Mother’s Day is to infertile women what Valentine’s Day is to singles: a day from hell. It’s not so great for children who’ve lost their mothers, either. But it may be most painful for a group of mothers who are among our most despised and stigmatized: addicted pregnant women.

Some people offer them payments to get sterilized, seeing their blood line—as well as their blood—as “dirty.” Politicians want to lock them up for “chemically endangering” their children, regardless of the fact that this may actually do more harm to the babies than the drugs. Still others demand that we take these mothers’ infants away at birth, seeing any drug use during pregnancy as a sign that future child abuse or neglect is inevitable.

None of the people who push these measures appears to understand the actual lives of alcoholic and addicted women who continue using during pregnancy. Indeed, the fact that these advocates of punishment pay virtually no attention to Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), which is the no. 1 known cause of congenital intellectual disability, suggests that public policy related to drug use during pregnancy isn’t truly concerned with child protection.

Labels: addiction, children, culture, mental health, motherhood, pregnancy

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Between 2006 and 2010, the number of unmarried teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 who reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that they’ve had sex dropped below 50 percent. The C.D.C. described this as an actual drop in the number of teenagers having sex; the cynical addition of the word “reported” is mine: obviously the only way for the C.D.C. to determine whether those teenagers were sexually active (and how) was to ask them, and I’ve expressed my doubts about the resulting data.

Now the Guttmacher Institute is backing up those teenagers with hard facts: in 2008, the pregnancy rate among teenagers dropped [pdf] to its lowest point in more than 30 years. In 1990, when the rate was at its highest, 116.9 out of every thousand girls between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant; in 2008, only 67.8 did. Among young women under 15, the pregnancy rate fell even more. ...

A representative of the Guttmacher Institute just let me know that it did, in fact, draw some conclusions. “A large body of research has shown that the long-term decline in teen pregnancy, birth and abortion rates was driven primarily by improved use of contraception among teens.”

Labels: abortion, adolescence, contraception, culture, pregnancy, premarital sex, teenage pregnancy

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...What is clear from the research about this issue is that women of color are less likely to receive midwifery care, and that disparity is larger than the population numbers would suggest. I think this dynamic is complicated by global sociopolitical historical factors. For example I experienced resistance from Latina immigrant women to midwifery care because of the stigma toward parteras (midwives) in their home countries. In many places in Latin America, midwives and home birth are seen as the option used by women who can’t afford to go to hospital for birth–basically an option only for those who have no other option.

That creates class and race stigma on home birth and midwifery care.

This stigma is no accident. Global socioeconomic policy in Latin America (and I assume elsewhere as well) has long promoted hospital-based childbirth as a marker of development, and encouraged this move with foreign aid dollars and other development initiatives. The medical students I observed in Ecuador were clear that their obstetrical training and guidance came from US practice. So does the push toward hospital-based birth and away from traditional midwifery care. ...

With African American folks who might not be recent immigrants, there is another factor at play. Claudia Booker was the first to make this connection for me. When hospital birth first began in the US, and for quite some time after, black women were excluded because of racism and classism. Those barriers to receiving care in the hospital created a similar race and class stigma to that I described from Latin America–meaning that women of color might also see midwifery or home birth as the thing you do when you have no other option. Hospitals are the place that people with wealth and privilege go to give birth. Why would one then choose to opt out?

Labels: class, culture, health care, midwifery, motherhood, pregnancy, race

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Ultrasound systems can be bulky and expensive. But a Redmond company by the name of Mobisante is looking to transform the industry with a new technology that turns a smartphone into a miniature ultrasound device.

Mobisante is expected to begin selling the $7,495 ultrasound attachment this month, with BusinessWeek noting that some top-end portable ultrasound systems can cost upwards of $100,000. ...

Here’s a demo of the Mobisante system....

Labels: culture, pregnancy

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While so many of my friends were enjoying the congenial company of like-minded scholars last weeks at the Law and Religion Roundtable, I spent two days last week with mostly other-minded scholars at the AALS's Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality, presenting some thoughts on the gender theory of complementarity on a panel entitled "Theorizing Gender." (A glance at the program [pdf] for this workshop will give you some sense of how well-receive was my suggestion that many women's religious faith will be an important influence on their views on gender theory.)

That experience caused me to appreciate even more getting the announcement yesterday of the posting of a truly extraordinary article on SSRN: Erika Bachiochi's just-published Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights, 34 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 889 (2011). It's a tour de force of pro-life feminism -- a creative and powerful piece of scholarship. This article is truly an invaluable resource for anyone teaching Con Law or feminist legal theory who wants to do justice to all sides of these arguments. ...

[from the article abstract:] I thus challenge the assumptions underlying the idea that pregnancy and motherhood necessarily undermine equality for women. I argue instead that abortion rights actually hinder the equality of women by taking the wombless male body as normative, thereby promoting cultural hostility toward pregnancy and motherhood. In a legitimate attempt to get beyond the essentialist idea that women’s reproductive capacities should be determinative of women’s lives, pro-choice feminist legal scholars have jettisoned the significance of the body. In rightfully arguing that pregnancy is more than just a biological reality, they discount the fact that pregnancy is a fundamental biological reality. I will show that acknowledging this biological reality—that the human species gestates in the wombs of women—need not necessitate the current social reality that women are the primary (and, too often, sole) caretakers of their children or the social arrangements in which professional and public occupations are so hostile to parenting duties.

Labels: abortion, feminism, gender, law, men, pregnancy, women

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...It is vital to cover the surrogate with both health and life insurance. Life insurance is important because having a child is still dangerous and, if something should happen, the surrogate’s family will need to be compensated. It is rare that a surrogate dies but it is very important to plan for the worst.

When it comes to health insurance, I strongly recommend Lloyds of London since it is the only insurance program that has been developed specifically to cover surrogacy. It is always a gamble to hope that the surrogate’s health insurance will cover pregnancy via surrogacy. More and more insurance companies are changing their policies to exclude surrogacy. Therefore, it better to pay a bit more for health insurance to avoid even the slightest chance of insurance fraud.

Labels: donor conception, pregnancy, surrogate motherhood, women

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"What are you going to do?" my friend Kate whispered across the square table at Le Pain Quotidian. She squeezed my hand.

"I have no idea," I said. I could feel tears collecting in the corner of my eyes. I would not cry in public. I would not. This is all a bad dream, I tried to tell myself.

There were several people to break the news to, first and foremost my husband. We've only been married for four years, practically newlyweds! This wasn't part of the plan. ...

Next on the list was my father, the professor. There was a long silence after I confessed to him.

"But you haven't even made tenure yet!" he wailed once he was finally able to speak. "A baby is going to derail your entire career!"

"It's going to be okay, Dad," I said, trying to calm him. "I'll only have to take a few weeks off."

"I thought you were waiting until 35," he said. "That's what good girls do."

"Sometimes accidents happen," I said.

Labels: children, class, culture, heterosexual couples, pregnancy, satire, sex

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...I’m a big fan of the NYT weddings/celebrations section which appears every Sunday in the Style section. This past week there was this entry. Steven Fuchs and Brian Lancaster were to be married this past Sunday afternoon. (I hope it all went off without a hitch.) They’ve been together 26 years. Here’s the detail that caught my eye:

And now Mr. Lancaster and Mr. Fuchs have two children of their own, 6-year-old Anna and 4-year-old William, who are to attend the wedding along with their surrogate mothers.

Obviously the surrogate mothers play significant social roles in the life of this family. (The wedding is in the family’s home, so it’s probably not enormous.) Equally obviously, there are no secrets here.

There’s much that interests me about this. I think the most common vision of surrogacy is one where the surrogate performs her function and then moves on. She doesn’t play a role in the family’s life once the child is born. Indeed, I’ve read that her presence can create friction with an intended parent mother who might feel more threatened by the surrogate. (I’m not saying this is the most common experience, only that it is the prevalent image.) Certainly in globalized surrogacy, where there never is much of a relationship between surrogate and intended parent, there is no vision of an ongoing family life that include all parties.

The erasure of the surrogate is something that bothers me, although I don’t think I’ve focused on it much recently.

Labels: children, culture, donor conception, more than two parents, pregnancy, surrogate motherhood

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During the past year that I’ve known our friends Xander and Alana, I’ve witnessed some of the more excruciatingly difficult and exquisitely painful moments that accompany the adoption process, while coming to terms with just how little most of us really understand about it. And it seems like one big part of being adoptive parents, no matter to whom, is having to play the role of benevolent public educator to an ignorant public who will take the existence of your children as some kind of personal challenge or display of moral one-upmanship.

And then there’s the obnoxious questions that will always follow them: why can’t you have children of your own? Don’t you know that they’re going to wonder why they look different from you? How much did they cost? Why didn’t their mother want them? What if there’s something wrong with them? What are you going to do with That Hair? You are going to induce lactation, aren’t you?

Even as an innocent bystander, these really raise my ire because of the amount of unthinking, condescending privilege that underscores them. I don’t know a single biological parent who’s had the very choice to give birth to their children questioned so constantly, and throughout her child’s life; you just don’t see pregnant ladies having to face an inquisition squad in line at the grocery checkout, full of people wondering why they didn’t choose to adopt? Couldn’t have they investigated foster care? Don’t they realize that there are already so many children already out there who need homes?

As you can imagine, a sense of humor is integral. And, at some point, Alana got the idea of taking a few metaphorical maternity photos, starring a large beach ball in lieu of a pregnant belly. This, after a couple of Google searches, led to the wide, bizarre, pretentious, tacky, often-naked, and always moodily black-and-white world of maternity portrait photography. And creative inspiration.

Labels: adoption, children, culture, motherhood, parenting, pregnancy

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Gaby Rodriguez would worry whenever anyone asked to touch her baby bump.

It wasn't because she felt shy or embarrassed. It was because the bulge -- fashioned from wire mesh and cotton quilt batting -- didn't actually contain a baby.

For the past 61/2 months -- the bulk of her senior year at Toppenish High School -- the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy.

Only a handful of people -- her mother, boyfriend and principal among them -- knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation.

Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn't realize they were part of a social experiment.

Neither did six of her seven siblings -- including four older brothers -- her boyfriend's parents, and his five younger brothers and sisters.

"At times, I just wanted to take it off and be done," she says. "I didn't want to go through this anymore."

But Gaby didn't give up the charade until Wednesday morning, when she revealed her secret during an emotional, all-school assembly.

The topic of her presentation: "Stereotypes, rumors and statistics."

"Teenagers tend to live in the shadows of these elements," she says.

Before taking off her fake baby belly in front of the entire student body, Gaby told her audience, "Many things were said about me. Many things traveled all the way back to me."

Then, she asked several students and teachers to read statements from 3x5 cards, quotes people actually said about her during the course of her experiment.

Labels: adolescence, culture, motherhood, pregnancy, premarital sex, race, schools, teenage pregnancy

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Unborn twin babies socialize as early as week 14 of gestation, a new study has shown.

Italian researcher Dr. Umberto Castiello of the University of Padova and associates used an advanced method of ultrasonography, which enables the movements of the babies to be recorded over time in 3D, to study five pairs of twins from a sample of low-risk pregnant women attending the Institute of Child Health I.R.C.C.S. Burlo Garofolo. ...

“Although various types of inter-twins contact have been demonstrated starting from the 11th week of gestation,” Dr. Castiello said, “no study has so far investigated the critical question whether intra-pair contact is the result of motor planning rather then the accidental outcome of spatial proximity.”

The five pairs of twins were studied during two separate recording sessions carried out at the 14th and 18th week of gestation.

The first 20-minute recording sessions showed the unborn twins touching each other as well as themselves, and the uterine wall.

During the second recording, four weeks later, their interest in their twin was approximately three times higher, with almost 30 per cent of movements directed towards the sibling. Those movements were also more accurate and of longer duration then self-directed ones, the researchers reported.

Labels: children, pregnancy, siblings

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EVER since I figured out in high school that my parents had married at 21 not for love, although there had been that, but because of an unplanned pregnancy, I have wondered about the implications of this truth. It forced me not only to reimagine who my parents were — that they’d been impulsive once, capable of making the mistakes they had so often warned their children about — but also to question what their relationship meant.

Once my siblings also put the pieces together, and my parents acknowledged (if a bit sheepishly) that my mother was indeed pregnant with my older brother at their wedding, the story lost much of its intrigue. But for me there continued to be a serious concern, and it was this: If my mother hadn’t gotten pregnant, would my parents ever have married at all? Would our family exist?

I never felt brave enough to ask them this question, even as I grew into adulthood. By then it didn’t seem to matter why we had become a family, only that we were one, and the unplanned pregnancy became relegated to a mere footnote, not the whole story.

And yet it seemed that something imperceptible had shifted in our family, like when the shoreline is reshaped by a steady undertow. Then, 10 years ago, came the event that threatened to swallow us whole: My older brother — the same child whose conception led to my parents’ decision to marry — returned home one night to their Queens apartment and said he needed to talk to them.

He was on the verge of turning 30, a grown-up, to be sure. But I imagine there was something about sitting on the sofa of our youth that made him feel like a child.

“The girl I’ve been seeing,” he said. “She’s pregnant.”

It was my father who responded first. “You know, you don’t have to marry her,” he said. ...

It was as if, in responding that way, he was giving voice to the advice he’d wished someone had given him all those years ago. And I finally believed I had the answer to the question I had long been afraid to ask: “Would you have married if you hadn’t been pregnant?”

And that answer was “No.”

Labels: culture, divorce, heterosexual couples, Marriage, pregnancy

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...But while it may be our natural, god-given right to freak out about the sex lives of adolescents -- and though it does seem as if unfettered access to the likes of Lady Gaga's disco stick, Ludacris's sex room and the wilds of the Internet have helped take burgeoning sexuality to a whole new level -- it appears that young people today really aren't any more promiscuous than we were. In fact, in the aggregate they're actually less so, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

This survey of more than 2,700 teenagers across the country found that 43 percent of boys and 42 percent of girls between ages 15 and 19 say they have had sex, a figure that's more or less unchanged since 2002 and compares with 55 percent of boys and 51 percent of girls in 1988. The new data, from 2006 to 2008, also showed that contraceptive use has remained steady in recent years, with 87 percent of boys and 79 percent of girls reporting that they employed some form of birth control the first time they had sex.

"The good news is that we've been able to at least hold the line on the number of kids still deciding to wait on becoming sexually active," says Kathy Woodward, medical director of the Adolescent Health Center at Children's National Medical Center. "For those of us who believe in prevention and education, we'd like to nudge that number higher, but at least we're staying the course, especially when you consider all of the media influences out there." ...

For one thing, accept that it's going to be a challenge, says Christopher Daddis, an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University who researched how 222 teenagers talked to their parents about dating and sex for a recent study in the Journal of Adolescence. He found that girls tend to disclose more about crushes, relationships and other dating topics than boys, that both sexes prefer to share such information with their mothers rather than their fathers, and that they were equally reticent to discuss sex, per se, with either parent. Younger teens had a higher level of communication than older adolescents on all topics, and those who reported a greater level of trust with their parents also opened up more about sex -- especially girls.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, parenting, pregnancy, premarital sex, sex, STDs, teenage pregnancy

VOTE

Critics of contract pregnancy contend that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is not simply a biochemical relationship or a matter of contingent physical connection. They also point out that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is different from that between a worker and her material product. The long months of pregnancy and the experience of childbirth are part of forming a relationship with the child-to-be. Elizabeth Anderson makes an argument along these lines. She suggests that the commodification of reproductive labor makes pregnancy an alienated form of labor for the women who perform it; selling her reproductive labor alienates a woman from her “normal” and justified emotions. Rather than viewing pregnancy as an evolving relationship with a child-to-be, contract pregnancy reinforces a vision of the pregnant woman as a mere “home” or an “environment.” The sale of reproductive labor thus distorts the nature of the bond between mother and the developing fetus by misrepresenting the nature of a woman’s reproductive labor as a commodity. What should we make of this argument? ...

Indeed there is a dilemma for those who wish to use the mother-fetus bond to condemn pregnancy contracts while endorsing a woman’s right to choose an abortion. They must hold it acceptable to abort a fetus but not to sell it. Although the Warnock Report takes no stand on the issue of abortion, it uses present abortion law as a term of reference in considering contract pregnancy. Because abortion is currently legal in England, the Report’s position has this paradoxical consequence: one can kill a fetus, but one cannot contract to sell it. One possible response to this objection would be to claim that women do not bond with their fetuses in the first trimester. But the fact remains that some women never bond with their fetuses; some women even fail to bond with their babies after they deliver them.

Are we really sure that we know which emotions pregnancy “normally” involves? Whereas married women are portrayed as nurturing and altruistic, society has historically stigmatized the unwed mother as selfish, neurotic, and unconcerned with the welfare of her child. Until quite recently social pressure was directed at unwed mothers to surrender their children after birth. Thus married women who gave up their children were seen as “abnormal” and unfeeling, and unwed mothers who failed to surrender their children were seen as selfish. Assumptions of “normal” maternal bonding may reinforce traditional views of the family and a women’s proper role within it.

Labels: abortion, feminism, motherhood, pregnancy, surrogate motherhood, women

VOTE

Greg Bruell and his girlfriend of a year and a half, Sandra Hedrick, had a pact. “We agreed that if we got pregnant, we’d terminate because we were not in a stable family unit,” Hedrick says. Or as Bruell more starkly puts it, “I resumed sexual relations with her on the condition that were birth control to fail, she’d abort without waffling.”

“Resumed,” because nine months ear­lier Hedrick had conceived a child with Bruell and the couple decided to end that pregnancy. Or rather, he decided, and she went along. Their relationship was too rocky—a series of breakups followed by passionate reunions—for them to become parents together, Bruell argued. Plus, both were still in the process of finalizing di­vorces, and he was a newly single father struggling to balance his needs against those of his eight-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. Bruell wanted to steady their destabilized worlds before jumping into fatherhood anew. ...

Hedrick, a petite 39-year-old whose lively blue eyes, long blond hair, and curvy figure recall something of the high school cheerleader she once was, also already had a child, a five-year-old girl, and was still untying the emotional knots of her seven-year marriage. Her reaction to the pregnancy, however, had been one of “love, hope, happiness, and an overwhelming feeling that the baby was meant to exist.” But Greg’s logic and unwavering certainty that the baby was not meant to be ultimately carried the day for her. Still, Hedrick admits, “If Greg wasn’t beside me on the table, I don’t think I would have gone through with it.”

It was the night after the abortion, and on a number of occasions following, that Hedrick vowed to Greg that if she conceived again, she’d immediately terminate. But when she got pregnant in early 2009 (she was on birth control, she says, though its effectiveness may have been diluted by antibiotics she was taking), she balked. “I looked at the ultrasound,” Hedrick says. “A bad move.” She also realized that this might be her last chance to have another child. She broke the news to Bruell: She was keeping the baby.

Infuriated about the “miserable betrayal,” Bruell told Hedrick it was over between them, for good. He believed she’d deliberately gotten pregnant. Then, two months later, as he was leaving a session with his personal trainer, he was served with a lawsuit demanding child support for his unborn child. That’s when Bruell called Mel Feit, a founder of the National Center for Men (NCM), and volunteered to become the next poster boy for male reproductive rights.

Labels: abortion, culture, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pregnancy, women

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"What's the book about?"

It was a question I heard frequently over the holidays this past December, as I went to pre-Christmas rehearsals, parties, and church services carrying Tsipy Ivry's Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel.

"It's about pregnancy," I'd say. "In Japan and Israel."
The inevitable response: "Why there?"

The gestation of Embodying Culture began when anthropologist Tsipy Ivry was concluding a research program as a graduate student in Tokyo, and became pregnant. A native Israeli, Ivry was surprised by what she describes as "an overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of becoming 'different,'" a sensation she attributes not only to the experience of pregnancy itself but also to the reality of being pregnant as an Israeli woman in Japan. This impression in turn led to a developing interest in the lived experience of pregnancy and how it is socially and culturally constructed in different societies. ...

Although both Israeli and Japanese women experience pregnancy as a highly medicalized event, much as in the United States, the forms that medicalization take differ greatly. And these differences, Ivry argues, are deeply rooted in distinctive cultural contexts: in Israel, a struggle to stay alive amidst constant military conflict; in Japan, an emphasis on the betterment of society through the long-term maternal efforts of child-raising.

If we think of each culture's implicit understanding of pregnancy as a narrative, Ivry contends, we'll find that the "protagonist" of the Japanese narrative differs sharply from the protagonist of the Israeli narrative:

In the Japanese arena the protagonist of pregnancy is the interconnected entity of the mother-baby, whereas in the Israeli case the protagonists are the pregnant woman and her suspect fetus. Pregnancy is conceptualized as an early stage of parenting in Japan and is all about the interdependence of mother and baby and their ongoing relationships. The Israeli model defines pregnancy as a state "in limbo" that involves two separate individuals (of whom only one is a person).

Labels: abortion, culture, Israel, Japan, Judaism, motherhood, pregnancy

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In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford's hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher's published works, mostly statistical treatises on women's height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, "I opened it up and there were these questionnaires"— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.

In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women's sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren't so Victorian after all. ...

Because it was hidden so long, her sex survey had little influence on her contemporaries, but today it's a valuable historic document that gainsays the stereotype that Victorian women knew little of sex and desired it even less. Granted, it is small and nonrepresentative, favoring well-educated, middle-class white women, and only those willing to disclose intimate matters. Mosher took care to obscure their identities—names and residences were not recorded—but it's likely the group included Stanford faculty and wives, the Mother's Club members from Mosher's Wisconsin days and other women she knew. Of those surveyed, 34 had attended a university or teachers' college. Nine were Stanford alumnae, six from Cornell; other alma maters included Wellesley, Vassar and the University of California. Thirty respondents had worked before marriage, mostly as teachers.

Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they'd gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like "watching farm animals." Yet no matter how sheltered they'd initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week. ...

Anxieties about unwanted pregnancies are also clear. This was a hot topic during the 19th century, when the marital fertility rate fell by half despite the criminalization of abortion and contraception, Freedman says. At least 30 respondents reported attempting birth control anyway. Many mentioned using douching, withdrawal or the rhythm method; a few had tried a "womb veil" or male condoms.

"My husband and I . . . believe in intercourse for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness," wrote one woman, born in 1860. "On the other hand there are sometimes long periods when we are not willing to incur even a slight risk of pregnancy, and then we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other." A woman born in 1862, who felt that without "a strong desire for children" marriage was no more than "legalized prostitution," nevertheless wrote: "I most heartily wish there were no accidental conceptions. I believe the world would take a most gigantic stride toward high ethical conditions, if every child brought into the world were the product of pure love and conscious choice."

Labels: contraception, culture, Marriage, pregnancy, sex, women

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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.

Labels: culture, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pregnancy, women

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The pregnancy was easy, the delivery a breeze. This was the couple’s first baby, and they were thrilled. But within two months, the bliss of new parenthood was shattered by postpartum depression.

A sad, familiar story. But this one had a twist: The patient who came to me for treatment was not the mother but her husband. ...

Up to 80 percent of women experience minor sadness — the so-called baby blues — after giving birth, and about 10 percent plummet into severe postpartum depression. But it turns out that men can also have postpartum depression, and its effects can be every bit as disruptive — not just on the father but on mother and child.

We don’t know the exact prevalence of male postpartum depression; studies have used different methods and diagnostic criteria. Dr. Paul G. Ramchandani, a psychiatrist at the University of Oxford in England who did a study based on 26,000 parents, reported in The Lancet in 2005 that 4 percent of fathers had clinically significant depressive symptoms within eight weeks of the birth of their children. But one thing is clear: It isn’t something most people, including physicians, have ever heard of.

Labels: animal research, Fathers, gender differences, men, mental health, pregnancy

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...Counselors and those who study dating, marriage and divorce say plenty of couples get married when they shouldn't. And their numbers may be increasing, because more couples are casually living together, which can complicate decisions about whether to marry, says Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver.

Stanley says his research on couples who cohabit before marriage has found that "some of those wouldn't have married if they hadn't been living together."

"People have committed themselves before talking about the commitment to the future, and that can get you walking down the aisle not being sure that's the right thing, or what you want to do," he says.

Stories of people entering marriages they felt were doomed from the start intrigued Carl Weisman of Torrance, Calif., whose book, So Why Have You Never Been Married? 10 Insights Into Why He Hasn't Wed, arrived last year. He says a divorced woman he knows said something he thought was quite profound: "I didn't listen to my inner voice. I knew I was going to divorce him before I even married him." That led Weisman to thinking about others who went into a marriage knowing it wouldn't last. But he couldn't find any academic research on the subject.

So Weisman, 50, who recently married for the first time, surveyed 1,036 people across the country and conducted in-depth interviews with dozens more for his new book, Serious Doubts: Why People Marry When They Know It Won't Last.

Those surveyed had one thing in common: "They all ignored their inner voice," he says. "They knew it wasn't going to last." ...

Donahue, who cohabited before her 11-year marriage (which ended five years ago), says she didn't heed some early signals, including religious differences. Her parents also didn't approve of their living together without being married, which Donahue says encouraged her to wed. "I was thinking that we were in love and we're going to make it work. I believed in this whole fairy-tale thing on marriage."

Other reasons for proceeding in the face of doubts may also sound familiar – like pregnancy.

That's why Neumann, 26, a non-profit market researcher from Chicago, says she went ahead with it. "I had some concerns in the relationship, but I thought if I got married, we would grow together," she says. "I was 18 at the time and thought it would all work out in the end."

Others may think a partner is too good a catch to pass up – even though there's no spark.

Rasmussen, 51, an office manager in Boise, says she tried to convince herself that she and her second husband were a good match. They enjoyed many of the same activities, including travel. She had financial resources, yet he offered to help her with her kids' college expenses.

She wasn't head over heels, but he was attractive and generous, so Rasmussen told herself "You can learn to love this guy."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Marriage, pregnancy, premarital sex

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