NYMPHE: Childless, Childfree, Parent, Stepmom.

Childless-or-free & Parents: Always the Twain Shall Meet

Babble.com ran a nice piece by a woman in the city whose next door neighbors—on the other side of thin walls—had a baby. A screaming, loud baby. But it's not an anti-breeder or anti-kid rant, just a thoughtful story about, well, life. Read Jami Attenberg's piece here...

 

MOVING BEYOND GRIEF: Advice from Sugar

My blog nattering may be helpful now and again, but I'm no Sugar on The Rumpus. Freaking great, amazing stuff. This Sugar post discusses grief, miscarriage, depression, and abused teens---yet it is compassionate, practical, and realistic. It's not depressing at all.

Grieving? In the stuck place? Click that link and go read. Now. And here is a quote:

"You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you."

My Fault, I'm Female...

MFIF—My Fault, I'm Female—is collecting everyday stories about how we are mistreated and belittled for being girls and women. Shouldn't be any big news to anyone who's been a chick for very long, but it makes for a strangely addictive read.

This post talks about being flipped out on by a very-breeding guy because the writer is female and CFBC (childfree by choice). 

(Photo is of me and Carrie in a high school play approximately 4.5 billion light-years ago...)

ALL JOY, NO FUN: CHILDFREE & CHILDED VIEWS TO PERUSE

Is parenting like being an ex-patriot or showing horses? Folks from across the spectrum weigh in, following The New York magazine article "All Joy and No Fun" by Jennifer Senior. The piece has stirred up conversation about whether parenting makes people "happy" or miserable, and makes [some of] us look at what the heck "happiness" is in the first place. How some others are responding to the piece:

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Sarah Wildman, a foreign policy correspondent, likens parenting to being an ex-patriot, where everything is more intense compared to the previous, childless/childfree life:

"When we were expats we liked to say the intensity of experience was different, different from living at home. Living in another language, in another culture, sharpened our senses. When things went wrong, they went disastrously, horribly wrong. But when they were right, the reward was so much sweeter.
Having a kid is a little like being an expat in the world—the highs are that much higher, the lows that much lower, the intensity like nothing else. Joy and pain; tears and laughter; everything that much sharper than it was before."

Read more at politicsdaily.com, where you can't make comments unless you're signed in as an AOL or AIM user. Not Facebook, not Google, freakin' AOL. (Wtf? Who the hell is an AOL user these days?)

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Rufus Griscom, a co-founder of Babble, sent writer Biz Mitchell on assignment to find out how previous studies worked, studies that consistently showed higher levels of "happiness" among childless/childfree people, or among eventual parents before having kids and during times of life when the kids get more independent.

"Biz did indeed find a silver lining, carefully extracted from Gilbert and his fellow gloomy scientists, and it was as follows: though average happiness goes down when you have kids, experiences of extreme pleasure and pain increase. In effect, by having kids you are re-submitting your life to the turbulent intensity — the highs and lows — of earlier phases of life."

Griscom's new article is here on Babble:    where a commenter called tableforthree also says, "For me, parenting is sort of like travel. There's a lot of suffering when you travel, but the moments of transcendence and discovery more than make up for the time stuck in airports."

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Writer Elizabeth Mitchell ("Biz", I assume), delved into issues of happiness and parenting—and took on the dismal studies—in "Are you happy? Are you sure? Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded" way back in 2006 on Babble. The article is thorough and entertaining.

"And maybe having children never actually promised happiness. We misunderstood all those cooing grandparents when they said they were so happy for us. They truly meant that they were happy, not you. They were happy you were finally going to be broken of your tenacious selfishness." Ha, that's pretty good. Misery loves company!

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Amanda Hess of Sexist Beatdown and Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown swap some lighthearted, occasionally interesting tidbits about the NY mag article at the Washington City Paper. The piece's intro starts strong, noting that feminist women writers have long bemoaned the drudgery of parenthood, whereas now that men often share the day-to-day miseries, suddenly it's big news that parenting can be a drag.

The comments on this piece are far more thoughtful and thought-provoking than the usual Internet childfree-versus-parenting fare, which is quite nice to see. Too bad the meat of the article tends to brush over real issues in favor of self-congratulatory humor about being childfree. Here are some of the good nuggets:

Amanda: 'I think the happiness part is some new-agey conception of raising children. It’s important to remember that joy aside, the fact is that now a lot of people get to choose whether they have children or not, and if so, when. And so it becomes much more of a quality-of-life question than a biological-necessity one. And so I think it’s fair to expect that you do the thing that you think will make you the happiest. But there’s also a lot of fear-mongering about that, because of that whole ovary-loss thing. So people are like, “If you don’t have kids now, you will never be happy and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!” And people on the other end are like, “Once you pop it out, there’s no turning back! Life-ruiner!” When, actually, I bet that a lot of people could find meaningful, happy lives doing either of those things.'

Sady: 'I think it’s worth noting that a ton of the parents interviewed, who were speaking most directly about being unhappy and frustrated, were women. Men in that article were mostly “experts,” even if they were also fathers.'

Sady again: 'But I’m also wondering if being told that children are the KEY TO HAPPINESS (if you are a woman) has to do with the disappointment (among women) that children don’t auto-fulfill you? I mean, Simone de Beauvoir talked about this. Her whole deal was that women are told having children will fulfill them, and then it doesn’t, and then they hate their children. Her solution: Make something else in your life more important than getting pregnant?'

Amanda again: 'The story did mention that the most unhappy parents of all were those who were the non-custodial parent (mostly fathers). So having a kid and not raising it? Depressed for life. Having a kid and raising it too much? Also depressed—single parents and moms in general were less happy. Solution: Move to Norway?'

One of their commenters, Rachel in WY: 'to me it’s funny that people don’t conclude from studies like this: the cultural expectations we have are really fucked when it comes to parenting, and especially mothering. Instead, in this narrative it’s the kids themselves that make you unhappy.'

Adds commenter PD: 'In my case, it took me a while to come to the conclusion that I wanted children. I spent a long time agonizing over all the possible issues that could come up when raising children, and debating with myself over whether I was willing and able to handle them. It took my husband maybe a week to come to the same conclusion, and he’s been very serene about it because, I believe, he just hasn’t thought about it very much.'

Says commenter Socrates, a dad: 'If you spend parenting time obsessing that you could be doing something else, well it is hardly surprising you won’t enjoy it. Happiness is a choice a lot of the time.' (Typepad seems to be barfing out on this formatting. My apologies if it comes out weird.)

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Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, wrote Stumbling on Happiness, a book that clearly illustrates how kids bum out their parents around toddlerhood and teenagehood, even though parents say that parenting has made their lives happier. "When they replicate this study in France," says Gilbert to Mitchell, "women in France are not quite as unhappy when they are interacting with their children as women in the United States. We could imagine in some cultures it's not true at all.

"The differences aren't genetic differences. They are cultural differences, and one cultural difference is that in most of Western Europe people are not living lives that are quite as — what shall we call them — professionally frenzied? Running to the job in the morning, coming home at night, both parents working night and day. People in Europe are a little more relaxed and are able to spend more time with their families. And if children were really a source of agony, then the more time you spend with them the worse you would feel.

"But it turns out that people who have a little more time to spend with their kids are happier with them. Which once again points to the problem being conflict, which is not that children make us unhappy it's that doing too much makes us unhappy."

These interview snippets come from the same Mitchell article above, on Babble.

While I'm pretty sick of any sentence involving the word "should" these days, I appreciate Gilbert's assessment that "Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn't all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn't what we're trying for. As human beings, it's not our aim. It shouldn't be our goal.

"What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average. In my own experience that's probably not a bad description of a day with a kid." Since the article is about parenting, he doesn't note that these kinds of experiences are frequently felt by non-parents who take on challenging situations: not light and fun in every moment, but unbeatably worthwhile in the bigger picture.

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...which is pretty much what I noted on Nymphe in "Meaning & Bigtime Satisfaction vs. Moment-to-Moment Happiness."

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Columnist Bonnie Erbé's article "Childless? Heck No—Child-free!" provides a non-parent point of view on politicsdaily's site. Unfortunately, it breaks little new ground for anyone who follows these issues. The word childless is a sucky way to describe people? Yep, we knew that. People treat you weird if you're childfree/childless by choice in a pronatal, family-centric culture? Yep, knew that too, especially if you're female.

Many childfree people would trade their "accomplishments," experiences, and memories for those of parents any day, we also discover. Well, duh! And many parents feel the same. They wouldn't go back in time and eliminate children from their lives in order to stay childfree forever. This is healthy. This is how we make sense of our lives and find joy in what we do, instead of wallowing in regret and doubt 24 hours a day.

Erbé compares her experiences showing horses with those of parents who bring kids to show their ponies. It's a nice example of different modes of living. Again unfortunately, because I for one would love to see the cliché of self-centered childfrees laid to rest, she comes off as smug, uninterested in other people, and a little shallow. But she does prove that she is happy, which I think was her point.

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Can I just say: come ON, childfree writers, step up to the plate! The parent-writers are kicking your *ass* on this one. At least on the blogs and papers I'm finding. This is exactly the sort of discussion that could lead to greater understanding of the childless/childfree minority by the childed/parenting majority. But being defensive, flippant, and shallow is not gonna engage 'em in the discussion. Urgh.

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Albert Mohler, a Christian blogger on Crosswalk.com, sees in the New York mag article that "Many parents do see their children as described by Senior — as "subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed." Parental authority is replaced by constant power struggles, lest the children be psychologically warped by a parent who stands in authority. Discipline is replaced by never-ending negotiation. The peace of the home is replaced by constant activity and frenetic energy. The earliest years of a child's life are increasingly filled with organized activity and institutional settings.

No wonder parents are less happy now." Lack of discipline, having kids late in life, and the transition of parenting from a normal life expectation to a lifestyle choice, contribute to the difficulties and unhappiness of modern parenting. Of course there's a solution: Christ! 

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Core Knowledge blogger Robert Pondiscio  writes of Senior's article: "For those unaccustomed to New York-style navel gazing, the piece can read dangerously close to Onion-style parody—“Parents surprised to learn parenting isn’t fun”—but if you can get past the whiny anecdotes from Manhattan habitués there are interesting ideas to chew on." He takes care to note Senior's discussion of how our currently popular mode of overbearing, overachieving parenthood might be sucking the happiness out of it.

COULD IT BE THAT THE CONVERSATION IS FINALLY GETTING MORE REASONABLE? CHILDFREE VS. BREEDERS IN A NEW LIGHT.

Obligatory warning: This post mentions pregnancy but doesn't otherwise get deep into infant/preggo talk. Should be safe for most CF/CL readers, I think...

The tenor of conversation online about childless, childfree, and parental issues seemed shrill, unreasonable, and unlikely to solve any problems in the long run, when I started this blog a few years back. I was vocally childfree for many years, got interviewed about it, got published about it, etc., but hopefully not in any hateful way. Still, it was an important component of my identity.

Some 10-15 years ago I joined an online CF group, a small one populated by some folks I knew in real life and other people too. Some stuff I found humorous; I didn't mind the word "breeder" (which my "fruit" friends had long called us "hets"); it was nice to share experiences with like-minded people.

However, the viciousness and bitterness of other posts seemed way out of whack. Well-off white people with graduate-level educations and good futures in the tech industry snarling about how put-upon they were by those nasty, evil breeding types—it seemed bizarrely cruel, classist, elitist, and frankly sometimes sexist. The conversations tended to be about how fuckin' cool we were for not being like the pond-scum normals who procreate. Many of whom were not just unenlightened and prone to talk about dull subjects like children, but poor and uneducated. La ti tah.

 So, though I really wanted to hang with fellow CF/CL people, I left the group.

When I wanted to rediscover resources for CF/CL folks online, years later, I found many a place that was even worse. Especially as I began, to my utter dismay, to experience the biological clock and question my previously rock-solid decision not to breed, I really sought good conversation about these things. From comments posted to newspaper sites when they ran articles about childfree living, infertility, any related issue... to blogs... to closed-loop discussion websites... I mostly found black-and-white thinking, bitterness, defensiveness, offensiveness, ad hominim attacks, and a lack of sympathy or interest in how other people lived. Everyone was a victim, it seemed—a whiny, angry one whipped to foaming peaks by the injustice of it all.

In other words, I found the Internet, in all its anonymous, cowardly glory.

This gave Nymphe an instant niche. I am still astounded by the feedback and support I've gotten for this one tiny, unpublicized blog. Just because I wrote about my experiences without assuming that parents are assholes and children are yucky. Just because I said, hey, there's a grey area of childless people, and we shouldn't have to fake that we're Totally! Happily! Childfree! all the time in order to fit the mold of the childfree cheerleaders. I still get the emails, some from people who've read current episodes of the blog and know I've crossed over... some from people who think I'm forever childfree.

I think the feedback has just been a sigh of relief from readers: thanks for writing this, because we're sick of the divisiveness. We're sick of the nastiness. Maybe we are victims in some ways, but we know things are more complex than many of the defensive CF groups want them to be, more complex than the defensive über-parents want to pretend.

Some people think it's weird or even unacceptable that a pregnant lady like me still reads and posts about childfree/childless/etc issues. But I do, because even if I were to squirt out two dozen screaming brats to drive all the other shoppers insane at the supermarket and overpopulate the planet and suck up all the tax money for schools, I would still care about inequality in our society. And the childless and childfree people in our society are treated unequally. That's just truth, supported by many facts. (See The Childess Revolution by Madelyn Cain for stats; it was written by a parent btw.)

In the last year I've noticed an uptick in reasonable, useful, interesting conversations about these issues online. Parenting blogs have them (see CafeMom post below). Childfree blogs have 'em too. (See this conversation at thebritgirl.com—the comments are probably more revealing than the initial post; you can see people mulling over each other's ideas.) Generalist newspaper articles tend to inspire pathetic posts lacking in thought, but strewn among them are really good discussions.

What I'd like to think is this: maybe we're actually listening to each other. Maybe we can guide the conversation to a point where it becomes useful. And then? There's hope for meaningful social change.

CHILDFREE & MIND CHANGERS ON OFFBEATMAMA

This post mentions pregnancy and such; it ain't fully childless-safe. Also, comments to the linked articles have a lot of moms and parents posting.

Well, I'm sorta sad that I didn't take Offbeat Mama up on it when they asked me to write a piece about childfree-childless-communication-changeovers, etc. Now that I'm pregnant, I'm too busy doing God's procreative work to dabble in such time-sucking hobbies as blogging.*

They did ask a still-childfree person, rainy, to write a piece, and it's good. The comments thread is great, too; it's so refreshing to find thoughtful people online genuinely discussing issues instead of wallowing in their own cleverness and defensiveness. Read it at offbeatbama.

From a different POV, there's an intriguing piece by a woman who preferred not to talk much to friends or in public when she and her partner started considering perhaps having a child. When she did finally come out about it, already pregnant, people's reactions were pretty darned weird—and very revealing about how society views childless and childfree people, the assumptions that are made. Check it here.

*The personality transplant from the old-me to mom-person hasn't completely worked yet. Apparently I'm still tongue in cheek sometimes, perhaps even sarcastic. The real reason i couldn't write it is that I'm on a very time consuming professional blogging/writing gig for NBC/Universal, and just got a grant to help produce the next issue of the magazine i co-edit. So... not so many unpaid blog posts these days.

NEW DATA ON CHILDLESSNESS COMPARES 1994 TO 2008. MOST PEOPLE: FEWER BABIES! GRAD SCHOOL CHICKS: MORE BABIES!

Pew Research Center released a new report on who's having babies and who isn't.

"Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s," they say. "While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees." Childlessness is defined solely by womb activity, as opposed to the day-to-day parenting.

There aren't too many surprises here. I was intrigued, though, by a few factoids. Perhaps we're trending away from the cliché of childless/childfree folks being white and highly educated. (Pew didn't measure the number of cocktail parties, height of stiletto heels, or number of cats per childless woman, however.) And there's solid evidence that the mom demographic isn't entirely composed of married ladies with no life outside their domestic duties. A majority of those advanced degree-holders were biological mothers.

RACE
Non-white categories saw sharper *relative* increases in childlessness than whites did. In the last fourteen years, the childlessness rates for black and Hispanic women grew by more than 30%, whereas the rate for white women increased just 11%. Still, white chicks are a bit more likely to be childless. In 2008, 20% of white women, 17% of black and Hispanic women, and 16% of Asian women were childless.

Americans being obsessed by race, there are loads of detailed stats about this on the survey. Take a look; it's interesting stuff.

EDUCATION
Proving once again that I'm a dutiful member of the herd, it appears that women with advanced college degrees (masters, PhD, etc) are more likely to have biokids now than they were ten or twenty years ago.†  What's that all about, I wonder? The report offers explanations for the general decrease in bio-childbearing among the population at large, but doesn't attempt to explain why we overeducated ladies started poppin' out babies again.

In all other groups, like "no high school diploma" and "bachelor's degree," women are either staying childless in the same numbers as they were in the early nineties or those numbers are increasing. "Since the 1990s, rates of childlessness have risen most sharply for the least educated women. The most dramatic change has occurred among women with less than a high school diploma, whose likelihood of bearing no children rose 66% from 1994 to 2008."

MARRIAGE
Surveys divide people up into "never-marrieds" and "ever-marrieds," not giving us detailed data about how long someone was married, whether the law doesn't allow them to marry their partner, or whether they divorced at age 18 after being married by an Elvis impersonator and living with their coke dealer husband for 45 days. In other words, the married/unmarried stats are as binary, old-fashioned, and unreliable as the childless/gave-birth stats.

Way, way more never-married women are childless than women-who-have-ever-been-married, but these days, far more never-marrieds are likely to give birth than they were a couple decades back. Let me take you back to 1994, when the World Wide Web was a wacky new phenomenon and hardly anyone in this country had cell phones or tattoos. Back then, 71% of unmarried women were childless. Whereas in 2008—when getting rid of your cell phone was harder to do than removing a tattoo, and you did your banking and half your social life online—only 56% of unmarried women remained childless. That's a dramatic drop.

NONBIOLOGICAL PARENTING, CO-PARENTING
The Pew report actually bothers to mention women who parent or co-parent without going through the full biological hoopla, though data comes from elsewhere and is mentioned only briefly. "Some women who do not bear their own children raise children as adoptive mothers or stepmothers. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, there are 61.6 million biological children in U.S. households, as well as 1.6 million adopted children and 2.5 million stepchildren."

Unfortunately, this data doesn't map directly to the Pew report's data. Knowing that there are 1.6 million adopted children in the United States doesn't tell us how many of their moms are considered "childless" by the Pew report!

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE NEXT SURVEY OR CENSUS,
since of course they are all reading random blogs to decide what information they should gather. Har har har. Anyway:

1) Stop defining "women who have never borne children from their uteri" as "childless." A full-time adoptive mother is in no way "childless." Ignoring her in the survey makes the data seem really inconclusive to me, in terms of tracking social trends. If you *do* take adoption and stepmothering into consideration, *then* what is the childlessness rate? That would be a much more useful statistic than "whose womb did what over the last ten years."

2) Track information for the grey areas of childlessness. How many PhD-toting women consider themselves "co-parents" but not "mothers"? I am a half-time stepmom, yet have characterized myself as "biologically childless." Where do I fit in? And a woman who happens to have given birth but isn't an active parent (gives the child up for adoption, doesn't have custody and rarely sees the child, etc.)—how should she be counted?

Basically, the binary definition of "childless" vs "parent" is inadequate and far too limiting. Childless, childfree, mother, biological parent, adoptive mother, birther or breeder who doesn't actually parent any children: give 'em all their own line on the census form!

3) Get over this quaint idea that women ages 40-44 provide a good measurement for studying childlessness and childbearing. Suppose Pew had interviewed me last year. Survey says? "Forty years old and childless." By the time those stats were compiled and published, they'd be inaccurate; today I'd say "Forty-one and pregnant." If all goes well, next year I'd say "Forty-two and a biological parent." I just skewed their results.

"This report uses the standard measure of childlessness at the end of childbearing years, which is the share of women ages 40-44 who have not borne any children," the report notes. One wonders who establishes these standards, given that more and more people are waiting later and later to have children, thanks to career options and to increasing availability of reproductive medicine and infertility treatment. To me, it would seem more sensible to survey women at age 50.

WTF
Maybe someone who understands statistics could riddle me this:

"Women who have borne children are more likely to be high school graduates (30%) than childless women (26%). Women with at least one child also are more likely than childless women not to have completed high school (11% vs. 8%)."  So if you have a biokid, you are both more and less likely to be a high school graduate. ??

FOOTNOTEY THINGS:

† "...rates have declined among women with advanced degrees -- by 17% for those with master's degrees and 32% for those with doctorates or professional degrees. Women with advanced degrees were more likely in 1994 to be childless than were women with bachelor's degrees -- 34% of women with doctorates or professional degrees were childless, as were 30% of those with master's degrees and 23% of those with bachelor's degrees."

Bibliography/bibliographical info: http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/758/rising-share-women-have-no-children-childlessness. Livingston, Gretchen and Cohn, D'Vera, "Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down Among Women with Advanced Degrees." Pew Research Center, June 25, 2010.

PREGNANT LADY WANTS EQUAL TREATMENT FOR NON-PARENTS. FILM AT ELEVEN!

the following is extracted from email i sent to a friend today. we'd had a disagreement about child care and parental / maternity leave policies in the workplace, and she sent me a long, thoughtful email stating her position. she believes that all of us should help take care of all our children and our elderly; that there should be a safety net. i agree. she also sees parental leave as a normal life necessity, whereas leave time for other purposes she characterizes as "Me time" or "vacation." and that's where i disagree; also, she didn't like my suggestion that it's unfair to offer preferential treatment to parents and families without offering something similar (such as non-family leave time) to nonparents, and found it whiny to complain about things being "unfair" when "that's just how things are."

so. here goes:

i believe in a social safety net. i believe in education, in creating an environment that enables children to grow and adults to take care of each other --- whether or not we're taking care of people we happen to be blood related to. i also believe that fairness is an OK thing to strive for. the desire to open our minds / consider that other people's situations might deserve a different approach / even consider that our *own* sorrows and unfair treatments might be worthy of better approaches than we've gotten in the past / help people in the future even if there is no totally workable solution today / work toward equality / allow for possibilities that seem alien to us... this desire is what ends up, eventually, bringing about justice and "fairness" for people who are gay, black, Latino, disabled, transgendered, or female.

"that's not fair" vs. "that's just the way things are" is relative...

NO CHILDLESS FEMALE ASTRONAUTS...

...at least not in China. The Chinese space program plans to send its first women to space, but these women must already be mothers before they're eligible to take flight.

"The insistence that they should also be wives and mothers does not relate to their multi-tasking abilities. Officials are concerned that space flight might affect their fertility.

"It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," Xu told the state news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious. After all, it's unprecedented in China."

No word yet on why women's fertility is deemed more important than that of men, especially in a country with limited reproductive rights—nor what of women who'd like to be spacefarers but prefer to remain childfree. Read all about it in the Guardian UK.

THE CHILDLESS TRAVELER

"Having children, being part of the direct genetic chain of generations, is one way to be in the stream of life...But, being at the center of history, I realize, merely walking the streets of a great city like St. Petersburg or New York, is another way of being in the stream of life."

Read Christina Gombar's post about dealing with chronic illness and infertility—and her negative feelings about the fertility industry—on the Silent Sorority blog.