vikki just sent this list that the revolutionary parenting caucus created.  thank god she wrote these down.

suggestions for building an intergenerational movement

at Saturday’s Revolutionary Parenting caucus, we brainstormed ways that people in our communities and movements can support the needs of their families. Here’s what we came up with:

*rotate the childcare role at meetings and events. This enables the parent or caretaker to fully participate while ensuring that no one person gets burned out.

*barter and trade for childcare. Parents and caretakers often have useful skills that they’re willing to share.

*form relationships with the kids in your community/movement/social justice project

*going to do something a kid might be interested in? Invite him/her along!

*at the start of any event, make an announcement that children (and the noise they make) are welcome. Many times we parents feel that we have to leave if our children make as much noise as the ringing of a cell phone.

*start (or participate in) discussions about the needs and contributions of families in radical communities. Don’t always leave it to parents to have to bring these issues up.

*start a childcare collective!

*One participant informed us that, despite all of her fundraising efforts, her friend, who is a mother of two, had been unable to afford to travel to the conference. Similarly, the mother who had originally proposed the parenting caucus, had been unable to come for the same reason. And so we added this suggestion:

Think about how the conference/event is helping
parents/kids/families get to them. Remember
that if we’re flying, bussing, taking the
train, etc., we’re often paying for more than
one seat (in addition to taking time off work,
having to pay for multiple meals at each
mealtime, etc). How are the organizers working
to make the event accessible for lower-income
parents/families?

*Remember that supporting parents and kids in your community is a big step towards deconstructing the nuclear family.

so the REVOLUTIONARY MOTHERHOOD publication is available!  yay!

get your copy today!

suggested 7 dollar donation!

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loving y’all

so i did the revolutionary parenting caucus with vikki.  it went great.  the beginning was stressful because i felt like i was being blamed for the caucus starting late.  even though the time and place had been changed a bunch of times in the 24 hours and i had to figure out where to go.  and no one was offering to help me with aza, or all my bags, or the boxes of zines and photocopies i had made.  so this older lady finally went up to these ‘nice young men’ and asked them to help me.  and so it was a not best way to start a session about how to support mothers in an activist community.  aza was on high energy post-morning nap, throwing paper everywhere.  i had headache partially from drinking a few beers celebrating our anniversary the night before, but mostly from sleeping weirdly in the van.  cal had disappeared to get lunch and took longer than he thought he would.

and then i started to get these weird vibes.  do you know them?  they are the bad mother vibes.  in the midst of a revolutionary parenting session.  crazy? huh?
i think it is because i told my daughter: no.  a bunch of times.  like i normally do.  to everyone.  hell, my daughter doesnt even know that ‘no’ is a single syllable word.  she really thinks it is:nonononono.  see previous post…to learn more about my bad mama philosophy.

it goes a little something like this: baby, no, that paper is not your paper.  i am not sure whose paper that is.  you can play with this paper.  here.  sit here. and ill go get…oh no…dont poor water on your head…give that to me..silly girl…fucking a…ok are you thirsty…here i dont have any juice left…so…well, drink my sprite, yeah cause what you need is more high fructose corn syrup in your life…you like it?  where is your toy? and your paper?  and no, dont play with her bag thats not your bag…ok how about i hold you while i explain this to the caucus…and…silly girl…..

everyone stares at me.  pretending not to judge.  very revolutionary.

cal finally comes back.  my head is throbbing.  we are 15 minutes into the caucus.  i have already been yelled at. judged.  and i am convincing myself to be calm and keep it real and am really grateful that cal can take aza, cause i am weaning and frustrated and i really want to cry.

and plus, i am having that: i am not a single mother guilt.  which is a strange product of having been raised by a single mother and brought up around  single working mothers and heard enough resentment against partnered moms, because they had it so easy, and now i am a partnered mom (with a wonderful partner/co-parent) but i dont have much in common with the vast majority of married moms or stay at home moms (because my conception of motherhood was shaped differently)

(by the way i had a great experience being raised by a single working mother.  my life would not have been better with two parents significantly.  plus who can tell the past results of things that never happened)

the rest of the caucus went good.  we had some interesting insights.  discussions.   it was a great time.  strange that the majority of people in the room did not have kids and were white…but you know in another way that is awesome.  i mean i thought i would be preaching to the choir.  and instead i got to see how many different walks of life converge at revolutionary parenting.

ok–i dont get it.  why would you not tell your children no?  after reading all this advice about raising a ‘free child’ and ‘preserving my kids autonomy’–i decided to see what it would feel like to not say no to my kid.  no: no, stop, dont.  okay i dont get it.  why is it wrong to give your child verbal boundaries?

so i talk to a guy who lives in a co-op with a kid about aza’s age: he says that they only use ‘no’ for safety issues.  okay, but why?

supposedly if you use the word ‘no’ too often your child wont take the word seriously when you really mean it.  so i experimented with aza.  turns out when i am happy and smiley and saying: no.  she knows i am joking. and when i am serious, drop a little bass in the voice, she knows that she needs to back away and
look at me.  actually, her responses are not about what words i use: i could be saying elephant or umbrella, but the tone of my voice.  which makes sense since she repeats tones much more than individual letters. and communication is 70% nonverbal, 20%tone of voice, 10%actual content.  she understands me.

secondly, i think it is important that she recognizes that she has the right to say ‘no’ to people and the best way for me to model this is to say ‘no’ to her.
and for her to watch me saying no to others.  and laying down the verbal and physical boundaries.  and expecting others to respect them.

the funny thing about this i dont spend alot of time around: free or radical parents.  and so i was not really aware of this dont say no policy.  really.  and this weekend i got this funny vibe as i was around those of the ‘ free philosophy.  i couldnt figure it out.  until i realized after enough ‘raised eyebrows’ that i was telling my kid no.  actually i was laughing and running after her and saying no.  and i was saying it sternly at times.  and exhausted at times.  and mockingly at times.  i guess i am just not free or radical enough.

sometimes my kid runs up to something.  something that i have said no to a bunch of times.  and she points at it and says: nononononono

that is so funny to me.  she is so smart.  and she looks so proud when she says it.
but lets be honest.  i am not someone who believes as default: child-centered parenting.  i believe in a mama-centric universe.  i have some serious concerns that the baby-centered philosophy leads to a renewed marginilization and disempowerment of women and mothers, because if the needs of the child are in conflict with the needs of the mother, the mother has historically traditionally been expected to take the back seat in western culture.  especially if the child is a son.
my mother had a different philosophy when we were young.  we were not allowed to say the word: can’t.  yep.  to this day my brother and i grapple with self-conceptions that we can do anything we put our minds to and work hard for yet we never seem to be doing enough.

a friend said to me last night that her parents taught her that she was brilliant and amazing no matter what she did and now as an adult she struggles with the fact that (in the real world) she has to work hard to convince and show people that she is brilliant and amazing, people dont just see it.

and i read these blogs by antiracist parents who dont tell their young children of color about racism or slavery or other bad things that people do to people because they dont want to give their children an ‘inferiority’ complex and they want their children to see themselves as equal to everyone else.  hmmm…..
i guess adulthood is a rude awakening for all of us.

quoted from pbs:

Our own modern scientific classification of animals is based on evolutionary relationships, common ancestry - although in fact scientists started categorizing animals this way about a century before they realized that was what they were doing.

We, for example, are mammals. That was established in the year 1758, a hundred years before Darwin, by a Swedish biologist named Linnaeus. Mammals constitute a natural category. If you ask biology students, they will tell you we’re mammals. Why? Because we nurse our young.

Here is something the student probably can not tell you. Do we nurse our young because we are mammals, or are we mammals because we nurse our young? Let me rephrase the question: Why is milk so important in the great scheme of things that we should take our very name on that basis? Couldn’t we come up with the same group using a different criterion, and so why don’t we?

For example, Aristotle more than two thousand years ago called land animals “Quadrupedia” (four-legged), and divided them into those that lay eggs and those that give birth to live offspring. Creating a category of four-legged creatures that give birth to live offspring gives you basically the same constellation of animals as the category of mammals (with a few exceptions, like the duck-billed platypus).

Mammals actually have many features that distinguish them from reptiles, amphibians, fish, and birds - hair, for one thing. Some scientists in the 18th century actually did call this group “Pilosa,” or hairy things. But Linnaeus called us mammals, based on an anatomical feature that’s only functional in half of our species, and then only rarely.

So why did he do that?

It turns out to have been a political gesture. In the 1750s, there was major controversy surrounding the practice of wet-nursing. Many middle- and upper-class women in Europe were sending their babies off to stay with poor women in the country to be fed, rather than nursing the infants themselves. Linnaeus was active in the movement opposing this practice. In fact he wrote a book on the virtues of breastfeeding your own children, how it was natural for mothers to do this, and how therefore wet-nursing was something unnatural and bad. Up to that time he had been calling mammals simply Quadrupedia, like Aristotle. Now he calls mammals Mammalia, and uses his “objective” scientific classification to make this point. He is saying the natural role of women is to nurse their own children - that is what is right, and that is what your family should do (Schiebinger, 1993).

The point of all this is to show that what a biology student takes for granted as a fact of nature, that we are in our very essence a lactating species, is actually a fact of history - a political stand from the 18th century embedded into biology. It is true, of course, mammals are a natural unit and the group can be defined by nursing, but having a shared natural property doesn’t make a group an objective category, simply “out there” to be discovered. It is not obviously the case that breastfeeding is the key feature that makes us mammals, any more than having a single bone in the lower jaw (which all Mammalia have, and only Mammalia have) is the key feature that would make us “One-bone-in-jaw-malia.” There’s more here than nature.

So: we make sense of our place in the universe by classifying; our classifications are not necessarily derived from nature; and even when they are derived from nature, they encode cultural information.

quoted from pbs:

What can ovarian cysts tell us about ideas of racial difference?

The study of ovarian cysts at the turn of the century offers a good case to look at, in terms of the ways physicians talk about differences between African Americans and whites. So there were two articles published in 1899 and 1900. The first is by a white physician at Johns Hopkins and he says, “Everyone knows that African American women don’t get ovarian cysts.” And the language he used would say, “What I hold before you looks like an ovarian cyst. It has all the characteristics of an ovarian cyst, but it cannot be so because it came from the body of a Negress, and Negroes have not evolved to the cyst-bearing stage.”

So then he goes on in the article to describe the fact that this is what everyone believes, and we know this to be true. However, he had done a small study among patients in the hospital at Johns Hopkins and he had actually found a few cases of ovarian cysts in the African American women that he saw, but apparently not enough to dispel the overall view that these were quite rare in African American women.

And following that, an African American physician, Daniel Hill Williams, ostensibly saw this article and responded quite vehemently to this by saying, “You know, it is commonly asserted that Negresses do not have ovarian cysts, but I have studied hundreds of African American women; I’ve seen all kinds of cysts. And the reason that other people don’t see them is in large measure because of this belief that Negro women do not have such cysts but also because of the great disparities in access to health care that these women experience on a daily basis.”

In other words, by the time they are seen with cysts, many of them have cysts that are so large, many of these women think that they were pregnant. They don’t know what’s going on with their bodies. And if they do, after the cysts have grown to be quite large, if they do have surgery they often die from the stresses of surgery at that particular point.

But his main point was that this perception that Negroes had not evolved to the cyst bearing stage prevented physicians from dealing with their patients’ actual conditions.

The perception of difference is so deeply embedded that doctors then don’t ask the kinds of questions that they should ask to determine whether or not what they see is something that’s due to race and a racial difference or if it’s due to a whole host of other factors. So the desire, I think, or at the very least the ways in which this notion of difference is so strong and still shakes perceptions is something that I see, certainly in cases from 1900, but you see it in cases up until the present as well.

REGINA MCKNIGHT – CONVICTED OF HOMICIDE BY CHILD ABUSE AS A RESULT OF UNINTENTIONAL STILLBIRTH - VICTORY AT LONG LAST (SOUTH CAROLINA)

Today, we were thrilled to learn that after 8 long years, the South Carolina Supreme Court has finally reversed the 20-Year Homicide Conviction of Regina McKnight. The unanimous decision recognizes that research linking cocaine to stillbirths is based on “outdated” and inaccurate medical information. NAPW has been working on behalf of Ms. McKnight for nearly 10 years.

Specifically the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Regina McKnight did not have a fair trial when she was convicted in 2001 for homicide by child abuse. Through this conviction she became the first woman in South Carolina to be convicted of homicide by child abuse as a result of suffering an unintentional stillbirth.

McKnight was arrested in 1999, several months after she experienced a stillbirth at Conway Hospital . McKnight’s conviction was based on the jury’s acceptance of the scientifically unsupported claim that her cocaine use caused the stillbirth. McKnight had no prior arrest history and even prosecutors agreed that she had no intention of harming the fetus or losing the pregnancy. Nevertheless, upon conviction she was given a twenty-year sentence, suspended to twelve years in prison with no chance for parole. She was projected to be released in 2010.

The medical community has strongly opposed McKnight’s prosecution and conviction. From the beginning, leading South Carolina and national medical, public health, and child welfare organizations and experts have opposed the prosecution and conviction. These organizations—represented by us– the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and the Drug Policy Alliance, with South Carolina counsel Susan Dunn included the South Carolina Medical Association, the South Carolina Nurses Association, the South Carolina Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors, and the South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families argued in an amicus (friend of the court) brief argued that women do not lose their rights to a fair trial upon becoming pregnant and challenged the state’s evidence that cocaine use or anything else that McKnight did or did not do caused the stillbirth.

In 2002 NAPW with numerous allies challenged the constitutionality of using homicide statutes to prosecute women who experience stillbirths. On appeal, a bare majority of the State Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the new interpretation of the state’s homicide law. The Court held that a pregnant woman who unintentionally heightens the risk of a stillbirth could be found guilty of “extreme indifference to human life” homicide. Under this decision a conviction for homicide is permitted on any evidence that a pregnant woman engaged in activity “public[ly] know[n]” to be “potentially fatal” to a fetus. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the decision.

Today’s ruling focused on the question of whether Ms. McKnight received a fair trial and concluded that Ms. McKnight’s counsel was “ineffective in her preparation of McKnight’s defense through expert testimony and cross-examination.” The decision also indicated that the medical and scientific basis for her prosecution and that of other women in the state is based on outdated and inaccurate medical information.

“Significantly, the opinion acknowledges that current research simply does not support the assumption that prenatal exposure to cocaine results in harm to the fetus, and the opinion makes clear that it is certainly ‘no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor.’” said Susan K. Dunn, South Carolina co-counsel for amicus. “This decision puts Solicitors [prosecutors] across the state on notice that they must actually prove that an illegal drug has risked or caused harm—not simply rely on prejudice and medical misinformation.”

This ruling addressed a petition filed on behalf of McKnight seeking a judicial review to determine whether the person is imprisoned lawfully or should be released from custody. The petition must show that the court ordered the imprisonment based on a legal or factual error. In McKnight, the factual error was accepting a causal link between McKnight’s cocaine use and her stillbirth. The Court held that the legal errors were not calling medical expert as witnesses who could refute that link, failing to investigate the medical evidence the state’s witnesses relied on and that was based on outdated scientific studies, and failing to challenge the court’s confusing and contradictory explanations to the jury of what “intent” Ms. McKnight had to have.

“Ms. McKnight is one of more than 500 women in South Carolina who experience stillbirths each year, and in many of those cases, medicine just can’t determine the cause,” said Brandi Parrish, coordinator of the South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families and NAPW local ally. “It is a tragedy that Ms. McKnight has been in prison for nearly eight years for a crime she did not commit. Families in South Carolina are not helped by treating stillbirths as crimes and wasting hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to imprison innocent mothers.”

The medical and public health groups also raised concerns about the consequences of South Carolina ’s policy of arresting pregnant women who experience drug problems. In their brief, they cited the fact that threatening pregnant women with jail time deters them from seeking prenatal care and other vital services, as has been the case in South Carolina since the Whitner ruling in 1997 that originally permitted prosecution of pregnant women under state child endangerment charges.

Ms. McKnight is represented on the petition by C. Rauch Wise of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina Foundation, Inc., and Matthew Hersh and Julie Carpenter of the law firm Jenner & Block for the DKT Liberty Project.

Disparities In Infant Mortality Not Related To Race, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Jul. 31, 2007) — The cause of low birth weights among African-American women has more to do with racism than with race, according to a report by an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In a report published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, Richard David says the quest for a “pre-term birth gene” that is now underway will be of no value in explaining low birth weights.

David is the report’s lead writer and co-author with James Collins Jr., professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University. David is affiliated with John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital and Collins with Children’s Memorial Hospital.

They compared birth weights of three groups of women: African American, whites and Africans who had moved to Illinois. Most African-American women are of 70 to 75 percent African descent.

“If there were such a thing as a (pre-term birth) gene, you would expect the African women to have the lowest birth weights,” David said. “But the African and white women were virtually identical,” with significantly higher birth weights than the African-American women, he said.

The researchers did a similar analysis of births to black Caribbean women immigrants to the United States and found they gave birth to infants hundreds of grams heavier than the babies of U.S.-born black women.

For black women, “something about growing up in America seems to be bad for your baby’s birth weight,” David said.

Another argument against a genetic cause is that children of American black women rate higher for all the major causes of death in the child’s first year.

“Genetic diseases pop up at random in different (racial) populations,” David noted. “But one group is taking all the hits. If this were a genetic problem it wouldn’t fit that pattern.”

Moreover, birth weights are not static but change in every population and from one generation to the next. Genetic shifts, however, “take place over thousands or tens of thousands of years,” he said.

One reason African-American mothers have babies who weigh less at birth is that they are at greater risk for such conditions as high blood pressure and preeclampsia.

Also, minority women are subject to stress caused by perceived racial discrimination, the researchers said.

David and Collins spoke with black women who had babies with normal weights at birth, comparing them with black women whose babies’ birth weight was very low — under three pounds.

They asked the mothers if they had ever been treated unfairly because of their race when looking for a job, in an educational setting or in other situations.

Those who felt discriminated against had a twofold increase in low birth weights. And for those who experienced discrimination in three “domains,” the increase was nearly threefold.

In David and Collins’ study of black women who gave birth in two Chicago hospitals, 16 percent said their partner was in jail during the pregnancy.

“We interpreted this finding as another indicator of stress, but one caused by institutional rather than interpersonal racial discrimination,” David said.

So a few months ago I was having a conversation with white mother and daughter about why infant mortality rates are so much higher in the states than in other countries.  The mother said that she thought it was because in the states so many middle class women are having children after 40 years of age.  I said that I thought it was related to the extensive poverty throughout the US.  Ever since then I have been keeping my eyes out for connections between race, poverty, culture, and infant mortality, mother health, etc.

So today a few selections from

Disadvantage, Inequality, And Social Policy

But what if policies that most enhance population health and increase disparities also bring large increments of improved health to those who are most disadvantaged? It is reasonable to accept disparities if the health of all groups is enhanced.

This dilemma is illustrated by examining progress in reducing U.S. infant mortality between 1950 and 1998.⁹ Black infant mortality in 1950 was 43.9 deaths per thousand live births, 64 percent higher than the white rate of 26.8. By 1998, black infant mortality fell to 13.8 deaths per thousand compared with a white rate of 6.0, a disparity of 130 percent.¹⁰ In every five-year period since 1965, more black babies than white babies were saved per thousand live births. A comparison of deaths in 1950 and 1998 indicate a reduction of 20.8 deaths per thousand live births for whites and a 30.1 reduction for blacks, an absolute change that favored blacks 50 percent more than whites. Ironically, this occurred while the magnitude of disparities in infant mortality increased, with the exception (discussed later) of the period 1965–1975, when blacks gained relative to whites.

If the derivation from Link and Phelan is correct, overall efforts to improve population health through new technological changes such as preventive screening, modifying smoking and other substance abuse, increasing exercise, improving nutrition, and many more may well increase disparities. Such initiatives, however, might improve the absolute health of disadvantaged groups more than would initiatives directed specifically at reducing health disparities.

so i guess we should just be grateful that a rising lifts all boats.

in this article David Mechanic makes a false dichotomy.  He posits the question as: Should we aim for overall health improvement or should we put our resources into targeting vulnerable populations even if it at the loss of white or more financially well-off communities.  Yet he does not show us when has targeting vulnerable populations ever led to less healthy communities of privilege.

He goes on to say: Interventions may improve population health without increasing disparities if directed at problems that are much more prevalent among disadvantaged groups and that offer a relatively simply executed and efficacious remedy….

and ends the article by saying:

Reducing health disparities is a complex task involving important considerations as to how to achieve the largest gains for disadvantaged persons from the investments made. The irony is that some of the largest gains possible for disadvantaged persons through population initiatives may have the effect of increasing disparities because of the dynamics of advantage. Health disparities impress many of us as fundamentally wrong and undesirable, but a compelling case could be made for policies that maximize population health at the cost of disparities when they provide large life and health benefits to disadvantaged groups as well as to others.

Strategies to redistribute income to the poor will remain contentious, although there is strong support for policies that help persons to attain health insurance and medical care access and for helping workers achieve a livable wage. Most thoughtful persons also understand the importance of maintaining a reasonable safety net for persons with disabilities and persons who are homeless, sick and uninsured, or temporarily down on their fortunes. Disagreements continue on how to respond to the more long-term welfare population who exhaust their eligibility. However this issue is resolved, there is much to be said for aggressive policy efforts in areas such as education, where positive outcomes can be expected and where there is much public support.

So it looks like  the dynamics of advantage are at work not only in current health care policies.  But also in future visions of US healthcare.  For example health care initiatives are limited by how much public support there is for the initiative.  And the public is not going to support a policy which readjusts these dynamics of advantage toward white folk.  It is easier to get support for initiatives which allow for some improvement in the health of vulnerable communities without changing the fundamental disparity between rich and poor white and colored.

great series of thoughts on sexual apostasy. i am not sure if i agree with her characterization of progressive sex education. i never got to take that class in high school. my sex education was considered rather progressive. we were told what sex was, how to be safe while doing it, and sexual morality comes from the home. but then i am old.

but i love the reference to the puritans.

I don’t think teen and young adults should NEVER have sex, ever. But they could NOT have sex until, you know, long-term relationship time rolled around. I mean, the idea of emphasizing celibacy for a period of time until one enters into a long-term relationship is honestly never a part of any sex education i’ve seen advocated by either right-wing people or left-wing people.

Altogether too many liberals find it being problematic that sectarians focus on sexual sin to the exclusion of other sins. But it’s problematic to err in the other direction and think that always choosing the option to have sex is ‘better’, which is the subtext you get from the other side. Plenty of people who are given to natural celibacy or asexuality, or even people who do want to wait and only have one partner for their own reasons often, often, often are considered strange and weird for not choosing the option to have sex.

……………………………………….

Also, and this is key, we now live in a society that does not understand why the aggressively anti-gay whatnot is just as much a symptom of endless indulgence as aggessively pro-gay. People feel free in this culture to indulge it all, be it tolerant support or intolerant dislike or outright hatred. It is an unintended consequence, but there it is.

The Puritans were so much more rational about it all. Wives and husbands were to please each other in bed and premarital sex was strongly discouraged, but you weren’t reviled if you had sinned that way because everyone sins and sexual sin wasn’t broken out and considered ‘worse’ than other sins and specific sexual sins weren’t judged as uniquely awful (like the current sectarian gay-hate– Puritans would have recognised that behavior as distinctly unChristian and rebuked it accordingly). But history is written by those who overthrew them, so the word has come to mean almost the opposite of what Puritans actually thought and believed, especially (though not limited to) sex.