Saturday Links

1. More on studies showing that children do not in fact make people happier. I'm not sure how much I can add to what I said last year; children actually make some people happier (as opposed to making them think they're happier) but yes, children also make a lot of people less happy. I don't know why we're pitter-pattering around the obvious truth, which is that there are a lot of people who should never have kids. That does not mean that the people who are having kids are falling prey to a "noble lie."  

2. Senate Democrats are considering increasing funding to the Legal Services Corporation, which in turn funds legal aid programs across the country. The poor in our country are in desperate need of adequate legal representation. This won't provide it, but more money is always better than less.

3. Tribal disenrollments over gambling money? Gambling has benefited Native tribes immensely, but it's hardly made some tribal members less selfish or short-sighted.

4. Disappointingly, the Obama administration indicates no interest in settling the over a decade long case against the Federal government over misappropriated trust funds. The the Federal government's ineptitude has long been highlighted by this case, officials in the Interior Dept. apparently believe that more time in court is the way to go.

5. Afghanistan: Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, says we need a "complete rethink" of drug policy towards Afghanistan. No ideas what this means yet, but it's better than the more of the same approach that's failed so far. Fred Kaplan breaks down the Obama administration's war plan in Afghanistan; "counter terrorism plus" but again, nobody seems to know what success in Afghanistan will entail.

Yes, Child Homelessness is a Problem

Mickey Kaus is an idiot. A reporter mis-states the findings of a report on child homelessness in America, and suddenly he's off to the races with a sweeping condemnation of a the group for using "every trick in the liberal antipoverty advocacy playbook", the "tricks" in this case apparently being the focus on children and pictures of children. In reality Kaus' biggest problems with the report are that it a) focuses on children and b) has conclusions he doesn't like. Tintin at Sadly, No! attempts to pardoy Kaus, but the task is nearly impossible as the man is a parody of himself.

Ridiculous

Anti-drug hysteria should not permit school officials to order children to strip down to their underwear and humiliated so they can be searched for drugs, especially when the terror that school officials are afraid of consists of something like prescription strength Ibuprofen. We are not permitted to treat children as we wish and justify it with concerns for their safety, and law professors aside, there should exist not "reasonable" disagreement about that fact.

The "Myth" Of Innocence

Judith Warner has some interesting thoughts on some prominent myths of our times about children. It's hard not to blockquote the whole thing, but here are the relevant excerpts:

At a journalism conference a couple of years ago, I met Linda Perlstein, the author of “Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers.” This meeting occurred right in the middle of the “rainbow party” craze – that is to say, the media frenzy around the alleged oral activities of oversexed (and lipsticked) tweens.

Rainbow parties hadn’t actually played any part in Perlstein’s book. But that, she told me then, hadn’t stopped TV producers – representing “Oprah,” from “The Dr. Phil Show,” from a Katie Couric special – from calling and cajoling her to come on their shows to talk about them.

“I’d say, ‘No one is doing that,’” she told me when I called her this week to refresh my memory of her story. “Even the sluttiest kids I knew, when I told them about that said, ‘Ewww. No one does that.’ This really prurient stuff was being way overblown.

“Believe me, I wanted to be on ‘Oprah.’ I had a book to sell. I’d say, ‘There’s lots of stuff to talk about. Stuff that really should be talked about, that’s more nuanced and complex.’ They were like ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

I found myself thinking about Perlstein’s media follies this week, when I read Tara Parker-Pope’s article “The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity” in Science Times on Tuesday. For me it not only raised the issue of myth and reality (teens are, in truth, having sex less and later than they did a decade or two ago), but also brought to mind the stories that we tell and what people are willing to hear.

Two sociologists in Philadelphia, Kathleen A. Bogle, of La Salle University, and Maria Kefalas, of St. Joseph’s University, both specialists in teen sexual behavior, told Parker-Pope that they’d had to struggle mightily to get people out of their “moral panic” mindset, and make them understand that teens are not “in a downward spiral” or “out of control.”

“They just don’t believe you. You might as well be telling them the earth is flat,” Kefalas told me when I called to follow up with her this week.

This reminded me of how the developmental psychologist Joseph Mahoney – and others – have had to fight to convince people that another much-discussed creature of our time, the Overscheduled Child, isn’t as common or as stressed-out or even as busy as we commonly think. (I myself didn’t believe him at first, and wasn’t too nice about it.) It reminded me, too, of the Boy Crisis – how hard it has been for scholars who have taken a hard look at the boy/girl achievement numbers to counter the popular wisdom that boys are falling behind. And it reminded me of the Overmedicated Child, that particular trope of child corruption, soul theft and performance pressure that has for so long fascinated me.

In each of these examples, real problems – that some girls are engaging in too-young, risky and degrading sex, that some children are being stressed excessively and stifled by nonstop structure, that some boys (poor and minority boys) are doing badly in school, that some children are getting really reckless mental health services – are grossly simplified and, via the magical thinking of dogma and ideology, are elevated to the level of myth. Real complexities and nuances – details concerning exactly which children are suffering, flailing or failing, and in what numbers, and how and why, and what we can do about it – are lost.

That’s no accident. After all, moral panics – particularly those concerning children – always serve some hidden purpose. “Modern ideas about the innocent child have long been projections of adult needs and frustrations,” Gary Cross, a professor of modern history at Penn State University, writes in his 2004 book, “The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture.” “In the final analysis, modern innocence has let adults evade the consequences of their own contradictory lives.”

So why are parents so quick to latch onto these myths to explain what's going on with their kids?

When they depart from kernels of reality to rise to the level of myth, they are, I believe, largely projections that enable adults to evade things. Specifically, the overblown focus on messed-up kids affords parents the possibility of avoiding looking inward and taking responsibility for the highly complex problems of everyday life.

In the case of the allegedly lascivious Lolitas, Kefalas sees this flight from reality very clearly: “People don’t want to hear about the economic context, the social context” to young teen sexual activity and teen pregnancy, she told me. “For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.”

[...]

Having a family life that’s so atomized and disconnected that children have the physical and emotional space to upload nude pictures of themselves onto the Internet, and lack the self-esteem and self-respect to know better is obviously undesirable. Being a stressed and frantic, frazzled and depressed parent is harmful, too. (“We are a mess,” Suniya Luthar, the Columbia University psychologist, once told me, explaining why she saw overscheduling as a symptom rather than a cause of family distress. “We are the ones running around like freaking chickens without a head…. It’s the situation where the captain of the ship has lost control.”)

Now of course every generation laments the decline of the younger generations; adults have been blaming the decline of civilization on worsening values in our children (or vice versa) since the time of ancient Assyria. But I do wonder how much of that previous inaccurate forecasting involved getting wrapped up in simple-minded and overwrought myths, as my generation seems want to. Without a doubt, American parents struggle with dramatic changes in the family structure; for every upheaveal (increased divorce rates, increased family mobility, greater economic pressures) there seem to be less stabilizing social factors to which we should anchor a family. Naturally, many parents react to this by worrying incessently about the quality of life of their children, and whether those children can survive emotionally and psychologically (or even physically) through the rigors of a childhood that seems so much more unstable and uncertain than in times past, especially when they compare it to a mythological "golden age" when families were stable, parents stayed happily married for life, and grand-parents lived right around the corner. Into this anxiety creeps these mythical fears, that seem only to confirm our worries that our children will slip away from us; we want to believe in the overscheduled child because we believe that we're supposed to give them a hundred things to do to foster their development. We want to believe in the promiscuous teens because we see rampant sexuality everywhere in popular culture; how can it not have a disastrous impact on our kids' sexuality? We want to believe that boys are getting left behind in class because everywhere we see the traditional role of men in our society upended, and we're not so sure what should replace it (or that boys can survive it and grow up to be good men.) 

Warner's column is both heartening and discouraging. Maybe things aren't so bad with our kids after all, right? Maybe they all will turn out okay, even if things seem to topsy-turvy and uncertain to us. At the same time, how much harder is it to deal with poverty, than to simply get on TV and scold parents to keep a closer eye on who their kids date or hang around with? How much easier is it to give kids a dozen things to do a week, than to make the hard decision about who does or doesn't work so that somebody's home with them (or lament that you can't even afford the choice)? How much easier is it to chide our culture for medicating children, than to accept that some children do struggle and the answer to dealing with that is not as clear as giving (or not giving) them drugs? 

I think all good parents, in exchange for the overwhelming feelings of joy and love that their children give them, are also cursed with a neverending anxiety about their children. What do we feed them? Where do we send them to school? How do we discipline them? Most importantly, how do we keep them safe? Those questions are especially difficult to answer when everything around us seems to be so uncertain. Of course one answer to this is to "let kids be kids", to stop worrying so much because kids in the past managed to grow up just fine. But that's just another myth; a lot of kids of our ancestors' generation didn't grow up just fine; they went work before they were even teenagers, or they never went to school, or they grew up in poverty and remained impoverished their whole lives, or they died of disease, or were killed in accidents. It was hard being a parent then, and it's hard now. It's just hard in different ways. So we reach out for myths to help explain what we see going on with our kids these days, but the answers are not nearly as simple and satisfying as we wish they were.

Nut Allergies a "Yuppie Invention"

So says Joel Stein (via Boing Boing) filling the niche of "knee-jerk reactionary columnist who over-reacts to a not very important issue and thereby minimizes a real problem." For a considerably more reasonable reponse, try this less entertaining but more informative article instead. 

Florida Adoption Ban Stricken Down

Arkansas voters may have succeeded in making sure there were less homes for foster kids, but a judge in Florida has stricken down the state's 31-year old ban on adoption by gays:

A judge on Tuesday overturned a strict Florida law that blocks gay people from adopting children, declaring there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman said the 31-year-old law violates equal protection rights for the children and their prospective gay parents, rejecting the state's arguments that there is "a supposed dark cloud hovering over homes of homosexuals and their children."

She noted that gay people are allowed to be foster parents in Florida. "There is no rational basis to prohibit gay parents from adopting," she wrote in a 53-page ruling.

"It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person's ability to parent," the judge wrote. "A child in need of love, safety and stability does not first consider the sexual orientation of his parent. The exclusion causes some children to be deprived of a permanent placement with a family that is best suited to their needs."

If only voters in other states could be so wise.

For Your Consideration, pt. II

A video that Glenn Sacks and his readers will appreciate, though probably not for the same reasons you or I might.

More on Arkansas Proposition

Ezra Klein, with thoughts on the extremely disappointing victory for Christian moralists in Arkansas that will almost certainly result in more children being consigned to foster care:

My two nephews are adopted. I love them more than I could possibly express here. And there's no doubt of what an important, unalloyed good adoption has been for their lives, and for our family. But in Arkansas, the Family Research Council and variety of other "Christian" organizations drew up a ballot initiative "that would make it illegal for any individual cohabiting outside of a valid marriage to adopt or provide foster care to minors." In other words, not only are gay couples prohibited from providing a loving home to children who need one, but so too are straight couples who are unmarried. And Arkansas is not a state with a surfeit of willing caregivers: They have foster homes for only 1/3rd of the children who need them. This initiative will not really harm gay couples, who can adopt in another state. And it will not really harm straight couples, who are similarly mobile. But it will do enormous harm to children who desperately need a safe and stable and caring home. It is a sad testament to the ferocity of modern bigotry that the organizations in support of Initiative One were willing to harm children in order to strike a symbolic blow against gay and unmarried couples. It is even sadder that the people of Arkansas were willing to indulge such base revulsion, and had so little concern for the children that fate has heedlessly placed in their care.

Is it any wonder that many of us on the left are turned off by "compassionate" Christians who put their personal beliefs ahead of the actual welfare of children?

Family Place Ads: Update

Via Unfair Park, here's an update for you on the status of the "controversy" surrouding the Family Place ads appearing on the side of local DART buses:

When The Dallas Morning News ran its story last Thursday about The Family Place's "provocative new campaign" on Dallas Area Rapid Transit buses, the agency, which assists victims of domestic abuse, said it had received few complaints. The ads, depicted above, began running on October 1, and DART spokesman Morgan Lyons told The News last week his agency likewise hadn't gotten a word of complaint.

Lyons says locals didn't seem to mind the ads when they began running at the beginning of the month. The first call he received about them came from KTVT-Channel 11, which was doing a story about how CBS Outdoor and Clear Channel Outdoor, billboard agencies, had refused to run the ads, which Lyons says met "community standards for the greater Dallas area," especially considering "the reputation of the Family Place."

But since Sacks started up his campaign, and posted a form letter easily filled out and e-mailed, "we've received probably over 1,000 e-mails," most, as he says, from well outside Dallas.

"And I've had a call from a newspaper in Hong Kong and an e-mail from New Zealand," he says. "And we had four folks come to the regularly scheduled board meeting last night and express concerns about the ads. But as of this morning, we had received fewer than a dozen responses to the online customer feedback form, and I haven't looked to see where those are from."

For now, the plan remains in place: The ads will run through the end of November. And Lyons says he's heard from Paige Flink, Family Place's executive director, that the ads have been effective. "They've been pleased with the response they've gotten in terms of calls from people needing help," he says. Flink was unavailable this morning.

Thank goodness that Sacks and his horde of cavemen have thus far failed to bully DART into removing these ads.

Arkansas Initiative Faltering

I wrote in August about a ballot iniatiative put forth in Arkansas by the conservative Family Council that would ban unmarried couples from adopting. The initiative is of course aimed at gay couples who wish to adopt, but anti-gay activists couldn't care less about the over-inclusiveness of their initiatives as long as it manages to hit some gays in the process. NPR reports though that the initiative is faltering though, and recent polls indicate that a majority of Arkansans are opposed to the measure. Jerry Cox, director of the Family Council Action Committee, is quoted in the piece as saying that the Family Council sponsored this measure because they were concerned about the welfare of adopted children and wnated to blunt the "gay agenda" which is using these children as "pawns to gain legitimacy for the gay lifestyle", or in other words, gays are adopting children only so they can indoctrinate them about the virtues of gay life or (gasp!) turn them gay. Never mind that Arkansas is struggling to find enough foster parents for all the children who need foster care, and that without the option of being adopted by gay parents, many of these children will grow up never having known a stable household or two parents who love them; to people like Cox, kids are better off in institutions being fed cold porridge than they are with two parents who can provide for them if thsoe parents are gay. If the trend holds, a majority of Arkansans will indicate on Nov. 4th that they disagree. 

Making a Difference

The first half of this week's This American Life told the heartening and inspiring story of Geoffrey Canada, the man who has led a "Harlem Renaissance" in education and is overseeing a dramatic new approach that promises to lift thousands of African-American children out of poverty by giving them a decent chance at a solid education through his Harlem Children's Zone. The program offers an all-encompassing approach to education that begins with parenting classes for very young children and a variety of programs that are aimed to aid children at every step of the educational process, all the way through college. In short, the HCZ is a resounding success. Study after study has borne out the idea that ensuring the success of people from impoverished backgrounds must begin with tending to their educational and health needs from infancy on. The episode explains Canada's unique philosophy, which is to reject the approach of prior anti-poverty programs, which focused mostly on the economic, health and educational needs of the parents in the hopes that the parents can lift themselves and their children out of poverty. Instead, all of the focus is on the children of parents who are mired in poverty. This can make for a harsh reality; Canada's program isn't designed to help the poor parent get a better job or improve their own educational prospects. This is done not only out of necessity (money for such programs is limited of course) but also because by the age at which they have children, most people do not have and will never gain the skills necessary to better their own socio-economic status. But they can still better their children's, by learning child-raising skills at the HCZ "baby college", free pre-K programs that prepare children for kindergarten, health and nutrition programs, and programs to aid teenagers in high school and young adults in college. The success of this approach is undeniable.

In a sense, Canada rejects liberal thinking, in the focus on programs that have never proven their effectiveness and have done little to lift millions out of poverty despite decades of application. But in another sense, the HCZ embodies the absolute best of liberal thought. Innovation, the rigorous application of scientific and technical principles confirmed by countless hours of careful study, and the unending willingness to better the plight of those who simply cannot better themselves without help; this is the liberal ethic, and to see it succeed in practice is truly inspiring. It is my firmest desire and hope that this program can be replicated across the nation, and that the success of programs like Canada's can galvanize policy-making aimed at the plight of poverty at a national level. 

Children and Happiness

Via this Sadly, No! post about something completely unrelated, I stumble across Megan McArdle, who agrees with Will Wilkinson, who says that nobody should really be all that surprised that studies show that people who have children are less happy than people who do not. Here's McArdle:

I don't understand why Will Wilkinson finds this so surprising: children don't make you happy, even though society tells you it does. Surely, a great deal of our raising involves society tricking you into doing things that are not in your immediate self-interest.

And here's Wilkinson:

To accept that we have been made less happy in a real sense by our children threatens our sense of the profundity and the value of that bond. So people get upset when they hear this.

Hmmm. Well, despite Wilkinson's assumptions, I have no interest in arguing with the empirical results of these studies. In fact, I'm perfectly willing to admit that many parents are less happy with children than they were without, and that's why many children in our country are treated so atrociously by their parents. It seems to me that the issue is more about expectations, and how they skew one's view of parenthood. Wilkinson appears to think so as well, but he and McArdle both overstate the case; instead of admitting that some parent's perceive themselves to be less happy, they seem to think that having children actually makes people less happy. Wilkinson again:

We yearn to love our choices, and our lives, with whole hearts. But to do so is to lie to ourselves about ourselves, to close our eyes and cover our ears like children to the profundity of what we have given up.

Okay, but not everyone feels like they've given up more than they've gotten in return. Or really even misses what they've given up. Some parents do, and perhaps they secretly hide their bitterness, or perhaps they drink and scream at their children, or hit their children, or abuse them emotionally. Maybe those parents thought they'd love having kids, maybe they knew they'd hate it and had them anyway, or maybe they didn't care one way or another. But some people eagerly await becoming parents, and enjoy parenthood fully and profoundly, without feeling like they've really given up much at all. They don't do this because society "lies" to them, as McArdle seems to think, or because they are unwilling to admit that they are actually less happy, as Wilkinson seems to think. In fact, they are genuinely happy. I would even go out on a limb and say that some people who were unsure how happy they'd be having children, turn out to be quite happy indeed with the turn of events and never spend a moment thinking about life absent their children. So even though they failed to fall for society's lie that having children makes you happier, they managed to be happier anyway.

Lastly, I would add that it really makes no sense for non-parents like Wilkinson and McArdle to write posts about whether or not having children actually makes you happier or not (and not simply what studies say about how parents feel, which anyone can write about.) Truly, you cannot know what having children makes you feel like until you have them, and I know this as someone who at one time had no children and wanted none, and who now has children and does not desire to imagine life without them. I don't say this because I think parent-hood is an exclusive state and that only parents are permitted or qualified to discuss it, but only because it is difficult for one to truly write about something that one hasn't experienced ( for example, who among us who hasn't experienced the death of a parent could convincingly write about how painful it is?) Wilkinson, absent this experience, can only talk about the "profundity" of the parent-child bond that somehow makes you less happy anyway (and condescend to parents, whose love of their children he equates with puppy love) and McArdle can only pen nonsense about a "noble lie" that perpetuates our species. Had they children of their own, they might sense the disconnect between this study's conclusions and their own. But absent children, and apparently eager to stay that way, they over-reach to demonstrate that they, child-free, are demonstrably better-off than parents...and these studies prove it. Which is as silly as those who condescend to the childless, and question how they can possibly be happy without children in their lives.

FLDS Way of Life a "Danger"

Or so the State of Texas appears to be prepared to argue (via the Local Crank):

In the immediate sense, the raid may have happened because of a hoax. Telephone calls reporting abuse at the ranch have been linked to a woman in Colorado with an alleged history of false abuse complaints.

But both Texas and the polygamists had been courting a confrontation. Under "prophet" Warren Jeffs -- now in jail in Arizona -- the fundamentalist sect seemed to be ordering more underage marriages. And a West Texas representative sponsored a bill in 2005 that set new laws seemingly targeted at polygamists.

Here in Eldorado, the small town closest to the compound, residents still say they're glad the raid happened.

"It's not legal, and it's wrong, the way they were living," said Rosa Martinez, behind the counter at her Rosita's Casita restaurant.

But legal experts say the case could easily become a quagmire. They say Texas has an unusual burden: It has to prove not spankings or sexual abuse, but the dangers of an entire belief system.

"Can they say with a straight face that's in the best interest of these children, to be taken away from their parents?" asked Ken Driggs, a public defender in Georgia who has done extensive research on polygamy and the law. "Does government want to get in there and say, 'This is a good religion,' or 'This is not a good religion?' "

The answer to that question is obviously no, but of course that won't stop authorities in our great state. The question for me of course is whether the raid was prompted in part by religious prejudice, or whether authorities will settle for religion as the rationale for the raid when their other justifications fall apart. If they find little to no evidence of sexual, emotional or physical abuse, what else can they put on trial but the FLDS way of life? It's either that or back down, and we don't back down in our great state.

This is where conservatism in Texas runs runs into a condundrum. Religious conservatives would love nothing more than to shut the FLDS down and run them out of the state, but as the story gains national awareness it will become evident that FLDS members adhere to a lifestyle that, but for the polygamy, religious conservatives claim to value (Scott Henson explains in more detail.)And it will become evident even in most dimly-lit and prejudice wracked religious conservative brain that putting somebody on trial for their deeply-religious and Christian-like lifestyle is a little too much like putting fundamentalist Christians on trial for their parental decisions (like home-schooling.)

I don't agree with the FLDS way of life, but neither do I agree with the decision of fundamentalist Christians to teach their kids at home and indoctrinate with anti-science dogma disguised as religious freedom. But above all I think people should be allowed to live and raise their children as they see fit so long as they don't harm them physically or psychologically, no matter how unusual or strange their customs may seem to the rest of us. If Texas really wants to put the FLDS way of life on trial, then our whole state will lose.

FLDS Compound Raid Fallout Worsens

I hadn't kept up with the story of the raid of the FLDS compound in Eldorado, a small town near San Angelo in West Central Texas. But the more I read about it, the worse it looks for law enforcement officials who are presently separating children from the mothers and packing them off to various parts of the state, and who's high profile informant whose accusations led to the raid now turns out to be a mentally ill woman residing in Colorado. I'm not out to rush to defend this group because I have secret Mormon affiliations, but because it's utterly and absolutely wrong to take children away from their mothers and fathers based on the barest of evidence or prejudice about the lifestyles or religion of the parents.

For more information, I recommend fellow Texas blogger Scott Henson who's been following the story close.

Get Your Baby from India

This is absurd:

The voice was commanding, slightly disdainful and officious.

“The legal issues in the United States are complicated, having to do with that the surrogate mother still has legal rights to that child until they sign over their parental rights at the time of the delivery. Of course, and there’s the factor of costs. For some couples in the United States surrogacy can reach up to $80,000.”

This was “Julie,” an American thirtysomething who’d come to India to pay a poor village woman to bear her baby. She went on:

“You have no idea if your surrogate mother is smoking, drinking alcohol, doing drugs. You don’t know what she’s doing. You have a third-party agency as a mediator between the two of you, but there’s no one policing her in the sense that you don’t know what’s going on.”

Would you want this woman owning your womb?

The Indian surrogate mothers quoted along with Julie in a report on American Public Media’s “Marketplace” on NPR last week didn’t much appear troubled by that kind of thought. After all, the money they were earning for their services — $6,000 to $10,000 – might have been a pittance compared to what surrogates in the United States might earn, but it was still, for their families, the equivalent of 10 to 15 years of normal income.

They couldn’t hear Julie speaking in her awful, entitled tone. And if they had, would they have cared? “From the money I earn as a surrogate mother, I can buy a house,” said Nandani Patel, via a translator. “It’s not possible for my husband to earn more as he’s not educated and only earns $50 a month.”

I don't have a problem with surrogate motherhood. I believe that it's a reasonable alternative for women who are unable to carry a fetus to term in their own wombs, as long as long as all parties know what they're getting into and the surrogate chooses to be a surrogate absent coercion and duress (including economic.) But I do have a problem with Americans paying Indian women halfway around the world to bear their children in special facilities where their behavior is regulated, and paying them substantially less than they would pay an American woman to do the same thing. I have a problem with it because Indian women will engage in this practice to procure money for basic necessities like food and shelter for themselves or their family, concerns that are not nearly as pressing for an American woman who might choose to engage in surrogacy. Consequently, Indian women are much more likely to engage in surrogacy when they otherwise would not. This should be troubling, as surrogacy is a process that is more burdensome and invasive to a woman than any other means of earning money that I can imagine (including prostitution) and a woman shouldn't feel the need to engage in it to put food on the table when she otherwise would not.

I don't particularly care for the argument, made by one of the surrogates later in Warner's post, that it's alright because both sides benefit. Not because it's not true; it clearly is. If you pay a homeless man $2 an hour to sit around and make sure nobody messes with your car, you're clearly both benefiting from the transaction. But the reason you're paying him so little is because he is grossly disadvantaged, and can't ask for more. That the homeless man gains from whatever you pay him does not make it unconscionable to pay him so little. Unlike American women, who may dare to eat fast food one too many nights and demand considerable sums of money to carry someone else's child around in them, Indian women are in no position to protest or say no to a few thousand dollars, not when if they do there's surely tens of thousands more who would gladly take their place so they can put food on the table.

To me this is no different than the poor of the third world selling their organs cheaply to people from developed countries. They sell them because the only thing they have of value is their bodies, and they're willing to sacrifice part of their bodies or their general health to benefit their families. It's also no different from conducting medical experiments on the poor and paying them to do so, and utilizing the results for the benefit of our own people. That they are willing to sell their bodies, that their bodies may be the only thing they possess of any real value, does not mean that we need to be complicit in the process and comfort ourselves by saying "Well, they get something out of it too, see?"

As an aside, I also don't care for a practice that appears to encourage the view the children are something that can be bought for the right price. Controlling as many aspects of the surrogates life and health as possible is done in an effort to ensure the baby is healthy, but it also represents an effort on the part of the paying couples to procure the "best" child they can get for their money. Fair enough if the pregnant woman desires herself to strictly regulate her behavior in an effort to bolster the child's chances at being a little genius, but to pay someone else for the same thing? That's buying a good.

In short, this process should be outlawed. If American couples desire a child they can come up with the money to pay an American woman to act as a surrogate, and they can be engaged in her life if they wish to have some say in her behavior as she brings the child to term in her womb. Or they can adopt. But the poor of the world do not exist to serve as incubators for Americans and other westerners who want children on the cheap.

What We're Missing

This is simply incredible. In a blog post at Crooked Timber Ingrid Robeyns argues that men and female partners should receive paid birth leave, so they can be at home with their wife/partner who has just given birth. Of course what's stunning to an American like myself is read about what mothers are already entitled to in the Dutch system. Here are some excerpts:

Female employees in the Netherlands are entitled to 16 weeks of maternity leave, paid at 100% of their current salary (there is a ceiling, but the ceiling is very very high). They have to take minimum 4 and maximum 6 weeks of leave before the due date. This leaves them with 10 to 12 weeks of leave after the birth, extended for the number of days the baby was born after the due date. According to Foubert’s review of the medical literature, women need 6 to 8 weeks to physically recover from giving birth. So that means that for their pregnancy, birth, and birth recovery, women need somewhere between 10 (4 weeks before + 6 weeks after) and 14 (6+8) weeks of leave; hence between 2 and 6 weeks are given to women for non-medical reasons; it is given to them as parents, rather than as mothers.

women are not allowed to stay in hospital after delivering their babies (except, of course, if there is some medical reason, such as excessive blood loss or a c-section with complications). Instead, a professional carer comes to the mother’s home to take care of mother and child there, paid for (largely) by the national health insurance. Yet this kind of care has been scaled down considerably – since 2006 the task of these careworkers is limited to checking the health of mother and child, cleaning the bedroom and the bathroom, doing the laundry, advising on breastfeeding, and preparing lunch. Until 2005 these care workers would also take care of older children, do grocery shopping, prepare the evening meals, clean the house, make coffee for visitors, and do anything else that needed to be done so that the mother could stay in bed. But how can mothers who just gave birth do what is medically necessary (that is, try to rest and minimise walking around for about a week), if they only receive care for 4 to 5 hours a day, and their partners have no legal right to stay away from work?

Only four to give hours of care a day? In our country, women are fortunate if their employer will pay them to stay at home and take care of an infant after they come home from the hospital. Many women must choose between taking unpaid leave and staying at home, or worse yet, losing their jobs as a result of their unwillingness to return to work. Paid time off before birth? Forget it, unless it's your vacation time you're using up. And someone coming by to help out with the kids by cooking and cleaning up? I'm not sure that most Americans know that any government in the world even pays for such a thing.

It's a tiresome cliche to say that the conservative "family values" crowd only cares about children until their born, but never has that seemed more true than in the way our nation treats mothers of young children, who are expected to either enter the workforce to make a living, or rely upon the father or someone else to provide for their's and their child's needs. There is no excuse, no reason, that mothers cannot be at home in the weeks leading to birth, and at home in the months following it. They shouldn't have to choose between doing so and getting a paycheck, because it is a benefit to our entire society that mothers are home taking care of the children. This is something that we strangely seemed to understand in the times before the emancipation of women, but it's not emancipation that has created this problem. It is an economic environment in which women must work for families to experience even the level of prosperity their parents and grand-parents enjoyed, where few employers have sympathy for working mothers, and where both traditionalist and fiscal conservatives believe that the cost to our society in taxes and lost "efficiency" is somehow more damaging to our nation than the damage that results from mothers and fathers not being with their children. And it is long, long past time for this to change.

What the Hell?

Despite the rather obvious benefits for a male such as myself, I have never really been a fan of the trend that encourages all adult women to dress as sexy Pirates/Nurses/Librarians/Teachers/Devils/Angels etc., etc., at Halloween parties (though who can blame them, since nowadays those seem to be the only costumes on sale at your average retailer.) But now the movement has infiltrated teenage and pre-teen girls, who also seem to believe that trick-or-treating requires flashing a little navel or leg. To that I say, enough. If saving young girls from overt sexualization in our culture means requiring adult women to once again dress up as frumpy ghosts and entirely un-sexy witches at parties, then I'm prepared to live with that.

And yes, this appears to be the first Halloween-themed post at TWM ever. For making it a grumpy one, you have my apologies. In exchange, here's a story about real pirates...of the decidedly un-sexy sort.

Is the library your mommy?

Busy parents Bill and Troy McKenzie said the public library was a place they had come to trust.

"Our kids...have grown up in the library," Mrs. McKenzie said. "I thought the library was kid-friendly."

However, when the family returned home from the Martin Luther King library branch in South Dallas last week, they started watching Black Shampoo, which was the movie their 8-year-old daughter Gabby checked out. The movie had sexual situations, full frontal nudity and foul language.

"I would categorize that movie as porn," Mrs. McKenzie said. "Porn should go where it belongs, and it's not in the libraries,"

The library did pull Black Shampoo from its shelves, but didn't bend on McKenzie's bigger concern, which is letting children take home "R" rated films.

"If there is an 'R' rating on this movie, why should somebody at the age of six, seven, eight, nine and 10 be allowed to rent it out?" she said.

Branch manager Lynne Craddock said none of the 18 Dallas libraries deny access to "R" rated films, and parents should assume that responsibility when they get their child a card.

"The policy of the library states that the parent is ultimately responsible for their child whenever they want to check out materials," she said.

The first problem is that these people think that some material they don't like shouldn't be available for anyone. The fundamental flaw with that is that people aren't going to agree on what's offensive and what's not. Not even in general. Some years back I witnessed a lady telling the librarian at one of our branches that we needed to get rid of "A Clockwork Orange" because it has a rape scene. She was offended, and didn't feel it should be on our shelves. Well, what about any of the movies we have with graphic sex or violence? There are people who object to those. Should we take them all off? You'll be able to find people who object to just about anything we have. Some people don't want books that teach evolution on our shelves. Some people don't want us to have books by the Marquis de Sade. Some people don't think we should have A Catcher in the Rye, or Huck Finn. If we just pulled everything people objected to, pretty soon we'd have nothing left but a couple of cds by Raffi. It's not appropriate for us to limit our selection simply for that reason. We're paid for with public funds, which is exactly why we should have materials that appeal to every citizen.

Then, of course, there are those who think we should evaluate the content as to decide what's appropriate for someone to read or watch. Well, adults have the right to watch or read anything they want. While you might argue that children don't, well, the public library is not the arbiter of anyone's rights or freedoms. If the parents don't want kids watching or reading something, it's the parent's job to keep them from getting that material. The library not only shouldn't be burdened with the responsibility of judging what's right or wrong for kids, it shouldn't have that power. Some parents send their kids to the library to pick up movies for the parents! If we had any restrictions on what their kids could get, they'd be pissed off. Well, that's their call, as parents.

The reporter compares the library to the movie theater or Blockbuster, where they enforce age restrictions. Well, that's ignorant. They're happy to take your money and your kids' money, and if that means restricting by age, so be it. They don't have any worries about misusing public funds, and they'll take your money and not watch your kids any more than the library will. The problem here is that parents have gotten so lazy they don't take responsibility for what movies their kids go see, or what dvds they buy. And they pay for that privilege at these stores. But the library isn't a daycare anymore than Blockbuster is, and if you don't want your kid getting R-rated movies, well, get your ass over there and make sure they don't get any. Is that too hard? The parents in this story admitted that they weren't there watching over what their kids were checking out, but instead of saying, "We need to be more watchful", they said the library was at fault for making questionable materials available to their children. Yeah, sure, make everyone but yourself responsible for your kids.

I have to make this point explicitly clear: the library is not a daycare. The librarians are not paid or expected to supervise your kids or keep them safe. They get a Masters of Library Science to be able to effectively put together collections and programs that entertain and educate the public, both kids and adults. If you want somebody to wipe your kid's ass, you get a babysitter, not a librarian. The library is not designed with unsupervised children in mind, and even if it were there's no way we have the money for the staff to watch them all because most people wouldn't vote for tax increases for necessary services like water and sewer, much less library personnel.

Final point: DVD players and TV sets from the last decade all have parental controls built in. You don't want your kids watching hardcore sex, USE THE CONTROLS. Quit trying to make it other people's problem.