A few years back I was a regular blogger about the Roe v. Wade anniversary. As it turns out, the last post I wrote about Roe v. Wade was in 2008. That would be a blog post I wrote while I was already pregnant with Maybelle but wasn’t publicly announcing it. I was intentionally, happily pregnant, and I was still adamantly in favor of women’s reproductive rights. This is an important thing to recognize.

I’ve obviously had a lot of other stuff going on since then. I’ve been blogging a lot about parenthood, and about disability rights. But this year I’d like to return to the old tradition and write a post offering a shout out to women’s reproductive freedom.

As I’ve always said, a woman’s control over her own reproduction affects every aspect of her life. Every aspect. So I maintain now, as I always have, that we must give women the right to end a pregnancy if they don’t want to be pregnant, and the pregnant women themselves are the ones who get to decide why they don’t want to be pregnant. It’s not a decision that other folks should have a legal right to weigh in on.

I also want to say that I’ve been pretty powerfully influenced by readings I’ve been doing about reproductive justice. When feminists talk about reproductive rights, generally they’re talking–as I am here–about the right to have an abortion. And this is hugely important. But reproductive justice expands that concept. Scholar Kimala Price explains that the reproductive justice movement’s “three core values are: the right to have an abortion, the right to have children, and the right to parent those children.” If we really want women to have control over their reproduction, that doesn’t just mean that they get to choose not to be pregnant. It also means that they get to choose to have and parent children.

Here’s another great quote from Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body (please note that if you’re in my capstone course, this is the book we’re discussing on Thursday):

Reproductive liberty must encompass more than the protection of an individual woman’s choice to end her pregnancy. It must encompass the full range of procreative activities, including the ability to bear a child, and it must acknowledge that we make reproductive decisions within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power. Reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice.

Why is this particularly important to me these days? Because I’m doing research on prenatal testing, and we know that when a person has prenatal testing and learns that the fetus has Down syndrome, 90% of those fetuses are terminated. And we all know that when 90% of a group is doing something, it’s no longer a matter of simple “choice.” As Roberts notes in the quotes above, we’re not simply individuals in a bubble, with 90% randomly choosing termination. “We make reproductive decisions within a social context,” and our social context tends to tell us that kids with Down syndrome are no good. Defective product. Best to get rid of that fetus and start over.

Biffle and I didn’t decide to get rid of that fetus, and we’re incredibly glad about that.

I’m adamant that we–and all other potential parents–should have the right to terminate any pregnancy that’s unwanted. My ability to choose not to be pregnant is as important now as it’s ever been in my life, if not moreso.

But I also see it as part of my reproductive activism to change the social context that would identify my daughter as a defective product (and the word “defective” is often used in descriptions of Down syndrome, trust me–that’s not me being hyperbolic). I want to change the inaccurate perceptions of Down syndrome that not only affect people’s decisions while pregnant, but that affect the options available to folks who are here in the world: school inclusion, for instance, college possibilities, media representations, availability of jobs.

Is it a stretch to say that programs like REACH are connected to my reproductive justice activism? Maybe a tiny stretch, but only tiny, because if I’d known while I was pregnant that I was soon going to be teaching people with Down syndrome in my college classes, that would have immediately challenged the stereotypes of Down syndrome that were frolicking unnoticed in my mind.

Perhaps I would have had a clue that the thing that’s really challenging is parenting.  The hardest things for me about being a parent have nothing at all to do with Down syndrome.  Learning ASL so that Maybelle can communicate earlier?  Easy and fun!  Dealing with a person in your house who says “NO!” to every single question you ask?  Challenging (and developmentally appropriate)!

Alright, so hurray for Roe v. Wade.  People who can get pregnant don’t have full humanity unless they have the right to control their own bodies.  And hurray for reproductive justice, which reminds us that reproduction is a far larger issue than abortion, an issue that urges us to make the world a place worth living in.

The end. (Cross-posted at Baxter Sez.)

Thanks to University of Wisconsin – Madison researchers for another study that says girls can do math!

We’ve been here before. I’m not blaming them. This research needed to be done. I wish it didn’t. But it does. This study does not only address if girls can do math or not, but it also addresses the frequent “solution” to helping girls do well in math and science — single-gender education.

From the conclusions of the paper:

[W]e conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. Our findings are consistent with the gender stratified hypothesis, but not with the greater male variability, gap due to inequity, single-gender classroom, or Muslim culture hypotheses.

In other words, the gap we see between girls and boys math ability is due to society and culture. “[T]hese major international studies strongly suggest that the maths gender gap, where it occurs, is due to cultural factors that differ among countries – and that these factors can be changed.”

It is not due to some mystery math gene on the Y-chromosome (greater male variability), not due to more boys having access to math classes (inequity), not due to separating boys from girls nor is it due to some mystery about Muslim culture. The last one is the most odd theory some people cling in order to not see that gender equity in society has an effect on girls and math performance. It was in Freakanomics. Essentially it goes like this: Since girls in Muslim societies have little equity, but they do awesome in math, feminism/gender equity has nothing to do with girls doing math.

‘The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,’ says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics.

Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample unrepresentative of the whole population. [cite]

The Muslim society theory depends on the strength of single-gender classroom theory. Kane and Mertz also debunks this beloved theory on how to combat the lack of girls in math and science. Other studies have tried to debunk the single-gender classroom/school theory by pointing out that most single-gender schools have smaller classrooms. I only say “try” because some people have ignored them.

Last month my office co-sponsored a Girls and Computer Science Day for high school girls. During the lunch Q&A panel where some of our undergraduate and graduate women in CS talked about how awesome our CS department is, I chimed in. I told the girls that our quest to see more girls in CS is not merely a pro-girl movement, rather it is a movement to ensure that we have as many heads at that table as possible when solving problems our world is facing. I don’t do my job just to get girls and women into science and engineering to get the numbers up. Rather women and girls add something to the process of how science and engineering is done. It is not that women do better science, but with women at the table, science is better. Kane and Mertz sum it up pretty well in their concluding remarks:

Eliminating gender discrimination in pay and employment opportunities could be part of a win-win formula for producing an adequate supply of future workers with high-level competence in mathematics. Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity in employment are at risk of producing too few citizens of either gender with the skills necessary to compete successfully in a knowledge-based economy driven by science and technology.

Now that we’ve settled these questions, let’s get back in the lab and get some science done, shall we?

Please go visit a tumblr that two of my students created.  It’s fantastic.  They’ve been a bit astonished at how much attention it’s gotten in the 30 hours its been online, but when you go over, you’ll see why:  it’s interesting, the photography is stunning, and the explanations of feminism are smart and clever.

Let me just say right now, I want in!

I’ve been meaning to write about some of the books on my bookshelf for quite a while.  (As in, all semester!)  So here’s a quick roundup of a handful of 2011 titles relevant to motherhood globally:

Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, by Lamia Karim (University of Minnesota Press).  If you’ve been following microfinance, often touted as a cure-all for global poverty, anthropologist Karim offers a more sobering look.  You can read the great review in the current issue of the Women’s Review of Books (WRB) here.

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl (PublicAffairs).  Hvistendahl is a correspondent for Science magazine, and her thoroughly researched (and deeply disturbing) book examines the gender imbalance globally. Amy Agigian does a fabulous job reviewing it in the same issue of WRB, although her essay (alas) isn’t available online.

The 21^st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How To Do It, edited by Andrea O’Reilly (Demeter Press).  If you need to feel uplifted about all the social change brought about by mothers, look no further.  This comprehensive anthology includes articles about maternal activism from all parts of the world, including Australia, Ireland, Germany, Argentina, Iran, Russia, Canada, and the U.S.

Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, by Rebecca Asher (Harvill Secker).  Journalist Asher examines the current state of motherhood in the U.K. and discovers that women are still left cooking the bacon and, um, pushing the pram.

Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering, by Cameron Lynn Macdonald (University of California Press).  Macdonald, a sociologist, provides a fascinating look at the relationships of professional women with their nannies/au pairs.  Rosanna Hertz reviews both this book and Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Communities, by Tamara Mose Brown (NYU Press) in that same issue of WRB (enough already, I know.  But have you subscribed yet?).  Brown has also reflected on her own experiences as a mother studying nannies, which I wrote about here.