Amber (featured in the first clip) dropped out of high school in the 11th grade when she became pregnant with her daughter Leah. She lives with Leah's father, and is dealing with what seems to be a particularly nasty case of post-partum depression. Now that her daughter is no longer an infant, Amber wants to complete her high school diploma, but learns that her lack of funds, her difficulty with math, and her busy schedule means that she will have to opt for a GED instead. While speaking with her career counselor, Amber realizes that getting a high school education is much more difficult to accomplish after one has dropped out. She breaks down and says that she "screwed up [her] whole life." While the scene is sad, I always wonder about people who talk about how they don't have any money, but have perfectly manicured false nails. Fill-ins and upkeep on that shit is expensive!

In the clip to the left, Maci is still dealing with the same issues with her fiancé she confronted in 16 and Pregnant. Her intended isn't an attentive parent, and he goes out with his friends all night long every night of the week. She stays up waiting for him until dawn—while keeping her baby awake with her. In the end, she writes him a Dear John letter, and moves back in with her parents.


Catelynn and Tyler's story is perhaps the most heartbreaking. They made a completely selfless decision by giving their daughter up for adoption, knowing that another family could provide her with a better life than they could. As part of the agreement, the couple were promised that theirs would be an open adoption, that they'd be able to see their daughter multiple times a year, and that they would be a part of her life. However, the adoptive parents decided to not disclose their last name to the couple, and didn't made good on any of their promises to include Catelynn and Tyler in the baby's life.

That would be the four-year Healthy Moms study, which wants obese participants to gain between zero and 3% of their body weight, or 5 pounds for a 170-pound woman. The New York Times coverage of the study, by Roni Caryn Rabin, doesn't explicitly state what women are supposed to do about the weight of the fetus and placenta, but the implication is that they should actually be losing some of their own weight to make room for them. Rabin says experts think women only need an extra 300 or 400 calories a day to have a healthy pregnancy, and that many obese women deliver healthy babies with no weight gain at all. The researchers in charge of the study hope to show that zero weight gain makes for easier delivery and decreases the baby's chance of obesity later on. But the advocates behind reducing pregnancy weight gain may also hope to set obese women on a path to weight loss. Says Prof. Kathleen M. Rasmussen, who worked on this year's earlier 11-15 pound guideline, "Pregnancy is what we call a teachable moment, a time when women are willing to make positive behavioral changes, because it's important for their own health and their babies' health."

But there's some evidence that pregnancy isn't the time to make big behavioral changes, at least not if they involve weight loss. If women burn fat during pregnancy, they may increase their blood levels of ketones, which in turn may lower a baby's IQ. The Healthy Moms study apparently doesn't plan to track the mental development of babies and children after birth, but some argue that it should. Then there's the risk to mom and baby of unhealthy weight loss. As Kate Harding pointed out in October, "the health care providers pregnant women visit most often aren't necessarily trained to recognize and address body image issues and eating disorders - but they are trained to track expectant mothers' weight and instruct them to keep it within a certain range. For women who struggle with disordered eating and body dissatisfaction, that can be problematic." And eating disorders can cause problems for the developing fetus as well as the mother.

There's also the more existential question of whether we should really be using pregnancy as a time for behavior modification. The reason it's a "teachable moment," the reason women are willing to quit smoking or drinking or eating soft cheese, is because many of them are anxious to do everything they can to have a healthy baby. Is it really a good idea to capitalize on this anxiety to try to make obese women thinner? Yes, the Healthy Moms study is in part geared toward healthier babies — but it's also about creating a population of moms who don't have to "lose the baby weight," because they already lost it during pregnancy. And should you doubt that women's worries about their babies and their bodies might be exploited as part of the new movement, note that two of the top three comments the Times Well blog post about this issue are hawking personal training services. One reads,

Very important also is to exercise the abdominals and pelvic muscles post pregancy. These muscles get turned off and stretched out. They don't just return to normal post partum. Specific core exercises are required. For exercise advice or training in nyc [link redacted]

Women are already getting the message that pregnancy, rather than a life stage that many women go through, is a sort of affliction that will totally fuck up their bodies, and that they need special products to recover from (Kourtney Kardashian has already chosen QuickTrim!). Teaching them that it's a time for weight loss — which zero weight gain during pregnancy essentially is — will almost certainly amplify this message. Combine that with the potential risk to babies' brains, and it doesn't really seem all that healthy.

New Goal For The Obese: Zero Gain In Pregnancy [NYT]
Zero Weight Gain During Pregnancy [NYT Well Blog]

Earlier: Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?

Mehmet, 38, spends the majority of the piece discussing her own beauty; how her mother, a beautician, pushed her to focus on her appearance, how she began using makeup at 12, and how these efforts eventually led to a career as a part-time model. It's evident from the get-go that Mehmet's self-worth is directly tied to her appearance, which casts a sad shadow over the rest of the piece, which reads, quite honestly, as someone having a slightly tortured conversation with herself.

Mehmet admits that she's jealous of her 17-year-old daughter, who is now "blossoming into womanhood." Yasmin is young and pretty and, according to her mother, a dead ringer for Mehmet herself in her younger days, which complicates her jealousy and resentment even further: "And although she was oblivious of all this, I couldn't help resenting her for it," Mehmet writes of her daughter's coming-of-age, "I began to make comparisons all the time, and a terror of getting old and losing my looks enveloped me."

The first time I read this piece, I was so irritated (it is the Daily Mail, after all) that my first instinct was to write a headline like "Mom Realizes She Is Not 18 Anymore, Calls Dina Lohan For Advice On How To Fix Situation," but after reading it a few more times, I realized the piece is just sad, really, in that Mehmet really doesn't seem to be able to let go of the idea that she is worth more than her looks, and that true beauty and happiness are not, despite what the magazines and the media might tell you, about trying to look 18 when you're 38.

I do feel a certain sympathy for her, as obnoxious as the article reads at times, in that I think it's normal for people to feel pangs of envy or jealousy when they realize certain points in their lives are behind them. The entire article is a sad commentary on the increasingly obnoxious values we place on youth and beauty, and the most disturbing aspect is that Mehmet doesn't seem to understand that she's just setting up her daughter to feel the same pangs of worthlessness and jealousy by constantly placing such a value on her child's looks.

Instead of trying to keep up with her daughter, or comparing herself with her daughter, Mehmet should find her own path and attempt to show her kid that life doesn't end at 18 (unless you're a member of Menudo, and then you are so out of there) and that true beauty has no age limit and that living in the past is a surefire way to miss the really great things happening in the present and waiting in the future. Yasmin claims that "we all get old, and to my mind there's so much more to life than looks. In 20 or 30 years, if I have a daughter, I'm sure I'll be confident enough to be glad that she's more gorgeous than me. I'll have had my time, and I'll definitely be ready to grow old gracefully. If only Mum could see it that way." If only both of them could see that there's so much more to "their time" than being the most gorgeous one in the house.

I Used To Be The One Who Turned Men's Heads, But Now It's My Teenage Daughter [DailyMail]

A womb transplant was tried on a human in 2000, but the organ had to be removed after three months because of problems with its blood supply. But now surgeon Richard Smith (that's not him above) has developed a "vascular patch technique" that connects major blood vessels like the aorta. His team performed transplants in five rabbits, two of which lived for 10 months after the procedure. Examinations after the rabbits died showed the transplants were successful.

Smith said the next step is to impregnate rabbits to see how the transplanted womb handles pregnancy. Then he will try the procedure on bigger animals — if he can get the money. He's been denied grants from several medical organizations, perhaps because of questions about the usefulness of his procedure. A transplant could allow a woman to carry a child if she was born without a womb, or if the organ was damaged by cancer or another disease. But she would probably need IVF, as the transplant would raise the risk of ectopic pregnancy if she conceived naturally. And she would need to deliver by C-section because the transplanted womb would likely not hold up in labor. And of course, the transplant itself would carry risks — the womb would only be left in long enough for the woman to have a child, but during that period she would need to take immunosuppressant drugs. The whole procedure would be expensive and potentially dangerous, and Smith says, "There's a lot of dismissal in the profession in terms of this being a step too far in terms of fertility management."

It's worthwhile to ask what "a step too far" really is. Some people object to IVF because of its expense or because of the risk of multiple births. Others see ethical problems with surrogacy, finding it distasteful to pay a woman to be pregnant. But both techniques have gained fairly wide acceptance, and it's possible that womb transplants would too. Smith says, "for a woman who's desperate for a baby, this is incredibly important." His choice of the word "desperate" is a little questionable, but the popularity of IVF does show that many women — and men — who have trouble conceiving still want to have biological children. Womb transplants would extend this opportunity to a group of women who don't currently have it. While some opponents of fertility treatment advocate adoption for such women, that's far from a cheap or easy process either. If Smith's research succeeds, it will give women without wombs the same options as women with them — which seems, on balance, like a good thing.

Womb Transplants 'A Step Closer' [BBC]
Womb Transplants 'On The Way In Two Years' [Daily Mail]
British Scientists Step Closer To Womb Transplants [Guardian]

My first reaction was, admittedly, confusion, and also a sense that perhaps maternity leave was being played up as a vacation of sorts, as opposed to a time of adjusting to having a new child in the home and recovering from pregnancy and giving birth. However, Sam Baker of Red Magazine tells Wallop: "This isn't a working mum versus working non-mums argument. Nobody thinks maternity leave is a holiday. Employers, especially now, need to incentivise their staff in imaginative ways and that could involve offering leave. Some companies are already doing this."

Wallop sites one company, BT, that "offered its staff the right to take a year off, in return for taking a 75 per cent pay cut," a move that allows a "maternity leave" of sorts, for an extremely reduced salary, in order to cut costs for the company, allow workers to opt for time off and still maintain a job to return to—hopefully in a better economic climate. However, there is nothing in Wallop's piece about the benefits given to these employees, and I"m still not sure how, exactly, this matches up with a traditional maternity leave.

What do you think, commenters? Should a leave of absence be made available to all women, or does this make maternity leave seem like a vacation instead of a time of stress and physical recuperation? [Women Without Children Should Be Allowed Maternity Leave, Survey Says [Telegraph]

[Image via CPSU]

When I write about Parker, it's almost always hard for me to choose which inflammatory quote to begin with — and indeed, today I'll start with two.

When a happily pregnant woman loses her pregnancy, she says she has lost her baby. Casting that painful episode as of no greater consequence than missing a lunch date should repel any beating heart.

And:

Regardless of one's moral position, it can't be convincingly argued that abortion and miscarriage are mere medical conditions like any other, as Trunk asserts. They both can involve medical procedures, but there's a life force at work that no woman who aims to give birth will deny.

From these lines, it appears that Parker is either being completely disingenuous or has not done as much research into her subject as I did to write a snarky blog post about it. Because if you read what Penelope Trunk has to say on the matter, you will learn that she has herself had:

• 2 miscarriages
• 2 abortions
• 2 children

Imagine if Kathleen Parker had read those two old posts — one about the painful and tragic miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy, one about Trunk's belief that her reasons for having abortions were ill-considered — without knowing about the infamous tweet. Except for the fact that Trunk expresses no shame about her abortions (or even regret, precisely), Parker probably would have approved. Trunk believes miscarriage is a tragedy! She's advised her numerous working female readers that career concerns are no reason to have an abortion! Two for two!

So here's what Penelope Trunk really did "wrong": She had the nerve to feel different about each one of her six pregnancies. She didn't automatically regard each embryo as a wanted child, as a blessing from a god she may or may not believe in, as a lifetime obligation she contracted to fulfill by choosing to have sex. She looked at each pregnancy in the context of her own body and her own life at the time it occurred, and made the decision that felt best for her. Three times, she chose to continue the pregnancy, and when one of those ended in miscarriage, she grieved. Three times, she chose to end the pregnancy, and when one of those ended in miscarriage, she was relieved. And tweeted about it.

The possibility that the same woman could have different feelings about being pregnant at different times in her life — that this is one of the reasons why so many people are pro-choice — is not something Parker allows for, even as she's writing about a woman who has experienced the joys of motherhood and the grief of a lost wanted pregnancy as well as the relief of terminating and losing unwanted ones. In Parker's universe, it seems, there is only one way to feel about pregnancy (happy), one way to feel about miscarriage (bereaved), and one way to feel about abortion (appalled). If you have what she considers the correct feelings about only 50% of your pregnancies, screw you. There is no partial credit.

According to the Guttmacher Institute (PDF), "About 60% of abortions are obtained by women who have one or more children." And that's not even counting the ones who, like Trunk, will later go on to have children when they feel ready. Which means, as reproductive rights activists have been saying forever, the majority of women who choose to end pregnancies at some point will also choose to continue them at other points. Now, take this with a grain of salt, since it's well-known that I'm a murderous, baby-hating feminist, but to me, that suggests that a hell of a lot of women feel different about different pregnancies at different times.

Parker's having none of it: "One might wish that Trunk were an anomaly, but one would be disappointed. To those for whom abortion is a correction, miscarriage is just a messier month."

Penelope Trunk is a woman for whom abortion has been "a correction," a woman who publicly tweeted that miscarriage was a relief. Penelope Trunk is also the woman who wrote this:

I am four months pregnant. But the baby is dead, inside me, and must be removed. I am devastated. I always knew this could happen, in the back of my mind. But you are never prepared for something like this to happen.

When I first heard the news, I did nothing. Cancelled every plan I had. Sat in chairs staring at walls, laid in bed hoping for sleep, and cried.

Unable to reconcile those two things, Parker simply leaves out the second part, placing Trunk squarely in the category of those too selfish and heartless to appreciate the "life force at work that no woman who aims to give birth will deny." Never mind that Trunk did indeed aim to give birth three times. And never mind that when her body had a different idea one of those times, she wrote publicly about her devastation. Penelope Trunk is the self-styled "brazen hussy careerist" whose tweet trivialized "not only the miscarriage but what little remains of our humanity" — ergo she could not possibly be the same woman who wrote, "On the day I found out the baby was dead... at the doctor's office, when I was crying so loudly that I was taken to a room farthest away from the waiting area so as not to scare already jittery expectant mothers, I didn't care if the interviews got done." That would suggest that women are complex human beings who feel different things at different times or something. The facts just don't fit!

And yet, they are the facts. Facts that take about 30 seconds to find if you ask yourself one question: "What does Penelope Trunk have to say on the matter of her own body, choices and feelings, in more than 140 characters?" Kathleen Parker, to her credit, must have asked that question, since she links to Trunk's blog more than once, including to the post that refers back to the previous miscarriage story. Nevertheless, she completely ignores the answer, because it doesn't support her casting of Trunk as the other kind of woman, the kind for whom "miscarriage is just a messier month." If you can only be one kind or the other — and clearly, that's the prevailing wisdom on Parker's planet — then any woman who's ever felt relief after a miscarriage, or after an abortion, is that kind of woman. The kind who doesn't get motherhood, who doesn't get loss, who doesn't get humanity — no matter how much personal experience she has with all three.

Regardless of how you'd characterize The Tweet, condemning Trunk as a woman who simply can't grasp the gravity of a lost pregnancy, some "grotesque" and "freakish" monster who misrepresents how real women feel about miscarriage, is the height of intellectual dishonesty. And it does a disservice to the millions of real women who have felt conflicted about unintended pregnancies (which about half of us will have before we're 45) and/or felt different about one pregnancy than another, by propagating the myth that wanting or not wanting children is a constant in each woman's life, never subject to her particular circumstances at the time. That there are "bad" women who choose abortion and "good" women who choose to be mommies; "bad" women who are grateful to miscarry, especially in states where obtaining an abortion is difficult, and "good" women who grieve for their lost pregnancies. It's pure bullshit to discuss Penelope Trunk's body, life and use of social media without acknowledging that she is all of those women in one. And she's far from alone.

Image from Penelope Trunk's blog.

A Miscarriage Of Propriety [Washington Post]
You Can't Manage Your Work Life If You Can't Talk About It [Penelope Trunk]
Sometimes Work Is A Welcome Distraction [Penelope Trunk]
What's The Connection Between Abortion And Careers? [Penelope Trunk]

Earlier: What Was Penelope Trunk Thinking Twittering About Her Miscarriage?
A Reconsideration Of Penelope Trunk, The Miscarriage-Tweeting Career Advisor

Forbes dresses up the article with the obligatory Lindsay/Dina Lohan pic, and author Jenna Goudreau writes that the best-friend mom "dresses like her daughter, offers TMI about her personal life and tries to befriend her children's teenage friends." But watch out: "Moms who try to be befriend their teenage children end up leaving them motherless—at a time when they really need a mom most." It's pretty much common wisdom at this point that trying to be your kid's BFF isn't good parenting. But is this really such a huge social problem?

According to clinical psychologist Stephan B. Poulter, yes. He tells Goudreau, "This trend has become very popular. Just look at People magazine." Poulter claims 30% to 40% of moms are now best-friend moms, a number we hope he arrived at by some method more scientific than flipping through tabloids. So what's behind this "very popular" trend? Goudreau writes,

One theory as to why comes from Poulter, who suggests that there is a greater number of mothers who don't have the time or energy—due to long hours at work, financial stress or otherwise—to put into being a full-time mom. These women are pragmatists in that it's more emotionally rewarding—"easier" as Poulter puts it—to be a friend rather than a traditional mother figure. All that—plus the adage "40 is the new 20." Is anyone growing up?

The culprit is those selfish working moms who are too lazy to discipline their kids — and too skanky to act like proper 40-year-old women. Don't get me wrong — the pressure on older women to continue looking like high school students is upsetting. But articles like Goudreau's imply that it's their fault, that middle-aged women in America are just so into being sexy and having fun that they don't want to "grow up." This attitude — like many discussions of "age-appropriate" clothing — denies middle-aged women's sexuality and makes it sound like the only sensible thing for them to do is slice oranges for the soccer game. And it promulgates a pretty rigid notion of what it means to grow up.

This rigidity is on display elsewhere in Goudreau's article. She talks to author Susan Morris Shaffer, who expounds on mother-daughter bonds today. Goudreau writes,

Shaffer feels that this era presents a new opportunity for adult daughters and their mothers to become closer. Because young women are increasingly attending college, pursuing careers and getting married later, they have an "extended adolescence" in which the mother-daughter bond may be one of their strongest.

It's true that I and many other young women I know have close relationships with our mothers, relationships that are probably closer than they would be if we were married with children. But does that really mean we're in and "extended adolescence?" Goudreau's language is especially strange here, as it seems to indicate that getting an education and pursuing a career are "adolescent" things, while marriage is what really makes you an adult. "Extended adolescence" is a pretty common term lately, and while it's not always as blatant as this, it usually implies that even if you have a job and a degree, until you get married and have a baby you're some sort of ancient teenager.

I have no doubt that it's unhealthy for parents not to discipline their kids, or to base their self-worth on whether their children perceive them as cool. But I do doubt that moms acting "young" is the biggest problem facing kids today. And I don't believe we should be using the standards of the past — either for marital age or for "age-appropriate behavior" — to judge our lives in the present. Being unmarried doesn't make you a teenager, and wearing a miniskirt or going to a club doesn't mean you think "40 is the new 20." Can't media outlets write about childrearing without perpetuating tired stereotypes about what makes a good woman or a good mother? Maybe someday they will, but given its record on issues affecting women, Forbes probably won't be leading the charge.

Are You A Best-Friend Mom? [Forbes]

According to Roni Caryn Rabin of the Times, the report, published by members of the American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, recommended that doctors try talk therapy first if a woman's depression is mild or moderate. But it also said that the risks of antidepressant use and shock therapy on the developing fetus are low. Dr. Kimberly Yonkers, the lead author of the report, says,

There's not a one-size-fits-all answer. You can't say, ‘Stop medication for all women because it's harmful,' and you can't put all women on medication either.

Most pregnant women can probably agree that there is not a one-size-fits-all answer to their depression (for proof, check out the Times commenter who says she cured her PPD by drying and eating the placenta). But beyond that, the report may not give them much guidance. The authors still caution that because of the lack of randomized clinical trials on pregnant women, research on drug side effect is limited. And four of the report's nine authors had some connection to drug companies, casting all their drug recommendations into a certain amount of doubt.

Paxil, Celexa, and Zoloftall seem to increase the risk that a baby will be born with a hole in the heart. The holes often close on their own, and the risk of the defect is less than 1%, but it increases if the mother took more than one SSRI. SSRIs can also raise the risk of persistent pulmonary hypertension, a condition that impedes blood flow to the baby's lungs, but the risk of this is also low, about 1.2%. Perhaps the greatest risk is that of drug withdrawal, experienced by 15 to 30% of babies born to moms who took SSRIs late in pregnancy. This can cause irritability, hypoglycemia, and even seizures in babies, but usually gets better within two weeks. Untreated depression, of course, has its own risks. In addition to the dangers to the mother, it may contribute to premature birth, growth changes, or irritability in babies.

Not all clinicians even agree with the report's relatively mild recommendations. Dr. Shari Lusskin says,

By the time I get to hear about somebody's perinatal depression, it's usually worse than what can be treated with psychotherapy alone, because women go out of their way not to complain; they don't want to be put on medication, and they feel guilty. We should use a low threshold for treating women aggressively.

And though the report emphasizes the relatively small risk of drug side effects, many women aren't reassured. One commenter on the Times Well Blog, who suffers from bipolar disorder, wrote,

I've been stable for a long time, but going off all my medication might change that. A high-risk perinatal physician recommended that I stay on everything, because depression and manic psychosis may be harmful to the baby. But my psychiatrist recommended ceasing all medication for at least the first trimester, which is the phase where the developing embryo is most sensitive to mutagens. Her recommendation is that I should go off everything and then, if I have a problem, I should use electroshock therapy. I have decided that this is the right path to take. But I'm still putting it off.

Rabin interviews Sherean Malekzadeh Allen, who says, "Every single thing you put in your body when you're pregnant, you wonder, ‘Oh, my God, am I growing my baby an extra finger?' I was worried that I would hurt the baby if I took the pills, and I was worried I would hurt the baby if I didn't." She was so anxious about hurting her baby with her medication that, "I would wait six or seven hours before taking the pill, and just work myself up into more of a state." Ultimately, her son was born healthy.

Given the low risk of serious birth defects from antidepressants, Allen's story — in which the biggest side effect is maternal guilt — is probably the most common. The APA/ACOG report may have its problems, but at least it doesn't issue any blanket pronouncement that might add to this guilt. It may not be a very useful guideline, but it's true that depression, whether during pregnancy or not, should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and that what works for some sufferers won't always help others. For those pregnant women who respond well to talk therapy, the choice seems clear. But those who need medication have to balance the risks to their babies with the benefits of having a happy, healthy mother. Like so many aspects of parenting, this balance is individual, and the report deserves praise for acknowledging that.

Image via New York Times.

Depression Is A Dilemma For Women In Pregnancy [NYT]
Coping With Depression During Pregnancy [NYT Well Blog]

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]

Scott writes,

While babies in prams got my friends all gooey, they left me cold. I didn't see how I could juggle a career with children. And I didn't see why I'd want to. [...]

I know Mum didn't begrudge the time she gave me and my brother. But I feared I would. After taking a fashion course at college, I landed a fantastic job in retail and rapidly started climbing the career ladder.

I couldn't imagine giving it all up for children.

Her essay admirably busts some myths about childless women. She's not cold or selfish — she has a close relationship with her family and mentors a teenage mom. She doesn't worry about who will take care of her in old age — not having children has allowed her and her husband to save up some money for nursing care, and, as she points out, most elderly people aren't actually cared for by their children anyway. She bristles when people tell her "that one day, when my ovaries have shrivelled, I'll regret not having children." "It's ludicrous," she writes, "No one should rush into something that life-changing."

I tend to agree that "just because you might want them someday" isn't a good reason to procreate. But unfortunately, this is the Daily Mail, and any article about a woman's lifestyle has to pit itself against — you guessed it — the lifestyles of other women. Zoe Lewis railed against feminists for supposedly forcing her to forgo marriage and children, and Scott slightly more subtly disses women who choose to breed. Married for 21 years, she says she and her husband Robert "enjoy a wonderful, passionate marriage and fantastic lifestyle largely because we don't have children." She explains,

We hold hands, we kiss. We do all the things couples with children somehow forget to do any more.

Not having children means we have time to focus totally on each other. So many marriages fall apart when children come along because parents don't have time to talk, and problems fester. That doesn't happen with us.

Apparently, couples with children have bad marriages. Also, when mothers get old, they're lonely anyway. Scott says as they age, she and her husband will "be better off than those sad old women waiting to be taken out to lunch once a month." Oh, and also you can't be a mom and have a successful career. To illustrate this one, Scott references one of the women she interviewed for her book, Two Is Enough:

Gina is a high-powered businesswoman in her 30s. ‘If you're going to be successful, you have to pour yourself into it,' she says. ‘And that wouldn't be fair on a child.' Does it make us selfish or sensible? I don't see anything great about trying to play Superwoman and ending up small-changing everyone.

Scott says "I don't want to sound smug," but she definitely does, especially when she says things like, "I suspect some of my friends envy me because I'm living the lifestyle they wish they could have. Do I envy them? Not at all." Given that friends and strangers alike accuse her of being selfish and ask her when she's going to pop one out, a little defensiveness is natural. But Scott ends up sounding almost as bad as those who say all women should stay home and make babies. Like them, she seems to be arguing that there's no good way to balance family and career, ignoring the fact that there are lots of ways governments and employers could help women do this. By claiming that nothing can make motherhood and work compatible, she gives society yet another excuse not to try.

She also seems to be saying having children is incompatible with happiness. Again, a certain amount of backlash against her wrongheaded critics is to be expected. And she does pay some lip service to moms by mentioning her friend Karen, who loves her kids. But couldn't she simply have explained why being childless works for her and her husband, rather than claiming their lives are better than those of people with kids? By doing so, she may actually be giving ammunition to the kinds of people who criticize her for not breeding — they could just as easily fire back with how much better their lives are than hers. Memo to Scott: the way to get other people to respect your lifestyle is not to malign theirs. Choice feminism: ur doin it rong.

Image via Daily Mail.

Friends Call Me Selfish - But Not Having Kids Is The Best Thing I've Ever Done [Daily Mail]

Savage, who gave birth to a baby boy Thursday, says she didn't hesitate to carry the child, even though it wasn't hers: "This was someone else's child,"she tells the Associated Press, "We didn't know who it was. We didn't know if they didn't have children or if this was their last chance for a child."

The child's parents, Paul and Shannon Morell, call Savage a "guardian angel" for agreeing to carry their child to term, though the Savages, understandably, are "going through a very difficult time." It's difficult to imagine the position Carolyn Savage was placed in, as an accidental surrogate of sorts, and though the Morrells surely have a happy ending in this situation, it's not hard to see why the Savages might be struggling.

The Savages, who have three children, are currently taking legal action against the fertility clinic, and The Telegraph is reporting that the couple is seeking a surrogate to carry their fourth child, as Carolyn's "age (40) and difficulties during earlier pregnancies" make another pregnancy too risky. As for the child they agreed to part with, "We will wonder about this child every day for the rest of our lives," Savage says, "We have hopes for him, but they are his parents and we'll defer to their judgment on when and if they ever tell him what happened and any contact that's afforded us. We just want to know he's healthy and happy."

'Wrong Embryo' Mother To Give Up Baby Boy To His Biological Parents After Mix-Up [Telegraph]
Ohio Woman Implanted With Wrong Embryo Gives Birth [ABCNews]

Often enough the walkers are quite small: elementary-school aged, I'd say, maybe 9 or 10, walking alone down what everyone in my town assumes are fairly safe streets. Maybe it's due to the stories I've heard about kidnappings over the years, the ones that always start the same way: small town, nothing like that ever happens here, walking alone on his way to school, etc, but the sight of a child walking unsupervised makes me worry, and apparently I'm not alone.

In today's New York Times, Jan Hoffman explores the debate between parents who feel their children should be escorted back and forth to school and parents who feel their kids need to experience independence and freedom, even in the face of paranoia stoked by the evening news and the disapproval of fellow parents.

When I was in school, there were two types of students: the bus pass kids and the walkers. When the bell rang, the walkers were free to skip out the door and head directly home, while it was a half-hour ordeal to make sure the bus pass kids got on the right bus, knew their bus stop, and were accounted for. The walkers had the freedom; it was bus kids like me who were fretted over. But as Hoffman notes, walking to school has become a rarity these days, as busing and car pooling have become, in the eyes of many parents, anyway, a "safer" alternative. "In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school," Hoffman writes, "by 2001, only 13 percent still did."

The way you view the world changes as you get older: when I was a kid, I thought nothing of standing at the bus stop unattended for 30 minutes, waiting for the stupid bus to finally arrive. I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where kids left the house at 10am and weren't seen again until a chorus of "Dinnerrrrr!" from various mothers and fathers rang through the streets at 5. We were allowed to be independent, to have adventures, to explore, just as our parents had twenty or thirty years earlier. But the thought of my 6-year-old niece going anywhere by herself, even outside in the front yard to play without supervision, makes me incredibly nervous.

So how do we reconcile our own fears with our children's need to assert their own independence? Lenore Skenazy, who famously wrote about her decision to let her son ride the subway alone, tells Hoffman that "we don't do [children] a service by going to the worst-case scenario in your mind and acting accordingly," and perhaps that's true, but there has to be a way to ensure that your kids are safe without feeling like the world is out to get them at every turn.

For the record, my mother, who used to let my sisters and I run around the neighborhood for hours, now walks my niece to school herself, and I don't blame her. Of course, she's still quite young, and when she's older, she'll be able to go alone, but for now, I think we all feel safer knowing she has someone holding her hand.

So what say you commenters? Do you (or would you) let your children walk to school? And have you found a way to balance your fears with your child's need to be independent? Feel free to recount your experiences in the comments.

Why Can't She Walk To School? [New York Times]

"I thought he might grow into it but found myself flinching every time I heard someone say it," Corner writes in The Guardian, "I never called him anything but 'the baby'. By the time he was six months old, I realized having a child whose name I couldn't say was a problem." After discussing it with her husband, Corner decided to change the baby's name—to Huxley. While Corner and her husband felt comfortable with the switch, she says it was tough to break the news to certain friends and family members, who expressed concerns "about me and the future identity crisis I was creating."

Corner claims that her experience is part of a larger phenomenon, known as "baby name remorse," wherein parents suddenly regret the name they've chosen for their child and wish to go back and name the baby all over again. Meg Ryan famously renamed her adopted child, first calling her Charlotte, and then changing her name when the girl was a year old, as "I thought she was Charlotte and she's just not - she's a Daisy." But it is it okay to turn a Ralph into Huxley, or a Charlotte into a Daisy? Yes and no, apparently.

Psychologist Oliver James tells Corner that the fact that Ralph/Huxley was only six months old when his name was changed means that the switch won't harm him much: "A six-month-old couldn't care less what you call it. But from the age of 18 months most children have two-word utterances. So from the age of about two onwards, if the name change wasn't something that came from the child itself, it might be highly puzzling for the child involved." In other words, if you change a baby's name early enough, there won't be many repercussions. But wait too long and you are, in fact, stealing a bit of their identity away.

Commenters on Corner's piece are pretty brutal, mocking her for being shallow, picking the name "Huxley," and noting that perhaps she should have bought a dog instead of having a kid. But Corner and her husband seem happier with the change, and it was done before little Huxley would know the difference, so I suppose things worked out for the best, though one wonders which name little Huxley would prefer, and if he'll ever be mad at his parents for renaming him.

So what do you think, commenters? Is it okay to rename a baby? Or is the excuse that a child hasn't "grown into" his name more a reflection on the parents for not being able to accept their own choices?

Ryan Changes Her Daughter's Name [Contact Music]
Why I Changed My Baby's Name [Guardian]

Scientific American's resident provocateur Jesse Bering, who once cited Jezebel as an example of "acts of social aggression" among women, tackles bottle-feeding in the somewhat creepily titled article "Breasts in Mourning." He cites a study by evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup and colleagues. The study says,

Opting not to breastfeed precludes and/or brings all of the processes involved in lactation to a halt. For most of human evolution the absence or early cessation of breastfeeding would have been occasioned by miscarriage, loss, or death of a child. We contend, therefore, that at the level of her basic biology a mother's decision to bottle feed unknowingly simulates child loss.

The evidence: mothers who bottle-feed score higher on one measure of depression than breast-feeding moms, even after controlling for age, education, and socioeconomic and relationship status. Also, bottle-feeding moms apparently want to hold their babies more than those who breast-feed do. Somewhat bizarrely, the study authors believe this desire "parallels findings among nonhuman primates where in response to the death of an infant, mothers of some species have been known to tenaciously hold, cling to, and carry their infants for prolonged periods after they die." To which this admittedly lay-reader responds — don't moms like to hold their living infants too?

Bering does admit that "these women may simply want to make up for lost bonding time that would otherwise occur during breastfeeding." He also cautions that "the reasons for bottle-feeding are complex and many, and not all women have the luxury of a choice in this regard." However, he winds up his article (which is illustrated, somewhat incongruously, with a picture of Bering himself in front of some water) with the statement, "the present logic may give new meaning to the expression 'breast is best'-if not for infants, then at least for their mothers."

There may be physiological and psychological advantages to breast-feeding, but we're not yet convinced that "not treating your baby like a corpse" is one of them. Might the elevated depression bottle-feeding moms experience be caused not by a subconscious belief that the baby is dead, but by wanting to breast-feed and not being able to? If so, couldn't more paid maternity leave and flexible work hours help alleviate the problem? Moms who don't breast-feed may also feel inadequate, perhaps as a result of pro-breast-feeding rhetoric. We should be making it possible for mothers to breast-feed if they want to and physically can, but for those who can't — for medical or other reasons — giving yet another "new meaning" to "breast is best" isn't all that helpful.

Breasts In Mourning: How Bottle-Feeding Mimics Child Loss In Mothers' Brains [Scientific American]

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]

In a Today Show segment worthy of The Onion, a bemused-looking Ann Curry interviews Women's Health editor Michele Promaulayko and Dr. Shari Lusskin of NYU on this supposed phenomenon. Says Promaulayko (a former editor of Cosmo who once pumped her staff for more stories in the "dead bridesmaid" vein),

Big families are having a moment right now, it's very much in the zeitgeist.

After this little game of buzzword madlibs, Promaulayko continues,

There is sort of an addictive quality to being pregnant, there are a lot of things happening physiologically and psychologically that would drive a woman to keep doing this.

There is, of course, always the chance that women are getting pregnant to have more kids, instead of to feed their addiction to bumpahol. Ann Curry asks Dr. Lusskin when we should be concerned about a woman's rampant spawning. Lusskin says,

We're concerned about this when women are doing it to the exclusion of the other factors in their life, in other words that drive to become pregnant just supersedes everything else, almost like Species, you know that movie?

Got it — so when women transform into alien-human hybrids who need human sperm in order to perpetuate their race of killer tentacle-beasts, it's time to worry. There's a lot more fun stuff in the clip, including Dr. Lusskin grinning maniacally as she discusses post-partum depression, but to see if there was a grain of truth behind all this hysteria, we looked at the original Women's Health article that inspired the Today Show segment. Called "The Belly-Rubbing High," it's written by Martha Brockenbrough, who also penned It Could Happen to You: Diary of a Pregnancy and Beyond (obviously an addiction memoir). The article includes several head-splittingly obvious statements like, "Having babies isn't addictive in the way that alcohol and narcotics can be," and requisite namechecks of various big families (the Octomom! The Duggars!). But it also offers this advice:

If you do find yourself feeling a void as your bundle of joy becomes a toddler, "that's a good sign that it's time to look in the mirror and figure out what's going on with you," says Ann Pleshette Murphy, author of The Seven Stages of Motherhood: Loving Your Life Without Losing Your Mind. "Invest in yourself. Though it may never be as satisfying as what we get from taking care of our kids, it's important to feel proud of something you do outside of child-rearing so that you don't think of yourself as 'only a mom.'"

Really? Investing in yourself may never be as satisfying as taking care of your kids? And yet, when taking care of said kids, you're in danger of feeling like 'only a mom?' If there really are women who are addicted to being pregnant (and Ann Curry, to her credit, doubts this is very common), might it have something to do with this double-edged sword? Once you have a baby, you're expected to think of raising it as more important than your own life, but at the same time you're at the mercy of those who think of child-rearing as an inferior activity. For some, pregnancy might be a respite from this conflict, a time to anticipate the joy of a child without yet dealing with the difficulties of being a mom (although pregnant women do get plenty of judgment about what they eat, drink, wear, etc.). Brockenbrough closes her article thus:

"Me time" can include big things-like going back to work or starting your own business from home-or small, daily experiences that enrich your life, such as heading to the gym or joining your girlfriends for dinner and cocktails. It's only when you have a balanced life that you can be sure the inner call for a new addition to your family should be answered.

If some women really do have a problematic relationship with pregnancy and childbearing, maybe the solution isn't to tell them when they should have kids (what is "a balanced life" anyway?). Maybe we should quit sending them mixed messages, quit judging and second-guessing them, and just leave them the fuck alone.

"Bumpaholics": Women Who Love Pregnancy [MSNBC]
The Belly-Rubbing High [Women's Health]