For Mother’s Day, Flower Power Mom is mounting a new resource for later moms and those looking to become moms in their 40s: Informed Choices for Later Mothers. Check it out and pass it on!
13 MayNew Resource for Later Moms to Be
10 MayAnother on the Way!
Happy to say, there’s a new version of READY on the way — due in August. This paperback (with spiffy new cover & Preface) updates the stats and analysis through 2012, with special attention to the recession effect (hint: the later motherhood trend continues, with lots of economic and political fireworks).
You can book your copy by pre-order. Or buy a copy of the hardcover now, for yourself, for one of the later moms (or dads) on your gift list, or for someone considering becoming a parent someday.
Cheers to all!
09 MarSlut Limbaugh and the Virgin Queen
What better state to play out reproductive political battles in than the only one named for a woman’s hymenal status. That’d be Virginia – named for the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth the First of England.
Funny, maybe, but more importantly a reminder that women’s access to direct power has long been linked to their ability to refrain from having … children. Whether or not QE 1 was sexually abstinent (it’s debated), her decision not to marry meant she had no master, no man to take the reign from her hands by assigning her to the world of childbearing. For most women, the fact that sex leads to children (and lots of them) has kept us busy, uneducated and out of decision-making circles for millennia. Reliable and effective birth control transformed the scene that had kept women in political and economic bondage. No wonder there’s pushback. But it’s too late.
Elizabeth was brought to power as a last resort—with no remaining male heir to carry forward her father’s DNA, she looked like a good chance to maintain the family line. But while she did that in herself, she stopped the onward flow of Henry’s genes by refusing to procreate. By practicing an early version of birth control.
With that refusal came a voice in government that she would not otherwise have had—a big voice. No one could forbid her access to her practice, because she was the state. But most women in her day were forced into marriage willy nilly, and little heard from in the public sphere.
Fast forward from 1558 to 2012. The recent rash of contra-contraceptive and anti-abortion efforts on the part of the right aims not just to deny women health care or a sex life, but to actively push us off the path to shared power we’ve been on for the past 150 or so years (since the invention of rubber). Denying young women contraceptives is not just anti-birth control, it’s a coercive pro-natalism, and, within the contemporary context, effectively a silencer.
Men and women have sex (generally together), this is a fact—some more, some less, and they start at different ages. But where in the past having a sex life often limited one’s options in life, especially for women, with birth-control it need not. An evolutionary change! Instead, women and men can delay their families while they go to school and establish at work, and then have kids if they want them within a context of financial stability and active desire to parent.
On the other hand, women denied contraception have more kids, and earlier. They are less likely to finish their degrees—in high school, college or beyond. In our family-unfriendly system, they’re less likely to climb the ladders at work. They won’t trickle up into policy-making roles. They don’t get a seat at the business table or in Congress, so they can’t voice their opinions in cultural debates in ways that will be heard. They can’t change the system to one that might be friendlier to families or that might require enforcement of equal pay laws. Instead men get those seats and that voice. We know what that looks like.
But this is not our world.
Yes, Congress is overwhelmingly male still, but that’s changing, and new assumptions rule. We have female representatives, and they are getting loud. Sandra Fluke, the student who dared protest the power grab portrayed in the panel photo, has been pilloried by “Slut” Limbaugh, notable for his loose ways with language & facts (turnabout’s fair play). Only a leftover from the hoary past could think that word, with its roots in Elizabethan kitchens, would resonate in the old shameful way in the ears of today. Now the condemnation is of him, as he has just grudgingly acknowledged. How much do these guys not understand about the change that has already occurred?! The world in which women depended on men to feed them while they raised the young and ran the house is over, as much as the throwbacks might wish it were not so and work to turn back the clock. That is not moralism; it’s sexism—plain and simple.
The crazy thing about these patriarchs struggling to hold on to the old ways is that they seem not to know how many of their fellow men benefit from birth control too. Not the priests, presumably, those male virgins with their own special access to power through childlessness. But the men who live and love with the women who take the Pill. Who also don’t want 12 kids in 20 years. Who don’t live on the pre-industrial farms where so many kids were once needed. Whose partners bring home a good wage and up the family opportunity level. Who like talking to their similarly educated wives and girl-friends.
Newsflash: it’s not 1558 or even 1958. A woman doesn’t have to be a virgin or a wife to be respected, any more than a man’s value as a citizen is defined by his sexual activity or marital status. Birth control not only allows individuals to make their own personal romantic choices, it serves the nation by giving women and men time to get an education before starting their families, so they can be the skilled workforce the nation needs. Birth control serves the national interest.
And, as of 91.5 years ago, all these female citizens can vote. As can their partners. Helpfully, these episodes are reminding us how important it is that we do so. Birth control has unraveled the social fabric that bound all but the very exceptional women with shackles of shame, violence and penury. There’s a way to go before we weave a pattern of full fairness, but there’s no going back. Good riddance. The queen is dead. Long live the enfranchised citizen.
This post first appeared on RH Reality Check.
01 FebHow Late Is Too Late?, the ongoing question
Here’s more discussion in the “how late is too late?” vein, on a show called Inside E Street. To watch the video, click here.
Is it 50, 60, 75 ….? And is it a different choice if you’re bearing a child via egg donation than if you’re adopting, or taking on the raising of your grandchild? The three people in those three roles may all be the same age — will they be judged differently?
The episode looks in on new-mom-at-51 Lynn Laszewski, as well as mom-in-her-40s Angel La Liberté (whose advocacy blog FlowerPowerMom serves as hub to the later moms community). They both seem to be doing a great job of parenting in the clips!
Bioethicist Bonnie Steinbock and I discuss the dynamics in the second half. I’m on the side of trusting people to get the facts and decide for themselves, with input from responsible (but not prejudiced) advisors and doctors. She doesn’t seem too far from that point of view either, but there’s a doctor with more concerns. See what you think!
19 NovPelosi on Childcare Reform: “We’re Going to Do It”
Nancy Pelosi
For instance, if enough people are tired of the many bad effects of our current lack of a national system of good, affordable child care, and rise in support of Pelosi’s initiative, good things could happen. Including education for the kids, work access for the moms, and jobs for the teachers and construction workers involved in building and running the centers, as discussed here recently…..
So far, few details from Pelosi on how and when, but she points to the health care model. Some dispute on the horizon? Better than no discussion at all. Bring it!
