Judge says James MacDougall, 37, was not upfront about fragile-X syndrome and should not meet some of those he fathered
A man with an incurable genetic condition who advertised his sperm to lesbians on social media has been banned from contacting some of the children he fathered as a result.
A family court judge took the unusual step of naming James MacDougall after finding he “took advantage of these young women’s vulnerability and their strong desire to have children”.
Continue reading...Moderna submits data to FDA, in hopes low-dose shots to protect babies, toddlers and preschoolers will be available by summer
Moderna on Thursday asked US regulators to authorize low doses of its Covid-19 vaccine for children younger than six, a long-awaited move toward potentially making injections available for millions of children by summer.
Frustrated families are waiting impatiently for a chance to protect the nation’s youngest kids as all around them people shed masks and other public health precautions – even though highly contagious coronavirus mutants continue to spread.
Continue reading...Peak GPs body calls for Medicare rebate to be extended to cover growing complexity of care for expectant mothers
Expectant mothers are unable to afford some antenatal consultations, the peak body representing GPs says, as doctors call on the federal government to raise the Medicare rebate.
Dr Karen Price, the president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, says there have been significant advances in antenatal care over the years but Medicare patient rebates had not kept pace with the costs of providing it.
Continue reading...Welsh government hails ‘historic moment’ for children’s rights amid calls for England to follow suit
Smacking and slapping children has been outlawed in Wales, with people told to contact social services or police if they see a parent or carer meting out physical punishment.
The law change, which came into force first thing on Monday, was hailed as “historic” by the Labour-led Welsh government and a number of child protection champions, who called for England to follow suit.
Continue reading...The actor, best known for her role as Lavender Brown, says her symptoms have lasted for weeks
Harry Potter star Jessie Cave has been admitted to hospital after testing positive for Covid-19 while pregnant with her fourth child.
The actor, best known for her role as Lavender Brown in the film adaptations of the hit books, said the virus had hit her hard and her symptoms have lasted weeks.
Continue reading...Research shows as many as 50% of ethnic minority carers say responsibilities hold them back from finding new positions
Three out of five women say their caring responsibilities for children and other vulnerable or elderly relatives are preventing them from applying for a new job or promotion, while only one in five men say the same, according to new research.
The poll of 5,444 people by Ipsos Mori and the charity Business in the Community (BITC) found that nearly half the workforce are combining paid work and care. Almost three in 10 adults have left or considered leaving a job because of difficulties in balancing work and care. The latter was particularly true of women.
Continue reading...Lawsuit filed after state’s governor and attorney general called medically necessary gender-affirming care ‘child abuse’
America’s largest civil rights non-profit has filed a lawsuit asking a Texas state court to block officials from investigating parents who seek medically necessary gender-affirming care for their children.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of Texas and Lambda Legal, named the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, as a defendant, along with the Texas department of family and protective services (DFPS) and its commissioner, Jaime Masters.
Continue reading...Rafael, star of The Ferryman, has been paying taxes since the age of one, while Adiya received glowing reviews for her portrayal of Lyra in The Book of Dust. Say coochy-coo to the babies treading the boards
When their son was seven months old, strangers used to ask Kat West and Jaime Vallés if they fed him sedatives. “No, I don’t drug my baby!” West recalls with mock incredulity. “That was the weirdest question.” But it wasn’t: as Vallés reminds West, someone once asked if their son was animatronic.
West and Vallés were subject to this line of questioning because, for about six months in 2019, their baby boy Rafael played Bobby Carney in The Ferryman. Bobby, as you might have gathered, is also a baby – the youngest character in the Olivier-winning Troubles drama by Jez Butterworth. For the show’s production team, and ultimately its audience, a real baby was miles better than a doll. “The live baby added to the verisimilitude of the production,” said Tim Hoare, associate director at the time. During its Broadway run, four different babies became Bobby, with Rafael playing him four times a week.
Continue reading...‘Misleading’ messages from $55bn-a-year industry are ‘unethical’, says report, which calls for plain packaging rules similar to tobacco
Countries should clamp down on the “aggressive” and “unethical” marketing of formula milk for babies, including forcing companies to sell products in plain packaging, a report by the World Health Organization and Unicef has said.
In research, commissioned 41 years after the global health community drew up guidelines aimed at regulating the industry, experts found that the marketing of formula had “no limits” and had become more “unregulated and invasive” in the digital age.
Continue reading...What started as a useful tip on social media has turned the US psychologist and mum of three into a parenting phenomenon and the voice of reason for a generation of young mums and dads
Talking to Dr Becky Kennedy today requires flexibility – the kind of flexibility that many of us parents have had to hone pretty well during the pandemic. My five-year-old daughter is off from school with her first bout of Covid, which means I have to take Kennedy’s Zoom call from the bedroom. Kennedy’s own seven-year-old daughter is also at home with a fever and sore throat; luckily her husband has stepped in to help oversee childcare, so she’s got an hour to speak.
The slapdash situation feels apt: Kennedy, a clinical psychologist from New York who specialises in parenting, experienced a rapid rise to prominence during the pandemic when young parents suddenly found themselves at home with their children and in desperate need for a hand to guide them through it. Kennedy had never even posted on Instagram when Covid-19 first emerged, but on 28 March 2020, two days after lockdown measures came into force in the UK, she wrote a message to her 200 followers that changed her life. It read: “Most young kids will remember how their family home felt during the coronavirus panic more than anything specific about the virus. Our kids are watching us and learning about how to respond to stress and uncertainty. Let’s wire our kids for resilience, not panic. How? Scroll for some tips.”
Continue reading...Authorities warn against surreptitious use of authorized vaccines for younger children due to no safety and efficacy data
As news broke recently that the Covid vaccine for children under five would be delayed in the US amid ongoing clinical trials, a call to make the vaccines off-label for use among those children gained force – but officials caution against vaccinating young children without any safety or efficacy data for this age group.
When providers sign an agreement to provide Covid-19 vaccine shots, they also agree not to give the vaccine off-label, or use it for purposes other than what it was approved to do.
Continue reading...Parag Agrawal’s plan seen as step toward normalizing time off for men involved in childcare
Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, is reportedly taking a “few weeks” off for paternity leave after the birth of his second child, a move that drew cheers from other fathers as a positive step towards normalizing men taking time off for childcare.
The 37-year-old became CEO of the company in November when its co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down.
Continue reading...When I was pregnant, I discovered that I had developed breast cancer – just like my mother before me. One day, the child I was carrying may face the same hard choices
When I was five, I would talk to my mother while she was in the bath. When she stood to get out, the water fell from her, her skin pink from the heat. Her body was miraculous to me. Women’s bodies are miraculous, with the things they can do, but I didn’t know any of that then. I just knew that she was soft and perfect, and mine.
By the time my mother developed breast cancer, I was 30. She was double that age and there was an ocean between us: I was married and living in New York, so when the news came, I couldn’t hold her to me, or be a practical support. I sat on my bed and cried. The next time I saw her, it was all over. One breast removed and carefully reconstructed. The cancer gone. My husband asked me, as we approached my parents in the airport, whether it was OK to give my mum a hug. The surgery was recent; I wasn’t sure. But it was OK. She seemed the same.
Continue reading...Child Covid cases have increased dramatically due to Omicron, yet no vaccine seems on the horizon for this age group
Four-year-old Joanna Gillikin likes to watch Ada Twist, Scientist, a Netflix children’s show about a young girl with a giant interest in science.
So when Matthew Gillikin and his wife, Shannon, enrolled Joanna in a trial in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19, they described it to her as a science experiment, like the ones Ada does.
Continue reading...In December my daughter brought Covid home from school as if a folded permission slip. The feeling, on seeing the two pink lines come up on her test, was complicated and raw, containing both bad memories and relief. Finally (a part of me thought, a part of me quite low down and bloodied), finally the thing we have been waiting for has arrived. I breathed out a breath I had been holding for two years.
There were six or seven other feelings, too, including a now-familiar sense of doom brought on by the realisation that for us, lockdown was to begin again. A gentle PTSD crawled in and made itself comfortable on my lap as I briefly mapped out the next two months of arguments and pasta in my mind. Of course, with rude inevitability, the virus took its time spreading through the house, lingering on our daughter, only taking up residence with our boy toddler when her isolation was nearing its end. He stopped sleeping, his temperature leaping up and down like a cat when the doorbell goes.
Continue reading...With the climate crisis becoming ever more urgent, a growing number of young, childless men are taking the drastic decision of being sterilised for environmental reasons
When Lloyd Williamson lay on his back in a GP’s clinic late last November, it was for the surgical culmination of years of soul searching. Williamson, who is 30 and from Essex, remembers wanting a family as a child, but something changed in his early 20s. “I thought: you know what? I don’t want to bring a life into this world, because it’s pretty shitty as it is and it’s only going to get worse,” he says, two weeks after his vasectomy.
Williamson was largely motivated to sterilise himself by the climate crisis. Given the link between fossil-fuelled economic growth and population growth, he believes that having fewer children is one thing individuals can do to help. “We can’t offset our carbon problem on to the next generation, because it’s not fair on them,” he says.
Continue reading...Campaign comes as figures show almost all expectant mothers hospitalised with coronavirus symptoms were unvaccinated
The UK government is warning that almost all pregnant women admitted to hospital with Covid symptoms were unvaccinated in one analysis over several months last year, as it kicks off an advertising campaign encouraging expectant mothers to get boosted.
The campaign is calling on pregnant women not to wait to get either their first, second or booster jab. It will highlight the risks of Covid-19 to mothers and babies, with testimonies of pregnant women who have had the vaccine to be broadcast on radio and social media.
Continue reading...Comments made during a recent general audience at the Vatican criticised
Whether millennials prefer to raise plants and pets over children for financial and environmental reasons or because they’re lazy and entitled has been hotly discussed in recent years. Now Pope Francis has waded in, saying that not having children is “selfish and diminishes us” and that people are replacing them with cats and dogs.
Pet owners have reacted angrily to the comments, made during a general audience at the Vatican. They argue that animals have a lower environmental footprint than children, enable them to lead a life that is different but equally rewarding, and compensate for financial or biological difficulties in having children, rather than directly replacing them.
On social media, people pointed out that the pope himself chose not to have children and said there was hypocrisy in such comments, coming from an institution which has grappled with a legacy of child sexual abuse.
Guardian readers who responded to a call-out asking for their views were similarly critical of the pope’s comments, which were branded “out of touch” and “sexist”.
Sophie Lusby, a 48-year old NHS manager in Belfast, said they were “really naive and insensitive” and failed to reflect that not everybody can or should have children. As a Catholic, she has struggled with feelings of shame about her inability to have children for medical reasons, given her religion’s emphasis on motherhood. “That’s what’s quite triggering about the pope’s words.”
She added that although she has two pets, which are “great company when you live on your own”, she doesn’t see them as substitutes for children, and instead has found meaning in her relationships with her nephews, nieces, siblings and parents. “If Catholicism is about family, I’ve been very successful at being a great family member and I don’t need to be told off.”
Estee Nagy, a 27-year-old jeweller from London, said that “having a child in today’s world is a luxury” because of lower earning power and a more challenging labour market. “It’s easier for those who were simply lucky and are rich or have more money than an average salary, but it gets harder when there isn’t enough.”
Stef, who works in education, said that in her home town of Brighton “loads of people have dogs and treat them like kids”. She has taken her rescue dog, Boss, on holiday to 11 countries, including the Vatican, and feels that he is “part of the family”.
Pontiff laments ‘denied parenthood’ and people who ‘substitute cats and dogs for children’
In a move likely to raise the hackles of millions of cats, dogs and their human cohabitees, Pope Francis has suggested that couples who prefer pets to children are selfish.
Wading into a debate noted for its toxic tone on social media, the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics said substituting pets for children “takes away our humanity”.
Continue reading...Pope Francis suggested people who own cats and dogs instead of having children exhibit 'a certain selfishness', during a speech on parenthood and adoption at the Vatican.
The pontiff lamented that pets 'sometimes take the place of children' and that countries were becoming older and losing their humanity as a result
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