Don't look to television for your role models
By Naomi Lakritz, Calgary Herald
December 6, 2009
What's all this talk about Tiger Woods being a role model? He's a top golfer. How is he a role model for anyone but possibly aspiring golfers? Even then, it's not about his personality or his deeds--it's about his technique on the golf course. I'm glad to see that the super-shallow cult of celebrity worship has taken a hit. Maybe people will smarten up and realize that just because someone makes a lot of money for doing something particularly well --golfing, hitting a puck, throwing a football, singing, dancing--doesn't make him or her a role model.
A psychotherapist named James P. Krehbiel told CNN: "I think part of it is we are fascinated with heroes because they become an extension of who we are. We live through them vicariously, and we develop an identity based on who they are." Krehbiel added: "Tiger Woods would fit in with the definition of being a hero."
No, he wouldn't. Woods is not a hero. He makes a lot of money because he can swing a golf club. He can swing it extremely well, but neither golfing nor making money is a heroic action. He has not used his golf club to save anyone from a burning building or held it out as a lifesaver for some drowning person struggling against the current in a river. Those are heroic actions. So while Krehbiel comments cogently on the psychology behind this phenomenon, he still, unfortunately, has succumbed to the jargon. As for living through these "heroes" vicariously and developing our own identities based on who they are, maybe it's time we learn to develop our own identities based on who we are. It would be a whole lot healthier. Because what has anybody's life got to do with that of Tiger Woods, anyway?
Columnist Jill Painter, writing in the Los Angeles Daily News, quotes a woman attending the Chevron World Challenge (from which Woods was conspicuous by his deliberate absence) as saying: "I held him in such high regard. I felt he was the best role model for our youth. I felt like I was his mother . . . "
The best role model for youth? How so? I feel sorry for Woods. He's had this ridiculous label of "role model" slapped on him by people who never knew him personally, people who weren't privy to his thoughts, his character or his daily deeds, and now that he's shown he can mess up, just like all the rest of us have messed up, they're stripping him of the label they themselves invented for him, a label that was purely fictitious. People need to stop confusing "celebrity" with "role model." The two are not synonymous, although some strange pop-culture brainwashing has led us to believe they are.
As someone posting on the CBC's website wrote: "Hopefully, we will reflect on this as another indication of our misplaced idolatry of celebrities." Well, "hopefully" is a nice word, but don't hold your breath. On Newspost Online, a regretful fan wrote: "We, the countless Tiger faithfuls, are presently in a bind, not knowing what to take him as. " That's easy. How about taking him as a guy who can play golf, and has made big bucks off it, but whose achievements do not merit submitting his name to the Pope as a candidate for canonization?
Woods himself wrote, as part of his unnecessary public apology: "Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn't have to mean public confessions." Too bad he didn't take his own advice by not penning the apology in the first place.
And it's too bad those "countless Tiger faithfuls" are in such a bind, but maybe now they will gain a little insight and start to look at the real role models--the people in their daily lives who go about quietly getting amazing things done, people who, regardless of their golf swing or the size of their bank account, put their values into action to make the lives of those around them better. These are real people, not images on a TV screen who will never interact with the foolish fans who worship them as "role models." Just what "role" has Tiger Woods modelled?
The distinction between admiring someone from afar for his or her athletic ability, acting talent or singing voice, and calling that individual a hero because of it, has become so blurred as to be pathological. You want role models? Look around you. They're everywhere. Ordinary people are the heroes and the role models, but they go unnoticed because they're not rich or glamorous and no cameras are trained on them.
Celebrity worship is so pervasive that it has convinced people that all that glitters really is gold when, instead, true gold is to be found in far more prosaic places.
nlakritz@theherald. canwest.coM
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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SOCIAL TRENDS
Population cure worse than problem
By Susan Martinuk, Calgary Herald
December 11, 2009
It's possible that Diane Francis, one of Canada's leading financial columnists, lies awake at night worrying about monsters in the closet. In her weekly Financial Post column, she confided to us her belief that world leaders meeting in Copenhagen are deliberately ignoring the real "inconvenient truth" that is the cause of world's environmental problems -- overpopulation.
People are the problem. Their "soaring reproduction rate" is ruining the world's vegetation, oceans and atmosphere. Since individuals have obviously been irresponsible in controlling their own fecundity, she advocates the implementation of worldwide, government-controlled population control laws. In her words, "a planetary law, such as China's one-child policy."
Obviously, it's a rather extreme solution. Maybe it would be easier to just get everyone to hold their breath (and cease pumping out those nasty carbon gases) for 10 seconds every minute.
We've heard this Malthusian nonsense before. Paul Ehrlich made it a popular fear in the 1970s after he published The Population Time Bomb. His writings predicted that mankind's uncontrolled reproduction would bring about the destruction of human life. He believed that the world's population would fall to 1.5 billion by 1985 and the U.S. would have a population of only 22.6 million by 1999.
Over the past decades, Ehrlich's fearmongering and predictions have been proven wrong and even ludicrous. Yet, every once in a while, someone like Francis decides it's time to beat that worn-out drum again.
Francis quantifies her need for a global dictatorship based on a statistic that the Earth's population will reach an "unsustainable" number of nine billion by 2050. But whether the world is full or half-empty very much depends on context.
For example, The Economist (Oct. 29, 2009) considers that same statistic within the context of worldwide fertility rates and proclaims that the world is reaching huge milestones in stabilizing and reducing population growth. One-half of humanity is having enough children to replace itself -- the rest have fertility rates that are below replacement rates.
Fertility rate is the hypothetical number of children a couple must have to replace themselves. The global average is about 2.3 (considering that some children die) and more than 70 countries (from every continent) now have fertility rates that are less than the replacement rate. It's not just western nations; the average fertility rate in developing countries has fallen from six to three children in the past 20 years. Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, South India and many others are already at -- or below -- the replacement rate.
In other words, population numbers such as those used by Francis may continue to climb for a time. But they will diminish on their own with lower fertility rates. There's no need to impose draconian measures such as mass sterilization or government population control.
We've already seen the horrific consequences of China's one-child policy (as advocated by Francis) in female infanticide, a lopsided ratio of boys to girls with the resulting social crisis of not having enough women to marry young men, and abortion rates that are higher than birth rates. By 2030, China will have the oldest population in the world -- with a very small population of young people to drive the economy and support their elders. Then what?
The consequence of low fertility rates is already evident in Canada, where fewer young people available to support the social and medical costs of an aging population. In 2007, a Maclean's article on our "baby bust" mused about paying women to have children.
So are we in the midst of a population explosion? Or implosion? That depends on how you view mankind. If man is just another animal resource to be managed or, worse still, a blight on the planet Earth, then there will always be too many people.
Conversely, if you believe that human capital is a benefit, then more people are always needed to stabilize society, to care for the elderly, to drive the economy and build a better world.
Susan Martinuk's column runs every Friday.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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By Susan Martinuk, Calgary Herald
December 11, 2009
It's possible that Diane Francis, one of Canada's leading financial columnists, lies awake at night worrying about monsters in the closet. In her weekly Financial Post column, she confided to us her belief that world leaders meeting in Copenhagen are deliberately ignoring the real "inconvenient truth" that is the cause of world's environmental problems -- overpopulation.
People are the problem. Their "soaring reproduction rate" is ruining the world's vegetation, oceans and atmosphere. Since individuals have obviously been irresponsible in controlling their own fecundity, she advocates the implementation of worldwide, government-controlled population control laws. In her words, "a planetary law, such as China's one-child policy."
Obviously, it's a rather extreme solution. Maybe it would be easier to just get everyone to hold their breath (and cease pumping out those nasty carbon gases) for 10 seconds every minute.
We've heard this Malthusian nonsense before. Paul Ehrlich made it a popular fear in the 1970s after he published The Population Time Bomb. His writings predicted that mankind's uncontrolled reproduction would bring about the destruction of human life. He believed that the world's population would fall to 1.5 billion by 1985 and the U.S. would have a population of only 22.6 million by 1999.
Over the past decades, Ehrlich's fearmongering and predictions have been proven wrong and even ludicrous. Yet, every once in a while, someone like Francis decides it's time to beat that worn-out drum again.
Francis quantifies her need for a global dictatorship based on a statistic that the Earth's population will reach an "unsustainable" number of nine billion by 2050. But whether the world is full or half-empty very much depends on context.
For example, The Economist (Oct. 29, 2009) considers that same statistic within the context of worldwide fertility rates and proclaims that the world is reaching huge milestones in stabilizing and reducing population growth. One-half of humanity is having enough children to replace itself -- the rest have fertility rates that are below replacement rates.
Fertility rate is the hypothetical number of children a couple must have to replace themselves. The global average is about 2.3 (considering that some children die) and more than 70 countries (from every continent) now have fertility rates that are less than the replacement rate. It's not just western nations; the average fertility rate in developing countries has fallen from six to three children in the past 20 years. Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, South India and many others are already at -- or below -- the replacement rate.
In other words, population numbers such as those used by Francis may continue to climb for a time. But they will diminish on their own with lower fertility rates. There's no need to impose draconian measures such as mass sterilization or government population control.
We've already seen the horrific consequences of China's one-child policy (as advocated by Francis) in female infanticide, a lopsided ratio of boys to girls with the resulting social crisis of not having enough women to marry young men, and abortion rates that are higher than birth rates. By 2030, China will have the oldest population in the world -- with a very small population of young people to drive the economy and support their elders. Then what?
The consequence of low fertility rates is already evident in Canada, where fewer young people available to support the social and medical costs of an aging population. In 2007, a Maclean's article on our "baby bust" mused about paying women to have children.
So are we in the midst of a population explosion? Or implosion? That depends on how you view mankind. If man is just another animal resource to be managed or, worse still, a blight on the planet Earth, then there will always be too many people.
Conversely, if you believe that human capital is a benefit, then more people are always needed to stabilize society, to care for the elderly, to drive the economy and build a better world.
Susan Martinuk's column runs every Friday.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
There is a related multimedia and more linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/13 ... .html?_r=1
December 13, 2009
21st-Century Babies
Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules
By STEPHANIE SAUL
Unable to have a baby of her own, Amy Kehoe became her own general contractor to manufacture one. For Ms. Kehoe and her husband, Scott, the idea seemed like their best hope after years of infertility.
Working mostly over the Internet, Ms. Kehoe handpicked the egg donor, a pre-med student at the University of Michigan. From the Web site of California Cryobank, she chose the anonymous sperm donor, an athletic man with a 4.0 high school grade-point average.
On another Web site, surromomsonline.com, Ms. Kehoe found a gestational carrier who would deliver her baby.
Finally, she hired the fertility clinic, IVF Michigan, which put together her creation last December.
“We paid for the egg, the sperm, the in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Kehoe said as she showed off baby pictures at her home near Grand Rapids, Mich. “They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us.”
On July 28, the Kehoes announced the arrival of twins, Ethan and Bridget, at University Hospital in Ann Arbor. Overjoyed, they took the babies home on Aug. 3 and prepared for a welcoming by their large extended family.
A month later, a police officer supervised as the Kehoes relinquished the swaddled infants in the driveway.
Bridget and Ethan are now in the custody of the surrogate who gave birth to them, Laschell Baker of Ypsilanti, Mich. Ms. Baker had obtained a court order to retrieve them after learning that Ms. Kehoe was being treated for mental illness.
“I couldn’t see living the rest of my life worrying and wondering what had happened, or what if she hadn’t taken her medicine, or what if she relapsed,” said Ms. Baker, who has four children of her own.
Now, she and her husband, Paul, plan to raise the twins.
The creation of Ethan and Bridget tested the boundaries of the field known as third-party reproduction, in which more than two people collaborate to have a baby. Five parties were involved: the egg donor, the sperm donor, Ms. Baker and the Kehoes. And two separate middlemen brokered the egg and sperm.
About 750 babies are born each year in this country through gestational surrogacy, and twice that many surrogacies are attempted. Most are less complicated than the arrangement that resulted in the birth of Ethan and Bridget.
But as the dispute over the Michigan twins reveals, surrogacy arrangements that go badly can have profound implications, particularly for the children. Surrogacy is largely without regulation, with no authority deciding who may obtain babies through surrogacy or who may serve as a surrogate, according to interviews and court records.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/13 ... .html?_r=1
December 13, 2009
21st-Century Babies
Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules
By STEPHANIE SAUL
Unable to have a baby of her own, Amy Kehoe became her own general contractor to manufacture one. For Ms. Kehoe and her husband, Scott, the idea seemed like their best hope after years of infertility.
Working mostly over the Internet, Ms. Kehoe handpicked the egg donor, a pre-med student at the University of Michigan. From the Web site of California Cryobank, she chose the anonymous sperm donor, an athletic man with a 4.0 high school grade-point average.
On another Web site, surromomsonline.com, Ms. Kehoe found a gestational carrier who would deliver her baby.
Finally, she hired the fertility clinic, IVF Michigan, which put together her creation last December.
“We paid for the egg, the sperm, the in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Kehoe said as she showed off baby pictures at her home near Grand Rapids, Mich. “They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us.”
On July 28, the Kehoes announced the arrival of twins, Ethan and Bridget, at University Hospital in Ann Arbor. Overjoyed, they took the babies home on Aug. 3 and prepared for a welcoming by their large extended family.
A month later, a police officer supervised as the Kehoes relinquished the swaddled infants in the driveway.
Bridget and Ethan are now in the custody of the surrogate who gave birth to them, Laschell Baker of Ypsilanti, Mich. Ms. Baker had obtained a court order to retrieve them after learning that Ms. Kehoe was being treated for mental illness.
“I couldn’t see living the rest of my life worrying and wondering what had happened, or what if she hadn’t taken her medicine, or what if she relapsed,” said Ms. Baker, who has four children of her own.
Now, she and her husband, Paul, plan to raise the twins.
The creation of Ethan and Bridget tested the boundaries of the field known as third-party reproduction, in which more than two people collaborate to have a baby. Five parties were involved: the egg donor, the sperm donor, Ms. Baker and the Kehoes. And two separate middlemen brokered the egg and sperm.
About 750 babies are born each year in this country through gestational surrogacy, and twice that many surrogacies are attempted. Most are less complicated than the arrangement that resulted in the birth of Ethan and Bridget.
But as the dispute over the Michigan twins reveals, surrogacy arrangements that go badly can have profound implications, particularly for the children. Surrogacy is largely without regulation, with no authority deciding who may obtain babies through surrogacy or who may serve as a surrogate, according to interviews and court records.
Census questions mirror shifts in social attitudes
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service
January 24, 2010
The history of census taking is full of quirks, controversy and language that changed with society -- or sometimes lagged behind -- and has offered an understanding of how society has evolved over time.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images, Canwest News ServiceThe U.S. Census Bureau has come under fire in recent weeks for including the word "Negro" on its 2010 questionnaire, which will be sent out on March 1.
The statistical agency defended use of the socially charged term -- which appears alongside Black and African-American as a single racial option -- because some older African-Americans self-identify as such and wrote in that specific response on the 2000 census.
Canada's census has never included that particular word, but the history of our census is full of quirks, controversy and language that changed with society or sometimes lagged behind -- from taking stock of weapons and family members of "unsound mind" to asking who owned a flush toilet.
"One of the important uses of the census is to understand how society evolves over time," says Marc Hamel, Statistics Canada census manager for 2011, when the next Canadian census occurs.
Pre-Confederation census tallies were concerned mostly with raising taxes and armies -- assessing the housing stock, muskets and swords owned by households, the agency says. Until 1911, the census asked whether anyone in the household was deaf, blind or of "unsound mind" and, soon after, questions on "insanity" and fertility were dropped from the questionnaire.
"These were the only surveys the government and provinces and territories had to be able to determine information on the population," says Dale Johnston, project manager for census communications.
"So when they went out to do a census, they really asked them everything."
Through to the 1971 census, questionnaires explicitly defined "head of household" as the husband and discussed other family members in relation to him.
Due to "growing opposition" to the "sexist, paternalistic" tone of the term, it was redefined to mean husband or wife on the 1976 census and, in 1981, abolished altogether.
Until the 1970s, the census also asked about such cutting-edge household amenities as a flush toilet, bath and shower and sewage disposal.
The 1991 census was the first to ask about common-law relationships and, in 2001, the definition was expanded to include same-sex couples.
"I would assume probably that 30 years ago we would not have been able to put a question like that on the census. Society would not have been ready to do that," says Hamel, adding the 2006 census was the first to count same-sex married couples, after Canada legalized same-sex marriage the previous year.
Today's census questionnaire contains what is essentially a patriotic error, with "Canadian" listed as an option on the question about ethnicity.
Prior to the 1991 census, the Sun Media newspaper chain launched a "Count me Canadian" campaign encouraging people who viewed themselves as Canadian "first and foremost" to give that response on the ethnicity question.
Because the sample answers beside each question are based on the most popular responses on the previous census and many people wrote in that response, "Canadian" is now ensconced as a common ethnicity.
"Part of it was based on their misunderstanding that Canadian was an ethnicity rather than being a nationality," says Johnston, noting there's a separate question about nationality.
"We can't tell people if this is a correct answer or how you should answer the question. We want people to tell us what it is that they feel."
A handful of groups is lobbying to change the wording of the religion question for the next Canadian census in 2011; the question currently asks people to identify their religion even if they're "not currently a practising member."
Hamel says the question is phrased that way to capture information on "affiliation and not so much practice," and to keep results consistent so they can compare from one census to the next.
Justin Trottier, executive director of the Centre for Inquiry Canada, an educational group devoted to science and secularism, says the question ignores the growing ranks of atheists and agnostics and provides warped results on the proportion of non-religious people in Canada.
"A lot of people who otherwise have described themselves as atheists and agnostic chose instead to answer the question by affiliating themselves with a religion, since they're asked by the government to do that," he says.
"I do believe the government is not getting accurate data and it's a result of this historical legacy and this weird oddity in the framing of the question."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service
January 24, 2010
The history of census taking is full of quirks, controversy and language that changed with society -- or sometimes lagged behind -- and has offered an understanding of how society has evolved over time.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images, Canwest News ServiceThe U.S. Census Bureau has come under fire in recent weeks for including the word "Negro" on its 2010 questionnaire, which will be sent out on March 1.
The statistical agency defended use of the socially charged term -- which appears alongside Black and African-American as a single racial option -- because some older African-Americans self-identify as such and wrote in that specific response on the 2000 census.
Canada's census has never included that particular word, but the history of our census is full of quirks, controversy and language that changed with society or sometimes lagged behind -- from taking stock of weapons and family members of "unsound mind" to asking who owned a flush toilet.
"One of the important uses of the census is to understand how society evolves over time," says Marc Hamel, Statistics Canada census manager for 2011, when the next Canadian census occurs.
Pre-Confederation census tallies were concerned mostly with raising taxes and armies -- assessing the housing stock, muskets and swords owned by households, the agency says. Until 1911, the census asked whether anyone in the household was deaf, blind or of "unsound mind" and, soon after, questions on "insanity" and fertility were dropped from the questionnaire.
"These were the only surveys the government and provinces and territories had to be able to determine information on the population," says Dale Johnston, project manager for census communications.
"So when they went out to do a census, they really asked them everything."
Through to the 1971 census, questionnaires explicitly defined "head of household" as the husband and discussed other family members in relation to him.
Due to "growing opposition" to the "sexist, paternalistic" tone of the term, it was redefined to mean husband or wife on the 1976 census and, in 1981, abolished altogether.
Until the 1970s, the census also asked about such cutting-edge household amenities as a flush toilet, bath and shower and sewage disposal.
The 1991 census was the first to ask about common-law relationships and, in 2001, the definition was expanded to include same-sex couples.
"I would assume probably that 30 years ago we would not have been able to put a question like that on the census. Society would not have been ready to do that," says Hamel, adding the 2006 census was the first to count same-sex married couples, after Canada legalized same-sex marriage the previous year.
Today's census questionnaire contains what is essentially a patriotic error, with "Canadian" listed as an option on the question about ethnicity.
Prior to the 1991 census, the Sun Media newspaper chain launched a "Count me Canadian" campaign encouraging people who viewed themselves as Canadian "first and foremost" to give that response on the ethnicity question.
Because the sample answers beside each question are based on the most popular responses on the previous census and many people wrote in that response, "Canadian" is now ensconced as a common ethnicity.
"Part of it was based on their misunderstanding that Canadian was an ethnicity rather than being a nationality," says Johnston, noting there's a separate question about nationality.
"We can't tell people if this is a correct answer or how you should answer the question. We want people to tell us what it is that they feel."
A handful of groups is lobbying to change the wording of the religion question for the next Canadian census in 2011; the question currently asks people to identify their religion even if they're "not currently a practising member."
Hamel says the question is phrased that way to capture information on "affiliation and not so much practice," and to keep results consistent so they can compare from one census to the next.
Justin Trottier, executive director of the Centre for Inquiry Canada, an educational group devoted to science and secularism, says the question ignores the growing ranks of atheists and agnostics and provides warped results on the proportion of non-religious people in Canada.
"A lot of people who otherwise have described themselves as atheists and agnostic chose instead to answer the question by affiliating themselves with a religion, since they're asked by the government to do that," he says.
"I do believe the government is not getting accurate data and it's a result of this historical legacy and this weird oddity in the framing of the question."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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VIEWPOINTS: Discovery Middle School shooting shows our consumer culture hurts children
By Special to The Birmingham News
February 14, 2010, 5:20AM
By JOHN DAVIS
Discovery Middle School is on a street busy with SUVs and vans. It is an asphalt metaphor for middle-class hyperactivity. Strip malls, sports centers, government buildings, homes and a host of churches line that street. Its students have all the advantages our wealth can bring.
But at Discovery Middle School two weeks ago, a 14-year-old boy calmly shot another in the head. Then, a witness observed, he calmly cocked the pistol again and walked away.
Madison, Ala., noted for its space and missile engineers, now joins Columbine as a place where young people kill one another at school. Not only did medical teams, lawyers and city officials descend rapidly on the place, but cordons of police security went into effect. Information was relayed well and accurately. We've come to this: We are technically prepared for the next ghoulish event of the culture of death we have become.
We've lost our way and don't know why. Inside us somewhere, we know something is missing. We instinctively know that all the metal detectors and emergency-response training won't stop this problem. Despite all we throw at it, it resists solution. It laughs at our rational responses; no technology, no bullet, magic or otherwise, will stop this mysterious, baffling horror.
What's missing is not material. We are a consumer culture, and our troubled children are the result. They learn their dread lessons early; that what is valuable are "things," not people. We define ourselves by what we have; our problem is we've lost compassion. We don't care about one another anymore. We love our possessions more than our own children.
Our kids don't see Mom and Dad as much because the job demands their time. Of course, the kids get plenty of time alone with their computers, televisions and virtual friends. Mom and Dad don't spend time with the family, but they sure spend money on activities and electronics. Kids learn that money is what matters, because money is why they are ignored. Mom and Dad work; spontaneous fun with the kids is almost unheard of. Dinner is caught on the fly, because networking trumps being with the kids. So the kids look elsewhere to fill the void.
They look to whatever Pied Piper is nearest. If they are lonely, imaginary friends may help. It is not for nothing that virtual identities, or avatars, are a reality in more than a blockbuster movie. Or they identify with something that expresses their suppressed anger. Web sites of gangster rappers, Nazi skinheads, drug dealers and pornography fill voids created by loneliness. These sites offer a world where a violent life gets money, sex and admirers. Or maybe they try for the real things. Kids now murder for another's sports shoes or because he was put down or because he just felt like it or because someone convinced him to do it.
The 1940s writer Eric Hoffer said: "A man by himself is in bad company."
Lonely young people want to be like the heroes they watch in movies, so their imagination runs like a rudderless boat. Mom and Dad try in vain to control their child's every waking hour when they are not there. Filters can't replace parents.
Murders in schools are not caused by Web sites or bad influences or poverty. They are caused by empty lives.
Here is Hoffer again: "An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish." If no one is there to love, listen and care for a young person as he or she grows up, then anyone can be his secret "parent."
Parents work relentlessly to provide, because they believe their possessions make them valuable. A caring adult is value enough. If a son or daughter knows the parents are always there, and not just during "quality time," he'll go to them. He'll trust them. Their home will be a place of safety and openness. Their kids will astound, because they'll carry their parents' compassion to others. No parent, even if he should lose his job, is ever alone if he's got a child to love, and a child who loves him.
Compassion learned at home spreads to school. My wife, a teacher, said: "School is a place where we learn all others aren't like us. But we learn to live with others, to tolerate them, and to someday maybe see them as brothers and sisters. It's not 'all about me.'"
School is a place where we learn our common citizenship and dignity. You can't shoot someone if you believe in this.
Compassion begins at home, with a loving, caring, present parent.
John Davis of Athens works for the federal government in Huntsville. E-mail: thingsth@bellsouth.net. <p>
http://blog.al.com/birmingham-news-comm ... le_sc.html
By Special to The Birmingham News
February 14, 2010, 5:20AM
By JOHN DAVIS
Discovery Middle School is on a street busy with SUVs and vans. It is an asphalt metaphor for middle-class hyperactivity. Strip malls, sports centers, government buildings, homes and a host of churches line that street. Its students have all the advantages our wealth can bring.
But at Discovery Middle School two weeks ago, a 14-year-old boy calmly shot another in the head. Then, a witness observed, he calmly cocked the pistol again and walked away.
Madison, Ala., noted for its space and missile engineers, now joins Columbine as a place where young people kill one another at school. Not only did medical teams, lawyers and city officials descend rapidly on the place, but cordons of police security went into effect. Information was relayed well and accurately. We've come to this: We are technically prepared for the next ghoulish event of the culture of death we have become.
We've lost our way and don't know why. Inside us somewhere, we know something is missing. We instinctively know that all the metal detectors and emergency-response training won't stop this problem. Despite all we throw at it, it resists solution. It laughs at our rational responses; no technology, no bullet, magic or otherwise, will stop this mysterious, baffling horror.
What's missing is not material. We are a consumer culture, and our troubled children are the result. They learn their dread lessons early; that what is valuable are "things," not people. We define ourselves by what we have; our problem is we've lost compassion. We don't care about one another anymore. We love our possessions more than our own children.
Our kids don't see Mom and Dad as much because the job demands their time. Of course, the kids get plenty of time alone with their computers, televisions and virtual friends. Mom and Dad don't spend time with the family, but they sure spend money on activities and electronics. Kids learn that money is what matters, because money is why they are ignored. Mom and Dad work; spontaneous fun with the kids is almost unheard of. Dinner is caught on the fly, because networking trumps being with the kids. So the kids look elsewhere to fill the void.
They look to whatever Pied Piper is nearest. If they are lonely, imaginary friends may help. It is not for nothing that virtual identities, or avatars, are a reality in more than a blockbuster movie. Or they identify with something that expresses their suppressed anger. Web sites of gangster rappers, Nazi skinheads, drug dealers and pornography fill voids created by loneliness. These sites offer a world where a violent life gets money, sex and admirers. Or maybe they try for the real things. Kids now murder for another's sports shoes or because he was put down or because he just felt like it or because someone convinced him to do it.
The 1940s writer Eric Hoffer said: "A man by himself is in bad company."
Lonely young people want to be like the heroes they watch in movies, so their imagination runs like a rudderless boat. Mom and Dad try in vain to control their child's every waking hour when they are not there. Filters can't replace parents.
Murders in schools are not caused by Web sites or bad influences or poverty. They are caused by empty lives.
Here is Hoffer again: "An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish." If no one is there to love, listen and care for a young person as he or she grows up, then anyone can be his secret "parent."
Parents work relentlessly to provide, because they believe their possessions make them valuable. A caring adult is value enough. If a son or daughter knows the parents are always there, and not just during "quality time," he'll go to them. He'll trust them. Their home will be a place of safety and openness. Their kids will astound, because they'll carry their parents' compassion to others. No parent, even if he should lose his job, is ever alone if he's got a child to love, and a child who loves him.
Compassion learned at home spreads to school. My wife, a teacher, said: "School is a place where we learn all others aren't like us. But we learn to live with others, to tolerate them, and to someday maybe see them as brothers and sisters. It's not 'all about me.'"
School is a place where we learn our common citizenship and dignity. You can't shoot someone if you believe in this.
Compassion begins at home, with a loving, caring, present parent.
John Davis of Athens works for the federal government in Huntsville. E-mail: thingsth@bellsouth.net. <p>
http://blog.al.com/birmingham-news-comm ... le_sc.html
February 18, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
No Fault of Their Own
By RUTH BETTELHEIM
Los Angeles
AS we have just passed the 40th anniversary of that much vilified institution, the no-fault divorce, it is an appropriate moment to re-evaluate how divorce affects families, and particularly children. The California law took effect on Jan. 1, 1970, and was followed by a wave of marital separations that continues to this day — and also a wave of rhetoric condemning divorce for harming children and undermining the fabric of society.
As divorce is clearly here to stay, it may be more productive to instead ask how the process of dissolving a marriage might be changed to avoid, as much as possible, damaging children.
This challenge is not as great as widespread preconceptions would suggest. Studies conducted in the past 20 years have shown that on all meaningful measures of success — social, economic, intellectual and psychological — most adult children from divorced families are no worse off than their peers whose parents remained married.
Researchers have found two explanations for this. Children who have to cope with their parents’ separation and post-divorce lives often grow resilient, self-reliant, adaptable and independent. And children benefit from escaping the high-conflict environment of a rocky marriage. After their parents’ separation, as conflicts fade, children recover.
Sustained family conflict can cause children to experience the kinds of problems that are usually attributed to divorce: low self-esteem, depression, high anxiety, difficulty forming relationships, delinquency and withdrawal from the world.
Given that reducing family conflict is good for children, the best way to protect them during divorce would be to minimize the acrimony of the proceedings. No-fault divorce, now practiced in every state except New York, has been one step toward this goal. But issues relating to children in divorce cases are still very often decided by long, heated contests between the parents. Custody disagreements are settled by a judge’s determination of what is in “the best interests of the child.” In practical terms, this means that both parents do their utmost to demonstrate that they are the better parent — and that the other one is worse, unfit or even abusive.
At stake are not only the participants’ self-esteem and their relationships with their children but also their financial security. As child support is often linked to the proportion of time the children spend with each parent, the days and hours of their future lives become tools for one parent to extract payment from the other. This is a recipe for warfare, with the children’s well-being both the disputed turf and the likely casualty.
What children need instead are no-fault custody proceedings — which could be accomplished with two changes to state family law. First, take the money out of the picture by establishing fixed formulas for child support that ensure the children are well taken care of in both homes, regardless of the number of days they spend in each. Second, defuse tension by requiring parents to enter mediation to find a custody solution that best meets the needs of all concerned.
Agreements reached through mediation would need to be binding (subject to the approval of a judge), so that they could not be discarded or contested later if new disagreements were to arise. Although some parents might worry that this would diminish their opportunities for recourse, mediation would actually give them greater control over the outcome than a judge’s unilateral verdict does.
In an adversarial custody battle, no one wins, but children are the biggest losers of all. Intelligent legislation could promote the one thing that children of divorce need most: peace between their parents.
Ruth Bettelheim is a marriage and family therapist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
No Fault of Their Own
By RUTH BETTELHEIM
Los Angeles
AS we have just passed the 40th anniversary of that much vilified institution, the no-fault divorce, it is an appropriate moment to re-evaluate how divorce affects families, and particularly children. The California law took effect on Jan. 1, 1970, and was followed by a wave of marital separations that continues to this day — and also a wave of rhetoric condemning divorce for harming children and undermining the fabric of society.
As divorce is clearly here to stay, it may be more productive to instead ask how the process of dissolving a marriage might be changed to avoid, as much as possible, damaging children.
This challenge is not as great as widespread preconceptions would suggest. Studies conducted in the past 20 years have shown that on all meaningful measures of success — social, economic, intellectual and psychological — most adult children from divorced families are no worse off than their peers whose parents remained married.
Researchers have found two explanations for this. Children who have to cope with their parents’ separation and post-divorce lives often grow resilient, self-reliant, adaptable and independent. And children benefit from escaping the high-conflict environment of a rocky marriage. After their parents’ separation, as conflicts fade, children recover.
Sustained family conflict can cause children to experience the kinds of problems that are usually attributed to divorce: low self-esteem, depression, high anxiety, difficulty forming relationships, delinquency and withdrawal from the world.
Given that reducing family conflict is good for children, the best way to protect them during divorce would be to minimize the acrimony of the proceedings. No-fault divorce, now practiced in every state except New York, has been one step toward this goal. But issues relating to children in divorce cases are still very often decided by long, heated contests between the parents. Custody disagreements are settled by a judge’s determination of what is in “the best interests of the child.” In practical terms, this means that both parents do their utmost to demonstrate that they are the better parent — and that the other one is worse, unfit or even abusive.
At stake are not only the participants’ self-esteem and their relationships with their children but also their financial security. As child support is often linked to the proportion of time the children spend with each parent, the days and hours of their future lives become tools for one parent to extract payment from the other. This is a recipe for warfare, with the children’s well-being both the disputed turf and the likely casualty.
What children need instead are no-fault custody proceedings — which could be accomplished with two changes to state family law. First, take the money out of the picture by establishing fixed formulas for child support that ensure the children are well taken care of in both homes, regardless of the number of days they spend in each. Second, defuse tension by requiring parents to enter mediation to find a custody solution that best meets the needs of all concerned.
Agreements reached through mediation would need to be binding (subject to the approval of a judge), so that they could not be discarded or contested later if new disagreements were to arise. Although some parents might worry that this would diminish their opportunities for recourse, mediation would actually give them greater control over the outcome than a judge’s unilateral verdict does.
In an adversarial custody battle, no one wins, but children are the biggest losers of all. Intelligent legislation could promote the one thing that children of divorce need most: peace between their parents.
Ruth Bettelheim is a marriage and family therapist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/opini ... nted=print
March 30, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Sandra Bullock Trade
By DAVID BROOKS
Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?
On the one hand, an Academy Award is nothing to sneeze at. Bullock has earned the admiration of her peers in a way very few experience. She’ll make more money for years to come. She may even live longer. Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don’t win.
Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.
This isn’t just sermonizing. This is the age of research, so there’s data to back this up. Over the past few decades, teams of researchers have been studying happiness. Their work, which seemed flimsy at first, has developed an impressive rigor, and one of the key findings is that, just as the old sages predicted, worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through.
For example, the relationship between happiness and income is complicated, and after a point, tenuous. It is true that poor nations become happier as they become middle-class nations. But once the basic necessities have been achieved, future income is lightly connected to well-being. Growing countries are slightly less happy than countries with slower growth rates, according to Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution and Eduardo Lora. The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness. On the other hand, it has become a much more unequal country, but this inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness.
On a personal scale, winning the lottery doesn’t seem to produce lasting gains in well-being. People aren’t happiest during the years when they are winning the most promotions. Instead, people are happy in their 20’s, dip in middle age and then, on average, hit peak happiness just after retirement at age 65.
People get slightly happier as they climb the income scale, but this depends on how they experience growth. Does wealth inflame unrealistic expectations? Does it destabilize settled relationships? Or does it flow from a virtuous cycle in which an interesting job produces hard work that in turn leads to more interesting opportunities?
If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.
If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).
The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.
The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.
This may be changing. There is a rash of compelling books — including “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” by David Halpern and “The Politics of Happiness” by Derek Bok — that argue that public institutions should pay attention to well-being and not just material growth narrowly conceived.
Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Op-Ed Columnist
The Sandra Bullock Trade
By DAVID BROOKS
Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?
On the one hand, an Academy Award is nothing to sneeze at. Bullock has earned the admiration of her peers in a way very few experience. She’ll make more money for years to come. She may even live longer. Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don’t win.
Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.
This isn’t just sermonizing. This is the age of research, so there’s data to back this up. Over the past few decades, teams of researchers have been studying happiness. Their work, which seemed flimsy at first, has developed an impressive rigor, and one of the key findings is that, just as the old sages predicted, worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through.
For example, the relationship between happiness and income is complicated, and after a point, tenuous. It is true that poor nations become happier as they become middle-class nations. But once the basic necessities have been achieved, future income is lightly connected to well-being. Growing countries are slightly less happy than countries with slower growth rates, according to Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution and Eduardo Lora. The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness. On the other hand, it has become a much more unequal country, but this inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness.
On a personal scale, winning the lottery doesn’t seem to produce lasting gains in well-being. People aren’t happiest during the years when they are winning the most promotions. Instead, people are happy in their 20’s, dip in middle age and then, on average, hit peak happiness just after retirement at age 65.
People get slightly happier as they climb the income scale, but this depends on how they experience growth. Does wealth inflame unrealistic expectations? Does it destabilize settled relationships? Or does it flow from a virtuous cycle in which an interesting job produces hard work that in turn leads to more interesting opportunities?
If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.
If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).
The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.
The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.
This may be changing. There is a rash of compelling books — including “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” by David Halpern and “The Politics of Happiness” by Derek Bok — that argue that public institutions should pay attention to well-being and not just material growth narrowly conceived.
Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opini ... ?th&emc=th
The Birth Control Pill's 50th Anniversary, From Three Generations of Women
Posted: 05/7/10
Frances Tobin: Going On the Pill: An Empowering Moment for Young Women
When I was 16 years old, I took the advice of my fifth-grade teacher -- whose sex education class taught me all I needed to know about my body, its power and the personal responsibility and authority I had over it -- and asked my doctor for my first prescription of birth control pills. Though I wasn't yet sexually active, the prescription was something I had planned, for quite some time, to discuss with my family doctor, who had been treating me for as long as I could remember.
The Pill was -- and still is -- a symbol of personal empowerment. For me, at 16, the Pill was as important as getting my driver's license and buying my first car. The license, the junky car and the pill were all momentous steps in my young adulthood, epitomizing both freedom and responsibility -- and I craved both. I wanted the freedom to drive my parents crazy every time I jumped into my car and dashed away, but I also wanted the responsibility that was required to have my own car, to put gas in it and drive myself to and from school and work. Similarly, with the Pill, there was a particular feeling of freedom in knowing that when I did eventually have sex, I didn't have to depend on a guy for everything. At the same time, I knew what responsibilities the Pill carried with it: to be diligent in taking it and to still practice safe sex.
As I approach my 25th birthday, I look back on the last nine years and think about how much of it would have been different if a kid were in the picture. I have lived my life as a woman who was not forced into motherhood simply because of biology and sexuality. Some girlfriends of mine have had children since high school and are raising beautiful families, and that's wonderful for them. It's a choice they've made, just as I've made one to ensure that my life is child-less (for now). Reproductive rights: They're a lovely thing.
Get the new
PD toolbar!
I may have never known a world in which birth control was not a choice, but that doesn't mean I would dare take this power over my own body for granted. Though the Pill has dramatically changed our social and cultural landscape for the better, women's bodies are still very much a battleground. I can't speak for all women my age, but for those of us who rely on the pill and our reproductive rights to live by our own volition, the fight still very real. What gives me comfort is knowing that there is an entire generation of women whose work and activism are there to be built upon, and I plan on doing just that.
Here's to the next 50 years!
Joann M. Weiner: How the Pill Changed the Course of Women's History
Back in about 1976, my high school history teacher asked us which of the following inventions had had the bigger impact on society: the Pill, or the TV.
I had had no contact with the pill at that time but lots of TV time, so I was amazed that the Pill was even in contention. As with Delia Lloyd, who was surprised when her mother said that the birth control pill was the most important invention that had happened during her lifetime, the question puzzled me. Surely there are inventions --- the internet, Facebook, TV, or the credit default swap (that's a joke) --- that have had a greater impact on history than the birth control pill.
But many disagree with me, including The Economist magazine, which calls the Pill the 20th century's greatest advance in science and technology. But, where's the proof? Let's look at the research.
The Pill was approved as an oral contraceptive on May 9, 1960 and within five years, 40 percent of married women under age 30 who used contraception were using the Pill. But, its influence really hit in the early 1970s when the "age of majority" was reduced to 18 years old. Young, single women could now get on the Pill, and within a couple years, 73 percent of all single women age 18 and 19 using contraception were using the pill.
These facts come from a 2002 study by Harvard economists, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, called "The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage Decisions" that shows the pill's incredible impact on women's lives.
It gave college-educated women the freedom to pursue advanced degrees in the professions. Before the Pill, a woman faced the risk of spending a lot of time studying for an advanced degree only to have to give it all up if she got pregnant and had to quit to take care of the baby. The Pill liberated her from this mental ball and chain and she scurried off to graduate school. The result: the number of female physicians tripled between 1970 and 2000, while the share of female lawyers and judges soared by 600 percent.
The Pill also made women less choosy about whether to have sex or not --- without the fear of getting pregnant, she could now have sex outside of marriage just as freely he could. This freedom allowed her to delay marriage. Although almost 50 percent of female college graduates born in 1950 were married by age 23, just 30 percent of those born in 1957 and who had free access to the Pill were married by age 23. The Pill also made it less likely a woman would get divorced. Goldin and Katz speculate that because women on the pill got married later, they took more time finding the right mate, and thus had a better quality of marriage than women who married at a younger age.
Economist Tim Harford showed another side of the Pill's benefits in his book, "The Logic of Life": The lifetime earnings of women who delayed marriage, which also meant they delayed having children, were ten percent higher for each year she waited to have her first child, which the Pill allowed her to do.
The Pill is not the sole factor in explaining women's expanded opportunities, but as the Harvard economists report, "a virtually foolproof, easy-to-use, and female-controlled contraceptive having low health risks, little pain, and few annoyances does appear to have been important in promoting real change in the economic status of woman."
Bonnie Erbé: The Pill at 50: Not All of Us Were So Thrilled by Its Advent
As a card-carrying member of the Woodstock generation, I did not imbue the Pill with game-changing qualities. Rather I saw it as part of the broad, blurry pastiche of the '60s and '70s that made the era so singular and special. There was peace, love, music, psychedelic drugs, communes and oh, yes, the Pill. We "loved the ones we were with" and plenty of them. But we gave credit for our sexual liberation not just to the pill but to the panoply of birth control options available to us.
While I had plenty of friends who used the Pill, I never actually did. I recall being alarmed by reports of possible health hazards from early high-dose versions of it. The alarm bell was sounded first by the 1969 book "The Doctor's Case Against the Pill" and again by Sen. Gaylord Nelson's (D-Wis.) congressional hearings on the Pill's safety. In 1970, the Food and Drug Administration was prompted by those hearings to order drug manufacturers to provide a nasty dose of information about possible risks and side effects with each prescription package of pills. Those warnings made a bigger impression on me than the fadvent of the Pill itself, scaring myself and many others off hormones for life. A little-known fact about the Pill is that these warnings were a first for any prescription drug and helped launch the consumer health movement.
One thing I never thought I'd live to see 50 years hence is today's high rate of unintended pregnancies, now running just below 50 percent nationwide. Among women 18-29 years old, a shocking seven in 10 pregnancies are unintended. That is the kind of problem I had thought the pill, the diaphragm, the IUD, et al., would have tossed on the junk heap of history by now. But the Pill is much more expensive now than when it first came on the market, as are other forms of birth control, so poor and uneducated women have limited access. That, my dear, is a full-fledged shame.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/07 ... ations-of/
Posted: 05/7/10
Frances Tobin: Going On the Pill: An Empowering Moment for Young Women
When I was 16 years old, I took the advice of my fifth-grade teacher -- whose sex education class taught me all I needed to know about my body, its power and the personal responsibility and authority I had over it -- and asked my doctor for my first prescription of birth control pills. Though I wasn't yet sexually active, the prescription was something I had planned, for quite some time, to discuss with my family doctor, who had been treating me for as long as I could remember.
The Pill was -- and still is -- a symbol of personal empowerment. For me, at 16, the Pill was as important as getting my driver's license and buying my first car. The license, the junky car and the pill were all momentous steps in my young adulthood, epitomizing both freedom and responsibility -- and I craved both. I wanted the freedom to drive my parents crazy every time I jumped into my car and dashed away, but I also wanted the responsibility that was required to have my own car, to put gas in it and drive myself to and from school and work. Similarly, with the Pill, there was a particular feeling of freedom in knowing that when I did eventually have sex, I didn't have to depend on a guy for everything. At the same time, I knew what responsibilities the Pill carried with it: to be diligent in taking it and to still practice safe sex.
As I approach my 25th birthday, I look back on the last nine years and think about how much of it would have been different if a kid were in the picture. I have lived my life as a woman who was not forced into motherhood simply because of biology and sexuality. Some girlfriends of mine have had children since high school and are raising beautiful families, and that's wonderful for them. It's a choice they've made, just as I've made one to ensure that my life is child-less (for now). Reproductive rights: They're a lovely thing.
Get the new
PD toolbar!
I may have never known a world in which birth control was not a choice, but that doesn't mean I would dare take this power over my own body for granted. Though the Pill has dramatically changed our social and cultural landscape for the better, women's bodies are still very much a battleground. I can't speak for all women my age, but for those of us who rely on the pill and our reproductive rights to live by our own volition, the fight still very real. What gives me comfort is knowing that there is an entire generation of women whose work and activism are there to be built upon, and I plan on doing just that.
Here's to the next 50 years!
Joann M. Weiner: How the Pill Changed the Course of Women's History
Back in about 1976, my high school history teacher asked us which of the following inventions had had the bigger impact on society: the Pill, or the TV.
I had had no contact with the pill at that time but lots of TV time, so I was amazed that the Pill was even in contention. As with Delia Lloyd, who was surprised when her mother said that the birth control pill was the most important invention that had happened during her lifetime, the question puzzled me. Surely there are inventions --- the internet, Facebook, TV, or the credit default swap (that's a joke) --- that have had a greater impact on history than the birth control pill.
But many disagree with me, including The Economist magazine, which calls the Pill the 20th century's greatest advance in science and technology. But, where's the proof? Let's look at the research.
The Pill was approved as an oral contraceptive on May 9, 1960 and within five years, 40 percent of married women under age 30 who used contraception were using the Pill. But, its influence really hit in the early 1970s when the "age of majority" was reduced to 18 years old. Young, single women could now get on the Pill, and within a couple years, 73 percent of all single women age 18 and 19 using contraception were using the pill.
These facts come from a 2002 study by Harvard economists, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, called "The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage Decisions" that shows the pill's incredible impact on women's lives.
It gave college-educated women the freedom to pursue advanced degrees in the professions. Before the Pill, a woman faced the risk of spending a lot of time studying for an advanced degree only to have to give it all up if she got pregnant and had to quit to take care of the baby. The Pill liberated her from this mental ball and chain and she scurried off to graduate school. The result: the number of female physicians tripled between 1970 and 2000, while the share of female lawyers and judges soared by 600 percent.
The Pill also made women less choosy about whether to have sex or not --- without the fear of getting pregnant, she could now have sex outside of marriage just as freely he could. This freedom allowed her to delay marriage. Although almost 50 percent of female college graduates born in 1950 were married by age 23, just 30 percent of those born in 1957 and who had free access to the Pill were married by age 23. The Pill also made it less likely a woman would get divorced. Goldin and Katz speculate that because women on the pill got married later, they took more time finding the right mate, and thus had a better quality of marriage than women who married at a younger age.
Economist Tim Harford showed another side of the Pill's benefits in his book, "The Logic of Life": The lifetime earnings of women who delayed marriage, which also meant they delayed having children, were ten percent higher for each year she waited to have her first child, which the Pill allowed her to do.
The Pill is not the sole factor in explaining women's expanded opportunities, but as the Harvard economists report, "a virtually foolproof, easy-to-use, and female-controlled contraceptive having low health risks, little pain, and few annoyances does appear to have been important in promoting real change in the economic status of woman."
Bonnie Erbé: The Pill at 50: Not All of Us Were So Thrilled by Its Advent
As a card-carrying member of the Woodstock generation, I did not imbue the Pill with game-changing qualities. Rather I saw it as part of the broad, blurry pastiche of the '60s and '70s that made the era so singular and special. There was peace, love, music, psychedelic drugs, communes and oh, yes, the Pill. We "loved the ones we were with" and plenty of them. But we gave credit for our sexual liberation not just to the pill but to the panoply of birth control options available to us.
While I had plenty of friends who used the Pill, I never actually did. I recall being alarmed by reports of possible health hazards from early high-dose versions of it. The alarm bell was sounded first by the 1969 book "The Doctor's Case Against the Pill" and again by Sen. Gaylord Nelson's (D-Wis.) congressional hearings on the Pill's safety. In 1970, the Food and Drug Administration was prompted by those hearings to order drug manufacturers to provide a nasty dose of information about possible risks and side effects with each prescription package of pills. Those warnings made a bigger impression on me than the fadvent of the Pill itself, scaring myself and many others off hormones for life. A little-known fact about the Pill is that these warnings were a first for any prescription drug and helped launch the consumer health movement.
One thing I never thought I'd live to see 50 years hence is today's high rate of unintended pregnancies, now running just below 50 percent nationwide. Among women 18-29 years old, a shocking seven in 10 pregnancies are unintended. That is the kind of problem I had thought the pill, the diaphragm, the IUD, et al., would have tossed on the junk heap of history by now. But the Pill is much more expensive now than when it first came on the market, as are other forms of birth control, so poor and uneducated women have limited access. That, my dear, is a full-fledged shame.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/07 ... ations-of/
In last few years or maybe a decade or so, I observed that, there has a been a trend which is surfacing or appearing on a mainstream social lifestyles in North America where straights and homosexuals are much more comfortable and enjoying each others’ companies in a much open and welcoming spirits. I personally have couple of good gay buddies (my hairdresser and a classmate at the Univ. of Ottawa)
Following is an article from Globe and Mail that reflects what I am talking about:
Lisa Weagle
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
He’s my date for weddings, my wingman and the person I always call first. He’s gay, I’m straight and we’re best friends.
Here we sit across from each other, my best friend and I. For the past few years this has been our Sunday morning routine – go for brunch, chat, read the paper, people watch and plan our day.
I wonder if this is what my life is going to be like in 20 years.
Waiting for our food to arrive, we are surrounded by other twenty something couples. From the outside, we probably look just like them.
We’re not.
The truth is we’re not dating. We’ve never kissed, never held hands. Never felt those butterflies for each other. We’re in more of a Will & Grace-type relationship. He’s a gay guy, I’m a straight girl and we’re best friends.
It wasn’t always like this. I was in a serious relationship before. It was my first love and I pictured a happy future together, until I came to the realization that he just wasn’t right for me. My first breakup was a tough one, and to guard my fragile heart, I carefully avoided anything resembling a relationship.
Shortly after the breakup, I found my “Will.” He was exactly what I needed at the time. A nice, good-looking, smart, funny guy, and he came without the pressures of dating or the possibility of breaking my heart.
We quickly bonded and became best friends, but it has grown into something deeper than that. We connect on a different level than most male-female friendships. It could partly be because we know there is zero possibility of us ever becoming romantically involved with each other. Sharing the same interests, from politics to men to celebrity gossip, doesn’t hurt either.
He has a way of making everything more fun, and we laugh our way through any situation. I don’t worry he’ll be less attracted to me if he sees me at my worst. We seldom fight. Cheating is never an issue – in fact, we are each other’s wingman.
When it comes down to it, he’s the person I choose to spend my free time with, the person I always call first. Basically, what a boyfriend is to most women.
He fills that role almost perfectly, minus the whole romantic relationship thing. He’s my date for weddings. I spend my summer vacations at his family cottage. My parents invite him over for dinner. We have moved into the same apartment building so now we’re neighbors too – Will and Grace, indeed. Once in a while I’ll catch a rerun of an episode and I don’t know whether to laugh or cringe when I see my life reflected.
Some people are confused about our situation. I’m often asked, “Why are you spending all your time with that gay guy?” Most of my critics divide into two camps: the ones who think I’m trying to turn him straight, and those who say I need to spend less time with him in the hopes of attracting a man for myself. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’m content with my life: I’m happy, single and enjoying my 20s.
We sit and drink our coffees, and I smile at the memory of a moment from early in our friendship. It was a miserable, grey Saturday morning, and I came home from the gym to find him sitting on my doorstep, after walking half an hour in the rain, waiting to surprise me with a newspaper and my favorite tea. I knew that I had found myself a catch, and wondered if I would ever find a real boyfriend who could live up to this guy.
Don’t get me wrong – I date. I try to be open-minded. But each potential suitor is in the unenviable position of being compared to my best friend.
Part of the problem is I find it difficult to open my heart to someone new. I find it even harder to come to grips with the idea that if I am to fall in love with someone, it will mean less room in my heart and in my schedule for my best friend.
He dates too. More often than I do. We joke that each guy has a two-week expiry date. He got serious about one guy, and to my surprise I was jealous. Now there was no time for me, and our suddenly infrequent conversations mostly involved him talking about his boyfriend. I can’t say I was too disappointed when they broke up, but it made me realize that our close relationship is going to have to change one day for us both to move on with our lives. I just hope that we can stay friends, because I can’t bear the thought of having to go through a breakup with him too.
Sometimes I wonder if there is a cruel joke being played on me – that this is the guy I’m meant to spend my life with, but obviously it’s never going to happen. Even with my doubts, I stay optimistic that I’ll one day find the entire package in a straight guy who loves me completely.
For now, I make sure to live in the moment and enjoy the time we spend together. I know it won’t be like this forever. But when I do find “the one,” I hope he will be understanding when, 20 years from now, I meet my best friend for brunch on the occasional Sunday morning.
Lisa Weagle lives in Ottawa
Following is an article from Globe and Mail that reflects what I am talking about:
Lisa Weagle
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
He’s my date for weddings, my wingman and the person I always call first. He’s gay, I’m straight and we’re best friends.
Here we sit across from each other, my best friend and I. For the past few years this has been our Sunday morning routine – go for brunch, chat, read the paper, people watch and plan our day.
I wonder if this is what my life is going to be like in 20 years.
Waiting for our food to arrive, we are surrounded by other twenty something couples. From the outside, we probably look just like them.
We’re not.
The truth is we’re not dating. We’ve never kissed, never held hands. Never felt those butterflies for each other. We’re in more of a Will & Grace-type relationship. He’s a gay guy, I’m a straight girl and we’re best friends.
It wasn’t always like this. I was in a serious relationship before. It was my first love and I pictured a happy future together, until I came to the realization that he just wasn’t right for me. My first breakup was a tough one, and to guard my fragile heart, I carefully avoided anything resembling a relationship.
Shortly after the breakup, I found my “Will.” He was exactly what I needed at the time. A nice, good-looking, smart, funny guy, and he came without the pressures of dating or the possibility of breaking my heart.
We quickly bonded and became best friends, but it has grown into something deeper than that. We connect on a different level than most male-female friendships. It could partly be because we know there is zero possibility of us ever becoming romantically involved with each other. Sharing the same interests, from politics to men to celebrity gossip, doesn’t hurt either.
He has a way of making everything more fun, and we laugh our way through any situation. I don’t worry he’ll be less attracted to me if he sees me at my worst. We seldom fight. Cheating is never an issue – in fact, we are each other’s wingman.
When it comes down to it, he’s the person I choose to spend my free time with, the person I always call first. Basically, what a boyfriend is to most women.
He fills that role almost perfectly, minus the whole romantic relationship thing. He’s my date for weddings. I spend my summer vacations at his family cottage. My parents invite him over for dinner. We have moved into the same apartment building so now we’re neighbors too – Will and Grace, indeed. Once in a while I’ll catch a rerun of an episode and I don’t know whether to laugh or cringe when I see my life reflected.
Some people are confused about our situation. I’m often asked, “Why are you spending all your time with that gay guy?” Most of my critics divide into two camps: the ones who think I’m trying to turn him straight, and those who say I need to spend less time with him in the hopes of attracting a man for myself. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’m content with my life: I’m happy, single and enjoying my 20s.
We sit and drink our coffees, and I smile at the memory of a moment from early in our friendship. It was a miserable, grey Saturday morning, and I came home from the gym to find him sitting on my doorstep, after walking half an hour in the rain, waiting to surprise me with a newspaper and my favorite tea. I knew that I had found myself a catch, and wondered if I would ever find a real boyfriend who could live up to this guy.
Don’t get me wrong – I date. I try to be open-minded. But each potential suitor is in the unenviable position of being compared to my best friend.
Part of the problem is I find it difficult to open my heart to someone new. I find it even harder to come to grips with the idea that if I am to fall in love with someone, it will mean less room in my heart and in my schedule for my best friend.
He dates too. More often than I do. We joke that each guy has a two-week expiry date. He got serious about one guy, and to my surprise I was jealous. Now there was no time for me, and our suddenly infrequent conversations mostly involved him talking about his boyfriend. I can’t say I was too disappointed when they broke up, but it made me realize that our close relationship is going to have to change one day for us both to move on with our lives. I just hope that we can stay friends, because I can’t bear the thought of having to go through a breakup with him too.
Sometimes I wonder if there is a cruel joke being played on me – that this is the guy I’m meant to spend my life with, but obviously it’s never going to happen. Even with my doubts, I stay optimistic that I’ll one day find the entire package in a straight guy who loves me completely.
For now, I make sure to live in the moment and enjoy the time we spend together. I know it won’t be like this forever. But when I do find “the one,” I hope he will be understanding when, 20 years from now, I meet my best friend for brunch on the occasional Sunday morning.
Lisa Weagle lives in Ottawa
Margaret Wente
Dare to be an optimist!
Over time, the best ideas – the ones delivering the most prosperity and well-being – have tended to win out
I can barely stand to read the newspapers. Just as we thought the world economy was on the road to recovery, Europe has imploded. The nations of the euro zone are desperately hacking and slashing at the welfare state to salvage their credit ratings. Two years ago, when the banks got into trouble, nations stepped in to bail them out. But who will step in to bail out nations?
In Canada, we have our troubles, too. A few years from now, oldsters in this country will outnumber children. As schools are rapidly converted into retirement homes, our streets will be thronged with nannies for grannies – if people can afford them, which seems increasingly unlikely. On top of that, the Earth is bleeding oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Pardon me while I go back to bed, permanently.
But wait a minute. Every previous generation in history would have happily traded places with us. So what if the Germans will have to sacrifice a week or two of paid vacation time, or if hairdressers in Greece will no longer be able to retire with a pension at the age of 50? Almost all their babies live. And they’ll still be stupendously well off. The world has become so much richer that today, the average Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. And she probably has TV and a cellphone too.
Here in Canada, there wouldn’t be an oldsters problem if only oldsters were considerate enough to expire at the age they used to. Instead, they insist on living longer and longer (and enjoying better health). The greatest nutrition crisis in the richer half of the world isn’t malnourishment or rickets. It’s obesity. Let’s face it. Compared to plagues and famines and the necessity of setting Granny loose on an ice flow when she got to be a burden, these are good problems to have.
Perhaps this sounds impossibly Panglossian. But for most people on the planet, the human condition has immeasurably improved. And according to an exuberant new book by British science writer Matt Ridley, things will keep on getting better. It’s called The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Not that Mr. Ridley thinks people will be easily persuaded. “A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out this sort of talk,” he admits. “Indeed, if you dare to say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad.”
What is it about humans that has enabled such astonishing cultural progress? And what makes Mr. Ridley think it will continue? It’s not our big brains or our opposable thumbs, or even language, he argues. Genetically, we’re pretty much identical to the people who drew pictures in the Chauvet caves 32,000 years ago. He argues that the key to cultural progress is our facility for exchanging – something no other animal does. Through exchanging – first things, then ideas – humans specialized their efforts and talents for individual gain. This encouraged innovation, which improved prosperity and living standards.
Mr. Ridley, who is the author of the best-selling Genome and three other books on evolution, draws an inviting analogy between biological and cultural evolution. The key to biological evolution is sex, which mixes up the gene pool in an infinity of ways, some of which are highly beneficial. The key to cultural evolution is exchange. “At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal,” he writes. “Ideas began to meet and mate, to have sex with each other.” Over time, the best ideas – the ones that delivered the most prosperity and well-being – tended to win out.
That, in a nutshell, explains how we got from the hand axe to the computer mouse in a mere couple of hundred thousand years. The hand axe is a single object reflecting the skill of a single individual. The mouse is a complex object with intricate design reflecting multiple strands of knowledge. No single person can make a mouse. It’s the offspring of millions of ideas, having sex.
The rapid evolution of cumulative and collective ideas should give us plenty of confidence about our ability to overcome our current problems, whether demographic, financial or environmental. Of course, things go wrong (see above) and pessimists are sometimes right. But not nearly as right as we imagine. Mr. Ridley admits in an interview with The Guardian that he, like other boomers, grew up reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. We all expected a cancer epidemic to strike us down. It never did. “The search for a widespread epidemic of cancer caused by synthetic chemicals, relentlessly and enthusiastically pursued by many scientists ever since the 1960s, has been entirely in vain,” he says. Genetically modified foods have been consumed by millions, without a single casualty. A new genetically modified gene (developed in a lab in Alberta) could allow plants to achieve the same yields with half the nitrogen, resulting in cheaper food, cleaner water and dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.
Alarmism over global warming, he predicts, will meet the same fate as alarmism over cancer epidemics. Even though the Earth may indeed be warming, he’s confident that humankind will adapt. He even has the audacity to argue that fossil fuels are, on the whole, a good thing. “You can regret the sinful profligacy of the modern world, which is the conventional reaction,” he told The Guardian. “Or you can conclude that were it not for fossil fuels, 99 per cent of people would have to live in slavery for the rest to have a decent standard of living, as indeed they did in Bronze Age empires.”
Yet for reasons he confesses he doesn’t fully understand, gloom sells. “The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.” He has every reason to doubt that his highly readable, deeply observed tour through the history of civilization can compete for readers with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Ehrenreich, Al Gore, George Monbiot, David Suzuki, Michael Moore and all the other best-selling dystopians who clog our bookshelves. On the other hand, he may cheer you up enough to consider getting out of bed again.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... cmpid=rss1
Dare to be an optimist!
Over time, the best ideas – the ones delivering the most prosperity and well-being – have tended to win out
I can barely stand to read the newspapers. Just as we thought the world economy was on the road to recovery, Europe has imploded. The nations of the euro zone are desperately hacking and slashing at the welfare state to salvage their credit ratings. Two years ago, when the banks got into trouble, nations stepped in to bail them out. But who will step in to bail out nations?
In Canada, we have our troubles, too. A few years from now, oldsters in this country will outnumber children. As schools are rapidly converted into retirement homes, our streets will be thronged with nannies for grannies – if people can afford them, which seems increasingly unlikely. On top of that, the Earth is bleeding oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Pardon me while I go back to bed, permanently.
But wait a minute. Every previous generation in history would have happily traded places with us. So what if the Germans will have to sacrifice a week or two of paid vacation time, or if hairdressers in Greece will no longer be able to retire with a pension at the age of 50? Almost all their babies live. And they’ll still be stupendously well off. The world has become so much richer that today, the average Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. And she probably has TV and a cellphone too.
Here in Canada, there wouldn’t be an oldsters problem if only oldsters were considerate enough to expire at the age they used to. Instead, they insist on living longer and longer (and enjoying better health). The greatest nutrition crisis in the richer half of the world isn’t malnourishment or rickets. It’s obesity. Let’s face it. Compared to plagues and famines and the necessity of setting Granny loose on an ice flow when she got to be a burden, these are good problems to have.
Perhaps this sounds impossibly Panglossian. But for most people on the planet, the human condition has immeasurably improved. And according to an exuberant new book by British science writer Matt Ridley, things will keep on getting better. It’s called The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Not that Mr. Ridley thinks people will be easily persuaded. “A constant drumbeat of pessimism usually drowns out this sort of talk,” he admits. “Indeed, if you dare to say the world is going to go on getting better, you are considered embarrassingly mad.”
What is it about humans that has enabled such astonishing cultural progress? And what makes Mr. Ridley think it will continue? It’s not our big brains or our opposable thumbs, or even language, he argues. Genetically, we’re pretty much identical to the people who drew pictures in the Chauvet caves 32,000 years ago. He argues that the key to cultural progress is our facility for exchanging – something no other animal does. Through exchanging – first things, then ideas – humans specialized their efforts and talents for individual gain. This encouraged innovation, which improved prosperity and living standards.
Mr. Ridley, who is the author of the best-selling Genome and three other books on evolution, draws an inviting analogy between biological and cultural evolution. The key to biological evolution is sex, which mixes up the gene pool in an infinity of ways, some of which are highly beneficial. The key to cultural evolution is exchange. “At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal,” he writes. “Ideas began to meet and mate, to have sex with each other.” Over time, the best ideas – the ones that delivered the most prosperity and well-being – tended to win out.
That, in a nutshell, explains how we got from the hand axe to the computer mouse in a mere couple of hundred thousand years. The hand axe is a single object reflecting the skill of a single individual. The mouse is a complex object with intricate design reflecting multiple strands of knowledge. No single person can make a mouse. It’s the offspring of millions of ideas, having sex.
The rapid evolution of cumulative and collective ideas should give us plenty of confidence about our ability to overcome our current problems, whether demographic, financial or environmental. Of course, things go wrong (see above) and pessimists are sometimes right. But not nearly as right as we imagine. Mr. Ridley admits in an interview with The Guardian that he, like other boomers, grew up reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. We all expected a cancer epidemic to strike us down. It never did. “The search for a widespread epidemic of cancer caused by synthetic chemicals, relentlessly and enthusiastically pursued by many scientists ever since the 1960s, has been entirely in vain,” he says. Genetically modified foods have been consumed by millions, without a single casualty. A new genetically modified gene (developed in a lab in Alberta) could allow plants to achieve the same yields with half the nitrogen, resulting in cheaper food, cleaner water and dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.
Alarmism over global warming, he predicts, will meet the same fate as alarmism over cancer epidemics. Even though the Earth may indeed be warming, he’s confident that humankind will adapt. He even has the audacity to argue that fossil fuels are, on the whole, a good thing. “You can regret the sinful profligacy of the modern world, which is the conventional reaction,” he told The Guardian. “Or you can conclude that were it not for fossil fuels, 99 per cent of people would have to live in slavery for the rest to have a decent standard of living, as indeed they did in Bronze Age empires.”
Yet for reasons he confesses he doesn’t fully understand, gloom sells. “The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.” He has every reason to doubt that his highly readable, deeply observed tour through the history of civilization can compete for readers with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Ehrenreich, Al Gore, George Monbiot, David Suzuki, Michael Moore and all the other best-selling dystopians who clog our bookshelves. On the other hand, he may cheer you up enough to consider getting out of bed again.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... cmpid=rss1
May 30, 2010
The Birds and the Bees (via the Fertility Clinic)
By ROSS DOUTHAT
If you want to adopt a child in the United States, you’ll face an array of bureaucratic roadblocks and invasive interrogations. Adoption agencies will assess your finances, your relationships, and your fitness as a potential guardian. The interests of the child, not the desires of the would-be parent, will be treated as paramount throughout.
If you want to procure sperm or eggs, the process is completely different. You can shop for gametes the way you’d go shopping for a house or a car — buying ova from an Ivy League undergraduate, or sperm from a 6-foot-8, athletic, blue-eyed Dane. The person selling you the right to bear and rear their biological offspring can do so anonymously, with no future strings attached at all.
The result is a freewheeling fertility marketplace whose impact on American life keeps increasing. Sperm donations generate between 30,000 and 60,000 conceptions every year, and roughly 6,000 children are conceived through egg donation annually as well. About a million American adults, if not more, are the biological children of sperm donors.
Not surprisingly, these Americans have a complicated relationship to the reproductive marketplace that made their existence possible. Their inner lives are the subject of a fascinating study from the Institute for American Values, based on a survey of younger adults, ages 18 to 45, who were conceived through sperm donation. The authors — Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval Glenn and Karen Clark — depict a population that’s at once grateful to the fertility industry and uneasy about the way they were conceived, supportive of assisted fertility but haunted by the feeling of being a bought-and-paid-for child.
On the one hand, Americans conceived through sperm donation are much more likely than their peers to say that “every person has a right to a child” and to support policies that encourage sperm and egg donations. (Indeed, 20 percent already had made such donations themselves.)
But these libertarian instincts coexist with angst, disquiet and even anger. Large minorities report being troubled both by “the circumstances of my conception” and by the fact “that money was exchanged in order to conceive me.” The offspring of sperm donors are more likely to oppose payments for sperm and eggs than most Americans and to say that “it is wrong to deliberately conceive a fatherless/motherless child.” And a substantial minority said that if a friend were pondering having a baby by a sperm donor, they “would encourage her not to do it.”
Americans conceived through sperm donation also are more likely to feel alienated from their immediate family than either biological or adopted children. They’re twice as likely as adoptees to report envying peers who knew their biological parents, twice as likely to worry that their parents “might have lied to me about important matters” and three times as likely to report feeling “confused about who is a member of my family and who is not.”
And the realities of commercialized reproduction — in which desirable donors can father dozens of children by different mothers, creating far-flung networks of half-siblings who will never know each other — weigh heavily on them. They are more likely than adoptees to say that “when I see someone who resembles me, I often wonder if we are related,” for instance, and much more likely to worry about accidentally falling into a romantic relationship with a relative.
Some of these burdens are inherent to a process that replaces natural conception with scientific technique. But some of them could be eased if the legal system treated sperm and egg donation with the gravity it deserves — as a process that’s far closer to adoption (and potentially more traumatic for the child involved) than our culture cares to admit.
Despite their reputation for permissiveness, many European nations have done much more than the supposedly socially conservative America to recognize that children as well as adults have an interest in the way assisted reproduction works. Britain, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland have banned anonymous sperm and egg donation, allowing donor-conceived children access to their family histories once they turn 18. Many countries also have limited the number of children a sperm donor can father to well below the 25 that the American Medical Association recommends.
Such restrictions would reduce the pool of willing donors and create longer waiting times (and greater emotional anguish) for aspiring parents. But they would also untangle some of the webs of secrecy and uncertainty that donor children find themselves born into. And they might diminish, if not completely undo, what one grown-up donor baby quoted in the study describes as the feeling of existing entirely for “other people’s purposes, and not my own.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opini ... ?th&emc=th
The Birds and the Bees (via the Fertility Clinic)
By ROSS DOUTHAT
If you want to adopt a child in the United States, you’ll face an array of bureaucratic roadblocks and invasive interrogations. Adoption agencies will assess your finances, your relationships, and your fitness as a potential guardian. The interests of the child, not the desires of the would-be parent, will be treated as paramount throughout.
If you want to procure sperm or eggs, the process is completely different. You can shop for gametes the way you’d go shopping for a house or a car — buying ova from an Ivy League undergraduate, or sperm from a 6-foot-8, athletic, blue-eyed Dane. The person selling you the right to bear and rear their biological offspring can do so anonymously, with no future strings attached at all.
The result is a freewheeling fertility marketplace whose impact on American life keeps increasing. Sperm donations generate between 30,000 and 60,000 conceptions every year, and roughly 6,000 children are conceived through egg donation annually as well. About a million American adults, if not more, are the biological children of sperm donors.
Not surprisingly, these Americans have a complicated relationship to the reproductive marketplace that made their existence possible. Their inner lives are the subject of a fascinating study from the Institute for American Values, based on a survey of younger adults, ages 18 to 45, who were conceived through sperm donation. The authors — Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval Glenn and Karen Clark — depict a population that’s at once grateful to the fertility industry and uneasy about the way they were conceived, supportive of assisted fertility but haunted by the feeling of being a bought-and-paid-for child.
On the one hand, Americans conceived through sperm donation are much more likely than their peers to say that “every person has a right to a child” and to support policies that encourage sperm and egg donations. (Indeed, 20 percent already had made such donations themselves.)
But these libertarian instincts coexist with angst, disquiet and even anger. Large minorities report being troubled both by “the circumstances of my conception” and by the fact “that money was exchanged in order to conceive me.” The offspring of sperm donors are more likely to oppose payments for sperm and eggs than most Americans and to say that “it is wrong to deliberately conceive a fatherless/motherless child.” And a substantial minority said that if a friend were pondering having a baby by a sperm donor, they “would encourage her not to do it.”
Americans conceived through sperm donation also are more likely to feel alienated from their immediate family than either biological or adopted children. They’re twice as likely as adoptees to report envying peers who knew their biological parents, twice as likely to worry that their parents “might have lied to me about important matters” and three times as likely to report feeling “confused about who is a member of my family and who is not.”
And the realities of commercialized reproduction — in which desirable donors can father dozens of children by different mothers, creating far-flung networks of half-siblings who will never know each other — weigh heavily on them. They are more likely than adoptees to say that “when I see someone who resembles me, I often wonder if we are related,” for instance, and much more likely to worry about accidentally falling into a romantic relationship with a relative.
Some of these burdens are inherent to a process that replaces natural conception with scientific technique. But some of them could be eased if the legal system treated sperm and egg donation with the gravity it deserves — as a process that’s far closer to adoption (and potentially more traumatic for the child involved) than our culture cares to admit.
Despite their reputation for permissiveness, many European nations have done much more than the supposedly socially conservative America to recognize that children as well as adults have an interest in the way assisted reproduction works. Britain, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland have banned anonymous sperm and egg donation, allowing donor-conceived children access to their family histories once they turn 18. Many countries also have limited the number of children a sperm donor can father to well below the 25 that the American Medical Association recommends.
Such restrictions would reduce the pool of willing donors and create longer waiting times (and greater emotional anguish) for aspiring parents. But they would also untangle some of the webs of secrecy and uncertainty that donor children find themselves born into. And they might diminish, if not completely undo, what one grown-up donor baby quoted in the study describes as the feeling of existing entirely for “other people’s purposes, and not my own.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opini ... ?th&emc=th
June 3, 2010
The 40-Year Itch
By DEIRDRE BAIR
New Haven
THERE’S an old French expression I found useful when I wrote a book about couples who divorced after long marriages: “I wasn’t holding the candle.” It means that I couldn’t know what happened between the two people in a marriage, so how could I possibly know why they split?
That hasn’t stopped speculation about Al and Tipper Gore, who are behaving with grace and dignity as they keep to themselves their reasons for ending 40 years of marriage. Public reaction has followed a pattern, beginning with shock and disbelief: “They seemed like the ideal couple, so perfect together.” Outrage came next: “Was it all a sham, especially that kiss on the convention stage?” And finally fear: “Are all marriages doomed to wither and die — and will mine be among them?”
But such questions expose just a few widespread but unrealistic assumptions about late-life divorce. Divorce lawyers tell me the fastest-growing segment of their clientele is the middle-aged and elderly. And their divorces do not all that often involve husbands running off with someone new, leaving wives alone and bereft. A 2004 AARP survey of 1,147 people who divorced in their 40s, 50s or 60s found that women initiated late-life divorces more often than men did, and if the divorced women wanted a new partner, they usually found one.
For my book, I interviewed 126 men and 184 women who divorced after being married 20 to 60-plus years. And what surprised me most was the courage they showed as they left the supposed security of marriage. To them, divorce meant not failure and shame, but opportunity.
“People change and forget to tell each other,” Lillian Hellman said. Still, many couples seem to have an “aha!” moment when they realize that it’s time to split up. No matter how comfortably situated they are, how lovely their home and successful their children, they divorce because they cannot go on living in the same old rut with the same old person.
Men and women I interviewed insisted they did not divorce foolishly or impulsively. Most of them mentioned “freedom.” Another word I heard a lot was “control”; people wanted it for themselves for the rest of their lives. Women had grown tired of taking care of house, husband and grown children; men were tired of working to support wives who they felt did not appreciate them and children who did not respect them. Women and men alike wanted time to find out who they were.
One spouse might have wanted to keep working while the other wanted to retire. Often, there was an emotional void; one would say that the other “doesn’t see me, doesn’t know who I am,” while the other hadn’t a clue: “I thought everything was just fine; we never argued, we don’t fight.” One grew disenchanted with the wrinkled person across the dinner table and wanted someone new and exciting.
I talked to men who were serial marry-ers with trophy wives they abandoned, as one of them put it, the minute the woman “got broody and wanted babies.” And I found women who wanted a man who would take them dining and dancing, but then go home to his own bed and leave them alone until the next party.
Many stories ended with some rendition of, “It’s my time and if I don’t take it now, I never will.” No matter whether they had spent years gearing up for divorce or decided on the spur of the moment after one minor disagreement too many, few had regrets. Men who wanted new companionship easily found it, and women who wanted new partners had them within two years.
Divorce is easier now. Our retirement years are longer and healthier. Both men and women often have enough money to make changes. And the stigma of divorce has long since faded. A century ago, Elizabeth Cady Stanton called it a “social earthquake.” But several decades later, Margaret Mead thought every woman needed three husbands: one for youthful sex, one for security while raising children and one for joyful companionship in old age. In the 21st century, Margaret Drabble, the British novelist, calls life after divorce “the third age.” The heroine of her novel “The Seven Sisters” says, “Our dependents have died or matured. For good and ill, we are free.”
So let us not feel shocked or sad about the end of Al and Tipper Gore’s marriage. Let us instead wish them well, and hope that they might enjoy their third age, individually and in peace.
Deirdre Bair is the author of “Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/opini ... ?th&emc=th
The 40-Year Itch
By DEIRDRE BAIR
New Haven
THERE’S an old French expression I found useful when I wrote a book about couples who divorced after long marriages: “I wasn’t holding the candle.” It means that I couldn’t know what happened between the two people in a marriage, so how could I possibly know why they split?
That hasn’t stopped speculation about Al and Tipper Gore, who are behaving with grace and dignity as they keep to themselves their reasons for ending 40 years of marriage. Public reaction has followed a pattern, beginning with shock and disbelief: “They seemed like the ideal couple, so perfect together.” Outrage came next: “Was it all a sham, especially that kiss on the convention stage?” And finally fear: “Are all marriages doomed to wither and die — and will mine be among them?”
But such questions expose just a few widespread but unrealistic assumptions about late-life divorce. Divorce lawyers tell me the fastest-growing segment of their clientele is the middle-aged and elderly. And their divorces do not all that often involve husbands running off with someone new, leaving wives alone and bereft. A 2004 AARP survey of 1,147 people who divorced in their 40s, 50s or 60s found that women initiated late-life divorces more often than men did, and if the divorced women wanted a new partner, they usually found one.
For my book, I interviewed 126 men and 184 women who divorced after being married 20 to 60-plus years. And what surprised me most was the courage they showed as they left the supposed security of marriage. To them, divorce meant not failure and shame, but opportunity.
“People change and forget to tell each other,” Lillian Hellman said. Still, many couples seem to have an “aha!” moment when they realize that it’s time to split up. No matter how comfortably situated they are, how lovely their home and successful their children, they divorce because they cannot go on living in the same old rut with the same old person.
Men and women I interviewed insisted they did not divorce foolishly or impulsively. Most of them mentioned “freedom.” Another word I heard a lot was “control”; people wanted it for themselves for the rest of their lives. Women had grown tired of taking care of house, husband and grown children; men were tired of working to support wives who they felt did not appreciate them and children who did not respect them. Women and men alike wanted time to find out who they were.
One spouse might have wanted to keep working while the other wanted to retire. Often, there was an emotional void; one would say that the other “doesn’t see me, doesn’t know who I am,” while the other hadn’t a clue: “I thought everything was just fine; we never argued, we don’t fight.” One grew disenchanted with the wrinkled person across the dinner table and wanted someone new and exciting.
I talked to men who were serial marry-ers with trophy wives they abandoned, as one of them put it, the minute the woman “got broody and wanted babies.” And I found women who wanted a man who would take them dining and dancing, but then go home to his own bed and leave them alone until the next party.
Many stories ended with some rendition of, “It’s my time and if I don’t take it now, I never will.” No matter whether they had spent years gearing up for divorce or decided on the spur of the moment after one minor disagreement too many, few had regrets. Men who wanted new companionship easily found it, and women who wanted new partners had them within two years.
Divorce is easier now. Our retirement years are longer and healthier. Both men and women often have enough money to make changes. And the stigma of divorce has long since faded. A century ago, Elizabeth Cady Stanton called it a “social earthquake.” But several decades later, Margaret Mead thought every woman needed three husbands: one for youthful sex, one for security while raising children and one for joyful companionship in old age. In the 21st century, Margaret Drabble, the British novelist, calls life after divorce “the third age.” The heroine of her novel “The Seven Sisters” says, “Our dependents have died or matured. For good and ill, we are free.”
So let us not feel shocked or sad about the end of Al and Tipper Gore’s marriage. Let us instead wish them well, and hope that they might enjoy their third age, individually and in peace.
Deirdre Bair is the author of “Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/opini ... ?th&emc=th
'Non-moms' find child-free terminology offensive
By Misty Harris, Canwest News ServiceJune 30, 2010
Nearly one in five U.S. women see their child-bearing years come and go without having a baby, up from just one in 10 in the 1970s.
The dramatic increase, described in a new report by the Pew Research Center, is consistent across all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels.
But at the same time the reproductive imperative is being rethought, critics say the language used to express the trend remains shockingly retrograde, with "childless" -- appearing throughout Pew's analysis -- implying a deficit or disability.
" 'Childless' has such a depressing connotation," says Danielle M. Stern, assistant professor at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. "Some women and couples are . . . choosing to be 'child-free.' "
Between 1996 and 2006, Statistics Canada reports that the percentage of married or common-law couples with children of any age declined from 59.3 per cent to 54.3 per cent. Looking at the window between 2001 and 2006, households consisting of couples with children (defined as age 24 or younger) crawled ahead 0.4 per cent, compared with 11.2 per cent growth in households consisting of couples without children.
"We're at the turning point of generations who value family in multiple ways versus a more traditional understanding of family," says Stern.
Though it may seem like trivial semantics, Stern says the language used by a society is indicative of its values.
As child-bearing is brimming with gender and family politics issues, she says it's important to call attention to rhetoric "so that we can move toward more inclusive language."
Pamela Tsigdinos, who spent more than a decade trying, unsuccessfully, to conceive with her husband, says the term "childless" has become a "legacy reminder of that painful period."
She finds the jauntier "child-free" no more respectful, with its implicit message of embracing liberation from a life of parenting -- a sentiment often expressed by those who've chosen not to have kids but rare among those whose dream of a family is unfulfilled.
Parents have similarly taken offence at the modern term's uprising, as "child-free" bears a negative insinuation that anyone with kids is somehow tethered down in life.
Though Tsigdinos wishes people weren't identified by child rearing at all, "non-mom" is her trope of choice.
Tsigdinos, author of Silent Sorority: A Barren Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found, says "there are so many value judgments placed on those labels."
Roger Pierson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Saskatchewan, agrees but isn't sure such a multi-faceted issue can ever be justly portrayed by a single term. "Everyone has their own expectations of what it means to be sub-fertile, infertile or childless by choice. . . . English might not be equipped (to describe) all that."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 3&sponsor=
By Misty Harris, Canwest News ServiceJune 30, 2010
Nearly one in five U.S. women see their child-bearing years come and go without having a baby, up from just one in 10 in the 1970s.
The dramatic increase, described in a new report by the Pew Research Center, is consistent across all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels.
But at the same time the reproductive imperative is being rethought, critics say the language used to express the trend remains shockingly retrograde, with "childless" -- appearing throughout Pew's analysis -- implying a deficit or disability.
" 'Childless' has such a depressing connotation," says Danielle M. Stern, assistant professor at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. "Some women and couples are . . . choosing to be 'child-free.' "
Between 1996 and 2006, Statistics Canada reports that the percentage of married or common-law couples with children of any age declined from 59.3 per cent to 54.3 per cent. Looking at the window between 2001 and 2006, households consisting of couples with children (defined as age 24 or younger) crawled ahead 0.4 per cent, compared with 11.2 per cent growth in households consisting of couples without children.
"We're at the turning point of generations who value family in multiple ways versus a more traditional understanding of family," says Stern.
Though it may seem like trivial semantics, Stern says the language used by a society is indicative of its values.
As child-bearing is brimming with gender and family politics issues, she says it's important to call attention to rhetoric "so that we can move toward more inclusive language."
Pamela Tsigdinos, who spent more than a decade trying, unsuccessfully, to conceive with her husband, says the term "childless" has become a "legacy reminder of that painful period."
She finds the jauntier "child-free" no more respectful, with its implicit message of embracing liberation from a life of parenting -- a sentiment often expressed by those who've chosen not to have kids but rare among those whose dream of a family is unfulfilled.
Parents have similarly taken offence at the modern term's uprising, as "child-free" bears a negative insinuation that anyone with kids is somehow tethered down in life.
Though Tsigdinos wishes people weren't identified by child rearing at all, "non-mom" is her trope of choice.
Tsigdinos, author of Silent Sorority: A Barren Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found, says "there are so many value judgments placed on those labels."
Roger Pierson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Saskatchewan, agrees but isn't sure such a multi-faceted issue can ever be justly portrayed by a single term. "Everyone has their own expectations of what it means to be sub-fertile, infertile or childless by choice. . . . English might not be equipped (to describe) all that."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 3&sponsor=
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... le1712789/
Doug Saunders
Teenage girls can change the world
Teenage Schoolgirls in Delhi India. Alamy
They are idealized, victimized – and doing most of the hard work
The Alam family lives in one of the more squalid corners of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and make their living in a pretty typical way: by deploying their teenaged daughters.
Each morning, 14-year-old Panchali walks down the mud lanes to her house-cleaning job in the nearby high-rise apartments, and 16-year-old Amolika goes out to spend 10 hours at a garment factory. Their brother, Sumon, 17, has a far less rewarding job unloading trucks and carrying heavy objects on bamboo poles, as does his father.
Together, the two teenage girls earn about three-quarters of the family’s income. That’s not unusual here, or in any of the fast-growing cities of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America: These places are the domain of the adolescent girl.
What you see in the streets and workshops and houses of the fast-growing parts of the world are young women, generally under 21, working hard. What you see aboard the trains and minivan-buses and horse-carts of the world are teenage girls, moving to the city.
As in Europe in the 19th century, young women often make up the largest group of people leaving villages for the city, sent to work alone, often in domestic service or garment piecework, and save their families. Half the world’s urban population is under 25, and considerably more than half of these are young women, because the men so often stay behind.
The girls tend to have more job opportunities in the informal, hustle-based economies of modern cities; they also tend to be treated far, far worse than anyone else, abused sexually, mutilated, impregnated, forced into prostitution, married to strangers. They are both the main agents of change and its predominant victim.
The opportunity and the danger tend to amplify each other. Fear of such fates, and other mythic images of debased innocence stoked by the terrifying shock of sudden change, leads the fathers and brothers of newly urbanized daughters into the hysterical comfort of extreme religious and political beliefs. The cruel ascetic offshoots of Islam in much of the Arab world, the violent political perversions of Hinduism in India and the waves of fundamentalist Christianity across the Southern Hemisphere, are in large part responses to, or manipulations of, anxieties over the idealized images of one’s daughter.
In fact, you could say that the most potent forces in the world right now – both the most promising opportunities for improvement and the most menacing and destabilizing movements and ideologies – are all centred around the mythic figure of the teenage girl.
This dual role will be brought into stark contrast next week with the release of a major study, by the charity Plan, of the situation of adolescent girls in the world’s cities. Titled “Because I Am a Girl,” it rightly recognizes that the fate of these girls and young women is precisely the fate of their countries and communities.
In many ways, the flight into urban work is turning girls into powerful figures – in large part by letting them escape marriage. In Bangladesh, the study notes, 31 per cent of adolescent girls who had migrated from rural to urban areas for work were married by the age of 18, compared to 71 per cent in rural areas, and “adolescent girls in cities are more likely than their rural cousins to go to school, marry later, give birth more safely and have more of a say in their own lives.”
And this flight often allows them to escape a fate that would turn them into baby-making machines: In Addis Ababa, a quarter of all women in the city between 10 and 19 had moved there from the village in order to escape early marriage.
That can change the world: Over and over, studies have found that the level of poverty reduction and economic growth in a country is directly correlated to the levels of education attained by women – more so than any other factor.
But the risks are real. Sexual predation is an ever-present concern in societies that still treat women little better than livestock. A study in Lima found that 41 per cent of girls between 10 and 24 had “experienced coerced sex.” Similar figures, or worse, were found around the world.
The flip side of this risk is the ideological defensiveness that leads fathers to marry off daughters earlier, cover their heads (even in countries, such as Bangladesh and Turkey, where this isn’t traditional), mutilate their genitals and throw them into the hands of religion. Of course, this is the same thinking that leads men to rape teenage girls – thus creating a self-sustaining cycle of backwardness.
Beyond this idealization and victimization are the actual lives of hundreds of millions of real girls, on the streets of the world’s major cities, avoiding dark corners and doing most of the hard work.
Doug Saunders
Teenage girls can change the world
Teenage Schoolgirls in Delhi India. Alamy
They are idealized, victimized – and doing most of the hard work
The Alam family lives in one of the more squalid corners of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and make their living in a pretty typical way: by deploying their teenaged daughters.
Each morning, 14-year-old Panchali walks down the mud lanes to her house-cleaning job in the nearby high-rise apartments, and 16-year-old Amolika goes out to spend 10 hours at a garment factory. Their brother, Sumon, 17, has a far less rewarding job unloading trucks and carrying heavy objects on bamboo poles, as does his father.
Together, the two teenage girls earn about three-quarters of the family’s income. That’s not unusual here, or in any of the fast-growing cities of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America: These places are the domain of the adolescent girl.
What you see in the streets and workshops and houses of the fast-growing parts of the world are young women, generally under 21, working hard. What you see aboard the trains and minivan-buses and horse-carts of the world are teenage girls, moving to the city.
As in Europe in the 19th century, young women often make up the largest group of people leaving villages for the city, sent to work alone, often in domestic service or garment piecework, and save their families. Half the world’s urban population is under 25, and considerably more than half of these are young women, because the men so often stay behind.
The girls tend to have more job opportunities in the informal, hustle-based economies of modern cities; they also tend to be treated far, far worse than anyone else, abused sexually, mutilated, impregnated, forced into prostitution, married to strangers. They are both the main agents of change and its predominant victim.
The opportunity and the danger tend to amplify each other. Fear of such fates, and other mythic images of debased innocence stoked by the terrifying shock of sudden change, leads the fathers and brothers of newly urbanized daughters into the hysterical comfort of extreme religious and political beliefs. The cruel ascetic offshoots of Islam in much of the Arab world, the violent political perversions of Hinduism in India and the waves of fundamentalist Christianity across the Southern Hemisphere, are in large part responses to, or manipulations of, anxieties over the idealized images of one’s daughter.
In fact, you could say that the most potent forces in the world right now – both the most promising opportunities for improvement and the most menacing and destabilizing movements and ideologies – are all centred around the mythic figure of the teenage girl.
This dual role will be brought into stark contrast next week with the release of a major study, by the charity Plan, of the situation of adolescent girls in the world’s cities. Titled “Because I Am a Girl,” it rightly recognizes that the fate of these girls and young women is precisely the fate of their countries and communities.
In many ways, the flight into urban work is turning girls into powerful figures – in large part by letting them escape marriage. In Bangladesh, the study notes, 31 per cent of adolescent girls who had migrated from rural to urban areas for work were married by the age of 18, compared to 71 per cent in rural areas, and “adolescent girls in cities are more likely than their rural cousins to go to school, marry later, give birth more safely and have more of a say in their own lives.”
And this flight often allows them to escape a fate that would turn them into baby-making machines: In Addis Ababa, a quarter of all women in the city between 10 and 19 had moved there from the village in order to escape early marriage.
That can change the world: Over and over, studies have found that the level of poverty reduction and economic growth in a country is directly correlated to the levels of education attained by women – more so than any other factor.
But the risks are real. Sexual predation is an ever-present concern in societies that still treat women little better than livestock. A study in Lima found that 41 per cent of girls between 10 and 24 had “experienced coerced sex.” Similar figures, or worse, were found around the world.
The flip side of this risk is the ideological defensiveness that leads fathers to marry off daughters earlier, cover their heads (even in countries, such as Bangladesh and Turkey, where this isn’t traditional), mutilate their genitals and throw them into the hands of religion. Of course, this is the same thinking that leads men to rape teenage girls – thus creating a self-sustaining cycle of backwardness.
Beyond this idealization and victimization are the actual lives of hundreds of millions of real girls, on the streets of the world’s major cities, avoiding dark corners and doing most of the hard work.
IVF is Nobel-worthy, but ethical issues remain
By Susan Martinuk,
Calgary Herald
October 8, 2010
Thirty-two years ago the world anxiously held its breath and waited for news of the birth of the first test- tube baby. Both scientists and the public alike were questioning the novel technology that created her, worried that some kind of a monster child with multiple birth defects would emerge.
But when Louise Brown was born on July 25, 1978, she was remarkably ordinary. A five-pound, 12-ounce, blond baby girl with 10 fingers and 10 toes. Adorable. Just like every other baby.
Yet, as we look back, it's clear that this one changed our view of human reproduction and ushered in a new era of medicine. Suddenly, a diagnosis of infertility wasn't the end of all hope -- it was merely the beginning of making a baby the "high-tech" way.
In recognition of this achievement, the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded this week to Robert Edwards, the British biologist who developed the IVF (in vitro fertilization) technology that produced Louise Brown. The Nobel citation stated that Edwards' vision now brings "joy to infertile people all over the world."
The problem is, the Nobel Prize implicitly marks society's broad acceptance of the process of fertilizing eggs outside of the human body. Over the years, the once-extreme technology has gradually morphed into a commonplace means of having a baby.
The history of IVF's rapid societal acceptance demonstrates how easily we will accept controversial technology -- and that's something to take note of as we consider other controversial technologies, such as cloning or genetic engineering. While Edwards' discovery opened the door to hope for the nearly 15 per cent of all couples who suffer from infertility, it also opened the door to numerous still-unanswered ethical, social and legal questions.
In other words, Edwards' highly successful technology has left a big, fat ethical mess in its wake and we're still trying to figure it out.
IVF is a relatively simple procedure. It involves taking eggs from a woman's ovary and fertilizing them in a petri dish. One or two of the fertilized eggs are then placed into a woman's womb to develop naturally. In bypassing the natural process of egg meets sperm, IVF can overcome a host of infertility problems.
But the ethical concerns that stem from Edwards' work aren't that simple. Approximately 70 to 80 per cent of fertilized eggs are never used. Hence, there are now huge numbers of leftover, but still viable embryos that are stored in fertility clinics around the world. What do we do with them? They can be donated to other couples, but rarely are. In some countries, extra embryos supply the live material needed for embryonic stem cell research -- but the embryos are killed as the cells are removed.
Edwards' work also founded the principles that are used in reproductive cloning technologies and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis -- a technique that allows scientists to test embryos for undesirable genes and traits prior to implantation in the womb. If any undesirables are found, the embryo is destroyed.
The ability to fertilize eggs outside of the body has also redefined fundamental social roles such as mother/ father/family. Using IVF, women can donate eggs to others or donate their wombs to carry a child for other couples. Children can now have biological parents who supply the genetic material and birth parents who raise them. Women are giving birth to their own grandchildren.
Finally, there are legitimate concerns that the search for the perfect child has lead to the commodification of human life as sperm and eggs are bought and sold.
All of the above stems from the IVF technology developed by Edwards and his impact on our lives isn't about to go away any time soon. According to Arthur Caplan, a well-known American bioethicist, "Edward's discoveries will make the issue of designing our descendants . . . trying to create children who are stronger, faster, live longer . . . the biggest issue in the first half of the 21st century."
Edwards' scientific achievement is worthy of a Nobel. So far, more than 4.3 million children have been born using IVF technology. But he also opened Pandora's box of ethical surprises and, for many observers, that's the gift that just keeps on giving.
Susan Martinuk's column runs every Friday
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
By Susan Martinuk,
Calgary Herald
October 8, 2010
Thirty-two years ago the world anxiously held its breath and waited for news of the birth of the first test- tube baby. Both scientists and the public alike were questioning the novel technology that created her, worried that some kind of a monster child with multiple birth defects would emerge.
But when Louise Brown was born on July 25, 1978, she was remarkably ordinary. A five-pound, 12-ounce, blond baby girl with 10 fingers and 10 toes. Adorable. Just like every other baby.
Yet, as we look back, it's clear that this one changed our view of human reproduction and ushered in a new era of medicine. Suddenly, a diagnosis of infertility wasn't the end of all hope -- it was merely the beginning of making a baby the "high-tech" way.
In recognition of this achievement, the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded this week to Robert Edwards, the British biologist who developed the IVF (in vitro fertilization) technology that produced Louise Brown. The Nobel citation stated that Edwards' vision now brings "joy to infertile people all over the world."
The problem is, the Nobel Prize implicitly marks society's broad acceptance of the process of fertilizing eggs outside of the human body. Over the years, the once-extreme technology has gradually morphed into a commonplace means of having a baby.
The history of IVF's rapid societal acceptance demonstrates how easily we will accept controversial technology -- and that's something to take note of as we consider other controversial technologies, such as cloning or genetic engineering. While Edwards' discovery opened the door to hope for the nearly 15 per cent of all couples who suffer from infertility, it also opened the door to numerous still-unanswered ethical, social and legal questions.
In other words, Edwards' highly successful technology has left a big, fat ethical mess in its wake and we're still trying to figure it out.
IVF is a relatively simple procedure. It involves taking eggs from a woman's ovary and fertilizing them in a petri dish. One or two of the fertilized eggs are then placed into a woman's womb to develop naturally. In bypassing the natural process of egg meets sperm, IVF can overcome a host of infertility problems.
But the ethical concerns that stem from Edwards' work aren't that simple. Approximately 70 to 80 per cent of fertilized eggs are never used. Hence, there are now huge numbers of leftover, but still viable embryos that are stored in fertility clinics around the world. What do we do with them? They can be donated to other couples, but rarely are. In some countries, extra embryos supply the live material needed for embryonic stem cell research -- but the embryos are killed as the cells are removed.
Edwards' work also founded the principles that are used in reproductive cloning technologies and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis -- a technique that allows scientists to test embryos for undesirable genes and traits prior to implantation in the womb. If any undesirables are found, the embryo is destroyed.
The ability to fertilize eggs outside of the body has also redefined fundamental social roles such as mother/ father/family. Using IVF, women can donate eggs to others or donate their wombs to carry a child for other couples. Children can now have biological parents who supply the genetic material and birth parents who raise them. Women are giving birth to their own grandchildren.
Finally, there are legitimate concerns that the search for the perfect child has lead to the commodification of human life as sperm and eggs are bought and sold.
All of the above stems from the IVF technology developed by Edwards and his impact on our lives isn't about to go away any time soon. According to Arthur Caplan, a well-known American bioethicist, "Edward's discoveries will make the issue of designing our descendants . . . trying to create children who are stronger, faster, live longer . . . the biggest issue in the first half of the 21st century."
Edwards' scientific achievement is worthy of a Nobel. So far, more than 4.3 million children have been born using IVF technology. But he also opened Pandora's box of ethical surprises and, for many observers, that's the gift that just keeps on giving.
Susan Martinuk's column runs every Friday
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magaz ... &th&emc=th
October 14, 2010
As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations
By TED C. FISHMAN
YOU MAY KNOW that the world’s population is aging — that the number of older people is expanding faster than the number of young — but you probably don’t realize how fast this is happening. Right now, the world is evenly divided between those under 28 and those over 28. By midcentury, the median age will have risen to 40. Demographers also use another measure, in addition to median age, to determine whether populations are aging: “elder share.” If the share, or proportion, of people over 60 (or sometimes 65) is growing, the population is aging. By that yardstick too, the world is quickly becoming older. Pick any age cohort above the median age of 28 and you’ll find its share of the global population rising faster than that of any segment below the median. By 2018, 65-year-olds, for example, will outnumber those under 5 — a historic first. In 2050, developed countries are on track to have half as many people under 15 as they do over 60. In short, the age mix of the world is turning upside down and at unprecedented rates.
This means profound change in nearly every important relationship we have — as family members, neighbors, citizens of nations and the world. Aging populations also alter how business is done everywhere. The globalization of the economy is accelerating because the world is rapidly aging, and at the same time the pace of global aging is quickened by the speed and scope of globalization. These intertwined dynamics also bear on the international competition for wealth and power. The high costs of keeping our aging population healthy and out of poverty has caused the United States and other rich democracies to lose their economic and political footing. Countries on the rise amass wealth and geopolitical clout by refusing to bear those costs. Older countries lose work to younger countries.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magaz ... &th&emc=th
October 14, 2010
As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations
By TED C. FISHMAN
YOU MAY KNOW that the world’s population is aging — that the number of older people is expanding faster than the number of young — but you probably don’t realize how fast this is happening. Right now, the world is evenly divided between those under 28 and those over 28. By midcentury, the median age will have risen to 40. Demographers also use another measure, in addition to median age, to determine whether populations are aging: “elder share.” If the share, or proportion, of people over 60 (or sometimes 65) is growing, the population is aging. By that yardstick too, the world is quickly becoming older. Pick any age cohort above the median age of 28 and you’ll find its share of the global population rising faster than that of any segment below the median. By 2018, 65-year-olds, for example, will outnumber those under 5 — a historic first. In 2050, developed countries are on track to have half as many people under 15 as they do over 60. In short, the age mix of the world is turning upside down and at unprecedented rates.
This means profound change in nearly every important relationship we have — as family members, neighbors, citizens of nations and the world. Aging populations also alter how business is done everywhere. The globalization of the economy is accelerating because the world is rapidly aging, and at the same time the pace of global aging is quickened by the speed and scope of globalization. These intertwined dynamics also bear on the international competition for wealth and power. The high costs of keeping our aging population healthy and out of poverty has caused the United States and other rich democracies to lose their economic and political footing. Countries on the rise amass wealth and geopolitical clout by refusing to bear those costs. Older countries lose work to younger countries.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magaz ... &th&emc=th
October 21, 2010
The Flock Comedies
By DAVID BROOKS
For most of television history, sitcoms have been about families. From “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to “All in the Family” to “The Cosby Show,” TV shows have generally featured husbands and wives, parents and kids.
But over the past several years, things have shifted. Today’s shows are often about groups of unrelated friends who have the time to lounge around apartments, coffee shops and workplaces exchanging witticisms about each other and the passing scene.
As Neal Gabler wrote in The Los Angeles Times this week, “Over the last 20 years, beginning with ‘Seinfeld,’ and moving on through ‘Friends,’ ‘Sex and the City’ and more recently ‘Desperate Housewives,’ ‘Glee,’ ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ ‘Cougartown’ and at least a half-dozen other shows, including this season’s newbies ‘Raising Hope’ and ‘Better With You,’ television has become a kind of friendship machine dispensing groups of people in constant and intimate contact with one another.”
These flock comedies serve an obvious dramatic function. In an age of quick cuts and interlacing, frenetic plots (think “30 Rock”), it helps to have a multitude of characters on hand zooming in and out of scenes.
But the change also reflects something deeper about the patterns of friendship in society. With people delaying marriage and childbearing into their 30s, young people now spend long periods of their lives outside of traditional families, living among diverse friendship tribes. These friendship networks are emotionally complicated and deeply satisfying — ripe ground for a comedy of manners.
Then, when these people do get married, friendship becomes the great challenge. Middle-aged Americans are now likely to live in two-earner families. But despite career pressures, they have not cut back on the amount of time they spend with their kids. Instead, they have sacrificed friendship time.
So these flock comedies serve another purpose for the middle-aged. They appeal to people who want to watch fictional characters enjoying the long, uninterrupted bonding experiences that they no longer have time or energy for.
The shows also serve one final purpose. They help people negotiate the transition between dyadic friendships and networked friendships.
Throughout history, the most famous friendships were one on one. As Ruth says to Naomi in the biblical narrative: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
Most essayistic celebrations of friendship have also been about the deep and total commitment that can exist between one person and another. In his book, “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of such an ideal: “It seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”
But today’s friendships — those represented in the flock comedies and perhaps in real life — are less likely to be one on one. Instead, individual relationships tend to be deeply embedded in a complex web of group relationships. This creates a different set of social problems.
Thanks to social network technologies, people have to figure out how concentrated they want their friendship networks to be. Those with low-density networks can have a vast array of friends, but if the network gets too distended you are left with nothing but a dispersed multitude of shallow connections. People with a concentrated network have a narrower circle of friends, but if it is too dense you have erected an insular and stultifying social fortress.
Thanks to the segmentation of society, people have to figure out how rigorously they should segregate their different friendship circles: their work friends from their play friends; their artsy friends from their jock friends; their college friends from their religious or ethnic friends.
Thanks to greater equality between the sexes, people are more likely to socialize within co-ed flocks. They have to figure out how to handle sexual tension within the group: whether the eroticization of friendship ruins the essential bond; whether sex between two people within a friendship mob threatens to destroy the entire chemistry of the mob.
Finally, there is the question of whether group friendships are more or less satisfying than the one-on-one, bosom-buddy relationships. In an age of Facebook, Twitter networks and geo-location apps, are people trading flexibility and convenience for true commitment?
In other words, group friendship is burbling to the surface of television life because the promise and perplexities of modern friendship networks are burbling to the top of national life. What’s striking is not that television is treating changing friendship norms so thoroughly but that other cultural institutions are treating it so sparingly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/opini ... &th&emc=th
The Flock Comedies
By DAVID BROOKS
For most of television history, sitcoms have been about families. From “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to “All in the Family” to “The Cosby Show,” TV shows have generally featured husbands and wives, parents and kids.
But over the past several years, things have shifted. Today’s shows are often about groups of unrelated friends who have the time to lounge around apartments, coffee shops and workplaces exchanging witticisms about each other and the passing scene.
As Neal Gabler wrote in The Los Angeles Times this week, “Over the last 20 years, beginning with ‘Seinfeld,’ and moving on through ‘Friends,’ ‘Sex and the City’ and more recently ‘Desperate Housewives,’ ‘Glee,’ ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ ‘Cougartown’ and at least a half-dozen other shows, including this season’s newbies ‘Raising Hope’ and ‘Better With You,’ television has become a kind of friendship machine dispensing groups of people in constant and intimate contact with one another.”
These flock comedies serve an obvious dramatic function. In an age of quick cuts and interlacing, frenetic plots (think “30 Rock”), it helps to have a multitude of characters on hand zooming in and out of scenes.
But the change also reflects something deeper about the patterns of friendship in society. With people delaying marriage and childbearing into their 30s, young people now spend long periods of their lives outside of traditional families, living among diverse friendship tribes. These friendship networks are emotionally complicated and deeply satisfying — ripe ground for a comedy of manners.
Then, when these people do get married, friendship becomes the great challenge. Middle-aged Americans are now likely to live in two-earner families. But despite career pressures, they have not cut back on the amount of time they spend with their kids. Instead, they have sacrificed friendship time.
So these flock comedies serve another purpose for the middle-aged. They appeal to people who want to watch fictional characters enjoying the long, uninterrupted bonding experiences that they no longer have time or energy for.
The shows also serve one final purpose. They help people negotiate the transition between dyadic friendships and networked friendships.
Throughout history, the most famous friendships were one on one. As Ruth says to Naomi in the biblical narrative: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
Most essayistic celebrations of friendship have also been about the deep and total commitment that can exist between one person and another. In his book, “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of such an ideal: “It seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”
But today’s friendships — those represented in the flock comedies and perhaps in real life — are less likely to be one on one. Instead, individual relationships tend to be deeply embedded in a complex web of group relationships. This creates a different set of social problems.
Thanks to social network technologies, people have to figure out how concentrated they want their friendship networks to be. Those with low-density networks can have a vast array of friends, but if the network gets too distended you are left with nothing but a dispersed multitude of shallow connections. People with a concentrated network have a narrower circle of friends, but if it is too dense you have erected an insular and stultifying social fortress.
Thanks to the segmentation of society, people have to figure out how rigorously they should segregate their different friendship circles: their work friends from their play friends; their artsy friends from their jock friends; their college friends from their religious or ethnic friends.
Thanks to greater equality between the sexes, people are more likely to socialize within co-ed flocks. They have to figure out how to handle sexual tension within the group: whether the eroticization of friendship ruins the essential bond; whether sex between two people within a friendship mob threatens to destroy the entire chemistry of the mob.
Finally, there is the question of whether group friendships are more or less satisfying than the one-on-one, bosom-buddy relationships. In an age of Facebook, Twitter networks and geo-location apps, are people trading flexibility and convenience for true commitment?
In other words, group friendship is burbling to the surface of television life because the promise and perplexities of modern friendship networks are burbling to the top of national life. What’s striking is not that television is treating changing friendship norms so thoroughly but that other cultural institutions are treating it so sparingly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/opini ... &th&emc=th
Growing Up With H.I.V.
Interviews by Pam Belluck, Video by Tony Cenicola, Produced by Lisa Iaboni
The first generation of children born with H.I.V. are now entering adulthood. What is it like to be a child with H.I.V.? How does it affect your relationships and your outlook? Four young adults speak about a their lives with H.I.V.
VIDEO
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010 ... &emc=thab1
Article
November 5, 2010
As H.I.V. Babies Come of Age, Problems Linger
By PAM BELLUCK
WARWICK, R.I. — “They’ve been telling me since age 3 that I would die,” Tom Cosgrove said quietly. “Then age 6, age 8, age 10.”
Now 20, he is considered the longest-living person born with H.I.V. in his state, but every year has brought struggle.
As a toddler at a shelter for children infected with H.I.V. from birth, he watched others die. Then, AIDS killed his mother and newborn brother. At 8, his body rejected medication and he became temporarily unable to walk.
He raged with anger, once even striking a teacher with a chair. Classmates, paranoid about his disease, refused to shake his hand or sit at his lunch table. Friends’ parents forbade them to visit, and he could not join basketball teams or karate classes.
Even now, medications impair his short-term memory, making school, and job prospects, difficult.
“We call them his stupid drugs,” said Barbara Cosgrove, who adopted Tom at 3. “But, as I say to Tom, ‘You’re either stupid or you’re dead.’ ”
At a time when H.I.V. in the United States has become a manageable disease for many, Tom Cosgrove and others like him are proof of the epidemic’s troubling, lingering legacy. They are the survivors, born beginning in the 1990s to the first big wave of people with AIDS, babies practically destined to die. Improvements in drugs, along with some luck, allowed some 10,000 of them to live — and these days only about 200 children a year are born with H.I.V., thanks to vigilant drug treatment of infected pregnant women.
But life for those first H.I.V. babies now entering adolescence and adulthood has been a battle, and their experience is considered so significant — not only in this country but also for the millions of H.I.V.-positive babies worldwide — that federal health agencies have begun an extensive study to follow these young people as they grow up.
Some are weakened by years of yo-yoing symptoms that early drugs failed to treat. Some have developmental delays or other problems related to having H.I.V. at birth. And their medications often have harsher side effects than those taken by people infected more recently as teenagers or adults because complications from their illness, or previous drugs they took and became resistant to, have made their disease more stubborn to treat.
Emotionally, they grapple with hostility toward parents who infected them, grief that those parents suffered and usually died, and anxiety about trusting others with a secret that still provokes hazing and fear.
And a serious problem is emerging: some are rebelling or asserting independence by skipping or stopping medication, which can make H.I.V. spiral out of control and become impervious to previously effective therapies.
“It ain’t over yet,” Dr. Ellen Cooper, medical director of pediatric and adolescent H.I.V. at Boston Medical Center, said about keeping these young people alive and healthy. Although she has not lost a patient in five years, she said, “I’m expecting a second wave” of these young people “dying because they’re not adherent” to medication, or because of “complications from treatment.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/us/06 ... &emc=thab1
Interviews by Pam Belluck, Video by Tony Cenicola, Produced by Lisa Iaboni
The first generation of children born with H.I.V. are now entering adulthood. What is it like to be a child with H.I.V.? How does it affect your relationships and your outlook? Four young adults speak about a their lives with H.I.V.
VIDEO
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010 ... &emc=thab1
Article
November 5, 2010
As H.I.V. Babies Come of Age, Problems Linger
By PAM BELLUCK
WARWICK, R.I. — “They’ve been telling me since age 3 that I would die,” Tom Cosgrove said quietly. “Then age 6, age 8, age 10.”
Now 20, he is considered the longest-living person born with H.I.V. in his state, but every year has brought struggle.
As a toddler at a shelter for children infected with H.I.V. from birth, he watched others die. Then, AIDS killed his mother and newborn brother. At 8, his body rejected medication and he became temporarily unable to walk.
He raged with anger, once even striking a teacher with a chair. Classmates, paranoid about his disease, refused to shake his hand or sit at his lunch table. Friends’ parents forbade them to visit, and he could not join basketball teams or karate classes.
Even now, medications impair his short-term memory, making school, and job prospects, difficult.
“We call them his stupid drugs,” said Barbara Cosgrove, who adopted Tom at 3. “But, as I say to Tom, ‘You’re either stupid or you’re dead.’ ”
At a time when H.I.V. in the United States has become a manageable disease for many, Tom Cosgrove and others like him are proof of the epidemic’s troubling, lingering legacy. They are the survivors, born beginning in the 1990s to the first big wave of people with AIDS, babies practically destined to die. Improvements in drugs, along with some luck, allowed some 10,000 of them to live — and these days only about 200 children a year are born with H.I.V., thanks to vigilant drug treatment of infected pregnant women.
But life for those first H.I.V. babies now entering adolescence and adulthood has been a battle, and their experience is considered so significant — not only in this country but also for the millions of H.I.V.-positive babies worldwide — that federal health agencies have begun an extensive study to follow these young people as they grow up.
Some are weakened by years of yo-yoing symptoms that early drugs failed to treat. Some have developmental delays or other problems related to having H.I.V. at birth. And their medications often have harsher side effects than those taken by people infected more recently as teenagers or adults because complications from their illness, or previous drugs they took and became resistant to, have made their disease more stubborn to treat.
Emotionally, they grapple with hostility toward parents who infected them, grief that those parents suffered and usually died, and anxiety about trusting others with a secret that still provokes hazing and fear.
And a serious problem is emerging: some are rebelling or asserting independence by skipping or stopping medication, which can make H.I.V. spiral out of control and become impervious to previously effective therapies.
“It ain’t over yet,” Dr. Ellen Cooper, medical director of pediatric and adolescent H.I.V. at Boston Medical Center, said about keeping these young people alive and healthy. Although she has not lost a patient in five years, she said, “I’m expecting a second wave” of these young people “dying because they’re not adherent” to medication, or because of “complications from treatment.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/us/06 ... &emc=thab1
No rights, no obligations - just companionship
Misyar or 'confidential' marriages abound in the region
By
* Muna Ahmed
Published Monday, August 23, 2010
The wife is not added to the citizenship document in misyar marriage. (FILE)
More than 20,000 marriages in the UAE are "misyar marriages", according to a judge. He also pointed out that the men and women who choose such confidential marriages, are almost exclusively Arabs.
A misyar marriage is legal in the UAE. It is a contract under which the husband and wife give up several rights by their own free will, such as living together, equal division of nights between wives, the wife's rights to housing, and maintenance money, and husband's right of homekeeping and access etc.
The couple continue to live separately from each other, as before their marriage, but get together regularly, often for sexual relations in a permissible and halal manner.
Although allowed in some Muslim countries, misyar is not popular with many because women lose nearly all their rights in a confidential marriage. A large number of such marriages end up in divorce.
A misyar marriage is one under which a couple get officially married in courts, but later on, the man does not complete the processes of the marriage.
He doesn't add the wife into the Citizenship Document, which is a must so that the wife gets her full official rights, sources said.
Widad Naser Lootah from the Community Development Authority in Dubai, said that misyar marriage is a legal marriage in the country.
"In this, they get married officially and have marriage certificate from the courts. They avoid having children, but if this happens, the children will be given their father's name and will be issued passports. The man is not obliged to spend on the wife and the children. He is exempted from paying for anything for them. However, he can pay from his own will."
She added: "Women generally accept to get into this kind of marriage when they reach 35 years of age and above and need male companionship.
"These women don't want to be alone. They seek male companionship, and thus accept to get married instead of being alone. In many cases, these women are divorced or widows," she said.
She added that almost all men who seek this type of marriages are getting married for the second time. "In these cases, the man normally hides his misyar marriage from his first wife and children. Thus, he doesn't spend the night with the second wife. He only visits her during the day after work and spends some time with her without his first wife's knowledge."
She added that the girl's family also doesn't mind such marriages as they want their daughter to have someone in their lives.
"When I was a marriage counselor in Dubai Courts, I received many women who wanted to get into such marriages. I personally don't encourage such marriages, but for some women, it is the best solution for their loneliness. For example, a widow came to me once and needed help for a misyar marriage.
"Her children had gone abroad for higher education, and they were to spend many years away from home. She was all alone, and got a misyar marriage proposal. She accepted it, and her uncle encouraged her to get married. Now she is living happily with her husband. This marriage was the perfect solution for both of them as they don't want to have children. All they want is to have each other's companionship," she said.
Misyar or 'confidential' marriages abound in the region
By
* Muna Ahmed
Published Monday, August 23, 2010
The wife is not added to the citizenship document in misyar marriage. (FILE)
More than 20,000 marriages in the UAE are "misyar marriages", according to a judge. He also pointed out that the men and women who choose such confidential marriages, are almost exclusively Arabs.
A misyar marriage is legal in the UAE. It is a contract under which the husband and wife give up several rights by their own free will, such as living together, equal division of nights between wives, the wife's rights to housing, and maintenance money, and husband's right of homekeeping and access etc.
The couple continue to live separately from each other, as before their marriage, but get together regularly, often for sexual relations in a permissible and halal manner.
Although allowed in some Muslim countries, misyar is not popular with many because women lose nearly all their rights in a confidential marriage. A large number of such marriages end up in divorce.
A misyar marriage is one under which a couple get officially married in courts, but later on, the man does not complete the processes of the marriage.
He doesn't add the wife into the Citizenship Document, which is a must so that the wife gets her full official rights, sources said.
Widad Naser Lootah from the Community Development Authority in Dubai, said that misyar marriage is a legal marriage in the country.
"In this, they get married officially and have marriage certificate from the courts. They avoid having children, but if this happens, the children will be given their father's name and will be issued passports. The man is not obliged to spend on the wife and the children. He is exempted from paying for anything for them. However, he can pay from his own will."
She added: "Women generally accept to get into this kind of marriage when they reach 35 years of age and above and need male companionship.
"These women don't want to be alone. They seek male companionship, and thus accept to get married instead of being alone. In many cases, these women are divorced or widows," she said.
She added that almost all men who seek this type of marriages are getting married for the second time. "In these cases, the man normally hides his misyar marriage from his first wife and children. Thus, he doesn't spend the night with the second wife. He only visits her during the day after work and spends some time with her without his first wife's knowledge."
She added that the girl's family also doesn't mind such marriages as they want their daughter to have someone in their lives.
"When I was a marriage counselor in Dubai Courts, I received many women who wanted to get into such marriages. I personally don't encourage such marriages, but for some women, it is the best solution for their loneliness. For example, a widow came to me once and needed help for a misyar marriage.
"Her children had gone abroad for higher education, and they were to spend many years away from home. She was all alone, and got a misyar marriage proposal. She accepted it, and her uncle encouraged her to get married. Now she is living happily with her husband. This marriage was the perfect solution for both of them as they don't want to have children. All they want is to have each other's companionship," she said.
Below is an interesting graphical illustration of the socio/economic trends in our world based on information and statistics generated from 200 countries. It is also providing an interesting projection into the future....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Related...
Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when | Video on TED.com...
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_a ... _when.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Related...
Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when | Video on TED.com...
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_a ... _when.html
Last edited by kmaherali on Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
July/August 2010
The End of Men
Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences
By Hanna Rosin
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... -men/8135/
There is also a related video at the above link....
The End of Men
Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences
By Hanna Rosin
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... -men/8135/
There is also a related video at the above link....
February 14, 2011
The Experience Economy
By DAVID BROOKS
Tyler Cowen’s e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” has become the most debated nonfiction book so far this year. Cowen’s core point is that up until sometime around 1974, the American economy was able to experience awesome growth by harvesting low-hanging fruit. There was cheap land to be exploited. There was the tremendous increase in education levels during the postwar world. There were technological revolutions occasioned by the spread of electricity, plastics and the car.
But that low-hanging fruit is exhausted, Cowen continues, and since 1974, the United States has experienced slower growth, slower increases in median income, slower job creation, slower productivity gains, slower life-expectancy improvements and slower rates of technological change.
Cowen’s data on these slowdowns are compelling and have withstood the scrutiny of the online reviewers. He argues that our society, for the moment, has hit a technological plateau.
But his evidence can also be used to tell a related story. It could be that the nature of technological change isn’t causing the slowdown but a shift in values. It could be that in an industrial economy people develop a materialist mind-set and believe that improving their income is the same thing as improving their quality of life. But in an affluent information-driven world, people embrace the postmaterialist mind-set. They realize they can improve their quality of life without actually producing more wealth.
For example, imagine a man we’ll call Sam, who was born in 1900 and died in 1974. Sam entered a world of iceboxes, horse-drawn buggies and, commonly, outhouses. He died in a world of air-conditioning, Chevy Camaros and Moon landings. His life was defined by dramatic material changes, and Sam worked feverishly hard to build a company that sold brake systems. Sam wasn’t the most refined person, but he understood that if he wanted to create a secure life for his family he had to create wealth.
Sam’s grandson, Jared, was born in 1978. Jared wasn’t really drawn to the brake-systems business, which was withering in America. He works at a company that organizes conferences. He brings together fascinating speakers for lifelong learning. He writes a blog on modern art and takes his family on vacations that are more daring and exciting than any Sam experienced.
Jared lives a much more intellectually diverse life than Sam. He loves Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and his iPhone apps. But many of these things are produced outside the conventional monetized economy. Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume.
They don’t even create many jobs. As Cowen notes in his book, the automobile industry produced millions of jobs, but Facebook employs about 2,000, Twitter 300 and eBay about 17,000. It takes only 14,000 employees to make and sell iPods, but that device also eliminates jobs for those people who make and distribute CDs, potentially leading to net job losses.
In other words, as Cowen makes clear, many of this era’s technological breakthroughs produce enormous happiness gains, but surprisingly little additional economic activity.
Jared’s other priorities also produce high quality-of-life gains without huge material and productivity improvements. He practically defines himself by what university he went to. Universities now have nicer dorms, gyms and dining facilities. These improvements have not led to huge increases in educational output.
Jared is very health conscious and part of a generation that has spent much more on health care. This may help Jared lead a vibrant life in retirement. But these investments have had surprisingly little effect on productivity or even longevity.
For Sam, income and living standards were synonymous. But for Jared, wealth and living standards have diverged. He is more interested in the latter than the former. This means that Jared has some rich and meaningful experiences, but it has also led to problems. Every few months, new gizmos come out. Jared feels his life is getting better. Because he doesn’t fully grasp the increasingly important distinction between wealth and standard of living, he has the impression that he is also getting richer. As a result, he lives beyond his means. As Cowen notes, many of our recent difficulties stem from the fact that many Americans think they are richer than they are.
Jared is also providing much less opportunity for those down the income scale than his grandfather did. Sam was more hardhearted, yet his feverish materialism created more jobs.
Jared worries about that. He also worries that the Chinese and others have a material drive that he and his cohort lacks. But he’s not changing. For the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.
During these years, commencement speakers have urged students to seek meaning and not money. Many people, it turns out, were listening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opini ... emc=tha212
The Experience Economy
By DAVID BROOKS
Tyler Cowen’s e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” has become the most debated nonfiction book so far this year. Cowen’s core point is that up until sometime around 1974, the American economy was able to experience awesome growth by harvesting low-hanging fruit. There was cheap land to be exploited. There was the tremendous increase in education levels during the postwar world. There were technological revolutions occasioned by the spread of electricity, plastics and the car.
But that low-hanging fruit is exhausted, Cowen continues, and since 1974, the United States has experienced slower growth, slower increases in median income, slower job creation, slower productivity gains, slower life-expectancy improvements and slower rates of technological change.
Cowen’s data on these slowdowns are compelling and have withstood the scrutiny of the online reviewers. He argues that our society, for the moment, has hit a technological plateau.
But his evidence can also be used to tell a related story. It could be that the nature of technological change isn’t causing the slowdown but a shift in values. It could be that in an industrial economy people develop a materialist mind-set and believe that improving their income is the same thing as improving their quality of life. But in an affluent information-driven world, people embrace the postmaterialist mind-set. They realize they can improve their quality of life without actually producing more wealth.
For example, imagine a man we’ll call Sam, who was born in 1900 and died in 1974. Sam entered a world of iceboxes, horse-drawn buggies and, commonly, outhouses. He died in a world of air-conditioning, Chevy Camaros and Moon landings. His life was defined by dramatic material changes, and Sam worked feverishly hard to build a company that sold brake systems. Sam wasn’t the most refined person, but he understood that if he wanted to create a secure life for his family he had to create wealth.
Sam’s grandson, Jared, was born in 1978. Jared wasn’t really drawn to the brake-systems business, which was withering in America. He works at a company that organizes conferences. He brings together fascinating speakers for lifelong learning. He writes a blog on modern art and takes his family on vacations that are more daring and exciting than any Sam experienced.
Jared lives a much more intellectually diverse life than Sam. He loves Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and his iPhone apps. But many of these things are produced outside the conventional monetized economy. Most of the products are produced by people working for free. They cost nothing to consume.
They don’t even create many jobs. As Cowen notes in his book, the automobile industry produced millions of jobs, but Facebook employs about 2,000, Twitter 300 and eBay about 17,000. It takes only 14,000 employees to make and sell iPods, but that device also eliminates jobs for those people who make and distribute CDs, potentially leading to net job losses.
In other words, as Cowen makes clear, many of this era’s technological breakthroughs produce enormous happiness gains, but surprisingly little additional economic activity.
Jared’s other priorities also produce high quality-of-life gains without huge material and productivity improvements. He practically defines himself by what university he went to. Universities now have nicer dorms, gyms and dining facilities. These improvements have not led to huge increases in educational output.
Jared is very health conscious and part of a generation that has spent much more on health care. This may help Jared lead a vibrant life in retirement. But these investments have had surprisingly little effect on productivity or even longevity.
For Sam, income and living standards were synonymous. But for Jared, wealth and living standards have diverged. He is more interested in the latter than the former. This means that Jared has some rich and meaningful experiences, but it has also led to problems. Every few months, new gizmos come out. Jared feels his life is getting better. Because he doesn’t fully grasp the increasingly important distinction between wealth and standard of living, he has the impression that he is also getting richer. As a result, he lives beyond his means. As Cowen notes, many of our recent difficulties stem from the fact that many Americans think they are richer than they are.
Jared is also providing much less opportunity for those down the income scale than his grandfather did. Sam was more hardhearted, yet his feverish materialism created more jobs.
Jared worries about that. He also worries that the Chinese and others have a material drive that he and his cohort lacks. But he’s not changing. For the past few decades, Americans have devoted more of their energies to postmaterial arenas and less and less, for better and worse, to the sheer production of wealth.
During these years, commencement speakers have urged students to seek meaning and not money. Many people, it turns out, were listening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opini ... emc=tha212
May 3, 2011
U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century’s End
By JUSTIN GILLIS and CELIA W. DUGGER
The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday.
Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said — a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.
The new report comes just ahead of a demographic milestone, with the world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. Demographers called the new projections a reminder that a problem that helped define global politics in the 20th century, the population explosion, is far from solved in the 21st.
“Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody — it’s as simple as that,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research group in New York. “Is it the end of the world? No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.”
The projections were made by the United Nations population division, which has a track record of fairly accurate forecasts. In the new report, the division raised its forecast for the year 2050, estimating that the world would most likely have 9.3 billion people then, an increase of 156 million over the previous estimate for that year, published in 2008.
Among the factors behind the upward revisions is that fertility is not declining as rapidly as expected in some poor countries, and has shown a slight increase in many wealthier countries, including the United States, Britain and Denmark.
The director of the United Nations population division, Hania Zlotnik, said the world’s fastest-growing countries, and the wealthy Western nations that help finance their development, face a choice about whether to renew their emphasis on programs that encourage family planning.
Though they were a major focus of development policy in the 1970s and 1980s, such programs have stagnated in many countries, caught up in ideological battles over abortion, sex education and the role of women in society. Conservatives have attacked such programs as government meddling in private decisions, and in some countries, Catholic groups fought widespread availability of birth control. And some feminists called for less focus on population control and more on empowering women.
Over the past decade, foreign aid to pay for contraceptives — $238 million in 2009 — has barely budged, according to United Nations estimates. The United States has long been the biggest donor, but the budget compromise in Congress last month cut international family planning programs by 5 percent.
“The need has grown, but the availability of family planning services has not,” said Rachel Nugent, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington, a research group.
Dr. Zlotnik said in an interview that the revised numbers were based on new forecasting methods and the latest demographic trends. But she cautioned that any forecast looking 90 years into the future comes with many caveats.
That is particularly so for some fast-growing countries whose populations are projected to skyrocket over the next century. For instance, Yemen, a country whose population has quintupled since 1950, to 25 million, would see its numbers quadruple again, to 100 million, by century’s end, if the projections prove accurate. Yemen already depends on food imports and faces critical water shortages.
In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, the report projects that population will rise from today’s 162 million to 730 million by 2100. Malawi, a country of 15 million today, could grow to 129 million, the report projected.
The implicit, and possibly questionable, assumption behind these numbers is that food and water will be available for the billions yet unborn, and that potential catastrophes including climate change, wars or epidemics will not serve as a brake on population growth. “It is quite possible for several of these countries that are smallish and have fewer resources, these numbers are just not sustainable,” Dr. Zlotnik said.
Well-designed programs can bring down growth rates even in the poorest countries. Provided with information and voluntary access to birth-control methods, women have chosen to have fewer children in societies as diverse as Bangladesh, Iran, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
One message from the new report is that the AIDS epidemic, devastating as it has been, has not been the demographic disaster that was once predicted. Prevalence estimates and projections for the human immunodeficiency virus made for Africa in the 1990s turned out to be too high, and in many populations, treatment with new drug regimens has cut the death rate from the disease.
But the survival of millions of people with AIDS who would have died without treatment, and falling rates of infant and child mortality — both heartening trends — also mean that fertility rates for women need to fall faster to curb population growth, demographers said.
Other factors have slowed change in Africa, experts said, including women’s lack of power in their relationships with men, traditions like early marriage and polygamy, and a dearth of political leadership. While about three-quarters of married American women use a modern contraceptive, the comparable proportions are a quarter of women in East Africa, one in 10 in West Africa, and a mere 7 percent in Central Africa, according to United Nations statistics.
“West and Central Africa are the two big regions of the world where the fertility transition is happening, but at a snail’s pace,” said John F. May, a World Bank demographer.
Some studies suggest that providing easy, affordable access to contraceptives is not always sufficient. A trial by Harvard researchers in Lusaka, Zambia, found that only when women had greater autonomy to decide whether to use contraceptives did they have significantly fewer children. Other studies have found that general education for girls plays a critical role, in that literate young women are more likely to understand that family size is a choice.
The new report suggests that China, which has for decades enforced restrictive population policies, could soon enter the ranks of countries with declining populations, peaking at 1.4 billion in the next couple of decades, then falling to 941 million by 2100.
The United States is growing faster than many rich countries, largely because of high immigration and higher fertility among Hispanic immigrants. The new report projects that the United States population will rise from today’s 311 million to 478 million by 2100.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/world ... s&emc=tha2
U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century’s End
By JUSTIN GILLIS and CELIA W. DUGGER
The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday.
Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said — a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.
The new report comes just ahead of a demographic milestone, with the world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. Demographers called the new projections a reminder that a problem that helped define global politics in the 20th century, the population explosion, is far from solved in the 21st.
“Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody — it’s as simple as that,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research group in New York. “Is it the end of the world? No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.”
The projections were made by the United Nations population division, which has a track record of fairly accurate forecasts. In the new report, the division raised its forecast for the year 2050, estimating that the world would most likely have 9.3 billion people then, an increase of 156 million over the previous estimate for that year, published in 2008.
Among the factors behind the upward revisions is that fertility is not declining as rapidly as expected in some poor countries, and has shown a slight increase in many wealthier countries, including the United States, Britain and Denmark.
The director of the United Nations population division, Hania Zlotnik, said the world’s fastest-growing countries, and the wealthy Western nations that help finance their development, face a choice about whether to renew their emphasis on programs that encourage family planning.
Though they were a major focus of development policy in the 1970s and 1980s, such programs have stagnated in many countries, caught up in ideological battles over abortion, sex education and the role of women in society. Conservatives have attacked such programs as government meddling in private decisions, and in some countries, Catholic groups fought widespread availability of birth control. And some feminists called for less focus on population control and more on empowering women.
Over the past decade, foreign aid to pay for contraceptives — $238 million in 2009 — has barely budged, according to United Nations estimates. The United States has long been the biggest donor, but the budget compromise in Congress last month cut international family planning programs by 5 percent.
“The need has grown, but the availability of family planning services has not,” said Rachel Nugent, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington, a research group.
Dr. Zlotnik said in an interview that the revised numbers were based on new forecasting methods and the latest demographic trends. But she cautioned that any forecast looking 90 years into the future comes with many caveats.
That is particularly so for some fast-growing countries whose populations are projected to skyrocket over the next century. For instance, Yemen, a country whose population has quintupled since 1950, to 25 million, would see its numbers quadruple again, to 100 million, by century’s end, if the projections prove accurate. Yemen already depends on food imports and faces critical water shortages.
In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, the report projects that population will rise from today’s 162 million to 730 million by 2100. Malawi, a country of 15 million today, could grow to 129 million, the report projected.
The implicit, and possibly questionable, assumption behind these numbers is that food and water will be available for the billions yet unborn, and that potential catastrophes including climate change, wars or epidemics will not serve as a brake on population growth. “It is quite possible for several of these countries that are smallish and have fewer resources, these numbers are just not sustainable,” Dr. Zlotnik said.
Well-designed programs can bring down growth rates even in the poorest countries. Provided with information and voluntary access to birth-control methods, women have chosen to have fewer children in societies as diverse as Bangladesh, Iran, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
One message from the new report is that the AIDS epidemic, devastating as it has been, has not been the demographic disaster that was once predicted. Prevalence estimates and projections for the human immunodeficiency virus made for Africa in the 1990s turned out to be too high, and in many populations, treatment with new drug regimens has cut the death rate from the disease.
But the survival of millions of people with AIDS who would have died without treatment, and falling rates of infant and child mortality — both heartening trends — also mean that fertility rates for women need to fall faster to curb population growth, demographers said.
Other factors have slowed change in Africa, experts said, including women’s lack of power in their relationships with men, traditions like early marriage and polygamy, and a dearth of political leadership. While about three-quarters of married American women use a modern contraceptive, the comparable proportions are a quarter of women in East Africa, one in 10 in West Africa, and a mere 7 percent in Central Africa, according to United Nations statistics.
“West and Central Africa are the two big regions of the world where the fertility transition is happening, but at a snail’s pace,” said John F. May, a World Bank demographer.
Some studies suggest that providing easy, affordable access to contraceptives is not always sufficient. A trial by Harvard researchers in Lusaka, Zambia, found that only when women had greater autonomy to decide whether to use contraceptives did they have significantly fewer children. Other studies have found that general education for girls plays a critical role, in that literate young women are more likely to understand that family size is a choice.
The new report suggests that China, which has for decades enforced restrictive population policies, could soon enter the ranks of countries with declining populations, peaking at 1.4 billion in the next couple of decades, then falling to 941 million by 2100.
The United States is growing faster than many rich countries, largely because of high immigration and higher fertility among Hispanic immigrants. The new report projects that the United States population will rise from today’s 311 million to 478 million by 2100.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/world ... s&emc=tha2
June 18, 2011
A Father’s Day Plea to Sperm Donors
By COLTON WOOTEN
Raleigh, N.C.
WHEN I was 5, my mother revealed to me that I had been conceived through artificial insemination. This was before I understood anything about sex or where babies came from — I think I thought they just sprang from their mothers’ stomachs at random. Because my understanding of conventional conception was so thin, my mom remained vague about the details of my conception — in all its complexity — until I got older.
When that time came, I learned how my mother, closing in on her 40s, found herself unmarried and childless. She had finished graduate school and established a career, but regretted not having a family. And so she decided to take the business of having a baby into her own capable hands. Artificial insemination seemed like a smart idea, perhaps the only idea.
She arranged a consultation at the University of North Carolina fertility clinic in early 1992. During the visits that followed she examined the profiles of the sperm bank’s donors, compared favorable traits and credentials, and picked one. In the autumn of that year, I was born.
My mom’s decision intrigued many people. Some saw it as a triumph of female self-sufficiency. But others, particularly her close friends and family, were shocked. “You can’t have a baby without a man!” they would gasp.
It turns out, of course, you can, and pretty easily. The harder part, at least for that baby as he grows older, is the mystery of who that man was. Or is.
I didn’t think much about that until 2006, when I was in eighth grade and my teacher assigned my class a genealogy project. We were supposed to research our family history and create a family tree to share with the class. In the past, whenever questioned about my father’s absence by friends or teachers, I wove intricate alibis: he was a doctor on call; he was away on business in Russia; he had died, prematurely, of a heart attack. In my head, I’d always dismissed him as my “biological father,” with that distant, medical phrase.
But the assignment made me think about him in a new way. I decided to call the U.N.C. fertility center, hoping at least to learn my father’s name, his age or any minutiae of his existence that the clinic would be willing to divulge. But I was told that no files were saved for anonymous donors, so there was no information they could give me.
In the early days of in vitro fertilization, single women and sterile couples often overlooked a child’s eventual desire to know where he came from. Even today, despite recent movies like “The Kids Are All Right,” there is too little substantial debate on the subject. The emotional and developmental deficits that stem from an ignorance of one’s origins are still largely ignored.
I understand why fertility centers chose to keep sperm donation anonymous. They were attempting to prevent extra chaos, like custody battles, intrusion upon happy families (on either party’s side), mothers showing up on donors’ doorsteps with homely, misbegotten children with runny noses and untied shoelaces to beg for child support. It’s entirely reasonable, and yet the void that many children and young adults born from artificial insemination experience from simply not knowing transcends reason.
I don’t resent my mom; she did the best thing she knew how to do at the time, and found a way to make a child under the circumstances. But babies born of the procedure in the future should have the right to know who their donors are, and even have some contact with them. Sperm donors need to realize that they are fathers. When I was doing college interviews, one of the interviewers told me that he didn’t have any children, but that he had donated sperm while in college because he needed the money. He didn’t realize that he probably is someone’s father, regardless of whether he knows his child.
I’m one of those children, and I want to know who my father is. There are some programs like the Donor Sibling Registry that try to connect those conceived through sperm and egg donation with lost half-siblings and sometimes even parents. But I don’t have much hope that I’ll ever find him.
For my eighth grade project, I settled on fabricating the unknown side of my family tree, and not much has changed since then. I’m 18 now, today is Father’s Day, and I still hardly know anything about my biological father, just a few vague details that my mother remembers from reading his profile so many years ago. I know that he was a medical student at U.N.C. the year I was born. I know that he had olive skin and brown hair. I know that his mother was Italian and his father Irish.
I call myself an only child, but I could very well be one of many siblings. I could even be predisposed to some potentially devastating disease. Because I do not know what my father looks like, I could never recognize him in a crowd of people. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities, by the reality that my father could be anywhere: in the neighboring lane of traffic on a Friday during rush hour, behind me in line at the bank or the pharmacy, or even changing the oil in my car after many weeks of mechanical neglect.
I am sometimes at such a petrifying loss for words or emotions that make sense that I can only feel astonished by the fact that he could be anyone.
Colton Wooten graduated from Leesville Road High School this month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opini ... emc=tha212
A Father’s Day Plea to Sperm Donors
By COLTON WOOTEN
Raleigh, N.C.
WHEN I was 5, my mother revealed to me that I had been conceived through artificial insemination. This was before I understood anything about sex or where babies came from — I think I thought they just sprang from their mothers’ stomachs at random. Because my understanding of conventional conception was so thin, my mom remained vague about the details of my conception — in all its complexity — until I got older.
When that time came, I learned how my mother, closing in on her 40s, found herself unmarried and childless. She had finished graduate school and established a career, but regretted not having a family. And so she decided to take the business of having a baby into her own capable hands. Artificial insemination seemed like a smart idea, perhaps the only idea.
She arranged a consultation at the University of North Carolina fertility clinic in early 1992. During the visits that followed she examined the profiles of the sperm bank’s donors, compared favorable traits and credentials, and picked one. In the autumn of that year, I was born.
My mom’s decision intrigued many people. Some saw it as a triumph of female self-sufficiency. But others, particularly her close friends and family, were shocked. “You can’t have a baby without a man!” they would gasp.
It turns out, of course, you can, and pretty easily. The harder part, at least for that baby as he grows older, is the mystery of who that man was. Or is.
I didn’t think much about that until 2006, when I was in eighth grade and my teacher assigned my class a genealogy project. We were supposed to research our family history and create a family tree to share with the class. In the past, whenever questioned about my father’s absence by friends or teachers, I wove intricate alibis: he was a doctor on call; he was away on business in Russia; he had died, prematurely, of a heart attack. In my head, I’d always dismissed him as my “biological father,” with that distant, medical phrase.
But the assignment made me think about him in a new way. I decided to call the U.N.C. fertility center, hoping at least to learn my father’s name, his age or any minutiae of his existence that the clinic would be willing to divulge. But I was told that no files were saved for anonymous donors, so there was no information they could give me.
In the early days of in vitro fertilization, single women and sterile couples often overlooked a child’s eventual desire to know where he came from. Even today, despite recent movies like “The Kids Are All Right,” there is too little substantial debate on the subject. The emotional and developmental deficits that stem from an ignorance of one’s origins are still largely ignored.
I understand why fertility centers chose to keep sperm donation anonymous. They were attempting to prevent extra chaos, like custody battles, intrusion upon happy families (on either party’s side), mothers showing up on donors’ doorsteps with homely, misbegotten children with runny noses and untied shoelaces to beg for child support. It’s entirely reasonable, and yet the void that many children and young adults born from artificial insemination experience from simply not knowing transcends reason.
I don’t resent my mom; she did the best thing she knew how to do at the time, and found a way to make a child under the circumstances. But babies born of the procedure in the future should have the right to know who their donors are, and even have some contact with them. Sperm donors need to realize that they are fathers. When I was doing college interviews, one of the interviewers told me that he didn’t have any children, but that he had donated sperm while in college because he needed the money. He didn’t realize that he probably is someone’s father, regardless of whether he knows his child.
I’m one of those children, and I want to know who my father is. There are some programs like the Donor Sibling Registry that try to connect those conceived through sperm and egg donation with lost half-siblings and sometimes even parents. But I don’t have much hope that I’ll ever find him.
For my eighth grade project, I settled on fabricating the unknown side of my family tree, and not much has changed since then. I’m 18 now, today is Father’s Day, and I still hardly know anything about my biological father, just a few vague details that my mother remembers from reading his profile so many years ago. I know that he was a medical student at U.N.C. the year I was born. I know that he had olive skin and brown hair. I know that his mother was Italian and his father Irish.
I call myself an only child, but I could very well be one of many siblings. I could even be predisposed to some potentially devastating disease. Because I do not know what my father looks like, I could never recognize him in a crowd of people. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities, by the reality that my father could be anywhere: in the neighboring lane of traffic on a Friday during rush hour, behind me in line at the bank or the pharmacy, or even changing the oil in my car after many weeks of mechanical neglect.
I am sometimes at such a petrifying loss for words or emotions that make sense that I can only feel astonished by the fact that he could be anyone.
Colton Wooten graduated from Leesville Road High School this month.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opini ... emc=tha212
Updated October 16, 2011 07:35 PM
Fewer Babies, for Better or Worse
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/20 ... &emc=thab1
Introduction
elderly in JapanKo Sasaki for The New York Times Playing gateball in Matsue, Japan. Some economists see graying societies like Japan as a disaster in the making. Others see falling fertility as a rational response to a crowded planet.
A recent report from the Social Trends Institute points to falling fertility rates -- not only in Japan and Western Europe, but also in China and the United States -- and warns that "nations wishing to enjoy robust long-term economic growth and viable welfare states must maintain sustainable fertility rates of at least two children per woman." In the United States, the Pew Research Center recently said that the birth rate appears to be falling when the economy suffers. If a slow economy curbs the birth rate, and low birth rates hurt the economy, it sounds like a downward spiral.
As Japanese, European, Chinese and American women have fewer children, is the global economy endangered? Or is that trend a healthy step toward balancing the population explosion in many developing nations?
Fewer Babies, for Better or Worse
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/20 ... &emc=thab1
Introduction
elderly in JapanKo Sasaki for The New York Times Playing gateball in Matsue, Japan. Some economists see graying societies like Japan as a disaster in the making. Others see falling fertility as a rational response to a crowded planet.
A recent report from the Social Trends Institute points to falling fertility rates -- not only in Japan and Western Europe, but also in China and the United States -- and warns that "nations wishing to enjoy robust long-term economic growth and viable welfare states must maintain sustainable fertility rates of at least two children per woman." In the United States, the Pew Research Center recently said that the birth rate appears to be falling when the economy suffers. If a slow economy curbs the birth rate, and low birth rates hurt the economy, it sounds like a downward spiral.
As Japanese, European, Chinese and American women have fewer children, is the global economy endangered? Or is that trend a healthy step toward balancing the population explosion in many developing nations?
November 23, 2011
Are We Getting Nicer?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.
So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries.
War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.
That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
“Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”
Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third.
Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars.
Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century.
Then there are the myriad forms of violence that were once the banal backdrop of daily life. One game in feudal Europe involved men competing to head-butt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining: the possibility that it would claw out a competitor’s eye.
Think of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One academic study found that modern children’s television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour, compared with nursery rhymes with 52.2.
The decline in brutality is true of other cultures as well. When I learned Chinese, I was startled to encounter ideographs like the one of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means “cutting off a nose as punishment.” That’s one Chinese character that students no longer study.
Pinker’s book rang true to me partly because I often report on genocide and human rights abuses. I was aghast that Darfur didn’t prompt more of an international response from Western governments, but I was awed by the way American university students protested on behalf of a people who lived half a world away.
That reflects a larger truth: There is global consensus today that slaughtering civilians is an outrage. Governments may still engage in mass atrocities, but now they hire lobbyists and public relations firms to sanitize the mess.
In contrast, until modern times, genocide was simply a way of waging war. The Bible repeatedly describes God as masterminding genocide (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — Deuteronomy 20:16), and European-Americans saw nothing offensive about exterminating Native Americans. One of my heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was unapologetic: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”
The pace of moral progress has accelerated in the last few decades. Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”
The reasons for these advances are complex but may have to do with the rise of education, the decline of chauvinism and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, even hooves) of others.
Granted, the world still faces brutality and cruelty. That’s what I write about the rest of the year! But let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/opini ... emc=tha212
Are We Getting Nicer?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.
So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries.
War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.
That’s the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It’s called “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and it’s my bet to win the next Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
“Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”
Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third.
Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don’t kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S. Goldstein in his recent book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.” Goldstein also argues that it’s a myth that civilians are more likely to die in modern wars.
Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries. The murder rate in Britain seems to have fallen by more than 90 percent since the 14th century.
Then there are the myriad forms of violence that were once the banal backdrop of daily life. One game in feudal Europe involved men competing to head-butt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining: the possibility that it would claw out a competitor’s eye.
Think of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. One academic study found that modern children’s television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour, compared with nursery rhymes with 52.2.
The decline in brutality is true of other cultures as well. When I learned Chinese, I was startled to encounter ideographs like the one of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means “cutting off a nose as punishment.” That’s one Chinese character that students no longer study.
Pinker’s book rang true to me partly because I often report on genocide and human rights abuses. I was aghast that Darfur didn’t prompt more of an international response from Western governments, but I was awed by the way American university students protested on behalf of a people who lived half a world away.
That reflects a larger truth: There is global consensus today that slaughtering civilians is an outrage. Governments may still engage in mass atrocities, but now they hire lobbyists and public relations firms to sanitize the mess.
In contrast, until modern times, genocide was simply a way of waging war. The Bible repeatedly describes God as masterminding genocide (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” — Deuteronomy 20:16), and European-Americans saw nothing offensive about exterminating Native Americans. One of my heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was unapologetic: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”
The pace of moral progress has accelerated in the last few decades. Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”
The reasons for these advances are complex but may have to do with the rise of education, the decline of chauvinism and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, even hooves) of others.
Granted, the world still faces brutality and cruelty. That’s what I write about the rest of the year! But let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/opini ... emc=tha212
February 20, 2012
The Talent Society
By DAVID BROOKS
We’re living in the middle of an amazing era of individualism. A few generations ago, it was considered shameful for people to have children unless they were married. But as Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise reported in The Times on Saturday, these days, more than half of the births to women under 30 occur outside of marriage.
In 1957, 57 percent of those surveyed said that they believed that adults who preferred to be single were “immoral” or “neurotic.” But today, as Eric Klinenberg reminds us in his book, “Going Solo,” more than 50 percent of adults are single. Twenty-eight percent of households nationwide consist of just one person. There are more single-person households than there are married-with-children households. In cities like Denver, Washington and Atlanta, more than 40 percent of the households are one-person dwellings. In Manhattan, roughly half the households are solos.
A few generations ago, most people affiliated with one of the major parties. But now more people consider themselves independent than either Republican or Democrat. A few generations ago, many people worked for large corporations and were members of a labor union. But now lifetime employment is down and union membership has plummeted.
A few generations ago, teenagers went steady. But over the past decades, the dating relationship has been replaced by a more amorphous hook-up culture. A few generations ago, most people belonged to a major religious denomination. Today, the fastest-growing religious category is “unaffiliated.”
The trend is pretty clear. Fifty years ago, America was groupy. People were more likely to be enmeshed in stable, dense and obligatory relationships. They were more defined by permanent social roles: mother, father, deacon. Today, individuals have more freedom. They move between more diverse, loosely structured and flexible networks of relationships.
People are less likely to be trapped in bad marriages and bad situations. They move from network to network, depending on their individual needs at the moment. At the same time, bonds are probably shallower and more tenuous.
We can all think of reasons for this transformation. Affluence: people have more money to live apart if they want to. Feminism: women have more power to define their own lives. The aging society: more widows and widowers live alone. The information revolution: the Internet and smartphones make it easier to construct far-flung, flexible networks. Skepticism: more people believe that marriage is not for them.
But if there is one theme that weaves through all the different causes, it is this: The maximization of talent. People want more space to develop their own individual talents. They want more flexibility to explore their own interests and develop their own identities, lifestyles and capacities. They are more impatient with situations that they find stifling.
Many people have argued that these changes have led to a culture of atomization, loneliness and self-absorption. That’s overdrawn. In “Going Solo,” Klinenberg nicely shows that people who live alone are more likely to visit friends and join social groups. They are more likely to congregate in and create active, dynamic cities.
It’s more accurate to say that we have gone from a society that protected people from their frailties to a society that allows people to maximize their talents.
The old settled social structures were stifling to many creative and dynamic people (and in those days discrimination stifled people even more). But people who were depressed, disorganized and disadvantaged were able to lead lives enmeshed in supportive relationships.
Today, the fast flexible and diverse networks allow the ambitious and the gifted to surf through amazing possibilities. They are able to construct richer, more varied lives. They are able to enjoy interesting information-age workplaces and then go home and find serenity in a one-bedroom apartment.
On the other hand, people who lack social capital are more likely to fall through the cracks. It takes effort, organization and a certain set of skills to surf these new, protean social networks. People who are unable to make the effort or lack social capital are more likely to be alone. As Klinenberg and others have shown, this is especially likely to happen to solitary middle-aged men, who are more likely to lack the drive and the social facilities to go out and make their own friendship circles.
Over all, we’ve made life richer for the people who have the social capital to create their own worlds. We’ve also made it harder for the people who don’t — especially poorer children.
These trends are not going to reverse themselves. So maybe it’s time to acknowledge a core reality: People with skills can really thrive in this tenuous, networked society. People without those advantages would probably be better off if we could build new versions of the settled, stable and thick arrangements we’ve left behind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/opini ... n&emc=tyb1
The Talent Society
By DAVID BROOKS
We’re living in the middle of an amazing era of individualism. A few generations ago, it was considered shameful for people to have children unless they were married. But as Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise reported in The Times on Saturday, these days, more than half of the births to women under 30 occur outside of marriage.
In 1957, 57 percent of those surveyed said that they believed that adults who preferred to be single were “immoral” or “neurotic.” But today, as Eric Klinenberg reminds us in his book, “Going Solo,” more than 50 percent of adults are single. Twenty-eight percent of households nationwide consist of just one person. There are more single-person households than there are married-with-children households. In cities like Denver, Washington and Atlanta, more than 40 percent of the households are one-person dwellings. In Manhattan, roughly half the households are solos.
A few generations ago, most people affiliated with one of the major parties. But now more people consider themselves independent than either Republican or Democrat. A few generations ago, many people worked for large corporations and were members of a labor union. But now lifetime employment is down and union membership has plummeted.
A few generations ago, teenagers went steady. But over the past decades, the dating relationship has been replaced by a more amorphous hook-up culture. A few generations ago, most people belonged to a major religious denomination. Today, the fastest-growing religious category is “unaffiliated.”
The trend is pretty clear. Fifty years ago, America was groupy. People were more likely to be enmeshed in stable, dense and obligatory relationships. They were more defined by permanent social roles: mother, father, deacon. Today, individuals have more freedom. They move between more diverse, loosely structured and flexible networks of relationships.
People are less likely to be trapped in bad marriages and bad situations. They move from network to network, depending on their individual needs at the moment. At the same time, bonds are probably shallower and more tenuous.
We can all think of reasons for this transformation. Affluence: people have more money to live apart if they want to. Feminism: women have more power to define their own lives. The aging society: more widows and widowers live alone. The information revolution: the Internet and smartphones make it easier to construct far-flung, flexible networks. Skepticism: more people believe that marriage is not for them.
But if there is one theme that weaves through all the different causes, it is this: The maximization of talent. People want more space to develop their own individual talents. They want more flexibility to explore their own interests and develop their own identities, lifestyles and capacities. They are more impatient with situations that they find stifling.
Many people have argued that these changes have led to a culture of atomization, loneliness and self-absorption. That’s overdrawn. In “Going Solo,” Klinenberg nicely shows that people who live alone are more likely to visit friends and join social groups. They are more likely to congregate in and create active, dynamic cities.
It’s more accurate to say that we have gone from a society that protected people from their frailties to a society that allows people to maximize their talents.
The old settled social structures were stifling to many creative and dynamic people (and in those days discrimination stifled people even more). But people who were depressed, disorganized and disadvantaged were able to lead lives enmeshed in supportive relationships.
Today, the fast flexible and diverse networks allow the ambitious and the gifted to surf through amazing possibilities. They are able to construct richer, more varied lives. They are able to enjoy interesting information-age workplaces and then go home and find serenity in a one-bedroom apartment.
On the other hand, people who lack social capital are more likely to fall through the cracks. It takes effort, organization and a certain set of skills to surf these new, protean social networks. People who are unable to make the effort or lack social capital are more likely to be alone. As Klinenberg and others have shown, this is especially likely to happen to solitary middle-aged men, who are more likely to lack the drive and the social facilities to go out and make their own friendship circles.
Over all, we’ve made life richer for the people who have the social capital to create their own worlds. We’ve also made it harder for the people who don’t — especially poorer children.
These trends are not going to reverse themselves. So maybe it’s time to acknowledge a core reality: People with skills can really thrive in this tenuous, networked society. People without those advantages would probably be better off if we could build new versions of the settled, stable and thick arrangements we’ve left behind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/opini ... n&emc=tyb1
March 12, 2012
The Fertility Implosion
By DAVID BROOKS
When you look at pictures from the Arab spring, you see these gigantic crowds of young men, and it confirms the impression that the Muslim Middle East has a gigantic youth bulge — hundreds of millions of young people with little to do. But that view is becoming obsolete. As Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute point out, over the past three decades, the Arab world has undergone a little noticed demographic implosion. Arab adults are having many fewer kids.
Usually, high religious observance and low income go along with high birthrates. But, according to the United States Census Bureau, Iran now has a similar birth rate to New England — which is the least fertile region in the U.S.
The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.
The Iranian regime is aware of how the rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the work force could lead to long-term decline. But there’s not much they have been able to do about it. Maybe Iranians are pessimistic about the future. Maybe Iranian parents just want smaller families.
As Eberstadt is careful to note, demographics is not necessarily destiny. You can have fast economic development with low fertility or high fertility (South Korea and Taiwan did it a few decades ago). But, over the long term, it’s better to have a growing work force, not one that’s shrinking compared with the number of retirees.
If you look around the world, you see many other nations facing demographic headwinds. If the 20th century was the century of the population explosion, the 21st century, as Eberstadt notes, is looking like the century of the fertility implosion.
Already, nearly half the world’s population lives in countries with birthrates below the replacement level. According to the Census Bureau, the total increase in global manpower between 2010 and 2030 will be just half the increase we experienced in the two decades that just ended. At the same time, according to work by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, the growth in educational attainment around the world is slowing.
This leads to what the writer Philip Longman has called the gray tsunami — a situation in which huge shares of the population are over 60 and small shares are under 30.
Some countries have it worse than others. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has managed the trick of having low birthrates and high death rates. Russian life expectancy is basically the same as it was 50 years ago, and the nation’s population has declined by roughly six million since 1992.
Rapidly aging Japan has one of the worst demographic profiles, and most European profiles are famously grim. In China, long-term economic growth could face serious demographic restraints. The number of Chinese senior citizens is soaring by 3.7 percent year after year. By 2030, as Eberstadt notes, there will be many more older workers (ages 50-64) than younger workers (15-29). In 2010, there were almost twice as many younger ones. In a culture where there is low social trust outside the family, a generation of only children is giving birth to another generation of only children, which is bound to lead to deep social change.
Even the countries with healthier demographics are facing problems. India, for example, will continue to produce plenty of young workers. By 2030, according to the Vienna Institute of Demography, India will have 100 million relatively educated young men, compared with fewer than 75 million in China.
But India faces a regional challenge. Population growth is high in the northern parts of the country, where people tend to be poorer and less educated. Meanwhile, fertility rates in the southern parts of the country, where people are richer and better educated, are already below replacement levels.
The U.S. has long had higher birthrates than Japan and most European nations. The U.S. population is increasing at every age level, thanks in part to immigration. America is aging, but not as fast as other countries.
But even that is looking fragile. The 2010 census suggested that U.S. population growth is decelerating faster than many expected.
Besides, it’s probably wrong to see this as a demographic competition. American living standards will be hurt by an aging and less dynamic world, even if the U.S. does attract young workers.
For decades, people took dynamism and economic growth for granted and saw population growth as a problem. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and it’s clear that young people are the scarce resource. In the 21st century, the U.S. could be the slowly aging leader of a rapidly aging world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/opini ... h_20120313
The Fertility Implosion
By DAVID BROOKS
When you look at pictures from the Arab spring, you see these gigantic crowds of young men, and it confirms the impression that the Muslim Middle East has a gigantic youth bulge — hundreds of millions of young people with little to do. But that view is becoming obsolete. As Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute point out, over the past three decades, the Arab world has undergone a little noticed demographic implosion. Arab adults are having many fewer kids.
Usually, high religious observance and low income go along with high birthrates. But, according to the United States Census Bureau, Iran now has a similar birth rate to New England — which is the least fertile region in the U.S.
The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.
The Iranian regime is aware of how the rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the work force could lead to long-term decline. But there’s not much they have been able to do about it. Maybe Iranians are pessimistic about the future. Maybe Iranian parents just want smaller families.
As Eberstadt is careful to note, demographics is not necessarily destiny. You can have fast economic development with low fertility or high fertility (South Korea and Taiwan did it a few decades ago). But, over the long term, it’s better to have a growing work force, not one that’s shrinking compared with the number of retirees.
If you look around the world, you see many other nations facing demographic headwinds. If the 20th century was the century of the population explosion, the 21st century, as Eberstadt notes, is looking like the century of the fertility implosion.
Already, nearly half the world’s population lives in countries with birthrates below the replacement level. According to the Census Bureau, the total increase in global manpower between 2010 and 2030 will be just half the increase we experienced in the two decades that just ended. At the same time, according to work by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, the growth in educational attainment around the world is slowing.
This leads to what the writer Philip Longman has called the gray tsunami — a situation in which huge shares of the population are over 60 and small shares are under 30.
Some countries have it worse than others. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has managed the trick of having low birthrates and high death rates. Russian life expectancy is basically the same as it was 50 years ago, and the nation’s population has declined by roughly six million since 1992.
Rapidly aging Japan has one of the worst demographic profiles, and most European profiles are famously grim. In China, long-term economic growth could face serious demographic restraints. The number of Chinese senior citizens is soaring by 3.7 percent year after year. By 2030, as Eberstadt notes, there will be many more older workers (ages 50-64) than younger workers (15-29). In 2010, there were almost twice as many younger ones. In a culture where there is low social trust outside the family, a generation of only children is giving birth to another generation of only children, which is bound to lead to deep social change.
Even the countries with healthier demographics are facing problems. India, for example, will continue to produce plenty of young workers. By 2030, according to the Vienna Institute of Demography, India will have 100 million relatively educated young men, compared with fewer than 75 million in China.
But India faces a regional challenge. Population growth is high in the northern parts of the country, where people tend to be poorer and less educated. Meanwhile, fertility rates in the southern parts of the country, where people are richer and better educated, are already below replacement levels.
The U.S. has long had higher birthrates than Japan and most European nations. The U.S. population is increasing at every age level, thanks in part to immigration. America is aging, but not as fast as other countries.
But even that is looking fragile. The 2010 census suggested that U.S. population growth is decelerating faster than many expected.
Besides, it’s probably wrong to see this as a demographic competition. American living standards will be hurt by an aging and less dynamic world, even if the U.S. does attract young workers.
For decades, people took dynamism and economic growth for granted and saw population growth as a problem. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and it’s clear that young people are the scarce resource. In the 21st century, the U.S. could be the slowly aging leader of a rapidly aging world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/opini ... h_20120313
Nigeria Tested by Rapid Rise in Population
Excerpt:
Last October, the United Nations announced the global population had breached seven billion and would expand rapidly for decades, taxing natural resources if countries cannot better manage the growth.
Nearly all of the increase is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population rise far outstrips economic expansion. Of the roughly 20 countries where women average more than five children, almost all are in the region.
Elsewhere in the developing world, in Asia and Latin America, fertility rates have fallen sharply in recent generations and now resemble those in the United States — just above two children per woman. That transformation was driven in each country by a mix of educational and employment opportunities for women, access to contraception, urbanization and an evolving middle class. Whether similar forces will defuse the population bomb in sub-Sarahan Africa is unclear.
More and multimedia at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world ... h_20120415
Excerpt:
Last October, the United Nations announced the global population had breached seven billion and would expand rapidly for decades, taxing natural resources if countries cannot better manage the growth.
Nearly all of the increase is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population rise far outstrips economic expansion. Of the roughly 20 countries where women average more than five children, almost all are in the region.
Elsewhere in the developing world, in Asia and Latin America, fertility rates have fallen sharply in recent generations and now resemble those in the United States — just above two children per woman. That transformation was driven in each country by a mix of educational and employment opportunities for women, access to contraception, urbanization and an evolving middle class. Whether similar forces will defuse the population bomb in sub-Sarahan Africa is unclear.
More and multimedia at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world ... h_20120415