Research has revealed the Top 10 most popular songs for mothers-to-be – and no, Salt-N-Pepa is not on there
Name: Songs to give birth to.
Age: Women have been giving birth since for ever, and presumably some have always chosen to do so to music. But this is about some recent research into the songs and artists most commonly listened to during labour.
Continue reading...Around the world, coronavirus has both highlighted and worsened existing inequalities
One year into the pandemic, women have little cause to celebrate International Women’s Day tomorrow, and less energy to battle for change. Men are more likely to die from Covid-19. But women have suffered the greatest economic and social blows. They have taken the brunt of increased caregiving, have been more likely to lose their jobs and have seen a sharp rise in domestic abuse.
In the UK, women did two-thirds of the extra childcare in the first lockdown, and were more likely to be furloughed. In the US, every one of the 140,000 jobs lost in December belonged to a woman: they saw 156,000 jobs disappear, while men gained 16,000. But white women actually made gains, while black and Latina women – disproportionately in jobs that offer no sick pay and little flexibility – lost out. Race, wealth, disability and migration status have all determined who is hit hardest. Previous experience suggests that the effects of health crises can be long-lasting: in Sierra Leone, over a year after Ebola broke out, 63% of men had returned to work but only 17% of women.
Continue reading...Are you left scrambling for paints and glue-guns every year? Never fear – here are some options that Donna Ferguson and nine-year-old Flora put together in less than 30 minutes
It’s World Book Day in the UK and Ireland today, one many parents approach each year with a stomach-clenching sense of dread. I know, because I used to be one of them. I cannot sew, I am useless at craft and I am not the most organised parent in the world. Or even in our house.
But my daughter Flora is nine, and I’ve learned a few tricks over the years. Armed with just four essential items – a professional face-paint kit, safety pins, a stash of coloured card and ribbons – I can throw together a World Book Day outfit in minutes, using the clothes in my daughter’s wardrobe. Here are five options using things most of us will already have in the house, and a good daytime activity that will cheer up those still remote-learning in the UK.
Continue reading...Juggling babies and a job is always difficult – what are the particular pressures for performers and how is the industry taking steps to improve?
Followers of Royal Ballet principal Lauren Cuthbertson cheer ardently for her Juliet, Manon and Sugar Plum Fairy, but are in raptures about her latest role, as mum to baby Peggy, born in December and already the toast of Instagram. Cuthbertson is one of a flurry of dancers at the Royal who are about to give or have recently given birth, in a serendipitously timed lockdown baby boom.
It’s a long way from the early days of the company, when founder Ninette de Valois set the tone. “‘You’re pregnant darling, goodbye!’ That’s how it was,” says Jeanetta Laurence, a dancer in its touring company in the 1960s and 70s. Even now, she says: “It’s hard to think of another industry where having a baby is so intrusive to the work. I’m in awe and wonder at how they manage it.”
Continue reading...The pandemic exposed gender inequality, shattering the fragile jigsaw of support that allowed women with children to work. Radical action is necessary to prevent women’s rights backsliding a generation
“It is so hard, I cannot describe it.”
“I burned out, completely.”
Continue reading...Scientists emphasise safety but younger women still hesitant
Amy Taylor was chatting to friends over a Zoom drink when the conversation took an unexpected turn. One of the group – all in their early 30s, mostly university-educated and in professional jobs – mentioned that she had concerns about the Covid vaccine because she wanted to try for a baby in the next year or two.
“I was surprised when others said they were also a bit anxious. Then I started thinking maybe I should be worried too – even though I’m pro-vaccinations and I know this is the way out of the pandemic,” said Taylor*. “This really plays into the fertility insecurity that lots of women in their 30s have anyway – have I left it too late, will I need IVF, should I freeze my eggs? We don’t want anything else that could interfere with our chances of motherhood.”
Continue reading...Every year, thousands of British children are conceived with the help of donor sperm. But few ever meet their siblings...
Caroline Pearson, a podcast producer from London, was a few days into her maternity leave when she discovered that her unborn daughter had two sisters. She had visited a website a friend had told her about, which allows recipients of donated sperm (such as her) to search for families who have used the same donor. If they’ve registered with this website, they could be anywhere in the world, since the US sperm bank chosen by Pearson and her husband, Francis, ships internationally, and the website, Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), is also US-based with an international reach. Pearson couldn’t resist, and typed in the donor’s reference number.
“Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly curious,” Pearson says. She didn’t expect to find anything – let alone two families living within a half-hour radius. The first profile was a single mother to a two-year-old girl, living nearby in London. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence. Caroline was “totally giddy”; her partner Francis, a photographer, was cautious. “I tried to rein things in,” he says. “Caroline was pregnant and we were already dealing with becoming parents, and the donor process. But all this other stuff, it was so unknown. I’m practical and you think: yes, that could be amazing – but what if they’re awful people?”
Continue reading...When I decided to adopt orphaned twins from Ethiopia, it felt like the most natural thing to do. But it raised many questions about motherhood and the bond we have with our children
I assumed I would conceive naturally when John and I decided to start a family. I didn’t. We turned to fertility drugs with ambivalence. Reports of the mood swings the drugs sometimes caused worried me. I had only gone through one round when I broke a wooden dish-drying rack over John’s head. I don’t remember what he said, but I’m sure it was something I’d otherwise have considered innocuous. Instead, a growling, uncontrollable rage emerged from nowhere and then overcame me like an emotional tsunami. We decided the drugs weren’t for us.
I had gone along with fertility treatments for the same reason I went along with other non-decisions I’ve made in my life, like having an enormous wedding, because people whom I loved wanted it for me. I thought I was supposed to want it, just like I was supposed to want to get pregnant by any means. Yet I cried genuine tears when, month after month, I was unable to conceive. I felt like a failure.
Continue reading...After nearly a year of disrupted learning, primary school children in the UK have missed key milestones - as well as their friends. What will be the long term cost?
• In pictures: pets, plants and cuddly toys: a child’s eye view of home schooling
It is fair to say that Wells, eight, does not enjoy remote learning. “It’s horrible,” he tells a group of fellow year 4 children over a video call. “I can see my friends, but I can’t talk to them.” Emily, nine, finds home schooling tough, too: “It’s really, really boring. I’m sad. But I like being able to play with my guinea pigs.” Flora, also nine, agrees lockdown learning isn’t all bad: “It’s fun solving maths problems with my granny on Skype, and I get to have yummy snacks, like chocolate biscuits, all day.”
But they would all prefer to be at school. “There’s less distraction,” says Betty, who has two younger siblings and is expected to work independently in the afternoons. “When you’re in class, you can talk to your teacher and ask for help,” Ainhoa says. “Privately,” Wells adds. “You get their individual attention.” The children talk about feeling frustrated, stressed and even exhausted at the end of the school day. “Sometimes I just want to scrunch up the paper into pieces,” Ainhoa admits. “I really miss playing with my friends in the playground,” Flora says.
Continue reading...Longing for a cuddle? Newlyweds, siblings and housemates hug the people they can – and look forward to being close with those they miss
Continue reading...A year after her husband Joe Hammond’s death from motor neurone disease, his widow reflects on grief, parenting through loss, and survival
How do you decide upon a day to die? For my husband Joe and me, that meant finding out when the doctors we needed were available, then we took note of our two sons’ school holidays and, finally, we looked at the carer rota for that month. Who could we trust with Joe’s death as much as we had trusted them with his life?
The next step was a meeting with the relevant doctors; what incredible women they had been throughout our whole, surreal journey. They asked us how we imagined the process might unfold, during which Joe would receive a huge amount of morphine to sedate him enough that his ventilator could be removed. We were bemused. What were the options? Apparently, some people choose to watch television and the programme of choice is Countdown. This gave Joe and me the giggles. We said we thought we’d manage without more conundrums than we already had.
Continue reading...My new novel is about a midwife’s daughter in the old American west. The peril pregnant women underwent, then and now, became all too vivid once I became a parent
Childbirth in the 19th century was a dangerous affair. Women routinely came down with puerperal fever, an infection of the uterus that could lead to sepsis and death. Others suffered a postpartum haemorrhage: heavy bleeding that, if not stopped, could also claim their lives. Some experienced eclampsia, a condition in which skyrocketing blood pressure could cause fatal seizures. In 1900, six to nine women died for every 1,000 births, more than 30 times the rate today.
I learned these facts when I started researching my latest novel, Outlawed, an alternate history following a midwife’s daughter on the run across the American west in 1894. I needed a working understanding of obstetrics and gynaecology of the era to give it verisimilitude. So I read about the history of the C-section, which, at least in Europe, was generally a fatal procedure until about the 1880s, though there are reports of women surviving it as early as the second century CE. I learned about the discovery of egg cells, which was the subject of heated debate in the 1670s between the Dutch doctor Reinier de Graaf (who demonstrated their existence by dissecting rabbits shortly after mating) and his rival Jan Swammerdam (who liked to travel with a human uterus and other “items of genital anatomy”). I studied the composition of early baby formula, which, in 16th and 17th-century Europe, often consisted of bread soaked in milk, fed to infants from a “pap boat” that was unfortunately hard to clean and prone to accumulating bacteria.
Continue reading...Disparity with white women shows need for action, doctors say, despite slight improvement in mortality rate
Black women are still four times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy or childbirth in the UK, and women from Asian ethnic backgrounds face twice the risk, according to a new report.
The data shows a slight narrowing of the divide – last year’s report found black women were five times more likely to die – but experts say that is statistically insignificant and not a sign of progress.
Continue reading...Prison, care home and mental health institution visit limitations failing to consider impact on family life, campaigners say
Children with parents in prison have been forgotten during lockdown, campaigners have told MPs.
The cross-party human rights committee is looking at the impact on the right to family life, with a focus on people in institutional settings including prisons, care homes and mental health facilities.
Continue reading...The phrase ‘adult beginner’ can sound patronising. It implies you are learning something you should have mastered as a child. But learning is not just for the young
One day a number of years ago, I was deep into a game of draughts on holiday with my daughter, then almost four, in the small library of a beachfront town. Her eye drifted to a nearby table, where a black-and-white board bristled with far more interesting figures (many a future chess master has been innocently drawn in by “horses” and “castles”).
“What’s that?” she asked. “Chess,” I replied. “Can we play?” she pleaded. I nodded absently.
Continue reading...I’d chosen an unconventional partner, and we both bristled at gender stereotypes. But I had sensed a distance between us, and it wasn’t just new parenthood
Today I sat on a bench facing the sea and sobbed my heart out. I don’t know if I will ever recover. This is a note on my phone, written on 9 November 2017.
I forgot about it for a couple of years, but I remember typing it as if it were yesterday. The gulls squawked and the sun dipped into the sea. I had been sitting there so long my hands were too cold to type. I put my phone into my coat pocket, and turned the buggy to face home.
Continue reading...I feared isolation, sleep deprivation and an end to the activities that had been keeping me well. I never expected to be filled with such love and wonder
I hadn’t expected to have a baby. But when I turned out to be wrong about that, I found myself expecting the whole thing to be a disaster. It wasn’t just that people tend to be rather negative about what early parenthood entails, focusing on the sleepless nights and endless nappy changes. It was also because I had a mental illness that I thought would make it impossible for me to cope at all, let alone enjoy motherhood. Neither had I expected to be giving birth in the middle of a pandemic, in which I would be cut off from much of my support network.
In the three years since I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of a serious trauma in my personal life, I had spent a great deal of time trying to work out how to manage my illness. I planned my weeks around activities that research told me would help mend my mind a little. I knew that cold-water swimming, for instance, appears to help us control the fight-or-flight instinct that often goes so awry in mental illness. I knew that running could encourage the body to produce chemicals that lift the mood. I had discovered that birdwatching and looking for wild flowers were much more effective for me than mindfulness apps, with their calls to sit in silence in a room. I had just written a book about the healing power of outdoor pursuits and was starting to feel mildly in control of my life.
Continue reading...It might be worth looking at why it’s so easy for him to make you feel like an idiot, says Annalisa Barbieri
I am a 40-year-old woman who has been talked down to and patronised by my older brother my entire life. He often speaks to me as though he assumes I don’t understand simple things, and when I try to communicate to him that I do understand, he doesn’t seem to listen. I looked up to him when I was a child, so there’s this loud voice inside my head that says: “He’s speaking to you like you are an idiot, therefore you must be an idiot,” and my self-confidence is dented more every time.
This makes no sense because I have a good life. But I’m forever beating myself up. He seems to have the power to make me feel worthless.
Continue reading...As Covid infections rose, hospital felt like an increasingly dangerous place to have a baby. But is labouring without midwives or doctors the answer?
On the morning of 3 May, Victoria Johnson prepared to give birth at her home in the Highlands. One by one, her three children came downstairs to where she was labouring in a birthing pool surrounded by fairy lights, the curtains tightly shut against the outside world.
Suddenly, she felt an urge to get out of the pool. “I stood up and it felt as if the weight of the universe crashed from my head to my toes.” Her waters broke – “all over the carpet, which wasn’t ideal” – and the baby started to crown. “Everyone was there, including both grandmothers on video call,” she says. “Once the baby was out, my eight-year-old son came over and said, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ And that was everything.”
Continue reading...Survey of 600 people finds some parents regret having offspring for same reason
People worried about the climate crisis are deciding not to have children because of fears that their offspring would have to struggle through a climate apocalypse, according to the first academic study of the issue.
The researchers surveyed 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were already factoring climate concerns into their reproductive choices and found 96% were very or extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their potential future children in a climate-changed world. One 27-year-old woman said: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”
Continue reading...