The first week of August marks World Breastfeeding Week, a full seven days of encouraging new mothers to feed their babies from the breast. Are you ladies "pumped" or what? (Heh). Important man angle: "Studies show that the father's stated preference for breastfeeding was found to be the most important factor influencing a woman's decision to breastfeed."

I'm reminded of a section from Mary McCarthy's The Group, recently highlighted by Sady Doyle:

In fiction, we have Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel The Group, in which the fragile Priss has a nervous breakdown because her husband insists she breastfeed their newborn. Priss doesn't have enough milk; the perpetually hungry baby never stops crying; Priss never stops feeling like a failure. She comes to dislike her husband. ("Up to now [his politics] had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans... But she did not like the thought of a Republican controlling the destiny of a helpless baby.") She comes to dislike her baby. ("She felt, to her shame, that he was a piece of hospital property that had been dumped on her and abandoned—they would never come to take him away.")

Get to it, dads!

Photo via National Media Museum

Last night, I re-read Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer Prize-winning feature on parents who accidentally forget their infants in the backseats of their cars, leaving them to swelter to death in the heat. And since I can make connections to rape culture out of practically anything, I was struck by this section in Weingarten's story, about the public's reaction to parents who make this fatal mistake:

"This is a case of pure evil negligence of the worse kind . . . He deserves the death sentence."

"I wonder if this was his way of telling his wife that he didn't really want a kid."

"He was too busy chasing after real estate commissions. This shows how morally corrupt people in real estate-related professions are."

These were readers' online comments to The Washington Post news article of July 10, 2008, reporting the circumstances of the death of Miles Harrison's son. These comments were typical of many others, and they are typical of what happens again and again, year after year in community after community, when these cases arise. A substantial proportion of the public reacts not merely with anger, but with frothing vitriol.

Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.

Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."

Sound familiar? The comparison to victims of rape doesn't end there. One mother whose baby died after she forgot him in the backseat of her car was—strangely—explicitly slut-shamed by an online commenter:

After Lyn Balfour's acquittal, this comment appeared on the Charlottesville News Web site:

"If she had too many things on her mind then she should have kept her legs closed and not had any kids. They should lock her in a car during a hot day and see what happens."

The idea of addressing parents who accidentally kill their children by putting them "in a different category" functions a bit differently when applied to the victims and perpetrators of rape. When we are confronted with victims of rape, we put them in a different category ("irresponsible sluts") in order to avoid believing that rape could ever happen to us; when we are confronted with rapists, we put them in a different category ("evil monsters") in order to avoid believing that our classmates, friends, brothers, and sons are actually capable of such a heinous crime. Parents who accidentally kill their children are both victims and perpetrators—they're our evil monsters and irresponsible sluts all wrapped into one.

Photo via spaceodissey, Creative Commons Attribution license 2.0

Sexist pet peeve: the persistent myth that women are all privately obsessed with producing tiny widdle babies. Working to debunk that assumption is a recent National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy study [PDF] which surveyed thousands of young Americans, aged 18 to 29, about their thoughts and perceptions about pregnancy. Guess which group is more likely to be "pleased" at an unplanned pregnancy? It's not the one with the silently weeping ovaries.

In order to gauge the "surprise fetus" reaction, NCPTUP researchers first isolated survey respondents who claimed it was "very important or somewhat important for them to avoid pregnancy right now." Then, researchers asked them how they would feel about an unplanned pregnancy:

If you found out today that (you were/your partner was) pregnant, how would you feel: Very upset, a little upset, a little pleased, very pleased, wouldn’t care.

Results: Staggeringly gendered! Forty-three percent of young men responded that they would be "a little pleased" or "very pleased" by the news; only 20 percent of women answered the same. Men also proved more comfortable with an unplanned pregnancy at an earlier age: Thirty-four percent of men 18-19 said they would be pleased. By the time they reach age 20-24, 42 percent of men said they would be pleased. And over 50 percent of men aged 25-29 would be pleased by the news. Remember: this is only among men who deemed it "important" that a pregnancy not occur at this junction.

Meanwhile, the percentage of women who would be "pleased" by an unplanned pregnancy stays steady at a low 16 percent all the way from age 18 to 24. By the time women reach the 25-29 age range, the percentage of "pleased" women soars to 29 percent. Despite the jump, women in their late 20s still lag behind their male counterparts by 22 percentage points. I don't know: Perhaps our joy is muted by the fact that unexpected pregnancies tend to put us ladies out a touch.

So, politely, what the fuck is going on? How many women out there are having sex under the assumption that their male partners are invested in teaming up to prevent pregnancy, only to discover that the guys are privately ecstatic about the idea? And could it happen to me? After all, my boyfriend falls into the Pleased By Surprise Fetus Danger Zone of age 25-29. Better safe than sorry:

me: Hey, would you agree that it's very important or somewhat important for us to avoid pregnancy right now?

him: What?

me: Don't worry, it's a theoretical question.

him: Christ. Very.

me: OK.

him: ??

me: If you found out today that I was pregnant, how would you feel: Very upset, a little upset, a little pleased, very pleased, wouldn’t care?

him: Hmm. Wouldnt care. I guess.

me: Just so you know, over half of men in your age range would be pleased or very pleased, even though they say it is important for them to not cause a pregnancy right now.

him: Oh, I would never have picked those.

Whew. I never thought I would register my boyfriend "not caring" about me getting pregnant as a small victory, but I'll take what I can get.

. . . But allow me to ignore the cries of my soon-to-be decrepit ladyparts for a moment in order to re-write this headline to reflect a few possibilities that reporter Carolyn Butler omits from the accompanying story. But first: What's with these ovaries anyway, and why are they so darned stubborn?

Butler's story is a tale of modern career woman v. nature. In it, women who are busy pursuing their professional dreams in their 20's may be dangerously ignoring the silent extermination occurring within their own bodies—according to Butler, "women lose 90 percent of their eggs by age 30"—until it's too late. But don't "start freaking out," Butler tells her readers, who, being women and all, are almost certainly doing just that.

Onto the science: "Society has changed," fertility doctor Robert Stillman of Rockville's Shady Grove Fertility tells Butler, "but the ovaries will take another million years or two to catch up to that."

Stillman's evolutionary perspective prompts this strange analysis from Butler:

Since we don't have another million years to wait, many women thinking of having children are left with the predicament of balancing the personal, primal urge to partner up and procreate with worthwhile social goals such as pursuing higher education and a successful career—not to mention economic stability.

As someone whose personal, primal urges have always been telling her to learn stuff and use her brain for stuff, not to make babies, I am left confused by the idea that my impulse to start a career is seen exclusively as a "worthwhile social goal" that is somehow at odds with my "personal" interests. But then again, there's a lot I don't identify with here. Possible alternate headlines for this story that I would be more likely to get down with:

Adoption agencies have adjusted to many women's decision to delay having children. [Seriously, Butler does even mention this possibility].

* Robert Stillman of Rockville's Shady Grove Fertility has adjusted to raking in tons of cash from many women's decision to delay having children.

* Ovaries indifferent to what you do with eggs after they pass off responsibility to fallopian tubes, uterus

* Ovaries privately concerned that women will end this whole society v. nature charade by just delaying having children until death

* Ovaries confused as to why the decision to have children is presented exclusively as a concern of women in this article

* Ovaries going through particularly rough time right now, could use a couple million years to adjust

In this week's YouTube video chat, Dr. Laura Schlessinger addresses an unnatural new development of modern life: stay-at-home dads. What are the possible psychological effects of this strange permutation of the traditional child-rearing arrangement? A listener writes in Thinking of the Children:

If a mom works, and the dad stays home with the children, does this have any psychological effect on the kids, with respect to their relationships later in life? You talk a lot about stay-at-home-moms, but I don't recall hearing much about what happens when the roles are reversed. Is it better for boys if the dad stays home or does it matter?

Dr. Laura, for her part, is far more concerned with Thinking Of the Wives:

This is one which gets very sensitive, because in general—that means there are exceptions everywhere, OK—when the moms are working, and the dads are at home, the moms, the women, the wives, tend to change their feelings somewhat about their husbands. They tend not to see them as the heroes. The warrior. The man. The caretaker. The provider. The protector. And those feelings are really very significant. And I have found over the years that there often is more marital strife when the roles are reserved. Whether you're a feminist or not, whether you like it or not, them's just the facts.

You see, when a woman wanders outside her natural role as child-rearer and housekeeper and enters into the dangerous world of the male warrior heroes, she's liable to start getting some Ideas. Ideas like, "Despite what I've been told, my feeble female brain can perform tasks outside of raising babies." Ideas like, "This is the 'work' my husband has been self-importantly occupying himself with for all these years? All these people do is dick around and watch YouTube videos." Ideas like, "Now that I'm getting paid for all the work I do, perhaps I shouldn't have settled for that loveless marriage after all."

But never fear: As long as women agree to leave the home without applying their critical thinking skills, the kids will be all right:

Now: it often works very well. And when it works very well—OK, when it works very well it's good for the kids, when it doesn't work very well, it's not good for the kids. The point is not, are the rolls reversed and is that good for the children? The point is, are the parents RHHHHGGG about it? Is dad being treated with less respect? Is mom coming home sort of bitter that she's not with the kids, and feeling like since she earns the money, she's the boss? If there is this kind of negativity and dissention, that hurts the kids.

In other words, are you still treating mom like a woman (with less respect), and dad like a man (the boss)? You're good to go. But once mom starts to get empowered by her new position—or dad starts feeling emasculated—it's back to the kitchen with her.

Bizarre Breastfeeding Contraption: The Breastfeeding Curtain

Patent No.: U.S. 7207070

Inventor: Swarez-Ballesteros, Eva R.

Description: " A nursing garment and method enabling women to nurse a baby in public by covering the mothers. Maintains the breastfeeding relationship by allowing breastfeeding to occur anywhere at anytime. Provides a nursing mother a true sense of privacy and modesty, and provides a mother the added security that most nursing garments or blankets do not. The nursing garment is formed by lined lightweight material and is designed to cover the mother's upper torso, partial back and the nursing infant. The curtain is attached around the neck of the mother by a semi-rigid annular hoop. A layer of material lies across the front panel forming a valance or curtain for added privacy. Added inside the nursing curtain is a pocket for the nursing mother to place nursing paraphernalia and attached to the pocket is a small sized sanitary cloth for the nursing infant and mother."

Why It's Milkable: Doubles as puppet show theater.

Why It Sucks: "The curtain is attached around the neck of the mother by a semi-rigid annular hoop."

Previously:

Bizarre Breastfeeding Contraption #1

What the Nursing Bib Means for the Right to Bare Breasts

Ella Laseinde is accustomed to seeing strangers’ breasts. “I’m a mammographer, so I’m with the breasts constantly,” says Laseinde, 71, who spent 30 years in government service—including five at the National Institutes of Health screening women’s chests. That’s not to say she’s interested in catching sight of stray bosoms outside the office. “I think in today’s time, they need to cover,” Laseinde says of nursing mothers. “There are so many people walking around who can catch a look.”

In 1995, Laseinde patented a contraption to help women breast-feed in public without sacrificing modesty. Laseinde’s Shield-Me-Baby Nursing Bib, inspired by the birth of a granddaughter, is a halter-style bib that attaches with Velcro around a woman’s neck and fits over her breast.

A circular hole, tailored to the woman’s cup size, allows the breast to peek through the innovative device, enabling the infant to latch on to the food source. To minimize the public visibility of this transaction, the device has a flap that rests on the head or perhaps cheek area of the infant. Though it’s possible that some flesh could be exposed even with Laseinde’s patented breakthrough, there’ll be no full-on breast views with the Shield-Me-Baby Nursing Bib.

Though Laseinde’s 14-year patent on the bib expired last week, it’s recently found new life courtesy of neighbor and public-relations mouthpiece Linda Jones, 55. Jones began helping Laseinde market the product a few months ago in order to address what she calls “the ongoing public breast-feeding controversy.” Which side is Jones on? “I believe in covering,” says Jones, who breast-fed her two children, now 36 and 26 years old. “I don’t believe in showing my girls.”

Laseinde began producing the cotton contraptions as gifts before realizing, in the 1990s, that she could be charging $25 and up to help new mothers cover up.

Laseinde’s nursing garment isn’t the first modesty saver to hit the market, but it is one of the simplest. When Laseinde was breast-feeding in the 1960s, necessity mandated consistent public breast-feeding, and modesty could be maintained with a well-draped handkerchief. With the advent of formula and pumps, however, the public display inched toward taboo. Laseinde designed the bib to help a daughter-in-law breast-feed on the go without offending the public’s newly sensitive eyes.

But in the decade-and-a-half since Laseinde first laid out her design, Bill Clinton signed the Right to Breastfeed Act into law, public breast-feeding has emerged from the back room—and upscale new-mama fashion became en vogue. The maternity market has responded with increasingly ridiculous ways to guard a new mother’s breasts from curious onlookers.

One “apparatus and method for breast feeding,” patented in 2007, “provides a nursing mother a true sense of privacy and modesty”—complete with peep-show atmosphere. Here’s how: “[A] curtain is attached around the neck of the mother by a semi-rigid annular hoop. A layer of material lies across the front panel forming a valance or curtain for added privacy.”

Another nursing garment, titled “an improved garment for providing a privacy screen for the body,” has more of a hardhat-area feel. “The garment lies over the shoulder of the wearer extending down the back to a weighting means and down the front to an expanded lower portion,” the 2002 patent reads. “The weighting means provides a counter-balance to adequately retain the position of the garment on the wearer. The expanded lower portion drapes over the midriff of the wearer to provide breathable privacy to the wearer and contents within.

At least one invention attempts to place the modesty burden onto the newborn. The Breastfeeding Hat (patent pending) “includes a head-receiving portion sized and shaped to receive the head of a child, and a brim portion extending radially outwardly from the head-receiving portion. The brim portion is sized and shaped to substantially cover a woman’s breast.”

There’s even a contraption to help eliminate the need for breastfeeding contraptions. My Third Hand, patented in 2004, “holds the mother’s shirt securely out of the way by hooking onto her bra and her shirt, thereby freeing her hands to hold her baby and making expensive maternity shirts unnecessary.”
Laseinde’s Shield-Me-Baby bibs, too, have grown more sophisticated since their mid-’90s debut; she’s currently working on disposable models as well as party-ready versions “to match her evening-wear.” Perfect for the black-tie diaper bag.

Nowadays, many modern moms see no need to borrow baby’s bib before a public breast-feeding session. Dia Michels, 50, a local breast-feeding advocate, spent a combined 15 years breast-feeding on Capitol Hill, no modesty device required. “The reason women are so freaked out about breast-feeding in public is because we have completely sexualized the breast,” she says. “The only way to make breast-feeding easier for women is to desensitize the public to breast exposure. If these devices allow women to hide what they’re doing and cover it because it’s shameful and because it’s embarrassing, it’s just perpetuating the sexualization of the breast.” Though Shield-Me-Baby’s duckline-printed bibs fail to cover the larger issue, they can help individual women still held down by an outdated taboo. “If your goal is to help a woman with her issues—if the bib allows her to get over the hurdle that’s causing her discomfort—it becomes an empowering device,” Michels says.

Though Michels says that breast-feeding still hasn’t recovered from the rise of formula, the cause to desensitize the public to a dropped breast is alive and well. These days, a good deal of breast-feeding etiquette is now directed not at mothers but at passersby. One guide, published at families.com, advises flashed parties not to bother a mother with questions, complaints, or idle conversation—and to never call security on her. In April’s Atlantic Monthly, Hanna Rosin argued that the dirtiest of playground looks are now reserved for women who refuse to serve up product on demand. When Rosin voiced an appreciation for formula, “[t]he reaction was always the same: circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets,” she wrote. “In my playground set…breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club.”

Even among less-exclusive mothering circles, breast-feeding etiquette remains a hotly contested issue. “It’s like fashion,” says Jones. “It’s a cycle. One minute it’s in, the next minute it’s out”—meaning the marketing opportunities are endless. The cyclical nature of breast-feeding acceptance also explains why, in 2009, “a lot of people are still debating this issue,” Jones says. The echo chamber on breast-feeding is exacerbated by the eternal impressionability of expecting mothers. “It’s a scary situation, having a baby,” Jones says. “You don’t know what to expect. When a woman is pregnant, she’s going to be looking for any help she can get.”

And when she does, Laseinde and Jones will be waiting for her. Laseinde’s home is located directly across the street from a reliable stream of impressionable customers: Providence Hospital. Laseinde hasn’t staked out maternity ward graduates just yet. “I’ve thought about it, seeing people coming out,” she says. Adds Jones, “We plan to catch them as they leave—there are so many of them coming out with babies.” CP

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Housing Complex blogger Ruth Samuelson notes the baby-dropping potential of this frightening political trend. "Normally when someone allows you to hold their baby, they're like, 'Are you ready? Okay, now sit her on your lap. And cradle her head. And here's her blankie...' And then people practically toss their babies over crowds whenever a politician's around," Samuelson confided in me today over e-mail.

Fast forward about 25 seconds into the Obama-does-Ben's video, and you see it—that baby flies into Obama's arms. Where are the parents? Who cares! If they don't fling that baby in Obama's general direction immediately upon sighting him, some secret service agent might very well intercept that baby, and it will never be blessed by the greatest American president in time between him entering a hot dog joint and him occupying his mouth with actually eating a hot dog. I know we're entrusting Barack Obama with saving the entire world's economy and everything, but can we all agree to pass those babies a little slower?

[youtube:v=4vQ7wQ80Aik]

Right: Baby "Suri," because of course the Reborn movement has some sort of weird overlap with the Scientologists.

"Reborn" baby dolls! According to several reports from the mainstream media, real women have taken to carting around these not-really-real-yet-frighteningly realistic human baby dolls in order to fill the aching void left by their own lack of children/poor mothering jobs/dementia. It's true, confirms "Linda," a mother to Reborn babies but no real children:

"It's not a crazy habit, like, you know, drinking, or some sort of, something that's going to hurt you. It's like a hobby, and it doesn't really hurt anybody," Linda told WJLA.

Lachelle Moore, who has a full first and last name, provided an more coherent, yet somehow crazier, quote to the press. "What's so wonderful about Reborns is that, um, they're forever babies," said Moore. Yep, that is crazy!

Too expensive (up to $4,000 a Reborn!) to be purchased ironically, these dolls must be marketed and sold to women who truly appreciate the meticulous crafting of these baby dolls, which may very well be more time-consuming than growing a real human. The Reborns' hair "is rooted in the head strand by strand, a process that can take 30 hours," the Today Show reported. "To add realism, some purchasers opt for a heartbeat and a device that makes the chest rise and fall to simulate breathing."

Well, I am sold and now ready to spend over a month's salary on this. Now all that remains is for me to pick out a creepily realistic non-real baby for adoption. Let's get Reborn! Below, an annotated gallery of Reborn babies:

There's something particularly soul-crushing about staring into the bright, wide eyes of a baby human being and knowing full well that it took some crazy woman in Scotland 30 hours to sew each individual hair into its scalp.

Why is every single one of these Reborns Caucasian as the driven snow? Oh, I know, because some crazy lady heard on FOX News that in the future there will be no pure white people and everyone will be a Mixed so we need to preserve the memory of our Hwhaaite Babies by carefully calibrating their birth weights and placing magnets inside their mouths to replicate pacifier suckling, the way white people do it, as G-d intended. Okay, makes sense!

I wonder if real Reborn enthusiasts commission babies to estimate what their son or daughter would have looked like with, you know, their highschool sweetheart or their Blockbuster video clerk or whatever? Oh, nevermind, of course they do. Baby "Ella" here has your hair, but Valued Team Member "Jason"s eyes!

Baby "Maddie," for those who always wanted to birth a baby-sized18th-century Dandy Fop but simply never had the time.

Baby "Natasha," specifically crafted for those moms who want their Reborns to appear Re-dead, already!

Photos via reborn-baby.com

People whose names I vaguely recognize procreate so often that I can no longer consider this news, even if the mother once did not have babies with Matt Damon. Please let me know when people i do not know stop having babies, a phenomenon I will report tirelessly.