Three opportunities to participate in edited volumes, forthcoming through Demeter Press:
Also, Demeter Press has recently announced the release of two new books related to mothering:
from Melissa Bollow Tempel at Rethinking Schools, “It’s Okay to Be Neither: Teaching that Supports Gender-Variant Children”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I had a child dealing with gender variance (defined as “behavior or gender expression that does not conform to dominant gender norms of male and female”) in my classroom that I realized how important it is to teach about gender and break down gender stereotypes. Why did I wait so long? I should have taken a hint from that kindergarten teacher years ago. As I thought about how to approach the topic, I realized that the lessons I was developing weren’t just for Allie. She had sparked my thinking, but all the children in my class needed to learn to think critically about gender stereotypes and gender nonconformity.
from Dresden at Creating Motherhood, “Food Stamp Etiquette: Human Kindness”
from Molly Remer at Talk Birth, “The Illusion of Choice”
While it may sound as if I am saying women are powerlessly buffeted about by circumstance and environment, I’m not. Theoretically, we always have the power to choose for ourselves, but by ignoring, denying, or minimizing the multiplicity of contexts in which women make “informed choices” about their births and their lives, we oversimplify the issue and turn it into a hollow catchphrase rather than a meaningful concept. [...]
And, I maintain that a choice is not a choice if it is made in a context of fear.
from Avital Norman Nathman at Mom & Pop Culture, “Music Madness”
Thankfully, besides the classics, there has been a lot of kickass kids music coming out lately. Perhaps a lot of musicians have become parents themselves and realized the lack of quality kids’ music? Regardless of the reason, there are now many options to choose from beyond “The Wheels on the Bus.”
“Haitian women experienced the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere prior to the January 2010 earthquake. [...] Today, women and girls experience even greater challenges.“
–Elizabeth Sepper, 2010-2012 Center for Reproductive Rights fellow at Columbia Law School
Karen Feltham is a certified nurse midwife, a clinical instructor at Binghamton University in New York, and a volunteer with Circle of Health International (COHI)–a pro-choice, nonprofit organization dedicated to “working with women and their communities in times of crisis and disaster to ensure access to quality reproductive, maternal, and newborn care.” COHI helps carve out a little safety for vulnerable people in unsafe times. Karen travelled to Haiti to help out with women’s reproductive healthcare in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. She’ll return later this month to continue supporting local midwives’ work during a ten-day trip to HCM Maternity Clinic in Fond Parisien–a birth center that’s staffed by two midwives and serves more than 2,000 women each year. Her goals for this trip are to:
Do you think you could pitch in ten bucks or whatever to help out with her travel expenses? If so, click here for more information. This post is part of BirthSwell’s push to help Karen and COHI through social media–their introductory post is here. Want more information about the current situation for women in Haiti, and/or about COHI’s work? Here are some links:
postscript: Last night I received an email from the folks at BirthSwell, announcing the good news that the campaign had already met its goal (and Karen’s immediate travel funding needs) of $1000. They continued, “Every additional dollar raised beyond our goal will go towards getting Karen – or another skilled midwife – to the next disaster or crisis. Each year, one-third of the world’s population will be affected by natural disasters. Women and children constitute as much as 80% of the world’s refugees and displaced people. COHI volunteers give their time freely to ensure that women can have safe births – even in unsafe times.” So, please still consider contributing! And thanks to everyone who already has.
from Dinosaur Comics, just some dinosaurs discussing routine newborn eye ointment (with a tip of the hat to Rebecca at Public Health Doula)
from Analía R. Stormo, Nikki A. Hawkins, Crystale Purvis Cooper, and Mona Saraiya in The Archives of Internal Medicine, “The Pelvic Exam as a Screening Tool: Practices of US Physicians“–Unfortunately, the full text of this article is not freely available online, but here’s a writeup from Reuters Health; here’s the main idea:
Stormo and her colleagues surveyed 1,250 doctors, including obstetricians and gynecologists, family doctors and internists on how often they performed pelvic exams to screen for cancer or sexually transmitted infections (STIs), as a requirement before prescribing birth control pills or as part of a typical physical or “well-woman” visit.
OB/GYNs were the most likely to say they routinely performed pelvic exams in each of those cases, but the majority of family and general doctors also did pelvic exams for every indication in question.
[...] Dr. Mona Saraiya, who also worked on the study, said there’s no need to do a full pelvic exam to screen for STIs — taking a swab or doing a urine test is enough. The researchers also said there isn’t any evidence that screening for ovarian cancer with a pelvic exam prevents women from dying of the disease, or that it’s needed before women go on birth control.
As part of a well-woman exam, its usefulness isn’t clear one way or the other.
No matter how it’s used, a pelvic exam can lead to so-called false alarms and overdiagnosis, when doctors find disease that would never have caused any symptoms but is treated nonetheless.
It’s also a very personal procedure. “It’s not like palpating your stomach,” Saraiya said.
Most of you are already familiar with the “Legos for girls” brouhaha. Here’s a Businessweek article that provides background information that I was missing in my initial “When did Legos start being for boys?” horror. (I remain horrified, just in a less confused way.)
from Lenore Skenazy at Free-Range Kids, “A Free-Range Soul (So to Speak)“: a fun little story about a stranger helping out with babies on an airplane
Welcome to First the Egg, a collection of practical information, links, and cultural criticism. This site is a feminist intervention in our rigidly-gendered culture of childbirth and parenting. It aims to provide a nonsexist space for people who want to learn, reflect, commiserate, or laugh about being pregnant, giving birth, and helping children grow up whole and happy.
Feel free to contact me with ideas or questions at
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book review: Peggy Vincent’s Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife
I really enjoyed–and recommend–Peggy Vincent’s 2002 memoir Baby Catcher.
Vincent’s narrative voice feels strong, empathetic, and funny. She tells many birth stories, spanning decades and multiple birth settings: we see babies born in three quite different hospitals, an ‘alternative birth center’ in one of those hospitals, and many different sorts of homes … including a sailboat in a tempest. There are lots of very funny stories, inspiring stories, quietly happy stories, and also a handful of very sad stories, which Vincent treats sensitively. We see Vincent’s own children born, with particular attention to her last birth, which occurred in the midst of her career as a homebirth midwife. I love the range of behaviors and reactions we see in laboring/birthing people and their partners and families here.
So, if you’re interested in what birth is like, this is one fun place to go for more examples.
Baby Catcher also serves well as an illustration of the medical and midwifery models of birth, and why the difference matters to so many of us.
Two small complaints:
1) Occasionally the quoted voices feel a bit off here; it’s hard to write dialogue, let alone dialect, and sometimes I have trouble hearing the voices she’s trying to pass along to me.
2) One moment made me cringe–when Vincent writes:
Although this is its most explicit and universalizing articulation, this image recurs a few times in the text: the image of birthing as the rite of passage that separates women from girls. This is obviously problematic, so obviously that it seems odd to explain it, but just in case: a female person doesn’t have to be a mother to be a real adult; not all mothers give birth; not all women have bodies that can grow and birth babies even if they want to (and surely they’re not damned to permanent childishness or unwomanliness); women can and do face tests of strength and endurance and self-realization that have absolutely nothing to do with our reproductive organs. Birth is one experience with the potential to tap into a person’s own deep and surprising strength, not the only one, lady-bits or no lady-bits.
However, the book generally avoids the gender essentialism and one-size-fits-all approach to birth that so often crops up in the ‘natural birth’ literature. These moments are a very, very small (though upsetting) part of the larger project, and I suspect they communicate judgments that Vincent herself would not embrace.
Also, it seems necessary to mention that the midwife gets attacked (repeatedly) by a large housecat, has a fight with a goose, refuses to perform an at-home cesarean for a very determined and brave woman, nearly drowns in the San Francisco Bay, makes it possible for a sixteen-year-old and her nineteen-year-old partner to birth their baby on their own terms and with privacy and love (he catches the baby, as do many of the fathers in these stories), attends one birth at which hands-down the most useful assistant was the baby’s toddler sibling, and rethinks a lot of her own snap judgments of the rather unusual folks attending some of these Berkeley births. Many adventures and characters here, and well-worth reading.