Babies

So we’re at war. Mums everywhere, online, on the radio, in the sand pit. Judging each other for the choices we make as parents. Putting each other down to sooth our own insecurities. Driving ourselves to competitive distraction.

If you believe TIME, and the reaction to it, we’re in the trenches and the enemy is other mothers who do things differently.

Only, we’re not… Because behind the controversy whipped up by so-called parenting experts, the media commentators and the shock jocks, ordinary parents are just getting on with the job of parenting.

Continue reading "Despite the furore, no one really cares how you parent" »

If a clean house is a sign of a wasted life then Octomom’s filthy home shows… what, exactly?

Turns out Nadya Suleman, who famously gave birth to octuplets and depends on handouts to feed the 14 children she now has, has some difficulty keeping her home sparkling fresh.

Read here how she lets the kids wallow in a squalid pad while she forks out $520 on a haircut and see the pictures here at TMZ.

Continue reading "Octoslum: When a mum can’t keep up with her litter" »

While pregnant, I remember gazing at the slim, lissome models in the posh maternity wear catalogues and wondering if they were going to give birth to a basketball instead of a baby.

Those graceful elongated elks seemed to inhabit an enchanted forest a world away from mine. They wore clothes I couldn’t afford to buy. They were tall, slim and had beautiful round compact baby bellies. I was short, squat, perspiring, and afflicted with varicose veins in unmentionable places.

But it never occurred to me that these catalogue women posing in the chocolate Toorak wrap dress ($269.99), the Point Piper aqua tee ($69.99) or the Double Bay print pant ($99.99) were not actually pregnant.

Continue reading "A knockout blow to knocked up confidence" »

Fertility is a precious commodity for the modern woman. Greater opportunities, education and choice, along with the difficulties of finding the right partner can make it easy to delay falling pregnant. Being able to stow eggs away for the “right time” is an alluring prospect.

In this context, a recent discovery by Dr Jonathan Tilly of Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital offers massive temptation. The American scientist has found that ovaries of young women harbour very rare stem cells capable of producing new eggs.

He made the discovery after an initial study found that stem cells in the ovaries of adult mice could give rise to viable eggs. This means that although women are born with a finite number of eggs, they now have more chances to fall pregnant later in life. But it’s also a risk of epic proportions.

Continue reading "Scrambled science or an ovulation revolution?" »

When I was pregnant with my second child, the 19 week ultrasound brought potentially devastating news. Our child had a growth on the lung which could kill them. At that stage, doctors were unsure what would happen.

The growth could get bigger, squashing internal organs and killing the baby. If that happened, they could induce the baby at about 26 weeks so doctors could try to operate. Or it may not grow any bigger and the baby could have it removed after birth.

News that a couple had the wrong twin aborted at 32 weeks when one was diagnosed with a serious heart defect brought these memories flooding back. This poor couple ended up losing both children, which is horrific for all involved.

Continue reading "Sometimes, you’ve just got to go with your gut instinct" »

There is no ‘right’ to have a child. This seems a callous thing to say, but wrapping any conversation about children up in cuddly pink fleece-lined jumpsuits doesn’t help what has to be a serious policy debate.

While it must be devastating for couples who, for whatever reason, are unable to conceive, there are limits to society’s obligations to help them. Like most controversial health decisions, this is a tale of clashing rights and finite resources.

Last year the Federal Government made changes to the Medicare Safety Net, effectively capping the amount they would pay out for assisted reproductive treatments.

Continue reading "I’m sorry, but society doesn’t owe you a child" »

You have to admire those fine doctors working at the cutting edge to help people with fertility issues achieve their baby dreams. As well as putting themselves out there by pushing the boundaries of science, many brave even more shark-infested waters: Australian gender politics.

The latest professor to put his head up and get it half bitten off is the veteran Melbourne IVF specialist, Professor Gab Kovacs, a man who must have lost count decades back of how many thousand little Australians he has helped into the world.

Mr Kovacs dared to suggest that rather than banking on new technologies such as egg freezing, women should consider settling for Mr Not-Quite-Right and just get on with it. Without a trace of tone, the worldly Prof Kovacs suggested women should not consider frozen eggs a guarantee of a “family in the fridge’‘.

Continue reading "Mr Not-Quite-Right isn’t always wrong" »

Four friends were dining over lunch in a swish Adelaide restaurant last weekend when a woman at the next table pulled out her chair and proceeded to change her baby’s nappy on the floor.

Can you believe that? The four friends couldn’t. They were so stunned they decided to phone The Sunday Mail.

“It was just so unhygienic and inappropriate,” said one. “Luckily it was only a wet nappy – imagine if it had been really messy.”

No thanks, ladies. Might put me off my own lunch. But talk about taking the new mums’ cause back 20 years.

Continue reading "Houston wee have a problem" »

Should circumcision be banned? Is it mutilation or a culturally and medically significant practice?

That’s the question facing legislators in San Francisco after a controversial, but successful, campaign lead by “Foreskin Man” Michael Hess to have the question put to a ballot.

In California in the last year, the anti-circumcision movement has gained enough public momentum to have the question put to a ballot. Under Hess’ proposal, the circumcision of a minor would be a criminal act and be treated as an assault.

Continue reading "Should we force kin to suffer the unkindest cut?" »

Yesterday, we had a lively discussion in The Punch office. The following is what the fly on the wall heard…

Ant: What’s this story you’re thinking about re babies on planes, T?

Tory: Malaysia Airlines are banning kids in first class and I reckon it’s a brilliant idea. I wish I had the money to fly first class, and now there’s one more reason. I’m always the passenger who ends up next to the screaming baby which means I arrive somewhere tired and pissed off when I’m meant to be enjoying my holiday

Ant: You’re aware that babies are human beings with every right to be on a plane, right?

Continue reading "I’ve had it with these #!* babies on this #!* plane" »

As a general rule, men and women know squat about babies. At least until they have to raise one.

Then it’s time to knuckle down and survive the crying and vegemite poo, striving for the same primal instinct that enabled our ancestors to find shelter without iPhones and run barefoot across rocky terrain, chasing the evening meal with only a large toothpick and loincloth for protection.

Giving birth, so we have been led to believe, was much the same thing. A labour, in all senses of the word, to be endured rather than enjoyed; a period of a couple of hours (if you were lucky) or a couple of days (if you were not) where all you could do was grit your teeth and hope for the best, as nature intended.

Continue reading "Giving birth really ain’t what it used to be" »

Before we had children, my husband and I had dual careers. We both jumped on planes at a moment’s notice, saw each other when we could and, in rare, quiet times, pinched ourselves because we had jobs we loved.

Then I became pregnant. My husband bought baby clothes. Lots of them. Being the literary tragic I am, I daydreamed about a daughter with a Shakespearean name: Cordelia, Ophelia, Perdita. As if.

What we didn’t think about, because neither of us are planners, was how we’d share looking after said baby. I was determined to be a mother, first and foremost, but I was also young, freelancing and the first of my friends to have a baby. Wouldn’t it just fit in?

Continue reading "Having babies is a choice and a sacrifice" »

Ninety-four year old actress Zsa Zsa Gabor’s ninth husband, Prince Frederik von Anhalt, reportedly wants her to have a baby using his sperm, a donor egg and a surrogate mother. Yes, he does. He visited a Beverley Hills fertility clinic for sperm analysis and blood work. 

There have been no reports of him also having his head read; however, Gabor’s daughter, 64-year-old Francesca Hilton (a product of Gabor’s second marriage to hotel magnate, Conrad Hilton) has denounced the story as the latest in a string of wild publicity stunts by her seventh step-father.

And while the Gabor-Anhalts gallivant around celebrity baby clinics (if gallivanting is possible when you are just shy of a century, with a partially-amputated leg), my friend – a single mum of two young children – has announced that she has successfully battled cancer at the age of 38.  Facing her own mortality, she had to put in place a plan for the care of her children, which involved her parents and her sisters. 

Continue reading "When is it too late to procreate?" »

So, radio personality Jackie O crossed a quiet, leafy, Double Bay pedestrian crossing while bottle-feeding her six-week-old daughter and made the mistake of being photographed.

Mothercraft and Nannies director, Jenni Waldron, tut-tutted in the Daily Telegraph that “it would be best to sit comfortably in a chair and hold your baby correctly while feeding”. She was probably caught off guard too.

Jackie felt compelled to explain herself on air: ‘I was running late and Kitty was screaming…’. Yes.  I feel like doing that myself when I read stories like this. 

Continue reading "The perils of breasts, bottles, and babies" »

Even cute babies have ugly mothers.  That’s how it was in the Bonds Baby online beauty contest last week, when things got so nasty the police were called in.

Outraged by a computer glitch which interrupted voting for their precious widdle sweedies, spurned mums turned on other chubby-cheeked cherubs in the running.

“Bonds Australia not Asia” was the charming comment posted beside a photo of two-year-old contestant Lilli, who shares Asian and European heritage.  One baby copped “a child only a mother could love” and another was labelled an “ugly duckling”.

Continue reading "Children can turn mothers into monsters" »

‘Delighted when hubby hung his first load of washing on the line,’ noted a Facebook friend. ‘Less delighted when I realised he didn’t use pegs.’ 

A domino run of comments followed, with women chortling over the guy who didn’t turn the iron on but flattened a shirt with it anyway, and the time a friend bet someone a bottle of Moet her partner wouldn’t notice if she didn’t wash his clothes for ten days.

As far as short cuts resulting in more work go, the non-use of pegs is right up there with the least thought-through of ideas.  My 12-year-old did the same thing with her sister’s Pumpkin Patch bikini recently (last seen in the dog’s mouth, as he belted gleefully behind the pittosporum hedge).

Continue reading "Fathers: Officially not as crap as Mothers say" »

Between baby bonuses and maternity payments, pushy people and their prying questions, there is too much pressure to push out puppies.

And most of it comes from men.

I get that people want to reproduce. Really.

Continue reading "In defence of choosing childlessness" »

Okay, so this is a delicate topic. How a woman ‘should’ give birth is such an emotion-charged issue because it’s something a woman has imagined since the moment she found out where babies come from.

If I am brutally honest, there are two camps of women here: one group of very vocal women who are yet to give birth, who are probably pregnant and have a very detailed birth plan (right down to scented candles and essentials oils). The other (far more realistic) group of women are the ones who know that a birth plan gets shot to shit when it’s crunch time.

And by crunch time, I mean that pivotal moment when you scream, “Please get this baby out of my body immediately, or I will kill someone.” (Not that I said this. In fact, I am surprised that for someone who likes profanities, I didn’t call my husband any names or tell him it was ‘his fault’. And whatever else Hollywood makes you believe is ‘normal’ during an intense delivery).

Continue reading "The best way to give birth" »

I’m sick and tired of women turning on each other. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I don’t expect all of us to sit around singing Kumbayah.But surely a little bit of support from the Sisterhood isn’t out of the question.

The latest example of sororicide is the story entitled ‘Breastfeeding, it’s not about choice’, written for The Punch by Rita Panahai. Ms. Panahai contends that Australia has deplorable rates of breastfeeding because mothers are selfish. (I’d always thought was an oxymoron.)

Continue reading "Breast form of attack: the stupid war between women" »

Sometimes you wonder whether you’re living in a parallel universe.

Like that South Park episode where Cartman is nice all the time, or in Seinfeld when Elaine meets Bizarro Jerry.

Or when the Federal Health Minister – who’s also the mother of a small child – won’t ban a toxic chemical that’s making babies sick.

Continue reading "The cost of inaction? Babies exposed to toxins" »

Not everyone wants to have children – in fact according to some recent research conducted by Schering Plough, about 24% of women surveyed said they don’t want to have children.

For the 76% who do, this survey highlighted the barriers faced by women in 2009 that affect their decisions about children.

In this group, almost two thirds (62%) of Gen Y women, those aged 18 – 29, say they will delay having kids now as they are concerned about the cost.

Continue reading "Why women don’t want, want and can’t have kids" »