Interesting article. However, I hate when writers get away with this:
- After all, child abandonment is nothing new and it's certainly not rare in the United States. Over 400,000 children are in the foster care system waiting to be placed in homes, thousands of parents relinquish their children every year. One woman even sent her adopted child back to his home country with an apology letter pinned like a grocery list to his chest. Whether it's because of hardship or not, many Americans are giving up on parenthood.
The conclusion is not necessarily supported by the preceding evidence. For all we know the data could be moving the other way. The number of children in foster homes could be falling.
Personally, I am a happy parent. But, I would never suggest to anyone that parenthood would make them happier. It very well may, but it also might not.
Contraception should be accessible to all. Few things are more tragic than an unwanted child.
Fuzzy logic and polemic to support a questionable thesis. I think Pamela Druckerman and Amy Chua would both agree that if there is a problem with "motherhood" in the United States, it is that cultural elements want women to think of themselves PRIMARILY as mothers and leave all other desires subservient. One of the most striking passages in "Bringing up BeBe," in my opinion, was Druckerman's observation that "MILF" is not a concept in much of the world. It is simply assumed that after a woman has a child, she strives to reclaim her womanhood and that a mother that is sexually attractive is the norm, not a deviation, for example. It's kind of depressingly oppressive to see Ms Valenti reaching clear back to Betty Friedan to talk about feminine oppression and then say "We see ourselves depicted in television, ads, movies, and magazines (not to mention relief!) as politicians, business owners, intellectuals, soldiers, and more. But that's what makes the public images of total motherhood so insidious." There's a difference between 'insidious" and "oppressive." The culture Ms. Valenti is bitching about is one that encourages women to do more than they might be capable of, not less. The problem, then, is not cultural, but individual: yeah, you might just have to decide whether you'd rather have four kids or have a career. And yes - chances are excellent that along traditional gender roles, your husband is more likely to spend less time with the kids. Thing is, men are now less employed than women and men's starting salaries out of college are now officially lower. So what, exactly, does Ms. Valenti want? Frankly, I'm sick of giving the woman an audience. She's been resoundingly skewered by a number of trusted reviewers and even the most friendly reviews mention that she doesn't bring much new to the table.
The most interesting thing here was the UofM study, IMO. Where I disagree with Valenti is the weight placed on cultural rather than material change. Increasing accessibility to contraception, counseling, and abortion would probably help build the new normal of 'woman without children' more than any raising-of-consciousnes. Also, I'm sure in this day of two income families, stay at home mothers can feel just as ill at ease at with their role as those women without children.
>The most interesting thing here was the UofM study, IMO. ...until you recognize that we are either three, two, one or zero generations removed from arranged marriages (depending on where you live and the culture you grew up in) and that discovering a correlation between attitudes prior to pregnancy and impacts on children after pregnancy is hardly rocket science. Especially when reporting your results involves "developing a scale." My brother-in-law teaches psychology; I'm not sure he'd permit a thesis project on "do parents who don't want children neglect their children more than those who do?" Valenti gets a case of the vapours over the fact that IUD use has gone up 161 percent since 2005 without acknowledging that the change is entirely due to a 99.5% effectiveness rate, increased coverage by insurance firms and a shift at Planned Parenthood from depo provera and Norplant to non-invasive, reversible birth control methods. As soon as your focus is more on preventing birth than preventing acne or preventing STDs, IUDs are a clear winner. It's the kind of surface-level analysis that really grinds my gears. Valenti doesn't know what she's talking about and cherry picks unrelated factoids to build a conspiracy theory a la Dan Brown. Elizabeth Warren (and her daughter!) did a much better analysis of the problems of feminism and motherhood in "The Two Income Trap." They did not, however, come up with any solutions that did not require a massive overhaul of the social contract. Neat bit of foreshadowing, that book.
I'm giving the study the benefit of the doubt, and considering that Valenti is just highlighting points. This was particularly interesting to me: Although you can easily build a rationale for the behavior, it's not obvious whether or not 'surprise' kids get unequal treatment relative to their siblings. If the study has good controlled data for this, that is interesting. Some of my friends are surprises. Some of my friends have surprises. To me, it suggests that a family capable of support, or even one giving support, is not enough, and that we could gain a lot from increased access to birth control all around, vasectomies included (which Valenti doesn't mention).Children who were unplanned were also subject to harsher parenting and more punitive measures than a sibling who was intended.
Well, it's not like they are going to be exterminated. I'm Polish, Finnish and Italian. My daughter is Chinese, Korean, Polish, Finnish, and Italian. I hardly consider her to be a loss for Western Europe or a gain for Asia. If anything, she is a loss for geopolitical boundaries and recessive genetic abnormalities.
They're not going to be exterminated, they're going to choose to let their genetic heritage, of whatever value, go. Along with cultural heritage, natch. I have no idea where you live, but in most of Europe the mixing of genetic heritages has to do with either trade or invasion routes. Or both. Today we mix our heritage differently. But if a society has lower than replacement growth for indigenous population, they have a certain period of time until they're ... gone. Math wins in the end. -XC