•  Last night John McCain told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren that he thinks people are being too hard on Sarah Palin, even if he does find it kinda funny. "I'm entertained and sometimes a little angry when I see this constant, vicious attacks by people on the left. I've never seen anything like it," he said. • According to a recent poll, 86% of men in Canada would rather be a driver than a passenger in bad weather. Unfortunately, 50% of men also claimed that they don't slow down in the snow, which makes things a little more dangerous for the rest of you up north. •  Researchers have found that a particular type of fertility treatment, ICSI, may produce more baby girls than boys. Even though few babies are born through this method, the authors conclude: "because our findings suggest that ICSI may reduce the sex ratio, we recommend that ICSI only be done if medically necessary, in an effort to prevent this potential side effect." •  19-year-old pimp DeShawn "Cash Money" Clark has become the first person to be convicted of human trafficking in Washington state. Clark faces up to 18 years in prison for his crimes. •  Years after doctors told her she was infertile, Sarah Wilkinson took an emergency trip to the hospital because she felt some pain in her stomach. Turns out, she was having a baby. She says she feels "fantastic" now, even though the pregnancy was a huge shock. • Did you know that there have been women in the Scotland Yard for 90 years now? Women first started working as officers in 1919, when they were introduced in order to help deal with prostitutes and suicidal women. Plus: here are some of their spiffy outfits. •  Vicki Kennedy told Oprah today that she has absolutely no interest in running for the senate seat left empty by her late husband, Edward Kennedy. She also told Oprah about the last days of her husband's life, including his determination to survive to see Obama elected president. •  Two teenage girls from New Zealand have been convicted of the murder of a retired school teacher. The girls, aged 18 and 15, broke into his house and beat him to death with his own walking stick before trashing the place and leaving with his wallet. •  Three lacrosse players from Sacred Heart University have been accused of conspiring to sexually assault a female student in a dorm room. The victim was engaging in consensual sex with one of the boys when his two friends crept in "as a prank," but their lawyers claim they had no contact with the woman. •  Lobna Abdelrehim used to work at a Wall Street publishing firm, until she got fed up with the rampant racism and sexism. She says she was constantly mocked for her faith and her looks, and has brought a lawsuit against the company. •  Michele Bachmann admitted to the St. Cloud Times that she sometimes says stupid shit: "I wish I could be more artful in the way I say things. But she went on add some qualifying statement about "bias in the mainstream media" and so on. • In other Bachmann news, she's headed to Nashville to join Sarah Palin for a Tea Party. Sadly, not the fun kind. •  A new study from the UK confirms that police often don't believe rape victims due to prejudices about their background, class, and "behavior." Officers were also found to be inadequately trained for dealing with rape, which can result in police that would rather "do nothing at all" than risk doing something wrong. • 

It's a debate as old as...well, the 1960s. And in recent decades, the father's place in the delivery room has become sacrosanct - indeed, Iran just lifted a ban on men in the delivery room in the hopes that women would become more comfortable and natural birth would become more common. But now there are new voices challenging the status quo, including the rather inflammatory French obstetrician Michel Odent, who feels men actually harm the process. The good doctor will be debating the issue at the Royal College of Midwives.

Pros: Teamwork, solidarity, comfort, and the little fact that some fathers might want to see their children born, too. "With husbands coaching, we have more than 90% totally unmedicated births. No other approach comes near to that figure," says Robert Bradley, who was an early advocate of present fathers.

Cons: As Dr. Odent would have it, "the masculinisation of the birth environment". His argument?

Having been involved for more than 50 years in childbirths in homes and hospitals in France, England and Africa, the best environment I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody around the woman in labour apart from a silent, low-profile and experienced midwife...Oxytocin is the love drug which helps the woman give birth and bond with her baby. But it is also a shy hormone and it does not come out when she is surrounded by people and technology. This is what we need to start understanding.

However, is barring men from the delivery room, 1950s-style, really the solution? Surely it's an individual choice, right? And while nothing should be automatic - it's a conversation that bears having - is a convent-like level of silence the alternative? If we're going to bar anything, maybe it's video cameras that should be on the table - they're notoriously unsupportive. And the strongest argument? Moms don't seem that grateful for Dr. Odent's concern.

A Top Obstetrician On Why Men Should NEVER Be At The Birth Of Their Child [Daily Mail]

Should Dads Be In The Delivery Room? [BBC]
No Dads In the Delivery Room? [BlogHer]

Top OB: Keep Men Out Of Delivery Room [StrollerDerby]

The MSNBC headline really says it all: "It's a boy? Disappointment plagues some moms." Of course, "gender disappointment" exists (as we know) in both forms. But for mothers who've been dreaming of girly bonding - or those, like my grandmother, who have four boys - the boy regret is apparently more common. As one mother quoted in the piece puts it, "There's not going to be any pink dresses. There's not going to be any scrapbooking. That's not going to happen."

Therapists quoted in the piece recommend that those who are super hung up on one sex find out in advance so as to deal with the disappointment. And now there's a resource: Altered Dreams: Living with Gender Disappointment, written by one mom whose sons will, hopefully, never check Amazon. I mean, surely at some point "gender disappointment" turns into "having a baby boy," right? This isn't the 19th century, where a father can't look at a girl without seeing the heir she should have been. And the moms quoted in the piece are sure to affirm that they love their sons, even if one of them "sometimes looks at her son and wonders, just for a moment, what he would look like as a girl." Well, if she's really curious, she can do what one of my friend's mothers did: dress him in dresses and bonnets because, dammit, she wasn't going to be cheated out of the pink.

It's A Boy? Disappointment Plagues Some Moms [MSNBC]

The blog posts pictures of users' mothers looking stylish. And they come with amazing anecdotes attached: this mom, with her perfect sunglasses and hangers in the back seat, was on her honeymoon in Cape Cod.

My Mom, Style Icon inspired me to look through some of our Past Fashion posts again. Of this photo, the contributor notes, "That thumb in the picture is my Dad's. They just celebrated 49 years, and he's still putting his thumb in pictures."

Here's another stylish lady on her honeymoon, in 1959. They're still married.

Wow. Just wow. A disco suit for homecoming!

This mom was a dancer on Dean Martin's show in the 60s. She went on to play Patty Simcox in Grease.

If you want to submit content — and I totally will be, when I go home for the holidays and can get my mitts on some family albums, 'cause my mom has mad style (and a freakish ability to navigate to a previously unknown thrift store in any town on the continent, including LaCrosse, Wisconsin; she should build an iPhone app for that and make millions) — e-mail pictures to momstyleicons@gmail.com.

My Mom, The Style Icon [Official Site]

I can rationalize my arrested financial status, my rental, my inability to drive. But staring at that row of expensive, alpha-hydroxy-boosting bottles, I knew I was in denial. Anti-aging products are scary and overwhelming, their labels full of vaguely-threatening pseudoscience. According to the most extreme dermatologists, we should all start using them at 18. And while generations of women seem to have gotten by perfectly well without a battery of pricey snake-oils, the fear campaign has done its work well: I feel anxious, guilty, terrified - and paralyzed with choice. Even as I know my collagen production is slowing down, my skin losing its youthful elasticity, the lines and wrinkles multiplying, I'm as frozen as I was when a 10th-grade chemistry test was set before me.

New findings suggest that, at the end of the day, we all become our mothers anyway: as in most things biological, you can't fight the DNA, and one's mother's face is, apparently, a preview of coming attractions. Says Reuters, "these findings may act as a further guideline for cosmetic rejuvenation of the eye region." Great. My own mom looks just fine. She's never used an antiaging product in her life, and for someone who was apparently never told that not sporting at least double-digit SPF every day is the worst sin in the entire world, well, she's certainly not the Dorothea Lange portrait ladymags are always insinuating. That said, she looks like what she is: an attractive woman of 60. And that isn't what we're supposed to want. We should be defying our age, not giving into it!

I gave my mom a call and asked her what she thought about all the age-defying tech out there. "Well," she said, "it's really much more defiant not to give into that, isn't it?" And she was right. Although I bought her some lotion with SPF and I think she's using it. "Health," she says, "I'll do. Vanity is very unattractive." I could have a worse blueprint.

It's Like Mother, Like Daughter When It Comes To Aging [Reuters]

Double X's new column, "Modern Love Revenge," is potentially pretty genius - provided, that is, the subjects are as prone to soul-baring as the original authors. Although Audrey Bethel, whose lack of communication causes mom Maynard to break into her email and discover a scary situation, you may recall - seems perfectly ready to go public, albeit in more diplomatic terms. Bethel's response is more measured and less personal than her mother's - but there are plenty of small digs in there.

It's pretty clear from Audrey's - and her mom's - pieces that living material is no novelty in the Bethel-Maynard house. As Audrey says, "My mother, Joyce Maynard, writes for a living, so I have spent my life learning that an event recounted by one person might not sound like the same event when recounted by another person, even if she was there, and witnessed it, and was at the center of it. It can be frustrating for me to let my mother own her stories-and by proxy, the stories of the people close to her." (As the daughter of two writers, I should point out here that this isn't typical. It probably is, though, of writers who write regularly about their own first-person.) "Over the years, my mother has often written works of nonfiction detailing my family's life and times-but never had anything so intimate or inherently mine to tell been the topic of her writing."

Here, Audrey reproduces the oddly loaded email her mom sent her before running the piece.

Dear Aud, I have written an essay that I need to show you. An editor at the New York Times would like to publish it, but I will not do this unless you can feel alright about this. I am guessing that if you could have chosen, you would prefer to have a mother who did not, as I do, write about her life. Though of course, if that were the case, you would have a totally different mother. And be a different person yourself.

And if that, in context, seems passive-aggressive - kind of defiant and impotent (how did "The New York Times" see this essay before Audrey granted her permission? Magic?) - check out this line: "I knew her primary purpose was not to write an academic piece to raise social consciousness, but I still felt strongly that the original draft of my mother's piece perpetuated certain stereotypes and assumptions. I knew how much she wanted me to tell her to go ahead with the piece, especially since it would be good publicity to coincide with her new book coming out."

Holy underlying tensions, Batman! In the end, Audrey, obviously a good sport, works with her mother to edit the piece into a compromise that acknowledges the social issues close to her heart. But her ambivalence, in the article, is palpable. And if this retort isn't an act of veiled aggression, I've never seen one. Sure, we know these people only by what they've shown us - maybe it's no relation to who they are in real life. But as characters in a public drama, they're choosing to paint quite a fraught picture. It would be interesting to see the exchange in which Audrey informed her mother of this piece - if in fact she did. Having made her, by her own admission, who she is by dint of her oversharing, Maynard could hardly object.

[Image via JoyceMaynard.com]

Modern Love Revenge: Joyce Maynard's Daughter Gets Her Turn To Speak[XX]

Related: Joyce Maynard Looks Back On Life?

• Welfare workers report that girls in gangs are often raped by the male members of the gang as part of initiation, but many of them accept this as routine. "The girls think they are going to be protected by the gang if they have sex with one person but then they find there are more boys there," said Teresa Pointing, chief executive of In-volve, a charity that works with teen girls. • According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Sasha and Malia Obama have not been vaccinated for swine flu. The vaccine is currently unavailable to the twogirls because they are not at high risk. • Doctor Patrick O'Brian recalls being shocked at the state of pregnant women in Uganda, a country that apparently has some of the worst maternal care in the world. In efforts to address this issue, he started a program with the University College Hospital in London that works to distribute medicine to women in need and offer pre and post-natal care to mothers. • Researchers have found that breast reduction surgery may have unexpected benefits. Through testing the removed tissue, doctors may be able to better identify patients at risk for breast cancer. Another upside to breast reduction? Decreased back pain and increased range of movement. • According to a new study, well-educated older women who live alone report a lower emotional well-being than breast cancer patients who live with a partner. •  A little girl from Brooklyn has made the news for a heartbreaking letter she wrote to Sasha and Malia Obama. Bianca's mother was shot several years ago by an abusive boyfriend, and the 6-year-old and her father are still struggling. In her letter, she begged for help for her family, and readers of the Daily News have been quick to respond. • Researchers have found that sperm itself - and not just the fluid it travels in - may transmit HIV to healthy cells. Doctors previously suspected that sperm could transmit the virus, but they were unable to prove this until recently. • A revealing new poll from the UK shows that 90% of expecting mothers are denied the choice as to where they will give birth. The vast majority of women in Britain are not offered the option to give birth at home or at a birthing center attended by a midwife. • The Daily Beast on sexism in nonprofits: "Charity is not allowed to use the same tools as business because society subconsciously regards it as female, and discriminates against it the same way it has historically discriminated against women." Read the rest of their interesting take on charity here. • Good news: The Saudi king has decided not to flog a female journalist charged with participation in a television show in which a man spoke publicly about his sex life. • Among women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, breast cancer is diagnosed six years earlier than in previous generations. Doctors don't know if women are screened better today, or if hormonal and environmental factors are giving women cancer earlier. • Jury selection will begin today in the trial of the first 12 male members of the polygamist sect whose Yearning For Zion ranch was raided last year. Flora Jessop, who escaped the compound 15 years ago, said she's happy to see the men go on trial but, "What I'm upset the most about, I think, is the fact that none of the women have been indicted, as well. ... I think that the women were nothing but pimps on that compound and giving their daughters over to these perverts knowing what was going to happen to them." • A study by the National Center for Voice and Speech found that female teachers used their voices about 10 percent more than males when teaching and 7 percent more when not teaching. Female teachers speak louder than male teachers at work. All teachers spend more time talking than most professionals and are at a greater risk for hurting their voices. • Debbie Davis, 29, of Sunderland, England has been named Britain's top Avon saleswoman. She started selling the cosmetics when she was laid off five years ago and now she's making $408,000 a year. • 14-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker says she will wait until the school year is over to begin her attempt to become the youngest sailor to circumnavigate the globe. She had planned to head out in August but was stopped by authorities who said she was too young. The court is expected to rule on her case by Friday. • Elizabeth Edwards told a local news station that John Edwards said of their relationship, "Perhaps [it's] not the great love story that we hoped, but maybe a great love story nonetheless." Well, most great love stories don't involve the man possibly fathering a child with another woman. • After more than 120 years, the Beloit's girls reformatory school in Kansas closed for good in August. Before 1983 the institution often housed girls who hadn't committed criminal offenses, but were considered "incorrigible," "immoral," or had suffered abuse at home. Under some administrations, girls were punished with huge doses of vomit- and diarrhea-inducing castor oil, humiliated with forced hair clipping, or even sterilized. • After a "concerned citizen" in Yulee, Florida tipped the police that the Girls Gone Wild bus was in town, police organized an undercover investigation and arrested seven women who complied with the organizers' request that they "show their breasts so they could be photographed/filmed or so they could have their breasts spray painted. The women were charged with indecent exposure along with the bar's owner and two Girls Gone Wild employees, who were each charged with illegally operating a sexually oriented business. •

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]

In the Daily Beast, Danielle Friedman shares the story of Joy Szabo, a woman so frustrated with her recent hospital experience, she took to scrawling a message on her car:

In bright-yellow paint, Joy Szabo wrote: "Page Hospital, enter my body without permission... Sounds like rape to me." She began driving that minivan around her small, rural town as often as possible-attracting the attention of her local paper, and this week, the country. [...]

To make a long, complicated story short: In June, Szabo's hospital adopted a policy prohibiting women who had prior C-sections from delivering vaginally-from having what's technically known as a VBAC, for "vaginal birth after Caesarean." While two of Szabo's kids were born vaginally, her second child was delivered via emergency C-section.

At one time, vaginal delivery was deemed too risky for women who'd had C-sections. Today, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists officially supports VBACs, but stipulates that an OB and an anesthesiologist must be in the hospital during the entire procedure. As a result, many financially strapped or small hospitals-like Szabo's-can't offer VBACs. And that has many moms and natural-birth advocates up in arms.

Much of the controversy revolves around a mother's right to choose what happens to her body in the process of giving birth to child. However, as doctors and hospital administration face tough decisions trying to balance budget constraints with the needs of patients.

For many women, having a C-section "feels out of their control-like there's nothing they can do, and it doesn't matter if they say no," says Desirre Andrews, president of the International Caesarean Awareness Network, known as ICAN, an advocacy group that helps moms have VBACs. Over the past six years, the number of ICAN support groups has ballooned from fewer than 30 to 112 chapters, in 43 states. "I think that's why, to them, it feels like an extreme physical assault."

And these women do have a point - the article goes on to point out c-section rates have skyrockets, and estimates about half of the procedures are medically unnecessary. And while there have been reports of women scheduling C-sections due to busy lifestyles (though that idea has been disputed), the fight for reproductive choice extends far past abortion rights and into the treatment of mothers. After all, as Michelle Demont, the creator of BirthCut.com notes:

"Healthy babies matter, of course, but mothers matter, too," Demont says. "We're not just vessels for babies to be born."

The C-Section Backlash [The Daily Beast]
The Risks of Early C-Sections [Time]
Can We Please Stop Blaming Women for C-Sections? [RH Reality Check]
Official Site [BirthCut]

Earlier:

Mad Men: Blood, Sweat, And Tears

• According to recently released statistics, Florida is where you wanna be if you're a divorcee. Three of the top 10 counties on the list of most divorced residents are located in Florida. However, the divorce capital of the U.S. is located in Indiana. •  In the UK, 46% of children born in the first three months of 2009 were born out of wedlock. The percentage of unwed mothers has risen by over 20% since 1991, and is now at an all-time high. • Accused rapist Rolland Hill didn't want anyone in his Massachusetts town to hear about his charges (aggravated rape and child assault), so he went out Tuesday and attempted to buy as many copies of the local newspaper as he could, thus insuring that his story would make even bigger news, and eventually end up here. • Authorities have busted a dog-fighting ring in Chicago that was being run out of a suburban daycare facility. The Cook County Sheriff said that the children "were playing on a swing set just 10 feet away from a vicious fighting dog and blood-stained floors...To be engaged in this sort of activity is disturbing enough, but to take a chance with anybody's children is reprehensible." • Jaycee Dugard's lawyer has said that she will probably testify against Philip Garrido when the time comes. Dugard is currently in seclusion with her family. •

Todd and her mother have always bonded over food: her mom's a comfort eater, and this becomes something they share. However, as the author grows up, she begins a cycle of comfort eating and yo-yo dieting that, oddly enough, strains their relationship.

Whenever I managed to lose weight, my mother said she was happy for me. But I detected a certain tightness in her voice, or maybe it was simply that I felt guilty about abandoning her: Now that I was a thin person, we no longer shared the extra large buckets of popcorn together. It was as if I'd gotten up from the kitchen table where we'd snacked and talked intimately and left her sitting across from an empty chair. I suspect she believed that my efforts to be thin were a rejection of her, and in a way, she was right. As much as I relished the smaller sizes and all the compliments from friends, every time I refused dessert or went for a run or lifted weights, I was warding off the specter of my mother's body, fighting the fear that I'd wake up one day and discover that somehow I'd become her.

Of course, this isn't really about food. It's about love, projection, acceptance, and female relationships in microcosm. Each relationship is obviously different, but we get so much of our sense of self from our mothers that it's inevitable that it should effect our perceptions - even if it's just the example of someone completely comfortable with herself, or blessedly disinclined to mention such things. These relationships can be famously damaging, or a source of bonding and mutual support - Beyoncé and her mom recently embarked on a joint diet. And the projection goes both ways; I know I've been quick to perceived criticism in comments of my mother's that I think, in retrospect, were just reflections of my own insecurities. A mother may not influence the way you present yourself to the world sexually, but she sure does effect the pattern of your interactions with other women. And, as women, we often couch things in terms of appearance that really have nothing to do with it. "I love your dress," we may use as a mode of introduction in a social situation - something men would never do. We feel we need to comment on the physical, for whatever reason, and a lot of times, this is probablt mirrored in the family. Hortense made a really smart point:

I think mothers and daughters use weight as a means to address, perhaps, the underlying issues behind a gain or a loss. It's easier to make a comment, I guess, about your child's physical appearance ("Are you eating enough? Are you dieting again?") than to ask, "Is something bothering you?" "Are you sad?" "Are you stressed out?"

In Todd's case, the balance of emotional power shifts with their weights. When she puts on some weight and her mother loses some - leaving them the same size - her initial reaction is resentment:

Let's start with the fact that my mother now had what I did not: time to exercise and make healthy meals. I'd be able to lose weight, too, I told myself, if I were a semiretired librarian with a free nutritionist. But it was more than that. For years, I'd blamed my mother for my yo-yoing weight, or, more specifically, for teaching me to associate food with comfort.

But the fact that her mother's thrilled with the new weight, and the author is distraught, ultimately provides a "teachable moment": for the first time, Todd realizes that it's not the food that's really at issue. "After all, thinness isn't the same thing as happiness and solace isn't the same as food." Of course, she only sort of believes that - as does Self, one can't help think nowadays. The piece is still predicated on the assumption that heavy = bad, and that bad habits and depression are the same thing as "weight" when in many ways it seems like two separate issues. The two end up bonding over healthy weight loss, and in a way food - unhealthy food - is still a demon and a villain, albeit one they're vanquishing together. (After all, bonding over food is not in itself bad: it can be wonderful and natural.) But the overall point is well taken: mothers and daughters and weight are a fraught issue. It makes sense: our relationship begins with feeding; we literally derive our nourishment from our mothers. Later, they form our habits, and later still a large part of our sense of self. The operative word is just that - self. (And that's with a small "S," by the way.)

Bonding With Mom Over Comfort Foods [MSNBC via Self]
Beyoncé's Mother/Daughter Diet [Extra]

This morning, The Onion posted yet another fake news article that rings a bit too true: the story of a mother who decides to step her poor kid's school wardrobe up a notch by thinking "outside the box." Her 10-year-old son, she thinks, needs to stand out this year and wow his peers with his sassy new wardrobe: "If Michael had his way, he'd probably run out the door every day in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers," the mother argues, "He doesn't understand that he'd make a much stronger impression on his classmates and teachers if he tried an outfit with more flair, like a nice mock turtleneck with a peach vest."

While I laughed at the article, I also cringed a bit, as it reminded me of the days when my mother and I would hit up the mall in a marathon attempt to get all of my back-to-school shopping done in one day. My little sister would come as well, though she didn't fight much with my mother's fashion choices: she just wanted to go to Pretzel Time and look at the kittens in the pet store window. I was the more difficult shopper, rejecting all of my mother's suggestions as "dumb" or "stupid," and rolling my eyes as she lifted up a lace-collared dress or a flowered top. "Lose the attitude, sister," my mother would frown. "You're lucky to even have nice new back to school clothes." She was right, of course.

The act of back to school shopping is perhaps one of the events in a young woman's life when she begins to pull away from her parents: "I will not wear that, I prefer to wear this," is a statement that both suggests defiance and a desire to express oneself without a parental filter. When you're very young, you let your parents put you in whatever they please; as you grow, you fight it (and often lose) until you get to the age where you really are on your own, mostly because you are making the purchases with your own money, and your parents accept your style as an extension of who you are.

This is not to say that my mother still didn't lay down the law: she rejected many of the hot styles of the day when I was in high school (thank you, Mom) as I was "15, not 45" but compromised by daring to set foot inside of a Contempo Casuals in order to help me pick out trendy but age-appropriate pieces. We fought over what was cool and what most certainly was not, fought over my mother's ideas of style ("You're a blonde, you should wear green. Don't wear black, it's too morbid") and fought over what was or was not appropriate for school.

It was a time for both of us to question each other's views on style, yes, but more than that, it was a bit of a generational challenge, and a way for me to assert myself as an adult, all under my mother's supervision. I suspect she let me win many of these battles on purpose, knowing that someday, I'd question the very rules I was making, and that it's not about the clothes as much as how I feel while wearing them. Still, when I had to go to a wedding recently, I was stuck between a blue dress and a black one. "Wear the blue one," I told myself, "black is just so morbid." Sometimes, even when you fight it, your mother's fashion advice wins out in the end. But I'm still not wearing that dumb lace collar, Mom. You can just forget about it.

Mom Has Some Wild New Ideas For Dressing Son This Year [The Onion]

• A new summer camp has opened in the U.K. that advertises itself as an alternative to all the religious camps run by church groups. The atheists camp says it teaches climbing, canoeing, and rafting, along with tolerance and empathy. If only this has been around when I was expelled from camp YMCA at age 17 for not being "Christian enough." • According to a new study, pregnant women who contract swine flu are four times more likely to be hospitalized than others with the virus. • Doctors have developed a new way to test for chlamydia in men, which requires nothing more than a little pee in a cup. The old way involved a painful urethral swab, and doctors hope that more men will be willing to get tested now that they don't need to have a q-tip stuck up their dicks. • The most horrible story in the news this week just got sadder: Otty Sanchez, the schizophrenic mother who killed and cannibalized her infant baby, may have exhibited warning signs that she was suffering from postpartum depression before the murder. • British TV presenter Nick Knowles tells The Mirror about being a "sex god," which apparently requires drinking Jack and Coke, smoking, and going for a run once in a while. • James von Brunn, who shot a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum last month, is being indicted on hate crime charges. • A man was arrested for sexually assaulting a horse named Sugar — again. He had been arrested for the same crime a year earlier. • A dubious-sounding online study suggests that Canadian men think of physical contact as the boundary between fidelity and infidelity. 16% of respondents thought going to a strip club was cheating, but 65% thought getting an "exotic" massage was. • Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese UN employee, is challenging her arrest in Khartoum for wearing pants in public. If she loses, she could get 40 lashes. • Despite publicity about such "fringe" cosmetic surgeries as vaginal rejuvenation, this and other unusual procedures are only performed on 1.6% of cosmetic surgery patients. • In a substantive and "judicious" criticism, Rush Limbaugh says Andrea Dworkin "could be the poster child" for obesity. • Australian radio host Kyle Sandilands won't apologize for asking "is that the only experience you've had" after a 14-year-old girl revealed on his show that she had been raped. • According to GLAAD, HBO has the most LGBT representation on television, TBS and A&E have the least, and TNT showed the biggest increase. • More women use social networking sites than men, especially among those 45 and older — 4.6 million women over 45 are signed up for Facebook, compared to only 2.6 million men of the same age group. • A study by the amusingly named Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior found that depressed patients saw relief from their symptoms after a weight-loss program. • Pro-choice activist Charles Wright was beaten to the ground outside an Akron abortion clinic on Saturday; you can send him a message of support through NOW. • Porn star and possible Senate candidate Stormy Daniels was arrested Saturday night on domestic violence charges. •

Here's how Salon's Kate Harding summarizes the situation:

In 2006, a woman known only as V.M. in court documents gave birth to a baby girl, J.M.G., at a New Jersey hospital. During labor, V.M. "behaved erratically" and at some point refused to consent to a cesarean section, despite her doctor's concerns about fetal distress. The obstetrician ordered an emergency psychiatric evaluation, which found that "V.M. was not psychotic and had the capacity for informed consent with regard to the c-section." The staff then asked for a second opinion, but before the next psychiatrist could complete his evaluation, the baby was born vaginally. And healthy. Oops...Nevertheless, a social worker at the hospital contacted the Department of Youth and Family Services, and J.M.G. was removed from her parents. Eventually, a judge agreed with DYFS that V.M. and B.G.'s parental rights should be terminated. Documents recently released by the apellate court say flat out that at that point: "the trial judge found that J.M.G. was an abused and neglected child due in part to her parents' failure to cooperate with medical personnel at the time of her birth. V.M.'s refusal to consent to a c-section factored heavily into this decision." And still, V.M. lost the appeal.

On the basis of these facts, the case provoked quite a bit of outrage, and understandably so: as Harding asks, when the parents haven't been allowed to take the baby home, how can they be accused of neglect? But as Harding looked into the facts, she found it was actually a bit knottier than this, and that the parents' behavior might, in fact, be called "erratic." To wit, neither parent showed at court hearings shortly after birth - and refused to deal with social workers on the phone - which is why the baby was placed in foster care. Evaluating psychiatrists claimed that they were "assaulted" when they tried to examine the mother (who had a history of mental illness and going off her meds), others diagnosed the mom as schizophrenic and unfit, and changing stories about whether the mother had, in fact, refused the C-section in the first place confused matters further.

While all these things in sum, from a legal standpoint, might meet the criteria for unfitness, it also seems like a bit of a chicken-and-egg: surely some of the hostility, paranoia and resistance to the process might be attributed to the fact that, I don't know, these people had their child removed, and were caught in a nightmare of red tape? If they weren't unstable to begin with, surely this could have pushed a lot of new parents over the edge. The fact also remains that none of this would even have been in question - their fitness, their mental state, anything - had the mom just gone along with the (unnecessary) C-section. And at the end of the day, that feels wrong.

Now, I understand why doctors err on the side of caution. Nowadays, the climate is such that lawsuits and prohibitive insurance policies are discouraging medical professionals from going into obstetrics, and you can understand why they'd want to avoid any complication that would result in harm to mother or child - as would most mothers. But insisting upon any procedure, even if a doctor thinks it best, is paternalistic. People have the right to refuse procedures - and often do, on, for instance, religious grounds. An appeals court judge agreed with this, in fact - stating that the Cesarean was, contrary to what internet outrage implies, the ultimate issue. A baby was not "taken from mom because she refused a c-section," - save initially - but that is what caused them to look into her mental fitness. The judge seemed to take the view, in my layman's understanding, that this was akin to an unnecessary incision - that led to the discovery of a life-threatening cancer, and allowed the courts an insight into what was best for the baby.

Now, it's hard to know what to believe. My gut tells me that, if parents want their baby, the court's first obligation should be to try to make that work: send a shrink to observe, if you must, but give them a chance to take their baby home first. Even if the parents have refused to cooperate, is foster care still a better solution? The truth is, though, I can't know anything, save that it's a tragedy. And that this whole case arose from too many people rushing to judgment.

Refusing A C-Section = Abuse And Neglect? [Salon]

Is A Woman In Labor A "Person"? New Assaults On Pregnant Women's Civil Rights In A NJ Case [Huffington Post]
Newborn Taken From Mom For Refusal Of C-Section [Babble]

I was picking up a 10-year-old girl — for whom I'd been babysitting for a while — from school, but I'd forgotten my wallet. Her school — and her home — were in my neighborhood, so when she came bounding out of the school, I told her that instead of going straight to her house we were going to stop at my place first. She'd never been to my house, but she said, "sure," but then asked: "Is it one of those buildings where people are hanging out of the windows going 'yo yo yo'?" Hmm. I guess this was a valid question, in a way. But it still stung; basically this little white girl wanted to know if I, a black woman, was taking her to the ghetto. I'd taken her to the park, and to piano lessons, and I assumed that she trusted me — and to some extent, she did — but she was also surprised to find out that my mom's building had a marble lobby and a doorman (hers had neither) and that a pal in her class lived on the floor above us. But I think I was hurt because as odd as it seems, I thought we were friends. And you don't ask friends stuff like that. But her question reminded me of my "place."

This memory was triggered by reading about Just Like Family, a new book by Tasha Blaine, which explores the role of nannies, the people paid to become part of a family.

"I've heard nannies say a lot that you have to love the children like they're your own, but at the end of the day you have to know they really aren't. You are like family, but you are an employee," Blaine tells Salon. For the book, Blaine — who has worked briefly as a nanny — interviewed over 100 nannies, and found that that they fall into two camps: The "career" nannies, and the "amateurs."

Blaine focused on three women: Claudia, an immigrant from Dominica who has left a son behind to work in the New York but faces eviction while watching someone else's two small children all day; Vivian, an American-born, college-educated nanny who works with the International Nanny Association; and Kim, a live-in in Texas going through a divorce and forcing herself to accept that she may never have kids of her own.

Of course, in the book, there are the stories about how, though families welcome these women into their homes, line between what is and what is not appropriate is blurred. for example: One day, Claudia tries to figure out if her employer will be working from home the next day so she can plan a schedule for the children, and she "gingerly" goes to his desk and flips through his calendar. As noted in this New York Times piece, "Unspoken, but implied: She can be present for blowout fights, wash their dirty laundry, and help raise their children, but she can't look at a calendar?" Then there's the time Kim is invited to a baby naming event on her day off — and discovers she's expected to set up all the food, carrying heavy platters up flights of stairs, because she is the help. It's like, just when you think you're something more, you're forced to remember you're something less.

But most interesting is the fact that generally, these are working women working for working women. Says Blaine: "They are women who are often navigating the same issues as the women who hired them. There are class and often race differences, to be sure. But Claudia and her boss are both working mothers." As for why people look down on nannies, Blaine offers, "I think it comes right along with our society undervaluing what it takes to raise children."

And, at this point, Blaine doesn't think she would hire a nanny, even if she could afford to: "I don't know if I'd be very good at navigating that relationship. Part of the problem was, having done my book, I would start talking with them and instinctively wind up getting their life stories. So then I would have the guilt. And I would want to be their friend. And I knew that if I thought they were doing something wrong I would probably not bring it up as well as I should. Day care was a better fit for me."

The Secret Lives Of Nannies [Salon]
How Do Nannies Manage? Gingerly [NY Times]

Recently we linked to a CNN article in which a mom discussed her preference for a boy over a girl baby. Now Tori Spelling is admitting to the same feelings, prior to giving birth to daughter Stella, now a year old. The product of a famously contentious relationship with her own mom, Candi, Spelling apparently worried about replicating the dynamic. "How was I going to handle a girl?" She asks in Cookie.

Of course, now that the daughters exist, both moms have come around, presumably appreciating the differences - and, more to the point, appreciating them as individuals rather than simply defined by their sex. But soon enough, apparently, that sort of journey won't be necessary. Says Babble,

Now, according to a Swedish medical ruling, if a mother or couple discover the gender of their baby and decide "that's what we were hoping for" they can get an abortion on that basis

It seems sad to think that people like Wilson or Spelling who take advantage of this won't get the chance to challenge their assumptions and maybe have something unexpected and wonderful happen - and what's with no one wanting girls? (Selective pregnancy for boys is, after all, chillingly familiar.) Then too, this seems like a very slippery slope: what of those who want to isolate the "gay" gene to guarantee heterosexual offspring?

On the other hand, perhaps any parent who is that single-mindedly eager for a son or daughter might let the disappointment (?) color a child's life, and if that's the only way they feel capable of parenting well, then...But: there's so much chance in having a child at all that the sex is surely almost the least of it! Having children seems to be largely about giving yourself over to a loss of control: to love, to fear, to the unexpected. Control is futile - isn't that the tragedy and the beauty of giving birth to another human being? - and any parent is going to learn that soon enough. Sex would seem like a good place to start.

Don't like Your Baby's Gender? Sweden Rules 'Gender-Based' Abortion Legal [Babble]
Tori Spelling Was Worried About Raising a Girl [Cookie]
Earlier: This Mom: Brave Enough To Admit She Wanted A Boy, Not A Girl