It was striking that all but one of the respondents said that their law school did not expect women to wait until tenure to have [...]]]> A couple of weeks ago, I invited readers to participate in a survey on maternity leave policies at various law schools.  This effort was aimed at provoking open dialogue on the topic rather than providing a scientifically defensible sample or survey of law school practices (a worthy endeavor but not one that this mommyprof can fit into her schedule!).  I received 22 responses to the survey, which could include some overlap from the same law school, so the results are not even close to representative of the 193 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S.  Nonetheless, I think the findings are interesting.

It was striking that all but one of the respondents said that their law school did not expect women to wait until tenure to have children.  The other respondent was not sure how her school would view pre-tenure childbearing, but worried that a leave might attract stigma from male colleagues.  On the brighter side, one commenter noted that at her school, all of the junior women in relationships had children before tenure in recent years.  While I know from conversations with friends at other law schools that this norm is not universal, it’s nice to see that it may be more widespread than I had expected.

Responses about law school policies on paid maternity leave were much more varied, ranging from sick time only with an expectation that the mother will take the rest of the semester unpaid to a semester paid leave (or light load for a year).  In between were a school that offers six weeks paid leave, others that offer 2-4 months of paid leave, and one that offers a semester leave at half pay.  It was encouraging to see that at least two thirds of the respondents’ schools offer a semester paid leave but troubling to see the cases in which women are forced to choose between their paycheck and a reasonable amount of time at home with their newborn.

So where do these anecdotes lead us?  As mentioned above, it would be a most worthwhile endeavor to survey paid maternity leave practices at all ABA-accredited schools.  Short of that, it may be helpful to open up conversations with peers at other schools to compare practices, and particularly for women on the job market who intend to have children to think about negotiating maternity leave as part of their compensation package.  At the very least, this important issue should be on the radar screen of mommyprofs, deans, and others who seek to recruit and retain a gender-diverse faculty.

Excellent multitasking, folks. In future DMCA smackdowns, Cory will cure cancer, save the rainforest, and abolish the designated hitter rule.

(Image: Wikicommons)

Do women man up?  I was interested to learn that they do.

Therefore, when Bridget Crawford, another of the main posters on feministlawprofessors.com, asked if I wanted to be named on their list of “self-identified feminist law professors,” I was thrilled to be asked. The question was raised, however: What does the label “feminist law professor” mean? If I was going to self-identify as a “feminist law professor,” I wanted to be sure I fit within the definition.

The reality is that those who know me [...]]]> I have long been a fan of the blog “Feministlawprofessors.com.” The blog does a stellar job of raising and discussing various issues, the content of the blog is sound and reasoned, and Ann Bartow, the founder of the website, has graciously cross-posted some of my posts on prostitution over the past couple years.

Therefore, when Bridget Crawford, another of the main posters on feministlawprofessors.com, asked if I wanted to be named on their list of “self-identified feminist law professors,” I was thrilled to be asked. The question was raised, however: What does the label “feminist law professor” mean? If I was going to self-identify as a “feminist law professor,” I wanted to be sure I fit within the definition.

The reality is that those who know me well might not immediately fit me within the category of “feminist law professor,” if we consider only the older stereotypes about what a feminist “looks like.” To wit, I have never taught “feminist legal theory” (though I could and would, happily), I am Catholic, I am fairly conservative, I have never been a member of NOW, I have been a member of the Federalist Society, I am not offended by some things that are clearly “gendered” (such as men opening doors for women), and I have never burned a bra.

That said, I support equality for all, and I engage in activities intended to support this goal. Indeed, one of the many things that troubles me about the legal profession is the fact that women make up roughly 50% of all law students but only about 19% of all law firm partners and less than 20% of all Supreme Court justices.

But does supporting equality for all make me a feminist law professor? If so, wouldn’t – in theory – most law professors be “feminist law professors?”

I realize that this blog post should be many paragraphs longer, to address the issues raised by my questions above. But even with a blog post five times the length of this one, I doubt I could do the questions justice. So I will end simply by observing that, while I am happy to be labeled a “feminist law professor,” it is interesting to me that the phrase is not easily defined.

When I hear about these situations, I always wonder about the “character and fitness” implications. It seems to me that a law student who is publicly judging a [...]]]> Law students sometimes use the internet to widely disseminate racist or gendered comments about women and minority faculty members. For example, I have heard about law students using teaching evaluation forms or Facebook or Myspace to make comments to the effect that that a female faculty member is a bitch with PMS or that an African-American faculty member is a [insert racial slur]. Indeed, the Auto-Admit debacle from a couple years back revealed that law students or potential law students seem to at least sometimes use the internet to convey vicious gendered and/or racist comments.

When I hear about these situations, I always wonder about the “character and fitness” implications. It seems to me that a law student who is publicly judging a female faculty member negatively on a gendered basis or who is characterizing minority faculty members by way of stereotyping and ugly slurs is raising questions about his/her character and fitness to practice law. In the same way that a lawyer who embezzles is not fit to practice, one might argue that a law student who dismisses individuals with ugly characterizations based only on race or gender might also be of questionable character for purposes of practicing law. Yet not everyone agrees with this assessment, and, with respect to law students using the internet for such attacks, there has not been a lot of discussion about the character and fitness issues raised.

Therefore, the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education will be presenting a panel at the AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans examining the issues raised – including the character and fitness issues – when law students, lawyers, judges, or potential law students use the internet to make gendered or racist comments. If a student posts on her Myspace page that Professor John Doe, who teaches Gender and Race and the Law, is an “ugly [insert racial slur] who only has a job due to affirmative action,” does that pose a character and fitness concern? Should we care?

There is a call for papers for this panel presentation, and anyone interested in submitting a paper or paper proposal is welcome to e-mail me for the details.

According to a provocative new study from Valerie Hudson and WomanStats, there is another factor more closely correlated with national belligerence than any of the above: A country’s levels of violence against women. As summarized in the Deseret News:

Look closely at the way women are treated, says Valerie Hudson. Look at the nonchalance with which a nation’s men beat their wives, or the dismissive way a country condones genital mutilation. These are clues, she says, about that nation’s likelihood of waging war. . . .

It has been widely assumed that other factors are more predictive of whether [...]]]> Which factors might predict a country’s likelihood of going to war? Undemocratic government? Widespread poverty? Dare we ask — Islamic religious values?

According to a provocative new study from Valerie Hudson and WomanStats, there is another factor more closely correlated with national belligerence than any of the above: A country’s levels of violence against women. As summarized in the Deseret News:

Look closely at the way women are treated, says Valerie Hudson. Look at the nonchalance with which a nation’s men beat their wives, or the dismissive way a country condones genital mutilation. These are clues, she says, about that nation’s likelihood of waging war. . . .

It has been widely assumed that other factors are more predictive of whether a nation might be unstable or aggressive. The three most likely candidates were poverty levels, lack of democracy, and the nation’s adherence to Islamic values.

But the WomanStats project offers a fourth predictor of a nation’s instability. Violence against women (VAW, in the shorthand of WomanStats) trumps the other explanations, proving to be three times more predictive of a nation’s instability than whether a country is Islamic, and one-and-a-half times more predictive than whether a country is undemocratic, Hudson says.

I haven’t yet looked over the numbers; and I wonder how much this can show. On first glance, this seems to be an area where causation and correlation would be awfully hard to disentangle. Still, the underlying thesis — that violence is violence, and that cultures which condone violence against women are likely to be more aggressive on a large scale — makes some sense, intuitively. And Hudson’s study is intriguing. It’s on my list of things to look over in more detail once I’m done with summer school.

p.s. On a global misogyny scale of 1 to 5, Hudson’s team coded the United States as a 3.

In conjunction with a recent conference on state security in Norway, I examined six reports on state weakness to determine their approach to the use of gender equality as an indicator of state fragility or failure. These six reports were issued between 2005-2008 by highly influential U.S. foreign policy institutions, including private and public agencies, and one of them was co-authored by Susan Rice (before she became [...]]]> This post is prompted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales’s discussion of the recent OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index. In her very thoughtful post – with which I entirely agree — she discusses the problems of “empirically measuring and ranking intangible phenomena such as social norms,” And she notes that the OECD publication was not entirely successful.But at least it tried.

In conjunction with a recent conference on state security in Norway, I examined six reports on state weakness to determine their approach to the use of gender equality as an indicator of state fragility or failure. These six reports were issued between 2005-2008 by highly influential U.S. foreign policy institutions, including private and public agencies, and one of them was co-authored by Susan Rice (before she became our Ambassador to the UN). While measures of gender equity are included in other assessments, such as the OECD’s index, the UNDP’s Human Development Report , or Freedom House’s evaluation of global freedom, this simply shows the integration of gender into development or civil liberties markers; these assessments are not self-conscious analyses of state security and fragility, unlike the 6 reports I examined. Apart from the USAID report, the other 5 reports did not use gender as an assessment tool.

Indicators and assessment tools can be important components in establishing state policies and practices towards developing countries. Consequently, the components that comprise each of these evaluative efforts are signs of what is considered critical to ensuring state stability. Donor agencies are increasingly using various indicators to help them evaluate country performance in order to ensure that their resources will be used most efficiently and effectively. While indicators are imperfect – they are subject to errors in measurement, and they take thin slices of complex issues — they are useful, within these limitations, for providing broad-brush pictures of a country’s status. But not if they don’t include gender at all. Gender equity provides a useful measurement of state security, as Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Dina Haynes, and I argue in our forthcoming book. Nonetheless, its significance is virtually unrecognized in numerous evaluations of state fragility, thereby leading to the risk that gender will remain unrecognized in efforts to promote state stability.

The California Supreme Court has announced that it will issue an opinion in three cases challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8 at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26, 2009.

I’ve previously blogged some analysis of the case. Like most other observers, I expect that the court will reject both the revision/amendment challenge and the fundamental rights challenge, but will not retroactively nullify the 18,000 marriages that took place before November. That would be, in effect, a partial victory for both sides.

I guess we’ll find out one way or another this Tuesday.

My first concern with the study is that the twelve variables that SIGI has chosen to measure social institutions and their [...]]]> I’m normally a fan of the statistical reports produced by the OECD, so was surprised to find myself in disagreement with the methodology of their recently-created Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). The idea behind SIGI is a good one — to get at the root of gender discrimination by examining traditions and social norms that impede women’s empowerment. To this end, SIGI assesses twelve variables in 102 non-OECD countries and then ranks these countries based on their “performance in social institutions.” The selection and evaluation problems with their study highlight the difficulty of empirically measuring and ranking intangible phenomena such as social norms.

My first concern with the study is that the twelve variables that SIGI has chosen to measure social institutions and their contributions to gender inequality appear to suffer from selection bias. Their model does include variables that impact women’s advancement globally, such as access to land and property and inheritance laws. However, given the relatively small number of variables examined, it was surprising to see the inclusion of discriminatory traditions and social norms practiced only in a limited number of regions, such as female genital mutilation, restrictions on freedom of dress and “missing women” (gender-selected abortion or infanticide) as stand-alone variables. To be sure, these forms of hidden discrimination are of concern, but if it’s to include traditions and social norms that impede women’s progress only in certain regions, the study should be as comprehensive as possible, including a broad range of regionally specific discriminatory norms (such as very limited access to contraception and abortion in much of Latin America). Alternatively, the study could be limited to variables that exist in nearly every country studied, with regionally specific norms as a subset but not a stand-alone variable (examining FGM as one manifestation of violence against women, for example). The study’s current approach inappropriately weights these variables and thus leads to odd results in the rankings — India, for example, is ranked 96 of 102 countries, just below Iran. While there’s no disputing that India has its fair share of hidden forms of gender discrimination, a claim that Indian women face more discriminatory norms than Iranian women is difficult to defend.
The study also appears to contain evaluation problems in that it relies on the law on the books to measure social norms without closely examining whether this law is applied in practice. So, for example, I was surprised to see El Salvador ranked number 8, with a mention of violence against women as a “serious problem” but nonetheless receiving an extremely high score for physical integrity. In contrast, the U.S. State Department’s 2008 Human Rights Report denotes violence against women as one of the top human rights problems in El Salvador, with over 6000 reports of domestic violence and only 12 prosecutions and 4 convictions last year. Again, it’s hard to take seriously an index that ranks highly a country with social norms that widely condone violence against women.
While the authors of the study are correct in their claims that these traditions and social norms often impede progress towards equality for women, it is extremely hard to quantify such intangible phenomena. Social norms and traditions that impede women’s empowerment take different forms throughout the world, and do not lend themselves easily to comparative assessment. More importantly, I’m not sure where the value lies in “ranking” hidden forms of gender discrimination. How should these rankings be used? To determine which countries should be prioritized in efforts to ameliorate gender discriminatory norms? As a shaming sanction against those at the bottom of the list? While it’s undoubtedly important to examine and elucidate these norms in order to redress them, it seems less worthwhile to measure and sort them, as if eliminating gender inequality were simply a numbers game. And as SIGI’s pitfalls illustrate, such a study should be performed by researchers familiar with the societies and cultures in question and should not rely on laws on the books as an adequate proxy for social norms. Moreover, any such study should rigorously select and weight quantitative or qualitative measures of discriminatory norms to avoid culturally biased and unreliable results.

Cross-posted on IntLawGrrls.

In previous posts, I’ve discussed the analysis of red families v. blue families I’m writing with Professor June Carbone. Reproductive issues – specifically abortion – retain their ability to rally the red paradigm base. Conservatives can’t stop talking about abortion; abortion is, in the words of one political [...]]]> The juxtaposition of the controversy over President Obama speaking at Notre Dame, a newly released Gallup poll finding that a majority of Americans are anti-choice, and a governmental report on the increasing rate of nonmarital childbearing highlights the challenges of reproductive rights in American life and politics. Abortion is an intrinsically divisive issue, and it has become a focal point for values conflict. What we really need to do is to change the subject, from abortion to contraception.

In previous posts, I’ve discussed the analysis of red families v. blue families I’m writing with Professor June Carbone. Reproductive issues – specifically abortion – retain their ability to rally the red paradigm base. Conservatives can’t stop talking about abortion; abortion is, in the words of one political commentator, “their meal ticket.” It remains the family values issues least amenable to compromise. Indeed, the Gallup poll measuring abortion views found little change in the views of Democrats. Instead, the increase in pro-life attitudes comes from those who identify as conservatives and moderates.
In contrast, attitudes toward contraception are on a continuum — over ninety-five percent of sexually active women will use contraception at some point in their lives. More critically, the intensity of the abortion conflict obscures the real tragedy: the United States has the highest rates of unplanned teen pregnancies in the developed world. Thirty percent of American girls will become pregnant before they turn twenty, and eighty percent of the pregnancies are unplanned. The only way to genuinely address family values is to reconsider the terms of family formation. The dramatic story of the nineties was a national decline in teen births, a decline most dramatic for the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, and one concentrated much more heavily in the urban northeast and the successful middle class. That decline in births occurred at the same time teen pregnancy and abortion rates fell, and it depended on both greater abstinence and more effective contraceptive use. In the last few years, teen births have crept back up, with the largest rise for African-Americans. This has been attributed to some combination of  increasing amounts of abstinence-only education and lesser access to contraception based, in part, on the economy.  At the same time, the morning after pill and non-surgical abortion (RU-486) have blurred the line between contraception and abortion for the middle class, increasing ease of access for those with medical care, and worsening the plight of women with the least resources as abortion later during pregnancy becomes harder to secure.

If there is middle ground in the cultural fight, it should be on the importance of moving family formation out of the teen years. Early marriage derails education and increases the likelihood of divorce. As the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy points out, young teen mothers are less likely to complete high school, and their children do not perform as well in school as do children of older parents. While abstinence reinforcement can play a useful role, few modern couples will forego contraceptive use altogether – whether within marriage or without. Comprehensive approaches to deterring improvident childbirth, with special attention to the needs of poorer, minority and evangelical teens, should command greater support. After all, those who succeed in avoiding unplanned births become more to like to marry, stay married, and bear children who replicate more stable family patterns.

So change the subject. To keep abortion legal, talk about contraception instead.

According to Ruth Padawer’s excellent profile of Seeking Arrangements, the deals brokered by “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies” on the site are complicated:

[S]ince the 1970s, courts have ruled that as long as the woman is paid for some service besides sex — housecleaning, companionship — the arrangement is not the equivalent of prostitution. “When these sugar-daddy relationships go the way I think they should go, the lines are [...]]]> Attorney generals have been pressuring Craigslist to eliminate “ads that are poorly disguised come-ons for illegal prostitution.” One key question about the campaign: is the prostitution or the “poor disguising” of it the target? The free pass given to Seeking Arrangements suggests the latter–and how difficult it is to limit commodification nowadays.

According to Ruth Padawer’s excellent profile of Seeking Arrangements, the deals brokered by “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies” on the site are complicated:

[S]ince the 1970s, courts have ruled that as long as the woman is paid for some service besides sex — housecleaning, companionship — the arrangement is not the equivalent of prostitution. “When these sugar-daddy relationships go the way I think they should go, the lines are pretty blurry between that and a typical boyfriend-girlfriend relationship,” [one woman on the site] said. “And when they go the way I don’t think they should go, the lines are blurry between that and sex work.”

One image on the site features a dazed, graying man doted on by two barely clad attendants . . . . But this marketing spin doesn’t capture the nuances of the relationships that often develop between the “daddies” and the “babies” who meet on the site — relationships that can turn out to be more complicated than even the members themselves expect.

Padawer notes that “these men — especially those shopping for women half their age — are digging deep into their pockets to pay for an illusion: that . .. they’re still enchanting enough to charm pretty young women.” It’s a description/judgment that might well undercut the appeal of such sites if it becomes prevalent enough (though the decadent spirit has always preferred simulation over the real thing).

The law appears to have chosen to fight only the straight-up trade of sex for money. The battle against sites like Seeking Arrangements will probably have to be a cultural one.

Depending on where you live, today or tomorrow is “Bike to Work” Day.  Bicycles have been around the US since at least 1866, when Pierre Lallement received patent no. 59,915 for a velocipede.  I’ve been an avid year-round bike commuter for 8 years now (aside from my 2 years in Kinshasa, Congo, when I couldn’t walk around the block without an escort), and, like most zealots, I like to proselytize. Now that I’ve converted to a bike commuter, I extol the economic [...]]]> One of the benefits of being at GW is that I get to talk to Dan Solove in person. When I saw him on Wednesday, he reminded me that blogging doesn’t always have to be about my past books or future projects. Thanks, Dan!

Depending on where you live, today or tomorrow is “Bike to Work” Day.  Bicycles have been around the US since at least 1866, when Pierre Lallement received patent no. 59,915 for a velocipede.  I’ve been an avid year-round bike commuter for 8 years now (aside from my 2 years in Kinshasa, Congo, when I couldn’t walk around the block without an escort), and, like most zealots, I like to proselytize. Now that I’ve converted to a bike commuter, I extol the economic and environmental benefits of riding:  bicycles don’t use any fossil fuels to get you from one place to another; an 8-mile bicycle trip keeps out about 15 pounds of pollutants from the air we are breathing; and somewhere between 6-20 bikes can be parked in one car parking space (mine is parked as a piece of art in my office).  Just as importantly, however, bike commuting is really fun. It is fast: even at my pace on the bike of 10-15 mph, I breeze right past people in cars. And it’s wonderful for my mental health. One of my friends interviewed me for a story she wrote for Good Housekeeping magazine (!) about how people find serenity. I told her I find serenity through writing articles and blog posts, but she wasn’t convinced; not until I told her about my bike commuting did she put pen to paper. So, as one corporate sports giant might say, Just do it!

I’ve met Ryan once, and was incredibly impressed with him – I’m not surprised that he was able to complete his competitive college program nor that he is seeking out half-siblings and the man who anonymously provided the sperm that enabled Ryan to exist.  Ryan and I met at a conference on establishing a national donor gamete databank. Ryan and his mother, Wendy Kramer, have started the [...]]]> Ryan Kramer graduated from Colorado University’s aerospace engineering program on Friday, a program that is so tough that only about 50% of those who begin ultimately finish it.  Before he starts his master’s degree in engineering management  at USC this fall, one of his big summer plans is to meet two of his half-siblings; he has at least five others.

I’ve met Ryan once, and was incredibly impressed with him – I’m not surprised that he was able to complete his competitive college program nor that he is seeking out half-siblings and the man who anonymously provided the sperm that enabled Ryan to exist.  Ryan and I met at a conference on establishing a national donor gamete databank. Ryan and his mother, Wendy Kramer, have started the enormously successful Donor Sibling Registry, which is now responsible for connecting more than 6000 people with others who share some of the same genetic origins (disclosure: I have just become a board member of the DSR).

Donor-conceived offspring often – although not always – regret their lack of connection with their entire biological heritage. They want to know more about the often anonymous individual[s] who helped create them. As the secrecy around using “donor” sperm and eggs dissolves – in the past, parents frequently did not tell their children that they had been created by donor gametes — offspring and their parents are increasingly trying to get additional information and are advocating for disclosure of “donor” identities. Many have begun to use the internet to create an extended family that includes others who have used the same donor. Almost 150,000 people visited the DSR website in 2008, and more than 24,000 people have registered on it. It maintains an extremely active blog and message group.

The language in the donor world shows how these families are constructed. Offspring who share the same donor are typically labelled “half-siblings.  “Accidental incest” is a concern.   The word “donor” is itself a misnomer; gametes are typically sold rather than provided altrustically.  

  Biological connection is, of course, only one of the many methods of forming a family. Yet the genetic ties between their children cause many women to feel strong family-like connections to each other.  Consider Gwenyth Jackaway, who, according to a story in O Magazine  searched for genetic relatives for her son, Dylan, because she wanted him to be “part of a larger community,” and refers to the other children she found as “Dylan’s siblings.” Then there’s Mike Rubino, who was Donor 929 at California Cryobank. He was inspired to find what happened to the sperm he had provided to the Cryobank, and, through the DSR, discovered that Rachael McGhee had written a thank you message to Donor 929. McGhee had given birth to 2 children using sperm from Donor 929, and, on Father’s Day, she’d remind the children to think about their donor and send him hugs. Rubino and McGhee, along with her 2 children, ultimately spent a week together, getting to know one another.
For Ryan, finding his donor led to a feeling of “‘immediate peacefulness,’” his mother explained to the Denver Post. As I have argued in the context of both adoption and the donor world,  the United States should establish a national donor gamete registry, similar to that in place in numerous other countries such as Great Britain. The registry should keep track of children both through donor egg, embryo, and sperm, including the identities of the gamete providers. Federal law already requires that fertility clinics provide information on the number of children born through donor eggs and embryos, although the procedures for collecting this additional information are not in place and would take some time to develop. Participation in such a registry would be mandatory for anyone involved in supplying donor gametes. When donor-conceived offspring reach a certain age, they should be able to receive identifying information about their donor (the donor could file a statement indicating his/her lack of interest in being contacted). While mandatory limits on donor anonymity constitute a radical change in existing practices, there are multiple reasons supporting this change – including a goal of helping other offspring find the “immediate peacefulness” that Ryan found.

The discourse of breast-feeding has long been about everything but the mother; women who wanted to breast-feed were once told that they shouldn’t do so because formula was better for their child, now mothers are told that they must breast-feed because of all of the benefits for their child — higher IQ, [...]]]> Sarah Waldeck’s recent post on the consequentialist rationale for publicizing breast-feeding’s benefits for mothers was right on the mark; breast-feeding can be challenging in the best of circumstances, so those who believe that “breast is best” should appeal to women’s self-interest rather than or as well as their noble sense of self-sacrifice.  In addition to the argument she lays out, there’s also expressivist value in changing the way we speak about, and thus perceive, breast-feeding. 

The discourse of breast-feeding has long been about everything but the mother; women who wanted to breast-feed were once told that they shouldn’t do so because formula was better for their child, now mothers are told that they must breast-feed because of all of the benefits for their child — higher IQ, less risk of obesity, diabetes, ear infections — you name it.  Inundated by these questionable claims during my pre-natal classes, I wondered how studies could possibly control for factors such as the socio-economic background of the mother.  It turns out they can’t, as Hanna Rosin explained in The Atlantic last month (in an article Sarah posted on here).  As Toto pulls open the curtain on its lack of empirical grounding, the breastfeeding orthodoxy is revealed as a stunningly paternalistic judgment on motherhood and women’s agency.

Think about it this way: say you’re friends with a father responsible for preparing his children’s dinner four nights a week.  Returning home at 6pm, exhausted from work, he feeds his kids a couple of hot dogs at least twice a week, as they’re incredibly easy to prepare and the kids love them.  Would you find it appropriate to lecture him on hot dogs’ lack of nutritional value and tell him that he really should make the effort to prepare a healthier meal for his children?  What if you knew, as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Food and Drug Administration note, that hot dogs pose a serious but as yet unquantified choking risk for small children?  What if you were aware of preliminary medical research findings that children who eat more than 12 hot dogs a month have nine times the normal risk of leukemia?  I’ll hazard a guess that most people would leave the decision whether to feed his children hot dogs in the hands of the father; while his childrens’ pediatrician may warn him of the potential hazards of hot dogs, I don’t know that he would be stigmatized as an inadequate parent for his choices.  While there is of course a point at which parental autonomy should be limited to protect the child (when, for example, a child’s diet leads to malnutrition), there’s a large grey zone in which parents are and should be allowed to undertake their own cost-benefit analysis between their child’s interest and their interests and act accordingly.

Not so with breastfeeding; “good” mothers are expected to subjugate entirely their own interests in order to provide what’s “best” for their child.  Even for those of us with highly flexible professional careers, this is a serious demand on time and energy; as Rosin notes, what about waitresses or truck drivers?  Are they forever doomed to being “bad mothers” given the near impossibility of maintaining milk supply while meeting the nonstop work ethic required in their jobs?  I like Sarah’s suggested reformulation of breast-feeding mantras, then, to focus on mothers as autonomous beings entitled to balance their interests with those of their child.  One can be a “good” mother in many ways; how we choose to feed our children should be simply that: a choice, without judgment from others.

The overall message from the website is that [...]]]> I wasn’t going to say anything about Bristol Palin’s new job, but then a friend sent me a column in today’s New York Timesabout Ms. Palin. In case you missed this news item, Ms. Palin (18 and nonmarital mother of baby Tripp) has become a teen ambassador for the Candie’s Foundation, which is supposed to educate us about how we can fight teen pregnancy. To market its message, the Foundation is selling tank tops for $15 with the slogan, “I’m Sexy enough . . . to keep you waiting.” (Disclosure: I should note that I tottered around in my 3-inch Candie’s high heel shoes several decades ago, but have given them up for shoes from The Walking Company.)

The overall message from the website is that teens should wait. On its webpage, “Tips for Teens,” the Foundation asks, “What should you know?” and then replies:

Did you know that over 90% of teens believe that it’s important that they get a strong message about waiting to have sex? In fact, 60% of teens who have had sex wish they had waited longer and 75% don’t see anything embarrassing about admitting that they’re virgins. Clearly, teens in the 21st century are recognizing merit in putting off sex and the consequences – both physical and emotional – that are attached to sex.

I think encouraging teen abstinence is incredibly important, even more so now that my younger daughter has just joined the ranks of teen-agers. But I think it is even more important not to let encouraging abstinence get in the way of discouraging pregnancy. The U.S. has the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the developed work — three in ten women will experience pregnancy before the age of 20, a very scary statistic. And those rates are almost certainly higher than they need be because of the energy we devote to encouraging abstinence. As Ms. Palin so clearly, vividly, and painfully shows, abstinence is not realistic.

June Carbone and I have observed that there is no evidence that abstinence-only education in fact makes abstinence until marriage more likely, or produces a decline in either teen or non-marital births.

Some studies show that abstinence-only education leaves teens less prepared for the sexual relations they later develop, with a corresponding increase in unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases; and that teens who participate in abstinence-only education appear to begin sexual activity at roughly the same ages as teen who do not participate in the programs and to be just as likely to have sexual encounters before marriage.

In April 2007, a comprehensive, congressionally authorized review of federally funded programs found that youth who participated in abstinence education programs were no more nor less likely to have abstained from sex than those in a control group who had not received the abstinence education programs. While religion can make a difference — religiously devout teens do begin sexual activity a year later on average than their less devout religious counterparts who profess the same religious beliefs – even the most devout overwhelmingly do not abstain until marriage.

The dramatic story of the nineties was a national decline in teen births, a decline most dramatic for the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. That decline in births occurred at the same time teen pregnancy and abortion rates fell, and while it involved greater abstinence during the early teen year years, the greater declines came from more effective contraceptive use among older teens. In the last few years, teen births have crept back up. Commentators attribute the increase to some combination of the worsening economy (a bright future is the best contraceptive), increasing amounts of abstinence-only education (the poorer the woman, the more likely she is to receive no information about contraception before her initial sexual encounter), and lesser access to contraception (the most effective methods require a prescription).
“Do as I say, not as I do” has never been an effective message.

Consider the proposed Georgia law, and almost copycat-like, [...]]]> Dan first asked me to blog a few months ago, around the time my book, Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation, was hitting the market. Since then, we’ve had Nadya Suleman’s octuplets, President Obama’s lifting of the federal stem cell research ban (although this may only apply to embryos resulting from fertility efforts), and proposed new legislation in Georgia that would allow for embryos to be “adopted.” These events in reproductive technology are neither as newsworthy nor as profoundly disturbing as the torture memos or bailing out Wall Street — or, potentially, as swine flu. They are, nonetheless, critical to the cultural conflict over abortion, family formation, and gender roles.

Consider the proposed Georgia law, and almost copycat-like, legislation in Tennesse. The “Option of Adoption Act” is a Georgia bill that is now sitting on the desk of Ga.. Governor Sonny Perdue. This is the same Republican governor who filed his own brief in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder (the Voting Rights Case that the Supreme Court heard last week), arguing – among other things — that electing a black president indicates no further need for the type of scrutiny Georgia receives under Section 5; the Georgia attorney general had, apparently, refused to file such a brief. Anyway, the Option of Adoption Act, which was introduced in the Georgia legislature by an anti-abortion state representative, sets out methods through which people who create an embryo (when someone undergoes a cycle of in vitro fertilization, there are often embryos left over that ) can donate any leftovers to someone else. There may be up to half a million frozen embryos in the United States, although many of them are incapable of becoming viable fetuses. In Georgia, if the legislation becomes law, the recipients of any embryo transfer can then choose to petition a court for recognition that they are the legal parents of any child born to them.

.One of the bill’s advocates, Daniel Becker, the President of Georgia Right to Life, trumpeted that, “’This bill is monumental in that it establishes the adoption of embryos as children for adoption purposes.’” Indeed, there have even been claims that an embryo exchange should be the basis for eligibility under the federal adoption tax credit. As Sarah Lawsky and I painstaking show in Embryo Exchanges and Adoption Tax Credits, use of someone else’s embryo is not an adoption. Calling embryos “children” is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, and most clearly, it is part of a right to life agenda designed, ultimately, to overturn Roe. In the short term, this is an effort to continue to control the rhetoric around abortion and to continue to make inroads through the political process on women’s right to choose. And, it is factually inaccurate. Not only is the terminology politically motivated, but also the legal procedures for donating an embryo are quite different from the legal procedures for an adoption.

Second, labeling an embryo a “child” may lead to questions about how to think about egg and sperm that are “donated” by one person to another. (Here again the language is tricky: egg and sperm are usually not donated but are — as many other wonderful colleagues have noted — sold. Stay tuned for a potential blog post about this.) If there are to be questions raised about the fertility industry, however, the questions should relate to better regulation without allowing right to life advocates to take over the discourse. For more on this, see Jennifer Collins’s recent post.

Finally, there are numerous options for thinking about what to do about the problem of leftover embryos. Many people don’t like the idea that their embryos will become someone else’s children, or they want to keep these embryos in storage for future family-building; others want to dispose of them entirely; some want to donate them for research; and then there’s the group who wants to help others family-build. If we think of embryos as “children,” however, we may limit people’s choices on what to do with their leftover embryos, and we may also get close, again, to shutting down federal funding for stem cell research. . No good outcomes here – unless we think of embryos as embryos.

Women who reported a lifetime history of more than a year of breast-feeding were 20 percent less likely to have diabetes, 12 percent less likely to have hypertension, 19 percent less likely to have high cholesterol and 9 percent less likely to have had a heart attack or a stroke by the time they enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative.

The word “potential” is important. The [...]]]> As an aside, I recently suggested that breast-feeding advocates organize a public information campaign about how breast-feeding can promote weight loss. An article from last week’s New York Times reminds me that such a campaign could point to other potential benefits as well. A recent study of 139,681 women enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative showed that:

Women who reported a lifetime history of more than a year of breast-feeding were 20 percent less likely to have diabetes, 12 percent less likely to have hypertension, 19 percent less likely to have high cholesterol and 9 percent less likely to have had a heart attack or a stroke by the time they enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative.

The word “potential” is important. The Women’s Health Initiative study showed an association between breast-feeding and reduced risk; it did not demonstrate a causal relationship. The study was not able to account for all differences in the lives of women who breast-fed and women who didn’t. In this regard, the study suffers from the same deficiencies as those that attempt to evaluate the effect that breast-feeding has on babies. Researchers cannot account for all the differences in the lives of children who are breast-fed and children who are not.

The idea that breastfeeding is beneficial for women is not new. For example, the association between breast-feeding and lower risks of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and osteoporosis have been known for some time.

All of this brings me to back to the question of why public health organizations that are eager to promote breast-feeding don’t focus more on the potential benefits for women. I suspect that it has something to do with an overly-simplistic take on the maternal mind: mothers want to do what is best for their children, period. The reality, however, is that most maternal decisions involve trade-offs between what is best for the mother and what is best for the child.

To wit, once an acquaintance who was active in La Leche saw me breast-feeding my child, who was then more than a year old. In what was an effort to be encouraging and supportive, she told me she thought it was “just great” that I was still breast-feeding. Because I was so ready to be done with it all, her comment was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I know I sounded hostile when I said that I was breast-feeding because it was easier than going through the hassle of forcing my child to stop. In other words, the decision to continue breast-feeding was about which of two imperfect alternatives was best for me, not about what was best for my child.

No matter how much a woman loves her child, self-interest doesn’t disappear. Public health agencies that want to increase breast-feeding rates should capitalize on this reality.