This year's winners of the Ig Nobel prizes are a bumper crop of wild and crazy SCIENCE!, featuring sword-swallowing, knuckle-cracking,
benefits of cow-naming,
pregnant women NOT tipping over,
a household use for giant panda poop (take that,
Packham),
diamonds made from tequila,
a brassiere that can be used as TWO gas masks,
"Ireland's Worst Driver", Icelandic banks, Zimbabwean currency, and a 'Peace Prize' earned by hitting people over the heads with beer bottles (and comparing the effects of
empty vs. full bottles) (
related inquiry)
posted by wendell
on Oct 2, 2009 -
23 comments
Let's Panic About Babies! "Fortunately for everyone in the whole wide world,
Alice Bradley and
Eden M. Kennedy have created the only website that accurately explains the journey from morning sickness to third-degree tears to keeping that baby alive for a year–or more! LET’S PANIC ABOUT BABIES will serve as a salve to the mystery and degradation of this most female of challenges. Its authors may not have 'science' on their side, but what they do have is far more valuable: a heady mélange of female intuition, sentence-forming know-how, and the achingly vivid memories of their own gestational journeys and unending motherhoods. So join Alice and Eden as they tell you exactly what to think and feel and do on every one of your 2,681 days* of pregnancy. They know everything!
* 'Science' would tell you that human gestation is actually, on average, 266 days. This is one of many ways in which science is terribly wrong." [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Aug 19, 2009 -
63 comments
Sixteen states already have
laws [PDF] related to
abortion ultrasounds . Eleven more states have recently introduced bills that demand that a woman who wants an abortion be forced to look at the ultrasound, while a doctor describes what she is seeing. All of these bills are because the legislators believe that adoption is the only choice a woman should make. This essay,
On Living Pro-Lifer's Choice for Women, explores the difficulties faced by birth mothers who choose that path.
posted by dejah420
on Mar 17, 2009 -
505 comments
Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family.
The New Yorker discusses the red-state/blue-state divide in attitudes about premarital sex, sex education, and teen pregnancy:
Red Sex, Blue Sex.
posted by Who_Am_I
on Oct 31, 2008 -
153 comments
Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town.
posted by swift
on Jun 19, 2008 -
209 comments
Wombs for rent: "Anand's surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies. More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years."
posted by mr_crash_davis
on Dec 30, 2007 -
134 comments
Resolve.org is a site devoted to providing support, both emotional and practical, to people struggling with infertility issues. The immediately apparent benefits to visiting would be their informational documents and errata, but of at least equal value are the bulletin boards where you can talk with other people dealing with infertility, whether it's for the sake of venting, chatting or just to have someplace you can go where you don't have to hear the words "well, adoption isn't so bad..."
posted by shmegegge
on Sep 17, 2007 -
66 comments
The ethics of infertility: After taking fertility drug Clomid,
Ryan and Brianna Morrison conceived sextuplets. Their religious beliefs steered them away from undergoing a
selective reduction procedure in favor of bringing all six fetuses to term. Four of their newborns have died; the remaining two are in critical condition.
This mother of multiples says that while she's grateful that insurance and Medicaid covered her million-dollar hospital bill, her "quest to have a family resulted in a significant drain on society's resources."
posted by lalex
on Jul 2, 2007 -
136 comments
Living With a Dying Baby. "Families can choreograph their child’s very brief life with their family . . . Sometimes they may have a matter of minutes, so they decide beforehand who can hold the baby, who will cut the umbilical cord, who will hold the baby when you know he is going to die."
posted by brain_drain
on Mar 13, 2007 -
66 comments
The Shape of a Mother There are a lot of sites out there that document the changes a woman's body goes through during pregnancy. The goal of Shape of a Mother (picture-heavy, NSFW) is to document what also happens
afterwards. Women from all over the world submit stories and pictures of how their bodies changed after giving birth and how it affects their self-image. From the site's creator:
"It occurred to me that a post-pregnancy body is one of this society's greatest secrets; all we see of the female body is that which is airbrushed and perfect, and if we look any different, we hide it from the light of day in fear of being seen."
posted by LeeJay
on Oct 14, 2006 -
53 comments
Forever Pregnant. The
CDC has released guidelines for improving the "preconception health" of all women of childbearing age whether they plan to have children or not. From the the WaPo article:
"among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control." So ladies, don't even think of touching the
litter box. You know, just in case.
posted by kimdog
on May 19, 2006 -
121 comments
When I was Garbage by Allison Crews at age 17, teen mother advocate and activist.
"I had become garbage, worthy only to sit in my isolated desk and cry to myself and throw up in a dirty bathroom stall. I was a pregnant teenage girl.
" Allison died recently aged 22. She was active in
girl-mom.com, an online and in life support and education network for young mothers.
"To radically accept and defend a woman's right to choose, we must acknowledge the multiple ways that women come to make reproductive choices. By marginalizing teenage mothers, even within the feminist community, we are failing to recognize the realities of countless women and their children." There's a
report of her funeral and a
website has been set up to collect memories for Allison's 7 year old son. {Allison's
LJ}
All of this comes via
BitchPhD - her entry is also worth reading.
(previous semi-related MeFi)
posted by peacay
on Jun 21, 2005 -
50 comments
Grin And Bear It, Woman! Think Of England! Caesarean births in the U.K. should be severely curtailed, say the medical mandarins.
Germaine Greer says, in a cracking column, that the
new guidelines are misogyny pure and simple. Is it just my impression (think of
American Pie-type teenage movies; advertising; "guy lit") or are hatred of women and beery, bozo celebrations of indifference to the feminine sex on the up and up?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Apr 28, 2004 -
64 comments
Recharge Your Ovaries? Would it be better to have babies in our 60's? What if we could eliminate menopause? Is this just another instance of the dawn of agelessness?
posted by ewkpates
on Mar 10, 2004 -
7 comments
The Visible Embryo. "This spiral represents the 23 stages occurring in the first trimester of pregnancy and every two weeks of the second and third trimesters. Use the spiral to navigate through the 40 weeks of pregnancy and preview the unique changes in each stage of human development." via
The Eyes Have It, which sadly looks as if it hasn't been updated since February, but still has much of interest to offer.
posted by jokeefe
on Jul 27, 2003 -
13 comments
Sending the pregnant to fight Saddam: The dramatic
rescue of GI Jessica brings up the issue [preemptive post justification]. This article has a nice historical overview of women's role in the military, in the form of a time-travel dialogue between today's soldier and a Vietnam era grunt.
posted by hairyeyeball
on Apr 3, 2003 -
22 comments
A 32,000 year old
etching on an ivory mammoth tusk is linked to the constellation Orion which may have been used as a primitive "pregnancy calendar" designed to estimate when a pregnant woman will give birth. The oldest known drawing of a star pattern, it was created by the mysterious Aurignacian people about whom we know next to nothing save that they moved into Europe from the east supplanting the indigenous Neanderthals.
posted by stbalbach
on Jan 26, 2003 -
17 comments
Pregnancy test results are not considered part of confidential medical records. Why, you say? Because the cops wanted to find out who dumped an abandoned baby, and subpoenaed Planned Parenthood's records to see who had gotten positive pregnancy test results recently. The rationale for the judge's ruling? "...the records aren't medical records because the staff who provide pregnancy tests aren't required to be doctors or nurses."
posted by beth
on Jul 18, 2002 -
14 comments
"I just can't believe that I'm having a baby." The yearbook at Pinellas Park High School this year included a 12 page spread about teen pregnancy and highlights some students and their experiences with staying in school while pregnant. Some see it a step in educating students about the issue, others see it as a glorification of teen pregnancy. Having had an older sister almost not finish high school because of a pregnancy, I'm all for education, but is the yearbook the appropriate place?
posted by turacma
on Jun 11, 2002 -
38 comments
Getting the Girl. The NY Times Magazine ran a great article awhile back on the emotional and societal consequences of being able to choose the sex of your baby. In the US, the
ratio for the overall population is 0.96 males for every 1 female. But it has been
changing over time and there's some
controversy as to why this is.
posted by euphorb
on Apr 11, 2002 -
10 comments
Woman Pregnant Twice. An Italian woman is due to give birth in a hospital in Rome this week to a baby girl - before returning three months later to have triplets. If both deliveries are successful, it is thought that this will be the first such case in history.
posted by tpoh.org
on Nov 12, 2001 -
17 comments
