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Strollerderby
While most parents-to-be will say they just want a healthy child and don’t have a gender preference, at least one large survey of prospective parents says otherwise. Nearly 80% of the more than 10,000 parents surveyed worldwide said they did have a gender preference going in and throughout their pregnancies. And while their reasons for desiring a boy or a girl may have varied, their options did not. Other than some completely unscientific methods that are supposed to help you conceive a boy or a girl, having a child of either gender is a 50/50 proposition.
But what if there was a way to ensure you got the boy or girl you always wanted? In Thailand, there is. Continue reading »
Think pink.
SD blogger Sierra reported last week that Maria New and her colleagues at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine have been experimenting with an off-label use of the hormone dexamethasone (aka “dex”), injecting pregnant women in order to prevent their daughters from “abnormal” gendered behavior.
In other words, New is using dex to create prototype 50′s housewives: feminine, straight, maternal homemakers. This news is disturbing enough, but what I find more insidious is the way that Sharon Begley of Newsweek is trying to temper the public’s outrage at this type of genetic engineering by presenting a more balanced portrait of New’s work.
Just as Hannah Rosin tried to offer a legitimate rationale for the methods Dr. Dix Poppas uses in surgically altering and subsequently testing the sensitivity of young girls with CAH in her recent piece on Slate, Begley begins her story by saying, “The controversy over using female hormones as part of prenatal care isn’t quite as shocking as the headlines suggest.” Really? Because I’m pretty sure it is shocking. Maybe more shocking than we’ve considered.
New’s mad scientist routine, along with Poppas’s quest to build a female Frankenstein, were both unearthed by bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University. Begley says the result of Dreger’s digging “is a discovery that is much less outrageous than the PR push, and some media coverage, would have you believe.” Dreger says New is pursuing the “first systematic approach to prenatally preventing homosexuality and bisexuality,” and she’s got quotes from scientific papers and slides from presentations by New that prove it. Begley herself even quotes a 2010 paper written by New, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, filled with inflammatory statements that clearly indicate New’s position that females who do not conform to traditional roles are abnormal, and that the prenatal use of dex will help them marry men and have babies, like any good girl should. Continue reading »
Disney has finally given us a trailer for ‘Tangled’, their upcoming princess movie. As expected, they’re downplaying the princess angle and pushing the prince. Word on the street is they’re aiming to market a princess movie for boys.
Good luck with that, Disney.
The trailer (which you can watch behind the cut, below), downplays the princess quite a bit. She doesn’t even show up till halfway through, and we get only glimpses of her. She’s a girl of few words, apparently. That’s all par for the Disney course.
Everything else is different. The prince is a thief, the dialog sharp and funny, the animation is CG fabulous and the princess…well. Let’s just say she’s not helplessly trapped in that tower.
In fact, all the hub-ub about her absence on screen and Disney’s marketing ploy for the ‘y’ chromosomes in the movie market has missed what seems to me the most important reveal of the trailer.
In ‘Tangled,’ Rapunzel has prehensile hair. Which she uses to beat up the prince when he invades her personal space. How cool is that?
The blog department here at Babble is expanding like a pregnant belly! Our latest addition, Being Pregnant, gives you all the news you need about how to get by during those fascinating nine months.
In a recent post, Ceridwen Morris – a childbirth instructor at Tribeca Parenting in NYC – weighs in on how much involvement fathers can and should have during pregnancy.
Dr. Jonathan Ives of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Birmingham says “dad’s involvement in pregnancy and childbirth might actually be setting him up to fail as a new father.” Morris says the logic behind Ives’ controversial statement is this: a man is expected to empathetically experience the pregnancy with his partner, “but hard as he may try the fact is he’s not the one doing the work. So he begins to feel like a passive, useless partner and this lack of mojo carries over into actual parenthood.”
I’ve seen the same argument used to explain why some modern men develop passive-aggressive personalities: because they don’t feel like men anymore. Have we, in our struggle to eradicate gender bias, lost some of the benefits reaped by our innate differences?
I’d always assumed that the reason men of today were encouraged to be more involved in pregnancy and the birth of their children is so they’d be more attached to the baby when it was born. But Morris actually thinks Ives is onto something.
She says, “America really loves equality. For better or for worse, it continues to be the primary force behind the women’s movement. But gestating and birthing a baby isn’t something men and women can share equally. It’s a time in our lives when the differences between men and women are starkly apparent.” Continue reading »
New Scientist has sent one of their reporters, who happens to be pregnant, to do a little investigative research on the power of old wives tales to predict who’s inside that bump.
“Women’s Intuition” won the day. While all the other tales she investigated turned up duds, Linda Geddes reports that she’s expecting a daughter. An ultrasound confirmed the feeling she’s had for weeks that her baby would be a girl.
She’s not relying on her own anecdotal experience alone, though. There’s research that shows over three quarters of women can accurately guess the sex of their baby.
When someone has the audacity to suggest that science is for boys or that girls can’t do math, I’ll simply ask them if they own or have ever used a computer. When they say yes, I tell them to thank a woman — specifically, Admiral Grace Hopper who is, in large part, responsible for the proliferation of computers we see today. Sadly, that sort of discussion happens all too often and, according to a new study of existing research, contributes to the lower numbers of women in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
While Barbie has been making strides to break the glass ceiling of corporate America (hey, Barbie’s a computer engineer!), a new line of Mad Men Barbies promises to set Barbie back to the subservient “don’t speak unless unless spoken to” gender roles of the 1960′s. Continue reading »
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