Pregnancy & Motherhood

Diva antics aside, Naomi Campbell is redeeming herself by picking up the feminist banner.

First, she took on maternal mortality becoming a global ambassador for the White Ribbon Alliance, an international coalition for maternal health.

Naomi stated publically that "no woman should die giving birth."  Most of us don't realize that pregnancy is the leading killer of women of reproductive age in the developing world -- more than 80 percent of them preventable. A woman dies in childbirth or pregnancy every minute worldwide.

Then, Naomi took on discrimination against black models, "Where do we see a woman of colour in an advert? It's quite blatant."

This article on sphere.com about the woman whose "vagina fell out" is eye opening.  Allison Henry didn't realize that she had suffered a vaginal prolapse during pregnancy.  It demonstrates how women do NOT have any idea what is between their legs.

"Women will suffer for years and not tell anyone," says Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, a gynecologist in Los Angeles. "They'd rather tell their doctor they have a sexually transmitted disease than say that something is hanging out of them."

A new DNA test given to women as young as 18 can predict how long you have left to start a family.  At 36, I would totally have this fertility test done and know exactly how long my eggs were fertilizable.  Then I wouldn't have to hear my mother scare me with infertility stories.  God, I love science.

The breakthrough follows the discovery of a gene called Fragile X that indicates the rate at which a woman's egg supply will diminish over the years.

Professor Norbert Gleicher, of the Centre for Human Reproduction in New York, said: 'We can take an 18 or 20-year-old girl and check her Fragile X and make a pretty good prediction of whether she's at risk.'

Meet Laura Scott.  She's 47, childless, and just wrote a book Two is Enough about the complex decision NOT to have a family.  While she's totally happy with her decision she's tired of people asking her when she's going to have a baby and tired of being called "selfish":

"I've had people ask: 'What's wrong? You're not too old.' Everybody assumes that if you're married, you've got to have children, especially because we both work with them at school. And if you don't, you have to explain yourself all the time.  Having children should be a choice, not an obligation. Yet many women I know have even stopped going to christenings or baby showers because they are sick of being emotionally bullied for not having children.  It's easier for men. Not feeling paternal isn't such a grave crime.

The Daily Beast has finally proven what I've known to be true - that career women who opted out of the labor market are bearing the brunt of the economic meltdown. 

I so remember that NY Times piece about the Opt-Out Revolution like it was yesterday.  It was this phenom where women with Ivy league educations and corner offices were "opting out" of the labor market to be soccer moms citing the stress of balancing work and family (and the fact that you're penalized for motherhood while your male counterparts are promoted for having the stability of a loving family, oh, and you still have to do 80% of the household chores).

Here is another link to a Ph.D. sexologist, Danielle Harel, who did her dissertation on sexualizing labor and birth.

I wanted to make her info available, but I want to comment on what I consider to be oversimplifications to the concept of increased arousal and increased stimulation in several of her statements. This is getting into the minutia of sexual technique and any time you move down into the details, I consider them advanced sex concepts. As Betty often says to me, "Goddess is very often in the details."

Here are three links to sites that have info on this largely unknown topic in women's sexuality:

Here's an article on sensual birth options with many fine links to more sources.

This link is a forum page on women who have integrated clitoral play into their labor and their results.

And this is from a favorite site of mine that discusses sex/intercourse/making love during labor.

I guess this is the rock star/supermodel phenomenon OR is it that plain women opt for single, career focused lifestyles and no one is plying their wombs with diamonds and dinners?

Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern.

Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a "beauty race" that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans.

So why do I feel so relieved that men are in the same biological boat as we are?  Thank you, Lisa Belkin:

Researchers found children born to 50-year-old fathers scored slightly lower on intelligence tests than children of a 20-year-old father, regardless of the mother's age. The researchers analyzed data from more than 33-thousand American children. The study's outcome is a hot topic in the blogosphere.

"I would hope that somehow it equalizes relationships of sexes," says Lisa Belkin of the New York Times.

Belkin blogged about the study and wrote an essay titled "Your Old Man," for the New York Times. The response, she says, has been overwhelming.

"The men are getting really angry and the women are a little too gleeful... There were just hundreds and hundreds of people and you could just divide them into two categories based on gender," says Belkin.

Now there is a new sense of urgency with some men.

Over the years of running workshops, several women told about having orgasm giving birth. One friend actually used a vibrator on her clitoris during labor. She was clear that sexual pleasure definitely helped her to deal with the pain. Once the birthing tub was brought back into use by midwives, it facilitated birth by using gravity and warm water. Manual stimulation of the clitoris along with massage naturally fell into place and many women began to describe birth as orgasmic.

Baby Food by Jill Lepore demonstrates that we are a nation filled with sexual ignorance and bigotry. This piece on breast feeding and the difficulty new mothers face nursing their children in public, pumping their breast milk at the office, and the failure of the Family & Medical Leave Act to support working women's role as mother is an eye opener.  We produce the most porn and have sex on the brain 24/7, but expose one female nipple and Americans fall apart. Who are these people?

Mother told me I was too weak to suckle as a premature baby. She got a breast pump and fed me with an eye dropper until I grew stronger. She actually used a Wet Nurse for her first baby. By the time she had her last two; she was healthier and made sure her babies got their "titty dinners."