Pregnancy Is Not the Public's Business « chanel bags for cheap
Pregnancy Is Not the Public’s Business
When should you have a baby? I ask not because I am planning one of my own (sorry, Mom!) or because, as I creak over the midpoint of my 30s, I can’t weigh the risks and drawbacks for myself. It’s not even that I care what you think. But between the Super Bowl’s controversial Tim Tebow ad, Lifetime’s highest-rated debut ever, “The Pregnancy Pact,” Rielle Hunter’s very public child-support woes, and a flood of recent other online, onscreen and on-page debates, I’ve finally realized that even if the question is moot (like, 20 years moot), a woman is still expected to offer it up for general discussion. Get the new
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So, here we go. Just so you know, I’m already up to speed on some major no-go’s. Not if I’m too young. (Covered!) Not if I’m too old. (Oh, no worries! Apparently it’s too late — when you’re over 30, even your eggs fly the coop.) And here come the more wobbly proscriptions of our modern era: Not — prepare the crimson “S”! — if you’re single. (See: “Not in the best interests of the child”.) Not if you’re amicably separated. (Unless you’re prepared to be seen as a damsel-in-distress by the entire Western world.) Definitely not when the father of your baby is currently married to someone else. (Here, as far as I can see, mainly because people won’t be able to differentiate that choice from the choice to have the affair.) And not if Sen. Scott Brown is anywhere in the vicinity. (Witness the man who used his victory speech to auction off his daughters give a moral-police snort at our president’s mother’s connubial status when she gave birth — which, as it happens, was married.) But even these are just offshoots of our culture’s favorite debate about women: how much you need a man, and how bad a person you probably are if you don’t have one. Children simply up the ante, because it’s generally agreed that children fare better in stable households, and it’s easy for the moral police to fudge “stable” to mean “mother and father.” (Don’t be insensible to the powers of such fudging. Well-meaning people tsk-tsk’d about my probable psychological damage as the daughter of one black parent and one white parent my whole life, and Loving v. Virginia only overturned the laws against it six years before I was born.) But only so many people have enough free time to subjugate women and second-guess other people’s parenting on a daily basis. (More than you’d like, but only so many.) Despite the perennial political football Roe v. Wade, the majority of Americans irritatingly persist in thinking other people’s child-bearing and child-rearing choices are basically their own. So what’s a media stalled on Rielle and John’s sex tape and
