Tag Archive for 'pregnancy'

Not mommy material

Published on June 30, 2008 in Environment, Health and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Now that I’m on the downward slide towards thirty, I find that the topic of babies is starting to creep into conversations at networking functions attended by a preponderance of women.  Carrying on the family gene pool is a pretty black and white issue for most, and while women are more than willing to put off having kids in the name of building a career, most that I meet hope to have one or two of their own  some day.

My best friend got married a few years ago.  Cycling served as the common denominator for the couple; not only did they take long bike excursions on weekends, but both taught spinning at area gyms.  In the span of a year, they moved in together, got married, and she got pregnant.  Once Boy 1 was born, their lives were thrown into complete upheaval. Between day care, work commutes and extended family issues, it took 2 years before either of them set foot in a gym again, despite fitness being an integral part of their lives.  Now with Boy 2 in the picture,  my friend looks forward to federal holidays so that she can go to the gym, knowing her kids are attended to at day care.

While my friend wouldn’t trade her kids for her freedom, I’m not willing to make that sacrifice.  I spent my childhood trying to make other people happy, desperate to connect with another human being at some level with a high personal cost:  my passions got lost in the process.  Now that I’m finally figuring out who I am and what I want, I not willing to sideline those interests for anyone again, especially for someone that’s going to require 21+ years of financial (about a quarter of million dollars before college is factored in) and emotional support.  To some that seems selfish.

But I would argue having kids is also selfish.  The world population is growing to a capacity that the planet will not be able to sustain continued exponential growth, and Americans use a disproportionate amount of the planet’s natural resources.  Also, given that half of marriages end in divorce, I have to wonder how often a baby is used as a temporary band aid to obscure deeper issues v. the baby being the issue, since “parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than nonparents”

Personally, I knew with certainty, on the most primal level, that there was no way I was having kids  after watching a “miracle of birth” video in middle school health class,   Helen Mirren recently echoed my sentiments.

“I swear it traumatised me to this day. I haven’t had children and now I can’t look at anything to do with childbirth. It absolutely disgusts me.”

Since the US is so fond of medicalizing birth, consider the “condition.” If you were not pregnant, such a condition (considerable amount of weight gain;  requisite enhancement of calorie, nutrient and vitamin consumption to compensate for the condition; and a variety of other side effects like hemmorhoids and back pain, all before searing pain as the growth exited your body) would be diagnosed as a parasite.   Pregnancy is not a symbiotic relationship.

I acknowledge that for many women, they can overlook the 36-40 weeks of a medical condition, followed by the searing pain of childbirth (that will eventually fade from memory), because the outcome is a new life they get to nurture.   Me, I don’t want more responsibility than a puppy.

And I’m likely to be happier for it. Lorraine Ali of Newsweek reports:

In Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book “Stumbling on Happiness,” the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child—and increases only when the last child has left home. He also ascertains that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008′s “Gross National Happiness” author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless.

For an interesting read on modern motherhood, I highly recommend Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, which addresses the stereotypes and cultural limitations of contemporary pregnancy and motherhood in America.

I’m also looking forward to seeing the documentary, “The Business of Being Born.”

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Your uterus might be a liability

Published on April 21, 2008 in Gen Y and Health. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

As much as I hate jumping on the it’s-a misogynist-world-after-all band wagon, a recent study shows that women face serious job discrimination in their child-bearing years.

The BBC reported on a new UK study’s findings:

And 76% of managers admitted that they would not hire a new recruit if they knew they were going to fall pregnant within six months of starting the job…

About 52% of those surveyed said that they considered the chances of a candidate getting pregnant taking into account age and whether they have just got married…

Other findings included only 5% employing someone knowing they were pregnant with 86% saying they would feel “cheated” if someone announced their pregnancy weeks after joining a firm.

The UK offers paid maternity leave, so pregnancy is arguably, more supported by their society than ours. And look at their study results. In fact, most nations mandate it per a 2004 Harvard Study

To put it another way, out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

In the US, California was the first state to legislate paid maternity leave, followed by Washington state. New Jersey if finalizing its own bill. However, most American women can only rely on the Family Medical Leave Act. In an interview with USA Today, Debra Ness of the National Partnership of Women and Families commented that

“The top 20 most economically competitive countries in the world have all figured out how to do it,” says Ness. “But not the United States.”

She points out that an estimated 40 percent of the work force is not even eligible for FMLA protection, because there have to be more than 50 employees in a workplace and an employee has to have been there for at least a year

A final note: In the United States women reported 5587 cases in 2007, which is a 14% INCREASE in instances of discrimination in 2006 and a 40% INCREASE compared to 1997. These are just the REPORTED cases of discrimination.

Given the above findings, is being upfront in a job interview about planning to get pregnant or being pregnant really the only option as Christine Hassler suggests in her Huffington Post column?

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Sex ed was not this entertaining in high school

Published on April 3, 2008 in Gen Y and Health. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Though I can’t forget the day our teacher held up a condom and asked for a male volunteer. . . .

How Pregnancy Happens


(via Feministe)

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Man grows replacement jaw via stem cells and organic soup

Published on February 2, 2008 in Business and Health. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Finnish scientists at Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine were able to grow a new jaw for a man using stem cells culled from the man’s own adipose tissue. They

isolated stem cells from the patient’s fat and grew them for two weeks in a specially formulated nutritious soup that included the patient’s own blood serum. . .

When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient’s abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said. (Sami Torma for Reuters)

The cynic in me immediately thought: cosmetic surgeons are going to have a field day as this development is fine tuned. . . Don’t like your breasts, don’t worry, we can grow you a new pair!

This type of development if harnessed correctly could advance medicine a number of fields, but it could quell the debate over how to encourage organ donation. There are just under 100,000 Americans on the national organ donor registry. Those waiting for kidneys have the longest wait, a median of 476 days to find a match. A 9 month gestation of a new kidney could cut that wait down at least 40%. And given an organ built from one’s own DNA is ridiculously unlikely to be rejected by the body, it’s a pretty safe call that there won’t be a need for multiple transplants after organ failure.

This advancement would also likely be well-suited to reconstructive surgery for cancer survivors and even burn victims.

Undoubtedly it will be years before there’s an opportunity to use such findings with in regularity, but it does bring up another ethical question: cost. Will insurers cover the cost of growing a new organ? Or will the cost be so prohibitive that 18 months on dialysis, traditional organ transplant and drugs to stave off rejection will seem cheap by comparison?

On another note, a man gestated a new jaw in his belly for nine months. If a man can grow a jaw, what’s to say the technology to grow a baby can’t be far behind. It would open up a world of opportunity for gay couples who still facing discrimination in trying to adopt, as well as alternative for women who find they can’t conceive. Even better, it would be a great equilizer — with women increasing completing more education than men and making more of the big spending decisions; wouldn’t it follow that in some couples, it might be easier for man to take on the role of “mom”?

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