Private Ceremonies. "Most women don’t talk about their abortions and miscarriages. Virtually none go through the experience with a loved one at their side. The greatest gift an abortion counselor can give is to bear witness, to be with a woman as she goes through this private journey, to witness her strength and weakness, her grief, her relief, her pain." A first person essay from a former abortion counselor.
posted by zarq
on May 21, 2013 -
34 comments
"Premature babies born at the edge of viability force us to debate the most difficult questions in medicine and in life. After just 23 weeks of pregnancy, Kelley Benham found herself in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with a daughter born so early neonatologist doctors would call her a "micro preemie." New technologies can sometimes keep micro preemies alive, but many end up disabled, some catastrophically so. Whether to provide care to these infants is one of the fundamental controversies in neonatology. This is the story of how Benham and her husband, Tom French, made the difficult choice:
Fight for the life of their micro preemie baby or let her go?"
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 8, 2012 -
70 comments
I'd always been fascinated by the trope of the doppelgänger and its long literary life, from Dostoyevsky to Nabokov to Spider-Man. Often, in books, these physical doubles represent the worst a character is capable of. Lately, though, perhaps because at age 41 I'd begun feeling less like the captain of my life and more like its deckhand, I'd started wondering if there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one—a person who encapsulates everything you've ever dreamed of becoming. Let's call him your Cooler Self. All those dreams that got lost along the way, the ones that were casualties of chance or duty or cowardice: There's a "you" out there—a mountain climber or war photographer or race-car driver—who brought them to fruition.
So I vowed to hunt down my Cooler Self.
posted by AceRock
on May 13, 2012 -
64 comments
NPR is reporting that the Susan G. Komen foundation is severing it's ties and
halting grants to Planned Parenthood, cutting off "hundreds of thousands of dollars", mainly earmarked for breast exams.
Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress — a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.
[more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Jan 31, 2012 -
313 comments
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest prospective study of mental and physical well-being ever conducted. For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been following 824 individuals through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Designer
Laura Javier took ten of those cases and visualized them in the
Elements of Happiness.
[via flowingdata]
posted by anifinder
on Jun 27, 2011 -
13 comments
"It was like trying to have a relationship with a sea sponge, or a single-cell protozoa. She didn't do anything! Or at least, nothing I could understand." — Phillip Toledan,
The Reluctant Father. A photo-essay on the cultural expectations of parenthood.
posted by chunking express
on Sep 25, 2010 -
102 comments
What Dads Don't Need for Father's Day: "A team of psychologists headed by Dr. Toni Zimmerman from Colorado State University analyzed the top-selling parenting books. Using a feminist perspective, they trawled the books for hidden gender messages. In findings published earlier this year, they concluded that the two mega-best sellers, John Gray's
Children Are from Heaven and Laura Schlessinger's
Parenthood by Proxy: Don't Have Them If You Won't Raise Them are filled with stereotypes, formulaic advice and information that does not conform to research findings."
Both books scored low in a feminist analysis of best-selling parental advice books. Kathleen Trigiani also wrote
a series of essays on John Gray entitled "Out of the Cave: Exploring Gray's Anatomy".
posted by jenleigh
on Jun 19, 2005 -
49 comments
Girl Power or:
Partnership status and the human sex ratio at birth: a paper by Karen Norberg
Could the sex of a child be influenced by the status of the parents' relationship at the time of conception? In a sample of 86,436 births in the United States, we find a small excess of sons among births to parents who were married or living with an opposite sex partner before the child's conception, compared to births to parents who were not. This is the first evidence that household arrangements can affect the human sex ratio at birth, and could explain the fall in the proportion of male births in some developed countries over the past thirty years. (Data published on
FirstCite registration required)
via
The Economist
(special note for mathowie: No word yet as to whether or not those single moms can also reliably produce offspring with an astigmatism.)
posted by lilboo
on Oct 27, 2004 -
12 comments
