Brown writes that the recession is just the excuse for women who, having been used to the 9-to-5, now find themselves somewhat unfulfilled by the 24/7 of diapers, feedings, potty trainings and nap times:

For some women, the recession is a time to clear up ongoing dilemmas and regain independence. For others, it's a time of survival.

See, all those ambivalent feelings that you might have had about personal fulfillment, childcare guilt and staying home, there's no reason to work them out in long conversations with your life partner and/or therapist. Just blame the recession and go do what you wanted to do the whole time!

"These women were struggling with their identities because they weren't working," [Amy Keroes editor of Mommytrack'd] says. But now, she adds, "I think 'having to' has made it easier for lots of women who were already struggling with whether to return."

Just, um, don't think that much is going to change, other than your bank account:

Adding more stress: As women work more to make up for loss of income or employment by a partner, there are more challenges at home. The biggest is how to divide domestic responsibilities when suddenly it's the woman who's working and the man who's at home.

In part, that's because many men see their job as finding another job, says Keroes. With working women still doing 70% of the housework, there's a lot of room for conflict.

Of course, women like Nancy Pelosi (and my own mother) have been moving in and out of the workforce as it suited them for years, and financial pressures were one of many reasons they chose to do so. But the idea that women need an "excuse" like the recession to take their places in the workforce makes me wonder who exactly they are justifying it to — and the Forbes piece is far from clear.

Jo Craven takes a slightly different tact on the same back-and-forth: women who left the workforce to stay home with children are now envying the women who stayed in it.

Just a short year ago, "working-mother envy" would have sounded highly unlikely . Now we're adjusting to a world that shifts on its axis every other day, where decisions we once deemed everyday choices are transformed into luxuries for the super-rich.

Yes, staying at home with your children is now a luxury for the super-rich, and not something that women and men often had to sacrifice to achieve (see: my parents) because they felt it was the right thing to do.

While it was once the working mother who struggled with the guilt as she swapped purées for presentations and made the daily dash to nursery with a weeping Archie and/or Ruby under her arm, now it's the stay-at-home mother who has to justify her choice, struggling with the new guilt of not being equipped to protect her offspring financially from an uncertain future, let alone pay for the flute lessons.

Because money eliminates uncertainty, and flute lessons are the be-all, end-all of a child's life. I mean, just because Laura Bennett thinks they are doesn't make it true.

It doesn't matter how often the Archbishop of Canterbury tells us that love for our children is free, the roof over their heads, the food on the table and the shoes on their feet still have a demanding price tag attached, even if you are already shopping at Asda.

Show me a parent who hasn't had at least a blip of anxiety about how they are going to be able to provide for their children in the coming year. As one stay-at-home mother told me: "I've never been extravagant, but now I'm frugal in the extreme. No more coffee-shop visits or Tumble Tots classes for me."

Actually, giving up coffee-shop visits and pay-for-playtime classes doesn't sound "frugal in the extreme," it sounds a lot like how I and plenty of my contemporaries grew up. And while there wasn't a Wal-Mart around when I was growing up, I'm not ashamed to say that I wore plenty of $10 Keds decorated with puffy paint and shoes my mom and I got on sale at K-Mart or Sears — and it didn't make a difference to me at 13, let alone at 5. Worrying that they won't get their pedagogically-approved classes in play is not the same as struggling to pay the rent or the mortgage, or hoping that Kraft Mac & Cheese is on sale on Sunday so that you can afford to buy it.

Some women work because they want to and others because they need to, while some have the financial security to stay home with their kids and others struggle to afford it but do it anyway — and while the recession may make some of those decisions starker for the women who never had to think about it before (particularly the ones who made those decisions from atop the highest tax bracket), it certainly is far from a new set of choices.

Why Women Who Opted Out Are Opting Back In [Forbes]
The Pressures Of Full-Time Motherhood [The Times of London]

Earlier: Project Runway's Laura Bennett Doesn't Appreciate The Judge-iness

At a level of great abstraction, there are probably some people who worry that recognizing a nonviable fetus as a person would in some way be a seed that could sprout into a threat to abortion," said Roger Evans, a lawyer for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "But I don't think we see it that way. We recognize the tragedy and loss of stillbirth, and as long as these laws are medically accurate, and the certificates are optional and commemorative, they’re a way to recognize that loss."

The choice phrases in there are "medically accurate" and "optional and commemorative," by the way, because Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups don't want women who choose to terminate their pregnancies after the 20th week (when a miscarriage becomes a stillbirth) to be handed birth certificates. The New York bill contains the language "naturally occurring intrauterine death," for instance, while the California bill (which passed last year) initially did not until the state Planned Parenthood organization threatened to oppose it.

The nationwide effort to get states to provide a document that says "Certificate of Birth" (even if it thereafter contains a caveat that said birth was a stillbirth) is being spearheaded by the M.I.S.S. Foundation, which calls the legislation the MISSing Angels Bill. The co-opting of Christian religious imagery might be one reason that some veterans of the reproductive rights movement are ever-so-slightly suspicious of the motivations of the organization, a suspicion that its founder, Joanne Cacciatore, says is unfounded. She told the New York Times last year that she started the organization to support other women who had suffered through stillbirths and that there are no ulterior motives.

Anyway, the point of writing this whole thing was mostly to point out that the New York Post article was completely slanted and un-researched and intended to make you feel super-fuzzy about the legislation without delving into why it didn't pass last year or still might not, not that they cared, which is part of the reason that some reproductive rights activists are uncomfortable with the bill in the first place.

Push Is On For Stillbirth Certificates [NY Post]
A Move for Birth Certificates for Stillborn Babies [NY Times]
Wrenching Politics Surround Stillborns [San Francisco Chronicle]

Related: The M.I.S.S. Foundation
Picture by Gregory L. Tracy for The Pilot

Earlier: One Thing Is Certain: Right Now, Yale University & Aliza Shvarts '08 Are 100% Annoying