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November 2015
We’ve said it before but here we go again: Women and men know surprisingly little about how our bodies work, procreatively speaking, beyond the basics. Along the way we tend to pick up a few more clues than we got in our first awkward parent or sibling-led convo about the birds and bees . But not that many more clues.
Unless we’re medical professionals or biologists, chances are we’re out of luck.
As one study pointed out, less than half of American women and even fewer men who recently graduated from college have any concept of when fertility might start to decline. Shocking? Yes. It should be.
File under: The media hasn’t had an OMG-she’s-so-old celebrity pregnancy story in a while, so it’s time to make one up! This installment is courtesy of Today.com, where someone apparently decided it was time to stick a fork in 55-year-old new mom Brigitte Nielsen and see if she’s done.
And? Brigitte Nielsen is emphatically not done. She sounds like she’s killing it, loving life as a new (again) mom, after raising four now-adult children decades ago. Her new baby Frida, the first daughter she’s had, is now seven months old, and sounds like she’s thriving. Nielsen bounced back from this pregnancy after just two and a half weeks—about a fraction of what it’s taken most other moms we know, in their 20s, 30s or anytime.
As quoted in this (surprisingly upbeat!) Today.com piece, Nielsen is grateful for the chance to be a mom in her 50s—with 25-year-old husband Mattia Dessi–and she isn’t taking a bit of it for granted. She’s keeping it real …
Meghan Markle’s pregnancy announcement this fall turned the celebrity media into a wiggly jello mold of glee: Oh look, another over-35 celeb we can cheer (read: rip to shreds) for having a baby late—even before she announces any such thing! And she’s a royal, no less! Story after story after trumped-up nonsense after faux-adulation after story later, there’s apparently nothing left to report, diagnose, cross-examine or fret over until Markle actually goes ahead and has the friggin’ baby, already.
So now what? Oh wait, there’s this! Comparing Meghan’s “pregnancy body language” with her sister-in-law and fellow royal scrutinee Kate Middleton’s. Pregnancy body language? Yeah, apparently that’s a thing.
Does throwing your kid a birthday party need to give you a migraine? Can’t you just get some friends together, sing happy birthday, eat cake, and call it a day? You can. Here’s what to skip from now on:
1. Buying Fancy Birthday Cakes
Consider this your get-out-of-jail-free pass: Don’t spend hundreds of dollars on your kid’s birthday cake. No one will care if you do. They’ll care for exactly 30 seconds, as long as it takes to ogle the cake before it vanishes into everyone’s jaw. Kids will eat it because it’s a cake, whether you paid $500 for a custom cake from a fancy bakery or $29.99 for a sheet cake at the supermarket. If parents are at the party, most of them will ask for “a sliver” anyway and will barely notice if it’s a fancy sliver or a sheet-cake sliver. Ok, they’d be happier eating a real baked cake, but their chief concern is surviving the party small-talk and keeping their kid from accidentally killing anyone. Save the cake-ordering headache, save money, save energy for what really matters: Making it through the party without getting (visibly) drunk on all the wine you’ve stocked for the party. Because parents who show up want that wine way more than they want cake.
2. Writing Personalized Thank You Notes
It’s sweet to get a thank you note. People like it. I like getting thank you notes, and I even like writing them, in theory. But when you’re staring at a pile of unwritten cards after a party, it’s not awesome. It takes me weeks, months, to attack the pile, and the whole time I’m asking myself why I suck so much and haven’t written the damn notes yet. Last year after a party for my son’s classmate, his mom mass-emailed the guest list
“The sky is falling. The sky is falling!”
Chicken Little was right all along: The sky IS falling. The latest UN report on climate change predicts a Walking Dead scenario—wildfires everywhere, mass starvation, wildlife in collapse— as early as 2040. Not at some abstract point in the future, as many of us who’ve been terrified about climate change have let ourselves believe.
2040. That’s pretty much tomorrow. A physicist and climate scientist named Bill Hare, quoted in the New York Times article about the report, summed it up best: This, he said, is “quite a shock.”
You’ve probably already done the math about how old you’ll be—and how old your kids will be—by 2040. If you’re like me, you’re ready to sign a lease for a cozy little condo on the moon, because our planet will be toast before we hit retirement age. If we take political action immediately, i.e. in the next 10-12 years max, to massively cut carbon emissions, we may delay the inevitable by a bit. But needless to say, action won’t happen under the current U.S. administration.
Yesterday I saw this post from a mom on a Brooklyn parents’ email listserv:
“I’m sure many of you read the troubling report that states we have 12 years left to act in order to avoid catastrophe. What do we do? I’m new to this level of activism but I want my kids to have habitable planet.”
“Deliveries are for pizzas, births are for babies,” Tia Dowling-Ketant told me when we sat down to chat and caffeinate one late-summer morning in Brooklyn. It was one of the dozens of quotable moments that stuck with me from the hour I got to spend with Tia, hearing about her work as a doula with a mix of clients ranging from low-income pregnant women in underserved neighborhoods, to affluent women looking for an experienced doula who knows the ropes, to couples of all backgrounds coping with infertility.
Hiring a doula can be expensive, but more and more community-based organizations like By My Side Doula Support—which Tia works with in Brooklyn—are helping lower-income women access the kind of care that usually only wealthier families can afford. This is especially crucial in neighborhoods with higher-than-average rates of maternal complications and mortality. Doulas are making a huge difference, and the data backs it up: “One-to-one emotional, physical and educational support provided by support personnel, such as a doula, is associated with improved outcomes for women in labor,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) said in a recent report.
Tia spoke to Crunch Time Parents about why she switched careers to do this tough and life-changing work, and gave tips on how women can become our own vocal advocates before, during and after pregnancy. And because Tia is also a fertility doula who experienced infertility before she went through IVF and gave birth to her son, she shared insights for anyone on a similar path.
A Huffington Post article this week makes the long-overdue case that doctors need to stop fat-shaming pregnant women who suffer from obesity or are simply overweight. In a nutshell:
"The reality is that the vast majority of overweight and obese women have perfectly normal pregnancies. But medical professionals are not immune to society’s tendency to disrespect fat people," as Brianna Snyder writes in the HuffPo article, titled "Fat-Shaming the Pregnant: How the Medical Community Fails Overweight Moms."
What does that disrespect look and sound like? Bullying women into believing that they'll be required to have a C-section if they don't lose weight. Frightening plus-size women into thinking they're risking their lives just by becoming pregnant. Asking them to abort the baby, lose weight, then get pregnant again. The horrors go on.
Carrie Underwood is all over the tabloids this week now that she's unveiled her baby bump, but the singer has had a rough few days. She got massively trolled for saying this to Redbook:
"I'm 35, so we may have missed our chance to have a big family. We always talk about adoption and about doing it when our child or children are a little older. In the meantime, we're lucky to be a part of organizations that help kids, because our focus right now in our lives is helping as many kids as possible," Underwood said in her recent Redbook interview.
Twitter didn't miss a nanosecond to start railing at her, and comments got nasty. Here's one:
Sex-ed classes in schools tend to steer clear of a topic that most people will face at some point in their lives: Do I want kids, and if so, when?
That question is thorny enough for adults, so it's no surprise that sex-ed curricula ignore it, or barely skim the surface. But considering that in a recent study of college students, less than half of women, and even fewer men, didn't know when women's or men's fertility starts to decline, it's time
Two of the most common causes of death during and after childbirth are blood loss and sharply rising blood pressure. Hospitals can reduce deaths by fatal hemorrhages by up to 90 percent, and deaths by stroke and other blood-pressure-related conditions by 60 percent. They know what to do, but they aren't doing it. Why?
Following up on ProPublica's groundbreaking Lost Mothers series, USA Today's "Deadly Deliveries" report this week analyzes data from 75 hospitals around the U.S. to figure out when and if hospital staff are following basic protocols. Reporters found that dozens aren't doing two basic things: weighing bloody pads to measure blood loss, and giving medication for high blood pressure within the crucial 60-minute timeframe after it's detected.
Those two basic protocols would dramatically reduce the rates of maternal death in the U.S.. Incredibly, "there are no requirements that U.S. maternity hospitals follow best practices," the article notes.
California is the only state where hospitals across the board are implementing best practices. The initiative has had stunning results: California chopped its maternal death rate by half in recent years.
By Salma A.
It's not exactly shocking that pregnant women who have a heart attack often can't tell they're having one: The symptoms are hard to tell apart from all the discomforts that spring up normally in those nine months. But keeping in mind that heart attacks, of all things, can actually happen to pregnant women—especially pregnant women older than 35—is at least one step toward recognizing them in time, and getting help.
A newly published study of 55 million women by the NYU School of Medicine notes that heart attacks in women who are pregnant, giving birth, or up to two months postpartum went up by 25 percent between 2002 and 2014. That's a huge jump in a relatively short time.
By Salma A.
A new report about a potential cause of autism points to clues in a baby's teeth. In children who later develop autism, researchers can see "records of what exposures occurred during fetal development, and when they occurred, in a manner similar to the rings on trees." says a New York Times column headlined; "In Baby Teeth, Links Between Chemical Exposures in Pregnancy and Autism."
Author Peri Klass, M.D., a regular contributor to NYT's Checkup column, takes pains to note that the findings should NOT in any way suggest that mothers, and parents in general, are responsible for kids' early exposure to those factors, but many readers aren't buying the sincerity of the "don't blame parents" approach.
In the intro to her column, Klass writes that "so many different exposures have been linked to problems in the developing fetal brain that parents can sometimes feel both bewildered and, inevitably, at fault for failing or having failed to take all possible precautions" to prevent autism in their child. Her piece, which has ignited a controversy,
By Salma A.
In case you missed it, this New York Times article about the declining rate of childbirth in the U.S. is fascinating for so many reasons. Here are just a few:
The only demographic in America with a rising childbirth rate nowadays is...women ages 40-44, says the NYT report. Survey participants in every other age group are having fewer babies than they thought they would. Here at Crunch Time Parents, one of the main reasons we exist is to explore—and celebrate—the fact that people have more options than ever before if they want to become parents later in life. But it's still a sobering surprise to see the childbirth rates plunging for every other age group.
So, why are Americans having fewer babies these days?
So, why are Americans having fewer babies these days?
By Salma A.
I just came across a terrific Salon essay titled "Mama Don't Preach." I'd printed it out and saved it 15 years ago, back in the days when I used to collect essays about the pros and cons of having kids. At that time, I felt 85 percent sure I'd never have children. The lifestyle, as far as I could understand it at the time, wasn't for me. But the to-breed-or-not-to-breed debate intrigued me (and still does), and I wanted to mentally play out as many possible scenarios as I could before it was time to make a decision.
Which turned out to be a full decade later. As I reread that Salon essay now, the writer's leave-women-the-hell-alone argument feels as spot-on as ever. (By the way I'm reading it on the hard copy I printed out, because back in 2003, who knew if that whole "Internet" thing would survive? Ahem). Author Amy Reiter wrote it as a mom who'd had enough of other parents pontificating to kid-less adults about the joys of parenthood. And now that I have two kids of my own (who bring me boundless joy, especially when they're not busy wrecking our sleep and our walls and furniture), I couldn't agree more with Reiter.
By Salma A.
The 54-year-old Danish-Italian actress Brigitte Nielsen—known in the States mainly for her roles in Beverly Hills Cop II, Cobra, and Rocky IV, and partly for her former marriage to Sylvester Stallone—just announced she's pregnant. This is Nielsen's first pregnancy, and the father is her 39-year-old husband Mattia Dessi.
That's just about all the media knows now, or needs to know. But why just publish a one-page article about a celebrity's pregnancy news, when you can pad it out instead with a Mad-Libs-worthy piece on the likelihood and unlikelihood, the ins and the outs, the cliches and the eye-rollers, about pregnancy at "advanced maternal age"?
To wit: Newsweek's article about Nielsen's pregnancy news, headlined "Risks of Pregnancy for Women Over 50? Brigitte Nielsen Announces Pregnancy at 54," starts off with a couple of brief paragraphs about the announcement, then launches into this:
By Salma A.
Happy Single Mothers' Day to single moms who are kicking so much ass every day, everywhere on earth, making a life and a home for their kids and themselves against so many odds. Wait, Single Mothers' Day is a thing? Yup, it’s on the Saturday right before Mother's Day.
But, and here's why you probably don't know about it: Single Mothers' Day only happens in South Korea. At least, it did for the last few years. There's no mention of Single Mother's Day 2018 anywhere, as far as we can tell, but we're celebrating the day anyway, and toasting all the single moms we know and the ones we haven't met yet. I first heard about Single Mother's Day in this NPR report
By Salma A.
Spoiler alert: We don't know if the infertility diet promised in the headline above is the real deal. But we're linking to today's InStyle article anyway, because the writer's story about her journey from hormonal issues and infertility to a healthy pregnancy at age 37 is potentially useful for anyone struggling with the same symptoms.
At age 20, Alisa Vitti, author of the InStyle piece, suddenly put on more than 50 pounds and started getting her period only twice a year. Doctors couldn't figure out what was going on, but Vitti, a medical-school hopeful, researched her symptoms on her own and found out she had polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).
"As I aged, I could expect to gain more weight, get diabetes, and develop heart disease and cancer," Vitti's doctor told her. '"And I would likely never be able to have children naturally—even with IVF."
VItti decided to attack the issue with dietary and lifestyle changes, and at age 37 she got pregnant after only trying for a few months. So, what were those diet and lifestyle changes?
By Salma A.
Summer 1978 was my own version of the Summer of Love. I was six, and instead of weed and psychedelics I had chocolate ice cream (did the trick back then). Instead of cruising around in a VW van, my brother and I crammed into the back seat of a Buick station wagon as our parents road-tripped our family around America.
A photo of me in San Francisco, fudge popsicle drippings covering my chin, is all I need to bring the trip flashing back: camping near the Big Sur cliffs (magical), getting kicked out of a Reno casino for being under 18 (scary), and eating syrupy mangoes in Miami, the best I'd ever had before or since (unrepeatable).
Where were you in the summer of 1978? If you happened to be in New York City, maybe you're in one of the photos the New York Times just discovered from that summer.