When that was finished, Lucy announced that we were going to do what the man on the computer was doing (Craig was watching the State of the Union): she would stand up and talk, and we would all clap.  The speech sounded roughly like this: “Blah, goobdy-glah, ookie jimbas.”  It was quite hilarious.

http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/topics/breastfeeding/calltoactiontosupportbreastfeeding.pdf

The Surgeon General has issued a “Call to Action in Support of Breast Feeding”, which (from my quick look) is pretty sweeping in its arguments for giving mothers more breast feeding support and in its suggestions for how to do that.  It’s a long read, and a lot of it is common sense (but apparently somebody has to say it – it’s not happening otherwise!) but there are a couple of parts worth looking at.

I’m particularly excited about pages 43-45, which suggest that formula companies ought to back off with advertising and giving of free samples, and that doctors should clear their offices of advertisements, free samples, pens, and the like which promote formula usage.  What happens when the hospital sends a new mother home with no support and a free sample of formula?  End of breast feeding.  I don’t dare to expect formula companies to stop advertising in “Parenting” magazine and the like, but I sincerely hope these recommendations are put into effect immediately, at least on the part of health care providers.  We have been watching Similac commercials in the OB’s office for the last few weeks, and I would certainly not miss them.  (If only they would do the same with prescription drug advertising, particularly contraceptives…but that’s another long discussion!)

The other exciting part is the call for employers to expand paid maternity leave and opportunities for mothers to nurse or pump at work.  (See pgs. 50-53 of the PDF.)  With as many women working as there are today, this would make a huge difference in how long many of them are able to continue breast feeding.

So it’s nice to see that somebody in D.C. is doing something that might just be worthwhile.  The hitch, of course, is that most of the actions recommended are voluntary, so there is still a ton of grass-roots work to be done.  But maybe this will open a few eyes to what they could be working on, and it certainly gives mothers a new tool for discussing these issues with their employers and health care providers, who tend to care about these sorts of documents.

-Ken Robinson, Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative

-Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative.  (emphasis mine)

“It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness.  And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money.  We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

-Seven Story Mountain

And this was published in 1948!  What amazes me is, we’ve somehow managed to keep it up for this long!

What’s funny is, this weekend I was saying how I’d like to plant a fruit tree in the front yard for people to take from as they pleased.

But not the tiny little tree in our backyard, not our first-fruits!  Not all of them!

Am I being selfish?  Part of me says, “Share!  Why do you need those oranges, when you have a basket of Satsumas that were given to you?”  But I really, really, really wanted to taste those oranges.  They could have left us one!

I’m telling myself that if I had a huge tree overflowing with oranges, I wouldn’t have even noticed, much less minded.  But they’re all gone.  Maybe next year there will be enough for us to get some.  But I don’t want to wait another year!  It makes me wonder about people.  Harumph.  And then I just feel bad for being grumpy.  It’s not fair.

“Dear  Friend,

I was outraged when I found out the Obama Administration  wanted to give Guantanamo Bay detainees  the H1N1 vaccine while millions of Americans – including  pregnant women and children – are still waiting  to get the H1N1 vaccine because of massive shortages.

Swine flu is a very real concern for all of us across  the country.  Currently, the H1N1 vaccine is only being provided to  certain high-risk segments of the population.  The vaccine is in short supply,  and, as such, there are millions of Americans in these high-risk groups still  awaiting the vaccine.  We should save the vaccine for those who need it  most, and as of today, women, children and other at-risk individuals should  fall squarely in line under that category.

Last week I introduced a Senate resolution with  several of my colleagues asserting that the Obama Administration should not  provide Guantanamo Bay detainees and terror suspects with the H1N1 vaccine  before the H1N1 vaccine shortage is addressed and all American citizens  prioritized as vulnerable to H1N1 have the choice to obtain the H1N1 vaccine.

Rest assured as your Senator, I will keep fighting so that terrorist suspects and detainees do  not jump to the front of the line while millions of Americans vulnerable to  H1N1 are waiting to take the vaccine.
Sincerely,

David Vitter
U.S.  Senator”

And this is the letter I wrote back to him:

“I would like to express my disappointment that you would waste public time and money by introducing a resolution to keep Guantanamo Bay inmates from receiving the H1N1 vaccine ahead of American citizens.  While I, too, would like to see all those at high risk from the various strains of flu provided with access to vaccines in a timely manner, squabbling about less than 300 vaccines does not seem particularly helpful to fulfilling this purpose.  Furthermore, I think we must keep in mind that inmates in prisons are most certainly in the “high-risk” group.  In fact, because of their close proximity to other inmates, guards, and other staff, those in prisons are, because of their incarceration, automatically at greater risk, regardless of their personal health.  Further, those at Guantanamo are not criminals; they are suspected of terrorist leanings and activities.  It is bad enough that they have been held so long without proper trials, will we now deny those who are at our mercy access to simple preventative health care?  By taking them into our prison, we, the American people, have taken on the responsibility for their health.  If we want to continue to claim the moral high ground (if that is even possible anymore!), I think it is necessary to show that we are willing live up to just these sorts of responsibilities.  In the future, I, as your constituent, would prefer you focus on bringing affordable healthcare to all Americans, rather than wasting time trying to deny it to a handful of people under our care whom you think are not worthy of healthcare.”

It really bothers me that people can be so self-righteous about making other people suffer.  Vitter is saying, “These guys don’t like us, so let’s let them get the flu and die.  That’ll show them!”  His web site brags that he and his wife are lectors at a parish in Metairie.  Sigh.

Anyway, if I knew someone who thought they didn’t have time to research birth choices, I would recommend this movie, and hopefully by the end of it they would realize they had to find time to do this sort of reading and research.  I found the discussion of the difference between the artificial hormones doctors use to induce labor and the natural hormones women get for and from labor particularly interesting.

Someday I’m going to get involved in what I like to think of as the “better birthing” movement…someday…maybe soon…

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Anyway, if you are wondering what I’m talking about, read the previous post and the links in it, and hopefully you’ll see why I thought I should say something.  So after all the stalling, here it is…

Your back-to-back stories on unplanned pregnancy and in-vitro fertilization struck a chord with me. They really serve to point out how selfish we as a society have become. We think we have a right to sex with anyone, at any time, without the responsibility of raising the children which are the natural result of sex. Therefore we pump women’s bodies full of artificial hormones, which cause uncomfortable side effects and can often confuse the body so that child bearing becomes more difficult later on. So when a woman decides that now she actually wants children, her body doesn’t believe her and she turns to more invasive and expensive medical procedures to achieve the pregnancy she has spent so long trying to avoid. Our desperate need to control our fertility on our terms, rather than work with it on nature’s terms, has led so many people to the heartaches of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies on one hand, and empty wombs on the other.

It is also disturbing to me that you perpetuate the destructive idea that a woman’s fertility is merely a burden and an inconvenience. Media in general portrays the possibility of pregnancy as the danger all women must face, when, as those women who desperately try IVF know, it is a mystery and a blessing. In a loving, stable relationship, children are not a hazard, but a joy. Partially as a result of this overtly negative attitude toward childbearing, women’s fertility is treated not as the result of the way their bodies are designed to work, but as a series of inconvenient medical conditions which require fixing. A young woman with an irregular cycle is given birth-control pills to regularize her, but this does not solve the problem, it merely postpones her body’s work. Years later, when she finally goes off the medication, her body still has to find its own rhythm and cycle. Women use all sorts of methods, some more dangerous or invasive than others, to try and keep their fertility at bay during the years when it is at its peak. And then, often when their fertility is waning of its own accord, they require more intervention to attempt to force their bodies to become pregnant. Those who do bear children are forced to endure the medicalization and hospitalization of childbirth, which, despite what current practice might lead us to believe, is not a disease! Many of the interventions in this area are not only uncomfortable, but can actually increase the risk of complications for both mother and baby. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it seems to me that this is all very good for the medical professionals who are kept in business in this way, but very, very bad for the women who spend their lives undergoing intervention after unnecessary intervention.

Beyond these larger issues, I have a couple of complaints about the Brenda Wilson’s report itself. I admire the courage of Joy Migala to tell her story so openly, but I fear that a couple of her comments could be very easily misinterpreted, and Brenda Wilson made no attempt, either on air or in the online article, to clarify these issues. My husband and I use Natural Family Planning (as do a number of our close friends) and have been very happy with its effectiveness as well as the communication it fosters in our relationship. The statement that “Migala tried to keep a chart of when she was fertile so she would know when to use a condom” includes two misconceptions about NFP. First of all, NFP, like other methods of family planning, does require consistency and understanding to be used effectively. I did not get the impression from the article that Ms. Migala had taken classes or similar measures to really know her fertility well enough to count on this method. On the other hand, using a condom during the peak fertile times is one of the best ways to have a “failure” with NFP, because it is no longer your own cycle you are depending on, but rather the efficacy of the condom. If the condom fails, and the woman’s body is working well, it is very likely that she will get pregnant. Anyone well trained in NFP would be aware of this risk.

Secondly, I found it interesting that the outcome of Ms. Migala’s pregnancy was omitted from the on-air story. I was curious about it when I heard the story, especially after Wilson goes to such trouble to help the listener understand and identify with Ms. Migala’s story. I am forced to wonder if it was left out purposely, in an attempt to divert those who would point out that contraception, because of the attitude which couples using it bring to sex (i.e., we do not want a baby), tends to lead to abortion? A couple who “owns up” to their sexuality by respecting the fact that it includes fertility and the possibility of pregnancy, and deal with this in a positive way (rather than the “I’ll avoid pregnancy using this device/pill” attitude of the user of contraception) is less likely to end up getting an abortion, because they come in with the attitude that a baby is a possibility, and a possibility that they accept responsibility for by taking the step of being sexually active.

Director Cullins’ statement about using different methods of birth control at different times of life struck me as strange. It has not been that long since I was in college, and it seems to me that it would be far easier to have an IUD as a freshman in college (when you are presumably not planning to have children until at least after graduation) than to take a pill every day at the same time of day. A college student’s schedule is one of the least regular I can imagine! Furthermore, as a twenty- or thirty-something career woman, if I were considering ever having children, I would be suspicious or using an IUD which would affect my fertility over such a long period of time. Otherwise, I would find myself in that group of women decide later in life that they want children, but I would have preempted my own chances at getting pregnant. This woman is not giving the sort of good, logical advice I would hope to get from someone at a fertility clinic!

In short, I felt that Wilson’s story left several things to be desired, namely, any challenge of the culture which essentially tells women their fertility is unhealthy to their bodies and their relationships and a lack of through research (which is further substantiated by the corrections which had to be made to her description of methods of birth control) which, to my mind, showed the bias seeping into her journalism.

I would love to hear a more critical story concerning the state of women’s reproductive health in the U.S. today. Wilson’s efforts did little to add to the common discussion, while only telling one side of a multi-faceted issue. It might be helpful to examine the way children have turned into another commodity to be sought (or avoided) at the appropriate moment of life. Trying to find “better” contraceptives will only lead women to continue to fight the same problems they have while using today’s contraceptives. It is a radical shift in thinking about the place of sexuality and fertility in our lives as well as a growth in respect for the procreative power of a woman’s body which are necessary if we are to both alleviate the fear of unwanted pregnancy and end the suffering of women who feel forced to turn to IVF in order to have the children they so deeply desire.