If public health decisions were made rationally in this country, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control would put paid to the argument that only sluts should get the HPV vaccine:
Turns out a teen’s level of sexual activity doesn’t predict her level of risk of contracting HPV, the virus that causes genital warts and cervical cancer. The researchers report that HPV is so common that anyone who ever becomes sexually active is likely to get it, and so every girl should get the vaccine.
But of course public health politics aren’t rational and so women will continue to die from a preventable cancer. Including, it seems likely, especially the daughters of right-wing Christians, whose parents, if this vaccine is not made mandatory, will be free to decide that their daughters don’t need this sluts’ vaccine, but whose husbands, judging by the recent track record of right-wing Christian politicians, may well be engaged in plenty of extracurricular sex that puts their wives at risk. Seems to me there’s only one interpretation possible: right-wing zealots want women to be punished for having sex (and even for their husbands’ having sex). There’s a dark side of me that takes grim pleasure whenever this truth is exposed, but mostly I’m depressed. The daughters of zealots don’t deserve to be punished for their parents’ misogyny. Nor do the rest of our daughters.
Sadly, it’s not just the children of the far-right who are at risk. Many parents are reluctant to give their young teenage daughters the vaccine because they can’t conceive their daughter might be sexually active or about to become so. This study should provide the squeamish with a reason to vaccinate their daughters: Any time their daughter ever has a single sexual partner she will be at risk unless she’s vaccinated. Every female but a nun should get it, and, hey, nuns have been known to change their minds, so they should too.
The study should also change the mainstream medical establishment’s approach to the vaccine, too. According to RH Reality Check's blog, the American Cancer Society recommends that women 18 and older talk decide whether to be vaccinated based on a conversation with their doctors about their sexual history. This study shows sexual history is no predicter of HPV risk and the cancer society should get on board with vaccinating everybody. (And indeed it suggests that even the CDC's recommendation that all females ages 11–26 get vaccinated is too narrow. What about older women?)
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Why I’m not for gay marriage
Before you decide I’m a homophobe, let me be clear: In a society where the government sanctifies heterosexual partnership under the name of marriage, I regard the denial of that sanctification to same-sex couples as a violation of basic rights. If the government grants anyone that right, it must grant it to all.
But instead, let the government stop granting marriage to anyone.
But I am married, so what gives?
There you get to the heart of why I’ve been thinking so much about this issue, but have taken so long to post on it. I have always been skeptical of marriage, and I used to have nightmares about finding myself in a white dress walking down an aisle. (Eek! How did I get here?) But after I had been with the man I’m now married to for a few years and realized I planned to create a lifelong partnership with him, I came to see refusing to accept the label of marriage as largely irrelevant and pointless. We had a wedding—I wore red, not white—and against all my expectation I enjoyed it. A woman rabbi married us, our families were there, and I, who am an only child and the daughter of a single mother, was delighted to be embraced in a new family. Warm and loving as that family would have been to me if we had decided not to get married, there’s no denying that that ceremony gave me a new status in the family. I now belong in a deeply comforting way. I gained a privilege that gays have traditionally been denied and that must change.
I also gained the 300-some dubious legal benefits of marriage. I say dubious, because many of these benefits are gains for my family unit but they have the effect of disempowering me. Our family unit may gain economically from the marriage—we can file a joint tax return, and my husband can claim for the family the right to Social Security based on 150 percent of his income, instead of 100 percent. But as a wife, I will face significant disincentives on my paid work. Because of joint filing, my earnings are taxed at a much steeper marginal rate than they were when I was single. (Ann Crittenden explains this well, although she doesn’t emphasize that this is a different problem from the more commonly known “marriage penalty”—the problem remains even if the couple as a unit doesn't pay any more than the total the two would pay separately. For a more technical explanation, see Siv Gustafsson’s scholarly paper [PDF]. For a full-length book on the subject, check out Edward McCaffery's terrific Taxing Women. )
Many women in this situation elect to drop out of the paid workforce, basing their decision only on a comparison of current costs and benefits. Yet dropping out of the workforce results in major long-term costs, including big hits to my lifetime earnings, my savings (including government-encouraged, tax-free savings under a 401K), and my accrual of Social Security. Social Security is designed to allow me to receive benefits under my husband’s umbrella, but my marriage had better survive for more than 10 years or I get nothing. If the marriage survives and I do take paid work, I likely will get no return on the Social Security taxes I pay on my earnings; that is, a non-wage-earning wife will get the same Social Security benefits I do, despite all the additional taxes I pay in.
If I am among the working poor, and I stay in the paid workforce once I marry, I will likely lose all or most of the Earned Income Credit, subjecting my earnings to whopping effective rates higher than the rich paid under the New Deal.
When a couple has a child, these disincentives to the wife’s paid work kick into overdrive. Rather than treating childcare as a business expense (as it clearly is) and allowing full deduction of it, let alone offering major tax credits or a full system of government-funded childcare, we get a token credit on a small fraction of the enormous cost of childcare. So lots of women drop out of the paid workforce when they have a child and even more do so when they face the cost of childcare for two or more children. Yet earnings are power, so this means they lose power, both within the marriage and in the larger world.
Marriage as a government-backed institution, whatever the privileges that come with it, remains a raw deal for women.
A majority of Americans now support domestic partnerships, but are uncomfortable with gay marriage. To which I think the solution is the abolition of marriage—as a government-backed institution. Which is not to say that marriage should be abolished altogether. Just get the government out of it. Let rabbis, priests, imams, and gurus and their associated communities provide the sanctification people want and need and let them call it what they want. Meanwhile the government would offer only domestic partnerships. And while we’re at it, let’s extend the right to enter these partnerships not just to gay and straight couples, but to any pair of consenting adults who want to live together and share living expenses, property, and, perhaps, responsibilities for children. Which is to say, junk the link between sex and partnership. Friends, sisters, cousins could become domestic partners if they liked.
When an unmarried acquaintance of mine faced a terminal illness, she knew she’d be turning to Medicaid to cover the high costs of dying, but Medicaid required her to spend down all her assets first. Her only asset was a condominium she occupied with her sister and wanted to pass on to her. If the sister had been her husband, she could have done so, without jeopardizing Medicaid coverage. Why should the government treat this relationship with her sister as any less significant than marriage to a man? Why should the government treat any life partnership between two adults less seriously than a sexual one between a man and a woman? Gays have raised this question, but we should take it far deeper and broader. This is both a practical matter and a matter of liberty and human flourishing, especially for women. Let us create less rigid and more expansive notions of family.
We should abolish joint filing and jettison the system that grants social benefits—from Social Security to health care—on the basis of marital status, in favor of granting them as rights of citizenship, or better yet as human rights.
But instead, let the government stop granting marriage to anyone.
But I am married, so what gives?
There you get to the heart of why I’ve been thinking so much about this issue, but have taken so long to post on it. I have always been skeptical of marriage, and I used to have nightmares about finding myself in a white dress walking down an aisle. (Eek! How did I get here?) But after I had been with the man I’m now married to for a few years and realized I planned to create a lifelong partnership with him, I came to see refusing to accept the label of marriage as largely irrelevant and pointless. We had a wedding—I wore red, not white—and against all my expectation I enjoyed it. A woman rabbi married us, our families were there, and I, who am an only child and the daughter of a single mother, was delighted to be embraced in a new family. Warm and loving as that family would have been to me if we had decided not to get married, there’s no denying that that ceremony gave me a new status in the family. I now belong in a deeply comforting way. I gained a privilege that gays have traditionally been denied and that must change.
I also gained the 300-some dubious legal benefits of marriage. I say dubious, because many of these benefits are gains for my family unit but they have the effect of disempowering me. Our family unit may gain economically from the marriage—we can file a joint tax return, and my husband can claim for the family the right to Social Security based on 150 percent of his income, instead of 100 percent. But as a wife, I will face significant disincentives on my paid work. Because of joint filing, my earnings are taxed at a much steeper marginal rate than they were when I was single. (Ann Crittenden explains this well, although she doesn’t emphasize that this is a different problem from the more commonly known “marriage penalty”—the problem remains even if the couple as a unit doesn't pay any more than the total the two would pay separately. For a more technical explanation, see Siv Gustafsson’s scholarly paper [PDF]. For a full-length book on the subject, check out Edward McCaffery's terrific Taxing Women. )
Many women in this situation elect to drop out of the paid workforce, basing their decision only on a comparison of current costs and benefits. Yet dropping out of the workforce results in major long-term costs, including big hits to my lifetime earnings, my savings (including government-encouraged, tax-free savings under a 401K), and my accrual of Social Security. Social Security is designed to allow me to receive benefits under my husband’s umbrella, but my marriage had better survive for more than 10 years or I get nothing. If the marriage survives and I do take paid work, I likely will get no return on the Social Security taxes I pay on my earnings; that is, a non-wage-earning wife will get the same Social Security benefits I do, despite all the additional taxes I pay in.
If I am among the working poor, and I stay in the paid workforce once I marry, I will likely lose all or most of the Earned Income Credit, subjecting my earnings to whopping effective rates higher than the rich paid under the New Deal.
When a couple has a child, these disincentives to the wife’s paid work kick into overdrive. Rather than treating childcare as a business expense (as it clearly is) and allowing full deduction of it, let alone offering major tax credits or a full system of government-funded childcare, we get a token credit on a small fraction of the enormous cost of childcare. So lots of women drop out of the paid workforce when they have a child and even more do so when they face the cost of childcare for two or more children. Yet earnings are power, so this means they lose power, both within the marriage and in the larger world.
Marriage as a government-backed institution, whatever the privileges that come with it, remains a raw deal for women.
A majority of Americans now support domestic partnerships, but are uncomfortable with gay marriage. To which I think the solution is the abolition of marriage—as a government-backed institution. Which is not to say that marriage should be abolished altogether. Just get the government out of it. Let rabbis, priests, imams, and gurus and their associated communities provide the sanctification people want and need and let them call it what they want. Meanwhile the government would offer only domestic partnerships. And while we’re at it, let’s extend the right to enter these partnerships not just to gay and straight couples, but to any pair of consenting adults who want to live together and share living expenses, property, and, perhaps, responsibilities for children. Which is to say, junk the link between sex and partnership. Friends, sisters, cousins could become domestic partners if they liked.
When an unmarried acquaintance of mine faced a terminal illness, she knew she’d be turning to Medicaid to cover the high costs of dying, but Medicaid required her to spend down all her assets first. Her only asset was a condominium she occupied with her sister and wanted to pass on to her. If the sister had been her husband, she could have done so, without jeopardizing Medicaid coverage. Why should the government treat this relationship with her sister as any less significant than marriage to a man? Why should the government treat any life partnership between two adults less seriously than a sexual one between a man and a woman? Gays have raised this question, but we should take it far deeper and broader. This is both a practical matter and a matter of liberty and human flourishing, especially for women. Let us create less rigid and more expansive notions of family.
We should abolish joint filing and jettison the system that grants social benefits—from Social Security to health care—on the basis of marital status, in favor of granting them as rights of citizenship, or better yet as human rights.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Facebook to users: pick a gender
This is kinda off topic, but it combines two subjects close to my heart—gender and grammar, whoopee!—so I can’t resist. Broadsheet reports that when Facebook sends a newsfeed about your friend’s latest picture tagging, instead of “Pat Smith tagged themself in a picture” you’ll now read “Pat Smith tagged himself” or “Pat Smith tagged herself.”
Darn but that old third-person singular is still giving us feminist grammarians grief. I’m not crazy about singular use of “they”—it violates my love of precision in language and often creates confusion—but I’m inclined to think it’s about as good a solution as we’re gonna get. We do need a solution, because “he” just isn’t a generic pronoun. And weird invented pronouns just sound, well, weird. Language after all is a social game; as Wittgenstein said, you can’t just go off and create a private language. Unless everyone suddenly embraces a new pronoun you can’t create a new one.
This is why Facebook’s effort to accommodate those who don’t wish to be boxed into gender categories by allowing users to enter whatever they want in the gender category doesn’t cut it. If you enter “shim” for example as your gender, you have immediately labeled yourself oddball. Which is not the same as staying gender neutral.
I’m sorry Facebook has taken this step. Everywhere else in life we’re forced to announce our genders, and now we’ve lost one place to opt out of that game. As a parent, I’m acutely aware of how ferociously gender is policed in children. People get really uncomfortable when they guess wrongly that my blue-bedecked baby is a boy, even though neither the baby nor I care. And heaven forbid a boy child should wear pink. And when my partner and I chose not to find out the kids’ sex before birth, people were more startled by that than when they learned we were choosing to have the children at home. Which is precisely why we chose not to find out. Let the kids—and us, their parents—be free of the rigid pressures and expectations of gender at least until they’re born.
You didn't think I was going to be able to bring this back to parenting, did you?
Darn but that old third-person singular is still giving us feminist grammarians grief. I’m not crazy about singular use of “they”—it violates my love of precision in language and often creates confusion—but I’m inclined to think it’s about as good a solution as we’re gonna get. We do need a solution, because “he” just isn’t a generic pronoun. And weird invented pronouns just sound, well, weird. Language after all is a social game; as Wittgenstein said, you can’t just go off and create a private language. Unless everyone suddenly embraces a new pronoun you can’t create a new one.
This is why Facebook’s effort to accommodate those who don’t wish to be boxed into gender categories by allowing users to enter whatever they want in the gender category doesn’t cut it. If you enter “shim” for example as your gender, you have immediately labeled yourself oddball. Which is not the same as staying gender neutral.
I’m sorry Facebook has taken this step. Everywhere else in life we’re forced to announce our genders, and now we’ve lost one place to opt out of that game. As a parent, I’m acutely aware of how ferociously gender is policed in children. People get really uncomfortable when they guess wrongly that my blue-bedecked baby is a boy, even though neither the baby nor I care. And heaven forbid a boy child should wear pink. And when my partner and I chose not to find out the kids’ sex before birth, people were more startled by that than when they learned we were choosing to have the children at home. Which is precisely why we chose not to find out. Let the kids—and us, their parents—be free of the rigid pressures and expectations of gender at least until they’re born.
You didn't think I was going to be able to bring this back to parenting, did you?
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Cuddling is risky, says New York
This is one of those stories that sets my outrage-o-meter climbing higher with each detail: New York and a number of other states have launched “Babies Sleep Safest Alone” campaign, claiming that “Co-sleeping is risky.” (In multiple languages, no less.)
There appears to be no science behind this claim. New York’s Office of Children and Families claims that co-sleeping is involved in approximately 20 percent of the child fatalities reported to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, but as we used to say in graduate school, let’s unpack that statement. “Involved” is an exceedingly weak verb, eliding a lot of imprecision as to what the real causes of the deaths were.. The campaign notes that alcohol, drugs, obesity, and overcrowding of the bed with people, toys, or blankets also appear to have been “involved” in these deaths.
And what about the risks of not sleeping with your baby? Of the 80 percent of child fatalities reported to the register that didn't involve co-sleeping, what fraction were caused by sleeping alone? That is, by unsafe cribs, from SIDS—the risk of which has been shown to be reduced by co-sleeping—from smothering in blankets or toys in cribs, or more broadly from whatever went wrong that was unnoticed because the baby was far away from an attentive caregiver?
This campaign and previous ones like it don’t cite studies proving cribs are safer than co-sleeping. They simply assume it. In fact, the burden of proof rightly goes the other way; humans have been sleeping with their babies since before we became human (and in most countries they still do). It’s a practice that was part of our evolution, and it seems plausible that closeness to the breathing warmth of one’s mother helps regulate all sorts of functions in the unformed human newborn. SIDS studies bear this out.
And co-sleeping makes breastfeeding a heck of a lot easier.
I got even more irritated when I read what I assumed would be a rebuttal of the campaign from Mothering magazine. The author wrote that she had planned to participate in activism against it, then decided against it.
But we’re all in this together. Official campaigns that discourage breastfeeding affect all of us. Guilt-tripping mothers for doing the most natural thing in the world affects all of us.
This seems to me yet another installment in the official valuing of the parenting money can buy over what it can’t; rich parents can buy nurseries with fancy cribs and high-tech monitors, while poor ones can only cuddle. I for one think cuddling is the better deal.
There appears to be no science behind this claim. New York’s Office of Children and Families claims that co-sleeping is involved in approximately 20 percent of the child fatalities reported to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, but as we used to say in graduate school, let’s unpack that statement. “Involved” is an exceedingly weak verb, eliding a lot of imprecision as to what the real causes of the deaths were.. The campaign notes that alcohol, drugs, obesity, and overcrowding of the bed with people, toys, or blankets also appear to have been “involved” in these deaths.
And what about the risks of not sleeping with your baby? Of the 80 percent of child fatalities reported to the register that didn't involve co-sleeping, what fraction were caused by sleeping alone? That is, by unsafe cribs, from SIDS—the risk of which has been shown to be reduced by co-sleeping—from smothering in blankets or toys in cribs, or more broadly from whatever went wrong that was unnoticed because the baby was far away from an attentive caregiver?
This campaign and previous ones like it don’t cite studies proving cribs are safer than co-sleeping. They simply assume it. In fact, the burden of proof rightly goes the other way; humans have been sleeping with their babies since before we became human (and in most countries they still do). It’s a practice that was part of our evolution, and it seems plausible that closeness to the breathing warmth of one’s mother helps regulate all sorts of functions in the unformed human newborn. SIDS studies bear this out.
And co-sleeping makes breastfeeding a heck of a lot easier.
I got even more irritated when I read what I assumed would be a rebuttal of the campaign from Mothering magazine. The author wrote that she had planned to participate in activism against it, then decided against it.
After some reflection, I realized that New York's campaign wasn't really directed at me…The recommendation…fails to differentiate between parents with limited resources who bed-share out of necessity, those who do so out of neglect, and those who intentionally bed-share in what they believe to be the best interests of their child.”She goes on to detail the evidence in favor of co-sleeping, but that comment illuminated one of the creepiest aspects of the campaign: its not-so-subtle classism. It’s okay for well-to-parents to choose to bed-share (or better yet buy an expensive “co-sleeper” sidecar), but heaven forbid you should do so because you’ve got nowhere else for the child to sleep. Perhaps co-sleeping is okay if you’re sober and slim and so on, but we can’t expect stupid (read poor) parents to understand that nuance and act on it. And we well-to-do, educated parents shouldn’t oppose the campaign because it isn’t directed at us.
But we’re all in this together. Official campaigns that discourage breastfeeding affect all of us. Guilt-tripping mothers for doing the most natural thing in the world affects all of us.
This seems to me yet another installment in the official valuing of the parenting money can buy over what it can’t; rich parents can buy nurseries with fancy cribs and high-tech monitors, while poor ones can only cuddle. I for one think cuddling is the better deal.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Missourians finally free to give birth at home
Finally, women in Missouri have the right to a midwife-attended home birth. By a 5-2 decision, the state supreme court rejected an effort by doctors to abolish a recent law legalizing the practice.
Until recently, Missouri was the only state where having a home birth attended by a certified midwife was actually a felony. A group of doctors sought to return women in Missouri to that benighted situation, claiming they had standing to sue by virtue of speaking for their patients. That is, seeking to speak on behalf of women who might foolishly try to have home births if they weren’t prevented, and therefore can't be trusted to speak for themselves. As Susan Jenkins, legal counsel for the National Birth Policy Coalition and a consultant to the Missouri midwives, stated:
Until recently, Missouri was the only state where having a home birth attended by a certified midwife was actually a felony. A group of doctors sought to return women in Missouri to that benighted situation, claiming they had standing to sue by virtue of speaking for their patients. That is, seeking to speak on behalf of women who might foolishly try to have home births if they weren’t prevented, and therefore can't be trusted to speak for themselves. As Susan Jenkins, legal counsel for the National Birth Policy Coalition and a consultant to the Missouri midwives, stated:
“This case confirms the message that’s been reverberating loud and clear in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere ever since the American Medical Association launched its attacks against midwives and home birth last week—physicians do not have the right to speak for patients when it comes to deciding who delivers their babies.”Our Bodies Ourselves notes how weirdly the concept of choice is being used by the medical establishment when it comes to reproduction and childbirth. At the same time that the AMA and American College of Obstetricians pushes the acceptability of “elective” C-sections, it is making VBACS harder and harder to have and opposes the expansion of women's choices in caregivers and birthing places.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Pope Benedict the lactivist?
I’ll make a wild bet here and predict this will be one of very few posts in which I praise the Catholic church’s stance on anything having to do with women and reproduction. So I’m going to enjoy this moment.
The official newspaper of the Holy See, L'Osservatore Romano, has chided Catholics for being offended by depictions of Mary’s breastfeeding baby Jesus. "Jesus was a baby like all others. His divinity does not exclude his humanity," church historian Lucetta Scaraffia said, according to the British Telegraph. The newspaper noted that since the 17th century artists have been covering up Mary’s mammaries to avoid “unbecoming” “carnality” in sacred images.
But, as Father Enrico dal Covolo, a professor of classic and Christian literature at the Pontifical Salesian University, pointed out in L’Osservatore, that’s kinda the point. The word made flesh and all that.
You ask me (and you did, since you came to this page), there isn’t anything more sacred and symbolic of the human condition than a mother nursing a child. Anybody who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch was never breastfed (or owes his mother an apology).
I may never say this again: Go, pope!
Now I’ll get tiresome and suggest that the irrepressibility of the Mary cult shows how tortured Christianity is. The ancient worship of the mother goddess makes a whole lot more sense than the death cult that is the Jesus myth, and the weirdness of the Holy Trinity dissolves if you let the threesome be father, mother, and child... I’m sure theologians all over the Holy See are now smacking their heads, saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and turning right to revising their texts. Get to it, boys.
The official newspaper of the Holy See, L'Osservatore Romano, has chided Catholics for being offended by depictions of Mary’s breastfeeding baby Jesus. "Jesus was a baby like all others. His divinity does not exclude his humanity," church historian Lucetta Scaraffia said, according to the British Telegraph. The newspaper noted that since the 17th century artists have been covering up Mary’s mammaries to avoid “unbecoming” “carnality” in sacred images.
But, as Father Enrico dal Covolo, a professor of classic and Christian literature at the Pontifical Salesian University, pointed out in L’Osservatore, that’s kinda the point. The word made flesh and all that.
You ask me (and you did, since you came to this page), there isn’t anything more sacred and symbolic of the human condition than a mother nursing a child. Anybody who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch was never breastfed (or owes his mother an apology).
I may never say this again: Go, pope!
Now I’ll get tiresome and suggest that the irrepressibility of the Mary cult shows how tortured Christianity is. The ancient worship of the mother goddess makes a whole lot more sense than the death cult that is the Jesus myth, and the weirdness of the Holy Trinity dissolves if you let the threesome be father, mother, and child... I’m sure theologians all over the Holy See are now smacking their heads, saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and turning right to revising their texts. Get to it, boys.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
AMA seeks to outlaw home birth
Not content with discouraging and disapproving of home birth, the American Medical Association at its annual meeting last weekend passed a resolution to press for the outlawing of home birth. Given the skyrocketing c-section rate, the spiraling cost of birth, and the nothing-to-be-proud-of U.S. maternal and infant mortality rates (our newborn mortality rate is the second worst in the developed world), this move seems, well, a little insecure. Fact is, studies have found home births to be as safe or safer than hospital care for low-risk births and they cost two-thirds less. Chalk this one up as just one more episode in the sorry history of the AMA.
RH Reality Check rightly places this as part of broader attempts to criminalize motherhood, having “at their core coercive control over pregnancy and childbirth.”
RH Reality Check rightly places this as part of broader attempts to criminalize motherhood, having “at their core coercive control over pregnancy and childbirth.”
"It's unclear what penalties the AMA will seek to impose on women who choose to give birth at home, either for religious, cultural or financial reasons-or just because they didn't make it to the hospital in time," said Susan Jenkins, Legal Counsel for The Big Push for Midwives 2008 campaign. "What we do know, however, is that any state that enacts such a law will immediately find itself in court, since a law dictating where a woman must give birth would be a clear violation of fundamental rights to privacy and other freedoms currently protected by the U.S. Constitution."
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