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EVERYTHING
Trump’s Project 2025 Architect: Having Kids Should Be a ‘Social Expectation’
What: Kevin Roberts, the man who helped lead the creation of Donald Trump’s Project 2025, is out with a new book, and it includes the usual GOP hits these days: opposing not *just* abortion but also birth control and IVF. (And Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance wrote the forward for the book.)
Why it matters: Roberts goes deep into criticizing people without children, saying that “having children should not be considered an ‘optional individual choice’ but ‘a social expectation.’” He goes on: “A culture of childlessness is, in the final analysis, a culture of despair. Getting married and having kids, on the other hand, gives you skin in the game for the future of your country. It forces you to grow up, give up childish things, and live in the real world.”
Source: Media Matters
PREGNANCY + POSTPARTUM
‘Natural’ Parenting Is All About Female Sacrifice
What: New York Times’ columnist Michelle Goldberg has the dark history of the people who sold women the “natural childbirth” movement.
Why it matters: “Amy Tuteur, a retired OB-GYN, former Harvard Medical School instructor and longtime foe of the natural-parenting movement, points out that Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who coined the term ‘natural childbirth,’ was a eugenicist who believed that ‘primitive’ women didn’t experience pain in childbirth, unlike ‘over-civilized’ white women. He regarded women’s fear of labor as hysterical and wanted upper-middle-class white women to get over it so that they’d have more babies. …When Dr. William Sears developed his influential theories on attachment parenting — a philosophy that promotes near-constant baby-wearing and co-sleeping — he was an evangelical Christian who believed that God had ordained women’s submission to their husbands. Natural parenting has since been thoroughly secularized, but it still preaches something akin to spiritual transcendence through female sacrifice.”
Source: New York Times
BIRTH CONTROL
North Carolina Makes Opill Free on Medicaid
What: North Carolina women on Medicaid—nearly 30% of women in the state—can now get the over-the-counter birth control pill, Opill, at no cost.
Why it matters: North Carolina restricts abortion after 12 weeks. Making birth control free of charge can go a long way to helping women in the state avoid unwanted pregnancies.
Source: ABC News
ABORTION ACCESS
Self-Managed Abortions Surge After Dobbs
What: A study in JAMA Network Open finds (unsurprisingly) that reports of self-managed abortions have increased 40% since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade. The authors surveyed more than 14,000 women under age 50.
Why it matters: “The new study suggests that self-managing an abortion with abortion pills has become more common, rising from about 18% of attempts pre-Dobbs to 24% post-Dobbs. However, many other ineffective, and sometimes unsafe, methods were also common. More than a quarter of women who attempted to self-manage an abortion said they took herbs, more than 1 in 5 said that they hit themselves in the stomach and nearly 1 in 5 said they used alcohol or other substances.”
Source: CNN
MENTAL HEALTH
Women Shoulder the Biggest Mental Load of Household Work, Too
What: Psychology researchers at USC wanted to go deeper on how two-parent households with a male and female partner divide labor. Instead of just looking at the tasks completed, they also examined “the cognitive work—i.e. anticipating, planning, delegating—required to actually get the tasks done.”
Why it matters: “We found a striking gender disparity: Mothers not only performed more physical housework but also carried a significantly greater share of cognitive labor compared with their partners. On average, mothers reported being responsible for about 73% of all cognitive household labor compared with their partners’ 27%, and 64% of all physical household labor compared with their partners’ 36%. Indeed, for every single task we examined, the gender difference was larger for the cognitive dimension than the physical execution dimension. There was only one task in which fathers did more planning and execution: taking out the garbage. Fathers also carried out more home maintenance tasks, but mothers did more of the related planning.”
Source: The Conversation
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