'Modern Love' But Same Old Perspective

Via Jezebel, this Modern Love column in the New York Times really shows how unequal we really view children and pregnancy. The woman writing the column describes and experience she had with her partner years ago:

I chose to end the pregnancy for what I thought were good reasons, chief among them being my boyfriend’s emphatic unwillingness to be a father. Although his initial reaction to the news was muted, he came out strongly against it once I announced my desire to keep the baby.

Months earlier he’d referred to me as his love, “ma femme,” he called me. But lately things had been dicey.

I argued weakly with him that we could make it work. Without him, I didn’t see a way forward. I had no savings, and no family around to support or encourage me. I was terrified, and not just about being a single parent. I was afraid that with a baby I’d be off the market for good. And I wanted a husband as much as I wanted a baby, if not more. Maybe I knew instinctively that I wasn’t cut out for single parenthood. And I wanted what I wanted: husband, home, baby, in that order.

Even before the pregnancy test I’d been hinting at commitment, and he’d been making evasive noises. We were in “turnaround,” as they say in show business. From the moment I told him I was pregnant, it became my “problem,” as in “What are you going to do about the problem?”

In this scenario, the man simply is unwilling to take on any of the burden of sexual activity. His partner became pregnant, and he asked her what she was going to do about the "problem."

It's true that men are still broadly financially responsible for child support, whether they plan the pregnancy or not, but it's often a long uphill legal battle that can destroy any amicable post-relationship feelings. Becoming a single mother is scary, and not every woman feels like she can do it. That puts women like the author of this Modern Love column in the difficult position of trying to persuade her partner into fatherhood.

It's not an easy battle, but if we can start thinking about the burden of birth control, pregnancy, and abortion as not just issues for women to deal with but also for men to consider when they have sex with their partners, fewer women would be put in difficult positions like this. It's a difficult culture to change, since such things have always been considered the burden of women. Perhaps once male birth control becomes more mainstream, men will begin to think about this differently.

Don't Blame Mom

I really liked reading Thin Is the New Happy last year. It was funny, well written, and honest about Valerie Frankel's struggle with dieting. But there was one thing that bothered me about it. The book opened with a passage describing her mother marching her to a scale and shaming her for gaining weight. The whole blame-the-mother's behavior a bit Freudian for the legitimate and pervasive problems that are presented by eating disorders. And today, Kate Harding presents a new study that hopes to put the motherhood blame for eating disorders to rest, once and for all.

It seems that a new study from the UK shows that eating disorders, like many other mental illnesses, are tied to genetics. They even allude to a potential screening process that can be put into place for parents and teachers to watch those prone to eating disorders more carefully, and to counteract dangerous behaviors before they become an ingrained part of a girl's behavior.

The study's authors say that eating disorders are something a child can be predisposed to, much like ADHD, dyslexia, or depression. So rather than blaming mothers for being too hard on their children, we can note that these behaviors likely happen because the mothers are genetically predisposed to the disorders themselves. It just goes to show that the more we learn about how these things work, the easier it can be to identify the causes and start the path to prevention.

Is There Such a Thing as a Pro-Life Feminist?

I didn't realize how intense the debate over whether pro-life women are allowed to call themselves feminists was until I went to WAM! this weekend. Lisa Stone, founder of BlogHer, a pro-women blogging coalition, put forth the argument that feminists need to be less restrictive about how they apply the label and asked if there was a "check box" for calling oneself a feminist.

Today, Jessica Valenti posted this video from Feminists for Life, saying that a fairly common question she's gotten when speaking at college campuses lately is if pro-life women are allowed to call themselves feminists. The debate, it seems, is peaking up all over the place.

What I find so interesting about this argument is that it doesn't ask if women can call themselves feminists if they don't support work/life balance policies, or if they don't support equality in the workplace. It seems obvious if these women don't support such things that they aren't feminists. But this debate reveals that everything is ultimately about the reproductive rights debate. The question about who is allowed to call herself a feminist is ultimately about choice.

The video that Jessica posted is a speech given by Karen Shablin, member of Feminists for Life, talks about her conversion. But some of the key parts of her speech are the most subtle ones. She says that she believes life begins at conception, something put forth by the personhood movement. It is also something that, if codified into law, would prevent women from accessing not just abortion but also birth control, Plan B, and subject miscarriages to investigation. These are the details that pro-life groups leave out when they advocate for their version of "feminism."

I tend to agree with Jessica -- what this is about is actually a legal question. Once groups decide that they want to legally restrict the rights of other women to have an abortion, the result is not just that they don't necessarily deserve to call themselves feminists, but it becomes much more serious. They're attempting to co-opt the word feminism.

This shows how powerful the feminist movement is becoming. Despite the fact that NOW members are bemoaning the fact that young women today "won't use the word" but if the word feminism were declining in popularity, it's unlikely that pro-lifers wouldn't even bother with it. It is precicely because feminism is gaining so much popularity and momentum that anti-choice women want to co-opt the word to make it mean something different. The tactics of groups like Feminists for Life might be different than those used in the past, but it's the same old stragegy of trying to deminish the work of legitimate feminists out there.

Must-Read Feminist Books this Spring

These are the three awesome books by feminists that have been released this spring that you should get your hands on and read, cover to cover:

• Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement by Kathryn Joyce
  
• The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti
  
• The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World by Michelle Goldberg
  
  
  

Georgia's 'Birth Crisis'

Today Tyler Cowen linked to this article about how Georgia is seeing a slight spike in Caucasian fertility rates after "the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II" promised to personally baptize the child of two parents, naturally, born in Georgia.

There are all kinds of problems with this scenario. First, it's a little unsettling that they're making a concerted effort to out-birth the non-Caucasian segment of the population in Georgia. I also find it extremely interesting that the head of the church has the outright title of patriarch. It's also extremely typical of socially conservative religions to only "count" the children of married parents, excluding those children born to single mothers.

That aside, it's all well and good for churches to try to encourage their membership, except that they're going about it in completely the wrong way. Georgia might be seeing a slight birth boom now, but demanding that the faithful increase the number of children they produce, with a celebrity reward, isn't sustainable. The notion that women stay at home to take care of children is becoming increasingly the way of the past, even in foreign countries. Expecting women to continue to pop out children while they need to help support their families (and having more children requires more money) isn't a good solution to the fertility problem.

What Michelle Goldberg found in her new book, The Means of Reproduction, is that countries that actually have the best birth rates among those with the great decline, are countries with the most social program support for families: state-sponsored child care, lengthy maternity leave, paternity leave, paid family leave, and state-sponsored medical care. Countries like Sweden and France are actually doing the best to replace their populations of all the those that are suffering from the so-called great birthrate decline.

So while it might seem that a surge in the population of a small, extremely religious group of people are the solution to a perceived birth crisis, what really does the best to encourage birth rates for everyone is a set of social policies that support families, no matter if they have two parents or not.

Flooding Along the Red River

Melissa's post at Kitchen Table brings back some memories for me. You see, I grew up in northwestern Minnesota, about an hour east of Grand Forks, North Dakota and about an hour and a half north and east of Fargo. Flooding happens sometimes along the Red River sometimes, and it was just as bad in 1997. That year, the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, Minnesota (the two cities on either side of the Red River) were almost wiped out by the flooding that year. Students from my local high school took time off of school to volunteer filling and stacking sandbags to hold back the rising river. In the end, many people lost their homes, destroyed by flood damage. Some, like my aunt and cousins that lived there, left for good. Others stayed to rebuild. Thanks to a combination of support and public funding, the cities were able to rebuild, bigger than before.

It's hard to say what might happen in Fargo this year. Fargo is a bigger city than Grand Forks. I remember that in 1997, holding back the river seemed a nearly impossible task. I, like Melissa, have my heart with those in Fargo.

Supreme Court Watch

Via Alyssa Rosenberg, Elena Kagen has been confirmed as the first female solicitor general. There has been some speculation that this could clear the way for her to become a nominee to the Supreme Court, should an opening arise.