Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
Homebirth and “extreme” moms on 20/20
Having two midwife-attended home waterbirths I was looking to this 20/20 feature on “extreme” moms with a great deal of trepidation. They advertised a program with segments about orgasmic birth, “reborn” babies, extended breastfeeding, “serial” surrogacy and homebirth.
Which of these things is not like the other? I’m on board for reborns and a dozen surrogacies as extreme behavior (though not impressed with portrayal of these women as freak shows). Orgasmic birth is not necessarily a choice, let alone an extreme behavior – it is what it is; too bad more of us don’t get to experience that way of birthing.
Extended breastfeeding until the age of eight? Yeah, extreme.
But midwife-attended homebirth IS NOT an example of “extreme” mothering.
Just the fact of its inclusion in this program did not bode well for how they’d handle the topic. So, anxious and frustrated before the show even began, we tuned in.
Orgasmic birth
The orgasmic birth segment was the best of the show (and that’s damning with faint praise). The other segments were incredibly biased, sensationalistic, judgmental. The whole premise of this show was misogynistic (let’s paint women, especially mothers, as weirdos so you lot can point and laugh).
Extended breastfeeding
The extended breastfeeding segment wasn’t *really* about extended breastfeeding. It was about statistical outliers – people so far off the curve that they would be considered… extreme. No false advertising here lol. My gripe with this, aside from the aforementioned problem I have with the entire premise of this show, is that mainstream society already thinks breastfeeding past a few months old is extreme and wacky. Which puts pressures on mamas to make decisions for their children that are not necessarily in the best interest for their health and well-being just to conform.
If ALL babies weaned on their own biologically-appropriate timeline, you’d have an extreme few weaning between 6-12 months and another extreme few weaning upwards of 8 yo. Outliers. The average age of weaning when it is child-led is between ages 2-4. (That’s me nursing my two year old toddler circa 2002, she weaned completely not too many months after the shot was taken.) Not extreme. But now we’ve got this show painting all moms who nurse past the first year painted with the same outlier brush.
Worse than all that, the developmental “expert” they featured was an IDIOT trotting out the children “need to be taught independence” myth. Raise your children secure in their attachment for you and you will not need to teach them independence. They are more likely to take risks when they don’t feel insecure about their parents’ love. And, incidentally, the healthiest adult mother/child relationships I know of are those where the adult child can STILL count on their mamas for comfort and support. ♥ Seeking support and comfort from your mother does not necessarily equal dependence on her. Mr. So-Called-Expert is neither informed nor analytical enough for me to have any respect for his opinions.
The mom nursing her six year old son, on the other hand, came off as sensible, reasonable and intelligent – an excellent counterpoint to the so-called expert of developmental psychology whose outdated views on “detachment parenting” contribute to much of the dysfunction we have in society today.
Check out Custom Made Milk for an even more detailed analysis of this segment.
Reborn dolls
Who cares? Not my thing and yeah, those women seem pretty weird, but it’s a harmless eccentricity. Those dolls are works of art – wow!
“Serial” surrogacy
Who cares? As Scott pointed out, most professional athletes use their bodies to make a living and take far greater risks with their health (boxing??) with exactly zero philanthropic motivation. And they are revered.
Ah, on to the homebirth segment…
First, they totally edited the footage from Ricki Lake’s movie so it looked like Abby Epstein was a failed homebirth emergency, when, in fact, she went into preterm labor with a breech presentation. Unless she was parking at the hospital for weeks, this “transport” to the hospital would have happened regardless of where the birth was planned. At least she had the advantage of having a professional healthcare provider attending her before she went to the hospital.
They don’t make a clear delineation between unassisted birth and midwife-attended homebirth. Unassisted birth is an extreme choice, but that choice does not represent the way most families choose homebirth. Again, outlier.
I was glad Ricki Lake was interviewed, but ultimately they focused on Abby Epstein’s experience and how it represents “everything people think is wrong with homebirth.” (ARGH) I bet the Business of Being Born camp was mighty disappointed at how the homebirth segment was produced. I know I was.
Other annoyances
In general, I assume most of these families were given some indication that a segment on 20/20 would give them the chance to participate in a balanced view of their cause. (Were they even told this was for an “extreme moms” segment and what that meant?) I doubt they tell these moms, hey we want to make you out like a freak show, can we interview you?
I was frustrated with the parents who let their children be interviewed for the breastfeeding piece. I don’t think they’re damaging their children by breastfeeding them – I do think putting them on TV to talk about it when our culture is so poisonous on the topic is a particularly unfortunate lapse in judgment.
All the fathers/husbands on the show were painted as long-suffering spouses putting up with their wives’ wacky behavior. Never once were we shown a spouse who demonstrated that he was a participant in the parenting/decision-making.
As I expected, the show was tabloid journalism at its worst – a segment produced for no other purpose than to exploit base human behavior (let’s make fun of weird people). And it was a segment that did no favors for couples who make well-researched, well-considered decisions about birthing and nourishing their babies, making informed choices that just happen to be outside of mainstream behavior.
On politics…
Courtesy of my friend Lynne’s email sig:
“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” ~ Plato
Is the ‘Mom Job’ Really Necessary?
Post-pregnancy bodies marketed as pathology. How depressing. 
Is the 'Mom Job' Really Necessary?
- New York Times
In 1970, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the seminal guide to women’s health, described the cosmetic changes that can happen during and after pregnancy simply as phenomena. But now narrowing beauty norms are recasting the transformations of motherhood as stigma.
These unforgiving standards are the offspring of pop culture and technology, a union that treats biological changes as if they were as optional as hair color.
And note: It's the marketing of elective cosmetic surgery to perfectly healthy women I take issue with… (not the existence of the option or the decision some women make about it).
Aggressively marketing some ridiculous ideal to postpartum women, however, is super ick.
As far as me, personally, a few years following three pregnancies and four total years of breastfeeding, I flirted with the idea of a breast lift and augmentation. I didn't like the message that sent to my girls, though, and I couldn't think of any acceptable explanation to give them later…
How prosperity made us more libertarian
This book caught my eye at Borders today (yes, I went there, too *chagrin*):
The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture
In the six decades since the end of World War II, Americans have been busy exploring the new environs of mass affluence. Those decades have witnessed both exhilarating discoveries and tragic errors, as well as a great deal of blind groping and simple muddling through. The story of postwar America is thus the story of adaptation to new social realities.
At the heart of this process was a change in the basic orientation of the dominant culture: from a culture of overcoming scarcity to one of expanding and enjoying abundance. From a more rigid and repressed social system geared to achieving prosperity to a looser and more expressive one geared to taking wider advantage of prosperity’s possibilities. American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change. Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a “creative class” of “knowledge workers”—all are the progeny of widespread prosperity.
Questioning Authority
No one has analyzed the process of cultural reorientation more exhaustively than University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who for decades has been using attitude surveys to track the progress of what he calls “postmodernization.” And his research has examined cultural trends, not only in the United States, but in dozens of other countries as well. The best-documented aspect of postmodernization is a shift from “materialist” to “postmaterialist” values, in which the “emphasis on economic achievement as the top priority is now giving way to an increasing emphasis on the quality of life. In a major part of the world, the disciplined, self-denying, and achievement-oriented norms of industrial society are giving way to an increasingly broad latitude for individual choice of lifestyles and individual self-expression.”
According to Inglehart, the shift toward postmaterialist values is only one part of a broader process. Specifically, the heightened emphasis on subjective well-being as opposed to material security is highly correlated with a marked change in attitudes on a host of apparently unrelated issues, from adherence to traditional religion to trust in government to views on sex and sexual orientation. The central thrust of this “Postmodern shift” is a “broad deemphasis on all forms of authority,” whether political, economic, religious, or familial. Once the quest for personal fulfillment and self-realization becomes a dominant motivation, all cultural constraints that might pose obstacles to that quest come under sustained and furious assault.~ From How prosperity made us more libertarian, by Brink Lindsey
Hysterical aftereffects
Good god. People need to CALM DOWN.
The Chicago Tribune reports that an eighteen year old straight-A High School student was arrested for writing an essay that 'disturbed' his teacher. Even though no threats were made to a specific person, 18 year-old Allen Lee's English teacher convened a panel to discuss the work. As a result of that discussion, the police were called in. '
Editing to add a link to this essay by Stephen King on predicting violence…
I've thought about it, of course. Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing — including a short story called ''Cain Rose Up'' and the novel RAGE — would have raised red flags, and I'm certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them, even though I interacted in class, never took pictures of girls' legs with my cell phone (in 1970, WHAT cell phones?), and never signed my work with a ?.
A nation’s miscarriage
My story:
1. My first birth was an unnecessary cesarean. It all started with an unnecessary induction when my body and baby were not ready and cascaded into a whole slew of interventions that put my uncooperative body on an impossible deadline. I had the highest possible dose of induction drugs (Pitocin) and my water broken. Nothing worked. After 15 hours of fake labor, I was still only dilated to 3 cm and B started to go into distress.
B was surgically delivered at 39 weeks gestation, identified with some breathing issues and separated from me in the NICU for her first 24 hours (while I recovered from major abdominal surgery that included all the fun of staples, support hose to prevent blood clots, IV fluids, catheterization and a morphine drip).
2. When I was pregnant again 14 months later, I wanted a different outcome. I got online and educated myself. I learned that if you really worked at it and fought the system, things could be different. I hired a doula as my emotional advocate. My doctor wanted to induce me again at 39 weeks, claiming that my history proved I couldn't deliver a "big baby" (B was 8 lb 2 oz) and he wanted to see me delivered before this baby got "too big."
I protested, citing that we had no evidence what size baby I could birth, seeing as how I didn't dilate past 3 cm last time, let alone to the pushing stage. I agreed to consider induction for a legitimate medical reason. He backed off. I was annoyed I had to fight for my right to a normal birth. Frustrated that I had to be THIS educated on the topic just to present the scientific, rational viewpoint in counter to the emotionally manipulative one. WTF? Why is the baseline of birth to treat it like a disease? Why does the default mentality presume dysfunction?
At 40 weeks, my labor began spontaneously. A labor doula attended my birth for emotional support and advocacy. HM was born in the hospital after 17 hours of nonmedicated labor (which I survived with LOADS of that doula's support). A successful VBAC. Exactly zero complications. She was one-half ounce shy of 8 lbs.
3. Three years later: Pregnant again and even more empowered this time (by god, I KNEW my body could do it). I decided, Why go to a Chinese restaurant when it's Italian I crave? Although lay midwifery enjoys marginal status in Ohio, I tapped into the underground and hired a team of experienced direct-entry midwives to attend my birth at home. No arguing with medicos about my care. I found a team with whom I was on the same page. A team of professionals I could trust to approach birth as a healthy, normal function unless there was reason to treat it otherwise.
Labor began spontaneously at 41 weeks gestation. Mir was born at home, in the water. 8 lbs 12 ozs. So much for the theory that I can't deliver "big babies."
In 2005, the US cesarean rate was at an unprecedented 30%. INSANE. Given the steep increase of this trend in the past five years, it was no doubt higher in 2006. Does anyone really believe American bodies are THIS much more dysfunctional than those belonging to the rest of the human race?
Cesarean Section Increases Maternal Mortality Rate 4-Fold (August 2003)
A research study published in the August 2003 edition of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology finds that Cesarean section significantly increases the maternal mortality rate.
The US has the 2nd worst neonatal mortality rate of any industrialized nation. We could do a LOT better than this with the appropriate management of care and more limitations on medical interventions.
Babies Delivered by Cesarean More Likely to Die (September 2006)
Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed over 5.7 million live births and nearly 12,000 infant deaths over a four-year period. The research, published in the journal Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, found that neonatal mortality rates (death in the first 28 days after birth) among infants delivered by cesarean section were more than twice those for vaginal deliveries, even after adjusting for socio-demographic and medical risk factors. "These findings should be of concern for clinicians and policy makers who are observing the rapid growth in the number of primary cesareans to mothers without a medical indication," says lead researcher Marian MacDorman.
I envision a better future than this for my daughters. A future where nonintervention is the standard of pregnancy care and the surgeons – rather than CREATING medical conditions and complications – are reserved for treating them as they arise.
Mom to 4 kids and 2 stepkids, I am a writer writing in the heart of chaos. I am the co-founder and former editor of 
