about, it also sounds incredibly condescending. Does Bristol really think that girls have no idea that sex can lead to pregnancy? And what about boys? Bristol's statement lets Levi off the hook pretty easily.

But she probably doesn't mean to talk down to girls. Bristol is in an incredibly awkward position — she was forced to be a public figure when she isn't particularly suited for it, the most private aspects of her life became national news, and now she's supposed to simultaneously adore her baby son and hold him up as the career-destroying consequence of bad behavior. Bristol probably never would have become an abstinence advocate if not for her famous mom, and her life would probably be better for it. She certainly wouldn't be called upon to make public statements about teen sexual behavior, something she's clearly not very good at.

Bristol Palin Exposes Her Sometimes Isolated Life [People]

Jessica Handler tells Newsweek that she's decided not to have kids because she has a 67% chance of passing on a rare blood disorder — and because children remind her of the sister she lost to that disease. It's a heart-wrenching article not just because of Handler's loss — another sister died in childhood of leukemia — but because she feels stigmatized by a decision that was obviously very difficult to make. She writes, "Our culture presumes that a grown woman's true responsibility is motherhood. We're obsessed with babies, even as we expect career success, hot sex and designer style. [...] While few can pull off parenthood with the glamour of Hollywood stars, the underlying message is hard to ignore: if you're not having a baby and enjoying it, something's wrong with you." It's sad that motherhood has become so fetishized that having kids is about proving your completeness as a person — not about raising complete, happy people.

Writing in a similar vein, Anna Quindlen takes aim at the notion that parenting is "easy." She reports the results of several studies showing that parents who receive training in such skills as discipline and positive reinforcement have healthier, better-adjusted kids. Quindlen argues that good child-rearing is a learned skill, not an instinct, and that our ignorance of this as a culture has warped our ideas of parenthood. She writes,

The prevailing ethos about being a parent is that it's mostly intuitive and uniformly joyful, even though the news, and our own lives, are full of those who found it so conspicuously otherwise that they made an utter mess of actual human beings. This mythology has two effects. One is that parents who don't feel happy or competent are made to feel like freaks-and to just keep quiet about the fact. The other is that this makes everyone believe not only that anyone can be a parent, but also that everyone ought to do it, even those who seem by character or inclination to be ill equipped.

Of course, even the "ill equipped" can learn — but the idea that having kids is a necessary part of a fulfilled life may be persuading people to breed before they're ready. And some people — because of personal tragedy or genetics, like Handler, or because of their desire for independence or the fact that they just don't want kids all that much — may never be ready at all.

But we know what you're all thinking — how does this affect men? Nirpal Dhaliwal of the Times of London has the answer. Men want kids too, he says, but they're often ashamed to say so. So far, so good — the desire to be a dad is nothing to be ashamed of (though Dhaliwal's term "throbbing balls" might not be the best way to describe it), and it's certainly worthwhile to bust the stereotype that women all want babies while men just want to drink beer, slap high-fives, and look at women's butts. It's when Dhaliwal describes how he discovered his desire to procreate that things get a little annoying:

I realised how bereft I am of children while spending the second half of last year in India - a country that is teeming with them. I'd watch young Indian families sitting on railway platforms, the fathers beaming as they cradled their perfectly formed, serenely quiet babies. Seeing people who earn a pittance, whose daily lives are a grinding struggle, take such genuine, uncomplicated delight in their children made me appreciate what a real and uniquely powerful experience parenthood is. It made me want to be a father.

Obviously he didn't run into this guy. But seriously, if your idea of offspring is a bunch of "perfectly formed, serenely quiet babies," you may be in for a shock. Babies get sick — sometimes, as in Handler's family — they get very, very sick. And they are rarely "serenely quiet." Actually, this brings us to a quibble with Quindlen's piece. Most of us know motherhood isn't easy — we have all of pop culture's frazzled moms to tell us that, at the very least, it involves a lot of laundry and yelling. But fatherhood, to the non-father, can sometimes seem kind of simple.

Take a look at the ads for the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse — from these, it looks like "taking time to be a dad" means playing with your kid. And while getting out the Super Soaker is important, a lot of being a parent isn't strictly fun. But because many fathers are still absent from their kids' lives, the bar for dads is still set lower than for moms. Motherhood is frequently described as a full-time job, but you can "take time [presumably out of your busy life] to be a dad." We don't want to rag on dads too much, or to challenge Dhaliwal's basic point that men can have parenting urges too, but let's be honest about what parenting entails. Along with the fun comes a lot of worry, conflict, and heartache, and in a just world (with some exceptions) these would fall equally on the shoulders of moms and dads.

I Won't Roll the Biological Dice [Newsweek]
A Teachable Moment [Newsweek]
The men who are desperate for kids [TimesOnline]

The New York Times reports that a recent study of 66,000 births by researchers at Tel Aviv University found that male babies had a greater chance of problems like premature birth and the need to be delivered by Cesarean. The results are similar to a 2002 study that examined 90,000 births in 1988 and 1999 and found that women pregnant with boys were 1.5 times more likely than women pregnant with girls to experience arrest of descent, in which the fetus stops descending during the pushing stage of labor.

Scientists believe the larger head size of males or their higher levels of androgens may play a role, but they add that the risks are so small that we shouldn't start worrying that male births are "high risk." Nor should the new findings give credence to the old myth about determining a baby's gender.

But, we've seen new research used to back up ridiculous urban legends in the past. Last year, two studies found that women with a high sodium intake and high potassium intake were more likely to conceive boys, and women who skip breakfast and have a lower calorie intake in general were more likely to conceive girls. Some interpreted this as proof that the old advice to eat bananas for breakfast if you want boys is true.

Though newspapers ran with headlines saying women who wanted boys should load up on Cheerios and French fries, "The F-Word" blog pointed out that there were several problems with the research. Only 56% of the women with high-calorie diets had boys. Often research on how a woman's habits increase her chances of having a boy or girl seems less significant when you consider that there is a 50/50 chance the baby will have the desired gender anyway. Pregnancy-info.net has a rundown of the many old wives tales believed to reveal whether a woman is carrying a boy or girl, from mixing urine with Drano to checking which breast is bigger. Most have been debunked by researchers and even in those with some medical credibility, the differences are so slight that they won't really help determine the child's sex. Aside from an ultrasound or genetic testing, they only way to be 100% sure of the baby's gender is to wait until it's born or adopt.

[Image via stock.xchng.]

The Claim: Birth Complications Are More Likely With Boy [The New York Times]
Boy Or Girl? Fact Or Fiction? [Pregnancy-Info.net]

Earlier: Want A Baby Boy? Eat A Burger For Breakfast

Though women have to deal with the repercussions of being a preemie on their reproductive health, men born prematurely have it a worse lot overall. Baby boys from developed nations are 60% more likely to be premature, reports Science Daily, and are also more likely to suffer complications from being born premature. Boys are also "at a higher risk of birth injury and mortality due to their larger body and head," according to Science Daily.

In the United States, premature births have risen steadily in the past two decades, due in part to the growing popularity of fertility treatments and the increase in older mothers. The rate of preemies in the U.S. in 2006 was 12.7%, says MSNBC, while the rate of preemies in Norway was a mere 7%. More premature babies are surviving than ever before because of medical breakthroughs, but study leader Dr. Swamy wonders, "Are we improving their survival but at the expense of significant problems down the road?"

Study: Premature Birth Has Lingering Effects [USA Today]
Preemies' Death Risks Continue Into Childhood [MSNBC]
Baby Boys Are More Likely To Die Than Baby Girls [Science Daily]

Earlier: The Miracle Of Life

(In the transcript below, "Rosie" is the 19-year-old new mom, "Mary" is the grandmother, "Sue" is a family friend and amateur cook, and "Fearnley-Whittingstall" is the television host. Elllipses denote where we've cut out material.)

VOICE-OVER: Mary's best friend, Sue, is a fellow social worker and a keen cook. Mary has asked her to take charge of all the cooking for Indie Mo's party. Sue's devotion to her friends will be expressed in the twenty-odd dishes she is planning for the party, but she is also rising to the challenge of a completely new ingredient.

ROSIE: The placenta is going to be cooked and made into a placenta pate-I'm not quite sure what the recipe is for that.

SUE: The real scary bit is the placenta, because I've never even actually seen one. I've seen photographs, but I've never actually seen one live, I've never had my hands on one. I don't know what they look like, what they feel like, what the smell is-I've got no conception of it at all, so that is going to be the real nail-biter.

VOICE-OVER: Immediately after Indie Mo's birth two months ago, Mary brought the placenta back home to store in the freezer.

MARY: [Laying the umbilical cord in a large serving dish] There's Indie Mo's cord ... fresh. A very beautiful thing. [Opens a plastic bowl with the placenta and placental blood] Have a look in here. This is Rosie's placenta. Waste not, want not. Have a smell. Isn't it lovely? Lovely and fresh?

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: It smells completely clean.

MARY: What do you think, Rosie?

ROSIE: Gory.

MARY: Yes, gory. It would have been good if we'd eaten it straightaway. That was our plan. Had things gone the way we wanted, Rosie was going to eat it straight after-we were going to have a little fry-up. Dad was looking forward to it.

...

VOICE-OVER: The challenge in working with a new ingredient is guessing how it will behave when cooked. After the excess blood has been rinsed from the placenta, Sue suggests slicing it up to check out the texture.

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: [Watching as Sue cuts the placenta into strips] Look at that in the middle. It's quite meaty, isn't it?

SUE: Almost purple. Really rich looking.

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: The outside is spongy, but the inside-

SUE: The inside is quite solid.

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: Quite dense.

VOICE-OVER: The onions and garlic come out of the pan, and the placenta is fried quickly in butter and oil.

SUE: It seems to be staying fairly tender. It's not contracting a lot.

VOICE-OVER: Sue's next inspiration is a baptism by fire: using a dash of cognac.

[Sue pours the cognac over the frying placenta, which then bursts into flames]

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: Whoa! That is elemental, isn't it?

SUE: It's earth and air and wind and fire.

...

SUE: [Cutting the cooked placenta into bite-sized pieces] Oh, it's so tender. The knife's just gliding through it.

MARY: [Entering kitchen] Look at that! Beautiful. Let's taste it. [Takes a bite] Go for it, Rosie.

ROSIE: [Chews] It's not bad.

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: Mary, what do you think?

MARY: Lovely ... You can taste the garlic. [Chewing] Texture's nice. Not too strong. Not gamy.

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: Quite mild, is it?

MARY: Mild, lovely smell.

ROSIE: Not as chewy as liver. It's nice.

...

VOICE-OVER: Next Sue blends half the placenta with a little butter, the onions and garlic, and chopped parsley and sage.

FEARNLEY-WHITTINGSTALL: [Watching Sue use a spatula to remove the placenta from the blender] That could sit up on some toast really nicely.

SUE: Yes. Yes, it could.

...

MARY: [Carrying the mousse, which has been shaped with a Bundt mold, to the buffet table] It's got a bit of the old cervix look about it, doesn't it?

SUE: Absolutely, dear. I thought it was very appropriate.

Placenta Pizza? Some New Moms Try Old Rituals [MSNBC]
Save Some Womb For Dessert [Harper's]

[Santa Monica, June 27. Image via Flynet]

Earlier: Bridget Moynahan Is Expecting A Boy