On not feeling like a mom

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When I get asked “How does it feel to be a mom?”, I don’t know how to answer that question, because I don’t feel like a mom. I just feel like me with a kid. Motherhood has brought more joy to my life and some healing, which is not at all insignificant, but being a mom feels like a very specific relationship, not a change in my general identity.

(I had similar trouble with the “How does it feel to be married?” question too, so my response was generally “Pretty much the same actually.” I can tell you what it feels like to be married to my specific husband, but would struggle to tell you how it feels to be a wife. While I think the ritual of a wedding ceremony witnessed by our nearest and dearest was important, there was no magic “We’re married!” moment, when I felt that everything changed. I’m sure that for those who weren’t already living together, it’s different.)

  “Doesn’t having a kid change everything?”  people will also ask.

Yes and No. It is true that I would not have been awake at 2:00 am last night and again at 6 if it weren’t for my daughter, but honestly, so far, having a baby is easier than I thought it would be. (My many years of whacked out sleep patterns are probably a plus for once.) I may feel very differently once she starts throwing tantrums, but at the moment – it’s mostly pretty fun.  I have my moments of frustration, of course, but those are just moments.  For the most part, I really dig hanging out with my little drooly bear, and parenting is only the fourth hardest thing I do every day.

 Some of this is no doubt circumstantial. I have a healthy, not terribly high strung baby, a supportive partner who does not have to be cajoled into caring for her, and a business that lets me work from home less than 40 hours a week. Because J and I both work from home, we can juggle baby care between the two of us. Things would be a lot harder if I had to be in an office for eight hours a day or if we were struggling to pay rent or if our baby had significant special needs.

Still, I thought I would be much more neurotic about parenting than I am, that I would question myself more, and feel more guilty. But I don’t.  I’ll spare you my labor and delivery story, but despite my firm insistence on a natural childbirth, I ended up getting an epidural about 14 hours into the situation.  It was the right decision, and I felt perfectly fine about it.  I still do.  When breastfeeding didn’t go quite as planned, the lactation consultant seemed to think that I would be devastated.  If the rest of my life is any indication, I should have felt like a failure. Instead I was a little bummed for a day or two, and then I got over it. And I just now realized that my daughter’s shirt is on backwards, although this does not seem to disturb her unduly.

  My inner critic puts in a full week’s work with overtime in most of the other areas of my life, so there’s not much carry over of this motherly equanimity, and most parts of my life – of me – feel unchanged.  I think this is why I resist the idea of finding “mom friends.” “Mom groups” feel a little bit like when people would try to set me up with someone in my single days, and when I asked why they thought we would be a good match, the thinking was “You’re single, he’s single, what more do you need?”

I do feel like I need to expand my social circle right now, but I’m not sure I want that to be centered around “mom stuff.”  Just because another woman and I both have babies doesn’t mean we have anything else in common – or even that we’re experiencing motherhood in similar ways. I’m not opposed to hanging out with other women who are parenting, but I would prefer that it be women that I click with on some level, and that we do more than just compare parenting philosophies.

 Speaking of which, my parenting philosophy involves feeding my child when she is hungry, so I’m going to go do that.

Team of Rivals and that hope-y, change-y thing

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I’m reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin right now, which is sort of a group biography about Lincoln, and his competitors for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination – Chase, Bates, and Seward – who later became part of his cabinet.  I’m still in the first 100 pages, which covers their early years, and I have been struck by how much death they all faced. And I don’t mean the Civil War, which was incredibly brutal. Life in the 19th century meant the death of your nearest and dearest on a regular basis.

All of the four men – Seward, Bates, Chase, and Lincoln – had at least one child die. Bates lost 8 of his 17 children (yes, 17 – let’s give three cheers for birth control!) A staggering number of women died in childbirth – including all three of Chase’s wives, and Lincoln’s sister.  Bates, Chase, and Lincoln each lost a parent as a child.  Seward’s daughter died, as well as Lincoln’s first love, both from diseases that would be preventable today.  Bates and Chase both had their fathers die when they were young, and their widowed mothers (who would never have the right to vote) were left with no way of supporting their children and farmed them out to relatives.  Seward had it the easiest of the four, and even he studied his ass off for 15 hours a day, entered college at 15, and was a lawyer by 22.

Seward, Bates, and Chase were from relatively privileged backgrounds, so if life was difficult for them, just think how much harder it was for poor people and women.  And if white women had it rough, think about how much exponentially harder it was for slaves or Native Americans.

We tend to get a little gauzy about larger than life figures like Lincoln, making something romantic out of studying books by candlelight, but there was nothing romantic about it. Lincoln grew up shit poor, was devastated by the loss of his mother and sister, and he kind of hated his father, most likely for excellent reasons.

Lincoln himself did not romanticize his upbringing. For most people in America in the 19th century, life was hard and then you died. Large swaths of the country were illiterate, and books were only for the rich. In many areas outside the east, there was essentially no public education. I always knew Lincoln didn’t have much formal education, but I was surprised to realize that he had only one year of school. I have a new appreciation for the herculean effort it took for him to educate himself, and just how extraordinary he was.

And then there was slavery, a grotesquely brutal institution on which the South’s economy depended.  While there was a strong abolitionist movement at this time, the South was fiercely devoted to keeping slavery in place, and many, if not most, Northerners were more concerned with the unity of the country than they were with getting rid of slavery.  Radical abolitionists were heavily criticized, and even those white Americans who were opposed to slavery couldn’t imagine black people being equal.  (While Lincoln was always opposed to slavery, he was far from being a radical abolitionist.)

I am finding this book strangely hopeful. The notion that we live in a post-racial society is utter nonsense, but damn, we’ve come a long way. In the roughly 150 years since Lincoln’s election, this country has gone from slavery to a black President elected and then re-elected, not to mention near universal literacy, the advances of feminism, and the fact that I could be reasonably sure I wouldn’t die giving birth to my daughter. Jason Collins got a phone call from the President and a congratulatory tweet from Kobe – Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have even had a category for that (or maybe he would, depending on which historian you talk to.)

There are many things that alternately enrage and depress me – rising income inequality, rape culture, my HMO, bombs in Boston and the dead children in Newtown who make the news and the dead children in South Los Angeles who don’t, next to a craven and dysfunctional Congress seemingly paralyzed to do anything about anything that matters. If it’s not wars, it’s drones, and if it’s not that, it’s Guantanamo. All of that is true and worrisome.

But this is why we need history. Congress was corrupt and cowardly then as well, and some of them were stupid – really, really stupid. Hell, they still had duels and shot each other. Still, in the middle of all that, there were some people of bravery and courage, and some of a middling disposition who got roped into doing the right thing in spite of themselves, and we got the 13th Amendment.

It’s a long way to travel from slavery’s profound evil, and the path to change is hard, sometime unimaginably so. The U.S. had to travel through a long, bloody, and devastating Civil War, Lincoln’s assassination, Jim Crow, lynchings, waterhoses, more assassinations (Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and JFK and Bobby), the legions of nameless dead and the equally nameless activists who worked tirelessly in obscurity for a better world that they would never live in.

History is a reminder that we can make the world less brutal than it used to be. And if that is possible here, in a country built on blood and bones and conquest, then it is possible elsewhere. There are still large swaths of the globe where a staggering number of children still die, where women have no rights to speak of, and millions of slaves wait for an emancipation proclamation of their own.

Change is always spotty and seemingly improbable, but with lots of hard work from lots of people, it does happen. Sometimes I need to remind myself of that.

Original Sin in Dapers

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I referred before to motherhood as something that I am finding profoundly healing.  Some of it is that babies require that you be present in the moment, which is healthy for someone who tends toward pathological levels of introspection. When she is hungry, she needs to be fed NOW.  When she has a dirty diaper, she needs to be changed NOW.  Much of caring for a baby is repetitive – Feed. Burp. Change. Bathe. Repeat. – which is about as much meditation as I am able to manage at the moment.

The bigger piece, though, is the realization that my child is good.  I look at my daughter, and don’t understand how I could ever think otherwise.  It’s not that I think she will never make mistakes.  She will.  Some of them may be big ones, but the idea that at her core she is somehow morally defective seems utterly absurd.  I was there when she came out of me, and all she needed was love and food and a little clean up.  If I were to look into her chubby little face and see something so bad that someone had to die for God to stand it – well, that would be my problem and not hers. My daughter is, admittedly, significantly cuter than average, but still, I feel confident in generalizing the statement to say that babies the world over are not repositories of evil.

 For those not raised in the shadow of Original Sin, I’m sure this seems abundantly obvious.  What kind of psychotic moron thinks her baby is immoral?  Because, you know, it’s a BABY.  What’s she going to do – plot to overthrow the government just as soon as she learns to hold her head up?

For those of a Calvinistic disposition, however, it is a different story. Original sin, which is also known as total depravity, (the T in TULIP, which is not nearly as pleasantly floral as one might imagine), posits the following world: God is holy.  God is powerful. People are so thoroughly sinful that we don’t even know what good is unless God tells us. Eternal hellish conscious torment is the final destination for the non-elect, which is most of the planet. The rest of us deserve hell too, but we just got lucky because Jesus died for us despite our lack of worthiness. Also, God is love. Reconcile that with the other the best you can.

Now there are perfectly nice people who believe this, in addition to a fair crowd who are not.  You can buff up the theology of it into something that sounds less harsh, but fundamental moral defectiveness is really the core of it, no matter how much it gets prettied up by seminarians.

Maybe the people that told me this didn’t really believe it, at least about themselves, but I did.  For many years, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that there was something deeply and irrevocably wrong with me, and I was stuck with whatever salvation God the wrathful Father might see fit to deliver, no matter how unsatisfactory it seemed to be.

I rejected the concept of my inherent sinfulness a few years ago, but that shit’s some nasty poison, and it sinks in bone deep.  I’m always running into it in the dark and less populated corners of my psyche, this idea that there is something wrong with me that I can never fix. Granted, there are reasons for that over and above bad doctrine, but I still sometimes feel the twisted power of being told that I can never trust my dark dark heart, and that’s The Gospel Truth.

 Staring at my daughter and her toothless grin, however, is like being smacked in the face with the ridiculousness of all of that.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with her and there’s nothing wrong with me and there’s nothing wrong with any of us.  Yes, for many people and many systems for lots of complicated reasons, it all goes bad somehow, but those dark deeds are not our starting point and not our deepest truth. (And if I fuck up every other blessed thing in parenting, I hope my daughter knows that much.) I’ve known this for a while, but it’s one thing to face things down with determined seriousness, and quite another to find them laughably bizarre. It takes away those bits of fear still hidden in the corner. We were all babies once and good.

Rules for blogging without ruining my life

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I had a blog before this one, and kept it up for six years. I learned then that you never know what will happen to something once you put it on the internet.  I once had a co-worker mention one of my posts that had been passed along to him by his nephew in France – a post where I discussed my employer.  The post contained no fireable offenses, but still – it was disconcerting.  Other posts ended up in unexpected corners of the world as well.  At that time, I lived alone – except for my dog. I don’t blog much about her because her hobbies consist of napping, gnawing on chew toys, and licking her butt, so there’s really not a lot to say.

Now, however, I have a husband, daughter, and stepson. So even though about six people read this right now, and I have no delusions of grandeur, I decided that I should make rules for myself about what I will and won’t write about. These are more to serve as a reminder for me, and should not be taken as a judgment on anyone else’s choices, even though they are just a little bit.

1. My story is my own to tell, but I don’t have the right to take possession of anyone else’s. Although I wouldn’t label myself a “mommy blogger”, (mostly because that seems like a very condescending term), I am very interested in exploring parenting and how I experience motherhood and how our society talks about it. However, I don’t want to put my daughter’s business out there when she is too young to consent to it – so no pictures, no cute stories, and not even her name.  She has a right to privacy, and I do not yet know where her boundaries will be when she is older, so I want to err on the side of caution.

2. Ditto for my stepson and husband. They’re older, but neither is a big fan of internet exhibitionism, so I already know they do not want their lives broadcast.

3. There is a place for exploring and sharing my family’s dynamics and issues or seeking support and validation. This isn’t it. These things are best left to my circle of friends I know in real life.

4. I get to say whatever I want about myself, past or present, as long as it doesn’t breach my family’s privacy.  I also get to NOT say whatever I want. While I want to be authentic and not pretend to be more together than I am, I don’t owe anyone on the internet the details of my life. Also, the contours of my complicated psyche will always be more interesting to me than anyone else, so I should bear that in mind.

5. I couldn’t think of a fifth one, but four rules seemed incomplete somehow.

Updates on motherhood

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I think that motherhood is already making me less neurotic – although clearly, less likely to blog. My daughter was born two days after Thanksgiving, and I was prepared for sleep deprivation and the warning signs of post-partum depression, but instead I’ve mostly felt happier than I ever have.  The sleep deprivation thing is true, and taking care of a newborn is a lot of work and there is no inherent joy in a poopy diaper, but so far, being a mother is kind of fun.  And in my unbiased opinion, my daughter is so damn adorable I can barely stand it.

Having a baby has been profoundly and immediately healing.  While I was pregnant, I was told by a couple of friends who also had less than optimal upbringings that this was the case.  I had a notion that becoming a mom might be good for me, but the reality of it has taken me by surprise – in a good way.  I’ve experienced pretty dramatic internal change before, but that involved several years of deeply excruciating and psychically and financially expensive work.  I didn’t have a framework for this kind of instantaneous transformational effect (if you consider something presaged by 40 weeks of pregnancy and 17 hours of labor to be instantaneous.)

This is not because I’m fulfilling my essential function as a woman or anything.  It’s more like getting something I’ve never gotten before, and a recognition that my child is GOOD, and by extension, so am I.  I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but so far – I think I’m doing a pretty good job at this motherhood thing. Given that I’m capable of second-guessing myself 42 times a day in virtually every area of my life, this is particularly impressive.

It’s not because my husband and I were or are utterly prepared or picture perfect. We are most assuredly (and I cannot stress this point enough) not, having managed to combine both advanced age and financial insecurity, as well as a couple of other significant complications that I won’t go into here.

I just finished reading a book on motherhood – a short one, so don’t be too impressed – and while there were parts I very much agreed with, I just didn’t resonate with a lot of her struggles of feeling constantly overwhelmed and unhappy – and I have historically had the ability to be unhappy for years at a time.  (There was also a theme that I have noticed in some mommy blogs and books that I find baffling: why do all these highly educated, competent, reasonably financially secure women who claim to have supportive husbands make so many references to not showering for days? I get why it’s hard to make it to the gym, but surely it’s not that difficult to work out a system to take care of your basic hygiene.  Do you not feel like you can say, “Babe, I seriously have to take a shower.  Here’s the baby.”? Is the proper hygiene of both parties not a mutual goal that a couple would share?)

I do however apologize to all the parents that I judged in my head for going out in public with spit up on their clothing.  It turns out that sort of thing is harder to catch than you would think on three hours of sleep.

There are certain indignities involved in motherhood, of course. On a recent weekend, I had to pump my breasts in a truck stop bathroom and the baby spit up all over my shirt, pants, and shoes at a Marie Callender’s in front of a table of elderly women who still thought she was cute.

But overall, a lot of parenting is pretty fun.  Not perfect, but good.

 

 

Due dates and maternity salad

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 Being two days past my due date feels odd, like time has been slightly suspended for a while. I started my maternity leave this week, so I’m not working. We’ve got all the baby stuff we need for now. I’m not sick, but I am physically limited in a lot of ways and full of a number of uncomfortable physical sensations, and there are a number of things I can’t really do. We can’t go too far from home. I can’t make plans even a couple of days in advance, because the baby might show up. We don’t even know what we’re doing for Thanksgiving, given the extremely high probability that we will have just had or be in the process of having a baby. I’m just hanging out and waiting.

Virtually every conversation I’ve had in the last week starts with inquires about if I’ve had the baby yet and how I’m feeling and when do I think the baby will come. Their guess is as good as mine.  With all the technological advances in medicine over the past few decades, you’d think that modern medicine would be able to do better than give a three-week window of when the baby will most likely appear, but that’s not the case. Nobody seems to really know what trigger sets labor in motion or why some babies are born two weeks early and other are a week and a half late.

I’ve memorized all of the signs of impending labor, and heard umpty-dozen birth stories, and it always comes down to “Well, every woman is different and the baby will come when she is ready, and this particular thing usually means labor will start in a couple of days – except for when it doesn’t.”  The internet provides multiple home remedies of how to induce labor naturally, most of which don’t really work.  There’s even a restaurant in Studio City that claims to have a salad that can induce labor (although they are careful to note with an asterisk that “No medical claims are intended or implied.”)  The key is apparently a salad dressing so top secret that the kitchen staff has to sign confidentiality agreements.

 I suppose it’s one more exercise in not trying to control the uncontrollable. There was no way to know ahead of time precisely when I would get pregnant or what it would be like when I did. There’s no way to know exactly when the baby will come or who exactly she will be when she does.  All I can do is take it as it comes.

 But if she doesn’t show up soon, I may have to try the maternity salad.

Babywatch 2012

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With less than a week to go until my due date, it is BABYWATCH 2012 here – said in momentous tones like a Southern California meteorologist announcing even the most minor of storms.  I don’t know if I am ready yet, but at this point, ready is a bit beside the point.  My daughter will be making an appearance sometime in the next week and a half, and we will have to take it as it comes.

Oxytocin is a marvelous thing. I have reached that point where I am physically uncomfortable most of the time and peeing more than I thought was humanly possible, but a different set of hormones is kicking in, and I’m starting to feel like I may not be a disaster at this parenting thing, and that everything may in fact be okay. Not okay in the sense of perfection – my life is not now, nor has it ever been, perfect, and I will be bringing a child into a world and a family with a number of complications – but okay in the sense of me having the necessary internal parenting equipment to at least muddle through somehow.

I have to remind myself on a regular basis that most people in most places are not raising children in picture-perfect nurseries in homes with healthy psyches and impressive interior design. Even those situations and people that seem ideal in the beginning don’t necessarily stay that way.  If we only have one significant bit of crazy, then most of us are doing well. I console myself with the fact that at least I mostly know what my fault lines and neuroses are, which probably puts me ahead of a substantial proportion of the population. While the voices in my head can be loud, they rarely take me by surprise.

 I am working on having compassion for myself that I didn’t figure everything out before bringing a child into the world, for having big patches of my life that I haven’t sorted out yet, and for not even being within striking distance of perfect role model territory.  I am doing the best I can, and sometimes the best I can do is thoroughly unimpressive.

But maybe that is something I can teach my daughter – that nobody gets out of here unscathed and love is not just for the happy and healthy and successful. She will not always (or maybe ever) be ready, but she can give birth to what’s inside of her anyway, and it won’t be perfect or simple, and that’s okay.

The GOP meets math

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Nate Silver is the man. Silver was right on the electoral outcome in 49 out of 50 states, (and probably all 50, depending on what eventually happens with Florida), the overall popular vote, and 31 of 33 Senate races. The truth is that the polls – if you averaged them all together – ALWAYS indicated that Obama was ahead of Romney – even after the first debate debacle. The incumbent having a small but steady lead makes for boring television punditry, however, so we were treated to wildly varying predictions from talking heads of what might happen in the election.  Most of them had nothing to do with any of the actual data.

It all comes down to math really: There just aren’t enough straight white Protestant dudes to win national elections anymore. (We may finally see an ignominious end to the GOP’s Southern strategy.) Obama won with just 39% of the white vote  – but he got a majority of women, gay people, people under thirty, everyone who isn’t white, and everyone who isn’t Protestant.  It turns out that’s the majority of the country. African-Americans, Latinos and people ages 18-29 turned out at the same or higher levels they did in 2008. It remains to be seen whether the GOP is ready to face the reality of changing demographics or not.

(Best tweet of the night: The rape guy lost.  Which one?  Your party has serious issues if you have to ask “Which one?”)

In a cultural watershed moment, voters in Maryland, Maine, and Washington passed marriage equality in their respective states, while voters in Minnesota rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.  This is the first time that gay marriage has passed at the ballot box, breaking a 0-32 losing streak. Wisconsin also elected Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay Senator, over a reasonably popular former governor.  I think we have reached a tipping point in the gay marriage debate.  Support for gay marriage is now a permanent plank in the Democratic party platform.  By 2016, I predict that several more states – California, Illinois, Hawaii, Oregon, Delaware, Rhode Island, and maybe New Jersey and Wisconsin – will provide legal recognition for gay marriage, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) will be toast, so those marriages will be federally recognized.  It will be quite a while before voters in Alabama or Oklahoma will vote for gay marriage, but it will eventually happen – most likely through a Supreme Court ruling. At any rate, the days of gay marriage being a wedge issue are quickly coming to an end.

Finally, a note to Los Angeles County Registrar:  I moved from Pasadena to Venice a year and a half ago.  During this time period, I have attempted to change my address and voter registration THREE TIMES, and yet once again, when I showed up to vote, I was nowhere to be found on the voter rolls. This seemed to baffle the poll workers, so I asked for a provisional ballot.  They gave it to me and said, “You have to fill out the front, but uh, we don’t have any pens.”

I confess that I got a bit snippy with them at that point, but I’m in my last two weeks of pregnancy and am uncomfortable and slightly grumpy and it pissed me off that my vote probably won’t count. I voted, took yet another voter registration form, and I have now sent in my FOURTH voter registration form to the LA County registrar.  Get it together, people – don’t make me come down there.

Put it on a T-shirt: Stop Talking Now

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A few weeks ago, I took an online poll that asked me about my opinions on a wide spectrum of both domestic and foreign policy positions.  At the end, they tell you which candidate you most agree with.  My results indicated that I agree with 93% of the Green Party candidate’s positions, 80% of Obama’s, and 7% of Mitt Romney’s, an outcome I found utterly unsurprising.  The chances of me voting Republican in virtually any election are extremely remote for at least 47 different reasons that have nothing to do with my reproductive organs.

However, if the GOP wanted to really ensure that I never move rightward, the way they have talked about women in this particular election cycle is definitely going to seal the deal. First of all – a note to all male GOP candidates: Have a campaign staffer make a sign with the words “STOP TALKING NOW.”   The next time anyone anywhere asks you anything about rape, pregnancy or abortion, have him or her wave the sign around in front of your face, and then talk about absolutely ANYTHING else.  Tax cuts, Iran, gutting Obamacare – virtually anything would be less offensive. Rape survivors have enough to deal with. We don’t need to be a political talking point, thanks.

Here’s the deal: If you are a politician and you really believe that abortion is murder and therefore should be illegal in all circumstances, no matter what, I think you are dreadfully wrong.  Internally consistent, but wrong.  However, I support your constitutional right to advocate for whatever policies you believe in.

But I have a request: Please stop trying to twist theology, women’s experiences, and reproductive biology into a package to make that stance seem more palatable than it is.  That’s something you are doing to make yourself feel better.  I can assure you it does nothing to reassure me.  Don’t try to convince me you really do care about women or what God is or isn’t up to or make statements of any kind about my reproductive organs. Your position is that the right of the fetus to exist trumps all other considerations.  Own that position, and then STOP TALKING.

 For the rest of us, I’d like to issue a reminder: When it comes to politics and policy, the question is NOT “Is abortion right or wrong?”  A number of people who are pro-choice fall into the “I am morally uncomfortable with abortion or think it’s wrong and would never get one myself, but don’t feel like I can impose that on all women.”  category.  As a case in point, I am pro-choice myself, while simultaneously finding abortion to be morally complex. Frankly, being pregnant has made me MORE pro-choice, not less.

Right or wrong is not the question up for discussion.  The question is “Should abortion be legal or illegal?  What legal restrictions, if any, should be placed upon when and where and how a woman gets an abortion?”

And because we are talking about social policy that affects millions and millions of people, instead of talking about the special cases – What if the fetus has a serious disability?  What about partial-birth abortions?  What about the 13 year old girl? What about parental notification? – I would love it if we would focus the majority of our attention on the actual reality of abortion in the U.S.

Here’s the deal: When we talk about abortion in America, we are mostly talking about adult women getting abortions in their first trimester as a result of more or less consensual sex. (Consent can be a complicated matter, but a very small percentage of abortions happen as a result of rape or incest.)

According to data from the Center for Disease Control:

  • The vast majority of abortions in the United States happen during the first trimester. In 2008, 62.8% of abortions were performed at or before 8 weeks of gestation, and 91.4% were performed at or before 13 weeks’ gestation.  (7.3% happened between 14 and 20 weeks. Only 1.3% of abortions happen at or after 21 weeks.)
  • Abortions are happening earlier and earlier in pregnancy.  Over the past decade, more abortions are happening earlier: the percentage of abortions performed at or before 6 weeks’ gestation increased 53% from 1999 to 2008.
  • The abortion rate has been falling slowly but steadily since the 1980’s. The number of children born to parents who are not married has steadily increased during that time.
  • Women 18 and older get 93% of all abortions.  Girls under 18 account for only about 7% of abortions. 18 and 19 year olds account for about 10%, and women in their twenties account for 57% of abortions. Both the teen pregnancy and teen abortion rate have been declining for almost a decade.
  •  Poverty is STRONGLY correlated with abortion rates. The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level is nearly four times that of women above 200% of the poverty level. Richer countries also tend to have much lower abortion rates than poorer ones.
  • Increased use of contraception is linked to lower abortion rates. According to the World Health Organization, Eastern Europe cut their abortion rate in half in a decade, (from 90 per 1000 women of childbearing age to 44) primarily through increased use of contraception. Western Europe continues to have the lowest abortion rates in the world, even though abortion is broadly legal.

 So, if we are going to talk about abortion, let’s talk about abortion as it actually exists.  Make your case for why women should or should not have access to legal abortion during their first trimester. Explain to me your reasoning for being against legal abortion while simultaneously being opposed to requiring employers to cover contraception, sex education in schools, and universal health care. Tell me what you plan to do about women living in poverty.

Just leave the rape survivors out of it.

On being a None

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The Pew Research Forum released a study earlier this month, that showed two things that have caused a lot of discussion:

  • At 48% of the population, Protestants are less than half of the population of the United States for the first time ever.
  • The most rapidly growing religious group in America is the “Nones”  – the 1 in 5 Americans who are currently religiously unaffiliated, up from 15% since 2007. This trend is particularly pronounced among those under 30, with one-third of them currently unaffiliated – but the number of unaffiliated is increasing in every age group.

 I’m fascinated by religion in general, but I found this study particularly interesting, because these days I’m one of those “nones” – something that I still occasionally find surprising.  Certainly, for the first three decades of my life, I didn’t imagine that I would ever be anything other than Christian. There are some things – such as the precise nature of the Divine – that I no longer feel compelled to explain or understand. I would conceptualize the Divine more as an ultimate source or unifying force, than as a person – but what the hell do I know?  Theologically, I am probably most in line with the Unitarian Universalists, liberal Quakers, and Zen Buddhists with a bit of creation spirituality thrown in – although, for a variety of reasons, I’m not ready to sign up with a particular group right now.

There’s a long, somewhat messy story behind my own spiritual journey that I don’t tell to everyone. I didn’t drift away from my faith. I dug it out of my bones with knives, so I’m not at all interested in debating the fitness of my personal spiritual journey. It was a necessary act of self-preservation, so whether it was good or bad is entirely immaterial.

And I don’t know that a debate about whether the overall societal trend is good or bad is particularly productive either. I’m not a big fan of civil religion personally, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a bad thing that people aren’t just Christian by default. But regardless of anyone’s opinion, the move away from organized religion will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. (And the U.S. remains a very religious – and very Christian – country.  70% of people still identify as Catholic or Protestant, and 10% with some other religion.)

I think I am more interested in figuring out where to go from here. Many of those who are concerned about the rise of the Nones do have a point about excessive individualism and lack of community.  I can attest to the fact that it is harder to create a community than it is to participate in one that is already there.  While my friendships and relationships in general are stronger and more honest than they were during my church-going days, there are social connections and a sense of community in a church or other faith community that matter. (For one thing, I am damn sure going to miss the casserole brigade when we have a baby in a few weeks.)

I catch glimpses sometimes of what community for Nones (and not so nones) could look like sometimes. Our wedding ceremony a few months ago was attended by atheists, a smattering of Buddhists, Jews of varying levels of observance, evangelical Christians, and a host of people in varying states of not-religious-ness, and I think we managed to create a celebration that was meaningful for everyone.  Granted, it was all people who knew us and there was an open bar, but still, I think there are ways that people can come together around important things outside of formal religious structures.

 I’m a fan of time banking, and once I figure the baby thing out a bit, I’d like get more involved again. I do feel the absence of certain kinds of community in my life, so I need to do some more thinking about what community could look like.