I'm a DC-area mother with an over-developed sense of irreverence, ADD, socialist tendencies and a blog. All my opinions are entirely my own and not representative of anything officially sanctioned by any political party, my mother, or arbiters of common sense and good taste.
As part of my gig writing about pregnancy for Babble, I get a lot of Google alerts related to pregnancy, birth, fertility, abortion, and other germane topics. This, unfortunately, often yields me a slew of links to news stories that make me really sad or really angry. Occasionally, it nets me a story that is just jaw-droppingly nuts like this one: OK, here’s a story for the Oh Mah Gah Files. Apparently a doctor in…
I wouldn’t say we had been friends in high school. We ran in similar circles back then: the self-appointed misfits who congregated in the literary magazine office, listened to college radio, and read a lot of the kinds of books that weren’t on the AP English curriculum. He was good looking with a hard edge to his attitude and behavior. He was walking the walk of the outsider more than I was; he actually did…
You know the old joke about how you should never insinuate that a woman is pregnant unless you can see a baby emerging from her body? Well, I’m at the point in pregnancy where that apparently no longer applies because people are constantly asking when I’m due. It doesn’t bother me but I’ve heard the question so many times that I’m starting to make up snarky answers I could give instead of my due date.…
It’s an election year – I know. You’re shocked to hear that considering how low-key all the campaigning has been and none of it started two years before that actual freaking election. Grrrr. Anyway, it’s an election year and for some reason, that always seems to spur a hatefest against lobbyists. People get all twitchy when they remember that politicians have been meeting with lobbyists, probably daily, since the last election and then they scream…
Here’s an interesting new finding: teen pregnancy may not lead to poverty. In fact, poverty may lead to teen pregnancy. Mind-blowing, right? Here’s a little of what I wrote about this over at Babble today: There’s a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that says teen girls don’t become poor because they have babies. Instead, they have babies because they are poor. The study concludes that for young women in the United States…
The news has been pretty same-old-same-old lately. You could turn on the 24-hours news networks and expect to hear something like “Blah blah blah, Romney campaigning, blah, blah blah, Obama explaining, blah blah blah, no knows what the fuck is going to happen with the economy.” OK, maybe no one came right out and admitted that the economy is a mystery but they totally should, don’t you think? Then this week we got hit with…
Remember a few months ago when I lost my shit over all the hoops legislators all over the country were making women jump through in order to get an abortion? And I went off on a major rant about the stupid fucking paternalistic attitudes that male politicians take towards women and their bodies? I wrote a long post about it at The Broad Side. Here’s a bit of it if you don’t remember: When they…
Ok, this is so full of awesome I can hardly stand it. The incomparable Lydia at Rants from Mommyland clued me into an effort to provide clean birth kits for women in developing nations to mitigate the risk of post-partum infections that kill one woman every minute according to the World Health Organization. Lydia is working with two organizations – Bloggers for Birth Kits and World Birth Aid – to provide clean birth kits to…
