Those who bash women for 'delaying motherhood' are hypocrites, don't understand human reproduction

Having reached the advanced age of mid-thirties, my attention is called quite often to articles and opinion pieces in the news regarding us stubborn, career-driven harpies who refuse to reproduce until we are good and ready, only to find that after the witching year of 35, things aren't so easy. Your eggs are old, lady! Give up and get a cat. Serves you right, anyway. The Daily Fail is full of these types of pieces - 'personal interest' stories about some poor 40-year old woman who would give up all her success, designer shoes and non-essential organs if only she could go back and have a kid at 20. Or worse: a woman who did manage to have children after 35 or 40, but is now too old and decrepit to chase them up into trees or stay awake during Mommy and Me.

Now I can't be strictly sure that there are more such stories than before, (since when I was a wee sprinbok in my twenties concerned only with non-procreative sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, and that f**king career, I likely would not have noticed them anyway), but from all the apocalyptic yelling going on about it of late, it would certainly seem as if humanity is in decline: no one is having any babies, and the end is nigh, and it's all your infertile fault, thirty-something lady. Except, not so much. In the US, where much of the yelling is happening, infertility rates are on the decline, and not because more people are having fertility treatments; this latter statistic has remained flat since 2002. In the UK, adult infertility numbers are being linked more and more to male infertility, with "male factors now accounting for 30 percent of fertility problems - the same as female factors". Even in Europe, where falling fertility rates (ratio of live births in an area to the population of that area) since 2008 are being flagged as alarming, they are closely linked in the research to the economic recession. That is, countries like Spain and Greece which fared among the worst saw the sharpest decreases in fertility rates, while those with better performance recorded no change or even increases. In other words, it's less about women's 'selfish choices' (whatever those are) and more about real or perceived and/or future financial constraint. Even the Daily Fail is forced to admit the relationship between financial situation and reproductive decisions. A similar argument can be made in Latin America and the Caribbean, where fertility rates are in fact falling, though in general not yet having reached the below replacement levels of 'developed' countries. The region as a whole still reflects Bloom's 'demographic dividend' - with an economically active population that is greater than the dependent population - but this may not last much longer, particularly in the Eastern Caribbean. Still, high levels of migration in the working age population are more likely behind this than Caribbean women's refusal to have children.

And this new debate, if not presented as willful non-compliance in the business of populating the earth, is presented as emerging wisdom to fill some gap in knowledge: women have simply had the wrong information. Hey ladies, I know you thought you could wait forever and carry out your own, selfish lady-business before reproducing, but nuh uh, missy, NEW RESEARCH shows you're about to expire. As someone who has owned a uterus for over thirty years, let me say this: we know. I'm not saying that every woman everywhere is in possession of an identical body of knowledge. In fact, we know this not to be true, which is part of the reason sharing information on sexual and reproductive health and access remains important. But a high percentage of the target audience for this blame-a-thon - professional women with tertiary or advanced technical education - already. Know. They are all too aware of their declining fertility. This is one of those cases in which knowledge on its own cannot translate into action. In simpler terms: even armed with this information, what would you have them do? Certainly not run out and fall pregnant by some random, which itself attracts its own brand of she's-a-witch vilification, and is the basis of much urban legend. Everyone knows someone who knows someone whose dressmaker's neighbour's domino partner was tricked into fatherhood by some desperate thirty-something. Always something with these women - either they're 20 and poking holes in condoms to trap a cricketer (cause we all know how deep cricketers are rolling), or 30 and going off the pill so their boyfriend will marry them goddamit, or 40 and having one night stands with friends/strangers, then spiriting away their sperm. Tricky tricksters.

The thing is, every reproductive choice a woman makes at this age is criticized.
Happily child-free? You're selfish and just want to keep your flat belly and boozing ways.
Unhappily child-free? Your fault. You used to be selfish and just wanted to have your career, flat belly and boozing ways.
Child-free, single and trying to conceive? Hoor! Children are for couples. And what about your poor, fatherless child? Single mothers are everything that's wrong with the world. You're selfish and just want to have a child to love you.

Herein lies the hypocrisy. And even had they had this knowledge earlier, before it was Too Late, the same applies.

Me explico. Growing up in Barbados, getting pregnant was the worst thing you could do. Not just as a teenager, but anytime before you had secured your place as a DoctorLawyerBankmanager. I'm serious. The Worst Thing. Teenage or 'early' pregnancy was blamed for all the ills of society, directly or indirectly. Boys are under-performing in school? Teenage pregnancy (and girls' sexuality). Never mind that the boys' (teenage fathers') asses are sat in classrooms while the girls are the ones run out of school with pitchforks. The dubious problem of society losing its morals? The dubious explanation of teenage pregnancy. Drowning at Miami Beach? Teenage pregnancy. Winston Hall escaped from jail again? Teenage pregnancy. And so on. It doesn't matter what issue is at hand. Invariably, in any meeting anywhere on the island, someone is going to raise his hand confounded that we are four minutes into the session and no one has brought up the scourge of teenage pregnancy.

None of this was lost on the generation of women now in our mid-thirties. In the Caribbean, for children of the working class, education - and I'm not talking just high school I'm talking first or advanced degree - is the handful of magic beans. You had better get it and stick with it until you can prove to people that your family is officially out of the working class. So for women, pregnancy is to be avoided at all costs even into your twenties. Of course, people get pregnant in their early twenties and are not made to wear a scarlet A, but it is hoped in general that you get your papers before you get your pickney. And then there's the whole wedlock business. I noticed growing up that the least Christian of Caribbean people could utter the phrase 'out of wedlock' with the highest amount of reverence - for wedlock. The single mother business was nothing to be admired, so there's another delay. No babies yet. Get your papers, get your husband. And this is what I mean about how reproduction works. In general and for most of history, for a heterosexual woman, if you want a biological kid, you find a man. He has the rest of the genetic material required. One cannot just grow a baby by sheer force of will. So this emphasis on the selfishness and willfulness of women is just silly. Are we supposed to be selective in partner for all other purposes save for that of reproduction? It seems to me the place to be most selective.

At lunch with an older woman friend recently, I saw a man she knew say to her, in disgust: "Why don't you go and get your children? What else you waiting for?" She said, without hesitation, "I going when I leave here. Where they selling?" And that's really the point. Apart from the inappropriateness of commenting on a person's reproductive choices, have we forgotten the several variables involved? Some of which we have all actively enforced throughout that woman's life cycle and until this point? I can't help but consider that in small societies such as ours, we see women who have 'opted for' marriage and/or children by 35 as well-behaved, and we are pleased. Whether that has meant a great, old-fashioned love and family story (I know some) or settling for marriage to some less-than-adequate (in her estimation) dude so babymaking could ensue, or something else, we can more readily live with a woman who has accepted misery as a cost of motherhood, than with one who has, for whatever reason, not chosen motherhood at all.

Most readers could guess my private and public position: child-free by choice? Ok. Child-free and trying at 39? Ok. Adopting? Surrogacy? Platonic co-parenting? Whatever. Not only are the success stats not as dire as the flailing people suggest, but there are several paths to happiness.

But what strikes me is that just as a generation of women hits 35-44 and are grappling with their reproductive choices, we are now, conveniently, getting over some of our puritanism just enough to discover that in fact, 'early' pregnancy is not the worst fate that could befall a woman and society. No pregnancy is. I tell you. If it isn't one thing - and by 'thing' I mean false set of values based on nothing but ascribed to all - it's another.

Newsclips and Quotes [Strange New Phenomena]

This is a real item in the Nation Newspaper today:

Why are so many men keen to enter relationships with single mothers, and what can these women do to encourage these partners to marry them?

Share your views below or by calling or texting your comments to telephone number [246] 262-5986, or e-mail us at sankaprice@nationnews.com.

I think we should all call or email Sanka Price to tell him exactly what is patently absurd about everything going on above, starting with the framing of single motherhood as some kind of scourge on humanity with which no reasonable person would want to associate, hence the certainty of some Strange Modern Phenomenon afoot. And including the assumption that a single mother in possession of (presumably) no fortune and (certainly) no self respect must be in want of a husband.

Researching attitudes about mothering and feminism

Researchers Mindy Erchull and Miriam Liss at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia are engaged in a study examining attitudes about mothering and feminism. They've developed a survey to collect data from women over the age of 18, including "feminists, non-feminists, mothers, and non-mothers", and are asking our help in gathering information.

You can find the survey here:
http://ff5umw.com/motherconsent.html

It takes about 15 minutes, and you can repost the link anywhere you like. Wear it on a t-shirt, leave it in a fogged-up mirror in an airport bathroom, you know, spread the word however you wish. Given the number of surveys I've asked poor, unsuspecting strangers to complete, I always like to help people out. (Who knows - maybe Miriam and Mindy will shed some light on the whole feminist, baby-hating movement that apparently exists.)

"Too indulgent" mother denied access to her children

Help me. Because I'm having a really difficult time understanding exactly what on earth is going on here. I'm going to have to post most of the article, because it's just paragraph after paragraph of wtf [emphasis mine]:

A COURT has denied the former wife of a rich City financier all access to their three children after she was found to be turning them against him.

In an extraordinary ruling, the woman, who was also judged to be too indulgent a parent, has been legally barred from seeing her children for three years. She was jailed for approaching one of them in the street and telling him she loved him in breach of a court order. She is facing a possible return to jail this summer for posting a video about her plight on the internet.

The woman judge presiding over the case justified banning contact between the mother and her children because they were being placed in “an intolerable situation of conflict of loyalties resulting in them suffering serious emotional harm”.

During supervised visits with her, the children made serious allegations about their father which were later shown to be unfounded. Social workers believed the mother was either prompting them to make the claims or they were saying them just to please her.

A psychiatrist who assessed the case said the mother “loved her children” but had harmed their development by trying to be always “available” to them.

The judge said she had “serious concern about [the mother] infantilising the children, encouraging them to make complaints about the father and encouraging them to want to take an inappropriate part in these proceedings”.

The mother breached an injunction excluding her from her children’s lives by approaching her son in public. She also sent texts to her former husband, including one saying she was sorry. Another said she would do whatever he wanted to get access. She was sentenced to a month in prison.

Custody cases are messy, and it's not unheard of that children, confused, make unfounded allegations against one parent, or even that angry parents seek to influence their children against the other party. But this is the kind of dysfunction that merits court-mandated parenting classes or restricted, supervised visits. Surely it doesn't merit removing all access to the children.

"The woman judge presiding over the case justified banning contact between the mother and her children because they were being placed in “an intolerable situation of conflict of loyalties resulting in them suffering serious emotional harm”."

That's called divorce: there will be conflict of loyalties. The role of both parents and the courts is to minimize the harm caused by this conflict, not to place all blame with one party and imprison her. And if she was suffering post-partum depression that, according to her, contributed to the unfolding of these events, then she ought not to have been punished for it, but rather supported through it along with her family. If there was a court order in place barring access to the children, and it was breached, then this mother has to accept responsibility for that, and one might argue that she knew the consequences of not adhering to the law, and contacted the children anyway. But to spend a month in jail for telling her son she loved him, and to face further jail time for posting a video on the internet? Something about this does not sit right with me.

"A psychiatrist who assessed the case said the mother “loved her children” but had harmed their development by trying to be always “available” to them."

That devil woman. I think that at worst, when I picture the most exaggerated incarnation of who this woman might be, I see someone in need of some psychiatric attention and help with parenting. But absent other details, it seems like three years' removal from her children is a bit of overkill. Still, I have not reproduced. So maybe I'm missing some analytical skill that from the point of view of the other parent, would deem this ruling a fair one. I submit myself to your enlightenment.


Read an article containing more details and an interview with the mother here.

And finally, a bit of musical nostalgia in honour of Mother's Day

So my mother got us the Little Shop of Horrors video back in the day, and she, my sisters and I watched it together somewhere between 9 172 and one meelion times. The following clip was one of my favourite parts, because even though "Feed Me" and the crazy dentist bit with Steve Martin and Bill Murray got all the attention, Skid Row had all the vocal chops. Tichina Arnold and Tisha Campbell-Martin are so much more than Pam and Gina in this film.

I know every part of this production: every single lyric, bit of dialogue, harmony. It gave me pleasure. My mother would sometimes come into the front house (that's 'living room' for you outsiders) and say "Want to watch the plant?" which of course meant the film. And duh(!) we always wanted to watch The Plant. Who wouldn't want to watch The Plant? So watch this bit of The Plant with me. Sing it, Gina:

In which I promptly remember things I had just forgotten

Also, my mother worked for many years at a care facility for young people with special learning and developmental needs. For some of the others who worked there, it seemed it was just a job (which is fair enough); but for my mother, it was an opportunity to build really special relationships. Some of the children didn't have parents in their lives, and weren't very acquainted with a home life that was different from the slightly regimented, honestly boring as rocks care home. So sometimes my mum would bring them home for weekend visits or have them come out with us when she felt we were doing something they would enjoy.

One of the boys fell in love with her, and vice versa. He came to stay all the time. And at first, even though we had been taught to be polite to everyone, we really didn't care for him. He was about our age, so he wasn't cutesy to us the way a baby might be. And he was loud. He also had a lot of love to give, which was kind of the point, what my mother was trying to give him an outlet for, but we didn't really want it. He was very talented - he sang and played the keyboard - and was always making something with his hands. He had been born with a condition that caused the digits on his hands not to form or move separately, and was also born with one leg and wore a prosthetic limb. Sometimes the prosthesis would hurt, because he was still growing, so he would remove it and drag it around the house behind him.

Some of this was shocking for us at first, and once or twice when we complained to my mother about his noise or effusiveness, she would explain to him that sometimes people needed a little quiet time, or remind him about inside voices. But for the most part, she was having none of it from us. She knew it was our privilege talking - our unwillingness to be made in the least bit uncomfortable. And she gave us a huge, steaming pile of 'get over it'. She didn't have to say much. But I think the fact that our whole lives, we were shown that you have to share your world and your space and your kindness with other people, that she removed any sense of entitlement from us by opening our home up to others that she also entitled to what we had, was one of the most important lessons of my childhood.

That was 20 years ago. My mum is still working with children and still taking them home. We warn her that this is a different time, and one has to be careful of misunderstandings that might create a difficult situation with parents or authorities. Because even with the best intentions, it has been known to happen. All she says is that she hasn't had a misunderstanding yet. But she has enjoyed and helped a lot of wonderful children. And we can't really argue with that.

In which I boast about my pet goat, my library tickets, and my inimitable mamá

It occurs to me that since Sunday is Mother's Day (Mothering Sunday in the UK was March 22, but my family celebrates the May Mother's Day. Also, Mothering Sunday is kind of a creepy name. It sounds like we're all meant to go out and nurse and diaper whatever we can find - maybe a frog or the postman or David Hasselhoff), I should say something inspired about motherhood, or name my favourite mother characters in film or TV, or write a poem, a skit. Something.

My best friend just became a mother, and I was moved in unexpected ways when I heard that her daughter was born. That should give me an angle, right? Not so much. It does give me a beautiful new child in my life, and another person to call on Sunday, but no useful angle for a Mother's Day post. (I don't so much like the Mother's Day phone call, because after the somewhat weak "Happy Mother's Day!", you feel like you're meant to keep talking about motherly stuff, and I'm not sure what that would be. And it's a bit like that birthday call where you ask "So what does everyone have planned for you today?" and if the answer is "nothing", what can you say besides "I'm sorry your kids suck"? So I stick to calling only people I'd want to talk to anyway. The others get overcompensatingly exuberant e-cards.)

So I thought and I thought about my own mother and all the things I've learnt from her and what has changed about our relationship and all those things we've all thought about millions of times. I thought about how she always made all our clothes for special occasions, and about how that was the treat, not store-bought clothes. When my mother decided she could find the time to make us an outfit, then sat attentively while we described how we wanted a side zip but under no circumstances was it to be a back zip, and a scrunchie to match - the scrunchie was very important - and other ridiculous but crucial details, it was like Christmas. And I thought about how she would wake us in the middle of the night to make sure it fit because she wanted to sleep too, you know, and she wasn't the one going to Andre's birthday party tomorrow. And we would drip out of bed bleary-eyed and (silently, of course) grumpy, wait for the clothes to be pulled on, and then watch in gleeful amazement as we were transformed before our very eyes into Sheena Easton or Lisa Lisa or Ashley from Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Which was of course what we were going for.

And I thought too about Saturday morning trips to the library, when my mother would hang about talking to the library staff about what new books they had gotten in, while we chose our reading for the week. And then we would check the books out ourselves with our very own tickets and feel important because other people's parents were choosing and checking the books for them and wouldn't even let them keep their own tickets. I mean...pfft..what kind of amateur night were they running?

These two habits and passions of my mother's, clothes and books and everything associated with them, were without doubt passed on to me. Less lasting was her interest in farming and gardening. My mother was big on family food security and earning extra for our well-being, which is why I got all warm and smooshy inside when I saw Michelle Obama planting her White House kitchen garden - what we also called our backyard plot. But my mother didn't stop there. she never stopped anywhere. Soon we had chickens, pigs, sheep and all manner of livestock, and quickly realized that this was our deal too: bringing the sheep in from pasture (incidentally, black bellied sheep are given to running around your legs in circles when they're on ropes. So yay for surprise sheep games after school!); helping kill and pluck the chickens; choosing which piglets we would sell on and which we would keep. And when I started to question the whole canine/livestock inequality dynamic - whereby dogs ended up in our photographs and sheep in our stew - I was given a pet goat named Mars, helped my father build a pen for it, and was invited to explore the kind of relationship I might have with pet livestock, which wasn't as exciting as one might imagine.

And I realize that the thing most striking about these examples and about our relationship overall, is the amount of agency and personal responsibility that was involved on our end, as children; the extent to which my mother showed us that it was our thought, our imagination, our creativity and work that would determine the kind of outfits we wore, the food we ate, the kinds of journeys we could take through books and relationships, and the kinds of lives we would live. Even though we were young, we had a space to collaborate with her, and input that was valued. Of course, it was a lot less valued when it came to say, what time we could come home at night, but it counted in the important places. And my mother isn't my best friend these days, which might sadden some. But I don't think she has to be. I have lots of great friends; but there's only one woman on earth to whom I feel an unspeakable connection borne of the independence that she both taught me and allowed me in those early years. And wherever our relationship goes from here, for me, that is something whose value cannot be measured.

Is it coming? 'Cause I am

Viv Groskop writes in The Guardian today about women who climax during labour. The writer talks to Amber Hartnell, a mother whose natural, water-birthing process is featured in the documentary film Orgasmic Birth, and who says she did not actually experience pain during labour, but rather, intense [orgasmic] sensations. The film examines such experiences in the broader context of ""undisturbed birth" - natural labour in a home setting, without drugs, or even gas and air."

According to the article, and as one would expect, the notion of orgasm during birth is meeting with disapproval and opposition in several places [emphasis mine]:

The response to the film has been one of both fascination and horror. For many women the idea that childbirth can be orgasmic is at best hippyish and possibly offensive - a notion that at once piles pressure on to women to find pleasure in giving birth, and seems to deny the pain the vast majority experience. One heavily pregnant blogger writes that she "can understand pain being natural in childbirth and letting your body take over and making it as enjoyable as you can. But orgasmic? No. Whoever finds that orgasmic needs help, in my opinion." Another suggests that they "wouldn't like to think my mother had an orgasm while giving birth to me."

I'm not sure why this would be a problem. What does it mean that my mother may have climaxed while giving birth to me? Does this writer feel like she had sex with her mother? Because if we're counting being forced out of someone's uterus, I need to change the date on that "had sex for the first time today! w00t!" entry in my diary.

The film's producer, birth educator Debra Pascali-Bonaro, says a woman's ability to feel intense physical pleasure during childbirth is "the best-kept secret". So well-kept that many women would argue that the phenomenon does not exist. There is debate over whether these women have really been experiencing a sexual climax, or are simply having some form of sado-masochistic response, mistaking intense pain for pleasure. After some critics in the US wrote the idea off as a "fairytale", one of the film's orgasmic subjects, Tamra Larter, a mother of two from New Jersey, clarified that she "felt something resembling an orgasm" and that the sensations she experienced "were something different than sex, but similar enough I feel OK using the word orgasmic."

G-spots were a 'fairytale' too. In any event, I don't see that this precise definition matters, or why we feel the need to invalidate what women say they experience because it makes us squirmy. Is it that we would only like a woman to achieve orgasm during a narrow set of controlled circumstances in which she is 'being satisfied by' a man either directly during partner sex or indirectly while presumably thinking of a man during self-pleasuring? (People who think this way tend to account for lesbian relationships as man-haters trying to approximate the heterosexual act of sex, so men are pretty much central to that orgasm too.) If so, there are some spin bikes in various gyms around the world that may have to be brought in for questioning.

Or is it that childbirth should hurt, g-dammit. Otherwise, without the fear of (i) being forced to give birth (which is the 'children as punishment' agenda that some pro-life advocates advance) and (ii) the accompanying excruciating pain, what's to stop women from having all the sex they want? The earth would descend into madness!

Perhaps some of us are just plain uncomfortable with mixing sex and childbirth. It's not like they are in any way associated with...oh wait.

Women in the documentary have been criticised online for kissing their husbands too much during labour, which some viewers find distasteful.

So in a scenario where people are coming out of my vagina, it's kissing my partner that you find too intimate to watch. Got it. I'd imagine these are the same people who find swearing during contractions unladylike. You would think that further partner bonding during labour would be encouraged.

British birth specialist Sheila Kitzinger, who was also interviewed for the piece, has an explanation for the discomfort people feel over the issue:

"It crosses the margin of decency - which I think is wrong," says Kitzinger, "We're told that sex is different from childbirth. In the same way, it is considered indecent to experience intense physical satisfaction from breastfeeding."

I agree, as the article acknowledges, that orgasm during childbirth should not be held up as some standard for women to achieve, and of course we don't want to encourage the "Well my ex-wife orgasmed during labour. She loved it. What's wrong with you?" dialogue. That would be insane. But people need to get over the policing. If I ever find myself in labour, and happen to climax when all I'm expecting are paroxysms, rings of fire and general torture, then I say bring on the O.

Hating mothers: the new American pastime

Along with shoulder pads and shiny jumpsuits, mother-hating is having a banner year. Madeline Holler's Babble article 50 Moms We Love To Hate is a strange kind of witch-burning festival that isn't tongue-in-cheek enough to make it seem harmless. That is to say, if Holler was trying to satirize our obsession with having opinions on the way women mother, the satire isn't effective enough that people wouldn't take it seriously. (At no. 50, she names one of the moms we love to hate as "Moms who hate on other moms", but it's at the end of the article, so it comes off as kind of a 'Haha fooled you!' after the damage has been done. We don't think that the writer necessarily actively hates all these women, but she doesn't exactly distance herself from the hostility either, so presumably she's doing her share of mom-hating as well.)

Just like Maxim's Unsexiest Women and Least Appealing TV Women and Women Too Ugly to Live (oh wait, was that not one?) lists, this one encourages us to hate women on the basis of their (only) purposes as women: eye candy or incubator of humanity. Somewhere, someone is right now compiling a list of 30 Women Whose Meatloaf Sucks Most.

Holler's list is an antithetical mishmash of women who, according to our idealist notions of motherhood, are either getting it very wrong, or getting it too perfect for anyone to possibly compete. In a time when the way we perform as mothers is up for judgment by all - when absent mothers are blamed for emotionally unavailable men, single mothers are blamed for criminals and overbearing mothers are blamed for the gays - it does seem like a list of offenders would be the next logical development. I think the pillories are coming soon.

Unsurprisingly, the revoltingly-nicknamed 'Octomom' Nadya Suleman tops the list, with Angelina Jolie in second and the prolific bearer of offspring Michelle Duggar at number three. Notice the trend? You must have kids, but not too many. Otherwise, you're just being smug and greedy. Women should only be reasonably fertile.

All the stereotypes of why women are supposed to hate other women are also represented here. Apparently, we hate Heidi Klum because three weeks after giving birth she was back on the catwalk: "She explained her lack of flab as "good genes." We hate that she just won't tell us it was surgery", and Kelly Ripa disgusts us because she's a hot, privileged mother who 'pretends' to mundane tasks like laundry. Will no one stop this insanity? Will no one speak up for those of us who enjoy seeing happy, confident women going about their business not ashamed of being hot? Not all of us despise attractive women and take pleasure in people looking like crap. So please keep your pitiful schadenfreude to yourselves.